Category: New York
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.
Sunnyside Yards Redevelopment
Sunnyside Yards, lying along the LIRR Main Line immediately adjacent to the site of my proposed Sunnyside Junction, span about half a square mile (1.3 km^2) of mostly vacant land, with some big box retail with ample parking at its eastern margin. The short distance to Manhattan has already made Western Queens increasingly desirable (538’s Nate Silver called Sunnyside the third best neighborhood to live in in New York); the new rail junction would make this vacant land into prime real estate, making it feasible to sell air rights above the yards in a similar manner to how much of East Midtown was developed with air rights over the Grand Central tracks.
I would like to discuss how this should be done. This can be thought of as not just a particular Sunnyside question, but also my general ideas for how to do good transit-oriented development, and even more general ideas for how to develop new sites for dense urbanity.
First, the development would be mixed-use. This is because there’s both commercial and residential demand near Manhattan. More speculatively, this could cause the Long Island City secondary CBD to expand eastward, from Hunters Point and Queens Plaza toward the proposed station. In any case, the station should be expected to have high-intensity retail and office buildings immediately adjacent.
On the other hand, the development should be integrated into the existing neighborhoods on both sides of the yards, in terms of both street layout and development intensity. This is not the place to test out new ideas of urbanism; the streets should look as similar as possible to those of Sunnyside and Long Island City. Here is one way to map out streets: note the block size is similar to that of the surrounding areas. The same should be true of street width.
The best way to combine the two goals – retaining existing neighborhood context and allowing high-intensity commercial development near the station – is for the city to have progressively higher-intensity zoning proceeding from the margins to the station itself. Away from the immediate station area, medium-rise buildings such as those of Upper Manhattan (excluding projects) should suffice, and the city should not try to ram high-rise buildings against neighborhood opposition. This would also be friendly to small developers, turning this into the anti-Atlantic Yards. Needless to say, there should be no parking minimums, since the area would be dense and well-served by mass transit.
The overall density of such development could be compared to the mid-rise neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan, such as Morningside Heights and Washington Heights. Morningside Heights has 40,000 people per km^2, and so does Washington Heights when one makes sure to exclude its ample parkland. Morningside Heights has a lot of open space and many jobs, but it’s also higher-rise than Washington Heights (excluding the projects, again). Either could be taken as a basis of comparison, by which standards the 1.3 km^2 over the yards should support about 50,000 people.
Sunnyside would effectively get a second core, around the station, in addition to the existing core along Queens Boulevard. Although the development could spill over, raise rents, and produce gentrification, by itself it would not change the existing neighborhood much, which is fine as Sunnyside is pleasant as it is. Even the Queens Boulevard semi-highway works remarkably well there: the 7 el does not produce too much noise, and instead breaks the boulevard in half, making it look narrower and producing a good street wall for each of the boulevard’s halves.
Bear in mind that out of everything I have proposed in this blog’s history, I would peg this as the least likely to happen: the development I’m advocating spurns big monolithic development. Instead, the city would just map out streets, enact mild zoning restrictions to prevent the community from rejecting the plan for fear of Manhattanization, and perhaps attract a few anchor tenants and companies to build immediately next to the station. In contrast, the present process of redevelopment in New York is laden with collusion, with big developers getting land for megaprojects for less than it’s worth. The city would give a developer not only the yard land but also neighborhood blocks around it, which would be turned into a modernist urban renewal hell instead of a higher-intensity version of the same neighborhood.
My sliver of hope is that the extra transit service coming from the new junction station, and the fact that at the margins of the land the new development would look hardly different from the existing blocks, would reduce neighborhood opposition. Often the dominance of big developers in cities comes from neighborhood opposition to change, creating an arduous process of obtaining variances and schmoozing with city officials that small business cannot afford. I would peg the chances of neighborhood approval at low to moderate, the chances of such a plan happening in case of neighborhood approval at low, and the chances of such a plan happening in the absence of neighborhood approval at zero. What say you, Sunnyside-area bloggers?
Sunnyside Junction Proposal
The in-progress East Side Access (ESA) project linking the LIRR to Grand Central is scheduled to open in 2016, and Metro-North is already studying options to use space vacated by the LIRR to run its own trains to Penn Station along the Northeast Corridor. Thus the basic service pattern will look as in this map. Observe that alongside Sunnyside Yards, there’s a stretch of track between the split between the Northeast Corridor and the LIRR Main Line, and the split between the access tracks to Penn Station and the ESA tunnels.
