Quick Note: Road Boondoggles

With all the focus on poorly done transit investment on this blog, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the primary source of US transportation waste is still roads. Consider for example the following projects proposed in Southern California, not all funded:

– $1 billion fully funded for adding one carpool lane in one direction for 10 miles to the 405 through Sepulveda Pass; since the 405 will have to be closed for two days, this is locally dubbed Carmageddon. This is about $60 million per unidirectional lane-km, which is to my knowledge a record for above-ground highways.

– $3 billion proposed for 4.5 miles of twin tunnels to complete a gap in the 710, of which $780 million is funded by Measure R, which generally funded transit projects. The cost, $400 million per km, is not high by global tunnel standards, but compared with the opportunity cost of building transit in the area, it’s enormous.

– $4.1 billion for widening the 5 from 8 lanes to 12-14 for 27 miles, not yet funded. It’s about $18 million per unidirectional lane-km, a figure that’s cropped up elsewhere in the US and should be compared with about $15-80 million per double track-km for light rail, which has about eight or ten times the capacity per unidirectional track or lane.

Those projects are cheaper than the Big Dig or the Bay Bridge Eastern Span replacement, but also provide much less – two are routine widenings, and one is a minor tunnel. The point is that even small upgrades to road capacity cost as much as a major transit project.

The US road network has been a money sink going back to the first federal-aid highway act, in 1917. The reference here is 20th Century Sprawl, by Owen Gutfreund, who describes how motorist lobbies complained about license fees, fuel taxes, and other fees since the 1910s, and created road lockboxes for the revenue generated. Even though gas taxes were treated differently from cigarette and alcohol taxes, which do not go toward funding tobacco and distilleries, they were still not enough to pay for roads. In fact the only paid for about half the cost of highways, and there was a huge subsidy from gas tax-ineligible urban roads to the national and state roads.

The situation today is hardly different. Although proportionally there’s much less cross-subsidy than in the 1930s, due to the growth of suburbs connected by Interstates or other gas tax-eligible numbered roads, roads’ financial performance is still low. Under the fiction that local streets are paid by the tooth fairy, US roads are $75 billion a year in the hole: as of 2008, all gas tax and toll receipts are $122 billion, including the portion diverted to non-highway purposes, whereas total receipts to be spent on gas tax-eligible highways are $197 billion, including $4.3 billion spent on collection expenses. That’s 62% cost recovery.

It gets worse when one does a total lifecycle cost analysis and does not deed all local gas tax money to state highways: in Texas, the best-performing highways have 50% cost recovery, and most have much less. In Maryland, one transit advocate computed a 20% cost recovery for state highways, based on an analysis that treats most of the gas tax as just a sales tax on gasoline; but even if one considers the gas tax to be a user fee for roads, the extra money only raises cost recovery to 32%. Even tollways frequently lose money when interest on capital is included, and in one case even when interest is not included.

In other words, the entirety of the US road program is one giant money hole, of proportions that far exceed even the worst transit projects. I talk less about it because the best industry practice is to toll the roads and build far less of them rather than to control costs; there’s a good way to build a subway, but not to build 14-lane freeways.

Sunnyside Yards Redevelopment

Sunnyside Yards, lying along the LIRR Main Line immediately adjacent to the site of my proposed Sunnyside Junction, span about half a square mile (1.3 km^2) of mostly vacant land, with some big box retail with ample parking at its eastern margin. The short distance to Manhattan has already made Western Queens increasingly desirable (538’s Nate Silver called Sunnyside the third best neighborhood to live in in New York); the new rail junction would make this vacant land into prime real estate, making it feasible to sell air rights above the yards in a similar manner to how much of East Midtown was developed with air rights over the Grand Central tracks.

I would like to discuss how this should be done. This can be thought of as not just a particular Sunnyside question, but also my general ideas for how to do good transit-oriented development, and even more general ideas for how to develop new sites for dense urbanity.

First, the development would be mixed-use. This is because there’s both commercial and residential demand near Manhattan. More speculatively, this could cause the Long Island City secondary CBD to expand eastward, from Hunters Point and Queens Plaza toward the proposed station. In any case, the station should be expected to have high-intensity retail and office buildings immediately adjacent.

On the other hand, the development should be integrated into the existing neighborhoods on both sides of the yards, in terms of both street layout and development intensity. This is not the place to test out new ideas of urbanism; the streets should look as similar as possible to those of Sunnyside and Long Island City. Here is one way to map out streets: note the block size is similar to that of the surrounding areas. The same should be true of street width.

