New Siemens S70 LRV Debut in Salt Lake

We discussed these bad boys when the order was put in back in 2008. The thing I find interesting about this version of the S70 is that they are snout nosed and less archy on the ends than the new Portland and San Diego vehicles. This apparently was so that they could continue to run four car trains.

Here's a photo of Portland's new LRVs (with some older)


via Thomas Le Ngo on Flickr

Then the new Salt Lake City version

via Transit in Utah

I think I actually like them better. If anyone in Utah gets some photos shoot em over and we'll post them.

Oakland Streetcars

The last few years have seen many ideas tossed around for a streetcar line up Broadway in Oakland. I like the idea personally because it would allow me to take the streetcar to Kaiser Hospital if I have Doctor's appointments during the work day and potentially revitalize a corridor with a huge economic upside. I've seen lots of floated ideas but none are as well thought out as Daniel Jacobson's plan. He really did his homework and has a great result. Hopefully some folks in Oakland take a good look at this work.

Temporary Switch

I'm a fan of Veke on facebook but most of the time I have no idea what they are talking about because Hungarian to English translation leaves much to be desired. But I enjoy their work covering trams in Budapest and other Hungarian cities. So it was kind of cool to see how an emergency tram switch would be employed when a section of track was closed due to what I believe is some sort of flooding. While they fix it, this ramp allows trains to move forward without having to dig into the track surface. Check out the blog through google translate here. Also check out the youtube video below.

Midnight Notes

So sad to see that Elana Schor is moving on from Streetsblog. You can still follow her work but it's not likely to be all transportation all the time.
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I can appreciate the want to allow people to walk and bike to the store and perhaps consume less in general. But saying that people can't buy a lot of groceries seems like a bit of overkill to me.

The plan intends to discourage large purchases, which will help ensure that people walk or bike home.

I really only have time to go to the store once a week and I walk and use a single reusable bag. But if you have a large family that can be a bit tougher. What do you all think?
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If you haven't seen the dramatic photos that show the change of the Vancouver skyline, i suggest taking a look at Price Tags.
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I think Megan McArdle completely underestimates the value of buses and bikes in congestion pricing schemes. She doesn't make a single mention of them. While the subways in New York are crushed, if you limited traffic and gave buses and bikes some lanes, you might find that transit service could improve and people could get around the city just fine without their cars. While I love the subways and think many cities should have better subway systems (ie San Francisco) I think we discount the roll of buses and bikes at our own peril.

Kids These Days

The day that I went somewhere and said "dang kids" was the day I knew that I had grown old. Not that I am that old, but it just means I'd started desiring different things in my older life than that of my childhood. Kid me would probably be off buying packs of baseball cards and candy corn. Today though I can't even muster up the courage to throw down for an xbox 360 to finally play Halo 3.

But I'm not the point where I'm telling kids to get off my lawn like New Urbanist Andres Duany. In an article in the Atlantic in their very cool city section, Andres goes on to do just that:

There's this generation who grew up in the suburbs, for whom the suburbs have no magic. The mall has no magic. They're the ones that have discovered the city. Problem is, they're also destroying the city. The teenagers and young people in Miami come in from the suburbs to the few town centers we have, and they come in like locusts. They make traffic congestion all night; they come in and take up the parking. They ruin the retail and they ruin the restaurants, because they have different habits then older folks. I have seen it. They're basically eating up the first-rate urbanism. They have this techno music, and the food cheapens, and they run in packs, great social packs, and they take over a place and ruin it and go somewhere else.

I'm not quite sure where this came from. It's pretty low to bash on the people who are moving to cities in droves because they want the urban experience. Do we all become angry at younger folks like this at some point? I sure hope not.

The Discussion is Lacking

This exchange on Real Time with Bill Maher between Chris Matthews and Ross Douthat is the perfect example of why this country is so misinformed. While Chris goes on extolling the virtues of High Speed Rail, all you can hear Ross say is that Amtrak is heavily subsidized. No mention of highway subsidies or other market distortions, just the fact that Amtrak is government run. And no one really fights back. Never mind that most of the time it has to borrow tracks or has a higher operating recovery ratio than any other mode in this country.

