Transportation Planning Urban Planning

The Stubborn Middle: Why Progressive Transportation and Urban Policy Will Always be a Local Thing

May 15, 2012 – 11:38 am

The branches on either side of my genealogy snake quite a distance before they reach my brothers and me. My mother’s side comes from southern Honshu, diminutive middle-class Japanese folks with a taste for canned sardines and a disdain for low-sodium soy sauce that they’ve passed onto their American cousins. My father’s relatives are half-cowboy and half-redneck, hailing from Wyoming and Colorado with mainly a taste for Coors and two-bit whiskey. They’re hearty, almost universally killed off by old age when liver failure and lung cancer should have cut them down—something about the Rockies and open spaces might prove to be a better panacea than AA and Nicorette. I was visiting my father’s parents in Colorado Springs (COS), a city that their relatives and ancestors put on the map as a city of prospectors and cowboys, in order to talk to my grandfather about his 85 years and hoping to put together a blood history and maybe even get commissioned by the city historical society.

The interviews with my grandfather didn’t take as long as I thought they would. Stories, I’m starting to realize, may take their shape over hours and days but can be relayed in a matter of minutes. It was a depressing personal revelation: sharing our realities with another person tend to disappoint unless you’re blessed with the controlled quicksilver abilities of a natural storyteller. I spent a lot of the time looking around the different parts of COS while my grandparents were shuttling me between nostalgically significant geographies, my grandfather’s motorized picaresque.

As far as small cities go, I’d forgive you if you mistook COS for Des Moines, Iowa or Waco, Texas; it’s memorable for personal reasons and dotted with architectural Americana like the Broadmoor Hotel and the Colorado Mining Exchange. Colorado College flanks either side of Cascade Avenue and looks like most bucolic cloisters of American liberal arts—on an especially sunny spring day in May (coeds drinking Fat Tire on their above-market rate porches) the backdrop made me miss college and lazy afternoons. It’s a city that wouldn’t look odd if it was rendered in grainy black and white.

One other thing about the Springs: almost everyone drives everywhere. While Colorado is still the healthiest state in the nation by both statistical and anecdotal metrics, there is still the feeling that outside of the token bike lanes used mostly by the under-30-and-oft-bearded demographic there is not a desire in much of suburban America for anything outside of the current vernacular of urban planning. Too much traffic? Build more roads. Not enough housing? Build more housing. There isn’t a desire for anything different because necessity hasn’t dictated taking a different look in how things work in places like the Springs. People are generally happy with current planning practices because there aren’t diminishing returns for additive infrastructure—it’s vanilla planning for people who like vanilla.

That isn’t to say that my paternal homeland is somehow backwards or stunted (OK, maybe a little backwards). Necessity has driven places like New York to develop (and keep developing) stringent safety measures for pedestrians and cyclists, or Boston to link its mass transit system in a way that moves as many people as efficiently as possible (still in progress). For the middle country those driving mechanisms haven’t really presented themselves in any intractable way outside of marginally higher gas prices. (Yes, gas prices are at historical highs nominally and effectively but the financial affect on the vast majority of Americans is constantly and grossly overstates and those histrionics are probably the main reason that our interstate infrastructure is in such shoddy condition). Why would they need to change the equation if it’s working just fine for them?

And that’s why transportation changes will always be a local game. Infrastructure development is something that needs to be planned for the long run but is almost always dictated by immediate needs. In a standard small city like Colorado Springs, and indeed most metro-areas that don’t have any geographic bounds, the immediate needs are not going to include progressive infrastructure for another decade at least.  Movements like Complete Streets may have taken off in cities that were already geared towards that sort of politic, but there will be a much tougher contingent to deal with in places like the Springs.

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Cars Transportation Planning

Why Hybrids and Increased Fuel Economy Won’t Save the Environment

April 24, 2012 – 5:33 pm

For the purposes of this article “fuel efficient” and “hybrid” will be effectively interchangeable even though they are not the same thing. I’m sorry to all the auto-lexical purists out there. 

Ad professionals are pretty smart. Or, maybe more accurately, they’re pretty perceptive, able to pick up on trends, memes, and slang and insert them into slick commercials that have almost become events in themselves. Most of the time the ads are for mass consumption—I’m sure that if I was sitting with a petroleum engineer he or she would have something to say about Chevron’s commercial offerings, same thing with a grease monkey and those really annoying Dennis Leary-narrated Ford spots—so expecting any sort of nuance within those 15 or 30 second spaces is asking for a lot. But sometimes, when ad teams are feeling especially bold and knowledgeable (I’m sure expert consultants are involved), they insert themes into commercials that are, for lack of a better word, profoundly misguided. Like this one:

Alright so I can’t find the car commercial I was talking about in the vast archives of YouTube so this will be kind of funny: essentially a pretty standard 30-something is driving a sedan and he alternately looks out the driver and passenger side windows to see things symbolizing power and things symbolizing environmentalism. Not terribly creative but gets the point across plainly in the course of a 30-second ad, i.e. you don’t have to sacrifice power for being green. I swear I spent a few hours looking for this stupid commercial. I’ll link it if it comes on TV again and I can actually remember the make and model. 

This guys gets to have the best of both worlds! He can have a humming 200 horsepower engine and not drop a mint every time he hits the pump! It’s a goddam miracle. He’s an environmentalist and a fun driver, the two paths have finally met in a sepia-toned wood.

