Tag Archives: Metro

Links: iPhones and airports

CC image from Yutaka Tsutano

Rail to Dulles: MWAA Board member Robert Brown suggests eliminating the Dulles Airport rail station and replacing it with a people mover to connect to the Route 28 station as a means to save costs.  Yonah Freemark finds the concept intriguing, offering some operational considerations that could make it work.

However, the notion that building an entirely new landside people mover system will save money is ludicrous (IAD’s AeroTrain just clocked in at $1.4 billion). Likewise, while the concept would be an interesting solution to connecting an existing airport to an existing rail link (such as between BWI and the BWI rail station), the fact that the rail line has not yet built is a perfect opportunity to ensure that the airport itself is ‘on the way,’ to borrow Jarrett Walker’s terminology.

Freemark notes that one benefit of this concept would be to reduce travel time to the core and/or Tysons, but several other concepts considered by Metro would probably provide more utility to larger areas of service.

Meanwhile, Dulles offers a connection to the world via it’s ‘accidental aerotropolis.’

iPhones and agglomerations:  When I last touched on the Aerotropolis, I noted Aaron Renn’s observation that the book isn’t so much about airports and cities as it is about globalization.  One such element is the extensive description of the extraordinary agglomeration of manufacturing infrastructure and firms in Shenzhen.

This weekend’s New York Times contains a lengthy article on why the iPhone and other similar devices are not manufactured in the United States.  In his blog, Paul Krugman sums up that article in one word: agglomeration. Some key snippets from the article:

But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

Since we’re talking about iPhones and not cheap Christmas ornaments, the availability of materials and the skill of the labor is more important than the cost of that labor – all benefits of the large agglomeration of technology firms in Shenzhen.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

More thoughts on iPhones, agglomerations, and jobs from Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen.

Likewise, an interesting set of charts looking at market share for various computing platforms – starting from more traditional personal computers, but eventually adding in smartphones and tablets.  While smartphones and tablets aren’t yet substitutes for a personal computer, they’re getting closer.

Station Domination: via Tyler Cowen, an interesting post from Matt Glassman on the cost of Metro station advertising and the linkages between national politics and the local transit system.

In need of a good decongestant:  Housing Complex takes a look at slight optimism from COG staffers on de-congestion pricing, and makes note of a lengthy Washingtonian piece on the subject.

The evolution of infrastructure: 4-track subways and parking decks

With Rail~volution complete, several recaps of conference sessions have sparked some interesting discussion.  One panel posed the hypothetical question – what would DC look like today if we had never built Metro?

WMATA’s Nat Bottigheimer emphasized the linkage between high capacity rapid transit and the ability to support dense urban development, drawing a contrast to the spatial inefficiency of automobile-based systems:

Bottigheimer gave an analogue for Washington, DC, saying that the parking needed to serve all the cars that would come in place of Metro could fill the entire area from 12th to 23rd Streets, Constitution to R (including the White House) with 5-story parking decks.

That’s a lot pf parking.  It’s an absurd amount, really – but it shouldn’t be a surprise.  Consider an auto-oriented business district like Tysons Corner:

Tysons’ dependence on the automobile, and a place to park it, is dramatic when compared with other areas. With about 120,000 jobs, Tysons features nearly half again as many parking spots in structures, underground and in surface lots. That’s more parking, 40 million square feet, than office space, 28 million square feet. Tysons boasts more spaces, 167,000, than downtown Washington, 50,000, which has more than twice as many jobs.

Of course, downtown DC never would’ve developed in such a fashion.  Bottigheimer’s hypothetical is meant to draw a contrast rather than represent a plausible alternate universe.  Never the less, the ratio of space devoted to parking compared to space devoted to other stuff (offices, retail, housing, etc) is striking.  An auto-based transportation system requires the devotion of half of your space to just the terminal capacity for the car.

While acknowledging Metro’s power to shape development and growth when paired with appropriate land use and economic development policies, the GGW discussion turned (as it often does) to Metro’s constraints.  Several commenters ask – why not four tracks like New York?  Why not have express service?

