The Problem is the FRA, not Amtrak

House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) has finally come out explicitly in favor of privatizing the Northeast Corridor and letting private consortia bid for high-speed rail construction. Mica’s rationale is that Amtrak is an inefficient government provider, and its proposal for spending $117 billion over 30 years to build high-speed rail in the Northeast is deficient.

Not mentioned anywhere in the article is the FRA, which is the real obstacle to modern rail operations. Mica has to my knowledge said nothing about the FRA, which is too bad, since it could feed into the Republican narrative of bad government and the need for privatization and deregulation.

Under present FRA regulations, not much more than NEC service levels can be done: rolling stock would have to meet guidelines developed for the steam era, curve speeds would be limited, and the signaling would not provide enough capacity for adequate service levels on shared track. This is independent of the incompetence of every FRA-compliant railroad; in fact part of the incompetence is manifested in unwillingness to try to get waivers, even though Caltrain, a small operator, applied for a partial waiver and got it.

On the other hand, under modern regulations, even Amtrak could provide somewhat better results, and an Amtrak that Mica and the Obama administration pressured to reform could provide much better results. Although such reforms would include less staffing per amount of service provided, ridership could increase so much that total employment would increase, making this at least in principle fathomable by the bureaucrats. If top management wants to make it happen, it will happen.

In contrast, no reform of the FRA is possible short of a complete overhaul. The appropriate passenger rail regulation in the US is that everything that’s legal in Japan or Europe is legal in the US, and the only local task should be a skeletal staff reconciling European and Japanese rules where necessary. A piecemeal approach leads to partial and suboptimal reforms, requiring additional testing of already extensively used trains. For example, in Europe, tilting trains can have up to 315 270-300 (corrected, see dejv’s comment below) mm of cant deficiency, but the FRA won’t permit more than 229 (9″).

JNR’s problems in the 1980s involved overstaffing and operation of marginal lines; these are the things privatization could fix. This is not true of bad regulations, which remain no matter what. Private vendors could lobby for a fix, but they have other interests in mind than maximum efficiency – for example, making life harder for competitors – and besides, what’s the point of hoping for private lobbyists to do a task that as chair of the relevant committee you can do yourself? At the end, a government that’s too incompetent to do things by itself is probably too incompetent to be trusted to ensure the private sector will provide better service rather than looting the taxpayer.

Quick Note on Air Pollution

Yesterday’s USA Today carried a story about a study from the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis coming up with a huge figure for excess mortality, 2,200 nationwide just from the extra gas consumption caused by traffic congestion. Such a figure is almost certainly too high.

On page 4, the study compares the costs of congestion in terms of wasted time, wasted gas, and excess mortality due to pollution. In 2020, the cost of excess mortality is given as just under $20 billion in the largest 83 urban areas. Since the total amount of fuel wasted due to congestion according to the TTI, on whose data the study is based, is about 3.5 billion gallons, this corresponds to more than $5 per gallon.

With this figure in hand, we can compare the study to studies of car pollution and not just congestion pollution. American studies tend to find much lower costs of pollution and lower percentages of pollution coming from cars than foreign studies, and foreign studies find costs in the $2-3/gallon range. For examples, see here for Toronto and compare with fuel consumption figures coming from carbon emissions figures in the same study; here for Sydney and compare with fuel consumption figures from here; and here for Auckland sourced to this New Zealand study and compare with these fuel consumption numbers. Note that in the US, such figures are considered high-end estimates – see anything on social costs by Mark Delucchi.

The most likely reason for the factor-of-2 discrepancy we obtain is funding sources. The study under discussion was sponsored by the transportation construction industry, and was conducted by a research institute that had ties to the tobacco industry in the 1990s.

The study’s content indeed suggests such interest conflicts. The methodology estimates pollution per unit of VMT; it could just as well have posted figures for total car pollution. And the conclusion, far from suggesting regulations or pollution pricing, is:

long-term policy alternatives for addressing congestion such as traffic management through congestion pricing, traffic light synchronization and more efficient response to traffic incidents, and adding new highway and public transit capacity.

Adding more transit capacity is reasonable, since it displaces car trips. But adding highway capacity means people drive more, which increases rather than reduces pollution. And nowhere does the study recommend a tax on gas, which is what causes this pollution in the first place. This is not serious public health research; it’s lobbying for construction.

Whither BRT?

