Category: Urbanism
Transit-Oriented Development and Rail Capacity
Hayden Clarkin, inspired by the ongoing YIMBYTown conference in New Haven, asks me about rail capacity on transit-oriented development, in a way that reminds me of Donald Shoup’s critique of trip generation tables from the 2000s, before he became an urbanist superstar. The prompt was,
Is it possible to measure or estimate the train capacity of a transit line? Ie: How do I find the capacity of the New Haven line based on daily train trips, etc? Trying to see how much housing can be built on existing rail lines without the need for adding more trains
To be clear, Hayden was not talking about the capacity of the line but about that of trains. So adding peak service beyond what exists and is programmed (with projects like Penn Station Access) is not part of the prompt. The answer is that,
- There isn’t really a single number (this is a trip generation question).
- Moreover, under the assumption of status quo service on commuter rail, development near stations would not be transit-oriented.
Trip generation refers to the formula connecting the expected car trips generated by new development. It, and its sibling parking generation, is used in transportation planning and zoning throughout the United States, to limit development based on what existing and planned highway capacity can carry. Shoup’s paper explains how the trip and parking generation formulas are fictional, fitting a linear curve between the size of new development and the induced number of car trips and parked cars out of extremely low correlations, sometimes with an R^2 of less than 0.1, in one case with a negative correlation between trip generation and development size.
I encourage urbanists and transportation advocates and analysts to read Shoup’s original paper. It’s this insight that led him to examine parking requirements in zoning codes more carefully, leading to his book The High Cost of Free Parking and then many years of advocacy for looser parking requirements.
I bring all of this up because Hayden is essentially asking a trip generation question but on trains, and the answer there cannot be any more definitive than for cars. It’s not really possible to control what proportion of residents of new housing in a suburb near a New York commuter rail stop will be taking the train. Under current commuter rail service, we should expect the overwhelming majority of new residents who work in Manhattan to take the train, and the overwhelming majority of new residents who work anywhere else to drive (essentially the only exception is short trips on commuter rail, for example people taking the train from suburbs past Stamford to Stamford; those are free from the point of view of train capacity). This is comparable mode choice to that in the trip and parking generation tables, driven by an assumption of no alternative to driving, which is correct in nearly all of the United States. However, figuring out the proportion of new residents who would be commuting to Manhattan and thus taking the train is a hard exercise, for all of the following reasons:
- The great majority of suburbanites do not work in the city. For example, in the Western Connecticut and Greater Bridgeport Planning Regions, more or less coterminous with Fairfield County, 59.5% of residents work within one of these two regions, and only 7.4% work in Manhattan as of 2022 (and far fewer work in the Outer Boroughs – the highest number, in Queens, is 0.7%). This means that every new housing unit in the suburbs, even if it is guaranteed the occupant works in Manhattan, generates demand for more destinations within the suburb, such as retail and schools.
- The decision of a city commuter to move to the suburbs is not driven by high city housing prices. The suburbs of New York are collectively more expensive to live in than the city, and usually the ones with good commuter rail service are more expensive than other suburbs. Rather, the decision is driven by preference for the suburbs. This means that it’s hard to control where the occupant of new suburban housing will work purely through TOD design characteristics such as proximity to the station, streets with sidewalks, or multifamily housing.
- Among public transportation users, what time of day they go to work isn’t controllable. Most likely they’d commute at rush hour, because commuter rail is marginally usable off-peak, but it’s not guaranteed, and just figuring the proportion of new users who’d be working in Manhattan at rush hour is another complication.
All of the above factors also conspire to ensure that, under the status quo commuter rail service assumption, TOD in the suburbs is impossible except perhaps ones adjacent to the city. In a suburb like Westport, everyone is rich enough to afford one car per adult, and adding more housing near the station won’t lower prices by enough to change that. The quality of service for any trip other than a rush hour trip to Manhattan ranges from low to unusable, and so the new residents would be driving everywhere except their Manhattan job, even if they got housing in a multifamily building within walking distance of the train station.
This is a frustrating answer, so perhaps it’s better to ask what could be modified to ensure that TOD in the suburbs of New York became possible. For this, I believe two changes are required:
- Improvements in commuter rail scheduling to appeal to the growing majority of off-peak commuters as well as to non-commute trips. I’ve written about this repeatedly as part of ETA but also the high-speed rail project for the Transit Costs Project.
- Town center development near the train station to colocate local service functions there, including retail, a doctor’s office and similar services, a library, and a school, with the residential TOD located behind these functions.
The point of commercial and local service TOD is to concentrate destinations near the train station. This permits trip chaining by transit, where today it is only viable by car in those suburbs. This also encourages running more connecting bus service to the train station, initially on the strength of low-income retail workers who can’t afford a car, but then as bus-rail connections improve also for bus-rail commuters. The average income of a bus rider would remain well below that of a driver, but better service with timed connections to the train would mean the ridership would comprise a broader section of the working class rather than just the poor. Similarly, people who don’t drive on ideological or personal disability grounds could live in a certain degree of comfort in the residential TOD and walk, and this would improve service quality so that others who can drive but sometimes choose not to could live a similar lifestyle.
But even in this scenario of stronger TOD, it’s not really possible to control train capacity through zoning. We should expect this scenario to lead to much higher ridership without straining capacity, since capacity is determined by the peak and the above outline leads to a community with much higher off-peak rail usage for work and non-work trips, with a much lower share of its ridership occurring at rush hour (New York commuter rail is 67-69%, the SNCF part of the RER and Transilien are about 46%, due to frequency and TOD quality). But we still have no good way of controlling the modal choice, which is driven by personal decisions depending on local conditions of the suburb, and by office growth in the city versus in the suburbs.
Meme Weeding: Embodied Carbon
The greenhouse gases emitted by the production of concrete, called embodied carbon, are occasionally used as a green-NIMBY argument against building new things. A Berlin Green spokesperson coauthored a study opposing U-Bahn construction on the grounds that the concrete used in construction would raise emissions. More recently, I’ve seen American opponents of transit-oriented development in Manhattan, of all places, talk about the high embodied carbon of new high-rise buildings. Katja Diehl calls for a moratorium on new buildings on anti-concrete grounds, and a petition for the EU to shift regulations to be against new buildings and in favor of reuse on embodied carbon grounds got written up favorably by Kate Wagner in the Nation. Against all of this, I’ve found some numbers on the actual emissions involved in concrete production for new buildings, and they are so low as to be insignificant, 1.5 orders of magnitude less than transportation emissions. A decarbonization strategy should largely ignore embodied carbon concerns and embrace pro-growth sentiments: big buildings, big subway systems, big cities.
What is embodied carbon?
Embodied (sometimes called embedded) carbon is the carbon content emitted by the production of materials. The production of concrete emits greenhouses gases, mainly through two mechanisms: the chemical process used to produce cement emits CO2 by itself, and the energy used for production adds to the emissions of the electric grid.
What are the embodied carbon emissions of new buildings?
The embodied carbon content of concrete depends heavily on the local electricity grid as well as on the required strength of the material, with stronger requirements leading to higher emissions. The Climate Group commissioned a report on this in the British context, finding a wide range, but the average is around 250 kg of CO2-equivalent per m^3 of concrete, the 75th percentile is about 300, and the upper bound is 450. This is a cradle-to-gate figure, taking into account the existing conditions of the carbon intensivity of where concrete is produced and of the logistics system for getting it to the construction site. This is already with some reductions from a previous baseline (EC100; the UK average is around EC60), and further reductions are possible, through decarbonizing the logistics and production; the goal of the report is not to bury the concept of embodied carbon as I do but to propose ways to reduce construction industry emissions.
