Monthly Archives: August 2012

Buying into the urban ‘myth’

Williamsburg Bridge. CC image from Kev Gilmour

(Building off the previous post, in response to this Atlantic Cities piece)

If Feargus O’Sullivan isn’t really moving to a “suburb” as his article is entitled, but rather to a different urban neighborhood – then what’s the reasoning behind this?  O’Sullivan complains about  “hype” and “supposed edginess and creative ferment”, instead arguing that they are “increasingly as banal, antisocial and plain dull as any suburb.”

Maybe I’m reading too much into O’Sullivan’s piece – it’s one thing to be a lament over a supposedly cool place not living up to the hype, or for a personal experience in a place to fall short. Drawing conclusions beyond that seems dubious, but nevertheless interesting fodder for discussion.

So, is this really an indictment of urbanism, or just one of hype?  O’Sullivan’s complaint is focused on “fashionable” neighborhoods, and given the fact that O’Sullivan’s destination in the suburbs isn’t really all that suburban (or, rather, it’s quite urban under a reasonably broad understanding of the term).  This makes me want to discount the idea that it’s the city – rather, the critique seems to be focused about what’s cool.

Some quotes:

For all their reputation as hives of individuality, neighborhoods like my own city’s Broadway Market offer almost identical businesses to those you’d find in currently hip city neighborhoods anywhere.  While the base materials (streets and houses) may be different in, say, NYC’s Greenpoint, Berlin’s Neukölln, or Madrid’s Malasaña, the trappings of gentrification – expensive coffee and bike shops, junk sold at a premium as “vintage” and, soon after, bitterly resented chain outlets – make these places seem increasingly homogenous.

So, it’s about gentrification.

Even accepting this description of the problem seems to be setting up a straw man to be beaten down, however.  O’Sullivan claims “people are being asked to buy into an urban myth whose claims don’t always stand up to scrutiny.”  Are they really?  Are people really being asked to buy in to this?  Or perhaps, do they just want the basic characteristics presented by the physical urban environment?

As O’Sullivan delves into “the myth’s central tenets,” he cites the idea of creative people living near the heart of the city.  However, his definition of ‘creative’ is awfully narrow, limited to “starving artists, wannabe writers, thinkers, eccentrics, [and] aesthetes.”  But we know (through empirical evidence) that innovation and density are linked.  O’Sullivan admits this is a narrow definition (both of creativity and, previously, of urbanism), but points out that his myth holds out for “more exciting neighbours.”  This seems to be a critique not of the places O’Sullivan visits, but of the trendiness that colors his experience.

Indeed, what is the actual myth here? At Salon, Will Doig writes about Williamsburg, Brooklyn, asking: “Are urban bohemias, you know, so over?”   Doig notes”Pre-hipster Williamsburg was a neighborhood of working-class ethnic groups, crack dealers and violence — but also, crucially, post-industrial vacancy: boarded-up factories, weed-choked lots, an abandoned waterfront, train tracks to nowhere.” The answer draws on a similar line from an Atlantic piece by Benjamin Schwarz entitled Gentrification and its Discontents, noting similar critiques from other authors:

He doesn’t recognize that the SoHo he yearns for was precisely the product of that rapid industrial decline, which made economically available to artists and their hangers-on all those cool industrial spaces that in more industrially vibrant times would have been used by, well, industry.

Despite these lamentations about the change of the city (which Doig’s piece notes wouldn’ve been unthinkable for a city-dweller in the 1920s – particularly if one reads Robert Fogelson’s Downtown), Doig closes with this from the gentrifying ‘hood:

As the neighborhood begins to upscale in a way that fills Anasi with dismay, Napoleon opens Williamsburg’s first proper lounge and rides the crest of the transformation with purpose. His swanky club becomes a smash hit, and helps create a whole new scene on the sleepy south side. Moreover, it gives the young entrepreneur — a poor kid of color from a dangerous neighborhood — a chance at a life he might not have otherwise had.

Given the larger scale economic processes, it’s hard to understand what these writers are making a big deal out of, whether it’s a myth of urbanism or some sense of authenticity.  On one hand, O’Sullivan’s embrace of a less-cool neighborhood would seem to undermine the fears of a lost bohemia and instead embrace the idea of a large pent-up demand for urban living of all stripes, myth or not.

