Frank Lloyd Wright the Villain?

There was an interesting Talk of the Nation episode on NPR about a month ago that discusses how Women as consumers are becoming a greater force and how smart businesses are changing to accommodate their needs. Keeping clean restrooms in auto dealerships and pointing to the room number on a sheet instead of saying it out loud in hotels are some of the changes that Paco Underhill writes about in his books that make a huge difference in safety and return business.

In this clip however, he talks about his belief that Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry Ford were the greatest villains of the 20th century in their encouraged suburban development taking us away from the beneficial village community and pushing us to rely too heavily on automobiles and suburban development. It's an interesting listen and while we often think about Hummers as the suburban evil and now folks see them in that way, another thing is houses and their true needs. People often talk about McMansions but do people really need $30,000 Wolf Ranges as well? Likely not but I hadn't thought of these extra issues before. It makes me wonder what else we are McMansioning.

It also makes me think about the flat that my parents had in Rotterdam. It was a very nice place and livable. Everything was available close by and the fridge was smaller than most here given you could get to the store everyday. The washer and dryer were small by American standards but again very efficient. Not everyone really wants to live that way of course but again there is this need to have choices for people such that they can decide how they want their lifestyle to play out.

Click To Play

But even though FLW and his broad acre city plan were something that some think led to a suburban ideal, there were obviously much larger forces at work (which we've discussed in many a post before). So I don't know if I would call him a villain, just someone who saw the car and suburban lifestyle coming before its time. If you had to pick just one villain, who or what would it be? Eisenhower Freeway System? Lending Practices? Zoning Laws?

Pushkarev & Zupan on Employment & Ridership

This is always a chicken and egg fight but I'm starting to believe that the residential density argument is a bit misstated in terms of its impacts on transit ridership. Specifically since you're talking about housing density and not employment density. Charlotte's Uptown development had a larger part to do in transit ridership than residential density does along the corridor. And ultimately the cycle of building housing is going to create more demand, the employment was the initial draw. The transit agency just figured out how to serve it.

Over 60% of transit trips are for work (See Commuting in America III). This is compared to just under 20% of overall trips. This means that the focus on where people work is important in monocentric cities such as Nashville. I'm not saying that residential density is ultimately unimportant. But I believe its less important for starting a transit system and more important for growing it. There are lessons on this in previous research works that we tend to ignore.

To be honest I hadn't really read Zupan in full until more recently on account of there is just too much to read in general. But when I caught up on it, the findings are quite interesting and get you wondering if we've been looking at this whole transit and development thing all wonky. In their seminal work Public Transportation and Land Use Policy (1977), Jeff Zupan and Boris Pushkarev made the following observations based on the existing data at the time:

Pushkarev & Zupan Pg 174-175:

1. Clustering or dispersing nonresidential space. Suppose 10 million square feet are to be added to a growing urban area. One option is to put the floorspace into two highway oriented non residential clusters, each 5 million square feet in size. Another is to create a new downtown of 10 million sq ft. In the second case, per capita trips by transit within a 3 to 5 mile radius will be 50 to 70 percent higher than in the first case, keeping residential density the same.

2. Enlarging downtown size or raising nearby residential density. Suppose the options are to double the size of a downtown from 10 to 20 million square feet, or to double the residential density within a few miles of it from 15 to 30 du/acre. The former will increase per capita trips by transit three to four times more than the latter.

3. Increasing residential density near downtown or farther away. Suppose the options are to double non-residential density from 5 to 10 dwelling units per acre either within one mile of a downtown of 10 million square feet or at a distance of 10 miles from it. In the first case, public transit trips per capacity in the affected area will increase seventeen times as much as the second case.

4. Scattering apartments or concentrating them near transit. Suppose a rapid transit station is located 5 miles from a downtown of 50 million square feet of nonresidential floorspace (the 1976 size of Newark). At a density of 15 du/acre, the square mile surrounding the station will send about 620 trips a day downtown by transit. Suppose speculative development scatters apartments throughout the square mile, raising its density by 20%. This will increase transit ridership at the station by about 24 percent. Yet if the apartments are clustered within 2000 feet of the station, preserving the rest of the neighborhood intact, transit ridership will increase by 34% or more; at least a car load of 62 people a day will be added not from any increase in average density within the square mile, but only from a new arrangement of the new development within it.

