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The World Makers: SimCity’s Broken Independence

April 3, 2013 – 9:56 am

simcity2000 The World Makers: SimCitys Broken Independence

You don’t win SimCity 2000. There’s no final cut scene after you figure out the golden ratio of commercial-to-residential zoning or light boxed VICTORY that pops up after you fit one last green/blue/yellow square onto the digital landscape. But there are Launch Arcologies.

Launch Arcologies are what would happen if you fit Endor into a snow globe and stuck it on top of an especially obese chicken walker. There are actually a bunch of Arcologies in SimCity 2000: one looks like the house from Blade Runner where Dr. Tyrell lives; another like an especially sad (and constipated) ebony idol; the last one looks like a game designer got bored and started eating too many donuts. Hallucinogenic architecture doesn’t come cheap so you’ll either have to tax the hell out of your sim-stituents or type “imacheat” during gameplay to get $500,000 instantly. (The free money comes with a couple string attached: first of all, Maxis has taken your pride by making you admit you’re a cheater. Secondly, the windfall is usually bookended with a natural disaster of some kind—though you can stop a flood by typing “moses.” You can also start a nuclear disaster by typing “gomorrah.” The guys at Maxis seems to have a thing for getting all Old Testament on your citizens.)

If you want to come as close to “winning” as you can while playing SimCity 2000 you’ll build as many of the Launch Arcologies as your coffers will allow because once the calendar hits 2051 and you have 300 of these weird, robot looking park-city things, your citizens will be rocketed upwards in their eco-domes to salvation while all the poor schmucks living in “condos” will be doomed to perdition, Maxis style. I would start saving for a spot in a Launch Arcology now. You wouldn’t want to be Left Behind.

The simultaneous launch of the Arcologies is pretty satisfying. SimCity 2000 was created in 1994 and isn’t what you would call dynamic by today’s standards, though compared to SimEarth it might as well be Mass Effect 3. So when you see these little glass rockets separate from their terrestrial thunder thighs and make a beeline for the heavens, it’s as good an ending as you could for though I wish the little statue Arcologies starting going Godzilla on the city at some point as well

As far as simulators go, there’s Maxis and everyone else. Will Wright, the brain behind the SimCity franchise (minus the newest version, but we’ll get to that later), is the godfather of “software toys”— games that cannot be won or lost. It’s best to think of the Wright-era Maxis games as a sandbox rather than a baseball diamond. If you owned a computer in the last two decades there’s a good chance you ran into one of Wright’s creations, whether it was the infinitely expansion pack host The Sims or the more traditional evolution game Spore, which sold 2 million copies in its first three weeks on the shelf. He also designed SimAnt and SimCopter which, I mean, cool I guess. (Conspicuously absent from his C.V.: SimTower. This is still my second favorite Maxis game for no logical reason and I was always pissed that my 47th floor movie theater needed two floors of space because it screwed up the vibe of my building. Plus I could never figure out the tiered/express elevator system and now that I work in a building with that system I feel stupid for not getting it. Director: Yoot Saito.)

Wright’s stock in interactive game design isn’t so much an investment as it is a personal Tony Robbins audio loop. He was more interested in concepts like resource planning and “industrial food chains” than racking up points that would eventually be exchanged for congratulations. Wright’s games aways give players a single role: Creator—not God. You’re allowed to create and customize characters in the Sims but you can’t control consequences; it’s less dollhouse and more science project, a division that he expanded on in a conversation with Game Studies in 2001:

[The school system] is not designed for experimenting with complex systems and navigating your way through them in an intuitive way, which is what games teach. It’s not really designed for failure, which is also something games teach. I mean, I think that failure is a better teacher than success. Trial and error, reverse-engineering stuff in your mind—all the ways that kids interact with games—that’s the kind of thinking schools should be teaching. And I would argue that as the world becomes more complex, and as outcomes become less about success or failure, games are better at preparing you.

You cynics are thinking that Wright’s outlook is absurdly rosy and that we do measure life in wins and losses and they’re called income tax brackets. (It used to be called gout!.) It’s not as if learning from failure is a concept that is only present in Wright’s Sim-era games, either. Learning how to defeat Sephiroth was always about (infinitely frustrating, infuriating) trial and error as well.

Where Wright’s comments become especially lucid are when he talks about the obsolescence of true “success or failure” as the world complexities begin to unpeel.

SimCity 2000 6 The World Makers: SimCitys Broken Independence

Play the new SimCity that Electronic Arts released this March and you can probably guess Wright has been out to pasture. (EA bought Maxis in 1997.) The bones of SimCity’s ancestors are still there, but the dedication to systems, infrastructure, and efficiency—things that planners get hard ons for—has been replaced by design. The game is beautiful. The granularity of the architecture is sublime. It’s worth the $60 price tag just to see your towers rise and commercial centers boom like they a Lisa Simpson science experiment. It’s also like playing a sandbox that happens to be the size of a tabletop zen garden where the little rake costs $15 and the rocks are being released in Spring 2014.

The plot size for your city in SimCity is claustrophobic. Will Wright is balanced in his comments on the new game. In an interview with NowGamer he said, “It’s interesting, in some sense it reminds me of the post-economic crash. It’s not about making your city big, it’s about making them not poor. [The size] makes you focus more on interrelations of those factors, so you could make a city four times bigger but you’d be dealing with the exact same variables.” As a planner that kind of statement is a bummer. Listen, SimCity was never designed to teach 12 year olds about code-based development or right-of-ways or grant anticipation revenue bonds for infrastructure projects. It’s still as much a preparation for city planning as a flight simulator is for flying a F-14, but there’s no downplaying its importance in launching thousands of careers in architecture, design, and urban planning.