The best way to combine the two goals – retaining existing neighborhood context and allowing high-intensity commercial development near the station – is for the city to have progressively higher-intensity zoning proceeding from the margins to the station itself. Away from the immediate station area, medium-rise buildings such as those of Upper Manhattan (excluding projects) should suffice, and the city should not try to ram high-rise buildings against neighborhood opposition. This would also be friendly to small developers, turning this into the anti-Atlantic Yards. Needless to say, there should be no parking minimums, since the area would be dense and well-served by mass transit.

The overall density of such development could be compared to the mid-rise neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan, such as Morningside Heights and Washington Heights. Morningside Heights has 40,000 people per km^2, and so does Washington Heights when one makes sure to exclude its ample parkland. Morningside Heights has a lot of open space and many jobs, but it’s also higher-rise than Washington Heights (excluding the projects, again). Either could be taken as a basis of comparison, by which standards the 1.3 km^2 over the yards should support about 50,000 people.

Sunnyside would effectively get a second core, around the station, in addition to the existing core along Queens Boulevard. Although the development could spill over, raise rents, and produce gentrification, by itself it would not change the existing neighborhood much, which is fine as Sunnyside is pleasant as it is. Even the Queens Boulevard semi-highway works remarkably well there: the 7 el does not produce too much noise, and instead breaks the boulevard in half, making it look narrower and producing a good street wall for each of the boulevard’s halves.

Bear in mind that out of everything I have proposed in this blog’s history, I would peg this as the least likely to happen: the development I’m advocating spurns big monolithic development. Instead, the city would just map out streets, enact mild zoning restrictions to prevent the community from rejecting the plan for fear of Manhattanization, and perhaps attract a few anchor tenants and companies to build immediately next to the station. In contrast, the present process of redevelopment in New York is laden with collusion, with big developers getting land for megaprojects for less than it’s worth. The city would give a developer not only the yard land but also neighborhood blocks around it, which would be turned into a modernist urban renewal hell instead of a higher-intensity version of the same neighborhood.

My sliver of hope is that the extra transit service coming from the new junction station, and the fact that at the margins of the land the new development would look hardly different from the existing blocks, would reduce neighborhood opposition. Often the dominance of big developers in cities comes from neighborhood opposition to change, creating an arduous process of obtaining variances and schmoozing with city officials that small business cannot afford. I would peg the chances of neighborhood approval at low to moderate, the chances of such a plan happening in case of neighborhood approval at low, and the chances of such a plan happening in the absence of neighborhood approval at zero. What say you, Sunnyside-area bloggers?

Sunnyside Junction Proposal

The in-progress East Side Access (ESA) project linking the LIRR to Grand Central is scheduled to open in 2016, and Metro-North is already studying options to use space vacated by the LIRR to run its own trains to Penn Station along the Northeast Corridor. Thus the basic service pattern will look as in this map. Observe that alongside Sunnyside Yards, there’s a stretch of track between the split between the Northeast Corridor and the LIRR Main Line, and the split between the access tracks to Penn Station and the ESA tunnels.

This should be turned into a new junction station, Sunnyside Junction. At this junction, passengers could transfer cross-platform between trains to Grand Central and trains to Penn Station, just as they do at Jamaica between trains to Penn Station and trains to Brooklyn today. If Metro-North diverts half of its 20 peak New Haven Line trains per hour to Penn Station, and the LIRR diverts two thirds of its 36 peak tph from Penn Station to ESA, then the service to each Manhattan terminal will be about equal.

Since both Manhattan destinations are of high importance, no train should skip Sunnyside Junction, not even peak-of-peak LIRR express trains that skip Jamaica. (Trains should not skip Jamaica, either, but that’s another matter.) Thus off-peak frequency could be assured to be fairly high, comparable to that to Jamaica (about a train every 10 minutes), and peak frequency would be so high that the transfer penalty would be negligible.

An advantage of this setup is that even at the peak, one-seat rides to each destination would become unnecessary. Therefore the interlockings and switching moves could be simpler, and new grade separations should not be necessary. In the off-peak, the transfers should be timed, even across agencies; this should be the first step of good regional rail service. Note that I advocated something similar as part of a comprehensive regional rail plan for New York, but Sunnyside Junction could be built independently of it. Indeed the interlining that minimizes switching moves and conflicts is not the same as the through-running in my original plan, which is based on matching ridership at the New Jersey end to ridership at the Long Island or Connecticut end.

Because a stretch of straight track for this station already exists, all that is necessary is platforms. Because all trains should stop at this station, and the capacity limit lies elsewhere in the system (namely, in the ESA tunnels), it would suffice to have two island platforms and four tracks serving them, and two additional bypass tracks to allow Amtrak to skip the station even at peak hour. If the station became very busy then two additional stopping tracks could be required, and construction should leave space for them.