Sample of Midtown Manhattan track maps from nycsubway.org

New York’s four-track trunk lines are indeed impressive pieces of infrastructure, but it’s worth remembering that they are essentially the second system of rapid transit in the city.  New York did not build those four-track lines from scratch, they built them to replace an extensive network of elevated trains. Consider the changes from 1904 (left), to 1932 (center), to present (right):

Red lines are elevateds, blue lines are subways – source images from Wikipedia. The process of replacing older elevated trains with subways is clear, particularly in Manhattan and around Downtown Brooklyn. The relevance to DC is that four-track subway lines don’t just happen.  The circumstances in New York that desired to get rid of most of the elevated tracks provided an opportunity to rebuild all of New York’s transit infrastructure.  Metro is not provided with such an opportunity.  Adding express tracks to the existing system would require essentially rebuilding the entire system, and without a compelling reason to do so (such as New York’s removal of Els), it’s simply not going to happen – no matter if it were a good idea and a cost-effective idea or not.

Perhaps the single biggest opportunity for an express level of service would be the conversion of MARC and VRE into a through-running S-Bahn-like transit service. Portions of the Red Line do indeed have four tracks – its just that two of them are for freight and commuter rail.  Likewise, should there be future expansion of Metro within the core (such as a separated Blue line) there would be the opportunity to study making such a tunnel a four-track line.  That concept would have to include a number of different ideas, however – future expansions to link into that capacity, surface/subway hybrid service for streetcar (such as in Philadelphia or San Francisco), etc.

Weekend reading

DC-Streetcars-Planned-Streetcar-Radius-Map

Excuse my timing on this, as this doesn’t leave much weekend to play with – but here are some items worth noting from the previous week or so:

Streetcars bridge the gaps: Yonah Freemark has an excellent post on DC’s evolving streetcar network and its ability to fill the gaps in Metro’s network.  Yonah’s excellent visuals (as usual) help frame the discussion.

New maps: New York gets a new map – Second Ave Sagas has the breakdown.  The map decreases clutter, though nothing compared to the more schematic designs for other systems.

Metro too cluttered: Speaking of clutter, Massimo Vignelli thinks Metro’s gotten too cluttered since he and Harry Weese came up with the signage scheme for the system decades ago.

Congestion pricing:

Grid vs. Sac: David Alpert notes a (perhaps the only) redeeming quality of the cul de sac; Jarret Walker notes the many advantages of gridded street networks.

Value capture & private transit financing

NoMA Development. CC image from bankbryan.

NoMA Development. CC image from bankbryan.

Jarrett Walker’s weekend links post directed me to this article in The Atlantic by Chris Leinberger, asking if we might return to the days when private interests invested in transit as a means to facilitate real estate development.  Our own urban history is one of linked transportation and land use planning, accomplished through the market and real estate development:

How did the country afford that extensive rail system? Real-estate developers, sometimes aided by electric utilities, not only built the systems but paid rent to the cities for the rights-of-way.

These developers included Henry Huntington, who built the Pacific Electric in Los Angeles; Minnesota’s Thomas Lowry, who built Twin City Rapid Transit; and Senator Francis Newlands from Nevada, who built Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Railway up Connecticut Avenue from Dupont Circle in the 1890s. When Newlands got into the rail-transit business, he wasn’t drawn by the profit potential of streetcars. He was a real-estate developer, and he owned 1,700 acres between Dupont Circle and suburban Chevy Chase in Maryland, land served by his streetcar line. The Rock Creek Railway did not make any money, but it was essential to attracting buyers to Newlands’s housing developments. In essence, Newlands subsidized the railway with the profits from his land development. He and other developers of the time understood that transportation drives development—and that development has to subsidize transportation.

The result of these transportation and real estate investments were the now ubiquitous streetcar suburbs.  Leinberger proposes to return to that model, where the value added to a given area of land from transit can be re-captured through some means and invested in the transportation network.

When the streetcar/real estate barons controlled the entire system, such value capture was merely an exercise in accounting.  Additionally, the ease of developing greenfield sites on the rapidly expanding fringe of the city (Leinberger’s DC example of growth along Newlands’ Connecticut Ave rail line represents the first real urbanization of that space) makes things much simpler than dealing with already established urban environments.

With those key differences in mind, Jarrett throws a wet blanket over Leinberger’s nostalgia for the way things used to be. Rightly, Jarrett notes that we won’t be able to re-create the environment of those private real estate and transportation investments.

