Ground floor retail isn't vacant by accident

Lot of developers are happy to treat the required ground floor retail as a deadweight loss, much like they do required parking. So income from rents on that space doesn't enter into the proforma, and it's easier to just not deal with it. Compounding the issue is that for new builds, the leasing agent is looking for a stable corporate tenant who can afford to pay the high lease rates. And rather than simply accept lower rents, they are willing to wait. Waiting five years to rent for $100/sf for five years is better than renting for $50/sf for ten year - no buildout or depreciation.

When it comes to transit, there is no 'mode'.

BRT makes a mockery of the 'best for' typology, largely because BRT is such a heterogenous category - quality varies from being heavy-rail competitive to being a bus with slightly nicer stops. (FTA labels aside, most 'BRT' isn't actually 'Rapid'--it lacks exclusive guideway).

American light rail hardly a 'clean' category either - tram-train is the norm, resulting in things like poor Portland (and formerly LA), where a through-corridor suffers a tram section in the middle. All are 'light rail' because they can't share track with 'heavy' rail - metros and commuter rail roads. Light rail is a vehicle crashworthiness standard. 

Having tried to identify all light rail stations (prior to the Transit Politic getting it done) actually transit is bafflingly heterogenous. Even with the 'New Starts' light rail systems, there are three distinct tropes: 1) tram-trains, 2) diesel, and 3) streetcars. 

1) German tram-trains (stadtbahn) are the trope definer for most American light rail - rapid transit service in the suburbs by using a former freight rail corridor, street-running in the central city (to avoid tunneling costs)*. In America, when we lack a freight rail corridor, we've built in freeway medians. 

2) New Jersey River Rail line is the trope definer, but Texas has built a lot of it. Save yourself the costs of electrification (and unsightly catenary) by keeping power generation onboard the vehicle. But that same fix makes stopping and starting both slower and more expensive, so stop spacing is much wider than for electrified traction**. 

3) Portland Streetcar is the trope definer for American streetcars. Portland's modern streetcar uses standard European trams, but that wasn't what got America excited about streetcars--rather, it was Portland's historic streetcars that were the original 'Development-oriented transit'. Supported by a local option tax along the corridor (American transit owes a huge debt to Powell's city of books). The whole concept of a 'pedestrian extender' and using a streetcar as a catalyst for real estate development in a proximate but inaccessible area (Pearl district). All of it street running from go. Over time, Portland has taken streetcar to the next tier, with a streetcar-only bridge, applying the same logic to places across a river. 

*If you put your city center light rail in a tunnel, so it's all rapid transit, it's evolved into a light metro.

** Battery technology may be a game-changer for diesel light rail, permitting both low-cost installation and electric traction levels of acceleration. Getting the brakes right is going to be the sticking point - batteries weigh a lot, so regenerate breaking practically necessary, and the 'trucks' (wheels) on rail vehicles are already complex and putting that much potentially explosive silicon near track is a bit perilous. 

Doubtful battery will be as relevant for trams/streetcars - anyplace that already has transmission lines will keep extending them, so the use-case is marginal--places without systems, for which the competition is BRT, which has a far lower initial investment cost and far better capability for incremental upgrades. 

If you are developer, the things that matter

If you are developer, the things that matter are: 1) financing costs, 2) land costs, 3) construction costs) 4) regulatory costs, and 5) time. 1, 2 and 3 aren't generally in the local remit. 4 absolutely is--regulatory costs (height limits, setbacks, parking requirements, tree coverage) are. Time somewhat is (public process, design review). Right now, land costs too much, because landowners are still pricing it as if we still enjoyed the near zero interest rates of 2020.

Commercial Vehicle Electrification

Commercial vehicles like buses are one of the places where vehicle electrification is spreading like wildfire. Climate ideology may have driven the political mandate for developing electric buses, but their adoption is being driven by cold hard dollars. Fuel costs savings were always going to be greatest for the vehicles that spent the most time in motion. But I suspect once we get data on long-term maintenance costs, production of Internal Combustion Engine buses is done. 

"For-profit developers won’t build it because the ROI doesn’t match their pro forma"

The first time a developer returns a negative ROI on capital, and fails to repay their loans, they cease being a developer. Developers don't have any money of their own. They borrow it from banks or equity partners. And if those partners don't like the ROI, they don't lend the money. Developers watch interest rates (and hence their cost of capital) like it's the world cup, because it's key to their business model - it determines what 'pencils', what can feasible be built with and ROI that covers their cost of capital, their costs, and the risk they undertake borrowing money in the face of appreciating construction cost and uncertain regulatory delay. 

Peak Homebuying Window

 People decry high interest rates, but buying a house after a long spell of high interest rates is actually amazing: Once you buy the price is fixed--but you can always refinance to a lower rate. Admittedly, when rates spike, the housing market shuts down, and no one buys anything. Housing prices are sticky, so it takes a long time for them to adjust to lower prices. However, high rates also mean inflation, which takes the sting away: inflation drives housing prices up, even as financing costs are trying to drive them down.

Housing prices aren't a measure of affordability--the monthly payment is. And there is a mathematical relationship between interest rate and the price of an asset. In Economese: "When rates rise, the discount rate increases, reducing the present value of future cash flows and lowering asset prices"

When rates are low, both building* and borrowing are easy. But when rates rise, it costs more to borrow money, raising the monthly payment for the same loan amount. But income does not rise with financing costs, so buyers can only manage a smaller loan, for a worse location. Less demand for houses in better locations, and with fixed supply, that should lower prices. But house prices are sticky--someone who bought a house for $500,000 isn't going to sell it for $400,000 (How would they pay off their mortgage?).

