The Legacy of Prohibition

As a culture, America has minimal capacity for multifamily urbanism. We used to know how to do it, then we made it illegal for so long we lost the know-how. And the infrastructure, and the institutions. And so to do it again, we have to reinvent it all over again. We have to change the laws, build the infrastructure, develop the institutions. It's slow going.  It's like Prohibition, when we banned alcohol. Except that the ban has gone on so long that all the former brewers are dead or retired, and banks no longer know how to estimate the risk of breweries, so they won't fund them, and cities still won't permit them to locate within city limits. Oh, and anyone who buys a bottle of non-alcoholic juice gets a 10% discount from the Federal Government, and doesn't have to pay sales tax.  

Georgism and affordable housing

From the stand of basic economics, land value taxation makes sense to me: A bond with a higher interest rate is worth more than one with a lower one, ceteris paribus. Hence, a bond with a negative interest rate (one that costs your money to hold) must be worth less than one with a positive ones. And in the case of two bonds with negative interest rates, the one with the less negative rates is clearly more valuable. And hence costs more.

The same analogy applies to land: All else equal, prefer the parcel of land with lower property taxes (the lower negative interest rate). The higher the tax rate, the less the land is worth. If you want to keep land values low (and affordable to more people), raise the property tax.

LVT keeps housing affordable

LVT has such a powerful dampening effect on idle land speculation that even the land portion of the real estate tax keeps housing affordable. Cities with the highest real estate taxes have the most affordable housing. Texas and California were the two fastest growing states in the second half of the 20th century. Texas, which relies heavily on property tax, having no personal income taxes, has four of the six most affordable cities in the nation. California, which dramatically curtailed its property taxes, has 23 of the 25 least affordable cities.

It is only logical that a tax on buildings would discourage construction and reduce the supply of buildings, increasing real estate prices and rents. However, LVT is such a potent disincentive to idle landholding that it has a much stronger opposite effect. 

-http://savingcommunities.org/issues/taxes/landvalue/

Rents are primarily set by location value, only secondarily by actual quality of housing stock. Affordable locations are affordable due to low site value, which doesn't change under Land Value Taxation. But as vacant urban land was forced into use by Land Value Taxation, landlords would have to compete on quality of housing instead of just location, so they would have incentive to improve housing stock just to charge the same rents. This would mean higher quality affordable housing. Luckily, under Land Value Taxation, landlords would no longer face higher property taxes for improving their buildings.

-Erïch Jacoby-Hawkins 

Competing Urbanisms

Attached housing is a different way of living than detached housing. Shared systems means reliance on communal assets, and hence some governance method for managing those communal assets. If you are poor, and your neighbors are trashy, there is an insoluble communal action dilemma, a veritable prisoners dilemma. It only makes sense for you expend effort cleaning up the central lawn if everyone else does it. In cases like bungalow courts, the number of people involved is small enough that the small-group dynamics habits evolution has hardwired into humans can work it out. As the number of people increases, individual agency is diluted, no one is responsible, and you get The Projects.

*Arguably, attached townhomes would work...but most 'townhomes' are actually condos, from a legal/governance setting, with a condo board, so they have a method of managing communal assets.

Regional Electric Rail.

I've largely ignored the UTA FrontRunner. I don't ride it. It doesn't go where I need to go, at the times I need it to go places. It's a commuter rail, ferrying office works. It doesn't serve my transit oriented lifestyle. But not everyone is me, and transit riders come in many varieties.

The new (draft) WFRC-MAG long range transportation plan is out.  And looking at transit, one of the things that really catches my eyes is the money being put into FrontRunner--extension, electrification, double-tracking. I'll admit all are worthy: a) a regional rail network needs to serve the region; b) It's a dirty secret that FrontRunner's diesel engines actually produce more pollution than the cars they replace; c) doubling tracking is strictly necessary for more frequent operations. 

But a whole pile of articles I've been reading have me thinking about through-running regional rail (see end of post). In a nutshell, the 'Réseau Express Régional' (RER)  works because Paris is polycentric. The center is historic, so they exiled all the new skyscrapers to the edge of historic Paris--literal Edge Cities. So when people commute to/from these edge cities, they do so using the RER to cross central Paris. Despite much hope, such an approach seems unlikely to work in NYC, because it has one central CBD. 

But it makes me wonder if it might work in the Wasatch Front--that long skinny ribbon of urbanity west of the Wasatch Mountains. The biggest 'CBD' is SLC, but neither Provo nor Ogden are exactly tiny. So it's possible to imagine a transit network connecting all three, flowing through and across them. Not just a CRT, but a regional rail network. 