Size is what makes cities so hard to manage. Sure, townships are corrupt and go bankrupt and have crime, but the idea that city issues are just town issues blown up is tough to swallow, especially from a doyen like Wright who always devoted himself to understanding the real world complexities surrounding his projects. (Just to put this in perspective: Wright designed scenarios in SimCity 2000 where you could deal with the fallout from any number of natural and anthropogenic disasters including the 1991 Oakland firestorm, Hurricane Hugo, and the 1970’s economic recession in Flint, Michigan. This isn’t some pseudo-historical bullshit rendered in DOS like Oregon Trail, it’s the history of urban America. He also read Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics and World Dynamics.) His comments sound like resignation and disillusionment. Or maybe he gets that it’s just a game.

In a fiery review covered by StreetsBlog, a commentator takes the SimCity developers at EA to task for ditching some of the more forward-thinking aspects that were present in the last go round, SimCity 4:

Not only did the game not add mixed use, but now density is tied to the kind of road you build (not transit or zoning). Want a modern subway system? Nope, not available, even though every game in the series has let you build one. Streetcars? They’ve been added – but only running in the middle of a 6 lane “avenue.” Pedestrian malls? Of course not, and don’t even ask about bikes.

At first, I thought the criticisms were just funny. People don’t complain about Call of Duty’s lack of multilateral diplomacy or economic sanctions and I’m guessing astrophysicists aren’t crowing about propulsion schemes in Deadspace. Progressive planning advocates are a loud and knowledgeable corner of the blogosphere, but like any other niche they tend to get trapped in their own echo chamber from time to time and the StreetsBlog review sounded tone deaf and naive.

simcity 5 1024x576 The World Makers: SimCitys Broken Independence

But then you read more about Wright’s philosophy on games being able to teach and you realize reviews like this—and there are plenty—aren’t lamenting the failure of a game to include bike lanes, they’re eulogizing the end of Wright’s campaign to make kids learn through trial and error. Now you have to play in EA’s world. There isn’t an offline version where you can build a loose duplicate of Philadelphia or Memphis just to blow it up and replace it with Prague. Destruction is what made previous iterations of SimCity a digital palimpsest and now it’s not even an option.

SimCity is still an interactive game and there are significant nods to urban planning as a scientific discipline—you can issue bonds, control tax rates, tinker with the power grid, even pull up some really interesting integrated map schemes—but you get the feeling from playing that the game has lost its ability to hypnotize. You won’t see another generation of architects and planners waxing nostalgic about SimCity sparking their love of cities. The sandbox that Wright and Maxis built is just another poorly backlit screen in a basement now.

Is the dream dead? Just mostly dead. You’ll probably be able to buy a simple resurrection for $20 come Winter. I’m hoping it’ll be called the Portland Pack and maybe it’ll come with a special fixed-gear Sim if you pre-order NOW. Still, EA’s decision to release this clunky version of a game that has such a dogged idealistic following is curious at best. I figure there are two ways they thought about this during final development:

  1. The people who really love this game will shell out money for expansion packs to get more granular features. Hell, they’ll probably even pay $15 just to get a “bike lane” option. Suckers.
  2. Shit, did we forget to put in subway systems? Eh, whatever Phoenix is doing just fine with their transit system, right? What do you mean property values fell 40% during the recession? The central business district is decaying too? And they traded Steve Nash for who?

It wouldn’t be the first time that a beloved franchise took an ideological u-turn (they’ve still sold over one million copies so dogma might be overrated), but either way it’s a shame. Still, for SimCity cultists, EA’s decision to snatch away player independence is probably its most unforgivable offense. There’s a chance that the game producers are betting long on the ubiquity of wireless networks and it’s probably a wise wager considering how much of a push major cities are making for public WiFi. But that barrier completely marred SimCity’s release in March—EA’s servers couldn’t handle the rush of players fiending for some sweet, sweet urban planning action, so many, including yours truly, didn’t get a crack at the game for the first week. You are at the mercy of your network connection this time around, and wireless fidelity is not a forgiving mistress.

I recently downloaded the old DOS version of SimCity 2000. It looks awful, the way most artifacts of nostalgia lose their sparkle once you’re face to face with them again. I’m relearning the old development strategies my brother taught me in 1996, when he was a sophomore in high school and spent sleepless nights trying to build up a struggling metropolis: don’t make the airport too big; keep taxes high; build industrial as far out on the grid as possible. I’m getting the hang of it again and now that I do this for a living (ok, not really) the game has taken on this odd spiritual component. Whenever I design a subway or water supply just right, it’s nerd nirvana. I still can’t win. I still don’t care.

 

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New York Traffic Transportation Planning Urban Planning

Among the Evangelicals: Conversions in Urban Planning

March 15, 2013 – 11:29 am

At 9:38 Thursday morning, a young woman dressed in a matching set of oversized collegiate sweats skulked out the deli on the corner of Fulton and South Oxford in Fort Greene, lowered her chin against the spitting rain, and ducked into her idling car parked ten feet away. The car was a compact sedan with a familiar pale marigold New Jersey license plate flanked by gently pulsating caution flashers. She had been grocery shopping, or as much grocery shopping as you can do in a Brooklyn corner deli, and threw her two full bags into the empty passenger seat. Her hazards stopped their electric metronome and she drove west on Fulton Street, the traffic crawling towards the borough’s most congested intersection.