But while rates remain high, the value of the home has fallen. It falls to inflation to balance things out. Over eleven years, even at 2% inflation, values go up 25%, and some with a $500,000 mortgage can sell for $500,000.

The best time to buy a house is always when rates fall - homeowners don't mentally reprice their asking price, even when shifts in the mortgage rate radically affect monthly payments. For example, on a $300,000 mortgage over 30 years:

At 3%: ~$1,265/month

At 4%: ~$1,432/month

Difference: ~$167/month (or ~$60,000 total over 30 years)

If an income previously supported a $1432/month mortgage payment at 4%, and rates drop to 3%, that supports an additional $35,000 worth of mortgage. A change that realtors have long** been slow to price in.

The 'Golden Age' is when rates have been high for a long time (long enough for inflation to 'float' everyone trapped in by a lower rate mortgage) and then rates start to come down.

*Builders operate almost entirely using borrowed money. When rates rise, it affects builders first. Even after they cease production of new houses, it takes months for homes under construction to finish, so the 'pipeline' of new stock that affects supply takes weeks to run dry.

**Less true today, thanks to Zillow and similar services, which have a large customer base, letting them spread research and analysis costs over multiple customers, enabling level of home price analysis far beyond the historical norm. Realtors were long dependent on 'comps' (comparisons) for recently sold homes, which lagged market prices by months. 

Maintenance Crises are Emergent

Fascinating element of visiting the transit museum in NYC was learning that maintenance crises were a recurring problem. Politicians suppressed any increase in the transit fare, starving operators of revenue, resulting in deferred maintenance, until some tragic incident generated sufficient public outcry to support raising additional funding by raising fares. The initial five cent fare was just too low to support safe operations and raising it at a rate sufficient to keep up with actual costs (and inflation) has been a constant struggle. 

Source: Wikipedia, via Reddit r/nyc: NYC Subway Fare over last 120 years adjusted for inflation

Emblematic of infrastructure in America, really. We subsidize use by underpricing user costs. 

Six months of weekly posts in blog queue!

Six months of weekly posts in queue, so I'm going to start doubling frequency - Wednesdays AND Fridays.

In this house, we believe....

1.  Cars are strangling our cities.
2. Building more roads just attracts more traffic and makes things worse.
3. Freeways pull people and businesses away from city centers.
4. Limiting cars downtown would help cities.
5. Rail transit moves more people more efficiently than roads.
6. Good rail would remove the need for many planned freeways.
7. Freeways eat up valuable land and shrink the city tax base.
8. Public transport needs funding to compete fairly with heavily subsidized roads.
9. Driving is expensive for individuals and for society.
10. Urban freeways cost enormous amounts of public money per mile.

Single-family construction headwinds

I suspect that single-family construction will continue to face headwinds. Every location is a trade-off between transportation costs and structure costs, and the components of suburban transportation costs (cars + gasoline) have gone up a lot over the past year. Interest rates are up, and thus so are financing costs. Car insurance rates also up substantially. Cars are also becoming more capital intensive, due to vehicle electrification. People are bringing down their fuel costs by paying more up front but taking on more financing costs to be able to pay more up front.

Remote work won't save the single-family home market. The pandemic induced wave of remote work has crested and is receding. The tide is still coming in, but this particular wave is ebbing. And with it, the need for an extra bedroom to use as a home office. No one who bought a house during the pandemic is going to shift back to urban living, but the number of people making that transition is going to drop off.

The cost of reversing the transition from urban renter to suburban owner is forbiddingly expensive: Transaction costs of home purchase impose a financial cost, home improvement customizations create sunk costs, etc. But the cost of making that transition in the first place is also costly--a second car becomes a practical necessity.

Blight

Any town whose land values no longer support the rehab/renovation of existing SFD is in a bad way. If there is zero demand for existing housing that can be restored using sweat equity, there is zero demand for (new) infill housing. What could be saved is pretty much irrelevant. Non-market infill development makes things worse--competes with existing housing. New multifamily isn't feasible. NIMBYism preventing existing SFD from being converting into multifamily is making the blight worse, because rather than having duplexes you have abandoned and decaying single-family-detached.

Fighting blight through demolition just creates pockmarked areas. Demolition of blighted structures just changes the flavor of blight - from building to lot. The core issue remains - insufficient demand. You can't cure a lack of demand by adding additional supply. You can subsidize non-market infill housing in the name of 'neighborhood stabilization'. Which will work, but only by strengthening a political constituency capable of advocating for infrastructure investment near them, to the detriment of other neighborhoods, such as has happened in Chicago.

Sanitarium Architecture

Modernism is an architectural style based on Swiss sanitariums for traumatized war veterans, who found blank walls and empty spaces restful. It triumphed in architectural practice because simple geometrical models were more persuasive in convincing clients to build things than the 2D facade drawings of Beaux Arts that previously prevailed. It gelled with the 'out with the old' ideology of post-war building and pseudo-technocratic rationalism. And it triumphed financially because it was cheap to construct - concrete form work rather than carved stone.

When Robert Venturi's Post-Modernism arrived, and people were given an option, they took it. 

Achievement

The post queue is looking good, with a post scheduled weekly (Wednesdays) until 2027. Six months of queue is the new goal, and then increasing frequency beyond weekly. 