The Institute for Transport and Development Policy has joined Brookings in publishing a completely pointless transit system ranking, this time focusing on the quality of BRT, the mode of transit ITDP advocates.

I want to like ITDP for its BRT planning guide tome, but this BRT ranking uses random criteria, with bad weightings. Every system is ranked out of 100 points, with points divided into small criteria and subcriteria. On page 17, we see the following:

Off-vehicle fare collection 7
Multiple routes use same BRT infrastructure 4
Peak period frequency 4
Routes in top 10 demand corridors 4
Integrated fare collection with other public transport 3
Limited and local stop services 3
Off-peak frequency 3
Part of ( planned ) multi-corridor BRT network 3
Performance-based contracting for operators 3
Enforcement of right-of-way 2
Operates late nights and weekends 2
Operational control system to reduce bus bunching 2
Peak-period pricing 2

Bus lanes in central verge of the road 7
Physically-separated right-of-way 7
Intersection treatments (elimination of turns across the busway and signal priority) 4
Physically-separated passing lanes at station stops 4
Stations occupy former road/median space (not sidewalk space) 3
Stations set back from intersections (100 feet min) 3
Stations are in center and shared by both directions of service 2

Platform-level boarding 5
Buses have 3+ doors on articulated buses or 2+ very wide doors on standard buses 4
Multiple docking bays and sub-stops ( separated by at least half a bus length ) 3

Branding of vehicles and system 3
Safe, wide, weather-protected stations with artwork (>/=8 feet wide) 3
Passenger information at stops and on vehicles 2

Bicycle lanes in corridor 2
Bicycle sharing systems at BRT stations 2
Improved safe and attractive pedestrian access system and corridor environment 2
Secure bicycle parking at station stops 2

Those criteria are for the most part not bad, but they’re weighted wrong. Observe that off-peak frequency counts for only 3 points, the same as contracting out the operations. It’s actually worse: a system gets 1 point for having any off-peak frequency, even if it’s worse than 15 minutes; 15 minutes is enough for 2 points. Peak-period pricing, which is absent or all but absent from many well-run rail and bus operations around the world, gets 2 points. The core elements of BRT – level boarding, physically separated median lanes, off-board fare collection, signal preemption – have 36 points between them.

In first-world cities, BRT has two uses. One, lower-capacity, slightly lower-quality transit on corridors with less demand. Two, dedicated guideways that can branch out and make local stops in shared lanes in lower-traffic areas, on the model of Brisbane. The full-fat BRT in Guangzhou and Bogota cited by BRT proponents requires a lot of concrete and many operators, and is best-suited to a city with low labor costs.

Many of the features touted for BRT can and should be used for all buses. Off-board fare collection with proof of payment is practiced systemwide in such cities as Singapore, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, and Florence; in conjunction with multi-door boarding, this reduces bus dwell times and increases speed with zero investment in concrete. Signal priority can be practiced independently of all else. Physical separation of lanes requires barriers only a few centimeters wide, and can be done selectively on the most congested and highest-demand segments.

Buses can be great buses; they make bad trains. By all means first-world cities should increase frequency, procure better buses with low floors and more doors, make sure riders know which routes are frequent and which are not, and give buses dedicated lanes when necessary. But the focus on specially branded rail-like BRT only detracts from this goal.

In American cities, BRT is more often than not an excuse to not implement those features on local buses. In New York, not only does the MTA rule out proof-of-payment on non-SBS buses, but also backroom state legislative dealings banned bus camera enforcement of painted lanes except on a closed list of six SBS routes. All this while SBS service levels are comparable to those of local buses in Singapore and many European cities – in fact lower if those local buses have signal priority. This and not low scoring on an arbitrary rubric is what ITDP should have complained about.

Brookings Folly

People who have read Brookings’ awful report saying San Jose is the second most transit-accessible city in the US and New York the thirteenth already know not to trust what Brookings says. Even at the level of collecting facts, it seems to get service frequency wrong, making sprawling suburbs with hourly bus service look like they have service every few minutes.

So it’s not surprising that senior Brookings fellow Robert Puentes’ article about infrastructure in the Wall Street Journal is full of misunderstandings and frankly amateurish claims about US infrastructure problems. Puentes opens with a standard claim that “we do a great job of building new roads” (no mention of the Big Dig, Bay Bridge Eastern Span replacement, or proposed Tappan Zee replacement, each substantially costlier than undersea tunnels in Europe) but smarter investments are needed. He proposes the following:

1. Boosting exports. Puentes complains that US border crossings are congested, and hints that more are needed, for example the proposal for more bridges between Michigan and Ontario. He mentions some interstate cooperation as a solution, but never says anything about international cooperation, which is the real problem.