To ensure the station is well-patronized by transferring passengers, like Jamaica and unlike Secaucus, it should not feature fare barriers or other obstacles between the platforms. Transferring should involve walking a few meters from one track to another, on the same platform. This is perfectly compatible with the current regime of requiring conductors to check every ticket on the train, because Penn Station and Grand Central are both in the CBD and thus the fare to them should be the same. The rationale for the faregates at Secaucus is that fares to Hoboken and Penn Station are different, and conductors would not have time to check that everyone on a train from Secaucus to Penn has a valid ticket to Manhattan; this is irrelevant to Sunnyside.

In the future, the LIRR and Metro-North should consider lowering in-city fare and raising frequency, which could work with more modern operating rules (i.e. proof-of-payment instead of conductors checking all tickets). Seamless fare integration with the subway would open the door to direct Queens-Bronx service; Metro-North is already considering Bronx stops for its Penn Station service. It would also give Queens another access point to Manhattan, slightly decongesting the near-capacity Queens Boulevard subway; the reason I say slightly is that the worst problems are far east of Sunnyside. And frequent service to the rest of Queens and to Manhattan would provide another public transit option to the area.

Unfortunately, the LIRR seems to not make any plans for such a station. It had plans for a station west of the split, serving only Penn Station: see page 13 here. I do not know if such plans will ever materialize in light of ESA’s cost overruns; I cannot find a more recent official reference to them. A cross-platform connection seems to never have been on any official agenda. Fortunately, even now it should be possible to add one, at relatively low cost since this station would be entirely above ground, and with minimal disruption to service since the site is a wide railyard with 6-8 active through tracks.

Is Technical Activism Necessary?

Since my post on technicals and politicals is getting some wider traction, with a discussion on Auckland Transport Blog, I should raise the question of whether technicals are even necessary. Recall that technicals are the transit activists who tend to mistrust transit authorities, especially when they claim a certain project or project component is required when it is unnecessary abroad or just very expensive. It’s a sort of activism that’s created by agency incompetence. I can imagine being technical about New York; I can’t imagine the same about Zurich.

Not knowing enough about the level of government competence in New Zealand, I can’t know how relevant what I’m going to say is to Auckland. Reading Auckland Transport Blog suggests that Auckland’s expansion projects are well-run, and the primary obstacle is political opposition by the National Party. In Auckland based on the impression I get from the blog, or in most major European cities (for example, Paris), the major divisions among transit advocates are either about pure politics (social services versus profitability) or value questions concerning how express lines should run or whether there should be more investment into buses or rail. Once the investment plan at each given level of funding is optimized, the question becomes how much funding to provide.

The political/technical division thus seems to be primarily North American and maybe Australian/New Zealander, certainly not European. In Europe, because the average quality of local projects is much higher, it is much easier to tell the bad projects apart.

Take Stuttgart 21, an expensive boondoggle that only looks good on a map. The need for massive takings and the high and escalating cost of the project led to massive protests, catapulting the Green Party to a state election victory for the first time in German history. But unlike unpopular rail projects in the US, the response was not to cancel all investment (the Green-SPD coalition wants to give more priority to rail investment and put it on equal footing with roads) but instead look for better solutions, hiring Swiss rail experts and coming up with an alternative plan. In other words, there was no difference between politicals and technicals.

In the US, such a response would be unthinkable. There’s no way for a mass movement to support transit investment in general but also oppose specific projects that are bad and promote more cost-effective alternatives. The Tea Party is heavily against all transit and urbanism, regardless of merit, and should not count. The opposition to Stuttgart 21 gathered in weekly protests by the tens of thousands; the opposition to ARC gathered in small rooms with about ten people in attendance.

Premium Cost, Substandard Quality Locomotives

I’m a little late to the game here, but let me just say that Amtrak’s just-funded contract for new electric locomotives is supremely expensive: $560 million for 70 locos, or $8 million each, $466 million for 70 locos, or $6.7 million each (see comment by aw with this link). The locomotives are an FRA-compliant version of Siemens’ EuroSprinter product, which has recently been sold in Europe for €3.7–4 million per unit, as has Bombardier’s competing TRAXX locomotive (in fact, the TRAXX even sold for €3.2 million). Amtrak is paying a premium of about 60-80% 35-50% for these locomotives, depending on exchange rates.

