Category: New York

Why the 7 to Secaucus Won’t Work

Bloomberg’s expressed support for the now $10-billion proposal to send the subway to Secaucus is generating buzz and speculation about the ability to secure funds. Missing from this discussion is any concern for whether more people would actually transfer at Secaucus than do today. The instinct is to say that this provides a better connection to most of Midtown, but the transfer penalty literature suggests otherwise.

One important thing to note, writes Reinhard Clever, is that for commuter rail, downtown-side transfers are much more inconvenient than suburb-side transfers. Suburban commuters will drive to a park-and-ride, but balk at a transfer at the city end. Clever’s example is Toronto, where commuter rail riders tend not to transfer to the subway at Union Station but only take transit to jobs that can be reached from the station by walking. This problem is what doomed the Austin Red Line. For all its flaws, ARC offered a one-seat ride from the Erie lines to Penn Station.

Another thing to note is that suburban commuters routinely change trains at Jamaica today, but not at Secaucus. I’m not aware of a study on the transfer experience, but I am fairly certain that the difference is that at Jamaica the transfers are timed and cross-platform whereas at Secaucus they are not. Transferring at Secaucus today involves going up steps, passing through faregates, and going down steps, with no guarantee of a connecting train. The literature is unanimous that passengers will spend more than one minute of in-vehicle time to avoid a minute of transfer or waiting time: the MTA uses a factor of 1.75, the MBTA 2.25, Houston METRO 3.5-4 (last two from pp. 31-2 of Clever’s thesis). None of this is going to change if people are instead made to transfer from a commuter train to the subway, except perhaps that the subway train is going to be less crowded because it won’t be carrying commuters from the Northeast Corridor and Morris and Essex Lines.

Both issues boil down to the same fundamental: not all transfers are created equal. Within urban rail, people transfer all the time. Perhaps the disutility of getting up while changing trains is not an issue when passengers do not expect to find a seat in the first place. Regional rail riders transfer as well, when the transfers are easy and there’s no additional waiting time – in fact, setting up a timed transfer on a highly branched regional line increases the frequency on each branch, so any disutility from transferring is swamped by the more convenient schedule. What people don’t normally do is ride a regional line that gets them almost to their job, and then take urban transit for the last mile.

Commuters on the Erie lines can already make an uncoordinated transfer involving passing through faregates at two locations: Secaucus, and Hoboken. Some, but not many, already take advantage of this to get to jobs near Penn Station or in Lower Manhattan. The contribution of the 7 to Secaucus would then be to create a third opportunity for a transfer to 42nd Street. While 42nd is closer to most Midtown jobs than Penn Station, the heart of Midtown is in the 50s. At Queensboro Plaza more inbound riders transfer from the 7 to the N/Q than the reverse, emptying the 7 by the time it gets to Manhattan: the MTA’s crowding estimate as reported by the Straphangers Campaign, has the taken at the entrance to the Manhattan core, ranks the 7 the least crowded subway line at rush hour. Thus, although the 7 to Secaucus would add to the number of jobs served by a two-seat ride, many Midtown jobs would require a three-seat ride, no different from transferring to the E at Penn Station.

Therefore, good transit activists should reject the 7 to Secaucus as they did ARC, and I’m dismayed to see NJ-ARP‘s Douglas John Bowen throw in his support behind it as an ARC alternative. Before anything else is done, the Secaucus faregates should be removed, and the platforms should be remodeled to let passengers go directly from the Erie platforms to the NEC platforms. Here are better candidate projects for adding a pair of tracks under the Hudson:

1. ARC Alt G. Despite the ARC cancellation, it remains the best option.

2. Hoboken-Lower Manhattan. This doesn’t give Erie commuters a one-seat ride to Penn Station, but compensates with a one-seat ride to Lower Manhattan, and a two-seat ride from the Morris and Essex Lines to Lower Manhattan. The Manhattan terminal should not be more than a two-track stub-end with short tail tracks and the potential for a connection to the LIRR Atlantic Division. With about 50 meters of tail tracks and a platform with many escalators, the Chuo Line turns nearly 30 tph on two tracks at Tokyo Station. It’s an outlier, but given the extreme cost of building larger stations in Manhattan, the response should not be “They’re different, our special circumstances won’t let this happen,” but “how can we have what they have?”. Modern signaling and punctuality are critical, but, as the Germans say, organization before electronics before concrete.

2b. Jersey City-Lower Manhattan. The same as option 2, but with somewhat less tunneling in Manhattan and a lot more tunneling in Jersey. The main advantage is that new underground stations at Journal Square and Exchange Place would serve more jobs and residents than a station in Hoboken. It may be cheaper due to reduced Manhattan tunneling, or more expensive due to less maneuvering room coming into Lower Manhattan. It also forces the Manhattan platform to be east-west rather than north-south for a far-future cross-platform transfer with Grand Central and Staten Island.

3. The L to Secaucus, or to Hoboken. This has all the problems of the 7 to Secaucus plus more – 14th Street is at best a secondary CBD – but it conveniently replaces the L’s current low-throughput terminal with another. Ideally the L should only be extended a few hundred meters west, to the Meatpacking District, but if such an extension has large fixed costs, the incremental cost of extending the L all the way could be low enough to be justified by the benefits of a Secaucus extension, which are low but nonzero.

