Category: Politics and Society
Core Connectors and In-Between Neighborhoods
In some American cities, new or proposed transit lines are either core connectors, i.e. city-center circulator streetcars built for development purposes, or far-flung commuter rail extensions with few urban stops. Both are present in Providence, with the South County extension of the MBTA and the Core Connector, but worse circulators than in Providence are proposed elsewhere (for example, in New Haven), and exurb-focused commuter rail with parking lot stations is the standard in most Sunbelt cities and also in Massachusetts. At first I thought my opposition to both was just a matter of wonky support of a specific stop distance and service pattern that falls in between those two extremes, but recently, after attending Providence urbanist blogger meetings and also rereading old threads about New Haven, I realized there’s a political and social dimension to all this.
Recall that old American cities have a donut-shaped income distribution: gentrified in the center, poor in most other urban neighborhoods and inner suburbs, and middle-class to rich in most suburbs. Those two forms of bad transit are specifically built to cater to the rich parts of the metro area, and ignore the poor parts. The problem, of course, is that the poor parts are precisely where transit ridership is concentrated. People in the gentrified cores of smaller cities can walk; people in the suburbs own cars, and those cities have too many roads and too much parking for buses to be an even semi-reasonable alternative.
In Providence, as I recently brought up, the busiest buses follow Broad and North Main, and serve working-class and poor populations. The same is true in New Haven: the busiest line by far runs on Dixwell, connecting the Yale student ghetto, the in-between poor neighborhoods, and the strip malls in middle-class Hamden. So what service addition does a study by the South Central Regional Council of Governments (SCORAG) propose? Naturally, a circulator connecting Union Station with the New Haven Green. You could chalk this up to a belief in systemwide upgrades over building a few high-performance lines, but many outlying bus stops have no shelter, and the study says nothing about that.
When Peter Brassard first pitched the idea of a local rail shuttle service in Providence and its inner suburbs to us privately, the observation one of us made (I think it was Jef Nickerson, but I’m not sure) is that it would invert the usual relationship between infrastructure investment and income. This is mostly accidental – the mainline serves Olneyville and Pawtucket but not the East Side. But something like this is more likely than not when the focus is on serving reasonably dense neighborhoods and perhaps inner-suburban malls outside walking range.
The same is true of what I believe to be the most promising rail shuttle service in New Haven – namely, a service using the Farmington Canal Trail, which runs about 200 meters east of Dixwell, and could be reused by light rail reaching downtown New Haven on city streets or rapid transit connecting to the mainline with a very short tunnel or trench. With a stop spacing of a little less than a kilometer, modern rolling stock could average 35-40 km/h in service, double the speed of the current bus.
I suspect part of the bias against such service comes from the belief that building ten kilometers of light rail is expensive. Because there’s an implicit hierarchy in planners’ mind between services, they think a downgrade is an automatic cost saver, even when it’s not – for instance, when a bus on an abandoned railroad costs far more than most rail reactivation projects do. One of these mantras is that commuter rail infill is less expensive (and then they build infill stations at $100 million apiece, strategically located away from the intersection with the main bus corridor). As a rule of thumb, each of these downgrades just raises unit costs because of various overbuilding schemes until total cost is the same as if they’d built regular urban rail, but the benefits are much lower.
But it’s more than a technical bias; it’s also political bias. The Core Connector is explicitly a development project. It may even be a successful one, if it convinces local power broker Colin Kane to drop plans for building 7,000 parking spaces in the Jewelry District, as described in a recent paywalled article in Next American City. Development projects like this never go to extant low-income neighborhoods, unless there’s an explicit effort at gentrification, and usually locals protest against the displacement; neglect is much easier and less controversial than redevelopment.
The technical and political biases merge in one of the less challenged cost-effectiveness metrics, the cost per new rider. Although it’s presented in neutral terms – the cost is compared to the predicted total transit ridership if the project is built minus the predicted total if it is not – the results privilege adding choice riders (that is, those who already own a car and drive to work) over retaining existing riders. Although transit revivals happen, most of the world’s transit cities built out their systems before most people got cars, and people simply kept using transit instead of buying cars even as they moved into the middle class. Portland may have about the same metro area transit mode share as before it built light rail, but other cities of similar age lost ground and have even lower transit use.
It’s tricks like ignoring retention that lead Boston to downrate replacing the southern half of the Silver Line with light rail on its list of possible projects even though it would be very cheap by US standards per rider, and rate new commuter rail branches well beyond the continuous built-up area as more cost-effective. The rail bias factor implied by the computation for new riders is less than 0.5%: 130 new riders against 34,000 existing ones. A Transportation Research Board analysis finds the rail bias is in the 34-43% range. I suspect that if the Silver Line served richer areas than Roxbury, Boston would use a more reasonable rail bias than 130/34,000, bringing down costs per new rider by two orders of magnitude. New York went ahead with Second Avenue Subway; it is undoubtedly the most important subway project in the region, but the next best corridors, e.g. Utica, serving less chic neighborhoods than the Upper East Side, are ignored.
The technical reason to build urban rail a certain way – own-right-of-way, stops roughly every kilometer within the city, etc. – is of course separate. Technical characteristics do not tell you which neighborhoods to serve, not without first looking into existing demand patterns. It is just fortunate that New Haven has a right-of-way closely paralleling Dixwell, and unfortunate that Providence has none paralleling Broad. But the income donuts, and more generally the connection between density and old industrial development that is usually working-class (since gentrification in such cities is within walking distance of the core rather than within transit distance), have certain social implications. The most annoying to the planner and the government official is that they must invest in poor neighborhoods as they are, and do not have a special reason to try to foist change upon them.
Or they can just build core connectors for the cities and park-and-ride extensions for the suburbs. The FTA will fund these no matter what; its cost-effectiveness metrics are biased that way to avoid having to send every penny it has available to a few expensive but high-ridership lines such as Second Avenue Subway. The developers will like them, because of real or imagined property value benefits. The state will like them – state governments are dominated by suburbanites and urban developers and view transit as pork rather than as useful spending based on ridership metrics; Rhode Island is much likelier to find support for development in the Jewelry District than for boring rail lines in already-developed Providence neighborhoods. It’s a win-win for everyone except the riders, and they don’t count.