The question is now how to convert cubic meters of concrete into square meters of built-up area. I have not seen European figures for this, but I did find a 2012 report by the Building and Construction Authority. In Singapore, the sustainability index used is the concrete usage index (CUI), measured in meters (cubic meters per square meter). The example projects given in the study, all around 15 years old, have a CUI of 0.4-0.5 m, and it was pointed out to me on social media that in Toronto the average is 0.55 m.
250 kg/m^3 times 0.4 m equals 0.1 t-CO2 per m^2 of built-up area. A 100 m^2 apartment thus has an embodied carbon content of around 10 t-CO2. This is relative to a baseline in which there is already some concern for reducing construction emissions, both the CUI and the carbon content of concrete per m^3, but this is largely without techniques like mass timber or infra-lightweight concrete (ILC). In Singapore the techniques highlighted in the BCA report are fully compatible with the city’s high-rise character, and the example building with gold but not platinum certification has 25 stories.
Should we worry about construction emissions?
No.
An aggressively YIMBY construction schedule, say with 10 dwellings built annually per 1,000 people, say averaging 100 m^2, emits around 0.1 t/capita annually: 0.1 t/m^2 * 100 m^2/unit * 0.01 unit/capita. All figures have ranges (and if anything, 100 is high for the places that build this much urban infill housing), but factor-of-1.5 ranges don’t erase an order of magnitude analysis. The emissions produced by construction, even if it were raised to some of the highest per capita rates found in the developed world – in fact higher rates than any national average I know of – would be about two orders of magnitude lower than present-day first-world emissions. They’d be 1.5 orders of magnitude lower than transportation emissions; in Germany, transport is 22% of national emissions and rising, as all other sources are in decline whereas transport is flat.
There’s a lot of confusion about this because some studies talk about buildings in general providing a high share of emissions. The Bloomberg-era PlaNYC spoke of buildings as the top source of emissions in New York, and likewise the Nation cites WeForum saying buildings are 37% of global emissions, citing a UN report that includes buildings’ operating emissions (its topline figure is 10 Gt in operating emissions, which is 27% of global emissions in 2022). But the construction emissions are insignificantly low. This means that aggressive replacement of older buildings by newer, more energy-efficient ones is an unmixed blessing, exactly the opposite of the conclusion of the green movement.
Instead of worrying about a source of emissions measured per capita in the tens of kilograms per year rather than in the tons, environmental advocates need to prioritize the most important source of greenhouse gases. The largest in developed countries is transportation, with electricity production usually coming second, always falling over the years while transport remains flat. In cold countries, heating is a significant source of emissions as well, to be reduced through building large, energy-efficient apartment buildings and through heat pump installation.
Regulations on new construction’s embodied carbon are likely a net negative for the environment. The most significant social policy concerning housing as far as environmental impact is concerned is to encourage people to live in urban apartment buildings near train stations. Any regulation that makes this harder – for example, making demolitions of small buildings to make room for big ones harder, or demanding that new buildings meet embodied carbon standards – makes this goal harder. This can be understandable occasionally if the goal of the regulation is not environmental, for example labor regulations for construction workers. It is not understandable if the goal is environmental, as the concern over embodied carbon is. People are entitled to their opinion that small is beautiful as a matter of aesthetic judgment, but they are not entitled to alternative facts that small is environmentally friendly.
YIMBY First, Building Reform Second
Last night I asked the American building reform advocates on Bluesky about different layouts and why developers don’t build them. I got different answers from different advocates about why the layout I’d just mocked of family-size apartments with two staircases isn’t being built in the US, some about regulations, but Mike Eliason said what I was most afraid of hearing: it’s doable but it’s more profitable to build small apartments. My conclusion from this is that while American and Canadian building regulations remain a problem and need to be realigned with European and Asian norms, they are a secondary issue, the primary one remaining how much housing is permitted to be built in the first place. Developers will keep building the most profitable apartment forms until they run out of the most profitable tenants.
The mockup
The following mockup has a scale of 1 meter = 20 pixels, so the building is overall 18 meters by 30. This is a point access block rather than a double-loaded corridor (see definitions here), but it also has two staircases, emanating from the central access block. Each floor has four apartments, each with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, the ellipses in the image denoting bathtubs. The windows are top and bottom, but not left and right; these are single-aspect apartments, not corner apartments.
On Bluesky, I said the floorplate efficiency is 94%; this comes from assuming the step width and landing length are 1.1 meters each, a metrization of the International Building Code’s 44″, but to get to 94% assumes the staircase walls are included in the 1.1 meter width, so either it’s actually 90 cm width or, counting wall thickness, the efficiency is only 92.5%. The IBC allows 90 cm steps in buildings with an occupancy limit of up to 50, which this building would satisfy in practice at six stories (a three-bedroom apartment marketed to a middle-class clientele averages closer to two than four occupants due to empty nests, divorces, guest rooms, and home offices) but not as a legal limit. Regardless, 92.5% is average by the standards of European point access blocks, whose efficiency is reduced because the apartments are smaller, and very good by those of American double-loaded corridors.
Now, to be clear, this is still illegal in many American jurisdictions, as Alfred Twu pointed out in @-replies. The building mockup above has two means of egress, but the typical American code also requires minimum separation between the two staircases’ access points. This is an entirely useless addition – the main fire safety benefits of two staircases are that a single fire can’t interpose between residents and the stairs if the two staircases are at opposite ends of the building, but that’s not legally required (quarter-point staircases are routine), and that the fire department can vent smoke through one staircase while keeping the other safe, which does not require separation. Nonetheless, this is not the primary reason this isn’t getting built even where it is legal, for example in jurisdictions that permit scissor stairs or have a smaller minimum distance between the two staircases, like Canada.
I was hoping the answer I’d get would be about elevator costs. The elevator in the mockup is European, 1.6*1.75 meters in exterior dimensions; American codes require bigger elevators, which is by itself a second-order issue, but then installation costs rise to the point that developers prefer long buildings on corridors for the lower ratio of elevators to apartments. But nobody mentioned that as a reason.
The rent issue
Mike Eliason responded to my question about why buildings like the above mockup aren’t being built by talking about market conditions. The above building, with 540 m^2 of built-up area per floor, can host four three-bedroom apartments, each around 127 m^2, or it can host 16 studios, each around 29 m^2. In Seattle, the studio can rent for $1,500/month; the three-bedroom will struggle to earn the proportionate $6,000/month.
It’s worth unpacking what causes these market conditions. The three-bedroom is marketed to a family with children. The children do not earn money, and, until they reach kindergarten age, cost thousands of dollars a month each in daycare fees; if they don’t go to daycare then it means the family only has one income, which means it definitely can’t afford to compete for building space with four singles who’d take four studios, or it has parents in the immediate vicinity, which is rare in a large, internally mobile country. The family has options to outbid the four singles, but they’re limited and require the family to be rather wealthy – two incomes are obligatory, at high enough levels to be able to take the hit from taxes and daycare; the family would also need to be wedded to living in the city, since the suburbs’ housing is designed entirely for families, whereas the singles take a serious hit to living standards from suburbanizing (they’d have to get housemates). In effect, the broad middle and lower middle classes could afford the studios as singles, but only the uppermost reaches of the middle class can pay $6,000/month for the three-bedroom.
In economic statistics, imputation of living standards for different household sizes takes this degressivity of income – $6,000/month for a family of four is a struggle, $1,500/month for a single is affordable on the average US wage – and uses a hedonic adjustment for household sizes. example by taking the square root of household size as the number of true consumption units. To INSEE, a family of four has 2.1 equivalent consumption units; elsewhere, it’s a square root, so it has 2 consumption units. A rental system that maintains a 4:1 ratio has no way for the family to compete.
The upshot is that the developers need to run out of the tenants who can most easily afford rent before they build for the rest. Normally it’s treated as a matter of distribution of units among different social classes, but here it’s a matter of the physical size of the unit. This is why YIMBY first is so important: eventually developers will run out of singles and then have to build for families.