Making Elevated Rail Work

Everybody hates els. They’re ugly and noisy and cities will even move their train station away from downtown to tear them down. The hypocritical treatment of els versus much wider and noisier elevated highways is fortunately the subject of another post, on Market Urbanism. I would instead like to discuss how elevated rail could be made to work in cities, allowing the construction of rapid transit at acceptable cost.

One way viaduct structures can be made more acceptable is if they’re branded as a new technology. This is the case of Vancouver’s SkyTrain, the JFK AirTrain, the Honolulu light rail line, and monorails. Another is if they’re along rights-of-way that are already considered blighted, such as freeways; this also helps explain why the JFK AirTrain was built whereas the proposed subway extension to LaGuardia was not.

As a first filter, the above examples suggest that the most useful elevated rapid transit – grade-separated mainline rail, or els over major streets – is impractical due to community opposition. But as a second filter, we could simulate some features of both cases in which viaducts are more acceptable – new technology and freeway right-of-way. If we build a well-designed and aesthetic arched viaduct over a wide road, this could pass community muster. For example, Robert Cruickshank prominently used the second and further photos in this CAHSR Blog post to argue that grade separations on the Peninsula will not be a blight. The 7 viaduct in Sunnyside is also a good example of an el.

As a third filter, the success of the elevated train over Queens Boulevard comes precisely from the enormous street width. East of Sunnyside, Queens Boulevard becomes practically a highway, nicknamed the Boulevard of Death and excoriated on Streetsblog for its lack of pedestrian scale. At the same time, the 7 above Roosevelt Avenue darkens the street and the steel el structure is very noisy. But when there is an el about Queens Boulevard, everything works out: the street is broken into two narrower halves, with the el acting as a street wall and helping produce human scale; the el is also farther from the buildings and uses an arched concrete structure, both of which mitigate its impact.

It’s possible to mitigate even further and imitate the methods of the AirTrain or SkyTrain. Those use modern viaduct construction techniques and are therefore relatively unobtrusive: see for example this photo on Greater City: Providence, in the context of reinstating some of the elevated infrastructure torn down in the 1980s. Even if the technology is your standard railroad, newer viaducts can reduce impact. In addition, the old els were built with very tight curves, producing squeal; building with wider curve radii is the norm today, and although it increases visual impact and can require more takings, it reduces noise impact, often to practically zero.

Commenters from various Northeastern suburbs have told stories of how people don’t even notice the electric regional trains, but complain about the freight trains. Of course those regional lines were built in the 19th century, but they were built to mainline standards, rather than to the standards of the Chicago L, and thus have what by rapid transit standards are wide curves.

The 7 el is 12 meters wide, and works fine on Queens Boulevard, which is 60 meters from building to building, and poorly on Roosevelt, which is 22. These give an upper and lower bound for street width. The N/W el on Astoria, at 12 meters over a 30-meter street, is also quite bad, though perhaps not as much as the 7 el on Roosevelt. The 1 el in Manhattanville is an imposing steel structure, but its problem is one of topography and height rather than street width, and so it should be put in the category of good els from the perspective of width; this is 12 meters over a 43-meter street. Finally, the Metro-North viaduct in Harlem is 18 meters over a 43-meter street; the area is quite blighted, though it could be a characteristic of the neighborhood more than of the el. Optimistically, it seems that a more modern two-track el, about 9 meters wide (and thus blocking light less than the New York examples regardless of street width), could work over a 30-meter street, such as the Manhattan avenues.

Of course, another issue is the surrounding density. Despite the above calculation I would not want to see new elevated lines on the Manhattan avenues. Partly this is because the population density in Manhattan is so high that the higher cost of a subway is acceptable. But partly it’s because the buildings are tall and would not pair off with the viaduct nicely as they do in Sunnyside. However, it could be a good solution in Queens and the North Bronx, where, additionally, the streets that could take rapid transit are wider than a standard Manhattan avenue.

The Tappan Zee Replacement’s Outrageous Cost

The Tappan Zee Bridge is about to fall down. As a result, the replacement and widening project is in spare-no-expense mode. Ordinarily, widening a bridge from seven lanes to ten would be judged in terms of costs and benefits, after which the costs would be ignored as they always are for US road projects. But now everyone thinks New York needs this project, to the point that even transit and livable streets advocates are more worried about commuter rail tracks on the new bridge than about the costs of the entire project.

Cap’n Transit cribbed study numbers before they disappeared from the official website. The budget of the project, without the transit component, was about $7 billion, and is now up to $8.3 billion; this includes highway widenings at both ends. The transit component people are fretting about is another $1 billion for BRT and $6.7 billion for commuter rail.