Netroots Nation and How the 99% Talk Hurts Consensus
For the first time since 2006, I went to Netroots Nation, as it’s held in Providence. There was one panel about public transportation, entitled “Saving Public Transportation,” whose speakers included Larry Hanley, who dominated the discussion; a moderator; and three political activists: including a local union leader, a Sierra Club representative, and a state legislative candidate who Greater City is supporting. The discussion focused on preserving bus operations rather than on expansion – in fact Hanley made the point that agencies expand capital while cutting back service because the federal government only pays for capital rather than operating funds.
Since the panel was entirely political, and dealt mostly with funding issues, when it was time for questions I asked about the saddling of transit agencies with highway debt; I specifically mentioned Massachusetts’ putting Big Dig mitigation debt on the MBTA. I wanted to see if the panelists would say anything about mode shifting or about the relative power of highways and transit.
Instead, Hanley, who took the question, ignored what I said about highway debt, and instead answered about refinancing debt at lower interest rates, as issue his union is harping about. In reality, according to his union’s own figures, the MBTA could save $26 million a year by refinancing debt; for comparison, its deficit this year, which it plugged with service cuts and a large fare hike, was $163 million, and its total debt payments in 2006 were $351 million, of which $117 million came from the Big Dig. Although the parts of this debt that are not from the Big Dig come from true transit projects, those were voted on by the state legislature, rather than by the MBTA; transit’s low position in the transportation funding food chain is thus responsible for 13.5 times as much money as could be extracted from the banks.
So at first pass, Hanley was pivoting to an issue he was more comfortable talking about, which happens to involve a fraction of the amount of money in question. But at second pass, something more insidious happened. Instead of answering a question about transportation priorities and getting state governments to assume debt they’d unfairly loaded onto transit agencies, which would require clashing with other departments with their own agendas, Hanley preferred to shift blame onto banks. He did not include figures during the panel and so I could not know he was talking about such a small amount of money; his explanation for focusing on the banks is that the MTA renegotiated deals with contractors to get lower prices, so it should do the same with the banks.
And after thinking about this, I realized how it shows exactly how despite appearances, the “We are the 99%” slogan is the exact opposite of any sort of democratic consensus. It silences any notion that there are different interests among the 99%. The auto workers and Providence’s carless residents are both members of the 99%; they have diametrically different interests when it comes to transportation. But in the Grand Struggle, the 99% must be united, and thus the leaders shift any discussion to the common enemy, no matter the relative proportions of the amounts of money in question.
After Scott Walker’s win, Matt Yglesias wrote that different industries have clashing interests just as much as labor and business do. But even within the framework of fighting big business’s influence, two of the most influential opposing interest groups, the union movement and small business, have different interests and are hostile to each other. Dean Baker wrote in The Conservative Nanny State that small businesses are being coddled because they pay lower wages and benefits on average; in general, the American union movement has not organized small businesses and supports the businesses it has already organized, and is hostile toward new companies, which are usually non-union. Small business in turn is hostile toward regulations on wages, starting a business, and so on.
The 99% framing papers over all of that. The voices that dominate the protests believe themselves to be the true representatives of 99% of the population, and by implication their own issues to be the most important. Other issues are subsidiary, or outright distractions from the primary needs. Any movement that claims to represent everyone is not consensual but nationalistic, and just as nationalism requires the elites to declare a certain archetype to be Real Americans (or Britons, or French) and everyone else to be one of many negative stereotypes, so does this 99% framing require movement leaders to coopt or downplay other groups’ issues.
Consensus comes from clashing points of view. The Swiss Socialists are farther left than what is considered serious liberal opinion in the US, and the Swiss People’s Party is about as far right as the Tea Party; they and the centrist parties are more or less in a grand coalition. The consensus comes from the realization that no single faction will ever dominate, and thus the best it can do is distill how it can advance its stated goals (poverty reduction, smaller government, greater national cohesion, etc., depending on the party). The Occupy protesters have very high supermajority requirements at their general assemblies, but they do not have this clash, this diversity in either viewpoints or demographics. They have procedural near-unanimity but not actual consensus governance, leading to a system that excludes most interest groups that comprise the 99%; unsurprisingly, the movement has severe problems with race, since its center is white and thinks it speaks for everyone.
Of course, within the union movement something similar is happening, with the dominant group being the older members. This is what New York-area transit commenter Larry Littlefield calls Generation Greed, spanning people of all political classes.
The end result is that no matter how much rhetoric is thrown around about new politics, forward-looking progressives, and so on, what ends up is a repetition of an old hierarchy, one with Real Working People and with fake ones. It has to; when it has no capability of dealing with tensions between transit users and other groups, or between whites and blacks, or between labor and small business, it cannot project any unity of the 99% otherwise. And without unity, it’s a movement without any clear policy agenda.
Quick Note: 77 Cents on the Dollar
The headline numbers for how much federal spending each state gets per federal tax dollar it sends to Washington come from the Tax Foundation and are almost a decade out of date. However, using IRS numbers for tax receipts per state, and QuickFacts’ numbers for federal spending per state and county, we can construct the numbers by state as of 2009. The picture is similar to the old numbers – the North subsidizes the South, as one would expect as the North is richer and also has a higher cost of living.
What I didn’t expect is that Rhode Island would get only 77 cents in federal spending per dollar of taxation. More precisely, in 2009 it paid $10.9 billion in taxes (more than richer states of comparable size, such as New Hampshire) and got $11.4 billion in spending; but the country as a whole ran a large deficit, and so if we divide 11.4/10.9 by the ratio of federal spending that actually came from taxes, we get 0.77. This was going on while the state ranked near the top in unemployment, and for a while, early in the recession, led the nation. The other high-unemployment states got much more than 77 cents on the dollar: California got 92 (up from $0.79 in 2004), Nevada $1.06 (up from $0.73), and Michigan $1.20 (up from $0.85); Florida, which was also hit hard, got $1.21, up from $1.02.
