Monthly Archives: April 2010

Briefly noted

7000Series

Some items of note today:

Weekend Reading

CC image from sabeth718

CC image from sabeth718

There’s a whole host of good stuff out there this weekend, covering the economy, smart growth, transit, high speed rail, and more:

Smart growth is nothing to fear: Roger Lewis aims to quiet the fears of Washington Post readers:

In fact, as new long-range plans are implemented in the coming decades, your property’s value will probably go up, your way of life and neighborhood character will be enhanced, and traffic congestion will not worsen. Indeed, it may ease. Also remember that such plans primarily serve future generations.

Optimism is justified. Stable, low-density residential neighborhoods and subdivisions will remain untouched. Transportation network plans do not depend on routing future traffic through subdivisions and local residential streets, many of which are loops and cul-de-sacs. And redeveloped areas actually will provide new, desirable conveniences for residents able to walk or bike to buy a quart of milk or sip coffee in a cafe.

Daniel Gross puts that into a larger context: Complete with quotes from Richard Florida, Mr. Gross looks to optimistic visions of the future and the chance to re-shape our economy, using the pending economic rebound to re-shape things – putting those kinds of smart growth plans into action:

So what will our new economy look like once the smoke finally clears? There will likely be fewer McMansions with four-car garages and more well-insulated homes, fewer Hummers and more Chevy Volts, less proprietary trading and more productivity-enhancing software, less debt and more capital, more exported goods and less imported energy. Most significantly, there will be new commercial infrastructures and industrial ecosystems that incubate and propel growth—much as the Internet did in the 1990s.

Not everyone is so optimistic: Reihan Salam at The Daily Beast isn’t nearly as optimistic about our economic prospects, despite the good intentions and aspirations of folks like Roger Lewis.

But one could just as easily argue that we’ve been furiously spending taxpayer dollars propping up the McMansion-and-Hummer economy. To protect homeowners, we’ve launched an extraordinary series of interventions designed to buttress housing prices, an approach that effectively transfers wealth from those who rent to those who own. Collapsing housing prices could prove a boon for less-affluent households or cautious investors who were reluctant to buy at the top of the market. That can’t help unless we accept that housing prices can and should collapse, even if that hurts key constituencies in the short term. And the same goes for efforts to keep the domestic automotive industry on life support.

So, are we in a moment of change or not?  The point about renters and owners is well taken, it reminds me of plenty of discussion around tax day about the perils of the mortgage interest deduction.

Beyond these big, national-level policy questions, there’s plenty of room to debate the local impact.  Housing Complex notes that DC has lots of jobs (relatively) and high rents, circling back to the notion that the ability to change things won’t be uniform across the nation.  Places like DC are positioned well to make the transformation – provided the Federal framework enables these kinds of changes.

On that note, Aaron Renn looks at a potential city-friendly federal policy framework, emphasizing talent, innovation, and connection – looking at policy areas of transportation, housing, the environment, and immigration.  Perhaps the key takeaway is the requirement of flexibility – many of today’s problems stem from federal policies that are too rigid to be of much use in urban environments.

Density discussions: Density is good for cities.  It’s also often misunderstood and feared – see Roger Lewis’ calming of fears regarding smart growth.  A few posts on the subject:

  • Yonah Freemark questions whether streetcar suburb densities are enough to get real urbanism and transit use.
  • Aaron Renn asks if density is overrated for smaller cities, as they can still compete without it, taking advantage of highways and cars that work well at lower densities.
  • Cap’n Transit criticizes both thoughts, emphasizing the bigger picture about why we want to encourage urbanism and transit use in the first place – arguing that Renn’s rationalization isn’t helpful in the long run.

Miscellany:

Enjoy the journey

Metro-North Bar Car

The New York Times has a couple interesting pieces on transportation, one dealing with volcanoes and the other with booze.

First, the obligatory volcano story: Seth Stevenson thinks the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull and the subsequent shutdown of air travel across the continent offers an opportunity to really enjoy travel, rather than just flying over the landscape (and all the interesting stuff) at 35,000 feet.