This should be turned into a new junction station, Sunnyside Junction. At this junction, passengers could transfer cross-platform between trains to Grand Central and trains to Penn Station, just as they do at Jamaica between trains to Penn Station and trains to Brooklyn today. If Metro-North diverts half of its 20 peak New Haven Line trains per hour to Penn Station, and the LIRR diverts two thirds of its 36 peak tph from Penn Station to ESA, then the service to each Manhattan terminal will be about equal.
Since both Manhattan destinations are of high importance, no train should skip Sunnyside Junction, not even peak-of-peak LIRR express trains that skip Jamaica. (Trains should not skip Jamaica, either, but that’s another matter.) Thus off-peak frequency could be assured to be fairly high, comparable to that to Jamaica (about a train every 10 minutes), and peak frequency would be so high that the transfer penalty would be negligible.
An advantage of this setup is that even at the peak, one-seat rides to each destination would become unnecessary. Therefore the interlockings and switching moves could be simpler, and new grade separations should not be necessary. In the off-peak, the transfers should be timed, even across agencies; this should be the first step of good regional rail service. Note that I advocated something similar as part of a comprehensive regional rail plan for New York, but Sunnyside Junction could be built independently of it. Indeed the interlining that minimizes switching moves and conflicts is not the same as the through-running in my original plan, which is based on matching ridership at the New Jersey end to ridership at the Long Island or Connecticut end.
Because a stretch of straight track for this station already exists, all that is necessary is platforms. Because all trains should stop at this station, and the capacity limit lies elsewhere in the system (namely, in the ESA tunnels), it would suffice to have two island platforms and four tracks serving them, and two additional bypass tracks to allow Amtrak to skip the station even at peak hour. If the station became very busy then two additional stopping tracks could be required, and construction should leave space for them.
To ensure the station is well-patronized by transferring passengers, like Jamaica and unlike Secaucus, it should not feature fare barriers or other obstacles between the platforms. Transferring should involve walking a few meters from one track to another, on the same platform. This is perfectly compatible with the current regime of requiring conductors to check every ticket on the train, because Penn Station and Grand Central are both in the CBD and thus the fare to them should be the same. The rationale for the faregates at Secaucus is that fares to Hoboken and Penn Station are different, and conductors would not have time to check that everyone on a train from Secaucus to Penn has a valid ticket to Manhattan; this is irrelevant to Sunnyside.
In the future, the LIRR and Metro-North should consider lowering in-city fare and raising frequency, which could work with more modern operating rules (i.e. proof-of-payment instead of conductors checking all tickets). Seamless fare integration with the subway would open the door to direct Queens-Bronx service; Metro-North is already considering Bronx stops for its Penn Station service. It would also give Queens another access point to Manhattan, slightly decongesting the near-capacity Queens Boulevard subway; the reason I say slightly is that the worst problems are far east of Sunnyside. And frequent service to the rest of Queens and to Manhattan would provide another public transit option to the area.
Unfortunately, the LIRR seems to not make any plans for such a station. It had plans for a station west of the split, serving only Penn Station: see page 13 here. I do not know if such plans will ever materialize in light of ESA’s cost overruns; I cannot find a more recent official reference to them. A cross-platform connection seems to never have been on any official agenda. Fortunately, even now it should be possible to add one, at relatively low cost since this station would be entirely above ground, and with minimal disruption to service since the site is a wide railyard with 6-8 active through tracks.
Quick Note: Safe Streets, Safe Cities
Everyone should go read Jan Gehl’s post on Streetsblog about good urban design, excerpted from his book Cities for People. I have nothing to add, except to underline one part that’s often underrated among urbanists: the role of parked cars as buffer between moving cars and pedestrians or cyclists. Compare this photo with this photo, and ask yourself where the cyclist is better protected.
I generally tend to be very supportive of Manhattan’s design. The streets may be wider than elsewhere, but that translated mostly to increased pedestrian space. Manhattan’s 18-meter side streets have 1-2 driving lanes and a parking lane on each side; so do the 12-meter side streets in Tel Aviv, the difference being that in Tel Aviv cars park with two wheels on the sidewalk. As long as there’s an adequate street wall and the buildings are not set back from the street, it isn’t a real problem. As Gehl notes, there are many ways to make cities livable short of the ideal of Venice, in which cars begin where the city ends.