To put things in perspective, consider the Øresund Bridge-Tunnel complex. Whereas the Tappan Zee is 5 kilometers of bridge, Øresund consists of 8 kilometers of bridge, an artificial island with 4 additional kilometers of road, and 4 kilometers of tunnel. The cost, including landworks on both sides, was a little more than €3 billion in 2000, which works out to $5.5 billion in 2010. The bridge-tunnel is narrower than the Tappan Zee replacement – four lanes of traffic plus two tracks of rail – but it’s also three times as long, and more complex because of the tunnel.

More importantly, if the Tappan Zee really needs that capacity, and width is such a constraint, they should build rail first, BRT second, and car lanes last. Roads will never beat mass transit on capacity per unit width of right-of-way. With all traffic from Rockland to Westchester County funneled through one chokepoint, and some centralization of employment (in Manhattan, White Plains, and Tarrytown), rail could work if it were given the chance. So the only environment in which a bridge with so many traffic lanes is justified is one in which the cost of ten lanes is not much more than the cost of four.

To be completely fair to irate Rockland County residents, more people use the Tappan Zee than Øresund, since the tolls are lower and it’s a commuter route. But not enough. The bridge is crossed by 138,000 vehicles per day. This means the replacement and widening project, excluding all transit improvements, is $60,000 per car. With normal commuter seat occupancy, it’s perhaps $50,000 per person. Transit projects in the US routinely go over this, but those are for the most part very low-ridership commuter rail projects. Second Avenue Subway, the most expensive urban subway in the world per kilometer, is about $25,000 per expected weekday rider.

Given the high cost, the only correct response is a true no-build: dismantle the bridge, and tell people to ride ferries or live on the same side of the Hudson as their workplace. Given expected ridership and Øresund costs, I believe the Tappan Zee replacement would make sense at $3 billion, with the transit components; without, make it a flat $2 billion. Go much above it and it’s just too cost-ineffective. Not all travel justifies a fixed link at any cost.

Skewed North Shore BRT/LRT Proposal (Hoisted from Comments)

The MTA produced an alternatives analysis for transit service on the North Shore of Staten Island. The study contains zingers and various factors making the cost many times higher than it should be, but the agency response to all comments is Decide, Announce, Defend. Commenter Ajedrez reports from a public meeting on the subject on Second Avenue Sagas:

I went for part of the meeting (from about 18:30 to 19:45), and this is a rundown of what happened:

* They discussed the updates from the last meeting. They eliminated the ferry option (that didn’t even make sense), and they eliminated the heavy rail option.

* The people were given the opportunity to ask questions and make comments. This one woman (the same woman from last time) ranted on and on about something historical at Richmond Terrace/Alaska Street that would be destroyed if they paved over it.

Then a few more people made some comments, and I asked why they eliminated the heavy rail option (for those of you who are wondering, I was the kid in the yellow jacket and blue/black striped shirt. Then again, I was the only kid in the room)

* Then we went to the back to talk with the people from the consulting firm. I discussed the heavy rail more in depth, and asked why it was needed if the West Shore Light Rail would supposedly cover the Teleport. I then made a couple of suggestions for the short-term (reverse-peak S98 service, my S93 extension, cutting back more S46s to Forest Avenue) and I gave them the name of a person at the MTA who they could contact.

To elaborate on my statement about heavy rail, they said that they took it completely off the table. It just amazed me that they originally had a ferry line as one of the options, but they didn’t even have heavy rail as an option south of Arlington.

Let me think, you have an abandoned rail line (and a heavy rail line at that), and you want to put a ferry line there. What sense does that make? I could understand maybe having the ferry supplement the rail line, but doing that would have the whole thing go to waste.

I said that the current SIR is heavy rail and the South Shore is more auto-oriented than the North Shore. And I said that it provides better integration with the current SIR (they said they could put light rail in the Clifton Yard, but it’s probably automatically cheaper if you don’t have to retrofit the yard). And I also said that there’s higher capacity than light rail, so in case there’s growth, it is better equipped to handle it

So they said “Well, it was too expensive (because one of the goals was to serve the Teleport) so we didn’t even consider it.” And then they said that SI doesn’t have Brooklyn-type density to support heavy rail (but somehow the South Shore does?). And if you limit it to light rail, you’re actually limiting SI’s growth potential. Think about it: before 1900, Brooklyn had some streetcar lines, but not a whole lot of ridership. When the subway was extended, the population exploded. But if they just extended some streetcar lines from Brooklyn to Manhattan, the population would be nowhere near the 2.5 million it has today.

And then they said “Oh, well during the last meetings (which I attended, so I know they’re not being completely truthful) people expressed a sentiment for light rail”. They didn’t. They expressed a sentiment against a busway, There’s a difference. They didn’t say “Oh, it shouldn’t be heavy rail”. They just said they want rail rather than buses.

I mean, the argument I should’ve made (besides the ones I already did) was the fact that there was heavy rail there before, and the population was smaller back then. I think it’s pretty obvious.

And when I made that statement, everybody was surprised at how young I was (16). One woman said “You should be the one studying this project”, and they actually tried to avoid responding to me (they were like “Thank you. Next question”, and then everybody said “But you didn’t answer his question”, and that’s when they made up the response about expenses)

Besides the wretched DAD attitude, the cost projections and the route choice doesn’t even make sense. The proposal is to use the abandoned B&O right-of-way along the North Shore, from St. George to Arlington, and then cut over to South Avenue and serve West Shore Plaza. Here is satellite imagery of South Avenue: observe that it is almost completely empty.

