This is a Boondoggle

This is a boondoggle. It's a craft project that we used to do in Boy Scouts so that we had something to put our keys on.

via Etsy Crap

Now, the overuse of the term boondoggle to describe projects that may or may not be bad but rather the writer doesn't like because its a hefty investment is epic. I find that its mostly writers and columnists who also use the phrases:

Streetcar Named Desire - Seriously. Stop it. It wasn't cool the first time you thought of it for an article headline, what makes you think its original the millionth time? Searching for an article on streetcars shouldn't bring me every mom and pop production of a a Tennessee Williams play.

19th Century Technology - So was the car. Karl Benz is the originator of the four stroke engine we know today in 1885. Frank Sprague made electric traction (electric railways) usable en masse in 1887. Also Portland Cement that we use in concrete was from the 1840's.

Driving pays for itself - I'm not going to waste time typing what people that read this blog already know.

If anyone has any other terms that the opposition uses that drive you nuts because of their truthiness, please use the comment section below. I saw boondoggle for the umpteenth time today while reading some articles, and it kinda made me want to hurl. But I wrote this to vent instead.

Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Ask Hunter S. Thompson about LA traffic and growth in 1965.

Guerrilla Streetcar Movement

Historians in LA are checking out historic houses along the streetcar lines that used to run all over the region. That got me thinking, we have housing evidence of streetcar lines in the city, but what if there were a guerrilla effort to stripe all the streets that once had streetcars on them. If people could see what had been lost, would they want it back?

Muni History - Video of Twin Peaks Tunnel Opening

George B sent this to one of my email lists and if you're from San Francisco you'll appreciate it for sure.

Scott Bernstein Part 2: It Is All Potentially Reversible

Yesterday we brought you a first listserve post by Scott Bernstein of the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago about some streetcar history. In further thoughts, he discusses how we can get at least some of what we lost back.

I sometimes skip long posts, but this one is certainly worth the time spent reading. All inserted links are my doing in order to try and give greater background and some edits have been made for capital letters and spacing.

Guest Post 2: Scott Bernstein

Here are some further thoughts.

The definitive history of the interurbans is The Electric Interurban Railways in America by George W. Hilton and John F. Due, Stanford U. Press 1960; 463 pages, very thorough analysis and directory of operating companies and maps, indexed; still in reprint but not hard to find a used copy.

It's impossible to fully describe what happened to the street railway systems without some description of the relationship they had to the electric power industry.

The divestiture you and I guess Andy refer to came as a result of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, aka, PUCHA, which left it to the newly minted SEC to implement via regulation. SEC was created, strictly speaking, to create and implement accounting standards, the lack of which were widely believed to be at the heart of the stock market crash and subsequent Depression. Hilton and Due state this clearly as follows:

"...the SEC interpreted the provisions concerning the elimination of holding-company systems to require that the power companies divest themselves of their electric railway affiliates and dissolve the pyramided holding company structures. As a consequence, the interurbans that were elements in the holding company systems were separated, usually by public sale of the stock...Most interurbans had been abandoned before the act became effective."

Hilton in particular believed that the interurbans represented a flawed interlude in the development of mass transportation, and he quite strongly and almost angrily stated this opinion when Congress revisited the Snell accusations and the GM-NCL case in hearings held April 4-11 1974 (Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate, 93d Cong. 2d Session on S. 1167, part 4, Ground Transportation industries). In this testimony and subsequent committee discussion, he offers interesting opinions on why certain streetcar systems survived both the early wave of abandonments and the divestiture rulings, and most of these have to do with urban form, density, and the availability of special right of way (note--he's an economic historian, not a physical planner or urban historian).

In the 1960 work, Hilton and Due acknowledge that other means were used to extend the life of these systems-- State and sometimes municipal investment and support, conversion or merger into publicly owned systems, and inter-line cooperation of marketing and fare-media (which probably extended the life of the excellent interurban networks in Ohio and Indiana, among the best in the nation), among other methods. This testimony, in my opinion, actually makes a strong case that abandonment wasn't inevitable, rather, it was result of failure to grasp the networked nature of the tangible (infrastructure networks) and intangible economic networks) that are essential to successful places.

The PUCHA passage bears some further examination.

No small part of the political impetus to pass PUCHA came from enmity between two people--Samuel Insull, founder of the American electric utility industry, former secretary to Thomas Edison and head of the Chicago-based Commonwealth Edison empire and affiliates; and Harold Ickes, confidant to FDR, Secretary of the Interior (where many of today's separate domestic cabinet agencies were formerly housed), and civic leader in Chicago and the North Shore suburb of Winnetka. Simply put, they despised each other; Insull's business model required demonizing the concept of public ownership and Ickes' view requiring that it be embraced.