In the five decades or so since jets became the dominant means of long-haul travel, the world has benefited immeasurably from the speed and convenience of air travel. But as Orson Welles intoned in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “The faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare.” Indeed, airplanes’ accelerated pace has infected nearly every corner of our lives. Our truncated vacation days and our crammed work schedules are predicated on the assumption that everyone will fly wherever they’re going, that anyone can go great distances and back in a very short period of time.

So we are condemned to keep riding on airplanes. Which is not really traveling. Airplanes are a means of ignoring the spaces in between your point of origin and your destination. By contrast, a surface journey allows you to look out on those spaces — at eye level and on a human scale, not peering down through breaks in the clouds from 35,000 feet above — from the observation car of a rolling train or the deck of a gently bobbing ship. Surface transport can be contemplative, picturesque and even enchanting in a way that air travel never will be.

Stevenson is so dedicated to this idea that he and his girlfriend successfully circumnavigated the globe without leaving the surface of the earth.

Stevenson’s admonishment of the jet age also stands in contrast to a piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, instructing us to ignore nostalgia for the golden years of airline travel.  Brett Snyder defends airline deregulation and the seemingly inevitable fees for carry on luggage as a further step into the purity of free markets.

I have a copy of TWA’s flight schedule from June 1, 1959. The first jets were being introduced into the fleet, but the vast majority of flights were still on propeller-driven aircraft. There’s an ad in the timetable for TWA’s low coast-to-coast “excursion fares.” Los Angeles to New York was only $168.40 roundtrip, if you traveled Monday through Thursday in Sky Club Coach class. That bargain is roughly equivalent to $1,225 today, before tax.

These fares weren’t valid on the fastest aircraft, so you had only two options, neither of which went nonstop. There was the 10:10 a.m. departure from Los Angeles that arrived in New York at 11:41 p.m. that night or the 7:55 p.m. departure that arrived at 10:56 a.m. the next day — more than 12 hours in the air. This was on a Lockheed Constellation, which, while beautiful, bounced you around in the weather at about 20,000 feet, far below the 35,000 to 40,000 feet you’d cruise at today. Even when the weather was good, that trademark prop vibration left you feeling like you were sitting on a washing machine for hours after you landed.

It is curious that Snyder chose to contrast today’s deregulated jet age with the age of turboprops – he could have easily picked a schedule from 1973 instead of 1959 – flying on a brand-new Boeing 747, rather than a dusty old Constellation – and at least been comparing jet-age apples to apples.

Still, the contrast between Stevenson’s nostalgia and Snyder’s rejection of is interesting, even if both are speaking toward different ends. Snyder writes about the benefits of market efficiency and competition for passengers, while Stevenson writes of enjoying the journey.

Perhaps there’s no greater way to enjoy the journey than to enjoy happy hour at the same time.  With that in mind, the New York Times writes about the endangered bar cars on Metro-North trains from Grand Central to Connecticut.

A new fleet of cars will soon replace the 1970s-era models now used by commuters on the Metro-North Railroad line heading to Connecticut. But with money tight, railroad officials said they could not yet commit themselves to a fresh set of bar cars, citing higher costs for the cars’ custom design.

“They’re being contemplated,” said Joseph F. Marie, Connecticut’s commissioner of transportation. “But we have not made any final decisions.”

Defenders of the boozy commute say it helps raise revenue: After expenses, bar cars and platform vendors made $1.5 million last year, up from $1.3 million in 2008. (Officials would not say if a bar car makes more money than a car with the normal number of seats.)

The Times note that fellow bar cars in Chicago, New Jersey, Westchester County, and the Long Island Railroad have all gone the way of the Dodo – though LIRR trains still occasionally have bar carts that make it on trains.

Modeled after the private club cars of the early 20th century, the Grand Central bar car sought to bring a perk of high society to the everyday commuting class. Still, the car’s current incarnation is more bar-around-the-corner than Tavern on the Green.