I understand that CAFE standards have sort of been the Grand Compromise between the Federal Government, leaning ever so cautiously towards environmentalism, and the American auto manufacturers who are looking for the best way to make a buck without triggering another economic catastrophe. The latter ends have been wildly successful, and while the stock prices have been more Siberian than Himalayan for Ford and GM they aren’t groveling at the steps of the Capitol anymore—not by a long shot.

hybrid lot Why Hybrids and Increased Fuel Economy Wont Save the Environment

Better MPG ratings for cars have injected new life into these car companies for two interesting and opposing reasons: lighter wallets and greener consciences. The first reason is of course a more general economic driver, especially since American families are spending higher and higher percentages on their transportation costs as a proportion of their overall income. The days of Escalades and Yukons in middle class suburbs are most likely over for good (yes, I know how much that exact sentiment is aped in the general press) because most people can’t afford to put down $120 every time they fill up. (You can also expect that number to go up in the medium term for the typical peak-oil-finite-resource-conflict-zone reasons. Also, if we see the same sort of stagnant wages for the middle 50% of Americans in the next two decades like we did in the previous two—well you can draw your own conclusions.) Cars with higher MPG-ratings are going to start moving towards that golden market share (>50%) once the secondary market gets inundated with Prius (Prii?), Insights, Camrys, Accords, etc. because of the nature of the car game. For the consumer without financial worries, though, buying a fuel-efficient car like a Prius or Insight is based on ostensible environmentalism—or as a good friend of Radials puts it: “conspicuous conservation”.

Let’s back up before we deconstruct that point, though. I understand the point of ads is to push product and that, most of the time, subtlety and nuance is not rewarded with higher volume sales and that building around a kernel of high concept truth (e.g. “Oil consumption is bad for the global environment”) is often enough to garner interest from the parties you’re trying to reach. Advertisements for high mileage vehicles are based in sort of a foggy reality where, unfortunately, the majority of progressive-minded people live when it comes to transportation. (I’m not saying I don’t live there when it comes to things like clothing; I’m a vegetarian yet still wear leather shoes. We confound our beliefs everyday, you just have to admit it to yourself.) We allow ourselves to be deluded because it’s a lot easier than dealing with hard realities or depressing truths, even when we think we’re facing those realities and truths. Ad professionals know those anthropological intricacies really well, and they know exactly how to make us feel better about doing something that might not be all that good for the world.

Fuel efficient and hybrid cars might be one of their greatest successes. The realities around the car industry are pretty simple: (1) buying a new car is always worse for the environment than buying a used one, even if the used one is a Ford Bronco and the new one is a Camry Hybrid and (2) just because you use less gas to get around doesn’t mean you are actually reducing petroleum consumption and, by proxy, saving the environment. (I understand that some hybrids are technically “zero emission vehicles” but in reality the difference between conventional combustion engines and hybrid-electric ones is a 30% reduction in CO2 release—also the reason that we’re using hybrid and fuel efficient interchangeably.) The first point is self-explanatory, but the second one takes a little more explanation and is an axiom that is well known in transportation circles but not necessarily outside of them.

410784077 e16a47c690 o Why Hybrids and Increased Fuel Economy Wont Save the Environment

Oregon DOT VMT Tax Pilot Program Courtesy of PortlandTransport Flickr

We drive a lot more than we used to. “From 1977 to 2001, the number of miles driven every year by Americans rose by 151%,” says a 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal, thought the intermittent price spikes for gas have created a relatively flat VMT chart from 2007-2012. (VMT = vehicle miles traveled, an important term for transpo-nerds.) Best antidote to that flatline? Better fuel efficiencies which can effectively offset gas price increases and balance demand back to normal levels, meaning we’ll drive more even if the costs are marginally higher. There’s been a lot of chatter about setting VMT reduction goals and some government bodies are even working to base insurance and gas taxes off VMT, a more accurate representation of an individuals driving habits and thus their relative risk-levels and proportional benefits from gas tax receipts. I know that last sentence was extremely boring to read, but honestly those sorts of programs will probably change everything about car ownership.

Environmentally, nothing short of reduced driving will really have much of an impact and that means to stop thinking we’re saving the world by actually consuming more. The commercials can tell you over and over again that you’re being “green” by getting that hybrid in your garage but at the end of the day that’s a decision that is based solely on your wallet, and advertising professionals apparently know that better than we do.

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Bay Area Bicycles News San Francisco Transportation Planning

The View from the Street: How Mutual Respect Makes for Safer Streets

April 19, 2012 – 10:56 am

Radials probably doesn’t spend enough time talking about cycling. It could be because I’ve been relocated to Southern California for a few months, a place so unfriendly to casual cyclists and pedestrians that I’ve actually been honked at for walking through a crosswalk at a stop sign. Longtime friend of Radials Abe Finkelstein may be the solution to our velo-needs as he is a devoted bicyclist living in San Francisco, one of the bastions of progressive cycling policy here on the west coast. Abe will be contributing to Radials as long as he stays in the good graces of the editorial staff which, knowing Abe, might not be that long. Here’s his first post. 

A recent incident here in San Francisco, where a pedestrian was mowed down in a crosswalk by a cyclist, has led to major uproar and has caused a push by the city to get tough on bicycle scofflaws.  The incident happened at the busy intersection of Market and Castro, where pedestrians, cars, bikes, buses, trolley cars, and even dogs are “frequently entangled in amusing and not-so-amusing ways.”

ba chronwatch14 SFC0099768009 part6 The View from the Street: How Mutual Respect Makes for Safer Streets

(Credit:  San Francisco Chronicle)

This comes at a time when more and more American cities are seeing vehicular homicides outnumber all other homicides.  The street has become the danger zone, a place where pedestrian injury accounts for over $20 billion annually.  Almost every day you hear about the life of another pedestrian or cyclist ruined by a gas-guzzling machine. It may seem like automobiles are the only culprit.  However, a moving bicycle on a city street is a dangerous vehicle too.  Even though pedestrian deaths by cyclists are rare, there needs to be more of a shared attitude about the law.