Nevertheless, Leinberger is talking about a broader concept – one of leveraging the value transit has and capturing that value as a means to finance the infrastructure itself.  Jarrett’s follow-up on the subject concurs – the same basic concept of capturing that value is the core of the issue.

Leinberger cites a of local example, the New York Avenue Metro station and the subsequent development of the NoMA area:

How would the private funding of public transit work? Most states already have laws in place that allow local groups of voters to create “special-assessment districts,” in which neighborhood property owners can vote to fund an upgrade to infrastructure by charging themselves, say, a onetime assessment, or a higher property-tax rate for some number of years. If a majority of the property owners believe they would benefit from the improvement, all property owners in that district are obligated to help pay for it. These districts can vote to fund new transit as well (potentially, the transportation-financing agency could even receive a minority-ownership stake in the district’s private property in return for building new transit). In the late 1990s, property owners paid for a quarter of the cost of a new Metrorail station in D.C. using this approach; after the station opened, an office developer told me he believed his investment was being returned manyfold.

The idea of a transit or government agency owning a stake in real estate development is another interesting idea – Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation both operates the rail system and develops/manages real estate around stations.   However, vesting this kind of authority in the government can be problematic, as mixing of eminent domain capabilities and the desire for private, transit-oriented real estate development can be a touchy subject, as some experience from Colorado shows.

Existing mechanisms for value capture, such as tax-increment financing (again, as Jarret notes) do work, but are limited.  As one of the commenters at The Atlantic notes, Leinberger’s example of an infill Metro station only works because the value of such a station is that it provides a link to an existing, robust transit network.  Such a mechanism wouldn’t work for starting a system from scratch.

The current battle over how to re-shape Tysons Corner is illustrative of many of the issues.  In Tysons, many land owners have agreed to tax themselves in order to add transit.  This works because they’ll be adding a linkage to Metro’s already robust and successful network.  At the same time, the initial plans aimed to maximize the return on the transit investment by substantially upzoning the area and increasing density – but now some parties are getting cold feet.

The other piece that Leinberger raises (as well as several commenters on Jarrett’s post) is reforming the federal piece of transit financing to be more responsive and agile in partnership with private capital:

We could hasten the process by making a much-needed change in federal transportation law. The federal government typically provides 20 to 80 percent of the money for local transportation projects (with local and state governments paying the rest). Yet federal funding of projects that involve private partners is extremely rare—in large part because federally funded projects typically take years to approve, and private developers usually can’t tie up their capital waiting for the government wheels to turn. Over the past few years, private corporations and foundations in Detroit raised $125 million to help build a light-rail line, and have been working for some time to secure federal funds to complete the project. Fixing federal transportation law to expedite transit projects would allow faster development at lower public cost.

None of these mechanisms is perfect, but each will likely be a part of future transit financing discussions – value capture, tax-increment financing, public-private partnerships, upzoning, etc.

Briefly noted

7000Series

Some items of note today:

A day in the life of Metro

Metro’s definitely seen better days.  The Washington Post had a lengthy piece in Sunday’s edition documenting the massive problems facing the system: aging infrastructure, missing leadership, a broken safety culture, amongst others.  Metro’s been trimming the fat to balance budgets for a while, and it now looks like they’ve been cutting into the bone and impeding the system’s ability to function.  WTOP notes that several internal and external candidates for the soon-to-be vacant General Manager position have turned it down.

At the same time, the Post managed to document the role the system plays in the daily lives of those living and working in DC.

At the same time, one of WMATA’s new Federally-appointed board members, Marcel Acosta, is asking for input from riders over at Greater Greater Washington.  In looking at some of the responses in the comments, you can’t help but notice people speaking out about how Metro enables car-free lifestyles; how crucial good transit service is to urban life.

On profitability and privatization

CC image from AMagill on Flickr

CC image from AMagill on Flickr

Given Metro’s current and future budgetary issues (and the plethora of ideas to fix them amongst various comment threads at GGW and other places), discussions of profits and priorities are certainly topical.  With that in mind, Jarrett Walker has an excellent post up on the fundamental goals of transit service – the public good we planners try to achieve.

In fact, high-ridership transit services are almost always the result of aggressive government investment and policies, including the pricing of car travel, the planning of dense centers around stations, and a huge range of other actions.  A democratic government must care not just about the bottom line of the transit but also about the quality of the community it serves.  In this role, it may advocate low-ridership services to serve other sustainability goals.  For example, when opening a new “transit oriented development,” the long-term health of the community may require a lot of public transit service just as the first people are moving in, to help them establish transit habits, own fewer cars, etc.  This service will be “unprofitable” but can be a rational part of a long-term sustainability strategy.