It gets worse. The new locos will enter service in 2013, just two years before the national mandate for positive train control goes in effect, allowing trains to be lighter and avoid the most onerous FRA regulations (in fact, the Northeast Corridor, where most of the locos are to run, already has a PTC system). The special modifications and design are what caused an increase in both weight, from 86-87 metric tons for the standard EuroSprinter to 97 for the Amtrak Cities Sprinter, and cost.

To put things in perspective, Sweden recently bought 180 km/h EMUs for €1.6 million per car. And the 700 Series Shinkansen cost $2.5 million per car. In other words, Amtrak could have gotten 3 EMUs for the price for one locomotive. (Amtrak’s new single-deck coaches cost $2.3 million per car, the same as EMUs abroad.)

The US Department of Transportation is announcing that “Siemens Industry USA is adding 250 new manufacturing jobs in order to design and build 70 new energy-efficient locomotives for Amtrak.” The cost premium works out to about $200-250 million $100-150 million, or $800,000-1,000,000 $400,000-600,000 per job added; the total cost is $2.2 million $1.9 million per US manufacturing job. Needless to say, most of this money is not going to American manufacturing workers, but to consultants and Siemens’s train designers.

Boosters’ Romanticism

One would expect that boosters of unbridled growth, such as Thomas Friedman, Richard Florida, Ed Glaeser, and countless proponents of urban growth would constantly look to the future and deprecate the past. They certainly deprecate attempts to recreate the past. But do they? Despite unabashed pro-Americanism, they crow about the fast growth of China. Glaeser looks back to an era of great infrastructure spending on water works in turn-of-the-century America. Infrastructurist and urbanophile bloggers look back to Daniel Burnham and early-20th century public works (though the Infrastructurist and Urbanophile themselves are very self-conscious and are more thoughtful in their boosterism).

Instead of writing about history as a series of epics, let us examine it with the same critical eye we examine the present. This means looking at historical paths not taken, much as we should examine alternatives for projects today; this also means looking at costs and benefits. In most cases, the inspirational projects of the past tend to not look very good under the microscope.

For a concrete example, consider the Interstate system. Examples of writings on infrastructure that take its greatness for granted are numerous, even on Streetsblog as far as job creation is concerned. But in reality, it was an epic disaster for most involved. The original 1954 estimate for the cost, enshrined in the 1956 act creating the network, was $25 billion; by 1958 it had already climbed to $40 billion, and the final cost was $114 billion. The construction required demolishing thousands of dwellings in each city the highways went through. Even burying the highways does not help: the scar of Boston’s Central Artery is still there despite the Big Dig, because amidst cost overruns they dropped the option of building above the tunnel.

The utter failure of the USA’s road-building program goes further back. As explained by Owen Gutfreund in his book 20th Century Sprawl, urban streets, on which it was illegal to spend gas tax money until the late 1930s, subsidized the early highways and rural roads; overall, roads only covered about half their capital costs through gas taxes. Tollways faced intense opposition from the AAA and the auto and tire industries. Instead an entire bureaucracy was created to ram roads through, paving the way to the large-scale neighborhood destruction of the 1950s. Tellingly, New York and San Francisco, the first two major cities to have freeway revolts, had a smaller population decline through 1980 than the other major non-Sunbelt cities, and are now the only two to have since surpassed their 1950 population peaks.

Transit investment in that era was no better. New York’s major project in the 1920s and 1930s was the construction of the IND, competing with the existing privately-run IRT and BMT networks. The new lines generally did not add transportation options. The Crosstown and Queens Boulevard Lines added service, but did not connect to existing IRT or BMT stops; to this day, the G train has no transfer to non-IND lines in Downtown Brooklyn, and only one, difficult transfer in Queens, which opened just a month ago. The remainder simply paralleled existing elevated or subway lines, which were subsequently torn down.

Part of it was the general opposition to elevated rail in that era, coupled with fascination with both subways and elevated highways. But only part: one IND line, the Sixth Avenue Line, required building new track alongside and later below the existing Hudson Tubes (now PATH), dooming previous plans to extend them to Grand Central for greater regional connectivity. On top of it, the difficulty of building next to an active subway created massive cost escalation, dooming future expansion plans that would add new service.

Although both of the above examples are from the middle of the 20th century, previous infrastructure investment was not much better. It’s a commonplace that New York’s first subway line was built in four years, versus ten for just one phase of Second Avenue Subway. It’s less widely known that ground broke on the subway in 1900 only after multiple decades of political bickering, route changes, and scandals; a short underground demonstration line using pneumatic tube technology had opened in 1869.