At the time that PUCHA was being conceived, Insull controlled not only the remainder of the former traction empire controlled by Charles Yerkes (who interestingly went on after having been pushed out of Chicago to help lead the construction of the London Underground) but also much of the midwest electric transmission system, the main midwestern interstate pipeline system and the local natural gas utility, plus Peoples Gas Light & Coke Co. too. Insull wrote the first check to the Commercial Club of Chicago for underwriting what became the Burnham/Bennett Plan of Chicago, but did not play a role in its development or in its subsequent marketing (as far as I could tell, Dennis I know has studied these matters too and may have a different opinion). Insull, while vilified for his monopoly, helped buy much public goodwill in playing both sides of the smoke abatement campaigns in Chicago for decades--electric utilities were powered by very inefficient coal-burning power plants, but so were railroad locomotives. He was able to sell railroad electrification as a civic and public health virtue, and simultaneously to sell natural gas as a "smokeless fuel for a smoke-free town." (To convert from the use of so-called manufactured gas to "natural" gas required tuning, retrofitting and/or conversion of all gas-fired appliances in Chicago, which was amazingly accomplished in 1 year, 1931; also, one of the themes of the 1933 Century of Progress Chicago World's Fair was that it was billed as the first "smokestack free fair.")

Nonetheless, Ickes and others were able to paint Insull as the prototypical villain at a time when heads needed to roll, and was convicted of securities fraud (reversed in 1934 but he spent his remaining years a broken man). To be fair, Ickes presided over much of his era's "recovery" investments through the Public Works Administration, and on the transportation side, the majority of the PWA's investments were in highways not in regional mass transit systems (an important exception was PWA investment in Chicago's subway, but Ickes refused to support building east-west tunnels for Chicago's streetcar lines, an action that bears further examination).

The divestiture and subsequent efforts to keep these systems viable, both the urban and interurban street railways, took a number of bizarre turns. In Chicago alone, a simple listing of the changes in policy, court rulings on bankruptcy proceedings and re-organizational changes along with maps runs over 400 pages (Weber, Outline History of Chicago Traction 1936, and it gets even more complex after that). The influences that needed juggling were truly vast, not half-vast; Frank Gruber's point about the iconic importance of the nickel fare posted yesterday is a good example, there were similar examples almost everywhere.

PUCHA seemed to be passed without regard for the potential urban damage that divestiture would likely cause. Around 1920, a federal commission on the future of electric railways failed to come to any firm recommendations for future federal interest, and as far as I can tell, that was the last time that a serious national examination of this essentially urban form of mass transportation occurred. But it was made clear at those hearings, in industry publications, in discussions held at various local governmental trade associations, that these private corporations were playing an essential public service (sound familiar?) role.

By divesting, public transportation lost a more or less guaranteed source of revenue for capital investment, whether it was made directly, through rate-basing of these costs, or indirectly, by using the backstop credit facilities of their holding companies.

And this occurred at more or less the same time that the fascination with modern road building and the idea of "limited ways" (later "superhighways" and "limited access highways") was taking hold (in the 1920s, Insull similarly promoted "super" transmission lines and pipelines).

Perhaps someone on the list can comment on this, but in reviewing the Burnham/Bennett Plan, and associated documents from the resulting Chicago Plan Commission, the transportation focus, outside of the central area, was on inter-city travel, not on internal circulation or accessibility. (this is also the point expressed in the late Paul Barrett's excellent The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Urban Policy in Chicago-1983) I suspect this was largely the case in city planning in the era that followed. In framing the issue in this way, and leaving it to the private sector to sink or swim w/ regard to mass transportation, a powerful force for decentralization emerged. Similarly, Burnham and contemporaries did not grasp the notion of the networked city, and in re-reading, that era's fascination with the promise of regional highway networks and what promised to be a viable airline industry evokes Henry Ford's comment that "we shall solve the problems of the city by leaving it."

So why go over all this?

Because it is all potentially reversible.

And because it is essential that we figure out how to make it so.

As we've discussed on this list, only by switching from liquid fuels to non-motorized and electric transportation can we meet any of our energy independence or climate goals.

And only by reducing dependence on individual vehicles to a greater reliance on mass transportation can we transition to a nation of great cities and regions.