PLSS and your local grid

Post-war suburbs are the same everywhere: wide arterials with strip commercial, connecting suburban subdivisions to freeways along old rural highways. The biggest difference is whether the Public Lands Survey System was used or not. 

Anywhere the PLSS was used, you tend to get streets that follow section lines, and hence square grids.

Everywhere east of the Appalachians lacks it. And so in those areas, the grid defaults to triangle, following the rural roads between towns, mills, bridges, and forts. For example, in Raleigh, there is a 'Durham Road' going to Durham. In Durham, it becomes 'Raleigh Road', and midway, it's 'Duraleigh Road'.  

Look at a map of anywhere in the South, and you can see the constant tessellation of triangles between each triplet of towns.  It's an emergent pattern - people follow the roads, and roads emerge where wagons can travel--paths that are the most energy-efficient for a heavy load, even if it's not the most direct. It's a pattern that can be seen over and over in urbanization - you can see it in London, in Paris, etc. For major towns, the roads forming the tip of the triangle will converge a way out (no need to maintain three closely spaced roads). Regardless, those triangles of rural roads became rural highways, which are urbanized as major arterials. If they don't have enough traffic, they get classes as minor arterials or even collectors. 

But whatever polygon makes up the grid of an urban area, the pattern remains: highways emerge, traffic is funneled to a limited number of paths, commercial springs up along high-traffic paths, and residential happens anywhere with decent job access that commercial or industrial users haven't already claimed. 

It's a demand pattern that affects even places that started with square grids, and why when major transportation investments (railways, freeways) get planned and major investments made, it doesn't tend to follow the grid--it responds more to transportation demand than to administrative costs. 

The Great Housing Mismatch

We don't actually need more single family - it's already most of the stock. Sure, it's still being used, but increasingly by non-family households who would be equally happy with something else. But three incomes outbid two, so families are still having a tough time. We need to build massively larger amounts of multifamily to have any hope of aligning our household types with our house types.

BTS RFI

1.  The overwhelming local government need is for data to satisfying MAPS/FAST Act reporting requirements
2. Much more focus on safety would be welcome. Right now, analysis is at a very basis level of "someone died here" with minimal analysis of causal factors beyond AADT. A FEMA-style document on "How to analyze safety data" would be welcome, with a specific focus on urban arterials, intersections, and pedestrians. 
3. More data on Infrastructure condition would be welcome. We have a much talked about maintenance crisis and pending funding crisis. We make decisions on what we measure, and infrastructure condition is important, so we should do more measurement of it.
4. Being able to access data via API is preferred. I absolutely love tidycensus (in R); it has saved me huge amounts of time downloading, unzipping and filing data, and it's ability to 'cache' data rather than re-downloading when  I re-run a script has been great.
5. API-based data is great, but if you don't have a good archive of past data I can trust (and which will remain comparable in the future) I have the download--I've even had to write custom scripts to download data from live servers, because I can't get a download. Vintage management is key -- If I download the same thing at two different dates, and my boss says "Why is this different", I need to be able to explain why, which means every time a dataset gets updated, it needs a (user accessible) unique ID.
6. If I open a map using experience.arcgis.com, I want to be able to download the data from it, not have to try to find it someplace else within the website. Given all the data in the web applications is publicly available, this should be a default. 
7. Why does the downloadable NTAD data say "coming soon", with a 2021 date? <https://www.bts.gov/geospatial/national-transportation-atlas-database/archivedata> It's a wall I've hit multiple times when hunting BTS geodata.
8. Obtain you own BTS domain on BlueSky, and mirror to Twitter using IFTTT or the like--more control, better archiving.  (Twitter is great for announcing things, but remarkably bad at making it possible to find something you saw and want to see again).I've yet to find an ArcGIS provided "Build you own map" useful. ESRI offers it, but does it provide any value? 
9. This webpage, specifically, is underwhelming: <https://www.bts.gov/browse-statistical-products-and-data> It's an alphabetical list of what, by what criteria?
10. I would love a product producing local-area specific estimates of growth in AADT. I've seen traffic engineers using county or even state level growth rates for built-out urban areas when making traffic projects.

Code Cruft in Zoning

Over time, any bit of code (zoning included) generates ad-hoc fixes to resolve problems never envisioned when the code was first devised, and most of those fixes satisfied an immediate need for a metric. Few of these metrics have any initial basis outside of simplicity and sufficiency, and their descendent metrics enjoy few advantages beyond custom and extrapolation.

Legally speaking, the purpose of all zoning code is to regulate health, safety and welfare. Functionally, zoning code has another use, beyond which: it is about pre-emptively managing nuisance by separating incompatible uses. Things which are noisy, or smelly, anything that disturbs a 'right to quiet enjoyment' are nuisances*. 

Even if we make the good-faith assumption that the purpose of all zoning code is to regulate health, safety and welfare, times changes and the problem that zoning fixes were designed to resolve is no longer relevant (ie, coal delivery, livery stables). 

Zoning is law, law is the basis of court cases and precedents, changing the law undermines the precedents, no city wants the cost & hassle of a lawsuit. So it's most often simply not to change zoning except on an as-needed basis. We often thing of the major cities like NYC or LA, but most city corporations are not far removed from that: In America, there are 19,000 incorporated cities, and over 100k 'populated places' of towns, villages, and townships. Many are not far removed from HOAs and are governed on a volunteer basis on a shoe-string budget. Hence, the quality of the average zoning code is not very good, and it is very likely out of date, most importantly regarding residential code.

Most of zoned land is zoned residential. Most of residential zoned land is zoned for single family detached housing, at a time when the nuclear family was the normal household, and land, gas and cars where cheap. None of these things are true any longer, but our zoning codes still reflect that. 