"Thus land use policies which will do most for public transportation are those which will help cluster nonresidential floorspace in downtowns and other compact development patterns. Downtowns of 10 million square feet of gross non residential floorspace, if confined within less than one square mile, begin to make moderately frequent bus service possible and to attract an appreciable proportion of trips by transit. By contrast, downtowns of 5 million square feet can support only meager bus service. Spread suburban clusters of nonresidential use can only occasionally support meager bus service, if they contain shopping centers, or if they are surrounded by residential densities in excess of about 7 du/acre.

Residential density is less important for transit use than residential location, ie proximity to a downtown of substantial size or proximity to a rail transit line. If greater transit use is the goal, it is more important to put housing close to a downtown than make it high density. In fact, moderate residential densities in the range of 7-15 du/acre can support moderately convenient transit service by any of the transit modes reviewed in this book. Of course, densities higher than this will support better service, as well as more trips on foot. Thus, a strongly transit-oriented city such as Montreal has an average density of 35 dwellings per acre; attached two-family houses form an important part of its newly developed neighborhoods. Evidence from New York suggests that the shift from auto to transit diminishes, and reductions in total travel per capita cease, at densities above 100 du/acre. This density can be represented by 13 story apartment houses covering 20% of their site; on transportation grounds, there appears to be no need to exceed this density. It is important to emphasize, though, that a 13 story building located amid open fields will make no contribution to transit; it will only make a contribution if embedded in existing urban fabric, close to downtown or a rail station.”

All of this says that increasing your downtown size, and putting dense housing near downtown is likely to increase transit ridership. Now this goes so far when we're talking about polycentric regions and employment clusters that we see today such as Tyson's corner etc. But ultimately I think this work has lessons for those places as well. It will be interesting to see where the next decade of TOD research heads because ultimately I think this is a part of the research that needs to be explored in greater detail.

Guest post: Why can't I find parking?

(Note from Pantograph: This is another guest post from my friend Ed. If you missed his first two posts, check back down the page for more of his work)

Spend any time driving in San Francisco, and you’ll notice that there isn’t a lot of parking. Then, just before you give up and put the car in a garage, it dawns on you that while there aren’t that many spaces, there also aren’t that many parked cars. Instead, driveway after driveway chops up the curb, leaving the street space unusable. Curb cuts are everywhere, of course, but San Francisco buildings seem particularly fond of them.

The obvious impact is that these curb cuts take away parking that could serve many different users of the neighborhood – residents, visitors, and shoppers, and put it into private hands. But there are a lot of other reasons to dislike curb cuts. They increase conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles, they set up hazardous situations as cars back out onto busy streets, they encourage sidewalk parking, and they can often leave a street without room for the trees and other amenities that improve the way pedestrians experience the street. Moreover, the garages they lead to take up space that could be used for a variety of things that add to street life, like storefronts or stoops.

The desire for off-street parking in some areas is certainly valid. However, because there isn’t a price attached to installing a curb cut, we see the type of “overfishing” that plagues any unpriced resource, with some buildings sporting rows of 4, 5, and even more garage doors fronting city streets. Fortunately, this is starting to change - the city is soon going to start charging at least $100 per year for installing a cut, and there have also been efforts to slow new installations in North Beach. Hopefully these measures will lead to efficient use of the city’s curbsides.

Acres of Free Parking Actually Cost Something

Over at my own blog, I've complained about the focus in the livable streets movement on environmental benefits to urbanism. It's not that those issues aren't important - it's that for most people, and certainly for most local governments, it's the pocketbook issues that get all the attention. So I was happy to see this piece today that discusses the opportunity costs of having your city build a Walmart surrounded by a sea of parking rather than a compact mixed-use district:

[Sarasota County Director of Smart Growth Peter] Katz showed the results from retail properties. Here comes surprise No. 1.: Big box stores such as WalMart and Sam’s Club, when analyzed for county property tax revenue per acre, produce barely more than a single family house; maybe $150 to $200 more a year, Katz said. (Think of all those acres of parking lots.) “That hardly seems worth all the heat that elected officials take when they approve such development,” he noted in a related, written presentation.

