Why zoning

While we're still stuck with zoning (and it's associated problems), its good to understanding where zoning comes from: the peculiar conditions of post-war America. The way is done, it's 1945, it's a war economy, with a combination of price controls, wage caps, rationing and subsidies in place. The wage labor market is tight (despite having drawn huge numbers of previously non-wage female workers into formal employment).

But at the same time, there is a huge amount of the labor pool is still across the ocean as an occupying force that is about to come home, and a complete horror of unemployment that is going to result when all those guys come home.

There has only been a tiny amount of new construction in almost a generation--1930-1945. The whole built environment is run-down and functionally obsolete. While not everywhere is a slum, everywhere is run-down. And there are plenty of actual 'Hoover-ville' shanty towns.

So there is a clear need to build a massive amount of housing. The Federal government has been playing  footsie with social housing (Greenbelt, etc), following the lead of what major cities were doing pre-war, and what it had to do for the dependents of the enlisted population during the war.

It's the form of American post-war housing that's notable--America went hard for detached single family housing. And as near as I can tell, it's purely due to the "No man who owns his own home can be a communist". That aside, why the strict segregation of uses? Lots of places have zoning without it (Japan most notably). 

The legality of zoning was in question for a long time. Euclid vs. Ambler is the court case that establishes the legality of zoning, says it's ok to segregate uses.

Anyway, intent of zoning is 'hygienest'. An urge to separate like from unlike. Because all the existing development seemed unclean--too much overcrowding. 

But the functionally obsolete matters. There had been a lot of technological change from 1928-45, no small amount of it driven by the needs of the war itself. Stoves and furnaces are the things that come to my mind, but bathrooms (indoor plumbing with a porcelain throne) also a shift for a lot of America. (Surreal, but many tenement buildings had only a single bathroom per floor).  'Cold water flats', with no water heaters in the building (let alone the units) also a thing. 

Is rural even a thing?

 Most places that claim to be rural aren't. I'm not even sure I believe in 'rural' as a construct. Where there are people, urbanity follows. Any time you get enough people for trade to exist, a central place emerges. And once a central place emerges, more things cluster around that. Once congestion/land values in a central places becomes too extreme, you get sub-centers. 

In an industrial society, subsistence farming just isn't a thing. Once manufactured goods exist, a farm needs to export something to make the money to purchase goods. It's a continuum of how much of farm production is devoted to local subsistence and how much to export 'cash crops', but once capital production equipment provides even a marginal advantage, specialization happens pretty fast. Someone buys a plow, and they specialize in field crops, and that's the end of orchards for them. 

So the actual traditional pattern in America isn't 'rural', but rather small towns. Places for the retail, repair and maintenance of manufactured goods, the provision of specialized services, and 'congregational goods', that can't be enjoyed privately, like church services and festivals. 

So what's the difference between a town an a city? Is it just when a town gets bigger? You might argue that it's just a difference of degree, that if a town gets big enough, a scale dependent transition takes place, and it becomes a city. I'd argue that this is bunk. Central Place Theory aside, a city is distinct from a central-place for central places. Fundamentally, what makes a city is trade. Every city* sits on a transportation nexus: a natural harbor, at the convergence of rivers, the union of railways, an interchange of highways. A city gets its start at the most accessible location, regardless of how terrible that location for future development (ie Pittsburgh). And where there is trade, ware-housing follows. And once materials are warehoused, it's only natural the industry (processing materials) and manufacture (combining elements) follows one the same site. Pre-mechanization, industry requires a big work-force, which means a lot people, which means a lot of housing, which means a lot of furnishing, in a parallel urban development cycle. Post-mechanization, industry and manufacture require a specialized/skilled workforce, which means high wages, which supports all sorts of secondary consumption, which drives further workforce specialization. 

*Administrative capitals being their own weird case. Salt Lake City also an interesting case. It was never intended to be a city, being rather designed as a 'super-town' of an agrarian/fundamentalist religious commune. Didn't work out. Even as remote and wrapped with mountains and lakes as it was, it still sat the crossroads of Emigration canyon and the Jordan River. 

City vs. Suburb is a bad dichotomy

City/suburb isn't actually a very good dichotomy, because we don't have good definitions for either. I prefer pre-and post automotive urbanism, and most places contain a mix of both--in some jurisdictions, it's 100% of the land area, and in others, it's .001%. What determines that percent is what percent of the city was built before the advent of mechanical transport.

It's easy to forget, but deep into the 19th century, horses were a regular part of urban life. If you were rich, you had a coach. If you were just affluent, you had a couple of horses. For those without, you might rent one from the livery stable, or you might rely on grabbing a ride on a horse-drawn wagon.