Building for Wealth, and Point Access Blocks
The biggest housing activism push in North America right now has moved on from YIMBYism to housing reforms to allow single-stair mid-rise buildings, called point access blocks. My off-hand reference to this last post ended up being the main issue debated in comments; this compounds a post by Matt Yglesias from November that I’ve been meaning to respond to, since he starts working off of some examples of double-stair buildings on corridors in an even older post of mine about the Kowloon Walled City in My Backward (KWCIMBY) meme. I strongly respect the main point access block activists pushing the issue, like Stephen Smith, so I’d like to revisit the KWCIMBY post and explain what I’m doing there, while also pushing back against some of the more iffy claims portraying point access blocks as not just more efficient but also inherently better for families. In short, both forms of housing are generally easier to build in a more affluent society with higher expectations, and some of the comparisons come from that.
What are the point access block and double-loaded corridor?
An apartment building can arrange its apartments on each floor in one of these ways. The KWCIMBY post assumes double-loaded corridors, as in the diagram below:
In each of these buildings, there are two staircases, as required by American and Canadian law; the first building has scissor stairs, forbidden in most of the US but allowed in New York, whereas the second separates the two staircases into opposite sides of the corridor. Apartments are on both sides of the corridor, with one aspect of windows except the corner units, hence the term double-loaded.
This building form is practically unheard of in European apartment buildings. Only one staircase is required per building, so architects instead slice the buildings into thinner pieces, with one staircase and an elevator and apartments radiating from the common area, called a point access block:
Each of the four access points has an elevator and a staircase; the first example has four apartments per floor, with one aspect per unit, whereas the second has two, with two aspects, both north and south. The result is more elevators and staircases per net floor area, but less corridor area; the floorplate efficiency is notably higher, 92.5% in the first case and 94% in the second case, compared with 89.5% in the first case of the double-loaded corridor and 86.67% in the second. This is one of the reasons Stephen is so focused on elevator costs.
All four buildings are 20 meters by 80, except the last, which is 14 by 80. 20 meter wide residential buildings are more or less unheard of in Central Europe – I see a few that are 18, in what look like higher-income neighborhoods to me. In contrast, 14 is standard in Central Europe, with some buildings looking like the above diagram, and others, almost always older ones, having wings that are still around 14 meters wide but end up with an area-to-external-width ratio of 8-9 meters, rather like a 16-18 meter wide building without wings. In practice, on a 100*100 block, we’d never have two buildings looking like an equal sign but rather an enclosed rectangle, with or without wings.
What about the single-loaded corridor?
A third housing typology puts all apartments on a corridor, but only in one direction. The corridor is then in the open air, and apartments have windows on both sides, to the corridor and in the opposite direction. I lived in such a place for a year in Berlin. This is not unheard of, but still rare. The width of such buildings is limited by the need for apartments to stretch all the way, limiting them to at most 14 meters and usually less.
The resulting floorplate efficiency is low, which turns this into a question of how much cheaper it is to build an external corridor than an internal one. When I asked on Bluesky, I was given ranges for the answer, from an external corridor being 25-50% cheaper to its being if anything more expensive. Temporary worker housing tends to use this form because it is built to lower standards, in which the external corridor is just some barred steel without protection from the elements above, which should reduce the cost of the corridor. This form still exists in permanent housing, with concrete corridors that offer protection from rain, but it’s less common than the other two.
Point access blocks and families
The biggest selling points of the point access block are that it has better floor plate efficiency and that it permits units with multiple aspects to allow for cross-ventilation and for strategic placement of rooms (living room facing the street, bedrooms facing the quieter internal courtyard of the euroblock). This is bundled with other issues, at the same time:
- In Europe, buildings are almost never built out of wood, and if they are, it’s usually mass timber. This means that the cost of construction is proportional to floor area, largely linear in the number of floors for a given footprint. North American construction uses light wood on a concrete podium, sharply limiting height to six to seven stories, hence the preference for thicker buildings to increase floor area. In turn, light wood is less safe in fires – but those codes don’t exempt concrete buildings from the two staircase requirement.
- The double-loaded corridor has units so deep that bedrooms come with their own bathrooms and walk-in closets. Absent these, the maximum usable depth of a bedroom is about 6 meters. Bathrooms cost more to build per square meter than bedrooms and living rooms, which drives up construction costs.
- The double-loaded corridor makes it easier to build units with fewer bedrooms – it’s just a matter of how much corridor width the apartment takes, so costs are linear in the floor area of units. The point access block instead prefers larger units, in square meters, since larger apartments have higher floorplate efficiency, and it’s routine to build a cheaper three-bedroom, one-bathroom unit.
The last two points have been used by some urbanists, especially more conservative ones, to argue that the point access block is inherently family-friendlier. The argument made by Mike Eliason (who’s not at all conservative) is that Seattle, where he’s based, builds multifamily housing rapidly but all of it is studios and one- and two-bedroom units, on the expectation that families with children should eventually move to the suburbs.
More conservative people even relate that with low urban American birthrates, which always comes off as strange to me given how low European birthrates are. The one developed country with above-replacement birthrates, Israel, doesn’t use any of these forms, but instead has independent buildings, some mid-rise and some tall – and there’s consensus among European and American urbanists that tall buildings are bad for families. At any rate, the Israeli sociologists I read on the subject, like Sergio Della Pergola, attribute Israeli birthrate exceptionalism to other issues than built form, just as Singapore’s Paulin Tay Straughan attributes the very low birthrates in rich Asia to other issues.
The difficulty of relating the issue of housing forms with that of apartment sizes is that housing a family requires a lot of apartment space to go to people who are not working, because they are children. If housing is expensive due to high construction costs, restrictions on building, or both, then housing will be built for the rich, which means not just high-income earners, but also households with a high income per person, which are almost always ones without children. A developer building a double-loaded corridor making a choice between a one-bedroom, say 6*9 meters, and a three-bedroom, say 12*9 meters, will choose the former if two independent households can outbid a family. This is getting to the point that in urban America, it’s normal for unmarried adults to live with housemates, because there are a lot more three- than one-bedroom apartments in cities that don’t build much housing, like New York or Boston.
The family could outbid the single person, but not in all circumstances. A two-income family can do well, and the working adults are likely to be older than the single person and thus higher earners. A landlord of a fixed apartment choosing who to rent to would also prefer the family to the group of three to four housemates – the family is more stable, divorce being far less common than housemates leaving with little prior notice. But not all families have two earners (and the social conservatives who are most anxious about family housing tend toward one income, not two), or two middle-class earners, and so far American developers haven’t yet run out of demand for single people and childless couples to build for.
Point access blocks and wealth
In a way, the point access block has benefits that aren’t yet unlocked in Europe. Higher wealth is spent on, among other things, bigger dwellings. The double-loaded corridor in a way bakes in assumptions of private bathrooms, essentially spending income on higher-cost elements. But it’s possible to do the same with a point access block. The point access block ends up more efficient when apartments are bigger, because it’s limited by number of units per floor, and the bigger the units, the smaller the proportion of the unrentable common areas.
Speaking of common areas, higher wealth doesn’t necessarily demand of them. If the expectation is that people should have a washing machine and a drier at home rather than in a common area, then the demand for such an area shrinks. Trash rooms take up more space, but then higher wealth, as opposed to higher inequality, means not just that the demand for trash rooms is higher but also that the supply of workers to staff them is scarcer, and at the end of the day people can just haul trash bags to a collection point in the courtyard or a side room on the ground floor. Trash chutes are an innovation that doesn’t take up common space (for one, they can be installed in-unit, especially if there are only two units per floor anyway). High-end condo amenities like private gyms are usually provided at the scale of an entire building rather than a floor, and a complex of interconnected buildings is likely to have just one either way.