Almost 40 percent of land within American cities is devoted to public streets.  Streets are the foundation that makes a city a great place to live, but also a place where people of all modes of transportation are jumbled together into a complex madness.  There is a competition for claims on public space, causing a disconnect in the way we treat each other on the road and the way we want to be treated.

4096328491 e02621e48a z The View from the Street: How Mutual Respect Makes for Safer Streets

(Credit: Spacing Magazine via Flickr)

A lack of respect for space exists between both cyclists and motorists alike.  

On a bicycle, you are completely exposed to the dangers of the road.  Cyclists will take command of a street not to be rude, but because they have to in order to stay alive.  Hordes of oblivious drivers move through traffic as fast as possible, drifting lanes and swerving around everything in their path.  A cyclist who takes the lane to avoid dangerous obstacles would otherwise get swiped by someone trying to squeeze by.  Sometimes on a bike you need to keep moving just to survive.

From the motorist point of view, it seems cyclists are renegades who refuse to obey traffic signals.  My observations while commuting to work (as a cyclist myself) through San Francisco are that some bikers will just keep on rolling, right through red lights and busy crosswalks (again, see above for a fast-moving example) unless there is an imminent threat of slamming into a truck or city bus.  The above-the-law riding habits are of some cyclists are atrocious, and a major headache to all others on the road.

According to the motorist, bicycle facilities are a traffic headache as well – valuable street space previously intended for car lanes and parking are given away to these entitled cyclists, who don’t follow the rules to begin with.  Unless we want more people to get hurt and things to boil over, something’s gotta give.

roadrage1 The View from the Street: How Mutual Respect Makes for Safer Streets

Every cyclist spends time in an automobile at some point or another.    

As a city dweller, I do not own a car, nor do I plan to own one in the near future.  I use my bicycle and public transit to traverse the city streets for daily purposes.  One thing I’ve found however, is that I need to use a car every once in a while (read: often) for long distance trips or to move large items.  Riding in a car is not a bad thing; it’s become a necessary and enjoyable part American life.

It is also important to note that each and every person on a city street who uses a vehicle, whether it be a bicycle or an automobile, must also become a pedestrian at some point.  Once you park your car or bicycle at your destination, you will find yourself walking the very same streets.

usa nyc bike car conflict The View from the Street: How Mutual Respect Makes for Safer Streets

(Credit: NYC Bicycle Coaltion)

The major issues related to pedestrian, bicycle, and automobile interaction on a city street boil down to conflicts on perspective and design.  

Depending on which mode you may be currently using at the time, your perspective on safety and responsibility will change drastically.  The place of the pedestrian, cyclist, and automobile on the designed infrastructure within the urban network should be agreed upon in order to prevent these conflicts.  This means the ways in which we interact with facilities, signage, and other vehicles must be implicitly clear. If we want to have safe and positive interactions between all groups, we need to start taking these issues seriously.

Abe Finkelstein is a transportation engineer living in San Francisco and an avid cyclist. Recently, he rode from coast-to-coast in the summer of 2011 in coordination with Habitat for Humanity on their annual Bike and Build trip. You can get in contact with him here. 

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Los Angeles Transportation Planning Urban Theory

Spongephalt! Or: Harvesting Rain in California

April 14, 2012 – 1:30 pm

Radials usually isn’t the place for discussing newfangled ideas. We pride ourselves on stodgy pragmatism (see: the party line on California high sped rail) and stick mostly to the dry, boring policy analysis that ends up being supremely important somewhere down the line. But it rained in Southern California today—a torrent! with wind! and felled palm trees!—and since California drivers have absolutely no idea how to navigate wet roads I had a lot of time to look around at the asphalt while rolling around at 15 MPH.

It’s been a dry year in Southern California, but that’s typically how it goes—you don’t come to Los Angeles for the lush green and windbreakers. There have been worse years and I remember dead lawns and short showers during especially parched seasons, but there’s no doubt that we’ll see a bloated number of forest fires when the summer rolls around like we do in most thirsty years. Since we can’t control the weather (alright, maybe the Chinese can) California sort of has to make due with what it has, even if that includes pilfering water from inland lakes to run faucets in Beverly Hills. But what if we could stop dehydrating aquifers in inland California and maybe start pulling our own weight?

HWY35%20 %201 Spongephalt! Or: Harvesting Rain in California

If there’s one thing we have a lot of here in the Southland, it’s asphalt. We drive everywhere and we pour tons of blacktop into every spare inch of space, leaving plant life on perfectly rectangular, well-manicured islands. Asphalt, as many people know, creates a lot of problems for the environment. It’s low permeability means that water rushes downhill flooding drainage grates and dumping any and all terrestrial flotsam into the ocean and waterways, and its low albedo (much like tarred building roofs) creates a lot of ambient heat, increasing temperatures in city centers and making metropolises into effective blackbodies. There’s been a lot of talk about “green asphalt” which has a higher albedo and isn’t a processed petroleum product, both significant upgrades over our current strategies, but that seems a little too uncreative for something so ubiquitous.