The Ambassador Bridge carries 10,000 trucks and 4,000 cars per day; the Holland Tunnel, which has the same number of lanes, carries 90,000 vehicles per day. The problem with the bridge is the border crossing, not the infrastructure. Nowhere does Puentes say the US and Canada should build more border checkpoints or process people faster. If Michigan doubles the number of border control booths or halves the time it takes to process a vehicle, it’s equivalent to building another bridge, but at a vastly lower cost.

2. Getting greener. Puentes praises Obama for proposing to put one million electric cars on the road in 2015. Then he talks about charging stations and the need for national standards encouraging them. In reality, the US has 240 million cars on the road, so Obama’s proposal would, even assuming zero-emission electricity, cut car emissions by 0.4%.

On the subject of cars and transit, Puentes wisely mentions that the government funds roads more liberally, but instead of railing against highways to nowhere and high construction costs says “We need equal treatment of all possible transportation projects, so cities don’t have to give up on, say, transit systems that fit their needs and help us go green, just because they cost more than highways.” It’s not that there aren’t examples of severe waste; it’s that Puentes doesn’t seem to care.

3. Adding Innovations. This is a boilerplate blurb for electronic toll collection, bus tracking, and, of course, public-private partnerships. Individually the things proposed are not bad – they’re just the most important things. For mass transit, fare integration and tighter schedule adherence are more important, but were not invented here and involve messy fights with the bureaucrats Brookings represent.

The PPP part indicates what this is really about: kickbacks to technology companies, often defense contractors looking to diversify. Many US transit systems have a smartcard using vendor-locked proprietary technology; defense contractor Cubic is the top vendor. New York’s smartcard proposal is instead a kickback to credit card providers, which is slightly less bad because the standard is open but is still far behind best practices. The best practices do not involve PPPs – instead, agencies develop technologies in-house, or instead rely on open standards. Minimal collusion offers minimal opportunity for corruption.

4. Connecting Workers With Work. Here Puentes repeats his institution’s flawed study’s findings as if they’re universally recognized facts. He does not even say “According to a recent Brookings study” – people are supposed to know it like they know Pearl Harbor happened in 1941. Then, based on said study’s conclusions, he declares the problem is that the poor are disconnected from their workplaces and makes relevant suggestions.

Since the Brookings study got things wrong in the direction of too much transit accessibility, the suggestions are for the most part not bad. The problem is that he says nothing about the problems of connecting people to where they work. The biggest problem for metro area transit is that while downtowns are reasonably connected (e.g. downtown LA workers have a 50% transit mode share), secondary downtowns and suburban job centers are not.

The common theme of all the proposals is that they’re makework for the bureaucrats and consultants who are Brookings’ base. Adopting best industry practices is useless to Brookings fellows, because pointing out that Europe does it better also means that the consultants who should implement reform are European managers. In contrast, PPP means coming up with new standards and new ways of doing things; it’s attractive to government administrators as much as it is to the companies that get the contracts.

The interests of the riders are not the same as those of the service providers. That labor does not have the same interests as riders is clear, but management benefits from bloat just as much: if things run smoothly, managers can’t look like they’re continually saving the day. Thinktanks like Brookings represent certain interest groups, and Brookings’ interest group excludes transit users.

Pedestrian Observations from Athens, GA

I’m currently at a conference at UGA, located in a town that clearly tries to be walkable, and for the most part fails: for example, it has bike lanes on high-speed arterials and unwalkable streets with share the road signs.

My observations may be colored by the fact that it’s the intersession now rather than the middle of the academic year, but walking is rare. Browse the photostream including the above photos; there aren’t many pedestrians.

Outside campus and a downtown area of about four by seven blocks, walking is downright foreign. Last night while walking back from a dinner at a suburban main street strip, we were accosted by two cops who accused us of jaywalking and kept going on about how unsafe it was and how they could arrest us. They didn’t arrest us – just lectured us about inebriation (I do not drink; the other two people I walked with had drunk a little, but why not harass drunk drivers instead?), common sense, and the danger of walking. In New York it’s routine to harass and intimidate cyclists even for legal behavior, but walking is considered normal; not so in Athens, where it’s apparently only for college students, very poor people, and outsiders.

