Dutch train station slide (glijbaan) might be a solution for Union Station and other highly used subway stations in the DC region

See "Slide to the Train Station with the Transfer Accelerator by HIK Ontwerpers" from the Arch Daily blog.

Interesting planning initiatives/research in Toronto

1. The City of Toronto, like Montreal and other cities, has an extensive underground tunnel-connections network, linking building basements and sub-basements to the subway system.

The Toronto City Planning Division is undertaking a study to update the 15-year-old design plan for the PATH system.

According to users, there are wayfinding issues, because the system doesn't conform to the street grid above.

- PATH facts (e.g., serves 100,000 commuters/day, etc.)

- PATH brochure

- The display panels from the first the Drop-In event held in May 2011 sets the stage for the study.

The PATH network has some of the same kinds of issues related to what I call "edgespace" and opportunities for an arcade at the New York Avenue Metro Station mentioned in past blog entries, "NoMA revisited: business planning to develop community," and "Transit and Placemaking."

2. The Avenues and Mid-Rise Development Study by the Toronto City Planning Division won an award from the Ontario Professional Planners Institute. See "Mid-rise, everything you want in a condo — and less" from the Toronto Star.

Interestingly, the buildings that they highlight as best practice seem to typify the types of condo and apartment developments prevalent in DC. This makes sense because high rise development in DC is mid-rise anywhere else (except Portland, Oregon, which has similar building height limits).

Thinking about this study and the issues in DC, I don't think that there is consensus within the city about adding density in commercial districts (avenues in the parlance of the Toronto study) to accommodate opportunities for growth.

I think the biggest failure of the Comp Plan revision process (2004-2006) was not following up the approval of the plan with a public outreach process, to explain the intent, and build a consensus for the kinds of development, transportation, and other proscriptions outlined in the plan.

- cf. How Does the City Grow from Toronto City Planning Division

3. The Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation has a toolkit, Shaping Active, Healthy Communities, workshop guide, and other resources for people interested in improving their health by improving the physical conditions of their communities.

4. However, researchers at Queens University have found that while urban environments have better spatial conditions for walking and biking, when it comes to active lifestyles for children, suburban environments may be better because reduced traffic means that kids can play in the street, and there are more likely to be parks and other open spaces nearby in suburban environments. See "Where do kids get more exercise – the suburbs or the city?" from the Toronto Star.

From the article:

Studies have shown that areas ... with well-connected streets and a high density of intersections, promote exercise among adults, who are more likely to walk or cycle to work or the green grocer.

But a recent study by Janssen and other Queen’s researchers suggests high street connectivity has the opposite effect on children. That’s because dense, busy neighbourhoods aren’t as conducive to unsupervised play or kids roaming up and down sidewalks on rollerblades or scooters.

“Where houses are crammed, yards are small and there’s more traffic, there may be no place for kids to play,” says Janssen. “Whereas if you have a quiet cul-de-sac it becomes a playground.” Those zones can become hotbeds for road hockey, dodgeball and skipping ropes.

The report, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, used data from a 2006 survey of school-aged children from grades 6 through 10 (ages 11 to 15). It looked at the physical activity patterns of 8,535 students from 180 schools across Canada, and then compared it to the 5-kilometre area surrounding each school.

The study found that youth in the neighbourhoods of highest density and most connectivity between streets were less likely to be physically active outside school.

Many factors determine how much exercise children get, including access to organized sports, whether parents can afford them and family attitudes regarding fitness. However, the Queen’s research was noteworthy because it demonstrated how street connectivity appears to have opposite effects on adults and kids.

All the more reason to tighten up "Level of Service" guidelines for parks, open space, and recreational spaces and opportunities in urban settings.

-- How Do You Effectively Assess a Community’s Need for Parks and Open Space? from Recreation to Re-Creation: New Directions in Parks and Open Space System Planning, and Providing Equity for Parks and Recreation Facilities, from Florida Recreation and Parks Journal, both by David Barth, ASLA, AICP, CPRP.

5. The Toronto Star article mentioned in the previous section prints an abbreviated list from the Heart and Stroke Foundation's Neighbourhood active, healthy design checklist (also in the Shaping Active, Healthy Communities toolkit) for rating neighborhoods in terms of their community design and whether or not the spatial organization of the community encourages physical activity:

Rate your neighborhood
• Are homes connected to stores and services by sidewalks and/or walkways?

• Are there sidewalks on both sides of the street? Are they continuous, in good repair, and wide enough for strollers or more than one person?

• Do streets form a grid pattern with short blocks that make routes more direct?