How about Spongephalt? I’m not an engineer, so I won’t go into the schematic details (but since I wouldn’t know where to begin, this should probably be encouraging) but here’s the idea: create a surface of semipermeable asphalt that allows rainwater to seep through (it can double as a filtering layer—bet you didn’t think of that CalTrans!) into a “spongy” polymer that drains into a reservoirs purified by water treatment centers. Yesterdays storm inundated Southern California, with most of the water getting contaminated by cars (and I know that sounds simplistic but “cars” will be an all-encompassing term for our purposes) and then running off into the ocean and wasted. This is rain catching for the 21st century, and with water becoming an increasingly strategic resource it seems as good a time as any to harvest as much as possible.

There are, of course, problems with this idea, mostly from the engineering side. How do we deal with the problem of potentially engorged sponge layers that may end up cracking and distorting the top layer of asphalt? The honest answer: I don’t know. But it seems like a problem that could be solved by having a robust drainage system with stress sensors interspersed between the layers. That’s a suggestion coming from a policy guy, so I’m sure some of my friends with a few more engineering classes under their belts can discuss this a little more fully.

Roads haven’t changed much in recent decades. Yeah, they’ve gotten more durable and smoother and maybe even more efficient, but the whole concept of streets as a single-use piece of infrastructure seems, well, boring doesn’t it? Can’t roads be more than just something we travel on? At least it’d be make me feel about the long showers I take on especially hot days in California.

UPDATE (04/16/2012): A good friend of Radials (Abe Finkelstein, trained engineer) pointed me towards Pervious Concrete which does exactly what I described in this article. So, problem solved.

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Boston Government MBTA News Subways Transit Transportation Planning

MBTA Fare Hikes: Where Idealism and Pragmatism Never Meet

March 29, 2012 – 11:53 pm

A few weeks ago in this space I mentioned Jay Walder’s lecture to a group of transpophlic students at the Kennedy School of Government where he presented the Cerberus of budget balancing tactics for cash strapped transit agencies: raise fares, cut service, increase efficiencies. The first two almost always get press—streamlining data storage or eliminating redundant administrative jobs don’t make for good headlines—and, if you live in the Boston area, you’ll no doubt have seen grumblings about the MBTA’s 23% general fare hike which will be rolled out this summer. (The elimination of four lonely bus routes will has only been mentioned tangentially.) Subway riders will shell out $2.00, bus riders $1.50, and a monthly pass will go from $59.00 to $70.00. Outrage has come from the usual suspects like the T Rider’s Union (who took over a public MBTA meeting clad in superhero garb) and LivableStreets Alliance, a local progressive transportation advocacy group.

But I just can’t really muster up any righteous indignation on this issue. Alright, the MBTA should have balanced their books and lobbied the State House to change the outdated funding techniques which are based on tax revenues projected during headier times. And yes, raising transit fares hits low income neighborhoods especially hard since higher income households are typically car commuters. And yeah, it would have been great if salaries had risen parallel with inflation rates and real costs of living instead of stagnating in the post-Reagan era so low income families wouldn’t have to shell out an increasing proportion of their income towards a transit system that hasn’t seen a capital improvement in decades.

It’s going to sound cold, but these uneven consequences are an intractable aspect of the current transit vernacular. Maintenance, engineering, consulting, accounting, benefits, pensions, etc. are all financially chained to a timeline; it only stands to reason that as those expenses grow the other side of the ledger needs to balance and fare hikes are the simplest and, in many ways, the most appropriate technique to accomplish that. And it completely sucks, but it’s the way  transit is paid for and will continue to be paid for.

Until it’s changed. And there are ample opportunities to change funding mechanisms (some of which have been discussed in this space in the past) but they require complete reconceptualizations of systems and bureaucracies and languages that have been entrenched in every major metro center through the country. There is a dusty linearity here, a mildewed inequality that only starts to run afoul when fare hikes are penciled into administrative schedules like President’s Day and Halloween because no one really considers alternatives—just gripes.

In the end, $2.00 for a subway ride will do minimal damage to most family and personal budgets. (I pay $`104 for a subway pass in NYC—talk about exorbitant). But eventually the nominal price hikes for transit service will catch up to higher and higher cuts of the population unless the prevailing economic realities of the American working class change or transportation administrators rethink how we pay for our buses and subways. Go ahead and guess which one is easier.

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suburbs Transportation Planning Urban Planning

Fixing the Suburbs from the Inside Out

March 27, 2012 – 9:45 am

If you have even an inkling of the general direction urban studies is going in (and if you’re reading this post, you probably have more than that) you probably know that the suburbs are the wellspring of all things inefficient and dirty and conceited. Loosely packed strips of suburbia spelled economic ruin for overextended budgets throughout the country, and all those two car garages meant an ever-bloating plume of greenhouse gasses floating in our planet’s atmosphere. Suburbs would be the end of this country’s greatness, we are told, and the only way to get back on track was to raze the American Dream of a detached house and a backyard and replace it with a 3rd floor walkup and a subway pass.

Easy enough, right?

But changing the living arrangements of tens of millions of Americans who have been living on stagnant wages isn’t as easy as simply changing their tastes in geography. Sure, cities are getting more and more desirable for young, creative Americans, but how many can afford to stay in the city when they start a family and need to move out of their closet-sized studio? And can you blame the couple that wants their own, personal patch of green without having to wake up the sound of garbage trucks and revelers at 4 AM?

The suburbs, more and more, resemble that escape hatch from the pressures of city life. (My temporary move from Brooklyn to Newport Beach has caused a crisis of conscience. I’m almost anxious thinking about how much easier everything is here compared to NY.) It’s the easy way out. Walking 5 blocks to the dirty, either freezing or boiling subway to wait for a train and get to the crowded and overpriced grocery store, or hop in your car, drive five minutes, and not have to carry your groceries more than 60 collective feet. Yes, there are days when I wish for the suburbs—I can hear the collective groan of my hardened urbanist friends now.