My first objection would be: "We already have TRAX!". But when I look at the Long Range Plan, I see 'infill stations' at 1700 S. and 2700 S. Infill stations improve the local access, but reduce network access. Every station requires an additional 3 minutes, making every commuter 3 minutes longer. Mode-share is very time sensitive, so adding 6 minutes the commute for someone coming from Sandy may lose UTA riders. (Whether the new stations add enough riders/trips to offset that requires serious analysis). But, less us presume things do go that way: That the TRAX corridor becomes more urban, with a stop every mile, such that the entire corridor is within a half-mile of a Trax Station--a veritable Transit Oriented Corridor (TOC--see Cervero's article on it). If that happens, SOMETHING is needed to replace the high-speed regional access formerly provided by TRAX. And if I'm reading the planning right, the idea is to have FrontRunner fill that role: A RER ('Regional Electric Rail'), touching Trax at North Temple, at 6400 South, and (sort of) in Sandy. LRTP is also showing cross I-15 at 102nd south, to connect Trax to FrontRunner, with a shared corridor down to 135th. (While still on the map, I view extending the Draper line as a dead letter. Nothing but miles and miles of single family out that way.) The South Jordan FrontRunner station would be a reasonable terminus. But, given the pressure to reach the Point of the Mountain and prison site, I can't imagine them stopping there. Draper FrontRunner would be the next reasonable terminus for extending Trax, and would make Ebay happy (they were long-ago promised a train). Past that gets muddy--reconnecting to east-side rail would require jumping I-15 again (not cheap), and is highly dependent on what happens with Utah County Trax.

• What the RER A vs. C Contrast Means for New York Regional Rai
• Regional Rail for New York City - Part I
• Through-Running at Penn Station
• To RER A, or to RER C? How Paris typifies the two models for cross-city commuter train lines

A rescued comment

I've 'rescued' the following comment from here, to amplify the signal. 

There is a major factor that far too few experts understand. Urban areas can have a median multiple of around 3, and a low, flat urban land price curve - if they have unrestrained sprawl ex-fringe. This has the beneficial effect of anchoring site values everywhere, including the central core. This is not just obvious in the sprawling median-multiple 3 cities today, it was true in New York for decades. Hence the very dynamic building "up" that occurred in Manhattan.
But when ex-fringe sprawl is curtailed by something like a boundary or zoning, the entire land market is altered in the way prices are derived; the prices become "elastic" to all inputs, rather than anchored in "differential value to rural land". Under these conditions, site values become "elastic to allowed density". This has the perverse effect that upzoning inflates site prices faster than actual redevelopment of additional floor space occurs. Site owners have more incentive to "hold" (in anticipation of further capital gains) than they have to "redevelop". Manhattan-type building "up" becomes LESS likely, not more likely. Houston is the fastest-intensifying city in the USA today because of its sprawl and its disciplined, flattened urban land rent curve. 

...I strongly recommend the book "Economics, Real Estate and the Supply of Land" (2004); Alan W. Evans. There are other academics also from Britain, who are much clearer about this subject, because in Britain they started to ration the supply of land back in the 1950's and they have decades of evidence of the perverse effects for housing supply. Paul Cheshire of the LSE is also an outstanding author.

-ThePhilBest • 8 months ago

This seemed like nonsense when I first read it (and I called it such).  Eight months later (and some reading on housing affordability) I get what was being said. To me, this is the 'nut' of it: 

 "Site owners have more incentive to "hold" (in anticipation of further capital gains) than they have to "redevelop". Manhattan-type building "up" becomes LESS likely, not more likely"

It's a real, and inescapable phenomena, and one of the things that drives me more and more toward a Georgist Land Value Tax as being the only solution. Also makes me wonder if zoning has been holding down value values--I seem to recall an article being published to that effect, regarding Chicago zoning. It would certainly follow. Also suggests to me that the way to maintain the affordability of small single family homes (and prevent their replacement by monster homes) would be to downzone the lot, from just single family use to "single-family, no more than .25 FAR" or some similar form-based code solution.

Comments may (finally) work again.

Had to pull the html for Disqus. Resetting the template was just not doing the job. 

Urban Libertarianism

Planning is generally thought as being centralized, command and control. Maybe once upon a time? Central planning makes sense when an economy can be directed toward a single goal: winning a war, engaging in 'catch-up' economic development. But when neither the way forward nor the common goals is known, central planning is problematic: You can't plan for something without a common understanding of ways and means, what is to be achieved, and how. 

As an urban planner, I am somewhat bemused by my own libertarianism. Perhaps a function of living in a blue city in a red state: I get why red states rail against the federal government in a very visceral way: top down intervention by a bunch of buffoons who either don't care about local context, or are hostile to it. 

So, let me define 'urban libertarianism' as the following: The most minimal restrictions on liberty possible, consistent with public safety, health, welfare, and morals. Or, as the Wiccan's put it: "An Ye Harm None, Do What Ye Will". But in a planning context, the harms (potentials for harm, endangerment) that must be considered are much broader, and longer lasting than in personal interactions. 