Another thing to note is that the streets aren’t overly wide, and many have bike lanes. Look those streets up on Google Earth: the Baxter Street roadway is about 12 meters wide, vs. 9-10 for a Manhattan street and 18 for an avenue. The difference with Manhattan is that there’s no street wall, making the streets look wider than they are – see this photo. Building-to-building, Baxter is about 40-50 meters wide, vs. 30 for Manhattan avenues. And unlike on the Manhattan avenues, traffic volumes on Baxter are not high, which means cars can speed on arterials in a way that’s impossible on First Avenue.

As usual in small towns and suburbs, almost all of this space between buildings that isn’t used for cars is not used for pedestrians, either. The nicer off-downtown residential areas in Athens have a meter or two of sidewalk on each side. Sometimes there’s a sidewalk just on one side. The rest is dirt or poorly kept grass, or sometimes parking.

One thing not captured in the photos is the sheer difficulty of crossing the street. This is by far the worst feature I’ve found other than the long distances of walking; the narrow sidewalks are unpleasant, but for the most part usable. A friendly stoplight phasing is possibly the most underrated feature of complete streets. In Manhattan, there are two phases, one permitting all north-south traffic and one permitting all east-west traffic, and each is about 45 seconds. In Athens, the phases are more complex, with different turn lights, and pedestrians only have 10-15 seconds out of a full cycle.

Another thing not captured on camera is the lack of normal amenities even in downtown Athens. The downtown area is full of restaurants and entertainment; it is short on supermarkets and grocery stores. What it tells me is that they’re not thinking of downtown as a place where anyone might live, but rather as a destination for tourists, college students with meal plans, and suburbanites.

There are worse cities than Athens. My last conference, in Worcester, ended in my having to walk about 3.5 kilometers to the train station, on a sidewalk covered with rubble and in the striped median of a grade-separated arterial. The striped bike path on Baxter is more continuous than some bike paths in Chicago. Athens clearly tries, within the general paradigm of a spread-out city with a suburban form. It’s just not enough for real walkability.

Fatality Numbers vs. Safety

On Streetsblog, they’re waving New York’s relatively high pedestrian fatality rate as evidence the streets are unsafe and much more can be done. The region’s pedestrian death rate is the 13th worst in the nation, about the same as Houston, which is supposed to be evidence of unsafe streets.

John Adams points out that in Britain, the pedestrian fatality rate today is one third what it was in 1922. The roads are much less safe than they were then, when they were narrow and traffic was slow, but there are so few pedestrians today that cars rarely hit them. As a result, looking at absolute death rates means nothing.

Even the Transportation for America study that Streetsblog links to doesn’t fully correct for it. It scales fatality rates based on the pedestrian commute share, which is better than nothing, but still fails to account the huge volumes of people in New York and other walkable cities who take mass transit to work but still walk a lot for their other trips. The proof is in the pudding: the study says Cleveland is the second safest metro area in the US for pedestrians, behind Boston and ahead of New York.

New York has a lot of street safety issues, but it’s still light years ahead of the rest of the US, except for small pockets in Boston, San Francisco, and other compact, walkable cities. The same is true for Manhattan within New York. Ignore complaints that the community board comprising the Upper East Side has the third highest pedestrian fatality count; it also has the third highest population, trailing two outer-urban CBs with fewer pedestrians. At this stage input-based measures such as traffic speed, sidewalk width, stoplight phasing, and the presence of a good street wall and trees are much better than any skewed output-based statistic.

As a corollary, bike lane opponents who complain about the large number of cyclist injuries on protected bike lanes are just as wrong (see here and scroll for comments). There are more cyclists on 9th Avenue than on pre-bike lane Prospect Park West; of course more will be injured. Counterintuitive claims about how bike lanes are less safe than mixed traffic are fun, but they aren’t true.

Reform vs. Reformism

Urban politics in what’s now the US Rust Belt has been dominated by the same battle between the machine and the reformists since the machines first came into existence in the 19th century. Since the national partisan battles weren’t too applicable, especially after the cities became dominant-party Democratic, the battle lines cemented based on this reform vs. machine issue, creating the same intense partisanship as at the national level.

I encourage everyone to read the Historic American Engineering Record‘s first two articles about the New York City Subway, by Wallace Katz and Clifton Hood. The importance is that the same battles are being fought today, with the same social ideas behind each group. The people Katz calls the patrician reformers still try to fix social problems with engineering and design, only they’re disaffected with cars and suburbs rather than cities.