Here are some tools to think about in framing methods of getting there--

1. Local electric distribution utilities never lost the legal right to power electric transportation; all 50 states have a common method of enabling electric distribution utility financing of all or part of the necessary systems, which is a rate filing to help finance these systems. This offers opportunities for cities, transit operators, developers, metropolitan planning organizations and states to build new kinds of financing mechanisms to more systematically support local and regional surface transportation infrastructure. A similar case can be made for local governments and special service districts (which own and operate almost all of the nation's airports outside of NJ, MD, Alaska and HI) to partner with the electric utility industry to support the infrastructure necessary for inter-city high speed rail.

2. Deregulation of the electric utility industry has been a mixed bag, but in over a dozen states a fait accompli. So in a sense this is an opening to partner with contemporary holding companies too. These companies need to re-certify their "market-based" rate making authority every three years with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, another opening for the new administration to address potential urban consequences of energy and climate policies.

3. PUCHA was repealed in the 2005 Energy Policy Act ( one outcome has been at least 100 municipalization efforts, 20 successful, most recently Winter Park Fl, but the repeal also opens up the potential for other kinds of ownership too)

4. A national debate on the future shape and location and purposes of the electrical grid has started and needs an urban voice, no less than does the analogous debate about transportation infrastructure.

5. A push by leaders in the public accounting profession and in the investment community for more transparency in State and municipal accounting led to the creation of the Government Accounting Standards Board in 1984, and their rules on accounting for infrastructure investment, aka Statement 34, implemented from 1999 to present, lay a first-time basis for disclosure of the life-cycle costs associated with different types and patterns of major capital investments. More recently, a push for better state and local disclosure in the waning days of the Bush administration, has been taken up in the Senate and House Banking committees. This is a real opportunity to show well how the hidden assets of cities and urban places perform.

Guest Post: Some Streetcar History

This was an email written earlier today by Scott Bernstein at the Center for Neighborhood Technology who is a huge streetcar historian and always discusses it in a different way than others. I asked if I could repost this to the blog because I thought a wider audience might be interested. Sometimes for good reason.

As a background, some on the list where I took this from were arguing about the NCL affair. It's not complete but I hope at some point Scott writes a book about this stuff.

Guest Post: Scott Bernstein, CNT.

"Do you think Fiorello LaGuardia insisted on removal of New York's streetcars because he was in the pocket of GM or NCL?" Clearly not, however, I would urge members of this list interested in the issue to read Zach Schrag's excellent article on the topic,

"The Bus Is Young and Honest": Transportation Politics, Technical Choice, and the Motorization of Manhattan Surface Transit, 1919-1936" published in Technology and Culture, Volume 41, No. 1, 2000, pp. 51-79; La Guardia clearly inherited what this eminent scholar called "Mayor Hylan's war against transit." NY Mayor Hylan went so far as to support a phony advocacy group that became famous for the eponymous title of their pamphlet, prompting Schrag to comment that the bus may have been young and honest, but nothing about the case for streetcar removal or anything else in the pamphlet was.

Having read some of the Congressional testimony on the NCL case including George Hilton's, the transport economist who argued most eloquently for the theory that the companies were on the way out in any event, I'd have to say that none of this is dispositive.

From 1885 to 1902, the US went from one electric street railway system (Richmond) to one in every city of 5,000 or more. The rapid growth was due, I believe to two factors.

First, network economies or economies of scope that occurred because of standardization and inter-connectivity (i.e. when Bell invented the telephone it was useless until he made a second one and had someone to talk with, and it kept getting better economically, with each additional
user). In a network economy, economies of scale arise precisely because of the economy of scope, as opposed to an economy that occurs because of returns to scale. The same can be said about electric, water, sewer, natural gas, road, fax, email and Internet networks, among others.

Second, rapid growth of streetcars served a second purpose that's very important to this list--it helped accelerate investment in urban street networks. Then as now, transportation funding was a conundrum. By deeding public right of way to transportation operators, a shared funding arrangement could be created, and almost always was. In exchange for franchises, street railway operators were required to share in the cost of paving and maintaining the streets they operated on, sometimes with the municipality, other times with the municipality and the adjacent property owners.

So then why were these two factors compelling enough to keep the street railways in business?

I'd suggest expanding the list of reasons and this discussion to include the following--

1. Street railway franchises were regulated by local city councils who were not sufficiently independent or accountable. Accounting systems were primitive, and once special assessment districts and public benefit districts started generating sufficient funds, they too often looked the other way when the railways starting deferring mandatory system renewal and maintenance. I can provide a slide showing that anywhere from 3 to 16 percent of municipal revenues came from such districts. (New York, by the way, was at the low end of the scale and Los Angeles at the high end).