Even before then, Britain had undergone a pair of Railway Manias, one in the 1830s and one in the 1840s (thanks to Danny in the comments for the link). Relative to GDP, the latter mania dwarfed both the 1990s’ tech bubble and the 2000s’ housing bubble. Costs ran over estimates by a factor of 2 or more, and ridership underperformed estimates. Although by the end of the Victorian era the lines had surpassed the mid-19th century predictions and were profitable, the investment was too fast, and ruined many investors.

Nobody romanticizes the present, because its problems are apparent to all. Some people romanticize the future; those are the boosters, for whom every problem with growth has a simple solution. But even those can easily slip and romanticize the past, whose main actors have since become national heroes and whose main battles have turned into epic legends. Obama and Bloomberg are controversial; Eisenhower and LaGuardia are heroes.

Planned Cities

The back and forth between Steve and me about his proposed pedestrian-oriented city led me to think more about planned cities, as his is. Although it’s normal among urbanists (for example, Jane Jacobs) to contrast organic cities with planned cities, there are really two aspects of planned cities, one economic and one design-based.

A city can be planned in terms of its urban design. A master plan came in and created its street layout, which is in some way regular. For the purposes of this discussion, it does not matter whether it was planned according to the principles of the Enlightenment, the Garden City movement, or modernism; however, this city will typically have grander major boulevards than unplanned cities, because they are meant to be the focus of civic and state power. A city can also be planned in terms of its economy and location: it was built out of scratch, typically to serve as a new national capital. Those two aspects of planned cities are more or less independent, and criticisms of one do not always carry over to the other.

We can present this using the following table of examples:

Economically Planned
 Economically Organic
Organic Design London, Tokyo, Boston, Rome
Planned, Enlightenment principles Washington, Toronto, St. Petersburg New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Chicago
Planned, Garden City Kuala Lumpur Tel Aviv (Old North)
Planned, modernist/postwar Brasilia Singapore, Mumbai (ex-slums), US Sunbelt, Tel Aviv (north of the Yarkon)

There are several things one should note about the above table. First, there are no economically planned cities with organic design, at least none I’m aware of: a city that exists only because of a national master plan will also have a master plan dictating its urban form. The closest things to it are a preexisting organic city that became larger when the national capital was moved there, for example Rome or Bonn, and a planned city that had some spontaneous development before being subsumed by a master plan, for example St. Petersburg. In fact the reason I found Steve’s proposed city a little weird is that it tries to approximate the features of an unplanned city (very narrow streets) in a setting that is completely planned (the city is plopped in a new rural subdivision).

Second, economically unplanned cities usually have downtown districts with no urban planning, regardless of how the rest of the city looks. This is true in New York (Lower Manhattan), Tel Aviv (Jaffa, pre-1920s Hebrew neighborhoods such as Neve Tzedek), and Singapore (the older parts of the CBD, Chinatown, Little India). When a city has no pockets of unplanned areas, for example Paris, it’s often because the entire city was razed and rebuilt according to a master plan; this is equally true of planned parts of cities, which contain few hints of the areas that were razed to make room for them.

Third, many, though not all, problems that Jacobs and other traditional urbanists associate with planned cities are problems of economic planning and not urban planning. A good example is Jacobs’ attacks on the Garden City movement, in particular Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes, for hating traditional cities. Such an attack could be justified by looking at new suburban subdivisions as well as Kuala Lumpur, built from scratch to be the capital of Malaya.

In contrast, Jacobs’ criticism looks misplaced when one looks at Tel Aviv’s Old North, a dense and walkable neighborhood built entirely according to a master plan specified by Geddes. If you reread my criticisms of Tel Aviv, you’ll see that they are more about what more modern planners have done with it than the Old North’s basic urban form. The urban form is walkable, and the narrow streets are inherently less car-friendly than those of New York or Paris, but the traffic engineers have nonetheless optimized traffic for cars, and the national government rejected a subway in the 1960s for anti-urban nationalist reasons.

In other words, although the urban form of Steve’s Triangle City is likely to be similar to that of Rome, Tokyo, Kyoto, and other unplanned cities, its social and economic characteristics are not. They are more likely to be similar to those of Kuala Lumpur, Brasilia, Washington, and master-planned suburbs.

At the same time, some of the problems of modernism remain true in both planned and unplanned cities. Singapore’s projects and cul-de-sacs are as socially isolating as those of American suburbia. The arterials are not walkable, and the government’s response to huge pedestrian volumes at the intersection of Orchard and Paterson was to construct pedestrian underpasses. The same is true of the newer parts of North Tel Aviv, north of the Yarkon, though the high incomes there prevent the gang problems common in American projects.