Here we have a line that consists of 8.5 kilometers of abandoned trackage, which can be restored for service remarkably cheaply, and 5.5 of an on-street segment, which tends to be much more expensive to construct. Compare the costs of regional rail restoration in Germany or Ottawa’s O-Train with those of French LRT lines (including Lyon’s cheaper line). In addition, the areas along the abandoned trackage are of moderate density by non-New York standards, while those along South Avenue aren’t even suburban. And yet, the MTA is convinced that the per-km cost of an option that terminates at Arlington is higher than that of an option that goes to West Shore Plaza ($56 million/km vs. $41/km).

While the cost range proposed is only moderately high for light rail – the French average is a little less than $40 million/km – this is misleading because of the nature of the lines. French tramways tend to be on-street, involving extensive street reconstruction. Sometimes they need a new right-of-way along a boulevard or a highway. In contrast, the North Shore Branch is a mostly intact rail right-of-way, which means that the land grading and the structures, the most expensive parts of any rail project, are already in place. It shouldn’t cost like a normal light rail project; it should cost a fraction.

On top of this, to inflate the cost, the MTA is talking about a train maintenance shop. It says a light rail option allows merely modifying the maintenance shop for the Staten Island Railway. Not mentioned is the fact that SIR-compatible heavy rail would allow the trains to be maintained in the same shops without modification, to say nothing of leveraging New York City Transit’s bulk buying to obtain cheaper rolling stock.

The O-Train’s cost – C$21 million for 8 km of route – included three three-car DMUs, piggybacking on a large Deutsche Bahn order; judging by the cost of a more recent expansion order from Alstom, a large majority of the original $21 million was rolling stock. New York should be able to obtain cheaper trains, using its pricing power and sharing spares with the SIR. The electrification costs would add just a little: electrification can be done for €1 million per route-km, and in high-cost Britain it can be done for £550,000-650,000 per track-km (p. 10).

For an order of magnitude estimate of the cost of a well-designed SIR-compatible North Shore Branch, we have, quoting my own comment on SAS:

For an order-of-magnitude estimate of what’s needed, figure $20 million for electrification, $5 million for high-platform stations, and $25 million for six two-car trains plus a single spare. Go much higher and it’s not a transportation project, but welfare for contractors.

In retrospect would add about $10-20 million for trackwork, since the line is abandoned. On the other hand, fewer trains could be used: I was assuming 10-minute headways and a 25-minute travel time to Port Ivory; with 15-minute headways and a travel time under 17.5 minutes to Arlington, which is realistic given subway speeds (the MTA study says 15), only three trains plus a spare would be required.

On a related note, the loading gauge excluding station platform edges should be rebuilt to mainline standards, to allow future regional rail service to replace the SIR. Eventually Staten Island is going to need a long tunnel to Manhattan or Brooklyn if it’s to look like an integral part of the city, and once such a tunnel is built, it might as well be used to provide RER-style service across the city.

In contrast, the MTA proposal has no concern for cost cutting, and looks like lip service to the community. It’ll be an especial tragedy if the line is permanently ripped up to make room for a busway, which will likely underperform and turn into a highway. The contractors are going to get well paid no matter what: the busway is cheaper, but not by an order of magnitude. It’s just the riders who will not have good transit on Staten Island’s North Shore.

Quick Note: ACS 2010

The Census Bureau has just released the American Community Survey numbers for 2010, using data calibrated to match with the 2010 census. At least, calibration is the best reason for why the ACS believes that New York went from 8,391,881 people in 2009 to 8,184,899 in 2010 (according to the new Factfinder). Because of such jarring discrepancies in results, people should under no circumstances directly compare numbers from the 2010 ACS with numbers from previous ACSes.

The best demographic survey in the US is still the 2009 ACS, which avoids the whopper claim that New York added more housing units than people at a time of skyrocketing rents, and should be used until it becomes completely outdated.

And even if 2010 census data is at all reliable, it’s still not directly comparable. Claims about absolute mode share or commute time are okay (the census after all only underestimated New York’s population by about 3%), but claims about change from 2009 are not. At best the 2010 ACS should be compared to the 2000 estimate base, and even that is strained – too much reliance on a census that doesn’t count everyone, insufficient reliance on years of rigorous statistical sampling.

Where Did You Grow Up?

The last few weeks’ posts on Old Urbanist made me think about what urban forms people prefer, and how it’s affected by what they are familiar with. Rather than speculate on what people in my social circle prefer, I yield the stage to you. What type of urban environment did you grow up in, and/or influenced your thinking about cities the most? And what form of urban development do you find most desirable?