2. Cities got somewhat greedy. Automobile registration, licensing, sales taxes on fuel, cars and rubber (for tires) provided tremendous additional revenue. Then as now, these taxes on throughput of transportation and energy, put states and cities in a conflict of interest when efforts are made to minimize such throughput, whether by direct regulation or incentive. (Ad valorem energy taxes are among the top 3 or 4 revenue sources for municipalities, along with property, sales and income taxes where they exist, almost everywhere in the US; one of the big behind-the-scenes brakes on rates of energy and location efficiency is the concern by local financial officials over potential lost revenue). With an apparent major new source of revenue coming in and powerful interests emerging around motorized vehicles, it became difficult to implement common sense regulations on traffic and parking

3. The street railway companies responded rationally. Yes, the histories show the obvious ones were controlled by rapacious money-grubbing traction barons; however, with cities being willing to allow unlimited growth in street use by motor vehicles, their basic business model was compromised. This was a real problem for cities, as improving rather than destroying mass transit was the key to successful and sustainable urbanization. Several excellent books and papers by Joel Tarr at Carnegie Mellon and Clay McShane at Northeastern University show clearly that this kind of hostile, cross-modal competition between bus and rail originated in fights between 1840 and 1890 between the early "omnibus" operators (from which we get the rubric of a "bus") and the early horse-drawn street railway companies.

The early street railway franchises were street-by-street entitlements, which were eventually consolidated into area-wide agreements, the argument for which was again urban value creation and value capture. And these were joint value creation agreements--once a city had acted to undercut the market by failure to limit the use of streets by motor traffic, the companies could state with impunity that the deal had been abrogated. (this theme is touched on by me all too briefly in the history chapter I contributed to Street Smart: Streetcars & Cities in the 21st Century by Reconnecting America)

4. Bad accounting again. As joint service agreements, the intended result was that the streets would come with the means of (mass) transportation, permanently. While the formal testimony in New York and elsewhere clearly showed not only the superior traffic handling capacity of street railways over both buses and individual automobiles, it also showed awareness of the relatively shorter life expectancy of buses when compared to fixed guideway vehicles. Making the decision in favor of the shorter-lived vehicle is the equivalent of deciding in favor of siting residential districts in single use trailers, another disposable commodity.

Have You Heard of the N Judah Heist?

This was the story back in 1955. Can you imagine a bunch of high school kids hoping on an N and going for a ride, picking up passengers and evading the Muni Managers today?

H/T SF Muni History List

Hidden Trains of New York

Very cool article via Planetizen. It would be interesting to be there when they open up that Brooklyn subway wall and find a tipped over steam engine.

Since his big reveal in 1980, Mr. Diamond, the 49-year-old founder of the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association, has been conducting tunnel tours via the manhole with the blessing of the D.O.T. But of late, Mr. Diamond has been pushing for another potential urban architectural “get.”

Behind a wall in the tunnel, near Atlantic Avenue and Hicks Street, he believes, there is a steam locomotive lying on its side like an abandoned toy train, in “pristine condition, a virtual time capsule.” And he wants to dig it up.

Seems to me that instead of digging it up, you could do some sort of ultrasound scan or something to make sure its there before you start digging. You can check out the location on Wikimapia here.

Digging Up the Past

I always like reading these articles. It's cool that you can find history right under the streets. Usually it's just utilities and such, but sometimes you find more...

When the site for MacArthur Center was excavated in 1997, discoveries included a Hessian gold coin, 4,000-year-old spear points, Colonial-era pottery shards and a 19th-century medicine bottle.
...
Streetcar tracks are not uncommon, he said, and often "ugly to remove. There's usually a large concrete footer beneath the tracks to work around." Streetcars ran in Norfolk from about 1870 to 1948. He's also come across old retaining walls and bulkheads since parts of Norfolk were underwater."We just punch our way right through them," Swan said. When improving Boush Street several years ago, he said, the most unexpected obstacle was a live Western Union telegraph line.

In other places around the world such as Rome, it can get a bit crazy digging for subways.

Books on Rail Policy

Ryan asks what some good books are on Rail Policy. I'm not sure if this is what he was looking for, but I think Stephen Goddard's Getting There is a good read.