I have no explanation for this. Connecticut and Massachusetts, both richer than Rhode Island, do not get this little. I thought it might be because Rhode Island is a large daytime job gainer – it is one of the top states in percentage of workers who commute in from other states because of all the Providence suburbs in Massachusetts – but North Dakota is another such state because of Fargo’s Minnesota suburbs, and it got $1.60 in spending per dollar of revenue.
Update: Quickfacts decided to stop putting out the federal spending statistics. Here are numbers from 2010, which seem to be in a permalinked format. In 2010, Rhode Island got $11.8 billion in spending and paid $10.5 billion in taxes, which works out to 81 cents on the dollar, again after adjusting for the federal deficit. North Dakota got $1.47. See spreadsheet here with numbers for each state.
Spreading Population Around
There was a series of hate marches and anti-immigrant riots in Israel last week, continuing intermittently to today; at heart was incitement against Sudanese and Eritrean refugees, who the government labels infiltrators and work migrants. Politicians from the center rightward have variably said the country belongs to white men, the refugees are cancer, and leftists should be thrown into prison camps.
I am not going to discuss the violence or the moral bankruptcy of the center and the right, not because it’s not important, but because I have nothing to add that the team on 972Mag hasn’t. What I am going to talk about is the saddening reaction of the left and center-left, which are reproducing all the urban renewal mistakes the patrician elite made in American cities.
First, some background: in both Eritrea (which Israel maintains diplomatic ties with and has sold weapons to) and Sudan, state terror has produced large numbers of refugees, of whom some fled to Israel. They do not have legal status in Israel, which categorically refuses to even check who is entitled to refugee protections, and instead labels them illegal work migrants, and occasionally deports them. The magnet neighborhood for refugees is Shapira/Levinsky, in working-class South Tel Aviv. The hate marches are not based in Shapira, but rather in Hatikva, a socially conservative working-class neighborhood separated from Shapira (and the rest of the city) by a freeway and a secondary neighborhood for the refugees. In one such march, the police did not protect black people within Hatikva, but did block the overpasses to prevent rioters from going to where the immigrants are.
Shortly after a major hate march in South Tel Aviv, leftist Meretz reacted with its own five-point program proposal for solving the crisis. It included general social programs, including social spending to alleviate poverty, and giving the refugees legal status and letting them take the jobs that currently go to temporary guest workers. This is par for the course on the left.
But the third point of the program was to spread the refugees around. It’s not fair that they all cluster in one or two neighborhoods, say both some longtime neighborhood residents and people who do not live anywhere nearby but sympathize selectively. The call for spreading the refugees around was echoed in some left-wing blogs and comments, for example in an article by Larry Derfner, who grew up in the US and should know better.
If we strip away the recent violence and the refugee versus economic migrant question, we can piece together the following story: people from the third-world moved to a developed country, mostly to a relatively low-rent urban neighborhood. They start their own businesses there (reports from the riot note broken windows at Eritrean stores). Crime rates are lower than the national average as the police indicates when pressed, but the media and leading politicians pretend the opposite is true and sensationalize real and imagined crimes. There are some clashes with older residents, but the worst comes from people who do live elsewhere: MK Michael Ben Ari, who started the first recent hate march, lives in a settlement 46 km from the city. The patrician elites then decide that the immigrants are a problem and propose to force them out of the neighborhood they have settled in and scatter them around the country.
It’s been done with poor Jewish immigrants before, for both anti-urbanist and nationalistic reasons of settling the periphery, where Arabs or Bedouins used to be the majority. (Even today, the center receives far fewer national housing funds than its proportion of the population.) Some of the towns those immigrants were settled in are now infamous for their poverty, and the rest are hardly any better. The only things that changed from the previous situation were that the physical stock of housing improved, and that those immigrants were put out of sight and out of mind.
It’s a story that’s played itself time and time again, in cities all over the world. When the patricians fail to uproot the newcomers, the newcomers often thrive and become upwardly mobile. Sometimes this is in perfect integration with patrician ideals, as was eventually the case for Jews and Italians in the US; sometimes it’s in neighborhoods that resist formal assimilation, such as the Brazilian favelas. When the patricians succeed, the newcomers remain segregated, even if they’re physically close to other groups. Singapore has racial quotas in HDB blocks, to prevent the formation of ethnic enclaves; despite this, segregation remains social fact, and the Malays and Indians remain poorer than the Chinese.
Although in most cases the patricians have won at least partial victory, in many it was a Pyrrhic one. In American cities, beginning in the 1930s, redlining pushed Italians and Jews out of their neighborhoods and into the suburbs, accelerating in the 1950s and 60s. Urban renewal programs destroyed what was left. Italian East Harlem exists only in a few landmarks serving people from outside the neighborhood. But by then ethnic whites had already attained middle-class status; they suburbanized because they had enough money to buy houses, and the role of redlining was to make sure they bought in the suburbs and not in the neighborhoods they grew up in.
It’s with blacks that the American patricians attained total victory. Blacks were always more discriminated against than ethnic whites, and so it was easier to destroy their neighborhoods, and suffered more police violence; but they also moved to the industrial cities fifty years later than most ethnic whites, in an era when urban renewal had the full backing of the federal government.
The heart of the problem is that Meretz does not think of the refugees as people it should serve. It doesn’t even think of them as potential future citizens and voters. It thinks of them as a problem to be solved so that it can show that it cares about a working class that persistently thinks it’s an elitist party and votes for the right.
As I keep stressing whenever I write about racial issues, the way to solve them is to treat people as people, and instead treat racism as the problem. This is not done by spreading population around, because that destroys the minority social networks that are crucial for upward mobility. It’s done by enforcing those anti-discrimination laws that are on the books but are never taken seriously. There are rabbis, on municipal payrolls, who issue no-Arab-workers certificates to business owners; they’ve never been prosecuted for this, and pressing the issue would do far more to help anyone in Israel who isn’t Jewish than urban renewal proposals.
Urban policy is marked by a host of government failures. It’s not that government abstractly can’t make cities better, but outside bounded infrastructure issues, with sanitation, transportation, and so on, it hasn’t. Elite planning can’t make functional neighborhoods, even when it employs the best design principles. And current Israeli zoning codes do not employ good design principles. In contrast, haphazard development has produced functional neighborhoods. Shadow Cities mentions a jewelry store owner in Rio who moved her operation from a rich neighborhood to a favela, because the favela was safer.