I’ll start: I grew up in the Old North of Tel Aviv, a dense (about 15,000/km^2) neighborhood whose residential stock is almost exclusively four-story Garden City apartment buildings. Buildings are not attached as rowhouses, but instead are set back a few meters from the edges of the lots; typical apartment size is 120 square meters. The neighborhood is upper middle class – indeed, North Tel Aviv is used as a metonym for latte liberalism – but is not uniformly so. Growing up, I knew plenty of people in the neighborhood who were middle middle class, a few who were working class, and a few who were outright rich. This somewhat distinguishes North Tel Aviv from some surrounding suburbs that are nominally equally rich but are more uniformly upper middle class. In the 1990s, it was also stable rather than gentrified; there were, and still are, people living in the same neighborhood, sometimes the same apartment, for multiple decades.

As a result, I never grew up with the association of detached houses with wealth. Hebrew even distinguishes words for houses in general (house/home) and words that denote wealth (villa, cottage) but has just one word normally for an apartment; English, which distinguishes an apartment or a tenement from a condo, is exactly the opposite. Having a car is important for social status in Israel, but the idea is to drive it a short distance to work, as my parents did. Driving 20 kilometers each way would be strange. At the same time, I took some measure of walkability for granted, making me uncomfortable with sections of the city that were built after the 1950s and were designed to automobile scale. I did not think of public transportation as a normal means of getting to work, unless one couldn’t afford a car, but it was nifty for getting to school.

The ideas about urbanism I’ve developed out of that experience, followed by Manhattan, are:

1. Street width should be close to building height; for the purposes of this discussion, street width is measured from building edge to building edge, and building height is the average height of the continuous street wall. A height:width ratio of about 1 or slightly higher is best. Below about 1/2, it’s too open; in Providence, where the ratio is about 0.6, measured from the top of buildings, I already walk in the middle of the roadway, as if the streets were naked. Above about 2, which exists on some streets in such pre-industrial cities as Florence, it feels like an alley. As a corollary, very narrow streets are suitable for low-traffic cities, whereas high-density places should look more like Manhattan.

2. Every normal neighborhood amenity should be reachable on foot, on streets that are designed to be used primarily by pedestrians. If you need to take mechanized transportation or cross a highway to get to the supermarket, there is something wrong with your neighborhood.

3. Bicycles are a form of private transportation.

4. Stoplight phasing is critical.

5. The street network should be porous. The closer to a regular grid, the better. The Old North has a grid of arterial streets, but the local streets terminate in T-shaped intersections, like this, and it’s not always possible to tell a local from an arterial street on sight; in addition, the grid is not really continued into other neighborhoods, making walking there confusing. I found Manhattan much more walkable than the Old North for this reason.

I will now exit the stage and make this an open mic.

Affordable Housing

A new post on Old Urbanist linking to prior posts about housing affordability, both on his own blog and on New World Economics. The theme is that various design standards – the two sites’ main scourge is streets wider than about 5-10 meters and in general excessive room for parking and front lawns – force the cost of construction up, making housing less affordable.

In reality, the first thing to note about high housing prices is that they exist everywhere: not just in new urbanist towns in the US, the type of development under discussion on the above blogs, but also in New York, and Paris, and Tokyo, and Tel Aviv, and Hong Kong, and London. In my matrix of different types of city planning, every row contains cities whose housing prices stretch the middle class to its limits. Often there’s significant homelessness, but most people have just enough to scrape by. The cities where housing prices are low compensate by either having very poor populations (inner-city Detroit) or requiring people to spend large quantities of money on driving (the Sunbelt): note how across US metro area, the total percentage of household income spent on housing and transportation is essentially constant.

Thus, as a first filter, the cities whose housing prices are low relative to incomes are very spread out and auto-oriented, exactly the opposite of any kind of urbanism other than suburbanism. As a second filter, Ed Glaeser notes that the high cost of housing in coastal cities comes from supply restrictions in the form of zoning, writing about Boston and about Manhattan as case studies.

First, what is clear about situations with unaffordable housing (really, barely-affordable) is that it is not due to high construction costs. Glaeser himself notes that construction of luxury apartments in Manhattan costs about $300 per ft^2, while the sales price per ft^2 is on average $600. In particular, parking requirements and other restrictions that effectively raise construction costs are not the primary agent to blame for high housing costs in general. An extra $20,000 for a parking spot is not going to make housing unaffordable, though it may influence developers’ decisions of what and where to build to maximize profits, in particular by making them abandon urban construction in favor of the suburbs. Glaeser blames persistently high housing prices on a regulatory tax, which forces developers to spend extra money on lobbying and preparing paperwork for permits.

Second, the primary determinant of housing prices is not capital costs, but the cost of the land underneath. An older post on Old Urbanist asks why real housing prices have increased since 1920; the answer is that a house is not a manufactured good, but primarily land, as is especially clear when one considers expensive, desirable cities.

Third, the worth of land is dependent on demand. Land on which a developer can build three apartments is worth three times as much as land on which a developer can build one apartment. That’s why on the level of the individual building, building higher does not reduce rents. Land supply only forms the limiting factor when there’s a regionwide desire to be in an area with a fixed land constraint, such as the national borders of Singapore or Monaco, or the physical extent of the New York City Subway or the walkable radius of Central Tel Aviv. In such cases, it could reduce prices to expand the available space for housing within the fixed constraint, via either increasing density or expanding the desirable area through transportation infrastructure or landfill. But otherwise, there’s not much point.