Fulton Street runs the east-west length of Brooklyn, from the Queens frontier where it begins as modest 91st Avenue until it hits a kink in Brooklyn Heights and becomes Joralemon Street a few blocks before it empties in Brooklyn Bridge Park. You can’t get from one to the other without switching from the B25 bus to the J/Z subway on Alabama Avenue; the whole length is about seven miles end to end.

In 2004 the New York City Department of Transportation installed bus lanes on Fulton Street between South Oxford Street and Flatbush Avenue in order to facilitate faster travel times for the bus routes that operate in the corridor. Then-commissioner Iris Weinshall (wife of Senator Charles Schumer) prioritized traffic flow during her tenure and saw the installation of “peak direction” bus lanes as the most effective route to harmonizing movement on congested routes. The logic behind the more flexible iteration of bus routes doesn’t take a doctorate in transportation planning to understand: more people are going towards the city in the morning and away in the afternoon, so dedicated transit lanes should reflect those preferences. Travel times decreased by 12% along the affected corridors, leading to extensions past Flatbush avenue in 2010 and the creation of the Fulton Mall transit center. There may be gripes among drivers but transit ridership in the on the rise, and NYC DOT has completely rehabilitated its image from corrupt bureaucracy to administrative talisman. Polls show that most New Yorkers think the DOT is uncannily attuned to their needs, from bike lanes to safety programs. Transportation planning has become improbably trendy.

If I were writing a 5,000 word essay on the genesis of the modern bus lane and how it’s propelled transportation planning into an era of incremental pragmatism, that’s exactly how it would begin. But even with an audience of dedicated transit and planning enthusiasts I’m not sure how much the topic would actually stick. Invention is only interesting in its novelty or re-purposing, and painting a white line down a busy stretch of asphalt doesn’t satisfy either test. Surveying violations is only marginally more interesting, mostly because it gives you an idea of what drivers do when they think no one of consequence is watching.

It’s pretty fucking terrifying.

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Government Highways Transportation Planning

Why a Sales Tax on Gasoline Makes More Sense than a Vehicle Miles Traveled Fee

February 10, 2013 – 7:54 pm

gas pump 1024x768 Why a Sales Tax on Gasoline Makes More Sense than a Vehicle Miles Traveled Fee

Progressive policy makers have a creativity problem. It’s not that they’re stuck in an unimaginative funk where new ideas are simply recycled old ones that include some sort of social media strategy. Rather, it’s the theory that every policy suggestion has to be revolutionary or novel, backed up by data that previously unavailable or unremarkable, and implemented by way of buzzwords and viral marketing. Basics aren’t viable anymore, which is probably why there’s such an issue getting even basic movement on pressing issues.

Transportation policy, for all its swelling influence over the past decade, might be the best example of those doldrums of creativity. Now to be fair, most of the good people who are trying to strike a better balance between pedestrians and cars on our nation’s roads (the scale is tipped almost uniformly towards the latter, of course) subscribe to Occam’s Razor via bike lanes and speed bumps and pedestrian plazas—there is a complicit understanding that keeping it simple works best.

I’m guessing that most people who find themselves here probably know that the Federal gasoline excise tax has been stuck at $0.184 per gallon since 1993, a charge that has lost 38% of its purchasing power in the last two decades, according to shifts in the consumer price index. Essentially, the gas tax has stagnated at levels that render its main beneficiary—the Highway Trust Fund or HTF—toothless and ineffective. We see the results in our ruptures interstate system and our crumbling bridges. Most reasonable people admit that we need to replenish the trust fund at a better clip, but there’s significant disagreement about how we do it and that’s how we get to the navel gazing of the Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) fee.

Listen, VMT charges are not on the same level of stupidity as Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proposed elimination of the state gasoline tax in exchange for an increased sales tax, a large chunk of which would be dedicated to infrastructure projects. That prospect is insane, not only for its regressive financial tack but also for the conceptual decoupling of driving and its associated user fee, a combination that is an ostensible pillar of American democracy. Instituting a VMT charge, however, is insane politically, financially, and organizationally. Maybe, as we’ve seen in continental Europe, there is an opportunity on the commercial side of the equation for a true user fee but unless there is a sea change in how we would potentially collect information on a given citizen’s driving record then the VMT charge is dead on the asphalt.

I think this is the point in a blog post where I should defend myself: I have no illusions about the state of privacy in this or any other country. I know my phone and credit card and computer are essentially monitoring devices and I am actually completely fine with the specter of Little Brother. I’m going to guess a lot of people don’t feel the same way but that in iterative generations that issue will continue to fade. The location-based aspect of VMT is the political concern in the immediate, but the considerable cost in ripping out a financial infrastructure and replacing it with something considerably more expensive on both capital and operating fronts is just crazy.

gaspump Why a Sales Tax on Gasoline Makes More Sense than a Vehicle Miles Traveled Fee

When you go to the pump in this country you’re paying for a given stack of interests from the actual cost of light sweet crude to the refining and distribution costs to the whims of the station owner. The last tier on that stack costs between two dimes and a couple quarters depending on the state you find yourself in—the total cost of filling the tank is a pretty simple arithmetic. With increased fuel efficiencies, what you pay for at the pump is lasting a lot longer which is, well, a good thing for you but a bad thing for the government since they depend on per gallon sales to keep the HTF afloat. This is the same slow decoupling we’ve seen with general energy costs over the last few decades: when you become more efficient, user fees get less and less accurate. Combine that with inflation eroding the value of a minor gasoline tax and you get our current transportation-related fiscal climate.