Meretz’s own history is not very pro-urban. Of the two traditional geographical elites in Israel – the kibbutz movement, and the urban favored quarters (including my own Old North) – Meretz tilts toward the former. That said, the patrician elites of early-20th century New York lived on the Upper East Side and not just in Westchester and Long Island. People in North Tel Aviv keep voting for politicians who engage in destructive urban renewal in Ajami; I doubt that any of the succession of centrist liberal parties that appealed to urban professionals would come up with a less bad program than Meretz.
The problem then is distribution of power. The entire discussion of immigrants in Israel has ignored activism by the immigrants themselves. For all I know, there hasn’t been much of it; the protests against racism were run by Jews, some from within Shapira but most from outside of it. Moreover, just as the Real American stereotype excludes people who live in the big coastal cities or who aren’t white, the stereotype of the ordinary Israeli, as opposed to the elite, is invariably Jewish. As a result, even in the eyes of the mainstream left, the refugees are an Other, a problem to be solved rather than people whose problems the government must solve.
It’s not my role to tell Meretz and other Israeli leftist parties how to conduct their internal affairs or how to construct their ideologies. There are enough people on the Palestinian and international left inching to declare Zionist parties morally bankrupt, and it’s not my intention to do the same here. For what it’s worth, any scenario involving the replacement of Zionist Israel with an Arab state would probably involve large-scale urban destruction in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (due to domestic policy, not war). It’s a problem of relations between political elites and newcomers, and of how people are to be thought of.
The only advice I can give here is that naturalized citizens can vote. Political parties that treat immigrants as future citizens and as a source of votes, as the Democrats do in most of the US and the Republicans do in Florida and Texas, are less racist and also cause more political integration than parties that treat them as a source of problems.
This is initially hard, because the political elite can’t create neighborhood political organization from scratch, and the existing organizations are run for older residents rather than for refugees. The human rights organizations are busy alleviating absolute poverty and protecting refugees’ civil rights; they cannot be expected to create immigrant social networks. However, a Do No Harm approach, focusing on keeping refugees safe from violence and letting them conduct their own affairs in the neighborhood they’ve chosen to stay in, could eventually lead to such organization.
The Cost of Heavy Freight Trains
Over at Pennsylvania HSR, Samuel Walker reminds us that the dominance of coal for US freight traffic slows down passenger trains, and this has a social cost in addition to the direct costs of coal mining and burning. But another post of his, regarding cant deficiency, suggests more problems coming from mixing modern passenger trains with very heavy freight. Coal trains slow all other traffic in three different ways, of which just one is the conventional schedule conflict, and even that means more than just slowing down intercity trains.
Schedule conflict reduces not just speed, but also span and punctuality. The Northstar Line in Minnesota shares track with BNSF’s Northern Transcon; since the line is freight-primary, there’s no room for off-peak service, and passenger trains can’t extend to the line’s natural terminus in St. Cloud, not without constructing additional tracks. Similarly, in Houston, plans for a commuter line to Galveston included peak-only service from the start.
Second, independently of scheduling, slow trains force faster trains to slow down by limiting the amount of superelevation that can be used. As a reminder: on curves, they bank the track, with the outer rail above the inner rail, to partly counter centrifugal force. If they do not cant the train enough, there’s cant deficiency; if they cant too much, there’s cant excess. Although there are strict limits for cant excess (in Sweden, 100 mm, or 70 on tighter curves), stricter than for cant deficiency (150 mm for a non-tilting passenger train, give or take), technically commuter trains could safely run at higher cant excess; however, for freight trains, high cant excess is unsafe because loads could shift, and the higher axle load means trains would chew up the inner track. Very heavy trains first require the track to have a lower minimum speed, and second have an even more limited cant excess because of the damage they’d cause to the track (about 2″, or 50 mm, in US practice). Walker links to a US standard guideline that uniformly assumes 3″ cant; greenfield high-speed lines go up to 180-200 mm.
And third, heavy freight trains damage tracks regardless. Coal trains also limit the amount of revenue the railroad gets out of each train, leaving limited money for maintenance, and are not time-sensitive, giving railroads no reason to perform adequate maintenance. To compensate, industry practices have to be less than perfect: cant and cant deficiency are less than the maximum permitted by right-of-way geometry and minimum speed, and freight railroads require barriers between their track and passenger track to protect from inevitable freight derailments. Even then the US safety level is well below what’s achieved anywhere else in the world with trustworthy statistics.
Of course, coal provides a great boon to the freight railroads. It’s a captive market. The railroads could price out coal and focus on higher-value intermodal traffic. Some of the lines that already focus on intermodal traffic are friendlier to passenger service, such as the FEC.
However, realistically, the end of coal is only going to come from environmental regulations. Those same regulations would apply to oil, inducing a mode shift from trucks to rail. The coal trains that would stop running would be replaced by trains carrying higher-value goods. The details depend on what the purpose and kind of environmental regulations are, but today’s environmental movement is heavily focused on climate change and not as concerned with local environmental justice, so loss of coal traffic due to a high carbon tax or local air pollution tax, both of which would also affect oil and gas, is much likelier than loss of coal traffic due to restrictions on mountaintop removal and air quality regulations at mining sites, which would not. (Of course oil causes plenty of damage to the biosphere, but the mainstream environmental movement is much more concerned with effects on humans than on other organisms.)
The political issue at hand, besides the easy to explain but hard to implement matter of avoiding catastrophic climate change, is what freight railroads are used to. Their entire business model is geared toward relatively low-value goods. A steep carbon tax is a risk: it should raise their mode share of total value of goods transported, which is currently 4% (see also figure 4.3 here), but it would come from a new set of goods, with requirements and challenges different from those of the current mix. The railroads would have to reintroduce fast freight, which most haven’t run in decades, and refine it to deal with the needs of shippers today. It’s not only a headache for the managers, but also a substantial risk of failure – perhaps rival railroads would be able to get all the traffic because they’d adapt to the new market faster, perhaps shippers would change their factory placement to move goods over shorter distances, perhaps they would not be able to cope with the immediate increase in fuel costs, etc.