[...]

But here’s the shocker: On a horizontal bar chart Katz showed, you see that zooming to the far right side, outpacing all the retail offerings, even the regional shopping mall, is the revenue from a high-rise mixed-use project in downtown Sarasota. It sits on less than an acre and contributes a hefty $800,000 in tax per acre. (Add in city property taxes and it’s $1.2 million.) “It takes a lot of WalMarts to equal the contribution of that one mixed-use building,” Katz noted.

It's worth clicking through to read the whole thing (and printing it out for your next local planning commission meeting about that TOD project you really like).

Guest post: Vegas Real Estate Explains it All?

Hi everyone, Ed here. Mr. Trolleypole has kindly invited me to do some guest posting here at the Overhead Wire, so I'll be writing here occasionally. Hope you enjoy. I figured I'd start off with everyone's favorite urban planning contrarian - Joel Kotkin.

Joel Kotkin is at it again.

It's funny. The links to this article from Kotkin (which also made it into the Wall Street Journal) suggested that it was about demographic trends and would include lots of evidence to show that people aren't moving to central cities anymore. But then I read the article, and the whole thing is really just a cautionary tale to the commercial real estate industry. Kotkin asserts that alleged trend of folks moving back into cities seems to be reversing itself. Now, maybe this is true. Maybe that's what the population data show. And this is an important conversation to have – it's not at all clear to me that cities are thinking rigorously enough about how best to grow, and who is likely to show up. We won't find any useful answers from Kotkin, though, who bizarrely bases the bulk his argument on price movements:

Housing prices in and around the nation's urban cores is (sic) clear evidence that the back-to-the-city movement is wishful thinking. … Condos in particular are a bellwether: Downtown areas, stuffed with new condos, have suffered some of the worst housing busts in the nation.

He then engages in some brazen cherry picking, discussing house-price declines in Miami, Vegas, and Los Angeles, and only focusing on new condo construction as opposed to the market at large. Beyond the fact that these aren’t exactly beacons of walkable urbanism, using these cities in particular to make a point is just misleading when you look at how their markets have been behaving:

These lines in the chart are the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices for the metros that Kotkin cites, along with the 20-city composite in purple (which isn’t exactly the same as a national average, but is a reasonable proxy). As you can see, LA, Vegas, and Miami all had much bigger bubbles and much bigger crashes than the nation as a whole. This means two things: 1. these are terrible examples to use for the nation, since they are where much of the bust has been concentrated, and 2. of course the market activity in these places looks terrible, and of course it looks really bad in their downtowns, which is where much of the growth had been taking place. You could make the exact opposite argument by choosing the Bay Area as your focus, and comparing price moves in exurbs like Stockton and Tracy to those in San Francisco. The truth is that this is just a nonsensical way to analyze a national trend since different metro areas have had very different experiences during the housing bust. The numbers he cites aren’t necessarily wrong, but they prove absolutely nothing, other than that people were making some crazy moves in Miami and Vegas during the housing boom.

Sunday Night Notes

Whew, it's been a little while. Still reading lots of news and tweeting nightly. Wanted to cover these few news articles in greater than 140 characters though:

Utah's possible new Senator is saying he's going to cut off the spigot for transit capital funding from the feds saying that he doesn't believe they should be spending money on state and regional priorities. I happen to disagree with this but its an interesting question of

A. what is a regional or state vs. a national priority
B. what would he stance be if it were regional freeway expansion instead of transit

Seems to me much of this debate seems to be framed by subsidization rather than investment. The language needs changing if the livable transportation movement is going to make any ground.
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The Green Line extension to Boston which is a Big Dig offset is delayed again. I'm not sure how anyone could speed it up, but it seems like the state can't really be punished in terms of money more than it already has.
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Transit Miami gets the scoop on the Heavy Rail plug being pulled in the Miami region. This will set Miami back a lot, though local officials say they will refocus on BRT. How much do you want to bet that BRT means limited stop buses only?
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I think this article about job incentives moving employers from state to state which means no new jobs are gained but tax gains for the region are less is replicated around the country when cities fight so hard for sales tax dollars that they lop off the benefits of those jobs. The one that always comes to mind is Emeryville and Oakland.

