Changing How We Think

Update: Some of this is just folks trying to kill transit projects by forcing them to restudy. But it would be nice if for the Red Line this was a serious thought at the start.

Already the new New Starts rules are starting to change thinking about transit investments. Now if we only had the money to construct these lines.

The committee wants MTA officials to take a look at “heavy rail” alignments for those proposals. Heavy rail is the mode used in the Baltimore Metro Subway, and MTA officials have insisted that it would be too expensive to win crucial federal approval.

But new Federal Transit Administration guidelines from the Obama administration have raised hopes among transit advocates that heavy rail might make more sense, because the consideration has been expanded to include more than just cost effectiveness.

War on the Car

It moves forward. It feels like I'm reading Killer Angels again...

The War on The Car drags on. The Resistance continues to suffer heavy casualties. Our foot soldiers, mounted forces, and transit brigade have launched numerous offensives this past year, but made only minor advances.

Monday Night Notes

Ah it's been a while. Got a bit of a chance today to throw you some links

Anyone wonder if the PDC could redevelop the Post Office property in a more urban fashion and then lease a single urban building back to the Postal Service with 5 blocks for more urban development?
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San Jose could take back roads from Caltrans in order to do things that actually move more people. San Francisco should do this with Van Ness as well. We might have actually had BRT by now if we did...
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Innovative financing mechanism in Australia for infrastructure.

The deal will enable the government to charge developers $95,000 per hectare to fund infrastructure in new fringe suburbs instead of ordinary home buyers. And instead of paying the tax up front they will pay 30 per cent when they purchase the land and the remainder in stages as the land is subdivided.

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David Lazarus says it's hard to get around on transit in LA. I wonder how far people go in LA versus other regions that makes transit so hard for people to consider. In Europe, new cell phone studies say people don't stray more than 6 miles (via Planetizen)from their home. I'd be interested to see what LA's sphere is like.
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Aaron makes a really big point that I honestly never realized was missing in the news I consume.

Newspapers used to explain what national and international trends and events meant to us, to our towns. They put the major events of the day in a local context.

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CTOD releases it's TOD and GHG report.

Double Vision

While it's great that the Chronicle and others are calling on Houston Metro to have a regional vision with goals, it means nothing without a tandem city land use and development infrastructure strategy. While Houston has no zoning in the usual sense, it does have everything else needed to regulate development (restrictive covenants, parking requirements, setbacks etc). The region can't just keep building HOV lanes and even light rail/commuter rail lines to chase development. Chasers never prosper, but leaders do.

Missles Are Quicker

I love Pearls Before Swine. This one stuck my fancy as a planner.

Open Thread

When I don't post for a while I get emails from folks interested in chatting about anything from high speed rail to the absence of overhead wires. I feel like I should foster a greater ability to have conversations outside of topic posts. So if you have something to say or share, I'll try to have more open threads.

Movement Depression and the Way Forward

It's been a bit rough lately. With the economy in the tank and people not wanting to spend any money, I've had great hope that some places were continuing to move forward with their urban rail plans. But the opponents fight harder than ever because they see the threat or people don't plan things enough to go forward with any confidence. Just today, the list of articles that show how hard we have to keep working was a bit much for me to handle.

Houston - The Mayor questions whether there is money to pay for two lines of the new five line light rail expansion in the city.

Austin - The Mayor decides its not time to have a bond election to pay for a future urban rail line.

Scotland - The company building Edinburgh's tram wants to delay 30 months after the rough ride they have already had.

Tampa - Ballot issue for rail dead for now due to lack of decision in how much of the funding would go to the rail project.

Bellevue: The city council is a bunch of morons there and don't want to run the line through a dense employment center.

There is a ray of hope out there. The Mayor of Los Angeles made me feel a bit better recently when he decided that he was going to ask to get things done faster. Ask for a loan so you can save billions in construction costs and have something built for your money faster. I would like to think that is how we work in the United States. But sometimes reading all the news I do just gets so depressing. At least someone has suggested a way forward. Whether we follow it or not is up to us.

Oscars Miss the Train Again

Every year I feel like I harp on this because I think that outside of these people with fancy gowns, there are a lot of folks including press that could get there via the subway. The first year I noticed this was the year that Al Gore won for An Inconvenient Truth. It's somewhat unfortunate that people aren't hopping on to make a statement. They might even get to the show faster.