In an urban context, 'harming none' a pretty high standard. Unlike the country, there is simply less margin for error in a city: Things are closer together. So when you fire a gun, drive a car, build a structure, there are more limitations on where you can do it, when, and how.   This seems like common sense to me. When I go shooting, I recognize that I need to go someplace there is no-one to hit, and that what I'm shooting at should be back-stopped by a hill. And I recognize that there is a difference in building a shed by backyard, and building a house on a hill (which might slide downhill onto someone else's house). 

The importance of public safety is the easiest one to elucidate. Health likewise: noxious land uses are limited in where they are permitted to locate, recognizing proximity to many industrial pollutants is sickening. Welfare...let us take a moment to define it: the good fortune, health, happiness, prosperity, etc., of a person, group, or organization. (And ignore the spurious definition of 'a government handout'.) 

Welfare is more than the silver rule ("Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you"). The idea of public welfare relies more on an understanding of equity: You should not, in pursuit of your enjoyment, be permitted to make me miserable.  Even if you find that an acceptable trade-off. My classic example would be amplified music: Your neighbor feels it acceptable to impose it on you, with the (reasonable) expectation that you might expect to do the same. Within planning law, 'spite fences' would be the example: You cannot build a fence to block a view, with the aim of making me miserable, regardless of how much you might enjoy it.

'Morals' is something I would not have included five years ago, and indeed would have actively excluded. Perhaps becoming a parent has taught me how much of our civilization consists of customs and habits, prone to lapse, unless we are active in their transmission and perpetuation. In which case, what restrictions on human liberty in pursuit of public morality are acceptable to planning, in it's role as regulator of the built environment? You can't legislate morality: you can only legislate the creation of a built environment consistent with morality, one that facilitates moral behavior in public. Largely, it becomes a matter of how it's proper to act: specifically in the division of actions which are acceptable in the public realm, and those which ought be constrained to the private. And providing facilities accordingly: People don't defecate in the streets for kicks (looking at you, San Francisco). Paris doesn't provide public toilets out of generosity, but out of a recognition that if your built environment doesn't permit moral behavior, violations result. Crosswalks might be another example: Too many cities make it too difficult to cross the street legally. Likewise, too many cities make it too easy to speed--they encourage it even, designing streets as if they were rural highways.

Undeniably, restricting behavior for guard public safety, health, welfare, and morals leads to a parcel of restriction. But those restrictions ought be as minimal as possible, drawn as tightly as possible: the most minimal restrictions on liberty possible. And that requires laws drawn narrowly, even to the point of absurdity. Laws against protesting, or making a 'public nuisance' are far too broadly drawn. It invites abuse.

Over-regulation is rife. Let the thicket be pruned, and anything inconsistent with public safety, health, welfare, and morals be removed.

Housing affordability

I'm spending more and more time thinking about housing affordability these days. CityLab's article (and paper on which it is based) effectively destroyed my naive belief that 'filtering' can ever provide affordable housing. In a nutshell, filtering only works if the population is stagnant or declining. (Or if the rich are your only immigrants, ha ha ha). One of the things that gets proposed is subsidized housing. Which is troubling, because the American history of public housing is generally one of grotesque failure (Cabrini-Green), and/or regulatory capture (Section 8, aka 'landlord support'). Affordable housing tax credits are also designed with a critical flaw: You can only take them to 'top up' the project to viability, destroying any profitability, and making them (mostly) only useful for specialty not-for-profit developers.

I'm enough of a libertarian to ask "Is there a way we could do this using market methods?" The immediate answer being 'of course not', as the problem is that the market can't provide enough affordable housing, because it isn't profitable enough. Still--do we need government construction of housing? Might not government subsidy of affordable housing be enough? (It's certainly worked well enough for single family detached). Hearsay has it that in the past ('70's?) the Feds managed to generate more multifamily by making it more profitable, by altering the tax laws on depreciation.

I can already hear the baying hounds of 'Thatcherism', about how the British built, and then sold off all of their social housing ('council houses'). And guess what? A generation later, and they have a cataclysmic housing crisis. None of the public housing that was sold off was replaced, and now Britain get to enjoy another round of the housing crisis which engendered the public support to create the public housing in the first place!

Which suggests that public housing has a generational issue as well: To be sustainable, it must be sustainable against the interference of the feckless short-termism later politicians. (Plundering the commonwealth by under-pricing public assets and selling them to select people wins votes--who knew?) Which in turn suggests that Federal ownership of homes represents a clear and present danger to sustainable public housing.

I've suggested elsewhere that China may have the right model for urban land: 99 year leases. Long enough for any structure to depreciate (financially), and so setting no limitation on their development potential. Yet the land, the portion which benefits from location, and appreciates accordingly, remains in the public hands. (That public investment is the primary creator of location value has been argued elsewhere).