‘Suburb:’ an increasingly worthless term

1954 GMC Suburban Ad - CC image from Alden Jewell

Hot of the presses last week at The Atlantic Cities was a piece from Feargus O’Sullivan entitled “Why I Moved Back to the Suburbs.”  Without touching on the reasons for O’Sullivan to make that move, the very premise depends on what you call a suburb.  As it turns out, O’Sullivan’s destination ‘burb isn’t really all that suburban to my view of the term:

 I should point out here that London’s outer districts are quite different from the average American suburb. For a start, they’re often pretty old – areas built no later than the 1930s still abut fields along some stretches of the city’s limits. They also tend to have medium rather than low population density, with decent transport links and broad, walkable sidewalks that mean car ownership is desirable but not essential. What they share with the U.S. however is their sprawl and their reputation for conformity – it’s often said that it was the dullness of suburbs a few miles beyond mine that helped spawnBritain’s Punk movement.

I don’t know that those ‘burbs are all that different from similarly aged American suburbs around the nation’s primary city, either. The further descriptors only serve to emphasize how useless the term ‘suburb’ is – this place has the key qualities of moderately dense development, strong transit links, and a walkable urban design.  If you were to ask someone in the US to identify a place with those characteristics without using the label, I’ll bet the responses would identify outlying urban neighborhoods with good access to the city – or, in other words, places that most would call ‘urban.’

So, to get value out of the word ‘suburb’ it would help to define it in terms of characteristics (similar to this exercise in defining sprawl and using the term for more than just outward patterns of development). O’Sullivan isn’t the only one to fall for this.  Joel Kotkin is notorious for praising the virtues of the suburbs while conjuring visions of Levittowns, while his analysis hinges on the political definition of a suburb (and all of the arbitrary boundaries therein) and ends up lumping Levittowns and McMansions in with Jersey City.  And it isn’t just political boundaries – Cap’n Transit notes that the New York Times has called the Upper West Side suburban in the past.

Cap’n Transit also hits on the need to define these places in terms of the characteristics, rather than just relying on the label:

The problem is that there are several features of suburbs that catch our attention more than whether they are within the city limits. We often essentialize these features and assume that all suburbs are that way. When someone says “suburb” they may actually be referring to just a few of those features, or even a single one.

I don’t know if I agree with Cap’n’s categories, but it does raise the issue of separating broad categories of key characteristics:  There physical factors, relating to density, design, land use, location, the built and natural environments, etc. – and I would posit that the physical factors are mostly the same as those used to define sprawl, just with different positions on the continuum of choices.  There are social and economic factors, covering race/ethnicity, language, income, wealth, jobs, etc.  There are network factors as well, looking at links to the core city, considering modes of transport and the quality of the links.  I suppose there’s also a category for institutional considerations, perhaps including those arbitrary political boundaries and other quirks of governance.

No matter what term you want to use as the sum of those characteristics, at least the characteristics tell a more complete story.  The New Urbanist transect model helps refine the thinking on some of these issues – at least with regard to the physical, built environment.  That said, the transect zone labeled as “sub-urban” (T-3) wouldn’t match the terminology used by others in different contexts.

Towards a DC S-Bahn

S-Bahn logo. From wiki.

This week, Greater Greater Washington has run a series of posts on the hurdles to implementing through-routed commuter rail services in DC. The technical reasons include many basic incompatibilities between the region’s two commuter railroads (MARC and VRE), ranging from type of locomotion to platform height, as well as the infrastructural shortcomings of DC’s rail infrastructure to handle high frequency transit-like operations.

Lost in the wash, however, is the reason to do this.  The reasons are two-fold: First, through-routed service expands the transit network relatively inexpensively, offering mobility benefits to current and future riders.  Second, such a service (and the technical changes required to implement it) help solve some of the other challenges of DC’s commuter rail network (such as insufficient storage capacity at Union Station for trains to layover mid-day). Through-running is both a means to an end as well as an end itself.

This isn’t exactly a new concept, as it has been raised in numerous places over the years:

Plus the southern intentions of intercity rail:

CSX’s plans for increasing freight traffic will also mean added capacity through DC, with implications for passenger rail.

None of these plans hints at even the possibility of the kind of S-Bahn integration potential that through-routing unlocks.

The goal should be to turn the core of DC’s commuter rail network into a system like Germany’s S-Bahns (touched on previously here and here).  David Alpert essentially suggested the same thing with his conception of the ‘Metro Express.’  The level of service would be more like rapid transit than commuter rail.  The geographic extent might not be as expansive as the current commuter rail network (there’s no sense in running rapid transit to Martinsburg, WV) but those outer extensions could easily be serviced by a service that mirrors today’s commuter rail.  The core of the network (say, to Woodbridge in the south, Manassas in the west, Germantown or even Frederick to the north, and Baltimore to the east) would see higher frequencies, through-routed service, and all-day, full week service.