There’s a pretty simple solution here, but it didn’t gain any traction or heft until the outgoing executive director of AASHTO brought it up in a speech last month: a gas sales tax. It might seem like splitting hairs—charging by the gallon or charging by the dollar—but the switch in units might save the HTF without affecting much else. Here’s an example:

A 2013 Toyota Prius has an 11.9 gallon fuel tank. The Hess station near my apartment in Brooklyn is charging $3.85 for a gallon of regular unleaded which means you’ll drop $48.82 on a fill up from empty to full. The Federal government’s cut: $2.19. Let’s say that instead of charging per gallon, we treat gas like any other commodity and slap New York City’s 8.875% sales tax on the final price. The Federal government’s new take: $4.34. You’re paying an extra $2 when you fill up (but you’re driving a 2013 Prius so what’s $2 to a rich guy?) and the HTF is essentially doubling its current tax intake. No need for a new tax infrastructure, no messy political discourse on the right to privacy, only the indignation of people who don’t want to pay taxes in the first place.

I’ll admit that there are potential issues with the installation of a gasoline sales tax, most notably the potential effects of price fluctuations and specifically the prospect of price crashes like we saw during Q4 of 2008 and Q1 of 2009 when prices fell to an average of $1.82 per gallon. Price events like this are aberrations—the average price of gasoline since 2005 is $2.86, and the two-year mean is $3.52 (all stats from EIA), hardly indicative of any general downward trajectory. (Plus we might be running out of oil anyway which means that shit is about to get expensive.) Governments deal with shortfalls in revenues constantly, and I’d guess that whomever the next USDOT Secretary ends up being would rather have a buffer against inflation rather than price crashes.

There’s no doubt that VMT charges will continue to receive most of the press in the small corner of the internet that is transportation blogging; it has the requisite combination of novelty and tech potential that is as in vogue as you can get in planning. But policy makers are sacrificing pragmatism for trends and mistaking newness for innovation. In the end the Highway Trust Fund simply needs more money to stay viable (don’t forget: this affects transit as well) and by letting VMT charges dominate the conversation we’re ignoring the solution that’s been there all along.

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Government New York Urbanism

The Two Lhotas

December 19, 2012 – 4:02 pm

It looks like MTA Chief Joe Lhota has decided to heed the call of Republican Party bosses and toss his well-connected name into the New York Mayoral race. Lhota, who served as a Deputy Mayor under Rudy Giuliani, resigned his post as MTA chief a little more than 11 months after he was put there by Governor Cuomo making him the second MTA Chief to leave the position in three years after former Chairman Jay Walder bolted for Hong Kong in late-2011. Lhota’s riding a wave of post-Sandy laudations and is the only Republican with a considerable name recognition after the MTA handled Sandy exceptionally well. (Business owners have apparently been clamoring for him to campaign as well, but that’s a different story.) It looks like our mayoral race is pretty much set: Joe Lhota and Christine Quinn with Bill DeBlasio skulking somewhere in the background. And transit is screwed.

I actually liked Joe Lhota in his capacity as MTA Chairman—he seemed to take a lot of no nonsense cues from his predecessor and faced unbelievable challenges during the aftermath of Sandy and he deserves to reap the rewards of his success. But, then again, his tenure at MTA is a blip. 11 months makes Walder’s reign seem Caesarian in comparison and there’s plenty of merit to the argument that Lhota could enact more concentrated change through his time as MTA Chairman then a mayoral term. (We’re in an age where people are actually interested in how transportation systems work [no, it’s not just me you cynics, there are a lot of out in there included your cool neighbor Carlos] and how to make them better across socioeconomic stratums. If Lhota didn’t notice that the NYCDOT Commissioner got a damn profile in Esquire because of her progressive transportation policy and realize “Hey there’s a lot of great stuff to be done here and I don’t have to be mayor to do it” then I guess he’s a little more tone deaf than I thought.)

Fortunately, Lhota’s association with the Republican party comes at a time when New York City have moved the goal post considerably left of center on most social policy programs. While far from perfect, Mayor Bloomberg has moved the city forward on several fronts including his laudable efforts to claw back tax revenues from incomes generated in New York but collected in geographies with lighter tax burdens. He’s also been generally supportive of progressive transportation policy going so far as to introduce a congestion charge schematic that ultimately failed once upstate lawmakers got a look at it. Mayor Bloomberg has been less vocal with regards to bicycle policy, however, leaving that to the stellar team assembled at NYCDOT—his endorsement comes more from a mute neutrality, refusing to engage with the sensationalists at the Post and allowing pro-bike policy to grow outside of his direct purview.