Tangentially, private cemeteries are obscene: The developer makes money selling lots (3'x6'). At some point, the land runs out, the maintenance stops, the developer goes bankrupt, and the public is left with the cost of maintaining the land or moving the graves).  Any jurisdiction that fails to provide cemeteries is abrogating a public trust, dodging responsibility. The solution is practically biblical: : Pick the worst piece of land in the jurisdiction (ie, a potters field) and make that the cemetary.

Market Urbanism

Markets are efficient only through repeated transactions. Market attempts at mega-projects reliably fail, falling foul of the same problems as public mega-projects. Plans that need everything to go right inevitably fail. The larger the number of things that need to go right, the larger the number of critical failure points. Like evolution, markets are efficient providers because they are good as discarding inefficient participants. Iteration is essential.

Iteration is also essential if you ask the government to do anything. A government is subject to the same kind of errors as any market participant (and a few others to boot). So if you are going to ask your government to provide something, it can't be a one-off. It has to be something which is going to be provided again and again--something your government can practice at**.

Mega-projects are stupid. If something needs scale to be successful, chances of success are marginal*. If something can't be built incrementally, don't do it. Demonstration projects that relies on scaling up later (monorails monorails monorails) are doomed to failure. To forestall the inevitable failure of mega-projects, demand everything be phased: broken down into smaller segments. If none of the segments are independently viable, odds are that the project as a whole isn't either. 

*Simplicio points to social media of Facebook and Google as a counter-examples: But I'm old enough to remember the silent evidence: MySpace and AltaVista, and the whole cemetery of non-Google not-Facebook social media firms.

**There is no guarantee you government will get better at provision. There is no competition, and no way to discard the 'inefficient provider'. Providing better provision of public goods requires a public agency with a cultural commitment to self-improvement. (Go read Good to Great: The social sectors). 

Bungalow Courts

If we really cared about the children, we'd build more of these: Bungalow Courts. Cars eat children. The most dangerous stranger is the one in a car. To hurt your child, a stranger outside of a car has to be actively hostile toward your child--a one tenth of one percent case. But a stranger in a car can kill your child, just by accident, through a moments distraction....

Sadly, we mostly design places like this. So everyone can drive their child-eating beast right up to the front door. Maximal exposure and endangerment. 

 "But we didn't build those for children!". But people with children move in anyway. In planning law, there is an idea of an 'attractive nuisance': If you make someplace attractive to children, and then don't take reasonable precautions to keep them out, you are liable for their endangerment.

Spatial Interactions Models, Travel Time, and Kids

In spatial interaction theory, there is a thing called the gravity model: That the interaction between two objects is proportional to the square of the distance between them. The longer the distance, the less the interaction. And it's pretty accurate, in terms of travel time: the frequency of a trip is inversely proportional to the travel time required. But when each trip is so costly (in time), you consequently make fewer of them.

Kids make every trip take longer (even if it's only getting them buckled in). So by adding a kid to your life, you've (effectively) moved further away from everything. Hmm...So it's not by accident that larger families move further out: Space is cheaper, and trip-times are already long. Adding 5 minutes to a 45 minute trip is nothing. Contrast: If I need to run to to the grocery store, it's a three minute drive. And a choice of four full-service supermarkets.

For my wife, grocery shopping is practically part of her commute: she just overshoots the stop nearest our home on TRAX by two stops, shops and returns.  My family in NYC likewise shops daily. I think...this is the cause of the misapprehension of suburbanites. The idea of shopping daily appalls, because if you live in suburbia, grocery shopping is a major undertaking, which takes a lot of time. Doing it daily seems appalling. But for my brother in Brooklyn, the bodega across the street is closer to him than most people's bedrooms are to their garages.

I admit to being uncertain of the differences in difficulty/time consumption in buckling a kid into a car-seat vs. a stroller. I assume them to be roughly equal, with stroller packing/unpacking similar to opening/closing doors with sufficient care as to not slam little fingers in them.

But this does sort of explain the emergence of massive strollers in NYC: It's not just a stroller: It's also a grocery cart--a place to hang bags and stash parcels so that the mother doesn't have to carry them.  

Home buyers, housing stock, and the Patriarchy.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/11/02/single-family-housing-upholds-the-patriarchy-and-hurts-moms/

The article argues, persuasively, that suburban GEOGRAPHY does enforce female isolation: By disaggregating shared-use spaces into private spaces, and then burdening women with labor of upkeep and operation of those spaces. Cooking has natural economies of scale (notice bachelors rarely cook), as does childcare (minding ten children is scarcely harder than minding nine).