In the examples I posted above, in a way I baked in a wealth assumption, in that the option with two units per access point assumes those units average 132 m^2, which is very high for Europe; the norm for high-end buildings here is three units, with slightly lower combined floor area than 264 m^2, and the same or a hair higher circulation area to allow for a third door, with the smaller apartment usually only having one aspect of exposure. A 132 m^2 unit, in effect 10*14 with slight recessing at one end, would generously have four bedrooms, likely configured as three actual bedrooms and a private office or guest room. The intended users would be families of means, but then again new housing tends to be built for this class, and over time, growth and abundance make the standards that today mark middle-class wealth more widespread across classes. The working class once didn’t have indoor plumbing.
Quick Note: the Experience of Train Stations
I was at a ReThink event about Penn Station the other day; it didn’t talk about through-running but about Penn Station redesign, as Richard Cameron presented options for rebuilding the station in-place, of course without expansion a block to the south. The presentation was interesting, and I have no strong opinions about the architecture, certainly no objection. But something said in there, I forget if by Richard or one of the other presenters, irked me: the presenter was complaining about the Penn Station rebuild of the 1960s saying that the station makes people feel irritated, whereas European train stations are grand and make people feel like they stepped through a gateway into the country. And that part lost me, because my experience of train stations in Europe is rather utilitarian, and so is the experience of rail riders here who I speak with. In fact, in a key way – namely, connections to the subway – I do not see a difference between those stations and Penn Station as it exists today, as an entirely subterranean complex without natural light.
Case in point: three weeks ago, I was visiting Rome for 2.5 days. I wrote about the train trip, which was rather slow as long sections have not been upgraded to high-speed rail standards, but not about the stations. Now that I saw the ReThink presentation, it’s worthwhile talking about the stations – Berlin, Munich, Rome. (I also connected at Verona and Bolzano but these are small stations in small cities.)
Roma Termini, in particular, is supposed to be a gateway station, exactly the kind in a European capital that Americans are supposed to love. Except, I didn’t get to experience any of the façade, because my ultimate destination was not within walking distance, so I connected to the metro, entirely indoors and underground. Lines A and B meet at Termini, and I spent far longer between when I got off the Frecciarossa and when I got on the subway navigating the passageways to this station than getting to appreciate any grandeur. Most of the other people in my car didn’t even do that, but rather hopped off one station before, at the more utilitarian Tiburtina, saving themselves the slow terminal approach and connecting more directly to Line B.
Berlin and Munich, which I’m more familiar with, are rather utilitarian. These are large complexes, in which it’s well-known that passengers can take some time getting from one set of platforms to another. They are also extensively daylit, and Berlin in particular has good sight lines for a five-level cruciform station, but their purpose isn’t to make people feel at ease; in fact most users scramble for a connection to the U- and S-Bahn, where form entirely follows function.
This experience also generalizes to the Parisian stations I’ve used. Gare de l’Est looked nice, in the one minute I spent there between getting off the Métro and getting on my train to Saarbrücken; I appreciated how fast this was, especially since I had booked a nonrefundable day trip and showed up at the station four minutes before my train departed, but I wouldn’t say any of this experience put me at ease. At none of these stations did the architectural details matter very much, and at none of them did the main entrance matter at all, because like virtually everyone else in Paris, I got there by Métro. Berlin Hauptbahnhof, at least, is modern enough that it understands this and doesn’t try to build the entrances as a cathedral to the power and wealth of the institution that built it.
Rather, what I think makes Americans feel differently about Europe is that when they’re here, they’re on vacation. The train stations make them feel relaxed, because they’re on vacation and relaxing anyway. The architecture puts them at ease, because they’re on vacation and have time to stop and admire the details. The walkable cities are pleasant, because they’re on vacation and their goal is to find things they don’t get at home to buy or eat or photograph; this way, I see American urbanists extoll the walkability of small towns with farmers’ markets even when those towns have rather American modal splits and the local residents do all of their shopping at hypermarkets. Europeans can be pretty solipsistic, but I at least don’t see people here talk about some aspect of Florida or Las Vegas is inherently psychologically relaxing.
This matters, because there are real advantages to European rail and urban planning. These aren’t just operational; for example, Stephen Smith and Mike Eliason have more or less singlehandedly imported single-stair point access blocks into American policy discussion. In rail planning, I wish the agencies using Penn Station came to Berlin and saw how a 21st-century major city station looks. But none of this can come from trying to psychologically project one’s own vacation experience. Europe is a place of production and not just consumption, and it’s critical to see what this production looks like from the inside.
Public Transportation and Crime are not About Each Other
Noah Smith is trying to make public transportation and YIMBYism about crime, and I don’t think he succeeds. In short, he says that transit cities and higher housing growth levels would be more publicly acceptable if American central cities were more sensitive to conservative concerns about crime. In effect, he is making public transportation investment not a matter of frequency or network design or reliability or good maintenance or transit priority on streets or low construction costs or any of the other technocratic issues that distinguish the Seouls and Zurichs and Stockholms of the world from the Los Angeleses (which, to give credit, he acknowledges are important), but about crime, conceived as a culture war issue about more police and more police visibility. And in this, he ends up ignoring both the literature on this and what makes good government tick in parts of the developed world that are not the United States.
Now, Noah is a pundit, who’s more pro-transit than the average in his milieu. He’s not the reason American cities are poorly governed or the separate suite of reasons American public transit is so bad and isn’t improving. He writes as a way of trying to engage conservative NIMBYs, I just don’t think he succeeds – and the way he fails is for many of the same reasons American public transit managers fails. Chief of those is American triumphalism, of the kind that will retweet a viral tweet that pretends Europe has no biotech or advanced physics and that uses the expression “europoor” unironically in a flamewar. People who fail to recognize how Europe and East Asia work are not going to be able to learn what works here and how to adapt it; I’m less familiar with Asian discourse, but Noah’s description of Europe is unrecognizable. Even the basic thesis about urbanism and crime isn’t correct in a global perspective. This leads to serious problems in diagnosing how European cities got to have the housing and transportation policies that they do; the solutions are, by the black-and-white polarization of American politics, best thought of as a blue-and-orange spectrum, starting with lack of local empowerment and inattention to neighborhood-scale stereotypes
Cities and crime
The American association between high crime rates and deurbanization is not at all normal. Globally, it’s the exact opposite; Gaviria-Goldwyn-Galarza-Angel find that high risk of violence leads to higher urban density, because of the effect of safety in numbers. Simon Gaviria roots this in the history of his own country, Colombia. In Latin America, crime rates are infamously high. Noah’s post compares the American homicide rate with a selection of European and Asian countries, topping at 6.8/100,000 in Russia (US: 5.8), but in Colombia it is 25.7, and in the 1990s it ranged between 60 and 85. People can’t suburbanize the way they have in the United States, even with a GDP per capita in line with that of midcentury America, because, in a sufficiently high-crime environment, driving to work means taking the risk of being carjacked at an intersection.
Now, public transportation in Latin America is not especially good, not by European or East Asian standards. Most cities haven’t built much recently; Mexico City deserves especial demerits, but Brazil has been flagging as well, and Argentina has no money for anything. Chile and the Dominican Republic are both expanding metros, Santiago doing so rather rapidly, and both have the same order of magnitude of homicide as the US (Chile: 4.5, Dominican Republic: 11.5), rather than that of Colombia or Brazil or Mexico. But this still does not make high crime a relevant factor in deurbanization.
Now, in the history of the United States, people do associate postwar suburbanization with high crime rates. While the crime rate rose rapidly in the 1960s, and remained high until the 1990s, there was little transportation risk. The stereotype of poverty-induced social disorder as seen from a car in an American city, at least in the 1990s and 2000s, was a panhandler coming to the car at a traffic jam with a squeegee, washing it, and expecting payment; jacking was (and still is) more or less unheard of. The stereotype was, safety on the road and in the suburbs, danger in the city. But that is a feature of relatively moderate crime rates. Indeed, the destruction of American public transit in the middle of the 20th century and the suburbanization of the middle class and aspirants both came before the increase in crime rates; two thirds of the fall in New York subway ridership from its twin peaks in 1930 and 1946 to its nadir in 1982 had occurred by 1960, on the eve of the explosion in the city’s homicide rate.