That tack is why I’m especially worried about this crop of mayoral candidates. All of them would pass for titular Democrat in a majority of states—reading left-to-right: Quinn, DeBlasio, Lhota. However, they’ve all subscribed to similar forms of 20th century transportation thinking. DeBlasio made himself persona non grata in the cycling community by supporting an “incremental” approach to bike lane development and criticizing steps taken by Commissioner Sadik-Khan though he does have plenty of marks on the other side of the ledger; Speaker Quinn, in the minds of many transit advocates, sided with drivers after snubbing mention of public transportation in her “Transportation Plan”; Lhota is hardest to read as he’s served as Chairman of the country’s largest transit authority but is attempting to top the ticket for a party that is staunchly pro-highway. (It should be mentioned that Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is also a mayoral candidate and, if we were choosing based on how much they would do for New York transportation, would probably be the strongest candidate.)

There’s one lost oddity about all this: New Yorkers overwhelmingly support more progressive transportation planning. They like the pedestrian plazas and bike lanes, hell, they even liked the congestion charge as long as the money was going towards improving transit. No candidate, outside of Stringer (who has, at best, an outside chance) and Lhota (who’s track record is shorter than a James Cameron marriage), has offered us a glimpse of how they would lead on transportation in New York and it’s sort of terrifying. Maybe StreetsBlog’s fear of us electing our own Rob Ford is well placed.

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Urbanism

24 Random Predictions on Urbanism in 2013

December 13, 2012 – 2:04 pm

Here’s a list of things that will almost certainly happen in urbanism in the year 2013 (and when I say almost certainly I mean there’s probably a 30% of five of them happening which is pretty good as far as clairvoyance is concerned) Feel free to add more in the comments!
  1. High Speed Rail advocates will continue to run into bureaucratic (in the BosWash corridor) and economic (in California) bulwarks while incremental moves will happen under the radar so that we get our first mile of track in…2030.
  2. New York City will never use plywood barriers to protect their subway stations during flooding again because pictures like this aren’t easily forgotten. (And everyone will remember that MTA employees did a damn good job in preparation and recovery with Sandy.)
  3. Car Sharing programs will start swallowing up market share from ZipCar especially in low-density cities in the western United States, like Austin.
  4. In a surprisingly pragmatic move, young people will start moving to cheaper cities like Denver, Long Beach, Richmond, and Philadelphia to pursue creative interests because their parents can’t afford to bankroll their children’s “Novels about zombies/bacon” anymore.
  5. Williamsburg will be renamed Murray Hill East.
  6. Janette Sadik-Khan will stay on as NYCDOT commissioner even as Mayor-elect Quinn tacks more conservative on her transportation policy to appease outer borough constituents, Albany, and the NY Post. Commissioner Khan will still be the coolest.
  7. Christine Quinn will win the New York City mayoral race and it won’t be close. Rudy Giuliani might say something ignorant while supporting Joe Lhota (whom I like. Edit: I am not endorsing Lhota for mayor [not that anyone cares]; he’s been a very good MTA chief albeit with a small sample size but Christine Quinn is my candidate).
  8. The New York Times will run the following trend pieces: “What’s Walkability Got to Do with It?”; “Green Roofs Quickly Becoming the Place to be Seen for Young Turks of Soho”; “Irony and Caviar: the Influx of Young Brooklynites to the Newly Affordable Upper East Side” and; “The Bronx: The New Queens? (Formerly: Queens: The New Brooklyn?)”
  9. Following Oscar Niemeyer’s death, Brasilia will see an influx of archiphilic tourists who end up going to Rio after a couple days because planned cities are never that great.
  10. Well-heeled families will continue restructuring brownstones into single-family dwellings without realizing they      are reducing an already choked housing stock in the process. Everyone will continue to be jealous that they don’t have a brownstone.
  11. American fans of the Channel 4 (UK) sitcom Peep Show will trek to South London like so many Sex and the Cityers, realize there’s literally nothing to do there, and then go to Bethnal Green like normal hipsters.
  12. Subway fares in New York will be raised to $2.50/ride, pricing out even more riders while reducing service and eliminating some bus routes entirely. Albany will continue to siphon dedicated transit funds to other projects and the MTA will continue to have their hands tied fiscally.
  13. The High Line will remain the best three season (free) date spot in New York for one more year before going all Times Square on everybody; the Low Line will host Tyler Brûlé’s birthday or something.
  14. Los Angeles will finally get a professional football team. Jokes about USC paying their players will reach an all time nadir.
  15. Conservative politicians will still attempt to support policies that benefit suburbs and exurbs until Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio explain to them how geopolitics work in the United States. They will then attempt to court the “urban vote” by having Shyne perform at the CPAC conference. Ron Paul will say something racist.
  16.  Public funds will be used on between three and six sports stadiums and economists will continue to explain that the positive financial impact on surrounding neighborhoods is essentially null (and here’s more!). Team owners will continue to rail against socialism while they use government-backed bonds and collect revenue distributions from TV contracts.
  17. The disintegrative effects of the War on Drugs in low income and minority neighborhoods will finally become part of the mainstream media narrative and the Obama Administration will attempt to scale back some of the Reagan era policies before being blocked by the extremely powerful prison lobby.
  18. “Walkability” and “Livability” will be replaced by more creative words, thank god.
  19. Books on urbanism will finally get their own placard section at Barnes and Noble but the glut of literature will produce unfortunate titles like Greenroofing Behind Your Landlord’s Back and Creating an Urban Core…Right at Your Front Door!
  20. TV will continue to show geographically neutered sitcoms and dramas; you will continue introducing your friends to The Wire (and to a lesser extent Treme) in order to exhibit the way cities should be used in excellent entertainment. David Simon will continue to be on point in everything he does.
  21. Bars will become the new coffee shops; coffee shops will get liquor licenses in order to remain relevant; spiked iced coffee becomes party drink de rigueur.
  22. China’s pace of urbanization will begin to slow albeit only slightly. Transportation systems will learn from past mistakes and make deadlines more flexible and manageable in order to buttress safety as their infrastructure will begin making front-page news more frequently. Hong Kong’s excellent subway system will be considered a best practice on financial front and American transit systems will take notice.
  23. Highways will continue to be built for no reason, though traffic management efforts will ramp up especially with regards to toll collection and financial incentive schemes, e.g. toll roads, express lanes, variable tolling models, etc. It’s mostly just tolling, sorry.
  24. You still won’t be able to afford to live in Manhattan.
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New York Transit