• Are culs-de-sac and circular streets linked by walkways?

• Are there bike paths and lanes to key destinations?

• Are public transit stops in easy walking distance? Is service frequent? Are there bus shelters?

• Are homes in walking distance of stores, services, schools, parks, recreational facilities and workplaces?

• Is there a mix of residential, business, stores and schools?

• Is there a mix of housing such as apartments, townhomes, single family dwellings?

• Are walking routes attractive and well maintained?

• Are routes not broken up by too many vacant spaces like parking lots or empty buildings?

• Are there benches or other resting places along the way?

6. Mississauga had their annual Big Ideas Summit, see "Mississauga Summit showcases five big ideas" from the Toronto Star. From the article:

The Mississauga Summit, scheduled for Tuesday night, is the fourth in an ongoing series that began in 2007 and is modelled after Greater Toronto’s CivicAction — a way to engage residents by having them contribute their own plans.

The event, held at the University of Toronto Mississauga, with an appearance by Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, was to feature five “big ideas” whittled down from an original 18. The five are: waterfront, diversity, human services (health and social services), post-secondary education and jobs.

The point, said co-chair Shelley White, is to let the people decide what’s next for the growing and diverse community. Over the past two years, summit organizers struck up five task forces comprised of businesses, non-profits, government and citizens who volunteered their time to draw up a vision for Mississauga’s future. “Government can’t be expected to do it all,” said White, president and CEO of United Way Peel Region.

7. The MaRS Centre (Medical and Related Sciences) in Toronto's Discovery District is focused on developing science and technology businesses and entrepreneurship development. They've had 1,200 clients since 2006.

Understanding suburban poverty demographics (a/k/a "the times, they are a changin'")

Levittown, Long Island photograph from the Tekula Family.

Historically, poverty has been (and is still centered) in center cities within metropolitan areas because outmigration of those better off financially left behind the people living in concentrated poverty, which became even more concentrated as income dynamics within the center city became less diverse.

Today the rise in poverty in the suburbs is not just a function of a greater diversity of destination choices on the part of immigrants, it's also a function in a significant exogeneous shock to the economic calculus of the U.S.

-- Suburbanization of poverty report, Brookings Institution

Suburban development ("sprawl" etc.) has long been a function of ideas about "the American Dream" of having your land, but fueled by mass production and cheap gasoline.

When gasoline is no longer cheap, and it won't be because of increased demand on the part of emerging economies such as China and India coupled with relatively tight supplies, a real estate development economy based on constructing new houses farther and farther away from primary activity centers no longer makes financial sense.

The farther out you are the more you are at risk, both because of increases in cost of gasoline, and the repricing of housing to take into account proximity to activity centers.

Instead of a house being a primary asset within a household's wealth portfolio, it's potentially a time bomb, if located in a place that is no longer desirable.

Yesterday's article in the Post about exurban school districts going to four day weeks, "In trimming school budgets, more officials turn to a four-day week," makes this point about the North Branch school district in the Minneapolis region. From the article:

North Branch is a city of about 10,000 people 50 minutes north of St. Paul and Minneapolis. The community was booming a decade ago, attracting families in search of good schools and affordable homes within commuting distance of the Twin Cities.

But the recession knocked North Branch onto its heels. Its downtown is forlorn, with vacant storefronts tucked between the taxidermist, coffee shop, barbershop and a thrift store. The dearth of commercial properties means homeowners shoulder a great deal of the tax burden. Last year, the county had one of the highest unemployment and home-foreclosure rates in the state. The drop in property values and taxes has had a profound effect on money for the schools.

Seven times in six years, the North Branch school board has asked voters to approve a local levy for schools. It’s failed each time, last year by a 2 to 1 margin.

The school board will try again Nov. 8, seeking a levy to raise $1.5 million annually for the next three years. The district is predicting a shortfall of $2.5 million next year, so the levy would only soften future cuts, not eliminate them. The average homeowner would pay $122 a year. Chances for passage appear slim.

“People here are angry,” said board member Randy Westby, who supports the levy even as he shares others’ economic worries. His three-bedroom home, purchased in 2004 for $500,000, is now worth $233,000. “I’m 61 years old,” said Westby, who owes the bank $400,000. “I’m not going to live long enough to see the market come back.”

People can be angry, but the real problem is making a series of choices depending on cheap oil and an ever escalating housing market.

Now that location valuation is a product of reduced dependence on cheap energy, more and more people and places are going to face this kind of predicament.

Public health social marketing campaigns: Let's Do This in Seattle/King County, Washington

(The American Public Health Association national conference is in DC this week.)