And to be clear, this is a matter of stereotypes, more than reality. New York is one of the safest large cities in the United States (4.7/100,000 in 2023). San Francisco is even safer: in 2024 through December 10th, the pro-rated homicide rate was 4.3. Texan urbanists outside Austin (4.7) have to contend with higher homicide rates: 15.7 in Dallas, 12.8 in Houston, 8.4 in San Antonio, all averaged over the first six months of 2024 and pro-rated. But Dallas and Houston are perceived as far safer than New York. This can’t exactly be racism – these two cities are nearly as black as New York and considerably more Hispanic. But whatever is causing the stereotype needs to be separated from the reality; the Texan rail advocates I talk to on social media don’t treat crime as a major obstacle for finding more money for public transit, and instead cite car culture, low perceived value of rail, and high costs, and if that’s not a problem there, it shouldn’t be in New York or San Francisco.
Stereotypes in Paris
Noah talks about how Europe succeeded in curbing crime rates – and to again give credit, recognizes that New York is safe – and says that this is driving greater acceptance of public transportation and housing growth here.
Except, this isn’t quite right. I don’t have comparable surveys asking people if they find Paris safe, but I do have access to French discourse at hand, and it does not at all say “Paris is safe, people who think crime is a problem there are idiots,” except maybe when an American is in the room and then the point is to pull rank on the American.
In Paris, in French, there are lists of sensitive city quarters, and there are arrondissements that are more fashionable than others. The 18th, 19th, and 20th are usually negatively stereotyped, if less so than the adjacent department, Seine-Saint-Denis, which is extremely negatively stereotyped. The 13th is negatively stereotyped, but this is likely to be missed by Americans – the population there is disproportionately Asian, and negative stereotypes of Asians by white people are worse in France than in the United States. Belleville, straddling the 10th/11th/19th/20th boundary, was listed as a sensitive quarter when I lived just outside its limits and went in frequently to buy tahini – and at the time, I saw either British or American media, I forget which, list these quarters as no-go zones.
Now, these are residential areas. The center of Paris is well to the west of these. But Paris has a low job density gradient within city limits between commercial areas (like the 1st or the 8th) and residential ones, and the Ministry of the Interior, for example, is located in the 20th, close to Nation. People commute to these neighborhoods, usually by the Métro or RER. Nation, at the 11th/12th/20th boundary, is a mixed zone, with features that connote middle-class consumption (like the farmer’s market) and others that connote poverty (like a Resto du Cœur; see citywide map here). The sort of people in France who see a black or Arab person on the street and immediately panic find the area dangerous, including at one point the minister of the interior himself, who professed to being shocked at seeing ethnic food at the supermarket.
And none of this matters to public transportation investment, or to housing. In a country where people treat the entire department of Seine-Saint-Denis as a no-go zone except for football games at the Stade de France, where the RER B has such a negative reputation for passing through this area that two different airport connectors are planned to parallel it, Grand Paris Express is still planned to make stops in Seine-Saint-Denis, and connect it better with the rest of the region, including the wealthy suburbs around La Défense. This was a bipartisan decision – there were differences between the Socialists’ and the Gaullists’ ideas of what exactly to build, but there was core agreement on a circumferential line through the inner suburbs, and it is considered a social policy to connect working-class suburbia with jobs.
Stereotypes and local empowerment
The stereotypes of crime in parts of the Paris region do not affect urban rail investment plans. Where they do matter is at the level that doesn’t matter: the local one. Anne Hidalgo is a committed leftist (and NIMBY), but centrist and center-right politicians in the region have long wanted an urban renewal project around Gare du Nord, which they consider a poor area, not because it’s especially poor, but because it’s where the commuter trains from Seine-Saint-Denis go and thus young black and Arab men congregate there, and the station’s facilities could genuinely use some modernization. Occasionally the negative stereotypes of the station even get to British media. But whether Paris engages in a wholesale renewal project around the station to make it more upscale is not going to matter in the grand scheme of things to either its public transport ridership or its overall level of housing production.
The difference between Paris and New York or San Francisco is not that it has lower crime, although its homicide rate is certainly lower. It’s that it doesn’t derail its social policy discourse by turning technocratic issues into culture wars. Paris has unstaffed sanisettes; in a handful of areas there’s drug use, seen as used syringes. San Francisco, like Paris, has a handful of areas with drugs in its sanisettes, but the moral panic got to the point that the city decided to staff all sanisettes 24/7, with two attendants at night. Paris’s 435 sanisettes cost 11 million € a year to operate, 25,300€ per unit; San Francisco’s annual operating costs are on the order of $1 million per unit because of staffing.
This isn’t because of crime, because San Francisco is not sufficiently more dangerous than Paris to explain this, or even the perceptions thereof. The difference is that European governance is, across the board, better than American governance at disempowering local actors, who are driven by stereotypes. Anne Hidalgo doesn’t want to build housing in significant quantities, but does want to build some public housing in rich neighborhoods to own the libs (French definition of libs), and she’s the mayor and the residents of the 16th are not; Ile-de-France writ large wants to do more transit-oriented development, and so it builds some, even with some local grumbling about how redeveloping a disused factory brings gentrification.
And the way forward is to build institutions that bypass and disempower those local actors. People almost never stay within a neighborhood, but the small minority who do are overly empowered in the system of councilmanic prerogative that governs American cities. This does not involve treating their perception as if it is based in reality; this does involve passing preemption laws at the level where democratic politics is possible, such as the state, and doing much more than the weak bills California allows.
Ideology and reform
I think Noah is uncomfortable with American YIMBY praxis, because the rhetoric in a place like New York or California aims at the median Democrat in the state, to activate liberal political ideology as a substitute for the failures of non-ideological localism. This ideology is not especially radical, but does violate maxims that liberal pundits who specifically pitch to a conservative audience have learned to follow, like the taboo on calling people racist. The mainstream of political YIMBY advocacy has, I think, chosen better, understanding that at the end of the day, an upzoning bill in a safely blue state passes without Republican votes, and cutting deals with state Democratic actors, which can be localist (like exempting certain NIMBY suburbs with low transit-oriented development value) or more left-wing (like bundling with some left-wing elements, like Oregon’s introduction of weak rent controls).
And in a way, this is also how YIMBYism and public transportation investment work here, politically. As of late, social democratic parties have leaned on YIMBYism as a reason for non-pensioners to vote for them, calling for more housing permits; Olaf Scholz even called for redeveloping Tempelhofer Feld. Because it lives within a party, rather than among people who try to acknowledge culture war paranoias, the policy is clear, and sometimes can even be enacted – Germany would have built more housing if interest rates hadn’t simultaneously risen for unrelated reasons (namely, the combination of inflation and the Ukraine war). In France, it was a bipartisan effort in the sense that there wasn’t much daylight between the center-left and the center-right on the need for more housing in Ile-de-France, but the enactment did not involve the sort of horse trading that Noah envisions. This is not too different from infrastructure investments with bipartisan support elsewhere, such as the Madrid Metro, or Crossrail.
I think it’s telling that the greatest successes in the United States have not been in the most liberal places, but in swing states with liberal governance but competitive elections, like Minnesota. The barrier is not that the cities have crime or are negatively stereotyped (suburbanites around Minneapolis have plenty of those against the city), but that safe states have developed such a democratic deficit that they can’t govern. I’m fairly certain Noah is aware of this (Matt Yglesias certainly is). It just implies that this really is about seizing control of state government through ideological persuasion – in other words, reminding the Democrats of safely blue states that they are Democrats – and not about telling people way to the right of the median in these states that they are valid. We don’t do that here and American YIMBYs don’t need to do it on their side of the Pond.
