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.

Philadelphia Link, or Organization Before Concrete

Pedestrian Observations commenter Steve Stofka has a blog post treating Amtrak’s $117 billion high-speed rail proposal for the Northeast Corridor with all the criticism for extravagance it deserves. Focusing on his hometown of Philadelphia, he explains how Amtrak’s proposal for new urban tunnels under the city and a new stop at Market East is insane, and how using mostly existing rights-of-way and stopping at the existing 30th Street Station is a vastly cheaper alternative.

Criticizing Amtrak’s plan is like shooting fish in a barrel. The reason I’m linking to Steve’s post is that it underscores a general theme in transit cost overruns. He explains the reasoning behind Amtrak’s choice of new tunnels:

How expensive is freaking expensive? The kind of bore being proposed is the single most expensive type of tunnel possible: it runs through a soft geological environment with zero tolerance for surface subsidence. It would cost more, mile by mile, than even the Gotthard Base Tunnel. The expense of this tunnel is so great that it amounts to about a tenth of the total budget of the plan (about $10 billion, or a billion a mile, out of a budget of roughly a hundred billion). When a single budgetary item commands that much expense, one must analyze and ask why: why do we need to spend a ludicrous amount of money in Philadelphia for what amounts to marginal access improvements? Knowing SEPTA, politics–and SEPTA’s “get-off-my-lawn” attitude–is most likely to blame.

The relevant answer is the slogan Organisation vor Elektronik vor Beton: organization before electronics before concrete. Getting agencies to cooperate is hard on the managers, but cheap. Electronics, for example modern signaling to increase train capacity, costs more, but is affordable in a rich country. Concrete requires labor-intensive construction and is expensive.

The existing right-of-way in Philadelphia has no capacity constraint. It has four tracks, and a peak commuter rail frequency of six trains per hour. In contrast, the S-Bahn tunnel in Munich has two tracks and 24 30 trains per hour (thanks to ant6n for the correction); the above German link is concerned with cost overruns on a project to construct a second S-Bahn tunnel, currently estimated at half the per-km cost of the Philadelphia extravaganza. And Munich is far more advanced on organization than Philadelphia, where Amtrak and SEPTA have separate tickets, station staff, and schedules.

The same could be said about the LIRR/Amtrak grade separation. From a technical perspective, it is unnecessary. From a political one, it requires Amtrak trains to use the Penn Station’s lower concourse, currently monopolized by the LIRR; said concourse has better passenger flow and has station staff and ticket vending machines, but because of artificial separation into LIRR and Amtrak turf, New York State has to fork over $300 million for concrete.

High Costs Should not be an Excuse to Downgrade Projects

In an environment of high construction costs, there’s an impulse to downgrade projects: build light rail instead of subways, BRT instead of rail, commuter rail on existing tracks instead of greenfield light rail, shared-lane buses and streetcars instead of ones running in dedicated lanes. Some of those downgrades have already gotten flak individually from transit supporters, of which Jeff Wood’s recent article about commuter rail and Mike Dahmus‘s repeated attacks on BRT and the Austin commuter rail are good examples.

I do not think anyone has made the following point connecting those projects: the same causes that lead to incompetence in running one mode will lead to incompetence in running all other modes. Regardless of the mode chosen, a project in the US can expect to cost several times as much as a comparable European projects. (As a single exception, FRA-compliant commuter rail can be expected to be especially bad, because there the regulations and operating traditions are especially bad.) With very few exceptions, building BRT in a corridor that begs for rail, suburban transit in a city that needs urban transit, peak-only commuter rail, and other apparent cost savers will incur the same cost escalations as in every other mode.

In particular, downgrading service will not save any money, and going to the FRA will actually raise costs. This affects both the choice of technology and the choice of how to use it: American light rail lines keep the per-km costs reasonable by building out to exurbia, creating ersatz commuter rail with low ridership. This is epitomized in Dallas, whose light rail is setting records for low per-km ridership, and whose plans for the next decade are projected to cost $2.4 billion for 60,000 additional weekday riders, i.e. $40,000 per rider. In contrast, Houston’s urban Main Street Line cost $300 million for 34,000 riders, which is about $10,000 per rider in today’s money, the lowest per-rider cost in the US in the last 15 or so years. And Houston is unusual; more common is the Portland Milwaukie light rail extension, projected at $55,000 per rider and $110 million per km.

If we start looking abroad, we see the same pattern. When European LRT is more expensive, as for example in Nice, it’s because it’s very high-ridership urban infill. And Nice is an exceptionally expensive case; Lyon’s trams are cheaper. Few European light rail lines go over $10,000 per rider, and on Yonah Freemark’s list of recent and planned projects in Paris, a few lines are below $5,000.

Something similar is true for bus transit. Despite Jaime Lerner’s admonition that “Creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget,” American cities have failed to create good BRT under budget constraints. The Los Angeles Orange Line is expensive for the ridership it has ($15,000/rider in construction, with the high operating costs of a bus) and has mediocre signal priority. Under a budget constraint, Los Angeles still built something inferior to the Blue Line, or even the expensive-to-build, cheap-to-operate Red Line subway.

As an aside, this also holds for the costs of transit versus highways. In the rest of the developed world, prudent cities invest most or all of their transportation money into mass transit, and try to restrain traffic. This should also be true in the US, where subways and light rail are expensive, but so are highway projects: see the 8-times-over-budget Bay Bridge Eastern Span replacement, the Big Dig, and the proposed Tappan Zee Bridge replacement, and compare them to the more complex Øresund Bridge-Tunnel connecting Denmark and Sweden.