Because of this, freight railroads may end up fighting a policy that would most likely benefit them. Although they represent a critical part of an emission reduction strategy, and are all too happy to point out that they consume much less fuel than trucks, fuel is a major cost to them, and coal is big business for them. These are not tech startups; these are conservative businesses that go back to the 19th century. Heavy coal trains then add a political cost as well: they help turn an industry that could be a major supporter of climate change legislation neutral or hostile to the idea.
The Growing and the Forgotten
Joel Kotkin’s attack on Santorum for his politics rural resentment drew a puzzled response from Cap’n Transit. Although both Kotkin and Santorum are opposed to the kind of urbanism the Cap’n and I promote, their approaches are the exact opposites of each other. Kotkin represents America the growing; Santorum represents America the forgotten. The same distinction applies to people who are not so conservative, and people on the same side of it (for example, Kotkin, Richard Florida, and Thomas Friedman) have more in common with one another than they’d probably like to admit.
America the growing is an America that is working just fine as it is. It needs more growth because capitalism always does, but it has no huge problems that can’t be solved with just more ingenuity. Kotkin’s perfect America looks like Texas. It’s rich, it thrives on bigness, and it’s doing better economically than the national average. It’s also diverse and forward-looking: its best days are ahead of it. Perhaps it looks like the growing parts of the Great Plains, but there, too, his post critiquing Santorum emphasizes diversity. This is the same as Richard Florida’s vision, except that Florida prefers the growth of gentrified, liberal inner-urban neighborhoods; the only difference between Florida and Kotkin is that Kotkin’s preferred regions lag Florida’s in gentrification, and still have fast suburban growth.
America the forgotten is the exact opposite. Its best days were behind it, and it feels bypassed by recent trends, with resulting economic decline. When there’s nothing else to do, one can keep one’s own cultural traditions. Some politicians channel this to an anti-immigrant politic. Santorum has not, his Puerto Rico language gaffe aside, but instead chose to talk about religion, gay rights, and contraception, staking positions that are often far to the right of what is mainstream in most of the US.
The same forgotten appears in cities, only it takes different forms. The Wire and the books that went into it are about forgotten urban areas; David Simon says, “The solution is to undo the last 35 years, brick by brick. How long is that going to take? I don’t know, but until you start it’s only going to get worse.” Urban NIMBYism is essentially the same viewpoint, only it’s more middle-class or at least working-class: we have a functioning community, we’re under constant assault by the powerful and by outsiders, and we need to not change.
The booster mentality of the growing does not lend itself into that kind of analysis. It has not to my knowledge produced anything as scathing as The Wire, because it tells people that they are fine as they are, and do not need to change. It’s understandable when done to boost the self-esteem of people who have too little of it; but there’s a big difference between telling a woman with a BMI of 22 that she’s not fat, and telling the global upper middle class that everything is great. It’s the death of social analysis.
As a result, this view ignores social problems until after they’ve been solved – for example, the environmental problems of today, as opposed to those that have been improving over the lat few decades. It’s unmistakable in Thomas Friedman: for example, in The World is Flat, writing about some social problems caused by the entry of Wal-Mart into regions, he says he was pleasantly surprised by the Wal-Mart executives for taking those problems very seriously and planning to address them. Of course Wal-Mart is still swatting down discrimination lawsuits and still plays towns against each other. Or, again with Friedman, consider his use of the language, “Win, win, win, win, win” about gas taxes. The point is not that he supports high gas taxes; it’s that to him such policies are obvious solutions, which nobody but special interests opposes. The fact that those special interests are fighting for their political survival does not concern him; he does not think he needs to be persuasive to people who buy gas, to explain to them why they’d be better off in a society where everyone thought of themselves as part of a common general interest rather than in one where everyone thought of themselves as part of a special interest.
Friedman is more stereotypical than Kotkin and Florida, but the difference between them is one of degree rather than kind. Florida ignores the very real economic tradeoffs a city must make when staking development strategy. No worries, he tells the business class: just be hip and trendy and don’t worry and you’ll succeed. Kotkin believes in a very different strategy, but sells it the same way, grasping at straws to convince people that they should just avoid megacities and density for every possible reason.
Of course, the knockers and the forgotten have their own set of problems, coming from xenophobia and fear of change. They, too, sometimes think things are fine as they are, or even more so as they used to be, and this leads to romanticism, which ironically can then set the stage for boosterism of another sort. The best antidote to some of the social philosophy behind The Wire is Mad Men: in the era David Simon admires, things were still bad, setting the stage for the destruction of today. But at least it can be done right, even if not by Santorum and other reactionaries.
Surreptitious Underfunding
One third of the MBTA’s outstanding debt, about $1.7 billion, comes from transit projects built by the state as part of a court-imposed mitigation for extra Big Dig traffic; interest on this debt is about two-thirds the agency’s total present deficit. Metra was prepared to pay for a project to rebuild rail bridges that would increase clearance below for trucks and cut the right-of-way’s width from three to two tracks. Rhode Island is spending $336 million on extending the Providence Line to Wickford Junction, with most of the money going toward building parking garages at the two new stations; Wickford Junction, in a county whose number of Boston-bound commuters is 170, is getting 1,200 parking spaces.
Supporters of transportation alternatives talk about the inequity between highway and transit funding in the US, but what they’re missing is that the transit funding bucket includes a lot of things that are manifestly not about transit. At their best, they are parking lots and other development schemes adjacent to train stations, which would’ve been cheap by themselves. At their worst, they are straight highway projects, benefiting road users only.
The situation in Boston, while unique in its brazenness, is not unique in concept. In the US, where there are no pollution taxes on fuel, the only way to mitigate air pollution is by regulation and by building alternatives simultaneously. Put another way, combined highway and transit construction is in most cases not really a combined project; it’s a highway project, plus required mitigation. Requiring the transit agency to shoulder the debt and the operating subsidies is exactly requiring transit users to pay for highways. It’s equivalent to charging transit multiple dollars per gallon of gas saved from any mode shift. And it may get even worse: the proposed House transportation bill includes a provision to allow spending national air pollution control funds on regular highway widening, in addition to the current practice of spending them on carpool lanes.