When high housing prices are genuinely the result of high capital cost, the result is different from that of high demand or a shortage of land. Consider North Tel Aviv, which mandates expensive whitewash on its traditional garden city buildings. When those buildings were first constructed in the 1930s, they were priced too steeply for the working class, leading the rising middle class to move in instead. Since the whitewash is also high-maintenance, apartments deteriorated, and the only buildings that maintain an aesthetic exterior cost much more to maintain and are only affordable to the rich. In effect, the result of high capital cost is worse physical stock, the opposite of what normally happens in Tokyo, New York, and other expensive cities.

Anti-gentrification activists often fight policies that make their areas more desirable; the above three points help explain why. Affordable housing to them is a bargain to richer people, and if they want to move in, they’ll be priced out. The only way to depress housing prices is to depress demand. One activist, a Harlem preacher with extreme right sympathies, even calls for a general economic boycott of his own neighborhood in order to cause an economic collapse and lower rents.

The inevitable conclusion, namely that it’s impossible to make housing persistently cheap without raising other costs or impoverishing people, does not mean that affordable housing issues are moot. First, the equity issue remains; although on average housing is just marginally affordable, to many people it is not affordable, and as a result, expensive cities engage in government intervention to prevent mass homelessness, even ultra-capitalist Singapore.

In addition, although expanding housing supply makes land more valuable and normally prevents prices from falling, it also create better housing in the process. Auto-oriented sprawl in the US has caused dwelling size to increase; upzoning and the construction of better transportation infrastructure in expensive cities would enable people to move from the periphery to the core – or, more precisely, people could stay where they are, but public transit could redefine regions from periphery to core.

For a toy model, suppose there are two kinds of development: regular suburbia and new urbanism, where new urbanism is more expensive. Constructing more new urbanism is going to reduce the price for both kinds of housing (new urbanism has an increase in supply, regular suburbia suffers from a subsequent decline in demand), while also shifting people from regular suburbia to new urbanism. Overall the average price of housing shouldn’t change, but the quality will increase.

In other words, on a national or regional level, affordable housing is never a problem; it may be a problem for poor people, but not in general, on average. Supply restrictions should show in low-quality housing, measured in terms of size, local walkability, aesthetics, and other factors that on the local level determine price.

Rent Control

Tel Aviv’s housing protest grows, and Saturday night tens of thousands of protesters descended on HaBima Square, demanding rent control. Although I have yet to see media heavyweights on the left echo those demands – instead, they view it in abstract terms of people power versus the state – they are clearly too important to ignore right now. There is already a response from the right and from (classical) liberals saying that it’s government’s fault and that the correct solution is deregulation of new construction.

However, since government intervention is ubiquitous in expensive cities, including several famous ones I have lived in, I’d like to talk about case studies of world cities. In most of the last ten and a half years, I lived in Singapore and New York. Both have extensive government regulation, despite the capitalist orientation of Singapore. However, this government involvement takes different forms, though some of consequences are similar.

In New York, there’s rent control, precisely what the Tel Aviv protesters are demanding. More precisely, there are two forms of rent regulation: rent control, and rent stabilization. Rent control is far stronger, requires the tenant to have continuously occupied the apartment since 1971, and only applies to 2% of rental units, mostly in Manhattan. Rent stabilization allows higher rents and merely limits the increase in rent every year to a few percent, and is far more common, applying to about half of rental units. Both figures come from the most recent housing survey, in 2008. There are also public housing programs, some for the poor and some for the middle class. In addition, the Inclusionary Housing Program encourages developers to set aside 20% of the units as affordable housing, by offering them a bonus in floor area ratio.

In Singapore, the main form of government involvement takes the form of subsidized public housing, called HDB estates after the housing development board. These are rented and sold to Singaporean citizens at a discount, and are home to 85% of Singaporeans. The mandatory savings accounts, which function similarly to social security programs except that people only get back what they paid in, with no redistribution of wealth, encourages home ownership by allowing people to use their accounts to buy housing. Thus home ownership is high, in contrast to the situation in other expensive cities, such as New York.

The important feature in both cases is that not everyone is eligible for reduced rent. In New York, rent stabilization disappears in certain cases if the tenant leaves (vacancy decontrol); in Singapore, HDB is not available to non-resident immigrants, who form 25% of the country’s population. This is also seen in other expensive cities, including Monaco, where the minority of residents who are citizens have access to highly subsidized public housing, and Hong Kong, where half the population receives housing subsidies.

The result is parallel markets. There’s an affordable market, and an unregulated market, which is much more expensive than it would be without government involvement since there is a restricted supply of market-rate housing. Effectively, in order to prevent mass homelessness, the government increases rent for unfavored groups – expats in Singapore, relative newcomers in New York – in order to reduce that of favored groups. Rich members of the unfavored groups, for example executive expats, can easily pay the higher rent. Poor members, for example recent immigrants from developing countries, pay the rent by living in overcrowded housing.