Taxes are not About Urbanism
I caused a ruckus on social media when I pointed out that a Venn diagram commonly posted on Strong Towns and by American urbanists in general about taxes, services, and urbanism, is completely false:
The truth is that the overwhelming majority of taxes and services are about things that don’t meaningfully depend on local density. The overwhelming majority of those services are not even locally provided. In the United States, in 2022, taxes split as 67.5% federal, 19.1% state, 13.4% local. In Germany, in theory the division is similar, but in practice 95% of taxes are levied federally, but a portion are distributed to the states by formula.
Most of what all of this goes to is welfare programs. La Protection Sociale en France et en Europe puts the proportion of GDP going to social protection at 32% in France, 29% in Germany, and 27% Union-wide, all as of 2022. This includes programs whose recipients loudly insist that they are not welfare, including old age pensions and health care, comprising 82% of the above total. Government spending ranges around 50% of GDP here; France ranks first in the OECD, at 58%, so that its share of government spending going to social protection, slightly more than half, is if anything a little less than the European average. In the United States, these programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income security) comprise two-thirds of non-interest federal spending, and one third of state and local spending. A couple additional percent – more in the United States than in Europe with one notable exception – is the military plus veteran-specific welfare in the US. None of this has anything to do with how much urban sprawl there is, or how municipal finances are structured.
Local taxes in the United States mostly go to schools. Education expenses are a combination of teacher and administrator salaries and facilities spending; these are not about density. Entire comparative tomes have been written about education funding, none touching density, because it doesn’t matter; for example, the OECD’s Education at a Glance database goes into per-student spending, teacher salaries, administrator salaries, student-teacher ratios, the public-private school division, the vocational-academic track division, graduation rates, the earnings advantages of graduates at various levels, and correlations with civic participation. The most notable features of the United States are high educational segregation, and low teacher salaries compared with the average for university-educated workers. This is not an urbanist issue; American urbanist activists have been spending generations avoiding talking about school segregation, to the point that the activists who do talk about education from any angle are more or less disjoint from the ones who talk about recognizably urbanist issue. The Venn diagram above is a good example of this: instead of talking about curricular rigor or teachers or segregation or how schools are funded, urbanists prefer to pretend reducing urban sprawl is the solution (not mentioned: any of the problems internal to, say, New York City public schools).
Once we get to items that do depend on what urbanists care about, it’s at the bottom of the list of budgetary priorities. Transportation costs are a small share of GDP; in the US, an extreme case in road costs, they’re 2% of federal spending and 5.6% of subnational spending, which averages out to somewhat more than 3% of GDP. German federal investment in roads is around 0.25% of GDP, and federal investment in rail is similar but planned to be double that in 2026-27. I haven’t seen more recent numbers, but in 2018, public transport finances across Germany amounted to 14.248 billion € in costs and 7.363 billion € in fare revenue; the difference, about 7 billion €, was 0.2% of 2018 GDP, covering about 16% of work trips Germany-wide.
So, yes, reduced sprawl would reduce the required spending on roads, but it’s not going to be especially visible in tax bills, which are dominated by other things. The biggest drivers of the cost of private transportation are the costs of buying, maintaining, and fueling the car. Those drive American spending on transportation to 17% of household spending, of which 8.3% are not cars, and buying the car and fuel for it are two thirds of the rest (that is, 10.3% of household spending). This is high per capita and per GDP; it is also not what urbanists who try to calculate operating ratios for roads talk about – the problem with private transportation is not the public cost of the roads, but the private cost to households.
Then there’s policing. Strong Towns has a particular infamy on the subject – Chuck Marohn essentially canceled himself among anyone concerned with civil rights when, during the initial Black Lives Matter protests in 2014, his take was about the lack of placemaking in suburbs like Ferguson, requiring people to protest in the middle of roads. On social media, multiple people insisted to me that higher density permits higher-quality (?) or lower-cost policing; at least as far as police brutality goes, the pattern is that it happens 1-2 orders of magnitude more in the US than in the rest of the developed world, and that in the US, it happens to black people about three times more than to white people, and it happens less in the Northeast than elsewhere, even in blacker-than-average places like Buffalo or Philadelphia. Urban departments are probably somewhat more professional than rural sheriffs’ departments, but this probably isn’t really a matter of suburban sprawl development but jurisdiction size, and is also not at all what the Venn diagram is trying to say. “Big central cities that have dense cores and can annex suburbs end up having very high police spending but get more professional departments out of this” is nowhere in the Venn diagram. It is not implied in it. It is directly opposed to what Strong Towns says about municipal finances, which is about long-term budgeting for municipalities with given borders and not about the desirability of delocalizing decisionmaking.
It’s always tempting to try to turn one’s issue into an omnicause. High taxes and poor services? Sprawl. Police violence? Sprawl. Schools? Sprawl. High housing costs? Sprawl. Government corruption? Sprawl. It creates an illusion of seriousness, of solving systemic social problems, while really only droning about one peripheral issue. It creates an illusion of outside-the-box solutions, while really ignoring real tradeoffs, in this case between taxes and government services. And it creates an illusion of solidarity and alliance between different advocacy groups, while really giving activists for one cause permission structure to bring up their pet cause no matter how unimportant it is in the moment.
Quick Note on Capital City Income Premiums
There’s a report by Sam Bowman, Samuel Hughes, and Ben Southwood, called Foundations, about flagging British growth, blaming among other things high construction costs for infrastructure and low housing production. The reaction on Bluesky seems uniformly negative, for reasons that I don’t think are fair (much of it boils to distaste for YIMBYism). I don’t want to address the construction cost parts of it for now, since it’s always more complicated and we do want to write a full case on London for the Transit Costs Project soon, but I do want to say something about the point about YIMBYism: dominant capitals and other rich cities (such as Munich or New York) have notable wage premiums over the rest of the country, but this seems to be the case in NIMBY environments more than in YIMBY ones. In fact, in South Korea and Japan, the premium seems rather low: the dominant capital attracts more domestic migration and becomes larger, but is not much richer than the rest of the country.
The data
In South Korea and Japan, what I have is Wikipedia’s lists of GDP per capita by province or prefecture. The capital city’s entire metro area is used throughout, comprising Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonggi in Korea, and Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, and Saitama in Japan. In South Korea, the capital region includes 52.5% of GDP and 50.3% of population, for a GDP per capita premium of 4.4% over the country writ large, and (since half the country is metro Seoul) 9.2% over the rest of the country. In Japan, on OECD numbers, the capital region, labeled as Southern Kanto, has a 14.5% premium over the entire country, rising to around 19% over the rest of the country.
In contrast, in France, Ile-de-France’s premium from the same OECD data is 63% over France, rising to about 90% over provincial France. In the UK, London’s premium is 71% over the entire country and 92% over the entire country excluding itself; if we throw in South East England into the mix, the combined region has a premium of 38% over the entire country, and 62% over the entire country excluding itself.
Now, GDP is not the best measure for this. It’s sensitive to commute volumes and the locations of corporate headquarters, for one. That said, British, French, Korean and Japanese firms all seem to prefer locating firms in their capitals: Tokyo and Seoul are in the top five in Fortune 500 headquarters (together with New York, Shanghai, and Beijing), and London and Paris are tied for sixth, with one company short of #5. Moreover, the metro area definitions are fairly loose – there’s still some long-range commuting from Ibaraki to Tokyo or from Oise to Paris, but the latter is too small a volume to materially change the conclusion regarding the GDP per capita premium. Per capita income would be better, but I can only find it for Europe and the United States (look for per capita net earnings for the comparable statistic to Eurostat’s primary balance), not East Asia; with per capita income, the Ile-de-France premium shrinks to 45%, while that of Upper Bavaria over Germany is 39%, not much lower, certainly nothing like the East Asian cases.