Fourth and finally, it is rare but possible for a city built from scratch to become a true import-replacing city, depending on circumstance. Toronto did; although it was built from scratch as Upper Canada’s capital, safely away from the US border, it grew and became Ontario’s primate city, and eventually eclipsed Montreal as Canada’s largest city. The same is true for numerous cities built or designated as imperial capitals before industrialization, e.g. Beijing, Berlin. I cannot tell whether Kuala Lumpur has achieved the same feat, but its size suggests it has. Washington has not – its economy depends almost entirely on government. Master-planned suburbs practically never do.

Sprawl is Auto-Oriented

Steve Stofka has a post detailing his ideal new city, built on principles of high density through very narrow streets, and an interconnected, pedestrian-friendly grid. Its population is given as 30,000, and its area as about 2 square miles, or 5 square kilometers. Although it’s meant to illustrate urban design principles, in a similar matter to my description of my ideal urban arterial street, the proposed location in exurban South Jersey raises questions about why new subdivisions remain auto-oriented.

Let us zoom out and see the general location of this Triangle City. It is exurban; there’s no access except by narrow local roads. This means that residents would drive to all locations outside the town, forcing high car ownership and raising car use well beyond the ability of narrow, pedestrian-oriented streets to carry them. Such towns can be built along potential commuter rail lines, but most of the time the stations along these lines are already developed at vastly lower density than 6,000/km^2. This alone means that such new development would not look like the narrow-street neighborhoods of Tokyo, which have rapid transit to get people to the rest of the metropolis.

Even if a rail line were built, it would not do much to make such development less auto-oriented. A town of 30,000 is very far from self-sufficient; its residents will do much of their shopping outside, making car ownership even more attractive. Morningside Heights, a neighborhood of 33,000, is not self-sufficient either, but because it’s part of a contiguous urban fabric with rapid transit links to the rest of the city, it has low car ownership.

For a more reasonable take on why sprawl absolutely requires cars and long drives, here’s commenter JJJ writing on his blog about a proposed Fresno sprawlburb of 10,000 people:

A self-sufficient community? So much laughter. 2,800 homes may be able to support a supermarket, a CVS, a few nail salons and chinese take-out….but people want more. People want to shop at Target, Best Buy, Costco, etc, none of which will EVER locate in a community of that size (they require much larger customer bases). People want a Cinema and bowling alley. People want a large selection of restaurants.

So residents will have to drive for 30 minutes, through the only road, which is used by those heading to the lake for recreation, or passing through to the national parks. That means congestion.

And the future supermarket, library, pharmacy, elementary school etc? The people who will end up working there won’t move into an expensive rural suburb. They’re going to live in Fresno. And every single one of them will have to drive in that one road. The idea that the retirees will be so self-sufficient that they will be busing tables at a small chinese restaurant is hilarious.

In other words, in a society where most people are rich enough to own a car, building sprawling subdivisions makes car use inevitable. Transit-oriented development done right should start in the dense cities and expand outward slowly, making it feasible to do all of one’s errands on foot, by bike, or by public transit.

Meticulously planned subdivisions usually flop in terms of urban quality, but if one wants to build any, they should be surrounded by or adjacent to existing high-intensity urbanization. This is the reason for gentrification: such areas are almost never empty, and as a result the only way to create them is to displace existing neighborhoods, either organically (Williamsburg) or by fiat (Manhattanville).

Politicals vs. Technicals: the Primary Division of Transit Activists

There are two distinct streams among modern American transit activists, both of which support more transit investment but in ways so different that the arguments between them have taken over debates on such transit issues as California High-Speed Rail and New Jersey’s ARC, and led to scores of back-and-forths on transit blogs. It’s a wonky division rather than a culture war like the mode war between cars and transit, but it discusses issues that are critical for transit revival.

Lacking better terms for the two camps I’m going to call them politicals and technicals, but there’s a fair number of people on the political side who are quite technically minded, and vice versa. Politicals are the people who tend to trust the transit authorities, support a general expansion of all rail transit projects, and believe the primary problem is defeating oil-funded anti-transit lobbies. Technicals are the people who tend to distrust what the authorities say, and prefer their own analysis or that of technically-minded activists; they support transit but are skeptical about many projects, and treat agency inertia and turf wars as the primary obstacles for transit revival.

Because the politicals are much more likely to be rooted in activism, predominantly of the progressive kind, they are better-represented in the major transit advocacy organizations; Streetsblog, Transportation Alternatives, and Transportation for America all deal with the politics and almost never with the little regulations, except for various road engineering standards. NJ-ARP, the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility, and other ARC critics are perhaps the few organizations that focus on attacking bad transit projects and promoting better alternatives.