A more pernicious result, common in New York, is landlords’ recurrent attempts to move rental units from the controlled or stabilized market to the unregulated one; although rent control is rare, it is concentrated in desirable neighborhoods that once hosted many working-class artists, such as SoHo and the West Village. Since the path of least resistance is vacancy decontrol, landlords harass such tenants in any way possible.

Immigrants who speak little English are a favored target of harassment, since they often don’t know their rights, and since many of their neighborhoods, for examples Washington Heights and Alphabet City, are desirable for college students. In contrast, students are often a standard replacement, since they have more money due to parental support, and are transient and therefore don’t complain as much about maintenance. However, everyone who is stabilized or controlled can be at risk; many of the stories I have heard come out of the Village rather than Washington Heights. Community board members know countless instances of landlords who defer maintenance, install noisy or inefficient heating and refuse tenants’ suggestions for better options, turn off the electricity or the water at inopportune times, and even engage in outright fraud. An anti-gentrification activist from West Harlem told a Columbia student group of landlords who pretend not to have received rent checks from their tenants, and then use this as an excuse to evict them.

I do not know whether the same results exist in other expensive cities with extensive rent control, for example Paris; I would appreciate help from any reader who knows the situation there. However, I posit that at least some degree of the two above issues are universal to a regime in which part of the market is regulated and part is not.

Based on admittedly partial information, I’d recommend against rent control in Tel Aviv, and for other forms of reform, including some government intervention when necessary. The differences with other land-constrained cities, in which intervention is universal, can be summed as follows:

1. Tel Aviv, while dense, is not as land-constrained as Singapore, which is limited by national borders, or New York, which is limited by the available subway infrastructure; therefore, there’s less inherent market pressure on land prices.

2. Tel Aviv’s zoning code allows much less development, and can be reformed accordingly. The 1920s-era Geddes Plan, good for its time but now in need of change, mandates setbacks of 4 meters front and back and 3 meters of each side, roughly halving the buildable area of the 20*25 lots typical of the city, and limits height to 4 stories. In addition, the city makes dividing apartments into smaller units so difficult landlords have taken to doing it illegally

3. A big portion of the problem is low purchasing power among specific groups, namely students, who do not have access to free tuition as in many progressive European countries or loans as in the US. Thus it’s not just a housing problem, as already noted by some protesters.

In general, there’s a distinction between socialism and bureaucracy. Social-democratic programs can be delivered with remarkably little bureaucracy. The Soviet Union was both socialist and bureaucratic, but Scandinavia’s quality of government is much better, as seen in its stellar rankings on corruption indices. In contrast, many developing countries impose many hurdles on starting a business without appreciable socialism, for example India’s license raj. The difficulty of building affordable market-rate housing in many cities can be traced to bureaucracy in the form of an onerous permit process, a zoning code that requires so many variations that developers are at the mercy of politicians, and similar questions that boil down to political power.

The consequence is that the process of reform must target regulations that empower kvetching community board and city leaders to make landlords’ lives miserable. Good deregulation would make it easier to build and easier to build densely, and streamline the permit process. It would not try to inflict maximum damage on tenants. The reason I’d mistrust any deregulation coming out of the present government is that its recent record – for example, cutting funding to fire services in the years leading up to the Mount Carmel fire – is not one of trying to make government better, but of trying to make government so small and inefficient it can be drowned in a bathtub. It’s exactly this attempt to destroy public services and give handouts to politically connected entrepreneurs that people in Tel Aviv are really protesting.

Airport Access vs. City Access

New York’s MTA and Port Authority have just released slides from a meeting discussing alternatives for transit access to LaGuardia. While the airport is the nearest to Midtown Manhattan by road and thus the option of choice for many business travelers, its transit options consist of local buses within Queens or to Upper Manhattan, and as a result its passengers are the least likely to use transit: about 10%, vs. 15% for JFK and 17% for Newark. Transit to the airport has been on and off the agenda for quite some time, with the most recent attempt, a Giuliani-era proposal to extend the Astoria Line, torpedoed due to community opposition to elevated trains.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have little positive to say about transit geared toward airport travelers. Business travelers are much better at demanding airport transit than using it. However, LaGuardia’s location is such that it could serve as a useful outer-end anchor for multiple lines providing transit to underserved areas. One is north-south service in Queens east of the Astoria Line, for example along Junction Boulevard; there’s already a bus that goes on Junction, but it’s slow and infrequent, and the lines do not combine into a single trunk except on airport grounds. Another is east-west service along 125th Street, which is replete with traffic and supports higher combined frequency on the four lines serving it than any other bus corridor in the city. Yet another is any service to East Elmhurst, which is a very dense neighborhood far from the subway.

The alternatives analysis seems biased in favor of Select Bus Service, i.e. not quite BRT, but such a question can just as well be asked of any mode of transportation, up to and including subways. However, even if the proposal is to physically separate the bus lanes, much good can be done on those corridors, independently of airport traffic. Because BRT can be done open rather than closed, the airport travel market could in principle even be served by a few direct buses from 1st/2nd Avenues through the Triboro Bridge, or perhaps over the Queensboro if the city adds physically separate lanes on Northern or Queens Boulevard. Those business travelers who are willing to use airport transit put a premium on direct service to the CBD: circumferential lines such as those proposed here would do more good for ordinary city residents than for air travelers.