Inequality
Among the five countries discussed above – Japan, Korea, the UK, Germany, France – the level of place-independent inequality does not follow the same picture at all. The LIS has numbers for disposable income, and Japan and Korea both turn out slightly more unequal than the other three. Of course, the statistics in the above section are not about disposable income, so it’s better to look at market income inequality; there, Korea is indeed far more equal than the others, having faced so much capital destruction in the wars that it lacks the entrenched capital income of the others – but Japan has almost the same market income inequality as the three European examples (which, in turn, are nearly even with the US – the difference with the US is almost entirely redistribution).
So it does not follow, at least not at first pass, that YIMBYism reduces overall inequality. It can be argued that it does and Japan and South Korea have other mechanisms that increase market income inequality, such as weaker sectoral collective bargaining than in France and Germany; then again, the Japanese salaryman system keeps managers’ wages lower than in the US and UK and so should if anything produce lower market income inequality (which it does, but only by about three Gini points). But fundamentally, this should be viewed as an inequality-neutral policy.
Discussion
What aggressive construction of housing in and around the capital does appear to do is permit poor people to move to or stay in the capital. European (and American) NIMBYism creates spatial stratification: the middle class in the capital, the working class far away unless it is necessary for it to serve the middle class locally. Japanese and Korean YIMBYism eliminate this stratification: the working class keeps moving to (poor parts of) the capital region.
What it does, at macro level, is increase efficiency. It’s not obvious to see this, since neither Japan nor Korea is a particularly high-productivity economy; then again, the salaryman system, reminiscent of the US before the 1980s, has long been recognized as a drag on innovation, so YIMBYism in effect countermands to some extent the problems produced by a dead-end corporate culture. It also reduces interregional inequality, but this needs to be seen less as more opportunity for Northern England as a region and more as the working class of Northern England as people moving to become the working class of London and getting some higher wages while also producing higher value for the middle class so that inequality doesn’t change.
Militarized and Other New Capital Cities
The news of the ongoing construction of Nusantara, Indonesia’s new capital in Borneo to replace Jakarta, got me thinking about other moves by various countries to create new capitals from scratch, to avoid having to deal with the urbanity of the existing capital. On this issue, Nusantara joins Brasilia, Islamabad, (at the subnational level) Chandigarh, and, most ominously, Naypyidaw and Egypt’s New Administrative Capital (NAC). The last two, unlike Nusantara, are built for explicitly military purposes, with the military considering the people to be its main adversary rather than any external enemy. Such capitals always waste money that could be spent on improving literally anything else – health, education, transportation, water, electricity, business climate, anti-poverty grants. In the less militarized cases, like Brasilia, these are just waste; in the more militarized cases, these showcase that the state is run by parasites.
Non-militarized cases
The move to Nusantara is being justified on the grounds that Jakarta is sinking. In truth, it’s better to view this as a continuation of the Transmigrasi program that the state has engaged in for decades. The zeitgeist was one of concerns about overpopulation leading to either forced sterilization of the poor or a program of settlement by the core population in peripheral regions; in Indonesia, this took the form of encouraging Javans to settle elsewhere in the country, where in practice they formed an overclass and sidelined the preexisting population. Nusantara, in a mostly undeveloped part of Borneo, needs to be viewed within this program, rather than as a tragic response to climate change.
Brasilia, similarly, was built on developmentalist grounds: the Brazilian elite wanted to develop the interior of the country, viewing the rainforest and savanna as low-value land to be mined and farmed. As this process predates the military dictatorship (1964-85; Brasilia was founded 1960), this is not really a matter of militarization. Rather, it’s better viewed as developmental failure – the resources invested in the new city could have gone to more productive uses, and the value of that land for farming and mining turned out not to be much.
The environmental impacts of the program of developing the interior were wholly negative. In Brazil, half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions are land use changes and another quarter are from the agriculture sector, leading Brazil to emit 10.7 t/capita in greenhouse gases. In Germany, the figure is 8.1 t/capita, with a large industrial sector and an infamously still substantial coal sector, and on these lower emissions, Germany produces close to four times Brazil’s GDP per capita. The environmental impact of Nusantara is likely to be the same in direction as Brazil’s program, and to the extent it’s likely to be smaller in magnitude, it’s because it’s a smaller endeavor than Brazil’s entire program of developing the interior, in which Brasilia was just one component.
Militarized cases
The worst are not Brasilia, or likely Nusantara, but rather Naypyidaw and the NAC. I’ve been asked to provide some resources on social media, going over what’s involved in both projects.
Naypyidaw
The military junta that ran Myanmar between 1962 and 2011 (with significant tightening in 1988) and has run it since 2021, and exercised significant power between 2011 and 2011, built the new capital, officially since 2005, unofficially since a few years earlier, at a remote location 320 kilometers from Yangon and 240 from Mandalay. After the 1988 protests and the crackdown establishing the military government that 1990s-2000s human rights advocates knew and hated, the regime made changes to Yangon to suppress future protests, evicting 500,000 people from city center in the process. Where normally such efforts mostly target poor people in order to create the illusion of a poverty-free city center and facilitate urban renewal, in Yangon the evictions targeted the middle class, which was sympathetic to the protest movement and had communities that had sheltered protesters. But even the new Yangon was not good enough for the generals, and so they shifted to Naypyidaw.
Part of the reason was that Yangon was too multiethnic, in a part of the country that was majority-Mon until the 20th century, while Naypyidaw could be more comfortably Bamar. But the main reason was security needs. The adversary in this case is not any foreign government – a city built in 2005 by a government that might worry about American-led regime change would look at what was going on in Iraq and opt to maintain its capital in a large, dense central city to facilitate insurgency and make it easy to hide among the civilian population. Naypyidaw instead does the exact opposite – it’s easy for a superior military force to take. Rather, its threat model is a popular uprising, and thus the modernist planning with separation of uses exists to prevent the broad public from being able to stage an insurgency. There is extensive regime propaganda in the city, such as national museums telling uncritical histories, but no major religious sites, since those might shelter protesters, as happened in 1988.
The urbanism of Naypyidaw is, essentially, a giant military camp. It is designed with strict separation of uses and large roads between different complexes for movement between them; people are not expected to walk between places. The Guardian calls it a post-apocalyptic suburbia, but I don’t think that’s quite right. In an auto-oriented American city, there’s nowhere to walk, but everyone owns a car and the development forms make it convenient to drive to one’s work and regular non-work destinations. Dubai, criticized vociferously among urbanists for its tackiness and auto-oriented character, is a place where one can drive or be driven to shopping malls and towers within a close distance. Naypyidaw doesn’t have any of this and doesn’t seem to even try; it’s a collection of sites, designed for no need but that of control by the military of a population that does not want to be controlled by it. It’s a monument not to modernist urbanism, though it tries to affect that, but rather to destruction of value by an unwanted government.
New Administrative Capital
The situation in Egypt, to be clear, is a lot less brutal than in Burma. At the same time, Egypt is several times richer, which creates more value that can be extracted and given over to cronies. This can be seen in the construction of the NAC, to replace Cairo.
The immediate history of the NAC is that in 2011, Egypt famously had the Arab Spring revolution overthrowing Hosni Mubarak; in the subsequent election, the only preexisting organized political force, the Muslim Brotherhood, won the election, leading Mohamed Morsi to take office as president starting in 2012. The election was free and the state of civil liberties improved, but the Muslim Brotherhood was making moves to consolidate power, leading to fears among human rights and democracy protesters of new authoritarianism, which led to a protest movement in 2013 called Tamarod, demanding new elections; later in the same year, the military reacted to the protests by launching a coup, removing Morsi from power and restoring the military elements of the prior regime, including a pardon of Mubarak, who was on trial for corruption. Eventually, the chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, won a rigged presidential election in 2014, and has been president ever since. Much of the focus of the protest movements was street protests in Cairo, where Tahrir Square became a global metonym for democracy protests (for example, in Israel, where people basically never draw any positive inspiration from Arab political trends). This created a need among Sisi and his inner circle for a new capital in the desert, built to forestall any future Tahrir.