Concretely, the best was to understand this division is to compare Clem Tillier’s writings on timetables and train control with anything on California High-Speed Rail Blog or with Bruce McFarling’s Sunday Train series. While the major bloggers are politicals, the split is more even than among the major activist organizations. In addition to the aforementioned, the Infrastructurist‘s views tend to echo those of the agencies that support more infrastructure investment, and Second Avenue Sagas‘ Ben Kabak is a major-league fan of the MTA’s work today. On the technical side there are Systemic Failure, Clem Tillier’s Caltrain-HSR Compatibility, this blog, and increasingly even The Transport Politic on such issues as the Fairmount Line. Writing on other issues such as urbanism can avoid these battles, but it’s almost impossible to transcend them; the only people who can are those who represent well-run agencies, and on the Internet the only blog that has done that is Human Transit.

Despite the name, being technical does not mean ignoring politics, or supporting technocracy. On the contrary, the primary impetus for the technicals, mistrust of transit and government authorities, is often bundled with mistrust of engineering standards, and with preference for practices that have worked abroad (European commenters on American blogs almost invariably side with the technicals). The difference is that the political battle lines we draw are less about mode wars and more about the interests of agencies versus those of riders, how broader political ideas affect transit and cities, or just plain corruption and incompetence.

Conversely, being political does not mean ignoring everything other than the effort to get projects built. Although the politicals are less picky about what projects to support (Bruce McF once referred to the position that only true high-speed rail be funded, rather than medium-speed lines such as the since-canceled 110 mph Ohio Hub plan, as another form of HSR denialism), they often do care about alignment and regulatory choices. For example, opposition to security theater on trains is universal. The difference is that they subsume them into the main political fight, treating them as less important issues, or just believe that truly incompetent decisions such as airline-style security will not happen. Insofar as the government’s statements on train security send mixed signals, they may be right; on the other hand, the FRA’s self-reforms are half-baked.

Although transit activists of both groups tend to tilt left of center, the political distribution in the two camps is different. The politicals’ emphasis on being part of the progressive fight has attracted many down-the-line progressives, who write for Daily Kos and attend Netroots Nation. In contrast, the technicals’ emphasis on mistrust of authority has attracted both radical leftists and right-wingers: the complaints about train overstaffing and government incompetence appeal to conservatives and libertarians, while the unfavorable comparisons of the US with Europe appeal to anti-American leftists such as Richard Mlynarik (see e.g. here).

It’s important to note that the division is not as rigid as depicted so far. Although technicals tend to oppose more transit projects than politicals, some projects (for example, Second Avenue Subway) enjoy near-universal support, while others (for example, the Oakland Airport Connector) enjoy near-universal opposition. ARC is more or less split down the line in New York – politicals supported it, technicals preferred Alt G; in California, technicals universally opposed the choice of the Pacheco Pass alignment for HSR, while politicals had no opinion and prefer to stay the course. But apart from these two, projects often have a different split. Jeff Wood of Reconnecting America and The Overhead Wire, who has never mentioned the FRA or agency turf, opposes new commuter rail on account of its poor performance as well as some exurban rapid transit extensions. And Systemic Failure’s Drunk Engineer supported Florida HSR, and despite complaints about grandiosity and incompetence (“Diridon Intergalactic,” as San Jose’s overbuilt station is named after local power broker and former HSR board member Rod Diridon) Clem Tillier still seems to support California HSR.

Ultimately, the two camps are on the same side when it comes to supporting a transit revival. However, the strategies are diametrically opposed. Ask Clem Tillier or Systemic Failure’s Drunk Engineer how to do it and they’ll propose modernizing the regulations, minimizing community impact through smart engineering to reduce NIMBYism, and making sure to build the most cost-effective projects in order to appeal to fiscal conservatives. Ask a political, such as Bruce McF, and he’ll propose to build locally popular projects and spread money around until there’s a critical mass of train riders willing to lobby for more cost-effective regulations. The two camps’ goal is the same, and there can be agreement on individual issues such as the need for FRA reform or support or opposition for specific projects, but the general strategies have the opposite sequences of steps.

Why Density Requires Height

Among modern urbanists, the universal consensus that the postwar urban form of towers in parks is bad gives way to fractious disagreements about which urban form to replace them with. The main battle lines are drawn between libertarians and such liberal sympathizers as Matt Yglesias who argue for removing zoning laws and building tall buildings on the model of Manhattan, and social liberals in the tradition of Christopher Alexander who argue for height limits and traditional pre-19th century urbanism. On the blogosphere, the most consistent advocate of the former is Market Urbanism, and the most consistent advocate of the latter is Old Urbanist.