It's weird to thing about, but most of our urban transport simply replaced horse-power with mechanical power. The switch was abrupt, and not just for technological reasons, but for biological ones: The Great EpiZooetic killed a lot of horses, and horse-power became more expensive. 

Classic urban model of land values is the 'teepee' of maximal value in the center, and an arcing decline from there. But that's a simplifying model, and doesn't reflect the complexity of actual conditions. There also exists a class of what I'll call 'carriage suburbs', which are affluent single-family detached semi-mansions located at the extreme edge (>.5 mile) of a pre-industrial 'walking' city. Prior to the advent of mechanical transport, there was never a pure 'walking city'. There were always suburbs and exurbs made accessible by horse or carriage. You see it in Rome, you see it in small towns, you see it in big cities. Model also fails to reflect height: all else equal, elevation is always a good thing-less flooding, less smoke, better views. In combination, the result is that the 'heights' of any city get occupied by an affluent class with access to non-walk based transportation. 

Past that, it's just a matter of density. The more limited the supply of land, the higher the resulting density. Barcelona being the extreme example case--rigorous denial of construction outside the city walls resulted in very high interior density. Most other pre-industrial cities tended to barnacle on faux-burgs just outside the city gates--locations that were 'on the way', but not bound by city laws or nuisance restrictions. And once a fauxburg became dense enough, it was incorporated inside the city wall and became part of the city. And a new fauxburg emerged at the gates once more. 

Arguably, fauxburgs are a case of suburbs: I disagree--fauxburgs are much more shanty-towns, increasing in density and permanence. Essence of suburb is the commute--living outside the city and commuting to the city on a daily basis. (Exurb being characterized by a non-daily commute or an extreme commute*).

Railroad suburbs are an interesting case, because while they are technically suburbs, they are both pre-automotive and pre-zoning. Which makes them radically different from post-war suburbs in block size, land use mix, and density. Every commute still involves a walk portion, and the street network has a characteristic 'long block' pattern with many side-streets (NYC's Avenue/Street pattern) to maximize access to the rail lines. Secondary pattern being commercial sales near the station, and noxious uses (industrial/warehouse) directly abutting the rail line. Since they still 'made for walking', even travel is now multi-modal, railroad suburbs are still generally considered good urbanism.

Post-zoning, urbanism goes to hell, and there is rhetoric about the 'extinction of walking', and the assumption that everyone will drive everywhere, and walk no further than across a parking lot, and that there will be parking skyscrapers as-needed. So we see a street network at a scale suitable for the automobile, the omission of sidewalks, and the establishment of massive building setbacks to permit future road widening, and massive required parking mandates. And that's the legal superstructure on which (most) of America has urbanized under for the past 80 years. And it's been going on for so long, almost no one knows anything different, unless they go visit Europe.

* Call it 1.5 hours of travel time. Normal commute is half an hour, plus for minus 15m.

Urban Ideology in America

Post-zoning, urbanism goes to hell, and there is rhetoric about the 'extinction of walking', and the assumption that everyone will drive everywhere, and walk no further than across a parking lot, and that there will be parking skyscrapers as-needed. And that ideology prevails until the 1970's, when the 'Urban Transportation Problem' gets published/realized--it's impossible to 'build your way out of congestion'. Also a general realization that the 'share automobile' of buses for non-car owners isn't financially viable (on a per-mile basis) in suburbia. So you get a decade of 'cars plus commuter transit' (BART, WMATA, MARTA) when it's realized that those cost too much to build out the planned network, and it takes until New Urbanism until we have an alternate ideology. While we're waiting for CNU to rediscover walkable urbanism, we're stuck with crank Modernist city planning, the rational comprehensive model, Brutalism, traffic-based transportation investments, and similar bunk.

FrontRunner Double-tracking and electrification

I've generally been negative regarding FrontRunner double-tracking and electrification. Partially because for most of my riding life, it's been an hourly commuter rail with PnR access. Not real useful for those living the car-free or car-less lifestyle. More recently I realized what double-tracking and electrification would do: Transform FrontRunner into something much more like the PATH train. Viz: an electrified heavy-rail system with (potentially) 15 frequencies. FrontRunner was built on the cheap (not a criticism), including a lot of single track, so in many segments the only place two trains can pass each other is at stations. So one train has to wait for the other, so if one train is late, the other train is made late. It's also a diesel train, so the amount of torque it can produce is limited, and hence how fast it can accelerate. (Diesel trains are great for long distances--for cheaper than stringing catenary for the whole distance, and rolling-friction efficiency of trains aside, a better option than carrying batteries the whole way). FrontRunner is also the only way the whole Wasatch Front can be on one train system. TRAX is great, but it's light rail, which means it can't share track with freight trains, which means it's limited to being on it's own ROW. (TRAX does some 'time separation', which is why the blue line will never have an 'after hours' train home for people who want to drink and not-drive.)