Anyway, listen to the exchange and see how the country can be mislead so easily by people that don't discuss things with the facts. I always say this when I listen to people I think might be smart talk about a subject I know something about, but I need to remind myself that if they are this unintelligent about a subject I know about, how much do they know about things I don't know about, and what kind of misinformation am I getting on other subjects?

You can listen here before the flash uploads.

For some reason the embed feature wasn't working. The audio is still at the link above...

On Gentrification, Supply, and Expansion

Living in the bay area can be particularly maddening. Even if you're working hard and making a good living, you are likely to still not be able to afford a house in the neighborhood of your choice. The reason being its so hard to build anywhere without coming up against NIMBYs and people that already have theirs. Take the BRT disaster where Berkeley rejected even doing the study for dedicated lanes in the city limits. It seems like progress is just a step away but defeat is often snatched from the jaws of victory.

I sometimes wonder why we can't just build more dense housing in employment districts or places where NIMBYs don't exist. There's a huge supply of land in these areas of San Jose with parking lots that could use serious transit infrastructure expansion. But the fact of the matter is that areas that are really desirable and dense are for the most part built out, and since they are built out their cost continues to increase dramatically because people really want to live there and there is a limited supply.

Take for example the Mission in San Francisco. For many years it was a lower income neighborhood known for its culture but over time transitioned. There are still vestiges of this in the compact and livable urban environment, but now the hipsters have come. I'm not sure that's a bad thing per say but we've seen this story before. Certain parties populate an urban neighborhood and then others follow until it becomes upper class, it gentrifies/yuppifies (a good read here on this subject). This end state of neighborhoods is seen as awful for the folks that were pushed out, but it is also seen as progress for the city as buildings get painted and the garden flowers are potted. This very end state of the process or "Starbucks Urbanism" is what becomes the mark of progress for those seeking it.

The problem however I see with this is not the end state per say, but the fact that the process has to happen at all. The biggest issue I have with the gentrification claim is that it can be rendered useless if we actually supplied housing for the actual market for housing. I know this is a claim long pushed by the planners and CNU set, but there's actually something behind the idea that we've overproduced single family housing and under produced urban types. What we've seen in urban neighborhoods with good bones over the last decade or so is a transformation based on lack of opportunity to improve without pushing out the middle.

But I do see a possible opportunity in the massive expansion plans that exist due to the transit space race to improve without pushing away. With multi-line expansion plans in places like Los Angeles, Denver, and Seattle, so many stations will be brought on line, the market won't be able to get to them all at once. One of the major benefits and worries of these new transit lines is that they will bring increased property values and push out existing communities. While this will provide better mobility to many of these areas, it's not likely to bring wholesale change to each of them. But it does start to provide opportunities for building housing that starts to change the urban vs. suburban market, without focusing it all on one close in neighborhood such as what has been happening in smaller regions that build transit over the last boom. We'll see what happens, but this is the theory I have.

Bad Design and Money Disconnects

Hey everyone, I realize that the posts on here have slowed to a crawl. I don't meant to neglect them but sometimes life gets in the way. You can find links from me on twitter everyday @theoverheadwire. They are also on the bottom right of the blog. But on to biz:

I've had some tabs open that I really wanted to comment on but hadn't gotten a chance. So if this is old news I apologize:

First off, Kemper Freeman stands to gain a lot of development money from light rail. It's unfortunate that his head is so far up his ass that he can't see the dollar signs and is instead wasting them on lawsuits. No matter, give all those earnings to the lawyers and watch him lose anyway.

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Second, I'm really annoyed at Yahoo's campus design. This is just more suburban crap and instead of creating buildings and a street network that actually form a true urban grid, such that other buildings could form some sort of urban neighborhood around them. This is what is wrong with our employment centers and why they aren't walkable, making it harder to take transit. Sure its better than what was there before, but it could have been used to set off a new way of developing office parks that was sustainable. Great you're next to a light rail line and it looks like a school campus. I still think Adobe is the champ for going downtown.


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Finally. If you haven't seen it yet, the 1906 SF streetcar video is pretty cool. You can find more explanation at Market Street Railway.