Overlay the Past

Kevin at Fortworthology sent me this map of the streetcar lines of 1925 overlaid with the current plan. It's interesting to see what was lost in cities around the country who have done this exercise. Also note the street grids that exist around the former lines. Compared to the networks that the streetcar built, auto culture looks so messy. I'm sure there is some sort of analogy for that.

If you've seen one of these overlays somewhere, shoot a link in the comments and I'll append them to this post.

Space Constraint

Urban Cincy Brings us this Gem:

1925 San Francisco Street Map

I wish this streetcar network were still around...



1925 San Francisco Street Map
Originally uploaded by Dollar Bin

Beginning of the End

The death of streetcars started this way.

The Hub of Progress

So my parents got me an awesome book on the History of Houston's street railways. On page 92 there's a flyer that has a picture of a streetcar, a bus and an interurban railcar in the center of a wheel. On the outside ends of the spokes there are pictures of destinations along the line such as shops, suburbs, factories, homes, offices, churches etc. The title of the flyer is "The Hub of Progress"

The text is just as interesting:

The hub around which the wheel of prosperity turns in city life is the transportation system.

Houston has grown very rapidly - to become one of the nation's leading cities, the streetcar, bus, and interurban transportation in a large way made possible the Houston of today.

They help to build new residential sections, they carry customers to the merchant, patrons to the theater and are the means by which the great army of wage earners go to and from their place of employment.

Their value to a city cannot be measured in dollars and cents. (emphasis added)

Perhaps we should remember that. Transit systems are often over analyzed in terms of cost and under analyzed in terms of benefits. We can use streetcars and interurbans to build the cities of tomorrow, while remembering that they built some of the best neighborhoods of today.

Historical Seattle Transit Data

I hear there is an upcoming election on a rapid transit network. The Mayor urges the opponents to stop being ridiculous. Hopefully that is a future, but here is a link to Seattle Transit's past. Check out PublicTransit.us' historical light rail data.

To Kitty Hawk and Beyond!

Just finished touring the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in DC. Saw something interesting. How did the Wright Brothers get to Kitty Hawk from Dayton to test their flying Machine? Why by train of course. How fitting. (I'll have photos up when I find my USB cord to my Camera)

Found it! The arduous journey to Kitty Hawk!

Louisville's Third Rail

Apparently Louisville Kentucky had elevated electric rail service in 1886, remnants of which still remain today.

History Lesson: Demise of Twin Cities Rapid Transit

Twin Cities Rapid Transit was one of the best streetcar companies in the country before its demise. It's secondly most famous for the streetcar burning photos that many cite when discussing conspiracy theories.


Well part of the story I had never heard before was told on one of my listserves by transit expert and former Deputy Secretary of Transportation for Pennsylvania Ed Tennyson. He states that at one point TCRT had saved up $10 million dollars to buy new streetcars and repair the tracks but got destroyed by Wall Street speculators. Well, I'll let his words tell the story. I'll add links for emphasis:

The Twin City street car to bus conversion was ironically caused by a pro-street car management, a man named Strouse, I think he was. During gasoline rationing he saved up ten million dollars ($ 160 million at today's prices) to buy more PCC cars, re-lay more track, moderninze the rail system.

A shrewd vulture on Wall Street named Green saw all that money in the bank and solicited the stockholder votes to throw out the sfreet car management so Green could disburse all that money to stockholders including himself. His first attempt failed as the stockholder had pride in the company but inflation hit them (and everyone else) so Green prevailed on his second take over attempt. Strouse was fired and the money was paid out to stockholders leaving nothing for renewals.

Wall Street neophytes saw those big dividends and sent the stock price soaring. Green soid his. Buy low and sell high. Local politicians took Green's place, one named Fred Osanna(In the picture above), a political lawyer. He got a promise from General Motors to loan him all the money he needed to rid the city of street cars and they had National City Lines send him their Barney Larrick to manage the job.

Since there would be no more profits, Osanna and Larrick sold all of the copper wires, car baen property and salvage from scrapping cars to their wives or other relatives at a rock bottom price. Their relatives waited a few weeks then sold all the junk on the market for far more than they paid Twin City Rapid Transit for it. Roy Chalk did the same thing in Washington but was careful not to go to jail. Osanna and Larrick both went to jail, for defrauding the other stockholders.

When You Ride With...

Martin over at Seattle Transit Blog has a good discussion going about how to appeal to anti-transit conservatives on issues of transit expansion. The Bill Maher book cover that he uses is taken directly from a WWII poster that promotes carsharing. 60 years ago they had carsharing yet we're just starting to pick it back up.