Historically, the diversion of funding from transit to roads took such insidious forms. For an instructive example from Owen Gutfreund’s book, roads advocates fought to get driver’s license fees and even inspection fees for fuel trucks recognized as road user fees, whose proceeds must be diverted toward roads. For another example from the same book, in Denver, the streetcar system was required to cover 25% of the cost of road maintenance on one-way streets and 50% on two-way streets, and as car traffic rose, streetcars both became slower and had to send over more money toward roads.
Another instructive case study is grade separations. It is to my knowledge universal that expressways and high-speed railroads, both of which must be grade-separated, pay for their own grade separations. In all other cases, who pays is determined by which mode is more powerful, and in the US, this is roads. As the national highway system was built in the 1920s, interurban railroads were required to pay for grade-separations, even when the rail came first. The practice continues today: in Kentucky, the railroad has to shoulder the full cost if it’s from 1926 or newer (Statute 177.110), and half the construction cost and the full planning cost if it’s older (177.170). In contrast, in Japan, grade separations are considered primarily a road project, and so the Chuo Line track elevation project was paid 85% by the national and city governments and only 15% by JR East (page 36). The segment in question of the Chuo Line was built in 1889; I believe, but do not know, that new rail construction in Japan is always grade-separated, at the railroad’s expense.
The situation in the US today is a surreptitious underfunding of transit, and at the same time a surreptitious overfunding of roads. It is not subject to democratic debate or even to the usual lobbyist funding formulas, but, like the obscure regulations that impede good passenger rail, hidden in rules nobody thinks to question. To pay for road mitigations and for parking, transit agencies will cut weekend service and reduce frequency. It’s bad enough when done in the open, but it’s done while claiming that transit is too expensive to provide.
Bad Defunding
The furor in the transit blogosphere about the House Republicans’ transportation bill proposal, defunding the Mass Transit Account and diverting the money to roads in order to shore up the Highway Trust Fund, deserves more scrutiny from the point of view of government effectiveness. Although the proposed defunding is clearly political and cultural (to many Tea Party Republicans, trains and buses are for hippies), the way in which it is done is a good reminder about what’s going on in US politics. The principle is that when government does not work, the people in government who propose to get rid of it are part of the same ineffective governance structure.
First, consider some recent projects or proposals for projects to expand transit. In Houston, as noted by rail critic Tory Grattis, of the four proposed light rail lines, the first two to be built are the less cost-effective two, while the more compelling Universities Line is saved for later. In Los Angeles, the Foothills Extension is being built before the Westside Subway. And the first California HSR contract to be tendered is for the northernmost initial construction segment, the segment that should be first on the chopping block if necessary to divert money to the more important Los Angeles-Bakersfield mountain crossing. In order to prevent smart scope changes from leaving the cost-ineffective parts out, the planners take the cost-effective lines hostage in order to make sure that they are built.
The same is true in the opposite direction. It was not so clear up until now because the big-ticket rail cancellations all involved just one major project per governor, but now that the Republicans are bundling all transit together, the pattern looks clearer. There is no accounting for good and bad projects here. Even cost-effective projects such as Second Avenue Subway would lose funds they need for completion. The goal is not to cut government waste; it’s to cut spending on people who the people who proposed the bill find distasteful, and the effect of quality of government services is about what you’d expect of any politicized government program.
It’s for the same reason that I think very little of Chris Christie’s ideas about transportation management, despite my criticism of ARC. Although some of the rumors floated suggest that the depth of the cavern was one of the things that made Christie think the project was ridiculous, he made no effort to try fixing it. Instead, he canceled the project, trumpeted it as a cost saving measure, and proceeded to spend more money on freeways. Aaron Renn, hardly an orthodox leftist (he is a fan of Mitch Daniels), compared him to Chainsaw Al and called his style of governance kindergarten-level.
In analogy with technical and political transit supporters, there are technical and political road supporters. The technicals exist, in various driver magazines that support spending more money on maintenance and less on expansion, and do not mind raising tolls or gas taxes to pay for infrastructure. But the politicians do not care about cost-effectiveness, and have no problems supporting Big Dig-style projects. At the risk of overinterpreting blog comments, let me say that every road supporter I have seen express an opinion on the Big Dig thinks that it was a necessary project and should have been built regardless of the cost (for the record, $15 billion for what to the best of my understanding is about 200,000 cars per day). The thinktanks that support them care more about finding ways to convince people to want to pay more money for expensive freeways rather than about cutting the cost of construction or reducing environmental impacts.
Thus the House transportation bill is bad not only because it’s bad for transit, but also because it’s bad government. It’s not even selective worrying about cost-effectiveness, a charge often thrown by political transit supporters. It makes no attempt to decouple any funding from gas taxes, a decoupling that it necessary for the purpose of making it possible to tax pollution without demands from both APTA and the AASHTO that the revenues raised be plugged back into transportation. It makes no attempt to let go of projects that cost too much while maintaining those whose cost is adequate. It’s purely an exercise in muscle-flexing, a continuation of the US practice of not having a transportation policy that’s separate from the usual political and lobby bickering.
Consensus and Astroturf
Anthony Flint’s article in The Atlantic Cities, which compares Jane Jacobs’ protesting to current Tea Party protests against urban planning, inadvertently unmasks a serious issue in any consensus society. In drawing parallels between the near-riots of the 1960s and those of today, he invites us to look at what giving communities more power has wrought. Although his description of the Tea Party is clearly unsympathetic, he leaves two issues incompletely treated – grassroots activism versus astroturf, and starting versus shutting down discussions – and this gives a feeling of a meander, or at worst a late defense of top-down planning with no civic engagement.
Part of the issue of the attitude toward public debate has already been covered elsewhere. Emily Washington does a good job at demolishing the pretense that the Tea Party is consistently against government intervention, in favor of a view that it supports intervention as long as it’s in favor of what its members consider their kind of people. And far from trying to explain to people why its preference for intervention is better, as Jacobs did in The Death and Life, it prefers to yell: see, for example, how it acts in the East Bay.