The primary argument used by height limit proponents is aesthetic. Charlie of Old Urbanist quotes the following passage from Nathan Glazer’s book, From a Cause to a Style:

Wherever social scientists examine these issues, they find a taste that architects on the whole do not find it interesting to satisfy, a taste for the low-rise, the small scale, the unit that gives some privacy, some access to the ground, a small piece of land wholly under one’s control.  I am not, of course, describing a universal taste,  But for people raising children – and indeed many others – it is a near universal taste, if people have a choice.  Nor is there any reason to think that is is necessary or desirable that people be educated against that taste and develop a taste for a larger or gargantuan scale…

A good rule of thumb is that one should dismiss every claim of a “near universal taste” that is not universal in the literal sense – and this one is not. I’m basing my impression on Charlie’s post and it could be that Glazer provides more justification for the universality of the desire for single-family owner-occupied housing, but outside the US, I just don’t see it. It’s not present in Tel Aviv, Paris, or any other city where the rich usually live in multi-story buildings, on their own volition. In Paris one at least has the consolation that people live in mid-rise buildings; Tel Aviv, where those mid-rise buildings are for the upper middle class while the rich live in modernist skyscrapers, has no such excuse. Even Manhattan is undergoing an upper-class baby boom, so even in the US families with children are no longer shunning the city.

In general, it’s easy to dismiss everything one does not like as going against a universal taste. All one needs is to point to universal acceptance in places where government regulations mandate one’s preference (for example, suburbia in most of the US) and, if one wants to be more self-conscious, then harangue about government regulations elsewhere mandating the opposite. In reality, the rich live where other rich people live, in gated communities, which can have any urban form; the middle class lives where the rest of the middle class lives; the poor live where housing is cheap. Even modernist projects can do: for middle-class examples, consider New York’s Co-op City and Stuyvesant Town.

In contrast, the primary argument used by height limit opponents is utilitarian: density requires height. This is obvious in central business districts, where the economics of agglomeration favor very large buildings, and vertical CBDs such as Midtown and Lower Manhattan and the Chicago Loop can attain very high densities. The footprint of the Empire State Building has a floor area ratio of 33, that of the Sears Willis Tower 37. It’s impossible to get anywhere this density without multiple tens of floors, even with buildings that rise vertically from the lot limit without tapering.

Unfortunately, this point is easy to miss, since the headline figure of density is residents per unit of area, and residential skyscrapers are rare. Skyscraper-ridden Manhattan and height-limited Paris have about the same residential density, but Manhattan’s skyscrapers are predominantly commercial. Aside from project towers, Manhattan’s residential urban form is mid-rise, with most buildings not exceeding 6-12 floors; this is similar to Paris.

Indeed, the last time I visited Paris I instantly felt at home, as if in a French-speaking Manhattan. The architectural styles are similar. The building height in Paris is the same as what I’m used to from living in Upper Manhattan. The street widths are on average similar, though Manhattan’s street widths are more uniform whereas Paris has many 10-meter-wide streets as well as many 40-meter-wide boulevards. Both places are the densest major clusters one can find in the developed world outside Hong Kong; this is about the limit one can get with mid-rise buildings flanking moderately wide streets.

To get higher density, one must build higher. Some parts of Manhattan do: the Upper East Side and Upper West Side have a fair number of buildings in the 20-30 story range, and although as Charlie computes only 1% of New York City’s residents live above the 19th floor, the proportion is much higher on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, and becomes even higher if one relaxes the limit from 20 floors to 12, already well beyond the limit traditional urbanists and high-rise opponents accept (Christopher Alexander proposes 5 as the limit). Those are precisely the neighborhoods with the highest density in Manhattan. The census tracts where the residents are upper middle-class rather than rich – generally those in the north or east of the Upper East Side – have residential densities of about 50,000-75,000 per square kilometer. In contrast, the average in Manhattan and Paris is about 25,000, and the densest quarter of Paris has about 40,000.

I’m unconvinced they’re clearly inferior to densely packed mid-rise buildings; zoning boards and NIMBYs can be just as shrill toward narrow streets, without which small buildings limit density to suburban levels, as they are toward high-rises. And when demand is so great that even 40,000 people per km^2 at modern urban apartment sizes is not enough – a demand that’s familiar for office towers, but relatively new for residences – higher buildings become a necessity. They do not have to have 50 floors as Ed Glaeser proposes, but any limit lower than 20 is an unreasonable constraint in this case.

I’m not going to make an aesthetic or environmental argument here. People of means have had no trouble living with very narrow streets in Tokyo, or with very wide avenues and high-rises. But, please, do not pretend you can limit height without limiting density. There’s a point beyond which demand will exceed your height limit.