Redundant Resiliency in New York City Transit After Sandy

November 29, 2012 – 7:54 am

How many days did you have off after Hurricane Sandy? Did your boss give you a couple days off since there was no way to get to work outside of waiting a couple hours for a bus from Brooklyn to Midtown or was she a nice manager and ended up giving you an unexpected week of vacation? Or was she more like James Dolan and say that even though it’s nearly impossible for you to get to work, you’re still going to be docked a vacation day should you fail to show up. 

Anyway, even if you had an angel of a manager it was probably still a challenge to get to work if you toil anywhere below 34th Street. Some of you took those buses with the comically long lines. Some of you walked across the Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn bridges like some sort of hipster diaspora. Some of you worked from home because you’re lucky jerks. But the winners in the post-Sandy transitocalypse took to the open seas of the East River, hopped on a ferry, and were able to head into the office three days after Sandy.

Obviously the ferry system in New York is sort of the forgotten cousin of the New York transit family, but most people forget that before the bridges went up the only way to get from Brooklyn to Manhattan was heading down to the coast and hopping on a ferry. (And yes, you can go look up Whitman’s “Brooklyn Ferry” now.) Now the ferry is sort of an u

Redundant Resiliency in New York City Transit After Sandy

Instagram User Virginia Laird Snapped this Photo of the Absurd “Bus Bridge” Lines

nfortunate gimmick, viewed as a niche transit mode used mostly by Staten Islanders (and just for clarification, we’re talking about the East River Ferries rather than the extremely useful [and free] State Island ferry) and people who use Instagram entirely too much. In fact, the ferries that run from Brooklyn to Manhattan are operating on a ticking subsidy that is set to expire within a couple years. (Quick aside: the fact that the ferries came back so quickly after Hurricane Sandy proved invaluable as far as emergency preparedness goes. That alone should extend the subsidy indefinitely—but it probably won’t.)

Redundant Resiliency in New York City Transit After Sandy

Have you ever heard some one on a bus or a subway (and this was especially popular in Boston) complain about buses and subways running the exact same route? If they’re smart they’ll use  ”redundancy”, if they’re not they’ll say “stupid”, because at the end of the day the words are interchangeable when it comes to transit apparently. Unfortunately, after Hurricane Sandy essentially took the MTA offline we saw that the false semantic equality manifest itself in masses of people struggling to make a trip that is almost instinctual. With transit, redundancy should be a goal only deferential to access. Redundancy has more in common with resiliency than waste, and it’s time the New York transit community embraced that equality.

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Government New York Urbanism

The Need for Strong Federal Government During City Disasters

November 1, 2012 – 10:55 am

A friend of mine in London asked how things were in New York in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Where I live in Brooklyn there was nearly no damage: a few trees were felled by the wind, storefronts using Verizon had to start dealing in cash (though this being Brooklyn that wasn’t exactly a huge change), and there were a lot more families out in the daylight hours with most New York schools closed. The devastation in Hoboken, Long Island, Queens, and Coastal New Jersey is extensive. New York’s subway system is in dire straits with major lines still closed. Manhattan below 34th street has been dark since Monday.

At the end of my email I couldn’t help but talk about the relationship between the Federal and local governments at times like these.

At one point in my career I was paid to educate local and regional financial administrators on how they can best stretch their dollars in order to invest in infrastructure development. For non-Federal entities, innovative financing is the only way to get projects done most of the time. State and municipal governments are legally bound to balanced budgets, they are not allowed to spend money they don’t have unlike the Federal government that can run astronomical deficits without worrying about the specter of bankruptcy—though some pundits would have you think otherwise. Regional transportation and planning officials often have to go to the Federal government and apply for those dollars and, often, they’re wrapped in red tape and marked with arcane regulations on spending, management, and delivery. The Federal government is lumbering by design—if they screw up it’s taxpayer money they’ve bungled, so the process is deliberate and glacial.

With disasters like Sandy this can be a blessing and a curse. Local governments (no, not even the city-state of NYC has the coffers for independent emergency management) cannot afford to deploy every asset they have during one disastrous week. If Gov. Christie, who has been doing a spectacular job at managing a devastating natural disaster, hasn’t applied for Federal fund he would have had to choose where to put his limited resources. FEMA (and dear lord, has there ever been a Federal agency who has had a bigger reputation transformation than FEMA in the last week?) has become an essential part of the recovery landscape and, for those who would espouse the need for states to have the say in how their emergency assets are spent, does not dictate how the Federal funds are spent. States apply for the funds, FEMA gives it to them, and States use the funds where they think it is prudent.