Perhaps a New Game

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

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)
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China's Urban property is going up in price. (Wall Street Journal)
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A new (to me) place to get all of your transport research needs!
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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)
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The Pedestrianist discusses what should happen to San Francisco's Central Freeway.
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Why people underestimate the pain of their commute. (Frontal Cortex)
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Why the Expo Line goes where it goes... (via @thetransitfan)

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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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???

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Baseball and Streetcars were bff back in the late 1800s.
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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.

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.

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)

Sunday Night Notes

A few things to chomp on:

State lawmakers in California are understanding what parking is not. Free.
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MARTA is a big reason why UPS located its headquarters in northern Atlanta. It's pretty interesting how much development happened around the MARTA stations outside of downtown.
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Since High Speed Rail is such a newfangled thing to most people in the United States, many want to put it into the urban transit category when thinking about its mission. However this is not the case. In my opinion its intercity transport like airplanes. Often opposition to HSR brings out the density straw man to oppose expansion of intercity rail lines but then they would also have to argue that airports and greyhound bus stations need density to operate as well.

I also believe that HSR is a one way train. It's not necessary to have density to operate between cities but it starts the conversation on increased density and transit service once it gets there. And I feel that the comparisons to Europe and density are really mischaracterized discussions about connectivity and service levels. Ultimately the reason why HSR is fairly useful in Europe is because you can get a train to everywhere. Much like the Hub and Spoke airport system in the United States.
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Wendell Cox is always a fun comic relief.

Music Sunday: City Pavement

I always like posting songs related to urbanism or city life. Here's one from the UK.

Wednesday Night Notes

A quick post because today was a blockbuster for articles:

Core Vitality Imperative - The Urbanophile - Aaron is really rocking these posts and is always thoughtful. If you're not reading you should start now.
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"I will walk, I will ride a bike, I'll even crawl to get the debt load off our children,"

This quote was an angry response to raising taxes for transit. These tea-baggers are too much.
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Who knew? Walking briskly makes you healthy. In cities you walk more.
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Ryan has two papers of interest. Paper 1 - Paper 2

According to the authors, it does seem that in polycentric regions, small cities can enjoy some of the labour productivity gains from a large market without having all of the disadvantages of a single large city (including high costs and congestion).

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Yonah asks how you connect a multi-polar region like the Triangle.
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From Switchboard:

Today NRDC released Location Efficiency and Mortgage Default, a study that shows a direct, statistically significant link between the high costs of personal transportation imposed by poor location efficiency and a much higher risk of default.

Ron Kilcoyne: An Emergency Operations Fund

Similarly to Human Transit, I got an email this week from Ron Kilcoyne who is the general manager at Greater Bridgeport Transit with a post advocating for an emergency operations fund for all the agencies that are getting slammed by the recession around the country. Below is a guest post by Ron:

What will it take to restore all transit service hours that were cut over the past two years and prevent additional service hour reductions? I haven’t found a number but I guesstimate that 10% of the total cost of providing transit service nationally would be a decent number. I suggest that $9 billion in a separate emergency operations fund (in addition to the $8.2 billion for capital in the House Bill) that can only be used to add service hours or prevent service hour reductions be appropriated over a 2 ½ year period. - $1.7 b for the balance of FY 2010; $3.6 b in FY 2011 and $3.7 b in FY 2012. Money would be distributed by 5307 and 5311 formula.

In order to receive funds transit systems would have to operate within 120 days of signing into law no less than the number of service hours (annualized) that they did on the first weekday, Saturday and Sunday of 2010 plus a number of service hours equal to the annual allocation under this program divided by the incremental cost of an hour of service. (Transit agencies with multiple modes operating at different costs per hour may allocate hours among the different services as they see fit.)

If a transit agency’s policy board approved service hour reductions prior to January 1 that were to be implemented after the first week of January or if the agency proposed specific services to be cut or specified a number of service hours that will need to be cut in 2010 or 2011 prior to January 1, 2010; then these hours may be counted in lieu of additional hours. Transit agencies that have not cut service or proposed to cut service could increase service hours. From a jobs perspective a compelling case can be made for this proposal.