The cars tend to break down, air-conditioning is creaky, and commuters have been known to sneak duct tape aboard for impromptu repairs.

The article’s accompanying slide show has great historical images of the bar cars in action.

Economists for cities, density

CC image from urbanfeel on flickr

CC image from urbanfeel on flickr

Ed Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard, chimes in on cities, density, and their economic value on the Economix blog:

But now humanity is marked more by concentration than by spread. In 2007, one-half of the world’s population became officially urban. One-third of Americans inhabit just 16 large metropolitan areas, which collectively use only a tiny fraction of the country’s land mass…

Understanding the appeal of proximity — the economic advantages of agglomeration — helps make sense of the past and future of cities.   If people still clustered together primarily to reduce the costs of moving manufactured goods, then cities would become increasingly irrelevant as transportation costs continue to decline.

If cities serve, as I believe, primarily, to connect people and enable them to learn from one another, than an increasingly information-intensive economy will only make urban density more valuable.

Glaeser highlights several conclusions – including a key one that density increases productivity. Ryan Avent has harped on this before.  Any way you slice it, the end idea is that cities are the intellectual and economic hubs of our country.

Improvements in transportation and communication costs made it cost-effective to manufacture in low-cost areas, which led to the decline of older industrial cities like Detroit. But those same changes also increased the returns to innovation, and the free flow of ideas in cities make them natural hubs of innovation. Since the death of distance increased the scope for new innovation, idea-intensive innovating cities were helped by the same forces that hurt goods-producing cities.

Humanity is a social species and our greatest gift is our ability to learn from one another. Cities thrive by enabling that learning, and they have become only more important as knowledge has become more valuable. Understanding what makes cities work is more important than ever.

In order to avoid alienating groups on political grounds, it’s worth noting that we’re talking about cities, broadly defined.   Just as the focus on urban, walkable places is an urban design distinction rather than a political one, the benefits of urban agglomerations are regional.  Design matters, of course – I’d be curious to see if an economist could measure if economic benefits of agglomeration can be attributed to any other characteristics other than density.

Streetcar smackdown watch

Over the last few days, the Washington Post featured a number of streetcar pieces.  First, Lisa Rein laid out the basis for the debate on overhead wires.  The Post’s editorial board then chastised all the players to find a realistic and reasonable solution.

Today’s print edition features two pieces delving deeper into how streetcars fit into the mold of historic preservation, urbanism, and urban untidiness.  The first comes from Adam Irish, a member of the DC Preservation League and a volunteer at the DC Historic Preservation Office.  Irish starts by marking the difference between those who seek to preserve urbanism and those that seek to preserve DC’s monumentality above all else:

This kerfuffle is about more than just ugly wires, however. It gets to the heart of an old and familiar conflict over how Washingtonians and Americans at large envision the city. In its coverage, The Post has referred to opponents of wires as “preservationists,” but I think “D.C. monumentalists” better describes their stance. For the monumentalist, Washington, D.C., the city comes second to Washington, D.C., the sanitized and photogenic capital.

The monumentalist vision of Washington has choked nearly all urban life from the Mall and its environs. It has fashioned large sections of our city into pleasing vistas for tourists but has given the rest of us lifeless wastelands (if you’ve ever stepped foot outside at L’Enfant Plaza, you know what I’m talking about).

Urban life and urban form isn’t always pretty.  In fact, the sometimes-messy complexity is part of what makes cities such interesting places to live in.  Spiro Kostof described it as “energized crowding,” a kind of messiness that’s inherent to creativity and day to day life.  This isn’t to discredit the formalism of Washington’s City Beautiful aesthetic – merely asserting that such monumentalism shouldn’t trump all other facets of urbanism.

Philip Kennicott expands on those themes in his piece, also running in Sunday’s print edition:

If you listen to preservationists, the most ardent of whom oppose any overhead wires in the city, you might think Washington was loaded with great vistas. And it is, but not the awe-inspiring views they’re thinking about, which turn out to be fairly few and often not that impressive. Even down our wide avenues, sightlines tend to terminate in small monuments that are best seen up close.