But more often than not, we here at Radials understand the severe inefficiencies and inequalities that the suburbs breed, from economic to environmental to demographic. They can’t be unbuilt though, so here’s a list of what of current problems and potential fixes that our low-density dwellers can drive in the near-future:

1. Energy and Resource Use

Vertical living relatively easy on the earth: hot water is typically communal cutting out the need for individual tanks for every 3 or 4 people, electricity distribution is concentrated as is potable water infrastructure and heating, and smaller abodes typically mean less intense energy use.  You’re also squeezing more people into less space allowing goods and services to be more efficiently parceled out—you’d be surprised how much those fleets of mail and garbage trucks affect the environment through their collective emissions when they have to go house to house instead of building to building.

Fixing the Suburbs from the Inside Out

Most of the efficiencies that can squeezed out of the suburbs are in transportation-related improvements (much more on that later) but there is still ground to be broken on immobile energy technology. Solar water heaters have been installed on top of 30 million households in China and the technology has gotten to the point where the panels operate under less than heliophilic conditions. District heating, where temperatures for thousands of homes can be regulated by a single, centralized plant, has been embraced by countries in Europe and Asia and plants are increasingly turning away from fossil fuels in favor of alternative energy. The best part: neither technology is density dependent. You can have your yard and trimmed hedges and nosy neighbors and still heat your house and your showers without the inconvenient plume of carbon dioxide.

(Note: I am not addressing alternative electricity sources for the suburbs here on purpose. There are quite a few choices out there on the market but none of them have been terribly successful and are almost universally price out anyone outside the top quintile of income brackets unless you’re an enterprising electrician with some spare solar cells lying around. As reductive as this sounds, the market will (with some help from choice subsidies) end up dictating the next step in residential energy production after fossil fuel production becomes either exorbitantly expensive or morally unsavory. The question is more about time horizons than innovation at this point.)

Fixing the Suburbs from the Inside Out

Suburbs Courtesy www.infrastructurist.com

2. Environmental Degradation Due to Development

There’s an amazing amount of resources that go into building detached houses individually, but even more disturbing is the volume of destruction that developers produce when they build clusters of tract housing. If you’ve ever traveled through the American west (Arizona and California especially; Las Vegas for true suburban dystopia) you’ll have seen the razed acres dotted with Version 1, Version 2, Version 3, etc. of a given set of prefabricated houses connected by curving asphalt and cursory greenways and bordered by a shoddy brick barrier or, in a nod to Czarist Russia, wrought iron gates.

Suburban development harms the environment for a pretty simple reason: they’re new. New buildings, even if they’re built out of recycled pizza by a hemp clad all-vegan construction crew and go LEED triple platinum, still leave a foundation-sized footprint and, as the well worn theory goes, used always trumps new when it comes to the environment. Those negative impacts are magnified when firms decide to build sub-developments in geographies that are, outside of millions of dollars in resource infrastructure, generally uninhabitable. Thousands of people were never meant to live in the Nevada of Arizona desert, so why are we building sprawling ranch houses with lush green lawns outside of Las Vegas and Tucson? Well, because we keep buying them.

Once again the secret to improving the environment is in the economy. When you buy a house in the ‘burbs, you are buying a final realization, a product of brick and mortar and sweat and engineering without having to pay for the externalities associated with the your home—the miles of pipe sucking water from an overworked aquifer, the stretch of concrete from your garage to a major onramp, etc. The non-inclusive (and often, non-monetized) costs are called externalities and there has been a decades’ long clamoring to capture these costs correctly in the form of excise taxes. The argument has generally been focused on drivers who have been paying a paltry $0.184 in gas taxes to the Federal government for two decades—even conservative economists say that it doesn’t even begin to capture the true cost of driving.

So what if we actually made developers and surburbanites pay the true cost of that immaculate green rectangle and spare bedroom? It sounds coldly practical but monetizing and penalizing for environmental degradation is among the only ways to actually influence development and consumer actions; if you want to move to the middle of the desert and expect a constant source of freshwater where there just isn’t any, then you (and the firm that built your home) should have to pay for more than just the infrastructure, you should have to pay what it actually costs the environment as a whole.

3. Transportation

If there’s one thing about living in suburban California I’ve learned it’s that driving is a necessity. The nearest grocery store is 1.5 miles away, my brother’s school is another 5, and the majority of jobs are between 10 and 50. There’s a bus system on main thoroughfares but, in what seems like a complete slap in the collective face of urban planning and/or simple logic, residences aren’t on any of the main thoroughfares. Getting around in these brands of suburbs is 100% car dependent that even a doubling or tripling of transit infrastructure would still only provide a marginal decrease in the proportion of families needing more than one car. Transportation in the suburbs is not a structural problem, it’s a geographic one.

As we’ve discussed at Radials recently, petroleum prices will ebb and flow with futures traders, Middle East chaos, and general demand. $4 per gallon gas isn’t enough to change driving habits significantly nor is it enough to spur ambitious and ubiquitous pursuit towards alternative methods of propulsion. The general consensus, though, is that oil production will peak and begin a relatively swift decline especially as the economies of India, China, and Brazil step up their demand for light sweet crude and Americans will eventually be looking down the barrel at $10 or $12 gasoline—more than enough to drive major automotive manufacturers towards something other than combustion engines.

suburb Fixing the Suburbs from the Inside Out

We’ve seen what industry titans like Nissan and Chevrolet can do with relatively modest cuts of their R&D budgets, as well as what boutique companies like Tesla and, more recently, Fisker can cut from whole cloth (though both companies have come under scrutiny for favoring form over function, though the form is pretty fantastic) in terms of all electric vehicles and several major builders have experimented with hydrogen-powered vehicles that spout water as their sole byproduct, but these are almost exclusively niche products favored by tony environmentalists and have yet to hit the market as anything more than a gimmick. (The rather large exception being the Toyota Prius which some say is purchased as more a badge of “conspicuous environmentalism” as a good friend puts it than a nod to true stewardship—and of course runs on gasoline. Also, it should be noted that upwardly mobile CAFE standards are not a solution to car emissions since most drivers tend to increase their miles traveled in tandem with their fuel economy.)