• A recent TCRP report indicated that each billion invested in transit operations yield almost twice as many jobs as a similar investment in capital (41K compared to 23K) A PIRG analysis of ARRA funds showed that investments in transit capital generated more jobs than similar investments in highway capital
• The jobs created/preserved by this proposal will be immediate and in place months before the elections
• From a jobs perspective an even larger impact will be on the number of jobs that will gain transit access. Unlike other job stimulus investments more transit service hours will provide more opportunities for individuals to access employment and training. (I don’t know how to quantify the number of jobs that will gain transit access or the number of individuals who will gain access to more jobs. – but I suspect the number is quite large however you do it.
• Fuel prices are increasing again. If this continues until another tipping point is reached as in 2008, transit agencies that struggled to meet demand then will be even less able to meet demand in 2010.

I think this proposal addresses concerns that funds will not be spent wisely or have a direct impact on jobs. Another concern will be what happens after 2012 – will there be pressure to add more federal operation funding. This is where the incentives and conditions that should be included in the authorization bill are important. By then hopefully states and local government will be in better position to increase support for transit and these provisions will provide powerful carrots and sticks to see that it happens. (I will describe what should be contained in the next authorization bill in a later post.)

So in closing contact your senators and ask for $9 Billion for emergency operations support and urge others to do so also. Please feel free to post this message anywhere there may be a receptive audience.

The Ravages of Prosperity

It's interesting how any transit investment can be seen as good or bad based on how the increase in values affects the community. Some want better property values but others don't for fear of being displaced. So you're damned if you don't, damned if you do.

Redevelopment, as it turns out, is actually bad because it prompts higher property values (and taxes) and might gentrify the district, forcing some people to move. In other words, light rail should be prevented from doing what it does best: add value to urban neighborhoods. More stations might be OK, according to the suit, but only if nearby residents and businesses are insulated from the ravages of prosperity. At least that's the drift of the argument.

So do we just not improve anything? I'm sure that's not the answer. But these things are tough to balance.

Public Input in Ogden

I was really shocked by this quote in Standard Net, the newspaper for Ogden Utah:

UTA spokesman Gerry Carpenter said he is impressed with the amount of homework and energy the Trolley District group put in and believes the group has worthy goals, but it may be coming to the table too late.

That last part about coming to the table too late is outrageous considering the group has been looking at the 25th street alignment over the 36th street alignment for over a year and has been very vocal about it as well. They were never allowed at the table, so to say they were late is a bit disingenuous. I know this only because I went to speak about streetcars in Ogden about a year ago, though not to advocate for a specific route. The activists were pounding the pavement in support then and are still on the path now.

It shows a disconnect between the citizen process and leaders such as the Mayor of Ogden who haven't wanted to see the 25th street alignment considered at all because 36th was his idea. There was also thefear of the state DOT who people have always believe would not want the streetcar running on their road, whether in a dedicated ROW or not. Perhaps the upstart group should look to some of the Urbanophile's suggestions for beating state DOTs and apply them to both UDOT and UTA.

TOD Will Pay Someday

Unfortunately it feels like there is a bit too much optimism that TOD will pay for infrastructure such as rail. Really though, the increase in value brought by new transit lines has too many people fighting over it, from the basic infrastructure to affordable housing to the lines themselves. We can't expect to put all of that weight on the back of a few projects. However we keep making TOD out to be the savior of all. I feel like it can do a lot of things, just not everything.

Assume the Risk

There have been a lot of issues recently over cost estimates that are starting to rub me the wrong way. I had never mentioned it before but in my head I kept thinking to myself that the cost for LRT in Norfolk seemed awfully low. The most recent estimate was $232 million for 7.2 miles. Compared to most LRT lines that would have been a steal. Phoenix was upwards of $80 million per mile while Norfolk was hovering around $32 million. Now it's $340 million which is still ok at $47 million a mile, but everyone is going crazy.

But today I saw something interesting out of Houston. The city is going to pay up front an extra $100 million for their contract and the bid winner will assume liability for any cost overruns during the project (assuming it doesn't cause them to go out of business). My question then becomes, how come we don't make all contractors stick to their cost estimates?

While I understand that things change and work orders change, shouldn't the company which came in with the chosen bid be responsible for seeing through with their magic eight balls? Perhaps that is asking too much or asking in some instances for disaster. Cutting corners leads to bad things and I certainly wouldn't want a contractor to go cheap on materials because they were trying to make money. In any event, with all these cost overruns on projects that are making LRT look bad, I don't see why more isn't being done to make the bidders more responsible for their bids.