Traffic is a nuisance

A nuisance is anything that disturbs a 'right to quiet enjoyment'. By this definition, most busy roads are nuisances. But as they precede development in most places, that new development is seen as having 'come to the nuisance'. Regardless of the exponential increase in traffic and noise that happened after someone build a house next to it.  Part of this is the 'boil the frog' nature of traffic--the annual increase is so marginal that it's hard to claim damages. But for major projects like freeways, where capacity (and hence noise) increase rapidly, nuisance is clearly an issue. Which is why we get soundwalls, which is why freeways are expensive. 

But why didn't earlier freeway projects suffer the same accusations of nuisance? For earlier freeway projects, the explanation is bleaker: racism. Planners deliberately directed urban freeways through black neighborhoods. Huge numbers of buildings were demolished. Most central city residents are renters, and renters move often, and the cohort effect of new renters incrementally erases any standing to sue.

*Done as a form a slum clearance. Were they slums? Absolutely. But they were also slums that were gentrifying, being improved by the sweat equity of a marginalized people. Anytime someone is dispossessed, ask: 'Was the land cheap, or were the people powerless'? 

SUVs were never designed to be safe

SUVs were never designed a safety project - the whole light truck category was created as a carve-out for things like army jeeps, until someone realized they could exploit a loophole and released the Jeep Grand Cherokee. And they were, for years, famously unsafe - does no one still recall the famous tendency of early SUVs to roll over? They are less safe than an equivalent vehicle. They just happen to be more massive than average. If everything else was equally as massive, their safety premium would vanish. 

Admittedly, they tend to do better than older passenger cars. By dint of height, when they rear-end a car with a low trunk, they over-run the car, killing the passengers in the backseat, rather than driver of the SUV. So, from a public health standpoint, I guess that's sort of a selling point, given that most cars are empty most of the time? 

(It's not by accident that all new passenger cars have a tall rear designed to stop SUVs from overrunning their rear.)

Vehicular innovation

The core of the issue is that our roads are designed with cars as the default and they have a hard time accommodating anything else. What grudging accommodation exists has made the alternative (motorcycles, bicycles, walking) so risky and unpleasant that few people would tolerate it. But bike-sharing cracked that equilibrium, and e-bikes shattered it. We are in an era of vehicular innovation, and our design and regulatory frameworks simply no longer fit.

Public petitions are lobbying, not public input.

One of the tactics of the vocal opposition is a petition, a weapon I have said for decades is the least useful and most easily corruptible method of public “input” there is. I’ve personally experienced the tool being abused many times. The problem is, project opposers use petitions as a tactic because the media loves to report on them, and politicians give them weight even when they shouldn’t.

            - Brent Toderian

Petitions aren't representative. They aren't a sample. They are the reverse of a sample, merely an indicator of how many people you can get to sign a piece of paper. And without a context of magnitude that is normal for a petition, it's hard to tell if 100 represents a lot of people or mere crankery. Again demonstrating the value of an actual (statistically valid) survey for assessing public opinion on a topic.

I understand that surveys are expensive (to design, to administer, to analyze) and that they are addictive. But they do offer elected officials something they can't get elsewhere: A representative sample of what their voters actually think on a specific issue. 

Managing Common Area Disagreements

A cluster of homes around a central green is problematic.  How are 7-14 households going to actually use this open-space /common area? The owners and occupants may have wildly divergent expectations about acceptable uses and maintenance standards. A central open space isn't an adequate replacement for single family front yards. Yards are private, and legal digests and planning dockets are replete with cases of the unacceptable use yard by a problematic neighbor for such uses as vehicle parking, junk storage, raising chickens, and gardens.

Condos are notorious for co-owner disagreements, characterized by both lawsuits and violent altercations, despite having explicit legally sanctioned governance structures. In a way, it's simpler when the central space is a street, plaza, or park--nobody owns it, and there is an impartial external arbiter for disputes about use. The provision of unsupervised, under-regulated and uncontrolled common areas was one of the blights of the use of the 'Towers in the Park' model for public housing. Anyone who has ever lived in a 'group quarters' situation (such as a dorm) can tell how quickly common areas become dirty, disgusting and damaged through neglect and abuse.

Central Terminals and Union Stations

Your central railroad terminal is your most accessible point in your network, because it connects to the largest number of routes. So there is a natural temptation to want to put it in the most central point, where people can walk to the largest number of activity generating buildings. 

By that logic, we should have a freeway interchange in the middle of every CBD. In reality, the freeway interchange always winds up at the fringe of the CBD - still providing excellent access, but not permitted to displace the core. In a private market, they can't afford the real estate. Worse yet is when your Central station is also a terminal station, where routes end*. When that happens, large amounts of space are needed to store vehicles--and long trains require long storage tracks and long access tracks, so you are basically devoting an entire series of blocks.  And that happens even when that space is very expensive. Both the Manhattan and Washington DC have enormous 'trail track' complexes, despite the staggering value of land those complexes represent. (The Hudson Yards development is, guess what, skyscrapers build over/between the train tracks of the railway's Hudson Yard). 

Union Stations, a central depot for all the railroads serving a city, is a peculiarly American obsession. I suspect part of it was city boosterism (as cities competed to produce the most beautiful civic megaproject) and the other half was clearing real estate for urban development. American cities of a certain age have amazing city halls, courthouses, and railroad terminals (veritable 'Cathedrals of Transportation'). Many will object that the alternate is the mess under Madison Square Garden. And the aforesaid urge still exists, as Calatrava's World Trade Center Transportation Hub and the Moynihan Train Hall clearly attest.