Of course, there is the argument that the volume of emissions and waste that goes into actually making a new car from scratch almost negates the effect that any low-or-zero emission car will have over its lifetime. But that theory lacks foresight. If alternative energy vehicles begin to switch market positions with their petrol-powered counterparts then eventually you create a secondary market that is essentially zero-impact and, by proxy, allow communities that are auto-based become saturated with earth friendly cars.

That endgame is down the road, admittedly, but one wonders what auto manufacturers could do if they really put their collective backs into creating more than niche vehicles—if electric cars could be more than a novelty for upperclass environmentalists. Would two car garages be as menacing to the progressive urbanist if they housed a Leaf and a Volt?

We’ve gotten ourselves into a mess when it comes to suburban sprawl but it’s not the type of problem that can be solved through tearing down and building back up. The imprint of the suburbs will last for decades in this country, and people will continue to leave apartment blocks for ranch houses and colonials for reasons of cost and aesthetics and health while simultaneously degrading the environment and straining the country’s infrastructure. Inefficiencies abound but razing the ‘burbs isn’t the answer (as much as many of you want it to be!), changing the culture is a much cleaner alternative.

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New York Transportation Planning

Making the Commute a Little More Fun (with Beer)

March 22, 2012 – 7:30 pm

After college, I took a job as a consultant with a small firm that worked solely with the Federal government on projects for USDOT/RITA. I had a small studio in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston and commuted to work every morning to Cambridge on the subway, leaving my apartment around 7:45 and arriving at work around 8:30. The morning commute was never awful; cars came every few minutes so on those rare occasions that the Green Line was packed you could simply wait for the next train. The evening commute was another story. Park Street, which serves as a major intersection for Boston and Cambridge bound transit lines, was a swarthy sardine can in the summer and a slushy mix of faux fur, nylon, and L.L Bean boots. Students, professionals, and the more than occasional drunk suburbanite tried to pack into trains but, unlike almost every other city I’ve ridden a subway line save for Paris, didn’t pack, well, efficiently enough to get everyone in one car. So we all waited. And, most of the time, waited some more.

The evening commute, no matter where you are, is uniquely tortuous. Sure, the morning commute is tiring and, if you really hate your job, festering with anxiety. But when you leave work, whether it’s at 4 or 5 or 6, and you start making the trek home you are sacrificing valuable clusters of free time to the altar of boredom. Sure you can read on your iPad or Kindle, you can text your friends who are probably doing the exact same thing as you are, but those hours spent on the train or subway or bus or hatchback are empty. And when you spend the better parts of the day (i.e. the part of the day when the sun is out) sitting inside an office or in a cubicle (like I did) there is nothing worse than openly squandered hours.

Perfect example: my roommate. He takes the Long Island Railroad home to Brooklyn every evening, the ride from his job in Cedarhurst to Atlantic Terminal taking about an hour. Now, he’s actually found a decent outlet for his time spent on the stained fabric seats of the LIRR: DJ-sets and mixtapes, but for those days that you can’t be bothered to match BPMs on  a Journey and J Dilla track you might want something a little more relaxing, like have a drink with some like minded individuals; a bar car with some personality.

bar car commuter train new haven Making the Commute a Little More Fun (with Beer)

Photo by Life Magazine

The best proposition I’ve heard is this: have the last car on given evening trains dedicated to people who share a similar sporting interest (let’s say the Knicks), demarcate the car so that no unwitting families wander into the fray, and let stressed out office drones relax and cheer or groan for an hour of the day.  Alcohol is nothing new to commuters coming in and out of New York City five days a week. (Two years ago the Times ran a piece about the beverage preferences of Metro-North and LIRR riders finding that the well-heeled Metro North riders heading to Connecticut and northern New York suburbs prefer wine almost twice as much as Long Islanders, and that LIRR riders really knock back the hard liquor and Bud Lights.) This isn’t turning LIRR or Metro-North or any of the other commuter services into a rolling sports bar, but loosening infrastructure’s tie somewhat on very select services—this isn’t exactly a kegger on the subway.

Hitting the sauce on the train is something that commuters just do, but it seems like we’re wasting a beautiful opportunity to not only increase revenues for transportation systems that are simply treading water and make your commute that much more enjoyable. But instead of anonymously drinking with nothing to watch but the slightly overweight guy from accounting try and schmooze with Jenna from sales, why can’t we watch (and don’t worry if you don’t get these references) Melo knock down a midrange jumper or JR Smith take an ill advised three? Have a beer, watch the game, just make sure you can still get off at the right stop.

What do we all think? Would this encourage illicit behavior on commuter trains? Can the MTA afford to loosen up a little bit? Would you watch a Knicks/Yankees/Mets/Rangers game with relative strangers on a moving vehicle? Would Boston try this and end with up a few too many drunks?