The capital could not even be named New Cairo, because there’s already a New Cairo, an eastern suburb of Cairo built expressly in order to decentralize the capital; Cairo is a huge, dense city. For a while, it was mocked as New New Cairo, for its location even farther east of New Cairo; by now, it has the formal name New Administrative Capital, with construction having begun in 2016.
The NAC is designed around digital surveillance of the population, and showcasing that Egypt can develop the desert, and maybe decongesting Cairo. It has pretenses of being the next Dubai, but where Dubai invites global starchitects to buy prestige, the NAC is instead giving contracts to domestic elites (as was also the case for Naypyidaw); the military directly owns 51% of the agency developing the NAC and the state ministry of housing only 49%, and the contracts are designed to enrich people who are politically connected to the government.
The violence levels involved are, again, much lower than in Burma. But precisely because Egypt’s economy is solidly middle-income, it’s frustrating to see vast sums wasted on a military prestige project. Cairo’s congestion and overcrowding have a well-known solution, in the form of building a rapid transit network to facilitate non-car commutes, and connect not just the existing built-up area to the urban core but also to-be-built areas adjacent to it. It’s a metro area of 22 million people, about the same size as New York, but only has a three-line, 100 km metro network. These 100 km should be closer to 1,000.
To be clear, there is some development of the Cairo Metro. Line 3 is being extended as we speak, with a new section having opened this month. Overall, the third phase of the line, 17 km long, cost 40.7 billion Egyptian pounds per a statement in 2012, which in contemporary dollars is $2.6 billion in exchange rate terms and $9 billion in 2021 PPP terms. On Google Earth, it looks like 9 km of the line are underground and 8 km are elevated or at-grade; this more than $500 million/km cost is not even fully-underground. This is a line where the main contractor is Orascom – this isn’t a case of outsourcing the state to Japan, China, or both, and therefore building at high costs, as is common in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. Rather, this is entirely domestic waste. Most likely, the same contractors that are profiteering off of public money through the construction of the NAC are also profiteering off of public money for what little infrastructure the military government deigns to build in the capital that people actually live in.
The Future of Congestion Pricing in New York
New York just passed congestion pricing, to begin operation on June 30th. The magazine Vital City published an issue dedicated to this policy two days ago; among the articles about it is one by me, about public transportation investments. People should read the entire article; here I’d like to both give more context and discuss some of the other articles in the issue. Much of this comes from what I said to editor Josh Greenman when discussing the pitch for the piece, and how I interpret the other pieces in the same context. The most basic point, for me, is that what matters is if the overall quality of public transit in and around New York is seen to improve in the next 5-10 years. In particular, if congestion pricing is paired with one specific thing (such as a new subway line) and it improves but the rest of the system is seen to decline, then it will not help, and instead people will be cynical about government actions like this and come to oppose further programs and even call for repealing the congestion tax.
The other articles in the issue
There are 10 articles in this issue. One is my own. Another is by Josh, explaining the background to congestion pricing and setting up the other nine articles. The other eight were written by John Surico, Sam Schwartz, Becca Baird-Remba, Austin Celestin, Howard Yaruss, Nicole Gelinas, Vishaan Chakrabarti, and Henry Grabar, and I recommend that people read all of them, for different perspectives.
The general themes the nine of us have covered, not all equally, include,
- How to use congestion pricing to improve transportation alternatives (me on transit investment, Yaruss on transit fare cuts, Nicole and Chakrabarti on active transportation, Henry on removing parking to improve pedestrian safety).
- The unpopularity of congestion pricing and what it portends (Surico about polling, Becca about business group opposition, Schwartz on political risk, Yaruss again on why the fare cut is wise); of note, none of the authors are coming out against congestion pricing, just warning that it will need to deliver tangible benefits to remain popular, and Surico is making the point that in London and Stockholm, congestion pricing was unpopular until it took effect, after which it was popular enough that new center-right leadership did not repeal it.
- Environmental justice issues (Becca and Celestin): my article points out that traffic levels fell within the London congestion zone but not outside it, and Becca and Celestin both point out that the projections in New York are for traffic levels outside the zone not to improve and possibly to worsen, in particular in asthma-stricken Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Celestin going more deeply into this point and correctly lamenting that not enough transit improvements are intended to go into these areas. The only things I can add to this are that for environmental justice, two good investment targets include a 125th Street subway tunnel extending Second Avenue Subway and battery-electric buses at depots to reduce pollution.
- Problems with toll evasion (Schwartz and Yaruss): there’s a growing trend of intentional defacement of license plates by the cars’ own drivers, to make them unreadable by traffic camera and avoid paying tolls, which could complicate revenue collection under congestion pricing.
The need for broad success
When discussing my article with Josh, before I wrote it, we talked about the idea of connecting congestion pricing to specific improvements. My lane would be specific transit improvements, like new lines, elevator access at existing stations, and so on, and similarly, Nicole, Henry, Chakrabarti, and Yaruss proposed their own points. But at the same time, it’s not possible to just make one thing work and say “this was funded by congestion pricing.” The entire system has to both be better and look better, the latter since visible revenue collection by the state like congestion pricing or new taxes are always on the chopping block for populist politicians if the state is too unpopular.
The example I gave Josh when we talked was the TGV. The TGV is a clear success as transportation; it is also, unlike congestion pricing, politically safe, in the sense that nobody seriously proposes eliminating it or slowing it down, and the only controversy is about the construction of new, financially marginal lines augmenting the core lilnes. However, the success of the TGV has not prevented populists and people who generally mistrust the state from claiming that things are actually bad; in France, they are often animated by New Left nostalgia for when they could ride slow, cheap trains everywhere, and since they were young then, the long trip times and wait times didn’t matter to them. Such nostalgics complain that regional trains, connecting city pairs where the train has not been competitive with cars since mass motorization and only survived so long as people were too poor to afford cars, are getting worse. Even though ridership in France is up, this specific use case (which by the 1980s was already moribund) is down, leading to mistrust. Unfortunately, while the TGV is politically safe in France, this corner case is used by German rail advocates to argue against the construction of a connected high-speed rail network here, as those corner case trains are better in Germany (while still not carrying much traffic).
The most important conclusion of the story of the TGV is that France needs to keep its high-speed system but adopt German operations, just as Germany needs to adopt French high-speed rail. But in the case of New York, the important lesson to extract is that if the MTA does one thing that I or Nicole or Henry or Chakrabarti or Yaruss called for while neglecting the broad system, people will not be happy. If the MTA builds subway lines with the projected $1 billion a year in revenue, politicians will say “this subway line has been built with congestion pricing revenue,” and then riders will see declines in reliability, frequency, speed, and cleanliness elsewhere and learn to be cynical of the state and oppose further support for the state’s transit operations.
The MTA could split the difference among what we propose. As I mentioned above, I find Celestin’s points about environmental justice compelling, and want to see improvements including new subways in at-risk areas, bus depot electrification to reduce pollution, and commuter rail improvements making it usable by city residents and not just suburbanites (Celestin mentions frequency; to that I’ll add fare integration). Nicole, Henry, and Chakrabarti are proposing street space reallocation, which doesn’t cost much money, but does cost political capital and requires the public to be broadly trusting of the state’s promises on transportation. The problem with doing an all-of-the-above program is that at the end of the day, projected congestion pricing revenue is $1 billion a year and the MTA capital program is $11 billion a year; the new revenue is secondary, and my usual bête noire, construction costs, is primary.
Pedestrian Observations 