But from a network design perspective, from a land use perspective, we are better not having a "Central Terminal"--we are better having a central station with through running, where lots of trains stop, but none of them are stored waiting. 

There are bogus arguments made about the need to store them there for peak commuters. The peak was never the whole story, and post-pandemic represents and even smaller fraction of the total. (Peak hour design is only relevant for assessing capacity restraints). If a train can be stored at a central terminal, a train can also be stored at a peripheral terminal 15 minutes away and scheduled to arrive at the proper time, while also providing additional service to nearby stations along the way.  

Some of the limitations to through running are infrastructural (Oh, Chicago, I'm so sorry). But many are merely operational. NYC is a notorious offender, because the different competing public agencies can't manage the necessary operational coordination necessary to share track. But the same issues exists at DC's Union station, where the Virginia Railway Express (VRE) and Maryland-Area Regional Commuter (MARC) railways meet. (Admittedly, efforts to resolve the issue are in-process). 

This may seem like a rail issue, specific to only a few large metros, but the same issues afflict smaller bus-based transit systems across America--Raleigh is afflicted by it, Des Moines is afflicted by it, etc. Trying to fit enough space to story buses into a downtown area means the terminal must be peripheral, which means it is less effective, and also more intrusive, more disruptive to walkable urbanism.   

*Worst of all is when some genius attempts to maximize management convenience by also centralizing maintenance depot operations in the same complex.

Rose Walks and kids

Many houses clustered around a central green hearkens back to the 'Rose Walk' style of apartments but makes a critical error. An essential element of the Rose Walk concept is that the wall-to-wall units make the common green a 'garden' suitable for unsupervised child play.  Given buyer-hostility to attached homes (most buyers of new homes are boomers), a compromise solution may be a site plan where each house is divided by a shed. No one hears their neighbors TV through the wall, and the front-facing shed serves the same function that so many garages do - weatherproof storage and ad-hoc workspace. And by facing such a shed onto the 'common' area, you get more of a front porch effect, but one with differential privacy, based on keeping the door open or closed. 

New Development and NIMBY

New urban development replaces existing urban development. NYC is on generation six of the process, and in suburbs of Salt Lake, farmland has become strip malls which has become mid-rise apartments in the last twenty. Any economist will tell you that the market produces as much density as prices support. Making sure those prices are high enough to make most development infeasible is the essential NIMBY strategy, and every regulatory device is perverted to that end: Delay through public consultation and design review, conditional approvals, spurious CEQA lawsuits, and 'poison pill' exactions by referendum.

On Journalism

 A generation past, old journalists taught young journalists that there are always two sides to any issue, and showing both was necessary for 'objective' journalism. Which has been perverted into ensuring that relevant political factions get equal airtime (without regard to objectivity or relation to reality). 

America would be better off with a more British adversarial partisan journalism which isn't objective and doesn't falsely claim to be. Adopting the regulatory standards from broadcast television news, where limited spectrum resulted in a limited number of stations practically inviting regulated monopolies, is almost accidental. It was purely a legacy of big semi-monopoly corporates borrowing a model from others in a related industry as they were bought out by private owners in a class private equity / corporate empire play.

Prior to the web, publishing meant actually manufacturing physical objects, using capital machinery, which was capital intensive, while providing content meant managing a lot of human capital, in an enterprise with enormous economies of scale. Quasi-monopolies were almost natural.  But there was absolutely no reason 'print' journalism needs to follow that model today.

It's not by accident that the web keeps seeing new publishing platforms emerge--news groups, websites, blogs, microblogs, social media, short-form video. Technological improvement is part of the game, but so is that the fact that private capital keeps trying to achieve return on investment by using network effects to scale to ubiquity and then extract monopoly rents. (We also see billionaires buying platforms to silence critics and acquire vanity assets: see Twitter and the Washington Post). Hence, BlueSky--not just a clone of Twitter, but a competitor designed to be invulnerable to being bought out. 

There are also the issues of censorship and content theft. Archive of Our Own (AO3) exists because LiveJournal purged sketchy content to make it more attractive to advertisers and hence investors. SubStack exists because blog traffic was being compromised by AI summaries of its best content. 

Again, there is no need for print journalism to make any effort to be objective, as there can be an infinite array of journalism providers on the web. In which environment, journalism can be as radical as it likes--infinite speciation to fill infinite infinitesimal niches, optimized through evolutionary selection. 

Rather than being objective, journalism should be informative. It should tell you something you didn't know before, even if it's only in a Jane-Austin-whose-daughter-has-married-whose-son sort of way. Good journalism will always be investigative, providing not just the facts, but the context necessary to understand implications of the facts. Really Good journalism is transformative - when new facts are used to demonstrate the limits of what someone previously thought they knew and create a new understanding that synthesizing both old and new understanding. Bad journalism is merely confirmatory - it affirms what you already knew is correct. Really Bad journalism is enabling delusion - reinforcing what you already know to be correct, even when that understanding is wrong. 

Present diatribes against 'fake news' and 'woke culture' exists in direct response to the threat that exposure to Really Good Journalism presents to Really Bad Journalism using a 'purity culture' technique to quarantine information by labeling it or its source as 'bad' or 'shameful' or 'sinful'. (If you are seeing a parallel to people getting 'cancelled' it's not by accident - extremists at both ends of the political spectrum use exclusion and denial an boycott as a threat. 

