Monday, April 19, 2010

Perhaps a New Game

It's called, spot the wires. Sure are ruining this nature scene for everyone! This is Turin, Italy.

Italy Transport

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Bigger Thinking on Texas Stadium Site

In my post below I talked about how hard it would be to connect the two parcels over the freeway. Looks like they have thought about that.

In an article in Fast Company, the developers and city of Irving are looking to make the freeway choked property where the stadium once was into "the densest, most walkable neighborhood in the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex outside of downtown Dallas." That's a pretty bold statement. But the renderings show they have some ideas about how its gonna be, and I must say, they do have a grand imagination.


Via the Irving Chamber

If they can get this done more power to them. I especially appreciate them doing it on the transit line. Now how about that transit connectivity? This type of density needs more than just one rail line.

Wednesday Night Notes

Notes for folks:

China is seeking their own manifest destiny with trains. (Reuters)
~~~
China's Urban property is going up in price. (Wall Street Journal)
~~~
A new (to me) place to get all of your transport research needs!
~~~
The most hilarious (unintended of course) trucks vs. trains conspiracy theory I've ever read. I probably shouldn't link to it, but I couldn't resist. (Examiner)
~~~
The Pedestrianist discusses what should happen to San Francisco's Central Freeway.
~~~
Why people underestimate the pain of their commute. (Frontal Cortex)
~~~
Why the Expo Line goes where it goes... (via @thetransitfan)

Sunday, April 11, 2010

How Things Should Work

Unfortunately it was raining pretty hard today, which means I can't get NBC and apparently AT&T service is somewhat haywire. But the Master's was on TV and there was a commercial that showed how AT&T wishes people could buy train tickets. While its nice to think that it would or could even work in this way, it will take upgrades to wireless in the subways and faster connections speeds. I wonder if they could have done this on a freeway.

Stadium Implosions and TOD

Well today was the day. 39 year old Texas Stadium was imploded as its functioning life was deemed over. However the death of a stadium opens up new opportunities for urbanism and some challenges.



The Loop 12 station is going to be located here when the development is finally ready for it but I question the planning of a station along a freeway or in a place where the freeway can severely hamper residential development. Part of the problem with getting cozy with the highway is that you cut off half of the walk shed from the station. In this instance, it's even more than half with the number of freeways that exist in criss cross. Below is the map of the regional transit plan and below that is the station location sourced from the environmental impact statement.




You can see Texas stadium where the main redevelopment opportunity is on city owned land. But the planned station is on the other side of a major freeway, and most of it is a private shipping company under the white blob I've drawn to show the area without a freeway barrier near the station. It's likely that this area will be best for office and some dense residential, but a grid network needs to be reintroduced on both sides for it to become a walkable urban place. It might be even better to route the transit through the center of the white blob to maximize the station area. It does move the station further away from the stadium parcel, but at the same time, it increases the probability of transit accessibility for buildings within the vicinity of the station.

It's a hard decision, but ultimately we need to stop building stations and alignments that are based on the previous freeway paradigm. Creating walkable urban places that connect to others through transit means that we need to connect opportunities, not freeway medians.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Thursday Night Notes

Here's some news I wanted to share:

I did a report on aerial ropeways once. The City Fix shows they are used for transport around the world and even in their favorite place, South America.
~~~
The Cotton Belt rail line in Dallas might have an interesting funding mechanism.
The plan would most likely include much steeper fares for the Cotton Belt, paid parking, and the creation of special tax districts that would capture property tax increases associated with private development along the rail line.
I'm always dubious of using value capture to pay for infrastructure. There's just not that much of an increment on commuter rail I think.
~~~
DFLers are going to start playing hardball with U of Minn. I don't really see how a mitigated train is any different than a few thousand cars and huge buses on the same road.
~~~
Are we really going to be spending $3.7 billion or more for a subway stop in Livermore and (an overestimated) 34,300 riders? Have we learned nothing from any of the other transit lines we've built (or didn't build) in this region? If Pleasanton has 7,400 exits (14,800) on a weekday, how is Livermore going to add 30K more riders???