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead

Well sort of. Today the 2005 dear colleague letter that then FTA Administrator Jennifer Dorn released on the world requiring that all New Starts projects have a medium rating on their cost effectiveness has been rescinded. Many have hailed this as a huge step forward for livability advocates but honestly its only half of the picture. One of the reasons I believe that the medium rating was imposed was to build more cheap BRT projects and cut out subway and lrt projects. But another reason was to cut all the junk projects out of the funding loop. With only about $8 billion dollars available for new starts projects in the last transportation bill, it leaves the need for regions to pick up the hundreds of billions more needed to build out transit networks. One estimate pegged the total at approximately $250 billion dollars. That is a huge gap.

So while some newspapers including the New York Times believe that this is opening up the funding floodgates, they are sorely mistaken. It does however change a few dynamics that have been holding projects back. The Central Corridor in Minneapolis is a curious case. They have been wanting to add a station in St. Paul to serve lower income community however it slowed down the travel time just enough to push the line over the index. This is just one example of how suburban to downtown speedy travel is emphasized over shorter trips in denser communities by the existing cost effectiveness index. Yonah has specifically mentioned another Minneapolis project that I also believe is headed in the wrong direction.

Dropping the medium requirement also takes a step towards making us think harder about what we're really building transit for. Is it for existing population or the future population or both? A common comment about the current cost effectiveness rating is that it would have never funded the DC or New York Subways. But DC and New York would not have gotten to where they are now in terms of density without the investments in the subway. Really this is a chance to start thinking about how to make transformative investments in transit around the country. It's an opportunity we've been waiting for, but as with all big ideas, it needs money.

Sunday Night Notes

I realize there has been much less posting here, but if you still want links you can follow me on twitter which seems to be more regular. @theoverheadwire

There are some interesting links today however:

I don't really think cities should compete to land new jobs. Especially for government funded jobs such as Northrup Grumman.
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Wal Mart doesn't create new jobs. Tell us something we don't know.
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So does this mean Smart Cars are PRT?

“Smart’s not a car in the traditional sense, it’s a high- style alternative to public transportation,”

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What does urban authenticity mean?

Is It a Wonder How Housing Prices Are So High?

I appreciate environmental regulations and the like, but it seems like a lot of folks in California just take it too far:

Talk of any development along the rail line has raised concern in the environmental community, some of whom believe the system will act as a catalyst for growth, as developers try to build for those who want to live near a train station.

and this:

Under proposed air-quality guidelines, for the first time in the U.S., if extra cancer risk meets a specific threshold, the developer would be told to study the potential health effects of the freeway pollution on the people who would live in the homes. That would be in addition to what the developer is already required to do: study the effects of the housing on freeway traffic and the surrounding environment. If the health risk is too great, the developer might need to modify or scrap his development plan, or spend extra time persuading the city or county to approve it.

If we can't develop near transit stations or near freeways in existing urban areas, where the heck are people supposed to develop new homes that won't affect the environment? Am I missing something here?

How ITS Should Work. Right?

How ITS Works through the eyes of a kid:



Via Portland Transport

Can One Development Catalyze a District?

And is it right to be developing once vital industrial land? It's a question that often comes up that I don't quite know the answer to. Here in Oakland many properties in West Oakland have been deemed off limits to commercial or residential development. Many council members want to preserve the industries that provide much needed jobs and an economic boost.

In Denver, there are developers who are looking to revitalize the South Broadway area around the Evans station that is primarily industrial. Much of the project is a mixed use redevelopment on six acres that was once a superfund site. The developer is a single developer which also begs the question of how a market gets started. Once he proves that the area is changed and continues to build more and more projects, other folks will follow suit. But ultimately the developer is the one who will boom or go bust.

I find this interesting because everyone is always looking for the next big neighborhood or district. In the past improvements have been predicated on good bones. The gridded street network already exists and a light rail station is already near by. But at the moment the market isn't there. Could it be a single developer who creates a market? Or are markets organic and ultimately unpredictable. I guess we'll find out.