 

bar car 1024x691 Making the Commute a Little More Fun (with Beer)

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Government News Transportation Planning

Finding a Break Point for Gasoline Prices

March 20, 2012 – 6:56 pm

I’m a little late on the gas price bandwagon with analysis and meta-analysis already covering most of the major transportation and urbanism blogs across the domestic blogosphere. Everyone agrees on a few things: that the public is misguided in thinking that President Obama can influence gas prices in any significant way, that gas prices were artificially low for at least two decades hence, that America still has some of the cheapest gas in the world, and that we are beginning to see the effects of so-called Peak Oil. High concepts are relatively easy to reach consensus on, but what is significantly less clear is what these climbing prices means for the average family.

gas pump Finding a Break Point for Gasoline Prices

Gas spikes typically mean fewer miles spent on the road for obvious reasons. And given the stubborn economic malaise in this country there is worry that upward pressure at the pump in 2011 means something different than it did a decade ago and that (gasp) high gas prices could even put the brakes on a recovering economy. Unfortunately most of the panic is based on heuristic evidence which leaves little to no room in the debate for hard statistics on what the most recent crisis means empirically for families, but thanks to the pollsters at Gallup we now have a decent guess.

According to a Gallup survey published on March 8th, the breaking point for most American families lies somewhere between $5.30 and $5.35—a full $1.50 more than the average American is paying for one gallon of regular unleaded and $1.20 more than those filling up their Benzs and Beamers with premium based on today’s AAA Fuel Gauge Report, a daily report based on up to 100,000 filling station prices. Even more telling is that only 17% of Americans would have to alter their spending habits at gas prices under $4.00 (current average price of regular unleaded: $3.846.)

Gallup Poll Finding a Break Point for Gasoline Prices

The statistics aren’t perfect, of course. States that have low state gas taxes like Georgia and Missouri (as well as Alaska which doesn’t collect one at all) are affected less by real prices of gasoline than states like California and New York, where state gas taxes are higher and demand is extremely high (Californians are paying an average of $4.348 today). Low density states like California, Texas, and Oklahoma are also faced with little recourse to driving nearly everywhere, whereas populations in infrastructure heavy states like New Jersey are able to simply shift their mode of transportation given a shift in pricing. Gas price impacts are understandably lumpy.

Still, with only two states at within one dollar of Gallup’s breakpoint (Hawaii joins California, though we should really consider Hawaii as an exception for obvious geographical reasons) is there much of a reason to panic? Not particularly, and for many progressive transportation advocates this should be viewed as a free look into the politics of raising gas prices whether it’s a “natural” market phenomenon like this or a potentially artificial one like a gas tax hike. Unfortunately the violent outcry against high gas prices and the absolute inability for a majority of Americans to understand exactly what drives gas prices to do what they do even though they think they do (phew) has shown that there is no taste for paying fair market price for a gallon of fuel (and it should be added that this author doesn’t pretend to fully understand the lever-pulling and politicking that goes into gasoline prices). Gasoline consumers (much like public transit consumers in an odd twist of infrastructure fate) would rather not face the complex economic realities of their chosen good—that it is much more complicated than point-t0-point navigation and that price is not a reflection of mood or climate but of competing realities.

(Aside: the environmental argument doesn’t even merit consideration here because it’s almost superfluous. We are consuming a finite resource that has eluded optimal management practices for everyone outside of a few OPEC countries who shrewdly know how to control their taps; it’s market heresy to want to pay a semi-fixed price [<$3.00/gal let's say] when we are sliding down the supply line steadily yet many who embrace that brand of economics don’t see it that way. Untapped domestic petroleum sources buy us another 15 years, a middling piece of temporal real estate geopolitically speaking.)

So we’re sort of stuck. Gas prices will continue to oscillate with the seasons and panic will undoubtedly tag along. We will continue to care and then, somehow, not care until we care again. It’s just gas, after all, and we can always get more.

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New York News Transportation Planning

NYCDOT’s DriveSmart Technology Brings Intelligent Driving One Stop Closer

March 13, 2012 – 1:50 pm

The technologies they’re putting into our cars nowadays seems hell bent on taking us out of the equation as quickly as possible. Lexuses (Lexi?) and Fords can parallel park by themselves. Volvos can tell you when some one is in your blind spot and you can now tell your Kia what music to play like its KITT’s more artistic cousin.  All these advances can be filed under the term “Driver Facing Technology” (DFT) because they are geared towards making you a better driver by eliminating or simplifying habits that involve a lot of spatial negotiations or acute awareness, and with the ubiquity of distracting technology hitting critical mass maybe making us less a part of the equation is a good thing.

That crop of research and development is all well and good but remains solipsistic, an important qualification when you consider most of our decisions are based on other drivers’ decisions. Driving, whether it’s in the city or the highway, is best imagined as a complicated system of interdependent actors, so when you add a technology that aids an individual driver you are not necessarily creating a more efficient system. To do that you need a technology that allows for feedback within the structure, a symphonic advance instead of a solo.

Currently, the major movements in that direction have come from the Federal government and from private industry. USDOT/RITA’s Connected Vehicles program is attempting to bring infrastructure and vehicles into closer harmony by developing technologies and applications that facilitate efficient congestion management through radio-frequency identification (RFID), easing the anxieties of privacy advocates and allowing for constant communication between cars and streets. Volvo has developed “vehicle platooning” where cars wirelessly follow lead drivers at constant speeds allowing drivers the option to take their mind off driving when they’re traveling long distances. There is an outlier though: the DriveSmart program currently under development by NYCDOT.

DriveSmart has a lot in common with the Connected Vehicles program; both are geared towards congestion management, so-called “eco-driving”, and information dissemination. However, where Connected Vehicles is going through a decade-long research and development program necessary for a national project, DriveSmart is allowed more flexibility in both policy and incubation because of its size relative to the Federal government.