The Let's Do This campaign is a public health promotion program designed to get King County residents to work together for healthier places to live, learn, work and play. See "Student stars in county’s ‘Let’s Do This!’ health campaign" from the Issaquah Press and "New campaign bringing healthier options to North Seattle and other King County residents" from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog.

They have promotional videos, posters, and an advertising program, including billboards. I don't know how much civic engagement and capacity building is acctually built into the program, but it is a classic example of a social marketing campaign focused on engaging people and working with them to change their behavior. I like the relatively positive focus. And it is focused more on making structural-systemic changes which have greater cumulative impact, as opposed to individual changes.

People do make a difference: historic preservation edition

The Lawrence (Kansas) Journal World has a story, "Building the case for historic preservation," about Dennis Brown, the president of the Lawrence Preservation Alliance. His interest in preservation was first sparked by plans to demolish the local, then abandoned, Union Pacific Depot. He and others developed and led a successful campaign to restore the building, which is now used as a visitors center. (Depot-visitors center is pictured left, Internet photo by Douglas.)

Masonry history primer: manual for teaching

Masonry History Integrity: An Urban Conservation Primer, written by Tom Russack, an instructor in the YouthBuild program sponsored by the Abyssinian Development Corporation ("Powerful Harlem Church Is Also a Powerful Harlem Developer" from the New York Times) in New York City, has just been published by the National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. From the entry:

This textbook has been developed as a primer and practical teaching manual for young people interested in construction, masonry preservation, green technology, building repair and the conservation of the urban environment. Each chapter is built around a particular masonry material, such as mortar, brick, stone, or stucco; or an aspect pertaining to the masonry trade, such as maintenance or green building technology. ...

According to the United States census and the NYC Department of Buildings, there are approximately 8.2 million people and over 975,000 buildings in New York City. Many of the buildings are over one hundred years old. Most are constructed with some sort of masonry material, to meet fire code regulations, and to endure the effects of time, weather and aging.

It is also noted that amongst the construction trades, there is a generally accepted understanding that the preservation, repair, conservation and maintenance of older buildings requires a different set of skills than those required for new construction. Presently, there are a half dozen college programs offering specialized hand-on masonry conservation training. But, there are no schools or programs in the United States providing an introduction to masonry conservation at the high school level.

There is however, one such program in New York City, provided by the Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC). It offers young men and women the opportunity to obtain a high school general equivalency diploma (GED) and learn about various construction careers, including masonry, masonry conservation and green building technology. ...

The (ADC) Workforce Development/Youthbuild Masonry Preservation program teaches general masonry, masonry conservation and green technology skills for students to gain pre-apprenticeship level trade skills. These basic skills enable them to enter the NYC building restoration and energy conservation work force.

To help develop the student’s self-confidence, personal integrity and an appreciation for quality craftsmanship, the hands-on masonry training activities are combined with stories from U.S. history and life skill lessons.

This textbook is the culmination of the ADC training program and curriculum. It has been developed as a primer and practical teaching manual through a grant from the National Park Service and the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. It serves as the first step of exploration for young people interested in construction, masonry preservation, green technology, building repair and the conservation of the urban environment.

Graphic design and advocacy and social marketing: Jay Shells

Jay Shells (Jason Shelowitz) has done some (re)design work for the Occupy Wall Street movement and has some guerrilla social marketing street signs in NYC under the sponsorship of the "Metropolitan Etiquette Authority." (Images from the Jay Shells website.)

-- "ARTIST JAY SHELLS REDESIGNS OCCUPY WALL STREET [PICS]", PSFK website

A few years ago I saw a presentation at the National Main Street Conference which was electrifying in terms of content.

A professor of graphic design at Iowa State uses graphic design methods to guide positioning facade improvement programs for Iowa commercial districts, as a studio design program for her students.

I thought that was quite interesting. It got me thinking more about the design method as a way to (re)organize approaches to planning, and is now an element of what I call action planning. See "Social Marketing the Arlington (and Tower Hamlets and Baltimore) Way."

This is a more current example of the approach from Iowa State:

-- Graphic Design Proposal for Marshalltown Central Business District, Graphic Design Senior Studio, Lisa Fontaine, Associate Professor, Institute for Design Research and Outreach, College of Design, Iowa State University

Field workshop on heritage tourism in New Jersey

Drew University in New Jersey has an extensive series of courses on historic preservation which look to be quite interesting. (Goucher College of Baltimore County used to offer a similar set of coursework, culminating in a certificate or a degree, in DC, but they don't anymore.)