Some people embrace suburban living. But for many people, suburban living is an imposition. You take what you can get, because it's the best you can afford. Housing is durable, and few people buy new houses: In the last 10 years, there has been (annually) about 10 new house per 1000 people. Everyone else buys used. Each year, if we only build houses for new-home buyers (typically dual-income families with children), then in ten years, 10% of the housing stock is houses best suited for that style of household. Most people are living in hand-me down housing. And like most things handed down, it rarely fits well.

Some Simplicio will doubtless argue that if there was a market for other things, developers would built them. And if there was a free market in housing, they might even be right. Claiming that housing is a free market is either a lie or bullshit (in the technical sense). Zoning forbids multifamily development on 90% of urban land. An attached single family home, ie a townhouse, condo) is still a single family home, without any of the agglomeration economies of multi-family.

Regarding Amtrak

This was posted as a comment in a Facebook group I'm part of (Greenway & Futuristic Rail System), and I thought it was worth boosting the signal on it.

Amtrak is failing, and it's not by accident. It's because Amtrak was designed to fail. Amtrak is the 'bad bank' that bankrupt railroads were allowed to offload the passenger service they were (contractually obliged) to provide, in exchange for the land-grants they received during their construction.

The railroad companies have all been losing money for decades now - as they always would have - if they hadn't really been real estate companies and land developers in a wide open, undeveloped frontier nation. The way our original rail structure in this country was funded and built was with gigantic land grants of huge swaths of public lands to the private corporations who built the rails that crisscrossed the country and allowed for its development. They made their money off of building a system to access those lands and then developing and selling the land they were given for free along their right-of-ways.
Just the opposite is true now for anyone wanting to build a high-speed rail network. High-speed trains need much straighter and totally exclusive right-of-ways (no at grade crossings) through densely populated urban and suburban areas with enormous property values. Expecting those companies to be able to afford to BUY and finance those right-of-ways and still be able to be "profitable" is ludicrous. Imagine if GM and Ford had to purchase and finance new right-of-ways for roads in cities across America to continue to sell cars and STILL be profitable! Imagine if we charged airlines similar amounts to purchase the air corridors they fly.
As for Amtrak, they have been at this disadvantage since they were formed. Sure, the government bought and continues to pay for the rolling stock, the engines, and cars, and stations, etc. but they must RENT the tracks they travel on from the freight companies. This puts them at multiple disadvantages. In many areas, the tracks are poorly maintained by the freight companies and kept only in the condition required for FREIGHT travel at much lower speeds than would be optimal for passenger service. Second, the long, lumbering freight trains are given PRIORITY over Amtrak's passenger trains meaning MORE unacceptable delays and speeds. Third, to solve that problem the only way is to purchase at ridiculous market value NEW right-of-ways AGAINST public opposition in many cases, tying them up in court and causing even more delays and costs. It's totally untenable. Finally, Amtrack can NEVER succeed because Amtrak's budget is so severely limited by a Congress who expects it to "make a profit" at the same time the airline, oil, and auto industries are paying those very same decision makers to ensure that Amtrack CAN NOT, WILL NOT EVER make a profit.
Until we as a society decide to factor in the REAL costs of the subsidies we provide now to the status quo industries, carbon emissions, public transportation for the non-rich, and understand the cost benefits and quality of life improvements of having a carbon-free, superfast and widely connecting transportation network nationwide, we will NEVER be able to achieve the successes achieved by most of the other industrialized nations in the world.
Just the opposite is true now for anyone wanting to build a high-speed rail network. High-speed trains need much straighter and totally exclusive right-of-ways (no at grade crossings) through densely populated urban and suburban areas with enormous property values. Expecting those companies to be able to afford to BUY and finance those right-of-ways and still be able to be "profitable" is ludicrous. Imagine if GM and Ford had to purchase and finance new right-of-ways for roads in cities across America to continue to sell cars and STILL be profitable! Imagine if we charged airlines similar amounts to purchase the air corridors they fly.
As for Amtrak, they have been at this disadvantage since they were formed. Sure, the government bought and continues to pay for the rolling stock, the engines, and cars, and stations, etc. but they must RENT the tracks they travel on from the freight companies. This puts them at multiple disadvantages. In many areas, the tracks are poorly maintained by the freight companies and kept only in the condition required for FREIGHT travel at much lower speeds than would be optimal for passenger service. Second, the long, lumbering freight trains are given PRIORITY over Amtrak's passenger trains meaning MORE unacceptable delays and speeds. Third, to solve that problem the only way is to purchase at ridiculous market value NEW right-of-ways AGAINST public opposition in many cases, tying them up in court and causing even more delays and costs. It's totally untenable. Finally, Amtrack can NEVER succeed because Amtrak's budget is so severely limited by a Congress who expects it to "make a profit" at the same time the airline, oil, and auto industries are paying those very same decision makers to ensure that Amtrack CAN NOT, WILL NOT EVER make a profit.
Until we as a society decide to factor in the REAL costs of the subsidies we provide now to the status quo industries, carbon emissions, public transportation for the non-rich, and understand the cost benefits and quality of life improvements of having a carbon-free, superfast and widely connecting transportation network nationwide, we will NEVER be able to achieve the successes achieved by most of the other industrialized nations in the world.