Look, the governmental response to Hurricane Sandy hasn’t been perfect with citizens having to take charge in neighborhoods like Red Hook and the Lower East Side because of the overwhelming need for emergency services all over New York and New Jersey. But there is a serious cognitive disconnect when pundits talk about the need for stronger state’s rights during natural disasters like this. New York City and New Jersey (the most urbanized state in the country), a city with an Independent mayor and a state with a Republican governor, understand the need for a strong Federal government during harrowing events like Hurricane Sandy, let’s hope the reaction from FEMA and the entire Obama administration makes that crystal clear.

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Government New York Subways Transit Urbanism

Joe Lhota’s Smart Pragmatism at the MTA

October 25, 2012 – 11:52 am

MTA Chairman Joe Lhota’s interview on this morning Brian Lehrer show (listen here) wasn’t exactly earth shattering: he talked about the potential fare hike scenarios, expressed his desire to make the MTA into the best transit system in the world (again), and offered some vague visions of the future. These interviews don’t really rise above local politics, though you’d be forgiven if you considered New York City transit policy a regional issue with national implications. Mr. Lhota was speaking to the daily riders who are worried about rising fare costs while simultaneously trying to convince them that the MTA is still one of the most effective transit systems in the world, not to mention one of the cheapest in the post-industrial world.

But then Joe threw some in this corner of the blogosphere a pretty significant bone: he talked about lengthening stations as an alternative to significant capital programs! And modernizing signal structures!

I’ll be honest that I’m not sure how lengthening stations improves service (I’m assuming Second Ave. Sagas or Cap’n Transit probably has a better idea than I do) but the fact that Mr. Lhota offered up something that is not only pragmatic but also achievable in such a hostile funding climate was sort of revelatory. Listen, everyone wants more service and better service and cheaper service, but at the end of the day that just isn’t a reality. Yes, Albany has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from dedicated MTA coffers, and yes, City Hall hasn’t increased transit funding since the first Clinton administration, but unfortunately there is no financial capacity to do anything additive outside of the Second Ave. subway.

Modernizing the MTA with incremental improvements like fixing the signaling structure (which would make trains come more frequently for all you rabble rousers out there) is a great step in the right direction and shows that Joe Lhota understand his constraints and is able to work within them with elegance and nuance. We’re all upset about the fare hike but I’m ok with an extra quarter going towards real improvements in the system.

Now if only Albany would stop messing everything else up for transit riders we could actually get somewhere.

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Government Highways Transit Transportation Planning

The Whole Cost of Driving or Why You’re Probably Paying too Much for the Subway

October 15, 2012 – 9:37 am

If you drive a car what do you typically pay for? There’s gas, insurance, the occasional trip to the mechanic, tolls sometimes, maybe some lump sum for parking if you don’t work in the suburbs. It adds up to a lot, in fact it’s actually a lot more than you’d be paying if you lived in the city and simply took the subway or rode a bike to work. (Luckily for us the American Public Transportation Association has a little online calculator that can tell you exactly how much money you’re throwing away by hopping into your Camry every day instead of grabbing BART, or Metro-North, or the MBTA or whatever your regional commuter service may be.) Sure, urban denizens might shell out more in rent and groceries (Brooklyn recently became the 2nd most expensive city in America but has a median household income of $32,000—what?) but we save a boatload on transportation costs even though the ever climbing fare schedule is actually beginning to price out the neediest communities from transit.

It balances itself out, right? Car owners have to pay out a couple thousand extra dollars every year in the form of additional expenses while city dwellers pay the higher living costs associated with having access to reliable public transportation. Drivers in major metropolitan corridors have to pay bridge, tunnel, and highway tolls while people closer to the city center have to pay fares for buses and subways. Equals peequals.

We are not equals peequals.

Public transit is a heavily subsidized industry and the related numbers are easily gleaned from budget outlays on a state-by-state basis. (Here’s a study that compares the subsidies across modal splits in NYC [PDF] and interestingly includes ferries the oft-forgot way to get to work.) For subways, New York subsidizes about a quarter of each passengers’ ride and for buses it’s about a 70% subsidy. When you get up to a commuter rail service like the Long Island Railroad the total subsidy is 88% for the average ride which is variable based on distance, unlike the other two modes. Balancing out the subsidies is simple for transit administrations: you simply hike the fares. The MTA, New York City’s public transit authority, is set to announce their new fare proposals presumably raising the regular fare from $2.25 to $2.50 which would reduce the subsidy percentage (given the same distribution formula) for subways by about 2.5% and for buses by about 6.5%. (Something that isn’t mentioned here or in the pertinent PDF is that there is a reduction in fare prices for those who purchase “bonus” or “unlimited” MetroCards, which most likely dampens those subsidy reductions.) A portion of your Federal, state, and city tax dollars goes towards funding transit even if you never ride it, a concept that many lawmakers and constituents in suburban and exurban communities are not cool with.

So if you’re an everyday driver you’re probably asking yourself, Where’s my subsidy? Why isn’t the government paying for 30% of my gas or 50% of my tolls or 70% of my Big Gulps?

Brace yourselves, drivers: they already kinda sort of do. You may consider the amount you shell out every month for driving to be exorbitant but the costs of driving (especially gasoline prices) are so artificially depressed that you are receiving an effective subsidy simply because there is no political will to hike the Federal gas tax like we hike transit fares. Car-based infrastructure is also heavily favored in the FHWA/FTA funding schemes; with the FTA (PDF) receiving $1 for every $4 FHWA (PDF) receives, not to mention the $600 billion cumulative difference between gas tax receipts (PDF) and car-based infrastructure costs.