One common characteristic of S-Bahns is the use of interlining and shared tracks in the core of the system (this Wiki diagram illustrates), where interlining produces short headways on the shared portion while the outer parts receive less frequent service due to the branching of the network. The three MARC lines feeding DC, each running on 30 minute headways would combine for 6 tph in the shared segment (Union Station to Alexandria).

VRE’s timetable shows Alexandria-L’Enfant at about 17 minuntes; Alexandria-Union Station at about 25 minutes.   There’s room for massive improvement here – Metro’s trip planner shows King Street to Union Station (Yellow to Red) as 20 minutes on Yellow, 4 minutes on Red; King Street to L’Enfant Plaza is the same 17 minutes on the Yellow line.

Give a DC S-Bahn transit-like service and that can be reduced.  Electric multiple unit trains would accelerate faster; level boarding and more frequent service would shorten station dwells; etc. Then, the commuter rail infrastructure would function as a key part of the region’s rapid transit network.

 

Green vs. gray – two sides of the same coin

DC Water's Blue Plains waste water treatment facility. CC image from erin m.

While perusing Twitter (hat tip to Jeff Wood), I came across this Guardian article about urban uses of natural processes to do the dirty work of urban pollution mitigation.  The piece discusses all types of green infrastructure and the natural processes they emulate, such as bio-filtration. I’ve taken note of local examples before, but the phrasing of their summary of the concept caught my eye:

Gray infrastructure is the system of pipes and ditches that channel storm water. Green infrastructure is the harnessing of the natural processes of trees and other vegetation — so-called ecosystem services — to carry out the functions of the built systems. Green infrastructure often intercepts the water before it can run into streets and become polluted and stores the water for gradual release through percolation or evapotranspiration. Trees also clean dirty water through natural filtering functions.

While drawing the contrast between green and gray infrastructures, the idea of “harnessing… natural processes” sparked a memory of this extensive summary from Mammoth of DC’s Blue Plains wastewater treatment facility – gray infrastructure on a massive scale.  In describing what goes on at Blue Plains, they note “the process of waste water treatment mimics — in an accelerated fashion — the natural cleaning processes of waterbodies.” The accompanying footnote:

Scott Huler explains this in his fascinating On the Grid, quoting a Raleigh wastewater treatment superintendent T.J. Lynch:

“All we’re doing is what a river would do… what happens in our plant  is the exact same thing that happens in a stream. That’s exactly where the process came from. We’ve just concentrated it. It might take the river a couple hundred miles to accomplish what we’d do in a couple days.”

Figuring out where any given piece of green infrastructure might fall in the spectrum from a naturally occurring ecology to a engineered technology is an interesting mental exercise. Rhetoric about sustainability aside, the same physical process is occurring using mostly similar mechanisms.

HSR and the Aerotropolis

Frankfurt Airport long-distance rail station - CC image from Heidas on Wiki

Alon Levy has a post up about the potential for high speed rail to fulfill the goals of ‘decongesting’ US airports. Alon looks at origin/destination pairs and compares the flight time to comparable HSR ranges where the technology has a chance to offer a superior travel time.

The takeaway is that the benefits for airport relief are likely bigger in California than they would be in the Northeast Corridor.  Assuming a fully built out rail system, this makes some intuitive sense: California’s big cities are arranged somewhat linearly along the coast/central valley, just as the NEC cities do along the fall line.  The big difference would appear to be the proximity of other cities – much of the California air traffic is intra-California travel:

Anonymouse in comments brings a good point about the distribution of short-haul travel within airport systems: there is often proportionately more of it at the secondary airports…

The five LA-area airports between them have 27.5% of their domestic traffic within 3-hour radius, but this splits as 21% at LAX, 35% at Long Beach, 37% at Santa Ana, 40% at Ontario, and 63% at Burbank. The three Bay Area airports between them have 19% of their domestic traffic going to LA and a total of 35% within 5-hour train radius, but this splits as 14% and 29% at SFO, 27% and 48% at San Jose, and 35% and 57% at Oakland.

In California, this isn’t a surprise, as SFO and LAX are the big international hubs.  In the Bay Area, SFO is next to the proposed line, but LAX is not.  Translating that to the NEC is different, however.  One element is adjacency – the NEC (or a short extension thereof) runs directly next to DCA, BWI, PHL, and EWR – of which only EWR is a major international hub.

This raises a few issues for HSR trips substituting for flights:  will HSR replace an entire trip, or just one leg of a trip?  If HSR is going to replace one leg of a trip, how easy does the HSR-Airport transfer have to be?  What kinds of trips would make sense for this kind of transfer, and are the best airports positioned along the line to handle them?