But the issue of fake grassroots campaigns is as important. Although liberals should be wary of carelessly dismissing the Tea Party as merely a brand for the Koch brothers’ lobbying, it is a general fact that people who perceive themselves as the normals tend to think they speak for everyone when they do not. The Lower Manhattan Expressway really was unpopular in most of the West Village. How could it be otherwise in a neighborhood where a large majority of households did not even own cars? Jacobs, in other words, really was speaking for the community. The same is not true of people who think themselves the silent majority; going back to the East Bay example, after the local Tea Party leader had her tantrum, people informally voted on their priorities in urban planning, and urban priorities like controlling pollution came out on top whereas big houses with big yards came out at the bottom.
Fortunately, formal democratic governance can also reduce the influence of a pernicious majority. For example, the referendum process could be made binding, and more long-term. It’s unthinkable that a governor elected by a bare majority of voters can unilaterally cancel a long-term infrastructure investment without a referendum. In Germany, when the Stuttgart21 disaster led to a state government led by the anti-Stuttgart21 Greens, the new coalition did not act as Rick Scott did. Not only was the Greens’ approach more responsible – they put forth a counter-plan and hired Swiss railroad experts to help – but also they put the cancellation to a referendum, and when the cancellation lost, they accepted the result. And in Switzerland, the referendum process tends to lead to continuity of policy, rather than to the situation in the US, in which the referendum process means that groups will put their preferred policy on the ballot every two years until it passes, and then lock it in so that it cannot be repealed. Although in principle the California governance system looks like direct democracy, in practice it has as much to do with it as Putin’s managed democracy has to do with actual democracy. But insofar as consensus democracy was attempted in the East Bay, the Tea Party disruptors lost.
Of course, merely dismissing the Tea Party as a noisy minority is not enough. The importance of this episode is that consensus governance is vulnerable to this kind of astroturf, or even an independent community of true believers who think they represent many more people than they actually do. On issues that have a clear expert consensus, you won’t find many defenders of consensus governance. Voting on science education means that some school boards will support creationism (not for consensus reasons, but for religious ones). There is an entire movement dedicated to restoring top-down social control, whose leaders come from a background in science popularization that really does boil down to transmitting the experts’ conclusions to the masses.
And yet, urban planning is not evolutionary biology. The need for consensus comes from the fact that planners have a history of getting things wrong in a disastrous fashion, and often of being upended by laypeople like Jacobs. Authoritarian planning will treat entire classes of people as problems to be solved, and house them in a series of projects modeled after the modern prison system: project towers, group homes, low-rise projects, supervised releases to suburbia. Giving people this power over others and hoping that the people in power will be wise is wishful thinking; one might as well support absolute monarchy.
Thus, there is no way to both have a good governance mechanism and prevent people from staging revolts for wrong reasons. A democracy will sometimes vote the wrong people into power; democratic urban planning will let itself be disrupted by a group of organized radicals. In both cases, the change in power should not spell the end of democracy; the ousted side routinely regroups and wins later in national bipartisan politics, and regularly has some input about government in national multiparty politics. Maybe all cities need is to treat their planning process with the same respect that countries treat their legislative process.
Cost Concerns, Reasonable and Otherwise
Stephen Smith’s recent post excoriating high US transit costs left me with a weird feeling that took me a while to figure out exactly. The feeling is primarily about the attitude, but the most telling quote about it is the following attack on East Side Access:
East Side Access, the most expensive project, is overpriced by about 1,000%. (Compared to Spain, the world leader in low-cost subway construction, the project is on the order of 10,000% too expensive.) And even in San Francisco, the Central Subway project, which will cost $500 million per kilometer, is – and I’m being generous here – about three-quarters waste.
It is completely true that East Side Access cost a hundred times more per kilometer as two recent commuter rail tunnels in Spain, but it doesn’t really capture the size of the construction cost problem. The range of costs worldwide is quite high; the large majority of projects are significantly more expensive than the single cheapest example. One could just as well criticize Paris’s plan to extend the RER E from its Saint-Lazare terminus to La Défense for costing €1.58-2.18 billion for 8 km of tunnel (see PDF-pp. 59 and 79); although the per-kilometer cost is average for the complexity of the project, and the per-rider cost is also low, it’s still much higher than the two cheapest Spanish projects, by a factor of about 5.
When I write about cost control, beyond just collecting information that isn’t otherwise available in one place, I keep two things in mind:
1. Am I comparing the project in question to the average, including some above-average-cost projects, or to one cheap outlier?
2. Is the project reasonably cost-effective at its present cost, independently of the fact that it could be done for cheaper?
For American subway projects, the answer to question 1 is unambiguously yes. Although there has to be a most expensive line, the projects in the US are persistently more expensive than outside the Anglosphere, and by a large factor, close to but not quite a full order of magnitude. I have less data for light rail and above-ground rapid transit projects, but the non-US numbers I do have are a fraction of some US projects, and American projects that seem more affordable are often very minimalistic, merely upgrading existing tracks to urban rail standards instead of doing construction on city streets. That said, the difference is not 10,000%; to get even 1,000% we need to start looking for the more expensive US projects or the cheaper European projects.
But the answer to question 2 is not always no. As construction costs decline, cities and countries start building more marginal lines, so that the construction cost per rider of urban transit, or the profitability of intercity rail, is not very low. Conversely, some very expensive projects are also so well-patronized that good transit advocates should not oppose them even as they push for cost savings in the future.
For example, Madrid’s MetroSur, built for about $1.7 billion in today’s money, or $45 million per km, gets only 140,000–170,000 riders per day, for a total of around $10,000 per rider. This is fine, but not very low, since the very low construction costs are matched with low ridership per kilometer, more comparable to a tramway than to a subway; most Parisian projects are considerably cheaper per rider, even though Paris builds on-street light rail for the same cost Madrid builds tunnels. In contrast, Second Avenue Subway is about $25,000 per projected rider, high by non-US standards but not obscenely so; I know of no cheaper project in the US under construction right now, including some with quite reasonable per-km costs. New York’s high construction costs mean that the only projects that can pass muster are ones that would set records for cost-effectiveness at normal costs and are still okay at elevated local costs.