At worst, the high costs of transportation in the US imply that government should spend its money elsewhere – on health or education, or perhaps tax cuts. Even then I’m personally skeptical about the efficiency of the marginal dollar: American health care is infamously expensive, tax expenditures are byzantine and in such cases as the mortgage tax credit create the wrong sort of incentives, and so on.

Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 is by far the most expensive urban rail project in the world today, but its per-rider cost is only $25,000, high by European and Japanese standards but lower than any other rail line proposed or under construction in the US today. It would not be approved in today’s pennypinching climate, and even ten years ago it was funded only thanks to legislative blackmail by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose district would be served by Phase 3. Of course at normal cost it would be very cheap, just as at normal cost everything else in the US would become much more affordable, but it is still more cost-effective than seemingly cheap commuter lines.

The upshot is that from the perspective of transit planning, high costs should not deter anyone. Other than the special rule that FRA-compliant commuter rail is practically never justifiable, the relative merits of projects are about the same in the US as in all other developed countries. Agencies all over the world have to choose between a subway, five trams, and twenty busways. In an environment of high costs, it still make sense to draw plans as if the costs are normal, and when the costs are not normal, build more slowly and start with the most cost-effective lines. If agencies and activists behave as if there’s no money for good transit, they will only get bad transit.

Suburban TOD

Hicksville is located 43 kilometers east of Penn Station on the LIRR Main Line. It’s a major job center of eastern Nassau County, with 25,000 jobs and a rather large shopping center adjacent to the train station. The station itself gets about 8,000 weekday boardings, more than any other suburban LIRR station except Ronkonkoma.

However, the station has no TOD. The shopping mall is transit-adjacent, but the route to it from the station passes through parking lots at both ends. The station is surrounded by thousands of parking spaces; a recent reconstruction of a parking garage cost $364 $36.4 million for 1,400 spaces, which at $26,000 per space is more than the per-rider cost of such expensive transit lines as Second Avenue Subway. As a result, the total number of people getting off at Hicksville in the AM peak is 700, for a rail share of 3%.

Such failure is quite common in the US. Leaving aside stations explicitly configured as park-and-rides, such as Metropark or Ronkonkoma, off-CBD stations have to have at least some retail and office space usable by reverse commuters, on the pure financial grounds that reverse-peak service is nearly free to provide. Otherwise, light rail and subway trains run empty in the reverse-peak, and commuter trains park downtown, leading to outsized costs for CBD railyard expansions.

For a comparison of how good TOD looks like, see this industry presentation about Tokyo’s Tsukuba Express. As is normal in Tokyo, the line is very expensive: $140 million per km for a line that’s just 26% in tunnel, though the tunnel percentage is much higher within the central city. But per rider this is not too bad, because as the images in the presentation demonstrate, intense TOD followed construction. Stations are surrounded by high-density office and residential buildings and not parking lots.

A theme I am going to revisit is that high construction costs should not be an excuse to scale down service levels. It may be expensive to develop on the parking lots adjacent to the station, but the ridership is always worth it.

If there’s to be a transit revival, it’s imperative to increase mode share at major suburban centers. The transit mode share for people working in Manhattan is 75%, while the auto share is only 14% – and the auto mode share is dominated by the suburbs that use the GWB, rather than Long Island. There’s some room to expand Manhattan employment, but not enough to make a dent in the region’s car use. It’s critical to instead make it easier to use transit and harder to drive to work in such secondary downtowns as Flushing and Jamaica, and in such major suburban centers as Mineola and, yes, Hicksville.

More on Driving vs. Transit Costs

Thanks to Elizabeth Alexis of CARRD for finding and giving me a link to the AAA’s methodology for computing driving costs, used in APTA’s flawed study about the high household savings coming from switching from driving to transit. The AAA methodology indeed assumes perfect rather than realistic maintenance and tire changing, and has elevated depreciation and warranty charges.

The full list of problems with the AAA methodology, according to Elizabeth:

You are spot on about the misuse of data.  The AAA study is really misleading It represents the costs for someone who buys a new car from the dealer  with the extended warranty, overinsures it, drives it for 5 years, buys a new set of tires and then trades it in to the dealer, getting totally ripped in the process.  If everyone did this, the average car fleet would be 2 1/2 years old (instead of 9).     The only thing this study tells you is that you should never buy a new car and that you are an idiot to do anything but buy used cars off craigslist.

They are also assuming:

1) You buy a new car every five years.
2) Even though you know you will sell the car, you buy the extended warranty.
3) You accept the dealer’s trade-in price (which is very low generally).
4) Even though you know you are going to sell it to the dealer for no money, you go ahead and put on a new set of tires right before doing so.
5) You buy insurance with really low deductibles.
6) Because on average you have a 2.5 year old car, your annual car tax and your insurance are very high (in most states, the taxes are based on the value of the car).
7) And you finance the car @ non-deductible 6% interest. It should be noted that most car loans are 3-5 years.  So if you kept a car after it was paid off… this cost would go away.

A better study for the costs of driving was done by Steven Polzin, of the National Center for Transit Research, who also serves on “several APTA committees.” Using various government survey data, he finds an average saving of $3,600 from giving up a car; this is less than the cost of an average car, since households might give up the lesser used car or take more transit or drive the remaining car more. I encourage everyone to bookmark the study and refer to page 18 for comparative spending on transportation in the US versus the EU-15; it’s a difference of 19.5% of household budget versus about 14%. Any figures for world public transit leaders Japan and Switzerland will be appreciated.