The ultimate symbol of machine politics in New York is Sheldon Silver; the ultimate symbol of reformism is Michael Bloomberg. The former bloc has gotten almost as much beating as it deserves from Streetsblog, Cap’n Transit, and other congestion pricing supporters. But the reformists must be equally examined, because although they want transit to be better, they want it better their way and this is not the same as transit advocacy.

The reformists’ idea of reform is framed in partisan opposition to the machine; bipartisanship in the national sense of liberal vs. conservative is just part of the plank. They’re not wedded to competence, which is a different animal. Being seen as doing something is more important than success. That’s why Jay Walder uses the high costs of the MTA as an excuse to go through with another failed smartcard scheme. Reformists have a lot of valuable outside knowledge to bring to the table – for example, proof-of-payment on buses and commuter rail – but so far the administration hasn’t really done any.

The opposite of outsider knowledge is insider knowledge, and reformists that ignore it will not succeed. The Swiss and the Japanese grew expertise from the inside, and learned from outsiders where needed. When overstaffed, they lost workers to slow attrition, rather than mass layoffs whose size is determined by labor lawyers and which are not targeted at the most redundant workers. Of course, the only people with insider knowledge are the union members who’d be let go – but this underscores the need for consensus, not heavyweights.

Another reformist problem is the unwillingness to invest in the lower class, except for paternalistic redevelopment schemes. This was true in the urban renewal era and is still true today. JSK’s bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, almost the only good import of the city’s reformist class, are a sop to gentrification. The opposition of community boards is part of the mythology of fighting for the greater good, leading to the same predictable authoritarianism as that of Robert Moses. In reality, when East Harlem practically begged the city for bike lanes, JSK ignored it.

Bloomberg impresses people who don’t know which good reforms he’s squandered because they don’t fit his preconceptions. A friend of a friend wrote a computer program that would automatically match substitute teachers to principals who needed them, back when Bloomberg’s focus was reforming education. The program would’ve saved the city $20 million in administrative costs. The administration refused to consider it, because it conflicted with the idea of running schools like businesses.

Reform should instead be done right. The first traditions to go should be those that impede the formation of consensus; unfortunately, this requires learning from the political systems of non-English-speaking countries, which means it’s extremely unlikely to happen. Beyond that, learning from outsiders should be done in the tradition of Japanese industrialization and European proliferation of good industry practices rather than in that of American companies bringing heavyweight CEOs to save them. The CEOs and the reformists are both more mobile and more insulated from their mistakes than the shareholders or city residents they affect. Perhaps the first thing American cities need to learn from the outside is what the proper way to learn from the outside is.

New York-Area Track Maps

The original purpose of this blog was to give me a domain name to upload things related to transit. The resource I was uploading was track maps of the New York area due to Rich E Green, whose site unexpectedly vanished last month without caching the maps on Google. Here are the maps I’d saved or gotten from helpful commenters:

LIRR
NJT/SEPTA
Metro-North
NEC in Maryland and DC

If you have any of the rest of the maps, please send them over so that I can make them publicly available again.

Update: all links scrubbed 12/7 by the author’s request, due to copyright issues.

More on Density

Commenter Benjamin Hemric replies to my previous post on Manhattan density, arguing that,

1) It’s very interesting that people seem to have very, very different goals and objectives here — and it’s good that these are expressed and out in the open. Otherwise people wind up talking past one another.

The Jane Jacobs goal (which is where I feel I’m coming from) believes there should be HEALTHY (self-generating, market-based) cities (for a variety of reasons, including economic and social ones) — and more and more of them to meet a growing world population. (I think Glaeser also shares this part of the Jacobs viewpoint.)

The saving of the environment (to extend what I see as the Jacobs’ viewpoint) is a by-product. And it isn’t from piling more and more people into a relatively small part of a city but from having many successful high density districts — and by having many dense cities, which by their very nature are greener than suburban sprawl.

2) It seems to me that it’s important to remember that the outer boroughs (to use the NYC example) and nearby northern New Jersey are not pristine undeveloped land, but already pretty well built up albeit oftentimes at relatively low density areas — so making them denser also helps save the environment.

The implied question is as follows: the New York region wants to add more people; where should we plan on housing them?