Urbanism and Restaurants (Hoisted from Comments)
There’s a brief but fascinating discussion on Market Urbanism between Scott Johnson (who comments here and on many other blogs as EngineerScotty) and Stephen Smith about the difference between formal eating in American suburbia and traditional cities.
My own experience is that, for all the supposed expense of New York, food here is remarkably cheap relative to the quality available. The quality of deli subs, which cost between $3 and $8 depending on size and how upscale the place wants to look, is much higher than the equivalent available on Subway. Similarly, the richer neighborhoods support many full-service supermarket chains, which tend to offer similar fare to Whole Foods but at lower prices. The expensive restaurants remain expensive, but there are plenty of good midscale ethnic restaurants offering comparable prices to and better food than their equivalents in smaller cities.
Part of this is that housing prices are to a large extent an opposing force to many other expenses (especially commuting – housing plus transportation cost as a percentage of income is nearly constant nationwide). Small and shared housing leads to a culture of eating out by itself, which encourages restaurants by itself. Even the non-touristy, but still upscale, parts of the French Riviera have a good restaurant scene, though for much higher prices than New York.
The cost of living in New York, or similar dense urban cores, depends on your lifestyle. If you feel like you must own a car, and believe in the suburban American ideal of nice, large homes, then the cost of living is brutal. The BLS and ACS estimates of New York’s living costs are not too bad – 36% higher than the national average according to the BLS (with rents 57% higher), or 28% higher for rent alone according to the ACS. But the corporate-focused ACCRA index thinks New York’s three largest boroughs range from 57% to 118% more expensive. Conversely, if you’re a student or a young couple or an immigrant or a poor person, your cost of living is much lower, because you don’t need a car.
Good cheap food is available wherever inequality is high within a small area; it means there’s disposable income to spend on food but workers’ wages are low. Singapore, the land of $2 food court lunches, is a good example. The US overall is a high-inequality country, but the suburbs tend to be homogeneous within their class. Within large cities, rich and poor live closer together, and, more importantly, the cost of living for the producers of midscale ethnic food is low (which means nominal wages don’t have to be as high) and so is the cost of living for many non-car-owning young couples and other consumers of midscale ethnic food. In this particular social class, New York is unusually rich.
The suburbs have different income and class dynamics, to say nothing of the fact that density is too low to support niche restaurants. Scott explains:
In much of US culture, there is an implicit expectation that “proper” members of society ought to be capable of hosting formal gatherings in their homes. I’m not discussing friends and family crowding around the kitchen table; I’m talking about formal occasions, including the hosting of business meetings, political events, and other occasions where professional acquaintances (as opposed to relatives and personal friends), are invited to the home, and served in a “professional” manner. (And likewise, many holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, typically involve a feast at the end of the day; one which is by tradition prepared and served at home, and often involves a large number of guests). As a result of this, many US homes, especially the larger ones, have hundreds of square feet nominally dedicated to formal entertaining: our homes have things like “dining rooms” and “living rooms” and the ubiquitous 0.1 bath, all of which exist to permit a semi-public space in which the dirty laundry (literally, in some cases) of family life do not intrude (and likewise, where guests at formal gatherings can be contained, and kept out of the private parts of the home). These things are often redundant with other rooms in the house intended for the family’s own use–kitchen tables, “family rooms”, etc.–and contain redundant sets of furnishings (table and chairs, sofas, lighting). And our homes also come with oversized kitchens where large feasts can be prepared and large quantities of dishes can be cleaned and stored, should it be necessary. This cultural expectation even affects land use; it seems our suburban neighborhoods are designed to accommodate the possibility that on any given night, someone might have 10 or more car-driving guests at their home, all of whom need a place to park.
In many other cultures, the idea of formal entertainment in the home is considered ridiculous (at least unless one is extremely wealthy). If one needs to formally entertain clients or host large gatherings, one charters a restaurant for the purpose. This is especially true for gatherings outside family or social circles; inviting business clients into the home is considered highly inappropriate. (One other cultural difference–many other cultures have far less attachment to “home cooking” than is found in the US, and view professionally-prepared cuisine to be superior to that whipped up in a home kitchen. Of course, in many parts of the US, the local dining scene is limited to fast food, greasy spoon diners, and chain restaurants of dubious quality; in that environment, a home-cooked meal may well be the preferred gastronomic choice). In these cultures, there is no need for individual dwelling units to come equipped with miniature banquet facilities; which permits greater levels of density. And greater levels of density permit a more robust restaurant scene, that can handle the formal entertainment needs of the populace.