It would stand to reason that if fare hikes are the best way to balance the transit subsidies (just kidding, privatizing transit is the best way to do that!) then increasing the cost of driving by, say, increasing the Federal gas tax by including the social costs of driving (congestion, emissions, public safety, depreciation of public infrastructure) would be the best way to balance out the cost of driving.  We haven’t had a Federal gas tax increase in this country since 1993. Just to put that in perspective the cost of a subway ride in New York and Chicago has increased by 44% (with a slated increase that will drive it to 50%) and in Boston it’s gone up by 57%—even adding a nickel to the current Federal gasoline excise tax (a relatively paltry 22% increase to $0.234/gallon) would add billions in revenue (PDF) to the USDOT budget and would go a long way towards funding the true cost of driving.

How likely are we to see a Federal gas tax increase in the next decade? Not very. There isn’t much favor for state-level gas tax increases either with only Iowa coming close to adding $0.05 to their state excise tax which hasn’t been changed since 1989. Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts also attempted to raise state gas taxes by a more robust $0.19, a hike that would have raised ~$600 per year million for the state—he backed off his proposal after realizing there was almost no political will to pass such a measure. On the other hand transit agencies are almost sure to increase fares that outpace inflation out of sheer necessity, and when you price out constituents from transit there’s not much in the way of recourse; price out drivers and there’s a high likelihood of alternative transportation modes.

 

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Boston Government New York Transit Transportation Planning

An Argument for Privatizing Transit from a Very Liberal Blogger

October 11, 2012 – 9:53 am

Access is important here at Radials. We’ve argued that lack of transit options in major metropolitan areas is a major contributing factor to urban poverty and plays a role in the uneven distribution of economic opportunities between neighborhoods in cities. We’ve talked about the differences between bus rapid transit, light rail, and heavy rail and what it means for the affected constituents. Hell, we’ve even talked about why Americans are so much better at basketball than everyone else and a big part of it has to do with access to training infrastructure. Give a community access to something positive and they’ll always benefit—you could say that’s Radials’ shorthand mantra when it comes to urban policy.

The first topic—transit access—isn’t given enough page space here though, so I’d like to offer an opinion that doesn’t really jive with my overall political philosophy (the good folks over at Market Urbanism are already typing “I told you so”): transit is probably best managed by private industry.

Before everyone lets the nightmare of a Mitt Romney-run subway system run away with them, let me explain what a private transit system would not consist of:

  • Profit

That’s pretty much it. Unless you’re Hong Kong and somehow have made a buck off transporting millions of people for $0.30 a ride you’re most likely providing transit at a loss—and for most major American markets the operational deficits can reach anywhere from 50% to 70%. (Reading about MTR Corporation Limited, the publically traded company that runs HK’s metro system and is also 74% owned by the government of HK is absolutely fascinating so if you have a minute, check out the Wikipedia page.) American transit operators are also heavily subsidized by the FTA and state entities, though many would argue correctly that the amounts distributed by the Federal government and more highway oriented SDOTs have unfairly skewed funding mechanisms towards rural transportation development, thus shoving transit systems into further debt valleys than is proportional plus no one has actually included the social impacts of driving on the country at large in the gasoline tax which means we have an artificially depressed coffer, but anyway. The transportation economist John F. Kain (UT-Austin) argues convincingly that those subsidies are actually better used to pay private operators to do what the MTA, MBTA, LACTA, etc. do currently at a heavy cost to taxpayers: provide transit.

This isn’t unheard of. Traditionally, when a government needs to build a bridge they’ll put a contract out for something called “Design-Bid-Build” which means exactly what it says: a private entity will design the bridge, bid on the contract, and build the bridge. Often they’ll add another stipulation to the contract: Operate. (There are a bunch of other combinations, such as including “Own” which means that the entity quite literally owns the piece of infrastructure.) When you get an operate stipulation in your contract as a private corporation you are entitled to toll revenues in exchange for providing maintenance and upkeep on the bridge (these are called “concession contracts”), all of which is outlined in stacks and stacks of paperwork that, if you work in any city administration office, is the bane of your existence.

This isn’t the only example: Chicago infamously privatized the Skyway; the toll roads near my family home in Orange County are all private operated; bus systems that serve the Orthodox Jewish communities in New York City are contracted out to private transportation operators. Privatization can be a scary prospect for public services, though, and the introduction of any program would need to be ironclad in its dedication to serving wide swaths of communities—the lack of profits would be filled by subsidies at lower levels than states and cities’ are currently distributing because of efficiency gains in switching from a publically operated system to a private one.

I’ll admit that there’s something unnerving for me in writing about the merits of privatizing municipal services. Orange County’s attempt to essentially privatize city government backfired famously, the aforementioned privatization of the Chicago Skyway is not necessarily popular nor effective, and transit privatization has only been applied in smaller communities save for Denver’s bus system which is 50% contracted out. It’s by no stretch of imagination a new concept—people have been clamoring for this brand of privatization for decades and there’s a renewed interest from larger cities (London is the best good example) in at least dipping their toes into transit privatization. In a climate of municipal austerity maybe it’s time to jump in with both feet.

 

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