On the domestic/short haul flights, commenter Anonymouse writes:

In the Bay Area at least, there’s been a slow tendency for flights to get more concentrated at SFO, with OAK and SJC having mostly domestic flights, and most of those short hauls operated by Southwest. With an HSR line to LA, each of OAK and SJC can easily lose a quarter of its passengers overnight, and with good connections to San Diego, Las Vegas, and Reno, that could become half of all their traffic. SFO and LAX would lose some of their existing passengers, obviously, but not as many, thanks to the fact that they’re hubs. And that means that airlines are more likely to cut flights at the secondary airports, rather than SFO, thus filling the SFO capacity right back up with the passengers displaced from the secondary airports.

On the NEC, a similar retrenchment to the big airports would mean more traffic at IAD, EWR, and JFK.  These three are the busiest international airports along the NEC.  Dulles in particular is one of the few with room to grow, and grow substantially.  The one problem: Dulles (like JFK) isn’t adjacent to the NEC.

Maybe the more interesting case is DCA.  With no international facilities (save for border pre-clearance cities), DCA’s traffic is virtually all domestic.  DCA’s old noise-related perimeter rule also limits most of the destinations to a 1,250 mile radius.  The wiki summary of domestic destinations shows several ripe for rail substitutions (in bold):

Busiest Domestic Routes from DCA (May 2011 – April 2012)[26]
Rank Airport Passengers Carriers
1 Atlanta, Georgia 828,000 AirTran, Delta
2 Chicago (O’Hare), Illinois 697,000 American, United
3 Boston, Massachusetts 685,000 Delta, JetBlue, US Airways
4 Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas 489,000 American, US Airways
5 Miami, Florida 449,000 American
6 New York (LaGuardia), New York 362,000 Delta, US Airways
7 Orlando, Florida 350,000 AirTran, Delta, JetBlue, US Airways
8 Fort Lauderdale, Florida 315,000 JetBlue, Spirit, US Airways
9 Charlotte, North Carolina 294,000 US Airways
10 Houston, Texas 264,000 United

The same data for BWI:

Busiest domestic routes from BWI (May 2011 – April 2012)[33]
Rank City Passengers Airline(s)
1 Atlanta, Georgia 720,000 AirTran, Delta, Southwest
2 Boston, Massachusetts 549,000 AirTran, JetBlue, Southwest
3 Charlotte, North Carolina 483,000 AirTran, US Airways
4 Orlando, Florida 463,000 AirTran, Southwest
5 Detroit, Michigan 342,000 Delta, Southwest
6 Tampa, Florida 301,000 AirTran, Southwest
7 Denver, Colorado 294,000 Southwest, United
8 Providence, Rhode Island 293,000 Southwest
9 Fort Lauderdale, Florida 283,000 AirTran, Southwest
10 Manchester, NH 273,000 Southwest

These two airports would seem to be the candidates to see a lot of rail trip substitution, with Dulles remaining the region’s predominant international hub.

Again, the problem is that Dulles is not along the NEC, preventing the kind of air/rail connection you see in Frankfurt or in Paris.  Or, look at the top destination for both DCA and BWI – Atlanta.  Given Atlanta’s massive hub status, what kind of air-rail connection would be required to get passengers to use the train for the first leg of that journey? Making the connection to get an international flight at Frankfurt is one thing, but doing so in Atlanta is another – particularly if the rail and air terminals are not co-located.

Having a great HSR-Airport station at DCA or BWI is relatively easy (compared to, say, IAD).  Alon makes this observation about California:

Note, by the way, how California is planning the Oakland Airport Connector and considering an HSR station at Burbank Airport instead of downtown Burbank. Because if there’s one place Californians would really need to use HSR to get to, it’s an airport 63% of whose traffic competes with HSR.

Now, a DCA rail station has far more potential that just serving the airport (it would essentially replace the current Crystal City VRE station and could easily offer pedestrian connections to both Crystal City and to National Airport), and it would be far more than just the massive parking garage that is the BWI rail station.  Burbank (~2.5 million passengers a year) also isn’t anywhere near National Airport (~18 million passengers a year). So, what might the future look like for DCA and BWI in an age of ubiquitous HSR? Alon offers one possibility:

For New York, the best things that can be done then are to use larger planes on domestic flights, and find relief airports. In Japan, the domestic flights use widebodies, sometimes even 747s, and this has enabled Tokyo-Sapporo to grow to become the world’s highest-capacity air city pair. In the US there are more airlines and the city pairs are less thick, but there is still room for larger planes than 737s and 757s.