-Chuck Meyers

Hey FTA~

Maybe the FTA should start mandating a minimum service threshold for the corridors it funds....with some sort of 'snapback' that requires immediate repayment if service falls below that threshold.

"The system is planned for half-hourly service once additional trains arrive, yet the project is indicative of a problem among many major transit projects in the U.S.: we’re willing to spend billions of dollars on construction, but we have less interest in paying the long-term costs of making sure trains and buses on these lines are frequent and reliable".

And maybe would should be learning from places in Europe, and start following a 'design-build-operate' model for our major transit investments. Because otherwise, when the snapback hits, transit agencies will simply cut bus service to offset the costs, and total ridership will actually be less.

Which begs the question: Why are we building all this rail? I'm a transit advocate, I ride every train I get a chance to (Atlanta's streetcar stinks, by the way), and I still wonder. When I advocated for rail  vs BRT (close to a decade ago) it was on the premise that rail could spur Transit-Oriented-Development. The reality check is that most rail spurs very little TOD, either. Mostly, it spurs park and rides. Only in a few select locations (downtown adjacent) do I ever see any TOD. And those locations are within streetcar range. So why build all the rail to suburbia? If all we're going to get is parking lots, why not build BRT? The academic research is pretty clear that it does no worse that rail at generating TOD.

I hate to say it, but rail (especially expensive rail) only makes sense for places that already have rail, either in the form of a network, or in the form of leftover freight rail. So that more rail either prevents a 'change of gauge' problem for riders (where they have to change vehicles), or makes duplicate use of rail track.

But I suppose that's the logic the New Starts program was designed to overcome: To provide a 'starter' rail system for places that didn't have rail, so they had a seed to grow from. Retrospectively (post Curitiba) it looks a little silly.

But as I reflect on it, there is another reason for rail: Guideway. When it's not just 'right of way', but actual guide-way. When you've got a vehicle moving through a tunnel, or on an elevated platform, when straying from the path would mean disaster.

If Salt Lake it ever going to connected to HSR, it will be through Green River...

...which basically means never.

As Jarrett Walker of Human Transit puts it, "BE ON THE WAY". As the map shows, SLC is a culdesak off of any HSR route. (Darn Wasatch Mountains, always getting in the way).

 It's not by accident--the Mormon pioneers chose SLC for it's isolation. Even when the interstate were being built, they detour around that big pair of bulges that are the Wasatch and Rocky Mountains.

Talk to someone who is old enough to know, and they still recall the changes that happened when I-80 reached the Salt Lake Valley. (Last bit completed was in 1986!)

Is this happy news, or sad?

 San Francisco’s new Central Subway, which will extend its T-Third Muni Line through downtown, is also remarkable in that it’s been being actively discussed since the 1990s and is the first subway completed in central San Francisco since the BART Market Street tunnel in 1973.

New transit is generally happy news. But in this case, it's a ray of sunshine after almost 50 years. When you built a rail system, and then don't expand it for fifty years, something clearly went radically wrong. Because when a rail system is working, you keep building more of it. More destinations means more trips, because the system becomes more useful to all your existing riders. And more origins as well, as previously inaccessible to the network can now ride it. 

So what breaks down this virtuous cycle? When you do the dumb thing, and sabotage your existing network (cutting frequency and operating hours) to pay for the capital costs of your expansion. If the expansion isn't going to pay for itself*, don't built it.

*Yeah, yeah. No (American) transit system finances itself. Neither does the highway network**. But both networks provide public benefits, and so we provide public subsidy. 

**The Federal Gas tax hasn't paid the cost of highway expenditures in years. Says the Heritage Foundation. It's in debt to the general fund. And if you claim that's because of diversions to the Mass Transit Account, I invite you to prove it. 

Yep. It's Uber that's to blame.

Public transit ridership in major US cities has been flat or declining over the past few years. Several authors have attempted both to explain this trend and to offer policy recommendations for how to respond to it. Past writing on the topic is dominated by theoretical arguments that identify possible explanations, with the few empirical analyses excluding the most recent data, from 2015-2018, where the decline is steepest. This research conducts a longitudinal analysis of  the determinants of public transit ridership in major North American cities for the period 2002-2018, segmenting the analysis by mode to capture differing effects on rail versus bus. Our research finds that standard factors, such changes in service levels, gas price and auto ownership, while important, are insufficient to explain the recent ridership declines. We find that the introduction of bike share in a city is associated with increased light and heavy rail1 ridership, but a 1.8% decrease in bus ridership. Our results also suggest that for each year after Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) enter a market, heavy rail ridership can be expected to decrease by 1.3% and bus ridership can be expected to decrease by 1.7%. This TNC effect builds with each passing year and may be an important driver of recent ridership declines.  