Stephen then adds:
That is indeed interesting, but I think that the culture is a result of the anti-density regulators rather than a cause. But that’s interesting what you say about restaurants – I never thought about it that way, but it’s definitely true that when I lived in Romania, only my stepdad’s very close business partners – basically, his close friends – would come into the house. In fact, though our apartment and late house were more than big enough to host people for formal dinners (as opposed to small family dinners), the only time I remember having people over was when my mom hosted an American Thanksgiving! I guess that’s proof that you need to develop the culture over a period of time, and that Europeans don’t just switch to the American way of hosting people when they get bigger apartments/houses.
What do you think – is it primarily an income dynamic, as I believe; an urban design and density dynamic, as Stephen believes; or a cultural question, as Scott believes?
Update: Stephen in the comments links to an article about a study showing that supermarket food is cheaper in New York than in the rest of the US as well. This has been my experience as well. Part of it is more competition, but another part comes from a method alluded to at the end of the article: since there are so many full-service supermarket chains, different stores discount different items at each time (that’s the circular the article mentions) as well as sell different items at slightly below average prices. It’s perfect price discrimination from the supermarkets’ perspective.
Staten Island’s Closed BRT Disaster
After having constructed something like bus rapid transit in the Bronx and Manhattan, the MTA is moving forward with its plan to have a line in each borough and has made a proposal for Staten Island Select Bus Service. Buses would run from the Staten Island Mall to Hylan Boulevard, the main corridor serving the South Shore, and thence to Brooklyn over the Verrazano Bridge to connect to the subway. As Ben Kabak reports, this is intended to resuscitate the idea of SBS after the cancellation of the 34th Street Transitway.
To see why this is such a bad plan, let us look at Staten Island’s existing bus map. The S79 follows the route proposed by the MTA and would become an SBS line under this proposal. But there are nine other lines on Hylan: the S78, which goes to St. George and connects to the Ferry, and eight express routes, which cross to Brooklyn and use expressways to get to Manhattan. The S78 has about two thirds the annual ridership of the S79; the eight express routes have between them about 30% more ridership than the S79.
The problem with MTA-style BRT is that it’s inherently closed, because it bundles lane separation with innovations that should be applied everywhere, such as proof of payment. Although buses could run partly in mixed traffic and partly in dedicated lanes, as they should, the fare collection systems and incompatible, and the MTA has ruled out off-board fare collection on non-SBS routes. Recall from the MTA’s smartcard report that:
Local and express buses will continue to have a farebox unit
o Accept contactless cards as primary payment method
o Accept coins (nickels, dimes and quarters) as secondary method
…
o Bus operator must be able to confirm fare paid by all means of payment
In other words, the best industry practice is ruled out, and the attempts at fixing it within the MTA’s rules only make things worse. On First and Second Avenues, where local and select buses use the same bus lanes, the stations are separate, reducing the effective frequency of buses on the corridor. On Hylan, which is a much lower-traffic and therefore lower-frequency route than First/Second, this is devastating to frequency on the shared trunk line. If the inspectors keep forcing buses to sit still during inspections, as they have on the Bx12 and M15 SBS routes, then reliability will drop as well.
The configuration of Hylan is such that open BRT, used in cities from Berlin to Brisbane, would be perfect for the corridor, if the fare collection were done right. The entirety of the Hylan corridor (except perhaps in the far south of Staten Island) as well as the approaches to the Verrazano Bridge would get dedicated lanes, and buses would be free to use parts of the infrastructure as needed. People with express bus passes who don’t mind taking a local or SBS pass for the trip could even board and transfer.
Because under open BRT dedicated lanes would not involve special branding, it would be easy to extend this to congested portions of Staten Island’s two other batches of relatively busy buses: the S53, which runs from the North Shore to the Verrazano and Bay Ridge, and the S44/S46/S48, which run on parallel streets from the North Shore to St. George. The S53 would be especially important, as it runs orthogonally to the borough’s rail infrastructure, and does not compete either with the Staten Island Railway or with a future North Shore service on the existing railroad corridor.
Once you count the need to pay first-world wages to more drivers, BRT infrastructure is not cheaper than rail for equal capacity, unless traffic is very low. The advantage of BRT is that it can branch out and run in mixed traffic. Closed BRT, as the MTA is proposing, is the worst of both worlds – high operating costs, no branching – and with the splitting of frequency for riders who stay on Hylan, it may not even be much of an improvement over local buses. It deserves no support from good transit advocates.