Chris Matthews Says Stimulate With HSR

I posted a few weeks ago about an discussion on Real Time with Bill Maher where Chris Matthews was arguing with a "Amtrak does nothing" conservative. Today he goes on his show and says that HSR is the way to stimulate the economy. Obviously there is a lot more than that but I like the way he's going.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Trax Siemens Debut

Ok so two posts on this is a bit much but I wanted to compare the Charlotte and Utah vehicles side by side. These are for you Gordon. It looks as if the UTA vehicles are even shorter than the Charlotte LRVs and much shorter than the Houston LRVs which are all the same series. I had read before that this was done to accommodate four car trains.

Utah Transit Authority

Courtesy of UTA

Charlotte CATS


Via Willamore Media Creative Commons on Flickr.

Houston Metro


Via Word Junky Creative Commons on Flickr.

Bonus video footage from today's car unveiling and wow is it going out into the boonies. Better do it right.

What is Austin Thinking?

Ok. I guess I should come clean. In 2004 I held my breath and voted for the Capital Metro commuter rail line when I lived in Austin. Given my small coalition of activists couldn't quite push the commuter rail line away or spark greater talk than a study of streetcars I just closed my eyes and voted for the commuter rail line hoping that it would all work out in the end. At the time there was some despair that if it didn't pass there wouldn't be another rail election for a very very long time. The 2000 loss still stung and though we kept fighting for light rail down Guadalupe during the Calthorpe led public input and other avenues it just wasn't going to happen if the leadership didn't want it to.

Ultimately all of this led to me writing my graduate school thesis on the politics of rail in Austin where I concluded from lots of reading of past articles about the process that Mike Krusee basically manipulated the system to get transit to his part of the region, even though he wasn't even a representative inside the service area. Since then he's had a "come to jesus" on New Urbanism and left state office but every time I think of what happened it makes me sick to my stomach what could have been. But it turns out that it wasn't just him. It was former GM Fred Gilliam and a whole host of people that just didn't want to push for the right route down the center of the region for fear of political retribution. And apparently they still don't because the Red Line has sapped the energy out of any forward movement and other regional entities keep proposing suburban serving lines that do nothing for the constituencies that actually voted for rail in that 2004 election.

So color me annoyed when regional planners start talking about spending $340M on a line that might get 5,800 riders to Round Rock. The current line is under 1,000 riders a day and cost $120M. This is in contrast to the 2000 plan which was $740M for 37,400 riders. I still can't believe that no one in the city looks at these numbers and wonders, why the heck do we keep proposing to spend money on these lines that won't have ridership until we have a good core connection line. Sorry for the crude paint map, but the blue line is 2000 and the black line is the current commuter rail line. Always go where the people are, not where the freight line happens to go.


M1ek has been harping on this for a long time and he's always made some good points. Obviously I don't agree with everything he says and I do wish that he'd be a bit more diplomatic and less in people's faces about it because it seems like once he annoys someone, they tune him out. But at some point folks have to start thinking about whether they are continuing to throw good money after bad and just swallow their pride. Anything less than a line down Guadalupe is the city selling itself short. And if you don't believe me, take a look at the FTA document linked above. You want riders for cheap? Connect places where people are. It's not rocket science.

More Electroexecution

This might be a little more gut reaction than normal but why in the heck would you get rid of trolley buses in Seattle? Honestly when everyone else is looking for ways to get on renewable energy and figure out ways to lower carbon footprints, you're going to really add more ghgs to save a little coin? When do we start pricing carbon so that these actually make Metro money?

This is a case where the bean counters are counting the wrong beans. The metrics they used are out of touch with what's going on in the world today and the whole host of externalities that bean counters are not generally meant to measure till they are forced to. I can tell you that the dismantling of the Milwaukee Road was the dumbest thing right before an oil crisis. He who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it. I find it interesting that these studies keep coming out decade after decade against electric transport on cost or other issues. Edison's battery for cars seemed to be taken out this way, the Milwaukee Road got taken out this way, and now the Seattle Trolley buses might get taken out this way. I want to see a diesel vs. trolley bus test up a hill. Stop the insanity.