But it's not JUST Uber/Lyft. It's the failure of transit agencies to respond TO the competitive pressures provided by Uber/Lyft. Providing 'circulation' on transit has largely been a myth (Chamber of Commerce dreams of shuttles and loops and circulators are just that). For 95% of people, it's not worth the wait to save the walk).

The idea that it's good for your bus to stop every block is stupid. Every stop costs time, and choice riders choose on time (and reliability). More stops also impair reliability: With so many stops, each stop has (on average) fewer people. But there is no way to predict which stops will have passengers to pick up and drop off at what times. 

To be successful, public transit agencies need to focus on what mass transit can do, that Uber/Lyft cannot: moving a lot of people very quickly. Focusing more on mobility, and less on access.

And how to identify WHERE to cut such services? Easy--just check the map of where the Uber pick-ups are.

source

Where the Uber pickups are, someone has gone wrong in transit provision: Maybe too much is being provided, maybe too little. Maybe it's at the wrong hours, maybe it's going the wrong place. (Uber is expensive, and people don't use it for kicks). 

Two sprawling sunbelt cities are making their transit systems work, even while ridership in the big 7 is falling

Phoenix and Houston redesigned their bus networks, and it WORKED. 


"Transit ridership fell in 31 of 35 major metropolitan areas in the United States last year, including the seven cities that serve the majority of riders...(New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C., San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia)

Exceptions to the trend: Seattle, Phoenix and Houston, which either expanded transit coverage and boosted service or underwent ambitious network overhauls, as in Houston’s case."

More service, more riders? Who'da'thunk? 

Not saying more service is the cure: Service in the right amounts, in the proper places is what is proper. 

Millenial Housing Problems

"It leaves my friends and I, .... with gloomy prospects for how and where we can live. More people are being pushed out to the car-dependent suburbs because it's more affordable."

Millenial housing problems in a nutshell. Priced out of desired urban areas, exiled to suburbia, until you can make enough money to buy one of the few, rare, homes available in the urban areas. (And then you can get accused of gentrification! All because the local city counselor grew up in a 1950's suburb, and can't imagine anyone ever wanting to lie any other way, and so won't permit anything else to be built. Never mind that land values have tripled, and so to maintain the same level of affordability, densities need to triple as well. 

How I'd do zoning: Nuisance

As time goes by, I like the idea of zoning less and less. It's a useful tool for planners, but it's really only useful for generating suburban sprawl. Rather, it's useful for real-estate speculation, as it ensure that the context around the new development is less likely to suddenly change: No pork rendering facility will suddenly occur next to the planned ranchettes. (This is largely a problem of suburbia, because only in the context of highway-enabled sprawl do land values change suddenly and systematically). 

So: How I propose to do zoning: Nuisance-based. Say, for example, there are three dimensions of nuisance: noise, shade and traffic. A 'noise' zone gets labeled by the maximum (peak) noise that can be generated at property edge: Airports would be in a 150 decibel zone, industrial in a 120 decibel zone, and cottage residential a 60 decibel zone. Some of the zones would be established by roadway proximity: An arterial highway generates 80 decibels.  Seems too difficult to map? Someone already did.

Shadow-zoning is also simply to explain: Nothing built on a lot can cast shadow on an adjacent lot. (Shadow on public ROW is ok). For urban locations, the rule could be 'no shadow on the lot behind you'. 

'Traffic' means traffic generation: How much traffic your expect to generate. That's easy to measure: Count the parking stalls. Uses with similar numbers of parking stalls are compatible. If the house next door can park two cars on the lot, a commercial building with two parking stalls is also acceptable. A 7-11 with four stalls in the parking lot would be a legal use, while a CVS with 20 would not be. Size of lot would be irrelevant--this is not a 'per 1000 SF' measure.  (Elsewise, Target would just buy up a big lot and generate huge amounts of traffic). 

Form-based zoning beats the pants off Euclidian (use-based) zoning, but it's mostly useful for infilling single-family neighborhoods. Mixed-use areas are going to need something better. 

 

Honolulu Rail

The most interesting bit about the Honolulu train was it's proposed automation: no driver, just a program. With elevated guide-way, there is nothing to crash into on the track, so all the driver does is stop and start the train--the rail guides it. No reason not to automate that. But it's what automation makes possible that is interesting: increasing frequency is no longer dependent on labor costs, but merely a matter of capital development. Running more trains per hour simply requires buying more trains. Theoretically, this could make very high frequency trains (ever 2-3 minutes) technically possible. And thus enable a transit-oriented lifestyle difficult (if not impossible) to duplicate elsewhere.