One of their continuing education courses is a field course on heritage tourism promotion. I took a similar workshop, based on a book, called Great Tours, that used to be offered by the NTHP, in association with the annual conference a number of years ago. Workshops like this are great ways to accelerate and deepen your understanding of a subject, so I highly recommend them.

From "Madison's Drew University offers 'Heritage Tourism' workshop at Craftsman Farms" in the Madison (New Jersey) Eagle:

A “Heritage Tourism Workshop in Collaboration with the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms” will meet from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 5, addressing the questions of whether a historic site is “visitor-ready” and whether an experience is being provided that will ensure return visits and good “word-of-mouth.” ...

The Drew program noted that tourism is New Jersey’s third-largest industry, yet history and historic sites are still realizing a very small percentage of this return. The one-day workshop will acquaint participants with New Jersey’s newly unveiled Heritage Tourism Master Plan and explore how historic sites and tourism providers can benefit by its implementation.

Using the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms at 2352 Route 10 in Morris Plains as a laboratory, participants will gain invaluable assessment tools and techniques to critically evaluate how visitors may perceive a historic site on their initial contact. The cost of the one-day workshop is $115.

The Economics Associated with Outdoor Recreation, Natural Resources Conservation and Historic Preservation in the United States

Study by Southwick Associates for the National Fish and Wildlife Federation. From the summary:

Historic Preservation

 Nationally, the federal tax credits returned more than $22.3 billion in federal tax dollars since 1978 on $17.5 billion in tax credits – a return of 27.4% from every dollar invested.

 Economic activity resulting from federal historic preservation tax credits supports 61,200 jobs, $6.6 billion in economic activity and generated $935 million in tax revenues.

 Every million dollars invested in residential historic rehabilitation generates approximately 36 jobs, $1.24 million in income and nearly $200,000 in state and local taxes.

 Properties in historic districts have increased values, generally around 20% higher than other similar properties elsewhere.

From "Outdoors, preservation raise $1 trillion a year" in the Jackson Hole (Wyoming) Daily:

Outdoor recreation alone accounts for $730 billion a year, 6.44 million jobs and $88 billion a year in tax revenues, the report says. The figures include hunting, fishing, wildlife viewing, hiking, camping, skiing, paddle sports, bicycling and motorized boating but not motorized recreation such as motorcycles, off-road vehicles and snowmobiles.

The value that ecosystem services provided by natural habitat in the lower 48 states is $1.6 trillion annually, the report says. Homeowners near parks and protected areas have property values about 20 percent more than similar properties elsewhere.

One study found that “visitors to National Parks spent $12.56 billion in ‘gateway’ areas adjacent to the parks and more than 56 percent of the total spending was by visitors who stayed outside the parks,” the report says. “Nationally this visitor activity ac-counted for 247,000 jobs, $9.66 billion in labor income and $16.46 billion in value added.

The local impact across parks amounted to direct and secondary effects of 149,500 jobs, $4.56 billion in labor income and $7.74 billion in value added.”

Pretty amazing graphic on carsharing

-- Future of Carsharing

New media workshops next week

1. What's Next in the Social Media Revolution?
Seventh Annual William G. McGowan Forum on Communications
Friday, November 4, at 7 p.m.
William G. McGowan Theater
National Archives

What's on the cutting edge of digital communications and social media, and what's the big picture? A panel will explore new opportunities and ideas for social media affecting the private, government, and public sectors and the average citizen.

Moderated by Alex Howard, the Government 2.0 Correspondent for O'Reilly Media, panelists include Sarah Bernard, Deputy Director, White House Office of Digital Strategy, Pamela S. Wright, Chief Digital Access Strategist at the National Archives, and David Weinberger, senior researcher, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

A Social Media Fair and Reception will take place in the theater lobbies prior to the program from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

This program is generously supported by the William G. McGowan Charitable Fund, Inc.

For all Public Programs, (unless otherwise noted) please use the Special Events Entrance on the corner of 7th Street and Constitution Avenue, NW. Doors to the building open 30 minutes prior to the start of the program. All events listed in the calendar are free unless otherwise noted. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

2. Discovering Technology fair
November 5th, noon to 5 pm
Bread for the city Northwest
1525 7th Street NW
Workshops, film, presentations, training consultations, discussions

More on the Metropolitan DC real estate market

In the last couple days, two major regional property owners (which happen to be real estate investment trusts) have announced lower earnings. See "Washington Real Estate Investment Trust reports weaker earnings" from the Washington Business Journal and "COPT earnings down 48 percent on economic woes" from the Baltimore Business Journal. COPT is a major landlord for the federal government.