There’s no doubt that New York is in dire need of advanced driver-side technology. If you’ve ever tried to navigate SoHo when commuters are heading back through the Holland Tunnel, or forgot that it was the Manhattan and not the Williamsburg Bridge that was under construction on a Saturday night, or wondered if the subway or that cute pedicab was a better option than a taxi, then you understand New York’s transportation problem has more than a few leaks to plug. But imagine for a second that you need to go downtown after a Saturday dinner at Taqueria y Fonda in Morningside Heights. You have your car, but it’s Saturday night it’s probably going to take you a while no matter what route you take—but are you sure? What separates DriveSmart from a simple GPS module is that it would supply you with not only real time traffic and route suggestions, but also predictive time and financial costs between modes and, if you’re the environmental type, the “green option” of travel.

It’s not that DriveSmart is going to solve every congestion problem in New York, nothing outside of a universal congestion charge or a manic pedestrian rights movement will ease the choking traffic in the City. But DriveSmart does begin to introduce drivers to the systemic nature of driving in a city, that your decisions affect other decisions the amalgam of which drives the extremely complex management technique present at NYCDOT. NYCDOT is also in the middle of a data -driven renaissance, spearheaded by the transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan; the city is beginning to discuss transportation systems in numbers instead of emotion. DriveSmart is the natural extension of that idea, the benefits of which will be staring you in the face as you speed around town.

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New York Traffic Theory Transit Transportation Planning

Bill Keller and Sam Schwartz on Variable Pricing for New York

March 6, 2012 – 3:01 pm

When former MTA and TfL Chairman Jay Walder spoke to a class I was sitting in on at the Kennedy School of Government he said that when you have a revenue shortfall (as nearly every mass transit system in America does) you can do three things: cut routes, raise fares, or increase administrative efficiency. That trio of choices each have their associated criticisms—the first two affect poor and disabled people disproportionately, the last means severe rounds of layoffs—but they are the only internal options a transit authority has when they’re faced with red which means that the fiduciary creativity needs to be an outside effort undertaken by either larger government valves (such as the Governor or Mayor’s office, or even the Dept. of Transportation) or monomaniacally devoted individuals. It seems as though the New York Times has brought attention to one of the latter.

traffic2 Bill Keller and Sam Schwartz on Variable Pricing for New York

Photo by Kate Hinds

Sam Schwartz is a pretty well-known name in planning and progressive transportation policy circles: he founded one of the most successful transportation engineering firms in New York City and designed the traffic plans for Atlantic Yards and the Ikea in Red Hook, among others. Bill Keller, the former executive editor the Times, has brought his name to the general public. In an Op-Ed published on March 4th Keller laments the “demise” of New York’s mass transit system:

IF you live in New York, commute to New York, or occasionally visit what Russell Shorto called the island at the center of the world, you have experienced the indignity of our city’s transportation hell. You have endured the screeching, flood-prone subways. You have surrendered exorbitant carfare to escape our eyesore airports, then lurched along congested highways, over creaking bridges and into our truck-clotted city streets. You have dodged the camping homeless at the Port Authority bus terminal, or wandered lost in the miasmal misery of Pennsylvania Station. New York City welcomes you with open arms — like the zombies in “The Walking Dead.”

Nevermind the inane condescension in Keller’s opening salvo (it’s obvious that Keller is not a transportation expert nor one for subtlety, every sentence is steeped in mid-20th century thinking and he doesn’t even address the lack of access as the prime issue facing the 5 million New Yorkers who don’t live in Manhattan) if you can, the point is that there are infrastructure problems in New York that go beyond the cost of a monthly subway pass and the volume of cars on the streets. Schwartz presents an idea that goes beyond the typical congestion pricing concept that has failed to pass in New York thanks to well-heeled suburbanites and their state representation. He wants the CBD (below 60th Street in Schwartz’s plan) to be a variable price charge zone similar to London and Stockholm, but also supports a complete restructuring of the bridge tolls, eliminating levies on the Verrazano and Triborough bridges and reinstating all other tolls on the East River (Personal Aside: I live in Brooklyn often on that late night or weekend in Manhattan it is damn near impossible to get home without a cab [the Q and B are often closed] so this would add a lot to a fare, but we’ll discuss that below).

Sam Schwartz Engineering Bill Keller and Sam Schwartz on Variable Pricing for New York

Sam Schwartz. Copyright Crains New York/ Buck Ennis

Variable congestion pricing (also known as market based congestion pricing) isn’t a novel concept—at this point it’s the pet theory of the traffic engineering community (another, more extreme plan by the transportation theorist Charles Kumanoff, calls for extremely high charges on commuters resulting in free mass transit for all; Kumanoff’s plan is admirable but I’m afraid it wouldn’t get past the Albany city limits). But Schwartz presents the case from multiple angles to preempt his critics, something that progressive planners have neglected in the past. Poor people win because the MTA will get a $1.2 billion injection, rich people win because they can travel downtown faster (Schwartz shows that drivers have a higher median income than transit users, a fact that most people state but usually don’t prove), and New York wins because the air will be cleaner and everyone can get around easier. There are, of course, still losers (like us broke Brooklynites!) in this system such as middle-class commuters who drive for myriad reasons; an additional charge for them will have a higher marginal impact than for tony Greenwichers and Scarsdalians. Still, there is no uniformly effective plan for New York infrastructure and this one marks most of the correct boxes politically and financially, something we haven’t seen for a long time.

I encourage readers to check out Sam Schwartz’s excellent Powerpoint PDF presentation here.

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