It would cost money. But it could radically reshape urbanism in Honolulu. Moreso than the area around the line itself, because a high-frequency transit spine enables the emergency of a transfer network, making is possible to get between places that aren't on the rail line, but are connected to it by bus/shuttle routes.

Honolulu rail system

In 1966, then-mayor Neal S. Blaisdell suggested a rail line as a solution to alleviate traffic problems in Honolulu, stating,

 "Taken in the mass, the automobile is a noxious mechanism whose destiny in workaday urban use is to frustrate man and make dead certain that he approaches his daily occupation unhappy and inefficient."^[20]

The failure of Honolulu to get their act together is staggering. It's an island. It has to import cars by air, and fuel by ship. All the urban development is constrained to a tiny strip along. The lack of a mass-transit system is quite puzzling. Takes a bit of reading to get to the core of it, but looks like the cause is political: it's a contest for space between mass transit and cars. (No surprise there--it's a fundamental conflict in urban transportation). And BRT doesn't seem to have entered the conversation until recently; prior to effective BRT, 'rapid' transit meant rail.

Should Honolulu have rail? Probably not. Circa 2000, rail probably looked reasonable. But that was before Curitiba pioneered BRT, and demonstrated that heavy-rail levels of capacity were possible using rubber-tracked vehicles with internal combustion engines.

Technically speaking, there are only two cases where rail transit is justified:

1. You already have a rail transit system, and you are building an additional corridor that will interconnect with it, and building more rail will eliminate the 'change of gauge' problem that continuing along a corridor would otherwise require a transfer to another vehicle.
2. A railroad line/corridor/ROW already exists and can be re-used/repurposed.  

Looking at the proposed rail line, looks like Honolulu meets neither of these criteria.  So why rail? Cars.  As I mentioned  previously, it's a fight for urban space, a fight for travel right-of-way. It proved politically easier to spend billions to build a curious heavy rail/commuter rail/light rail hybrid, rather than take roadway right-of-way from cars. (Choosing between pain today or pain tomorrow, and the public will always take pain tomorrow--something politicians endlessly exploit).  

If you can't make use of the surface right-of-way (which has been politically allocated to cars), then you have to use separated guidway--either elevated or underground. My understanding is that as a volcanic island, there is no 'digging' to be done on Honolulu: building anything underground means dynamiting through igneous rocks of various types. And elevated is cheaper than underground, regardless. (Digging through air is pretty cheap, I understand). So after the political decision to allocate all the surface space to cars was made, elevated was the only place to stick a train. But elevating a train isn't cheap: It's like building a highway consisting solely of bridges. And so the cost is in the billions. And so the project is politically tendentious. Complicating this, Hawaii has zero experience building rapid transit of any sort. 

Sadly, this is a common problem across America: we've not built grade separated transit in decades, and hence there is no professional experience in doing it. All the experience is European and Chinese. And yet the 'benevolent' requirements of 'Buy American' provisions for the FTA condemns U.S. rapid transit to autarky. Rather than import (and localize) foreign expertise, we have to 're-invent the wheel', making all the same dumb mistakes. 

Why? Because this is America, and we don't have a national rail agency. It's a federal system: the Feds fund it, but the local agency builds it. And to do that, every local agency has to learn how to do it. Which is impossible, and so most local agencies rely on consultants to provide the expertise.

And as a consultant, I can tell you, there is a strong incentive to over-state your expertise, 'stretch' related qualifications, and magnify that aspect of related projects. Because that's how you win work, and if you don't win work, you don't eat. And that includes practices like underbidding the work (saying you can do it in less time/for less money than the task will actually take). When public projects go sideways, the reasons for it are predictable. 

Airport Toll Roads

I read Aerotropolis, by Kasarda. Kasarda speaks of the importance of surface transportation access to airports.  Kasarda once missed a plane, while waiting in traffic within walking distance of the airport. The fundamental premise of an airport is that time is valuable (else you'd go by some other mode). Where the time-savings occurs doesn't matter--it can be on the airplane (by making the airplane faster) or on the ground, by making access to the airport faster.

For cars on a highway, the main source of delay is congestion. One commonly advocated solution to congestion is 'congestion pricing'. Ie, 'surge' pricing, except for road-space rather than cars. When the road is not congested, driving on it is free. But the more demand for road space there is (and the more congested things get) the higher the price you pay for road space.

Reading up on Dulles Airport, which is accessed by the Dulles Toll Road, and the idea is much on my mind: running a road like an airport. When the demand is low, prices are low to fill the seats. But when demand is high, the price rises, and only travelers who really need the speed are willing to pay for it.

Makes me wonder if we couldn't make congestion pricing more acceptable by introducing 'bereavement fares'--if you have to fly, on zero notice, because someone died, the airlines charge you the ticket price as if had been bought 3 weeks ago. Be nice to offer that for congestion tolls--if it was an emergency, the charge is negated.