There is a delusion among major new outlets that they can avoid this by being objective, but that is a pursuit of false ideal and a financial dead-end. Nothing can ever be 'objective' enough to satisfy the zealots who are the partisan drill sergeants--their job is to find something wrong in order to find something they can use as a basis for discipline and punishment. 

That most journalism is supported by advertisement is both tonic and poison. A tonic, because money doesn't have an ideology. And poison, because almost no one who buys advertising wants to be associated with a fringe position that might alienate potential buyers or induce a boycott. 

Together, this suggests we'll see two forms of journalism: the apolitical (or at least unaligned) journalism about 'Topics' and facts about those topics, and the ever-more unhinged 'Narrative' journalism focused on emphasizing some facts and deprecating others in order to privilege a preferred political narrative. In neither form of journalism is 'objectivity' relevant. For Narrative journalism, it's fundamentally contrary to its purpose. And for 'Topics' journalism, no one is going to care about objectivity -- the watch you trust is the one that tells the time best. And perhaps this already exists today, and the real frission we are seeing is the interstice between the two. And as a human writing about things, your only real question is if you are writing something that is informative, investigative, transformative-- or confirmatory and enabling.

 

Twitter & BlueSky

One of the reasons this blog is comparatively nearly devoid of content for 2021-2024 was caused by devoting a lot of my attention to Twitter. I find X.com a far inferior platform, but for those curious about past tweets. 

Active on BlueSky as well, but from a 'writing is thinking' perspective, I've found that the 300-character batches is a non-always-helpful limitation. 

Chunking utterances into 300 characters supports brevity and clarity in communication, as each utterance must stand on its own, but impairs composition when trying to articulate thoughts and aggregate related ideas. 

Accordingly, most threads run stream-of-consciousness, and folks who can be articulate in that matter are rare, a lot of what is posted is dreck*. So useful as a 'public conversation', with people responding to one another, but less useful in generating comprehensive things for people to respond to. 

(Being articulate on the fly is a pretty good indicator of expertise. Means someone has articulated something before and done so enough times that articulating that understanding no longer imposes a substantial cognitive burden). 

Hence, more content in 2025/2026.

An American-style 'union station' is a worst-case outcome

 An American-stye 'union station' is a worst-case outcome - a traditional terminal head station for multiple non-connecting railroad companies. Yet even after our commuter roads fell into public ownership, we kept the same operating paradigm, rather than exploring through-running. I anticipate part of which is a matter of station architecture--not design for thru-running, it's difficult to implement. But I suspect a greater part is institutional, that "The Purpose of Commuter Rail is Bringing Commuters to the CBD" and that was as much thought as went into it. 

City planners don't design roads

City planners don't design roads. Traffic engineers do, and they explicitly follow geometric design manuals produced by a clubbish non-profit named AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials), whose rules are then adopted by FHWA, which then makes them a requirement for local DOTs, who then make them a requirement for cities and counties. And even in cases when places are not required to use the AASHTO standards (non-federally funded roads), traffic engineer (mis)-apply the standards because they don't have anything better. 

This is despite the fact that most roads mileage is not, in fact, Federally funded. The vast majority of roads, by functional class, are local roads in subdivisions, the design of which is governed by local subdivision ordinances, which are the province of standards set by local engineers. The total thought that goes into them consists of two concerns: 1) "They should be wide enough for two cars to pass, even with people parked on both sides", and 2) "They should be good enough to last a long time without the city needing to rebuild them". Fire marshal concerns about fire access - routes to get to houses from a fire station being too long or circuitous -- also influence design. City planning only gets involved when a city has had issues with too curb cuts onto highways, or traffic lights too close together. It's fair to blame city planners for every land use problem, but city planners have remarkably little to do with roads. 

NIMBY Defined

 A NIMBY is someone who understands that the financial benefit of development to someone else outweighs any price they would be willing to pay to prevent that development and so attempt to achieve the same ends more cheaply by making nebulous claims of public harms. This inevitably entails claims of 'It could happen everywhere!', until it alarms enough people to gather sufficient political support to cause sufficient public clamor at a public meeting to intimidate council members. (This essential NIMBY tactic is my chief dispute with Missing Middle advocates. Upzoning everywhere threatens a lot of people with change).

A second standard NIMBY talking point is "Skyscrapers!" and "Manhattanization! and "East Coast!". Anyone who has actually traveled around the East coast can tell you that the pre-war urban core is dwarfed in scale by the surrounding suburbs, and that average density metropolitan density is quite low. But it's designed to cause fear, and it's almost always coupled with cries of "Crime! Renters!" like it's still 1980.

When the boomers are gone what will the appetite for cars look like?

 The 'appetite' for cars is going to decline. The boomers love affair with cars is based on a golden age when cars were cheap, gas was cheap, and roads were uncongested. The experience has been worse for each subsequent generation, such that Gen Z doesn't even like to drive and can't be bothered to get licenses. But we can't do away with cars -- dependence on them is baked into our built environment. 

How many careers revolve around the car as we know it?

Even if everything becomes EV and BEH, there will still be engines and cars to be maintained, and those vehicles will likely last longer, requiring their own maintenance specialists for body and brakes, rather than for the powertrain. 

If your city grows faster than its historic average it ceases to be able to meet its affordable housing needs through market-based filtering

If your city grows faster than its historic average it ceases to be able to meet its affordable housing needs through market-based filtering. High-income newcomers outcompete anyone lower on the income scale for rents, forcing everyone else down a rung on the ladder, and the bottom rung falls into homelessness. Then the stock of low-income housing decreases, as the competition for homes on the higher-income rungs makes it worthwhile to fix-up depreciated homes in good locations, and then in not-so-good locations. 