~~~
Baseball and Streetcars were bff back in the late 1800s.
~~~
One of my favorite things about the internet is all that it can do to break down international barriers. For example, this hungarian transport blog translated discusses the Salt Lake BRT line.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

St. Louis Kinda Back in the Transit Space Race

I haven't talked about the transit space race in a while because not a lot of big news has been happening. That and I've been a bit busy lately. But tonight a huge event took place in which a half cent sales tax was passed to better bus service and build light rail extensions to other parts of the St. Louis region, building off of one of the great light rail success stories in this country.

Yonah over at Transport Politic drew a map earlier this year of what the increase could help build over a 30 year period, though some of it is a bit wishful thinking because while $75 million a year is a lot of money, it's not the same as say Measure R's $40B in Los Angeles. But what it also did is trigger a City of St. Louis tax that was approved in 1997, raising an additional quarter cent, valued by some at around $8 million per year.

I hope that they increase the bus service much more because currently the service is subpar. This infusion hopefully allows them to fix that and move forward. I'm hopeful that the anti-tax sentiment out there didn't get to this plan and transit marches forward. Even sweeter in Wendell Cox's backyard.

Tri-Met In Motion

This is a really cool simulation of bus and train movements in Portland from the Walk Score Page:

Markets and Urban Development

I've been meaning to weigh in on the debate (1, 2, 3 and others) from a while ago on zoning restrictions that cause sprawl and the general libertarian argument. Matt, Ryan, and others have been pushing back hard on the idea that suburban sprawl is based on the market.

Basically the argument goes that because the market is not able to balance what people actually want, housing markets such as San Francisco, New York and many city centers to cost much more comparatively to places in the periphery. In addition, home owners don't want to see change. They like things the way they are and become an entrenched entity against any densification seeking to put all new growth somewhere else.

I agree with all of this but also would like to note that markets for density are highly dependent on agglomeration.
If land prices are rising, as they are empirically, firms economize on land. This behavior increases density and contributes to growth.
But what causes land prices to rise, or at least be high enough to support economization and higher densities? I would say that there needs to be a key catalyst, perhaps a major employer moving into an area or a major landowner or government entity focusing energies into a single place. These infrastructure investments increase land value and in turn make new dense developments possible. The demand for this type of living is real, but the ability to supply it can be harder and more locationally dependent than general sprawl.

It's also based on access. Just because someone runs a light rail line to a destination doesn't mean that a market for density is going to magically appear. If we think about where suburban centers pop up, it generally has to do with the transportation network and infrastructure that was set up to support it.

Ultimately the densest places are those that grew up close to where the major employment centers are located or proximate enough to the other largest employment center in the region with access enough to feed on it. Tyson's for example feeds off of the DC metro area and is suffocating. In order to get denser, the infamous edge city has to upgrade its circulation system and throughput. The Silver Line starts to do this and plans for a better grid and streetcar system are in the works.

But sometimes landowners believe their land is worth more than it actually is which stifles density plans as well. For example, in Houston in Midtown along the Main Street Corridor, there are some land owners just holding out for super high density projects that the market can't bear quite yet.
The typical price per square foot for land in the Midtown area grew from $4 per square foot in the early 1990s to more than $50 per square foot in 2006. This is in part due to land speculation fueled by the new light-rail line, with some buyers purchasing land in anticipation of higher land values in the future.
Or burdensome regulations such as parking requirements take the possibility of building higher density out of the mix. Once you get over a certain height, steel instead of wood must be used for construction and costs increase again. But all of this isn't possible if the land values are low or if demand isn't there. Demand typically increases when existing densities exist. But for many cities or station areas, this can be tricky. We can say that there is a demand for denser living, but we also need to know where the market exists to expand the agglomerations that exist, because unlike sprawl, we can't just build into nowhere land.