In a world in which New York’s construction costs are normal rather than very high, it would be possible to speculate about subway extensions. Although city officials have favored an extension of the Astoria Line, there are better ways to serve that segment of Queens, providing north-south service to East Elmhurst and perhaps additional east-west service north of the Flushing Line. My preference is something like this: a shuttle under Junction intersecting all existing and possible future radial subways, and a continuation of Second Avenue Subway along 125th Street. Although it has a gap in service from Harlem to the airport, Second Avenue Subway Phase 2 has a natural tie-in to 125th, making the airport less important as an anchor than it is for surface transit; and even with a subway, 125th may well have enough remaining bus traffic to justify physically separated median bus lanes.

Although the possibility of subway extension is remote given current construction costs, an SBS extension is likely. It’s affordable at current costs and willingness to pay, and provides lines on a map that political leaders can point to and say “I did it.” In addition, boosters and business leaders tend to like airport expansions, and those are sometimes useful for the city.

Although New York currently prefers closed to open BRT, it’s still possible that airport access will indeed be used as an excuse to improve city transit with circumferential SBS routes in Queens and Harlem. It’s unlikely much good will come of it – note how the slides talk about “service to the airport and Western Queens” instead of “service to Western Queens and the airport” – but it’s feasible.

24/7 Rapid Transit

It’s a commonplace in New York that the New York City Subway is almost the only one that runs 24/7, and that the rest – PATH, PATCO, and two lines of the Chicago L – are small operations. The reason for this operating plan is that the main Manhattan trunklines have four tracks, making it feasible to shut down tracks for weekend and late-night maintenance and skip a few stations in one direction. Occasionally, even midday midweek service is disrupted. This leads to complaints from passengers who actually ride transit in the off-peak, as well as various politicians, and exhortations from political defenders of the MTA that it’s a necessary byproduct of 24/7 operation.

In fact, there’s one additional system not mentioned above: the Copenhagen Metro, which began 24/7 operation in 2009. Although around-the-clock operation on weekends is common in some European cities, such as Berlin, Copenhagen took the extra step to run 24/7 reliably. It has only two tracks, like some lines in New York, but made sure it would be possible to single-track at night for maintenance. Late-night headways in Copenhagen are 20 minutes, like in New York, and this gives enough time to reduce long segments to a single track and run wrong-way service. Copenhagen’s trains are automated and this helps with wrong-way signaling, but it’s not a prerequisite and wrong-way operation is already done late at night on the subway in New York.

What this means is that there’s a technical solution to the problem of late-night and weekend service disruptions: make sure that there are crossovers placed at regular intervals to allow 20-minute service on single track. Installing switches requires extra capital construction money, but is orders of magnitude cheaper than building extra tunnels, and would make late-night maintenance much easier. Headways are such that a switch would be required every 7 or 8 minutes, which means every 2.5-5 km. At some places, crossovers already exist at that density, for example at all four tunnels from Queens to Manhattan, and all that’s required is schedule modification.

The result would still not be as satisfactory as in Copenhagen, ironically because of the multi-track trunklines. Under the slow-fast-fast-slow system used in New York, as well as most other four-track lines, it’s impossible for a local train to cross over to the opposite track without fouling the express tracks. This would create serious problems even on the three-track lines in Queens and the Bronx, since extra switching moves would be required, shortening the acceptable crossover spacing. It would still be possible, say with crossovers 6-7 minutes apart, but the maintenance requirements would be higher.

On the four-track mainlines, I don’t see any solution that unequivocally improves on the status quo. It’s possible to have the same crossovers, but at even tighter spacing, and without any express traffic. Weekend express traffic could possibly still be retained, but not late-night express trains, and late-night frequency would be reduced to 20 minutes even on combined lines, for example the local 1/2 in Manhattan.

What this means for future trunklines is that, if four-tracking is required for capacity or for express service, it should not run as was built in New York a hundred years ago. Instead, the slow tracks should be in the middle, and the fast tracks on the outside; this allows more operational flexibility as well as short-turning local trains, at the cost of making it harder to build infill stations. While the subway short-turns some local trains, for example the C at 168th and at Euclid, this requires flying junctions, which contributed to the IND’s excessive cost.

Maximum flexibility could be obtained by building every station with two island platforms, as if it were an express station, and having express trains skip low-traffic stations. This way, two tracks could be shut down for maintenance along the entire line with no ill effect on reliability, except that retaining express service would required timed overtakes. The problem is of course the much higher cost of such a line, especially if it is underground.

For underground lines, there’s very rarely a reason to four-track. Washington may complain about lack of flexibility and express service, but modern subway lines with good rolling stock and wide curves can achieve acceptable average speed even with medium stop spacing. The Copenhagen Metro averages 40 km/h, a speed previously reserved for systems with very long (~1.6 km) interstations such as the Moscow Metro, even though its stop spacing is just 1 km. Capacity is the only serious drawback of two-track lines, but if it is so pressing then the city should built two separate two-track lines, which with tunnel boring machines cost about the same as one four-track line.