Before Euclid and Modern Suburbia.

 

Is there a good descriptor of how pre-Euclid and pre-modern suburbia raw development, that led to our great cities, actually worked?

People build kind of whatever they wanted. In Manhattan, the Astor's (richest people in America) abandoned their mansion on the edge of town and moved away because of the encroach of working-class high-rises destroyed the neighborhood character. You had a legal right to build anything, and the only way your neighbor could do anything about it was by suing you for nuisance. And blocking someone's view or sunlight was not considered a nuisance.

But, I don't think Strong Towns is quite getting this quite correct when they broadly blame "regulations" and "financing" for how and why development is different today relative to some supposed historic "incremental" methodology.

Strong Towns is absolutely right in blaming regulations and financing for how and why development today is different. Euclid meant you could buy a house and know that no one was ever going to build a (smelly) glue factory next door. So, housing became a far safer investment. And that meant banks were willing to loan more money to more people. So, there was more demand for owner-occupied housing. SZEA and SCPEA made zoning more prevalent. But that wasn't enough. 

The GI bill made any returning veteran eligible for a subsidized mortgage. Prior to the GI Bill (Federally subsidized mortgages), a mortgage was 50% down and lasted 5 years. Afterwards, it was 5% down and lasted 30 years. By one estimate, half the adult male population had been in the military at that point. So huge numbers of people could afford to buy houses, setting off a massive surge in homebuilding, which made it into a real industry, and people started to apply the mass production methods used for war for housing production. (Levitt-town is famous for a reason). Streetcar suburbs had done something similar, but nothing like at the same scale--there hadn't been the finance to support the demand to support the scale to support the specialization.

Of course it is almost certainly some kind of change in "regulations" and/or how the government operates but I think this would be worth pinning down. If we want to go back to some supposed golden age we need to actually understand that golden age.

SZEA and SCPEA were enabling legislation - it made zoning less liable to legal challenge (Supremacy clause). And the GI bill provided the financing. But the government operations don't stop there. The whole paradigm of modern suburbia relies on government planned and funded freeways. How we did it was a bit tricky. Federal government can't legally own roads, so they passed legislation saying that any State with a DOT was eligible for a 90% construction subsidy for highways and also added a fuel tax. Lots of freeways were build, and combined with expanding auto-ownership, moving to a semi-rural suburban idyll with big yards and lots parking became available to many. (And for most boomers, that era is the Golden Age of their childhood). However, it came to a crashing end in 1973 with the Arab Oil Embargo, and the formation of OPEC. 

Canonically, when I think Chicago or New York, I think (maybe imagining) paper streets as far as the eye can read on maps read across miles of undeveloped land, or whatever the original townsite was. I know Jason Barr has some blog posts at building the skyline about the mapping and surveying of Manhattan, but it's light on the when, where and how of the actual infrastructure construction timing and its relation to the when, where, and how of the related building construction.

The Wikipedia Article on the 1811 Commissioners Plan is a good place to start. But It's critical to realize how minimal city infrastructure was until the Victorian era. The Croton aqueduct (1842) bringing fresh clean water to Manhattan was major civic achievement.  You don't have paved roads, water mains, piped gas, or even sewers for quite a long time. A road was where it was illegal to build, and it was dirt or mud with a ditch in the middle for stormwater for when it rained. Water came from the well in the back yard, probably with a latrine nearby, which probably emptied into the local creek. London itself doesn't get sewers until 1865. 

The building construction (multiple stories, half lot coverage) ran long before any kind of public infrastructure. Much the same in smaller towns. The house my dad grew up in dumped its sewerage directly into a local creek, via a cast iron pipe from the toilet, and had an old on-site well. You tended to see public infrastructure investment when property-specific system collapsed. Culinary water typically at the forefront - once the local watershed is polluted, there is no way to fix it. Sewers are an easy sell to voters - less smell. For paving, roads were paved using a system that looks very much like a Public Improvement District, levying a tax on houses fronting onto them. We owe a certain amount of paving to streetcar companies, for whom the franchise agreement allowing them to build a railway in the public right of way required them to pave it as part of the deal, and since they were already doing a lot of grading, earthwork, and water management to their own project, it wasn't a big deal. 

Highway paving was erratic and ad-hoc. The AAA maps don't refer to thinks as 'auto trails' without reason, and a journey from LA to Long Beach was an all-day excursion and mostly off-road. There was nominally a national highway system from 1926, but without attached funding it was a bit conceptual, and mostly a matter of signage, connecting bits of roads. 

Suburbia relies on highways. Suburban development relies on being able to link local suburban roads to the broader public network. Without public highways, travel to a new subdivision would be along a rutted rural dirt road, and thereby much less comfortable and far slower. Which meant such a location was less attractive, and so less rentable, and so not worth developing.

But really it was the scale of suburban development that mattered--building a subdivision meant an efficiency of scale that supported the develop of local infrastructure networks. By splitting the cost of a water main and sewer main over 30 houses with a sort of minimum spanning tree, you could afford to connect everyone to a local creek or sewer main. 

But part of what makes suburbia work is that it is a process - it's not just the one suburb, but the assumption that future suburbs will emerge. And that makes it worthwhile to make public infrastructure improvements in things like substations and public schools that would not otherwise be reasonable for a single suburb. 