Changing DCA’s perimeter restriction could plausibly open the door to such a change, though security and airfield restrictions limit that to some degree. (Boeing did recently bring a 787 into DCA for display, and Delta did operate 767s into DCA to add passenger capacity prior to the Obama inauguration – would’ve been fun to be at Gravelly Point for that.) Larger planes, and potentially different destinations – if HSR changes the distribution of the airline hub model.

Commenter Jonathan English offers a competing hypothesis:

Unfortunately, major American airlines (compared with European and Asian airlines) are obsessed with frequency. They believe that they will only attract business travellers if they offer many flights per day, in many cases hourly or even more. This means that even if high-speed rail really eats into the number of people flying, airlines may just compensate by down-gauging from 737s and 320s to regional jets. They’ll still operate just as many flights and put the same pressure on runways.

Given the importance of frequency to transit, complaining about frequent air service might seem a bit ungrateful, but air travel isn’t really like transit.  Due to limited capacity and security, you must schedule in advance. Security, logistics, and airport location demands an early arrival.

Predicting what the air travel marketplace will look like in this hypothetical scenario is somewhat pointless – what if oil prices spike? What if there is political action on global warming resulting in a carbon tax or something like it? Air travel will most certainly still have a major (and a high value) role in linking these places, but exactly which places are linked could easily be disrupted.

Updating the reading list

CC image from sabeth718

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the reading list, so I’ve added several new (and several old) reads to the list. I also kept the link to my old (and no-longer supported) Google Reader shared items feed, while also adding the full del.ici.ous links feed.

I’ve got a few more books on my bookshelf that I’d like to add to the list.  Any suggestions for books/content to add?

Cities and the constructal law

CC image from Other Think

Several months ago, I picked up a copy of Design in Nature as an impulse buy at the bookstore. I was purchasing a gift and the cover caught my eye. A quick perusal of the jacket and a few pages of the introduction was enough for me to fork over the cash.  I didn’t get around to reading it until I had several airline flights this summer (with the accompanying missed connections) to dig into the book.

The basic premise of the book is that the similarities we see in nature (why trees and lightning bolts and river deltas share the same branch-like architecture) isn’t a coincidence, and it certainly isn’t the result of divine inspiration.  Rather, these similarities are explained via thermodynamics and the ‘constructal law‘ as coined by the author, Adrian Bejan.  The law states: “For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.”

In short, the flow systems and the laws of physics that govern them influence those similarities in design. From the wiki summary:

The constructal law represents three steps toward making “design in nature” a concept and law-based domain in science:

  1. Life is flow: all flow systems are live systems, the animate and the inanimate.
  2. Design generation and evolution is a phenomenon of physics.
  3. Designs have the universal tendency to evolve in a certain direction in time.[2]

The constructal law is a first principle of physics that accounts for all design and evolution in nature. It holds that shape and structure arises to facilitate flow. The designs that arise spontaneously in nature reflect this tendency: they allow entities to flow more easily – to measurably move more current farther and faster for less unit of useful energy consumed.[3] Rain drops, for example, coalesce and move together, generating rivulets, streams and the mighty river basins of the world because this design allows them to move more easily. The constructal law asks the question: Why does this design arise at all? Why can’t the water just seep through the ground? The constructal law provides this answer: Because the water flows better with design. The constructal law covers the tendency of nature to generate designs to facilitate flow.

Reading the book, I thought back to previous examples of similar observations of cities:

  • The similarities of subway networks across multiple cities (linked previously here)
  • The work of Geoffrey West on a universal theory of cities (also here), economies of scale and the benefits of agglomeration
  • Jarrett Walker’s analogies of transit systems as rivers (both here and here), particularly with the usefulness of drawing out key principles (e.g. ‘branching divides frequency’).
  • Any number of urban economic studies of agglomeration, innovation, and human capital – studying the flows of information in cities (examples here, here, and here, among many others)

Jarrett Walker’s recent Email of the Month post sparked me to write this.  Walker’s emailer, Kenny Easwaran, notes:

At the time, I was thinking of the various transportation systems we know of that aren’t designed by humans.  The main examples I could think of were things within the human body, and I noticed that things like the circulatory systems of animals and plants, and the digestive system of animals, seem to follow somewhat different trajectories from grids.  In particular, they either have a branching tree structure, or something more like an extended linear structure.

Having recently finished Adrian Bejan’s book on constructal theory, the analogy to tree-like systems immediately caught my eye. For me, Bejan’s description of all of these phenomena as flow systems ruled by common principles of physics helps shape my thinking, even if it is a bit vague.  Walker’s analogies of transit networks to rivers is a similar case.