The great views down the streets of Washington are just coming into their full glory as the leaves of spring return. These aren’t wide-open vistas with monumental buildings in the far distance; they are tunnel-like views of shaded streets, overarched by majestic elms, oaks and maples. These shady tubes of green, which are rare in newer and suburban neighborhoods, are the truly distinctive beauty of Washington. The only reasonable concern about running overhead wires should be the protection of trees that create these glorious canopies.

Nobody in this debate would argue that overhead wires look good, but too often the debate is framed in either/or terms – either the wires are ugly or they are not.  Kennicott addresses this false dichotomy as well:

Arguments against overhead wires rest on two essential assumptions: that the city is filled with streets that have historically significant and aesthetically impressive views; and that wires and poles would be ugly intrusions on these grand vistas. The former is questionable, the latter a matter of opinion.

The point about wires obstructing views that don’t always exist is a good one.  As noted, DC’s canopy of street trees is a legacy worth protecting, yet these same trees (on, say, East Capitol street) make for a wonderful streetscape – but at the cost of forgoing views of the Capitol Dome beyond a few blocks.

East Capitol dome view

Google street view of Capitol Dome (it's in there somewhere) from East Capitol Street, near 4th Street.

This isn’t to say that wires wouldn’t obstruct this view – but the key point is that the streetcar plan does not propose to obstruct these types of views with wires at all.  Kennicott hammers on this point, noting that the current plans do not include major obstructions, both by avoiding major view corridors and considering the fact that wire ‘obstruction’ is relatively minor.  Like the trees that line many of these grand avenues, the positive benefits of the streetcars vastly outweigh the negative costs.

The takeaway message from all of these articles should be that a reasonable compromise – a hybrid of wires and battery power to protect key viewsheds – is both realistic and palatable to most Washingtonians.

The easy oil is almost gone

CC image from StuffEyeSee

CC image from StuffEyeSee

So says the Department of Defense:

The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.

The implications for urban planning and transportation are huge.  Part of the big push for a VMT tax instead of merely raising the gas tax stems from the macro-level supply and demand issues.  Seeing crude oil prices spike would almost certainly lead to a drop in consumer demand for gasoline, thus lowering gas tax revenues.   Add in mandated improvements in fuel efficiency for cars and light trucks, and the long-term stability of the gas tax as a funding source doesn’t seem that robust.

Certainly, there are many other potential implications, but this long-term funding issue ought to be front and center in the current debate over how to fund transportation.

Olympic Investments

CC image from marcmo

CC image from marcmo

Several weeks ago, Colorado released an ambitious high speed rail plan.  The $21 billion plan would feature two trunk lines: one running north-south connecting the cities along the Front Range, and the other running east-west along the I-70 corridor connecting Denver International to the state’s mountain ski resorts.   Colorado’s ski resorts along I-70 are a crucial economic engine for the state, but the interstate is jammed on the weekends.  Mountain geography provides an ideal choke point for successful rail transit, as there simply is no room for I-70 to expand, and adding capacity on alternate routes would only induce more demand.

At the Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark notes that such a large investment might make sense for Colorado, but isn’t a national priority.  These ideas sneak forward in the absence of a national high speed rail plan.

Enter the Olympic Games.   David Williams at the Colorado Independent sees the prospect of the 2022 Winter Olympics as the catalyst to encourage some long-range transportation vision for the state.

Denver was awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics, only to later reject via referendum the funding to pay for the required infrastructure, forcing the IOC to award the ’76 Games to recent host Innsbruck.  Thanks to this slight, it’s not certain the IOC would ever award the Games to Denver again – to say nothing of the recent feud between US officials and the IOC.

Nevertheless, at least the prospect of winning the Games has Colorado thinking big and long term.   Vancouver stands to benefit from multiple infrastructure investments in the run-up to the 2010 Games, and perhaps Colorado can do the same – even if their corridors are not a national priority.