Thatcher’s formulation, swallowed whole by Judt, is that service is either “profitable” or “social.”  Judt will go on to make “social inclusion” arguments for why service to low-ridership markets, such as rural towns, should be retained.  Fine, but he’s already given away the revenue that could pay for much of that service — the “profits” gained by the private operating company running the “profitable” services.  He’s also given away funds that could be used to fund new infrastructure investments for the next generation of profitable services — investments that should be government-funded not because they’ll be profitable, but because they’ll be intrinsic parts of a humane, sustainable, and livable city — all valid criteria for government attention.

Walker describes the definition of profitability (and the relentless focus on cost effectiveness to the exclusion of other considerations) as a “conceptual trap” that does not truly capture the reality of transit benefits or the complexity of how cities and urban places function.   Defining the debate in these terms automatically puts transit on poor footing.

“Social” and “economic” are just two legs of the three-legged stool that has come to be known the “triple bottom line,” a useful scheme for thinking about all of the possible valid outcomes of public policy.  The missing third term is “environmental.”  Judt is so attached to the “social” dimension of the question that the other two terms, “economic” and “environmental,” have collapsed in his mind into a single opponent, the “economic.”  We are all used to thinking in binary (us/them, this/that) terms, but the triple bottom line requires us to hold three points of view in the mind at once — which, to be fair, is much harder than it sounds.

Indeed.

Walker’s piece is excellent food for thought, particularly as our transit agencies and other municipal entities are facing huge budget problems and often turning towards privatization (see Chicago’s parking meters) – we must make sure we consider all of the potential outcomes, as well as all three legs of the stool.

Station cleaning – the end product

Today’s snow storm means Metro’s been limited to their underground service map only.  Given that buses are out of commission, this low level of service is the only real way to get around town.  It also means there’s plenty of time to spend in the stations waiting for trains.

So, while waiting at Potomac Avenue, I couldn’t help but snap a few pictures of the newly cleaned and whitewashed vaults, all part of Metro’s earlier noted station enhancement program.  For Potomac Ave in particular, the mid-way photos already showed a huge improvement over the dirty and grimy concrete vaults.  Given that Potomac Ave was one of the stations Metro painted years ago to improve light levels, the last step was to essentially whitewash the station vaults to complete the cleaning process, and then light those vaults up by replacing all the burnt-out light bulbs.

The difference is stark.  Today:

Whitewashed and illuminated vaults at Potomac Ave

Whitewashed and illuminated vaults at Potomac Ave

The mid-way progress:

Steam cleaning in progress at Potomac Ave

Steam cleaning in progress at Potomac Ave

And the original, dirty station:

Dirty station vaults before cleaning

Dirty station vaults before cleaning

For a synopsis of the station enhancement process, check out this WaPo article.

Metro snow operations

Given the heavy (and ongoing) snowfall, Metro is only operating rail service in select underground locations, in order to prevent trains from getting stranded as accumulating snow makes it difficult to maintain contact with the third rail, and also to use existing tunnels to keep rail cars dry and operable, rather than buried in snow and exposed to the elements in Metro’s rail yards.

The adjusted service map looks like this:

Metros snow map. Image from WMATA.

Metro's snow map. Image from WMATA.

Riding the trains today, the service is essentially single-tracking in the underground portions of the system.  The segments of each open line in the middle have both tracks open, with each line essentially having two trains to cover the entire length of a line – they shuttle back and forth on a single track, passing each other on the double-tracked stretch in the middle.

Waits for the trains are long, and as is usual during single tracking operations, the PIDS aren’t all that reliable for train arrival times:

PID at U St, during snowpocalypse

PID at U St, during snowpocalypse

In the single-tracked areas, the extra track is being used for train storage so that there are rail cars ready to enter service as soon as tracks are cleared:

Storage train riding out the storm at U St.

Storage train riding out the storm at U St.

Metro did a good job of getting the system up and running again after the December 19th storm, opting to prepare the entire system for Monday’s rush rather than restore service immediately.  They’ll likely do the same this time around.