February 27 2007 - An Inconvenient Truth
February 22 2009 - Oscars Lame Again

Saturday Night Notes

Opening up cities to new media.
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Where there's a bad freeway, Norquist is trying to tear it down.
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The tension between growth and saving industrial land is at the leading edge in Oakland.
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Why the Lagos bashing asks Next?
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More Urban Form

In an attempt to go a little deeper into the previous post I went looking for more pictures of Rotterdam and Houston and found even better comparisons and interesting views than the photos I posted before.

It should also be said that I don't mean to discount the devastation of war to people and property. There is a difference between choosing to build parking lots and having your life and possessions destroyed.

First Rotterdam:

This from scientific psychic:


And this from the special collections of the Wageningen Library:


Next Houston:

Clearance of housing to build US59 via TexasFreeway.com, an amazing resource if you want to see how freeways were built in Texas.


Also via TexasFreeway.com, a view of Houston from the same angle as the previous post's shot:



This is from Aerial viewpoint. A historic shot from 1945 compared with today. Notice the freeway intrusion. Also notice the downtown getting taller. Finally, where Union Station used to be is where highway 59 rockets through on the east side of downtown and Minute Maid park now exists with a token train filled with oranges.

Parking Bombs

More! That's the scream of merchants and others who believe that a downtown without an endless sea of parking is not worth going to. But once the whole downtown turns into a parking lot it's not really worth much anymore is it? Yet we still see the discussion of parking dominate without an eye for the destruction that it can cause a downtown if left unfettered.

Before Portland's miraculous return as an urban Mecca, it too was once infested by parking. So was the city of Houston, where parking lots took over most of the downtown at one point.

Via Mike Lydon and Transit Miami (Via the book City Shaped)

Perhaps you can say how different this is from Rotterdam after German bombing...


It's unfortunate that we didn't see what we were doing to our wonderful cities in the name of cars first. Europe had war, yet we dismantled our cities in a similar way in the name of progress. So much parking though, what has that done to the city's value? What has it taken away in terms of tax revenue from land and greater employment agglomerations? A study by Anne Moudon and Dohn Wook Sohn showed that offices that were clustered had greater values than those that weren't in the Seattle region. In addition to the spending on highways that expanded our regions to their current far reaches, how much real estate value did we destoy?

Greater value for downtowns was lost and in the process we saw places like Hartford, as found by Dr. Norm Garrick at UConn lose population, employment, and their character. Not just the loss from parking, but from the gutting of the city by the Interstate System. Here are some slides from Dr. Garrick showing the destruction. When he toggled through the first time, the room I was in audibly gasped for air.

Hartford Pre Interstate


Hartford Post Interstate


So what's the damage? The amount of tax creating employment did not grow and parking spots skyrocketed.


So in aggregate what did this look like? The red shows it all:


Lost revenue, lost agglomeration, lost value. Will these examples teach us a lesson about too much parking? Perhaps

Free Parking Again

Another issue with free parking. Isn't there a market based way to take care of this issue around Mockingbird Station?

Taxing Districts

More and more I think we're going to see assessments on property owners to pay for infrastructure. This specific example comes from a Grand Boulevard in Salt Lake City moving from downtown towards the airport:

The street beautification, intended to blend with the planned airport TRAX line, would include new lighting, landscaping, multipurpose sidewalks, decorative walkways, bicycle paths and public art.

Of course people are going to complain about another tax, but I wish people didn't feel that everything should be provided for free. Improvements cost money.

The Fight for Access

I'm a bit late posting this one...

One persons station access is another persons time added to the commute:

This north-side resident found the light rail underwhelming—the train chugs along at street level at a modest speed, stopping 10 times, even stopping at times for traffic lights. It’s still faster to take the express bus from downtown. So it was interesting to hear a south-side community organizer speak Wednesday about working during the light-rail planning process to get precisely the things that annoyed me. “We [told transit planners] we wanted more stops and we don’t want intersections cut off,” said Yolanda Sinde,

I suggest reading the rest of the post as well as it delves into gentrification and smart growth as well.

Respect - Pass It On

I saw this commercial the other day. More people need to learn this rule. There are a lot of kids that don't know it.