My environmentalist answer is that they should be housed in dense areas – it doesn’t really matter which ones, as long as they’re walkable and transit-accessible. Even marginally dense areas are okay as long as it’s part of a concerted effort at TOD – say, residential and commercial upzoning in Eastern Queens along the LIRR in conjunction with offering rapid transit-like service levels on commuter rail.

The Jacobsian answer that Benjamin is giving is that they should be housed not in the densest neighborhoods, but in somewhat less dense neighborhoods, on the theory that they’d become greener due to the additional flux of residents. This is, in principle, a good idea. The residents would cause more environmental impact than in Manhattan and live in what are now less walkable neighborhoods, but would induce such development that the impact of existing residents would drop. But it’s not clear which effect dominates, and since both options are much better than any alternative, both should be legal and encouraged; there’s no need for landmarking to force people out of the Village and into Brooklyn.

But that’s all in principle. In practice, densifying outer-urban neighborhoods is a political nightmare. Christof Spieler once wrote about how in Austin, development is governed by a coalition of NIMBYs and suburban developers and boosters. The result: it’s hard to increase density in existing urban neighborhoods, and easy to develop greenfield exurbs. In New York, a similar thing is happening, in reverse – it’s easy to develop in Manhattan’s non-landmarked areas, and hard in the outer-urban neighborhoods and the suburbs. (New York’s exurbs are also growing very quickly, but are too remote and lightly populated to matter.)

Adding density to parts of Queens and Brooklyn where it would introduce a tipping point in favor of walkable urbanism may well be harder than repealing landmark restrictions in the Village. Community boards are always drawn from the wealthier and more connected segments of society, and in those areas they invariably own a car. A new development in Flushing was saddled with extra parking, and NIMBYs all over outer-urban New York oppose dedicated bus lanes due to loss of car lanes.

The conclusion is that the alternatives to density increases in Manhattan are more parking garages all over the Outer Boroughs, and greenfield suburban development in the few parts of the suburbs in which there’s space (typically nowhere near rail). I’m all for walkable densification along outer ends of subway lines, or if commuter rail modernizes then also near train stations. Wake me up when that happens. Until then, the best approach is supporting political reforms to make both Manhattan densification and outer borough densification easier.

How Dense is Too Dense?

Whenever people who support restrictions on building want to justify the limits of density, they say the area is too dense, or possibly too dense for the present traffic capacity or quality of life. This is true regardless of density. It’s against this background that one should read Kaid Benfield’s article in Grist attacking Ed Glaeser’s proposals for upzoning in Manhattan. Manhattan, we are told, is already the densest county in America, so why build more?

Multiple lines of response come to mind; you should think of them as separately as possible. The first is that Benfield not only makes an argument about Manhattan’s density, but also posts lovely images of landmarked streets in the West Village, which Glaeser wants to permit replacing with 50-story residential towers. In light of that, let us remember what historic districts are, in practice: they are districts where wealthy people own property that they want to prop up the price of. They are designated arbitrarily, make arbitrary rules, and protect clearly non-historic buildings.

The densest neighborhood in Manhattan, the Upper East Side, has about 46,000 people per square kilometer, rising to about 70,000 in the upper-middle-class (as opposed to wealthy) section east of Third Avenue. The West Village only has 26,000, so there’s clearly room to build up.

There is no inherent reason to go by county or borough density rather than by neighborhood density. By the same token, one could say that the Northeast is the densest region in the US and therefore requires no more density. Southern boosters might like this, but not the people reading Grist, who care about environmental protection more. There is no induced demand with people: allowing taller buildings is not going to make more people be born, which means all it does is permit population to shift from exurbs to city centers.

What is more, there already is demand for more housing in Manhattan: last decade Manhattan’s population grew faster than that of the rest of the city as well as the rest of the metro area, amidst skyrocketing rents. In fact the reason I don’t trust the census is that it believes that New York added more housing units than people last decade, at a time of rising household size and stable vacancy.

There are ways to increase Manhattan density without plopping 50-story towers everywhere. For one, even the Upper East Side has few such towers – it is built to about the 20th floor. Unlike with office buildings, which favor more agglomeration, residential buildings remain mid-rise even if higher densities were possible, as they were in the 1920s; today, on the order of 1% of the city’s residential stock is located above the 20th floor. However, any density increase requires a rise in height – from 5 floors to 7 in Harlem and the Village, from 10 to 15 in Morningside Heights, and so on – without the loss of lot coverage coming from project-style towers.