The advantage of looking at low-cost outliers like Spain or Calgary is not that American projects are so much more expensive. It’s that we can look at what they do right and imitate some of their practices, in the hopes of getting some of the cost reduction. But it’s important to remember that they’re outliers, and the goal should be to have average costs, not a fraction of the average. To a good approximation, a subway in a dense city will cost $250 million per kilometer – and judging by the low density of the area around MetroSur and conversely the cost escalations on Barcelona’s L9, that’s true even in Spain. It’s possible to do better, but not so much better that it’s worth scuttling lines over.
The lines that are cost-ineffective in the US tend to be the kind that would be bad even at normal cost. In Europe, few of these are built. Those lines – BART’s Livermore extension, Los Angeles’ Foothills Extension, and New York’s 7 extension are favorite punching bags of local transit activists, even relatively political ones – are not necessarily the most expensive, but they’re the most cost-ineffective. The lines that would have been successful at normal costs are not even being proposed: high costs are making them unworkable, and they usually lack value as developer-oriented transit to make players push for them regardless.
The value of international comparisons then is not really for single items or for precise estimates. It’s a first-order estimate inherently. It’s useful as a reality check on certain claims: that it’s unsafe to have a single operator and no conductors on a train with a thousand passengers, that urban transit cannot run on a predictable schedule, that deep-level construction is always preferably to shallow construction. But this is useful exactly because the counters to such claims are frequently universal that claims of special circumstances are less credible – for example, nearly all subway systems in the world run with one employee.
The other problem with trying to rely on case studies of cheap outliers is that the reasons some places have higher construction costs than others may not be the same as those that the builders think. For example, the list of factors Calgary cites as reasons for its low construction costs include its standardized equipment, proof-of-payment system with high discounts for season passes, and a minimum of tunnels and viaducts. Those are fairly normal on American light rail lines as well; they distinguish the C-Train more from more expensive (and vendor-limited) Canadian subway systems.
In reality, the differences are subtler, involving contracting practices, and the health of the local political system. It’s of course not easy to think of Spain, Turkey, and Italy as leaders of good government and of Germany and the Netherlands as Continental Europe’s high-cost leaders, but government on the agency level works differently from on the national level. The US scores very poorly on this measure, with a transportation-industrial complex that sees transit revival as a grand national project, one that like all the previous ones is about image and not about prudence.
The importance of this more political and institutional view is that it’s not enough to just say construction costs should be lower. Insofar as reducing costs is a matter of increasing efficiency, it is essentially a form of economic growth; economic growth happens in spurts in individual industries, and rapid cost controls are possible, but not instantaneous ones. There’s a multi-century average of economic growth, of a little less than 2% per capita in developed countries, and thinking that those efficiency measures will average out to much more is unwise.
Moreover, the way rapid efficiency measures are usually implemented is not one that causes efficiency. I think this is what concerned me the most about Stephen’s article: it’s the implication that all US transit needs is an outsider like me giving it an honest look. I think what I do is interesting, but without very deep insider knowledge, and the cooperation of the trained workforce, it’s not going to lead to much. If I were given a detailed cost breakdown of subway operation in New York and Tokyo, I’d probably be able to see a large number of potential savings in New York. Maybe four out of five would work if I knew what I was doing and were careful enough; one out of five would instead lead to a disaster. It wouldn’t be possible to know in advance which one it would be; it would often not be possible to even know after the fact what caused the problem and what could remain reformed. The best a reformist like that could do is do everything quickly and move on before the edifice collapses; even then, eventually scandal would catch up, as it did to Chainsaw Al.
The process of reform from outside tends to fail for precisely this reason. The outside reformer has no use for insiders – he scorns them, and they return the favor. The Atlantic identifies Newt Gingrich with this mentality, but there are better, less national examples. In Israel, it’s identified with waste in the military and in business: leaders make themselves indispensable by constantly reorganizing everything to make themselves look important. Second, in the US, Bloomberg and allied reformists have a similar mentality, of running the city like the businesses they are used to. As a result, Bloomberg is unable to achieve anything that required the cooperation of people who are not his subordinates; this was made painfully obvious by the failure of congestion pricing.
The alternative to this process is much more painful, but more reliable, in both cases because it’s by design slower. It requires multiple levels of government to come together, inject money into new capital construction, and then add service in such a way that workers lost to efficiency improvements can be reassigned one-to-one to new service. For example, if Amtrak builds high-speed rail in the Northeast well, it will need to hire thousands of new trackworkers and other employees, and could potentially make an agreement to take redundant commuter rail employees in exchange for running faster and more frequently on commuter rail-owned tracks. Such agreements are necessarily complex, requiring the consent of multiple agencies and unions, but are the only way to secure insider support and knowledge for reform.
Recall that in Japan’s great shedding of mainline rail workforce immediately before and after JNR privatization, Japan was undergoing an economic boom, and the government made an effort to find the laid off employees private-sector work. Since the US is not in that position, it needs to find another way, and a spurt of growth in off-peak mainline service could partially do it; in combination with some FRA reforms, it could allow much better service for the same operating cost, using ridership gains to reduce state subsidies. Even then, it wouldn’t be enough everywhere, not with an agency as big as New York City Transit, and as in Japan the entire process could take decades of attrition. In construction, it’s technically simpler to reform work rules, and it is possible that new projects could be authorized more or less simultaneously, so that the cost reductions would be directed to more service rather than fewer construction jobs.
But what would not work is to decree that costs must be lower, and cancel all projects that don’t meet those goals. Cancellation threats on marginal projects could work; on the other hand, the worst projects are typically those with the most backing by power brokers, and since they’re justified by reasons other than cost-effectiveness, a more hawkish line on cost effectiveness would not reduce their support. Actual cancellations of unfixably bad projects could also work. But more than a Chainsaw Al style of management is needed here. What I write about comparative construction costs may be the beginning, but is not more than that, certainly not the end.
Pedestrian Observations 