Over Time

This is a great way to show the expansion of a system over time. Check out David Alpert's time lapse of Metro expansion. What is interesting to me is how its done slowly over time and in segments. I think a lot of cities can learn from this.

Incenting Employment to Centers

Peter Bell has a big job at one of two regional governments in this country (Portland the other). It's understandable that he threads a fine line between suburban and urban constituencies when discussing mobility and other issues a regional government deals with. However I do feel like he has an important duty to steer growth with transportation policy and employment incentives.

The current problem as I see it with the Twin Cities is that its expanding at a rapid clip. While the article mentions this growth has slowed, I don't really buy it. Much of this expansion is a continuation of the post 1950s suburban housing and job growth that continues to suck up resources at the expense of the region's two central cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Much of it headed to the favored quarter to the Southwestern part of the region in the areas of Edina and Bloomington.

But with the expansion of employment in those areas, it allows people to move further and further away from the core. The more we move away from the core, the less likely people are to live in urban neighborhoods designed for walking, biking and transit. Something Peter Bell seems to mention in passing but not completely understand is that those exurban sewer and road expansions cost a lot of money. A lot more money over the long term that creating capacity and value through density and transit. But once he expands sewer service to the outlying areas with septic tanks, then the community beyond wants the service, the community after that will ask for it, and then the employment follows workers and then the workers follow that employment. It's a growth strategy that is inherently unsustainable.

And really what I wish they would do is stop and think about how to make existing centers of commerce in the region less suburban and more like downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul. This way these areas can serve a diverse housing stock that people want while also allowing them to not be so dependent on the automobile. This requires that the Met Council work even harder to incent job growth in centers that will also contain the spread of residential development. Ultimately the first line of defense is containing job sprawl and the Met Council can get a better hold on that than they can on residential areas.

Since most people in the United States have around a 30 minute commute, there needs to be a way to keep that 30 minutes static to existing centers in the coming century. Ultimately that means that the Met Council would have to expand jobs in centers, connect the centers via high quality transit, make the centers walkable, and finally stop extending services to the exurbs unless they are going to pay full price for it. Tipping the balance sheets towards more favorable long term sustainable product doesn't just make environmental sense, it makes fiscal sense. If we think all of these cities and towns that have budget issues today during this recession, imagine the recessions in the future where all this extra infrastructure we build today will have to be maintained tomorrow. Only places of significant intrinsic value will be saved from the scourges that continue to occur on a bi/tri-century basis.

This is why I believe that Peter Bell can't just throw up his hands and say he can't do anything about it because too many people are giving him a hard time. I think he needs to lead, and in this sense he needs to take fiscal responsibility for the future of the region. I'm not a huge environmentalist. I can appreciate where they come from. My biggest concern is living outside of our means. Specifically with regards to suburbanism where we're basically just taking away from the economic generators that are cities and spreading our money outward instead of closer to the belt. My Geography professor in college that got me into all this planning stuff always said, if you want someone to pay attention, "hit them in the pocket book". This is ultimately what needs to be done. It might not be the easy way or the most popular way, but someone needs to start thinking about the fiscal ramifications of growth in the region, and the person that should be starting that discussion is Peter Bell.

Open Thread

Wow so I have been so busy I didn't even realize that I haven't posted in a long time. Consider this an open thread. I have a lot of posts I want to write but just haven't had time to write them. NJH asks in the previous post about the Central Subway starting construction. It's kind of beating a dead horse. How would you kill such a project? And why can't we close Stockton to ped traffic only? Does anyone think its going to actually get to Fisherman's Wharf at some point?

Bicycles are Hard to Draw

So says Stephen Pastis.

Jack London Calling

Jack London is closing Barnes and Noble book store. It seems like the perfect place for an urban renaissance but its so disconnected from Downtown Oakland by the freeway that it hasn't drawn any of the energy from the employment center. There's even a relatively close BART station if you consider the blocks are of a walkable size and most of the attractions are about a half mile away. But the highway is daunting. I often wonder what would have happened if they trenched the freeway or just made it an urban boulevard for a number of blocks to allow a smoother connection between the urban fabric that existed before the freeway. Ultimately I believe that this is the perfect connection for a streetcar, but it would be nice if there were no highway as well.

(The photo shows Jack London just south of the freeway before the waterway. The Lake Merritt BART station is just north and downtown Oakland is Northwest)