Little Things That Matter: Stoplight Phasing
In Manhattan, most intersections have two stoplight phases: one permitting all north-south traffic, and one permitting all east-west traffic. Each phase lasts about 45 seconds, ensuring that pedestrians can cross even the widest avenues in one go with time to spare.
In Tel Aviv, the signalized intersections are almost never as in Manhattan. Even intersections of major streets with side streets will usually have three phases, and intersections of two major streets will usually have four, permitting conflict-free turns; turn conflicts with pedestrians exist on such intersections, but are uncommon.
From the traffic engineer’s perspective, Tel Aviv intersections are better – they’re supposed to be safer and smoother for the driver, with none of the snarl that happens when a car driving on Upper Broadway tries to turn left. They’re also hell for anyone not in a car, since waits are much longer, and to compensate for the larger number of phases each phase is shorter. This discourages enough pedestrians as to reduce the number of pedestrians for cars to hit, creating an illusion of even more safety.
If there’s enough car traffic, then streets with complex stoplight phasing are uncrossable 75% of the time. But if the street is median-divided, this is even worse, because the traffic engineers try to optimize car traffic, which means the pedestrian green on the two halves of the street is unsynchronized. At some intersections, one direction of a crossing is pessimized for the pedestrian: that is, after crossing one half of the street, the pedestrian will have to wait nearly a full cycle to cross the other half.
There are emerging calls for complete streets, which include such important features of walkability as wide sidewalks and frequent crosswalks. But the frequency of the crosswalks is only partial consolation if the stoplights are optimized for high car speed rather than high walking speed. For a healthy, young individual, the difference between not having to wait at intersections and having to wait a minute and a half every 300 meters is the difference between walking at 6 km/h and walking at 4 km/h. Traffic engineers do not tolerate phasing that slows down cars by 33%, and should not tolerate phasing that so slows down pedestrians.
The above does not apply as much to low-traffic areas such as Downtown Athens, Georgia, because there are sufficiently few cars that locals ignore pedestrian stoplights anyway. But in a large city with many cars such as Tel Aviv, it’s difficult to cross safely on red. As a result, streets that are no wider than a Manhattan avenue can take multiple minutes to cross, and one such street, Ibn Gabirol, divides the neighborhood it passes through in a way that 42nd and Broadway never do.
Ibn Gabirol and similar streets are not suburban arterials. They’re not like Athens’ Baxter Street. They have a street wall, very wide sidewalks, and mixed uses, just like Manhattan avenues. They also have enough foot and car traffic that they don’t feel desolate. They feel very walkable, as long as you stay on one side; it’s when you try to cross that their auto-oriented nature becomes apparent.
Fatality Numbers vs. Safety
On Streetsblog, they’re waving New York’s relatively high pedestrian fatality rate as evidence the streets are unsafe and much more can be done. The region’s pedestrian death rate is the 13th worst in the nation, about the same as Houston, which is supposed to be evidence of unsafe streets.
John Adams points out that in Britain, the pedestrian fatality rate today is one third what it was in 1922. The roads are much less safe than they were then, when they were narrow and traffic was slow, but there are so few pedestrians today that cars rarely hit them. As a result, looking at absolute death rates means nothing.
Even the Transportation for America study that Streetsblog links to doesn’t fully correct for it. It scales fatality rates based on the pedestrian commute share, which is better than nothing, but still fails to account the huge volumes of people in New York and other walkable cities who take mass transit to work but still walk a lot for their other trips. The proof is in the pudding: the study says Cleveland is the second safest metro area in the US for pedestrians, behind Boston and ahead of New York.
New York has a lot of street safety issues, but it’s still light years ahead of the rest of the US, except for small pockets in Boston, San Francisco, and other compact, walkable cities. The same is true for Manhattan within New York. Ignore complaints that the community board comprising the Upper East Side has the third highest pedestrian fatality count; it also has the third highest population, trailing two outer-urban CBs with fewer pedestrians. At this stage input-based measures such as traffic speed, sidewalk width, stoplight phasing, and the presence of a good street wall and trees are much better than any skewed output-based statistic.
As a corollary, bike lane opponents who complain about the large number of cyclist injuries on protected bike lanes are just as wrong (see here and scroll for comments). There are more cyclists on 9th Avenue than on pre-bike lane Prospect Park West; of course more will be injured. Counterintuitive claims about how bike lanes are less safe than mixed traffic are fun, but they aren’t true.
Pedestrian Observations 