We used to build plenty and it might be related to how we built differently. How, exactly?

Well, no. For a brief period, we built plenty. But that period was pretty brief, only a few decades. It seems like it went on for a long time because we repeated the same cycle in new places (The interstate didn't reach everywhere at once, and viability of continued interstate widening has varied based on terrain, climate, and public opposition).

It's really critical to understand what Strong Towns is about, and the name should be a clue--they are about towns. A town is a place where, after the initial settlement boom, the increase in local population is largely dependent on local natural increase. Which tends to be gradual, and so new housing development tended to be incremental. A space previously used for an orchard or garden or poultry yard would become a new house.

The style of structure built was also different. Financing was limited (five years with 50 percent down) so everyone tended to build a small house and add to it over time, adding and enclosing porches to all sides. "Barnacling" as Strong Towns calls it.

Prior to mortgages, a starter home in the twenties might consist of a of a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and living room (where the children would sleep). A larger house might have a front parlor, dining room, kitchen, dining room, and two bedrooms. Laundry was done out of doors, porches were the 'mud rooms', and play took place wherever. The panoply of rooms that characterizes our houses today didn't exist.

After the GI bill, rather than incremental additions, you could afford to be like a rich person and build it all at once. And if a garage was attached and integrated into the house, that counted as part of the house, and that could be financed as well.

Prior to the GI Bill, households were also different. You lived with family until you got married, and once you had your own house, you had lodgers--siblings and cousins and extended family who provided domestic labor. And if you had any kind of money, you had live-in servants for whom you provided bed and board. A household was not a matter of relation--it was an economic unit. (You can still see this in early zoning codes, which forbid unrelated persons living together, excepting domestic servants). You took in boarders or lodgers inverse to your number of kids, and your youngest kid probably never moved out and stayed to care for you in your dotage. Or, if your daughter got married, you might move in with her to her new house.

Density isn't a choice--it's a market imperative

Density isn't a choice--it's a market imperative. When land is expensive, we built up. For 99% of human history, there was a structural limit on how high we could build. For 99.5% of human history, there was a transportation limitation. Streel frame skyscrapers conquered the first. Elevators conquered the second. At this point, how high we build is either a financial question (trade-offs between land-costs and building costs) or political one (how much of my sunlight can be neighbor block). Safety complaints are bunk - fire is irrelevant once you're no longer using an American-style wood ballon frame. 

What IS a choice is the land use and building typology. And we need to stop pretending otherwise. Jarrett Walker has done a lot of good work making explicit the frequency vs. coverage trade-off for transit. Someone needs to do the same thing for land use types. 

We can have something with good automotive access with good parking, good station access with direct corridors, or good pedestrian access with small blocks and a solid street-wall. 

With robotaxis, more VMT is inevitable. But perhaps, not much.

The simulations on robotaxis have been clear for years: more VMT is inevitable, because trip-ends are poorly matched to trip origins. If two people are going from home to work, that's four Origin-Destination trips, of which only two are ferrying people*. More miles on the road, but less demand for parking at destinations. 

Is that a worthwhile social trade-off? Ignoring the equity question ("Who benefits?"), and converting it all into something fungible (dollars), what's the value of a parking space versus the cost of road capacity? Answering that question requires bounding it in time and space: a parking space where, and VMT when. The value of a parking space in Manhattan could easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, while a parking space in rural west Virginia might actually be negative. Likewise, the cost of adding an additional car to the roadway at 3a is basically zero - the road is sized to serve peak hour traffic, and 90% of the time, isn't carrying anything like that volume. So as a thought experiment, say it's the peak hour and parking for a major league baseball event, where parking is $300 an hour for a prime spot. For the robotaxi user, not parking is a clear win - the cost of the trip might be $45, for a $90 round trip--still a huge win. But for society, what's the marginal cost of the additional VMT generated by the robotaxi moving to its next fare.  Extreme case is that it's pure dead-head - no outbound fare from the stadium and drives all the way back to where it picked up the last guy to start its next fare. 

Quick google suggests a value of 1.6 cents per mile for federal costs, plus .1-.5 per state. Call it two cents a mile. Say the stadium trip is 20 miles. So that's .02 * 20, or forty cents. 

Ride-hailing companies will argue that this is an absurd case, but empirical evidence has not been made broadly available. Published meta-analysis suggests robotaxis will generate more VMT, but not that much. Six percent is more than a rounding error, but far less than the 50% I've seen bandied about in the past. I suspect that it's density dependent - if you convert a whole city to ride-hailing, you get much better matching--the next pickup after a drop-off, the dead-head DO pair, is much lower. As a thought experiment, consider a city with only one robotaxi, taking fares on a more or less random basis. Adding a second robotaxi substantially increases the chance that time and place can be made to match, and adding a thousand robotaxis is exponentially better, as the DO distance and time match converge exponentially. 

But as with many urban schemes, the devil is in the details. Lots of schemes falter because while the end-state is optimal, a long-term project requires every intermediary stage to be sufficiently self-supporting to sustain itself if/when there is a pause in the progress of the scheme. In a way, that speaks well for the future of robotaxis--they've proven to be financially viable even at very low levels of penetration.

Also clarifies why Uber expanded from city to city only incrementally - it required massive subsidy (to drivers and passengers) to ensure sufficient market participants for the scheme to work in the first place. Lacking drivers, wait times would be analogous to that of phone-hailed taxis. But lacking a series of passengers, no driver will find it worth their while to make that first pickup. So the whole market had to be bootstrapped into existence.