The new and most effective U.S. politics may be local

Image: Ecobags® "Think Global, Act Local" tote bag.

Brookings Institution director of the Metropolitan Studies Program and Judith Rodin, ex-president of U of Pennsylvania and now president of the Rockefeller Foundation, have an essay in Time Magazine, "Forget Washington: America's Pragmatic Caucus is Creating Jobs," about what they call the "pragmatic" caucus of Mayors and state Governors focused on improving their local economies.

The piece makes the distinction between the relatively unoperative Congress and motivated local and state politicians. Note that it's not a new argument. Governing Magazine and people affiliated with it and the "reinventing government" have made that argument for 20+ years.

Still, when public opinion poll results about confidence in government and Congress in particular are at new lows, we can take solace in that some local and state governments are proactive and focused rather than reactive, dysfunctional, and immobile.

From the article:

Across the country, the Pragmatic Caucus is engaged in economic renewal.

While it took four years for Washington to finally pass a series of free trade agreements, metros such as Los Angeles, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Portland and Syracuse are reorienting their economic development strategies towards exports, foreign direct investment and skilled immigration.

While federal transport programs are in limbo, metros like Miami and Chicago, and states like Michigan, are restructuring and modernizing their air, rail and sea freight hubs to position themselves for an economy where growth is increasingly driven by global rather than just domestic demand.

While federal energy policy is in disarray, cities such as San Diego are building out their electric vehicle infrastructure, Seattle and Philadelphia are cementing niches in energy efficient technologies and the state of Connecticut is experimenting with Green Banks to help deploy clean technologies at scale.

What unites these disparate efforts is intentionality and purpose. After decades of pursuing fanciful illusions (becoming the next Silicon Valley) or engaging in copycat strategies, states and metros are deliberately and systematically analyzing, and then building, on their special assets, attributes and advantages using business planning techniques honed in the private sector.

Second, the Caucus has a distinct modus operandi. As Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper likes to say "collaboration is the new competition." Neighboring cities and metros, long divided by petty differences, are now coming together to engage forcibly in the global market. For example, Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky, once on opposite sides of a decades old college basketball rivalry, are now constructing a common platform for advanced manufacturing. In Northeast Ohio, the Fund for Our Economic Future, a non-profit intermediary, is leading a similar effort to retool and modernize small and medium sized manufacturing firms located across Akron, Canton, Cleveland and Youngstown.

The Pragmatic Caucus does not, of course, exist in all states and metropolitan communities. Many metros continue to be defined by division rather than unity. And, as Wisconsin's battles with its labor unions showed earlier this year, partisanship hasn't been repealed in states. But the dominant, driving trend at the state and local level is toward collaborative governance and no-nonsense results.

One of the local programs mentioned, the Fund for our Economic Future, invests in improvements in the manufacturing sector in Northeast Ohio.

Revitalization in weak real estate markets

I have a hard time reading a lot of the smart growth etc. blather about how to do revitalization based on people's very recent experiences in DC--recent defined as the last few years, since 2004-2006--because DC (and Brooklyn) are outliers nationally in terms of cities that have gone through post WWII decline, and are coming back.

Most other cities have a much harder time and the proscriptions are harder to realize and take even longer. And in DC it took about 25 years after the first opening of the subway system before you could really start to see positive revitalization energy deriving from transit access and proximity. But these days DC is one of the strongest real estate markets in the world, and in the U.S. In most U.S. cities, there is minimal population in-migration--most center cities continue to shrink--and limited amounts of new construction.

These are two photos of the 1800 block of Centre Avenue in Pittsburgh's Hill District, from 1930 and today, from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's "Storefront Project." (Current photo byRebecca Droke of the PPG; historic photo from the University of Pittsburgh.) Tell me "experts" based on your very recent in DC experience, what would you do there?

Making the case for intra-city (vs. inter-city) transit planning

Portland Streetcar at Jameson Square. Image from Portland Ground. Note that an ongoing discussion on this topic with Nigel Foster helped shape this entry.

Sparked by low ridership, continued financial problems and the impeding raise in fares, in September there was a piece, "Derail the People Mover," in the Detroit News by Bill Johnson, calling for an end to the city's People Mover. Separately, there are initiatives to develop light rail service along Woodward Avenue, serving Detroit and Oakland County.

My reaction was that the People Mover's general failure in Detroit has masked key distinctions in thinking about transit, over two scales, (1) intra-city transit and transit's role in repositioning center cities as desirable places to live, locate businesses, and visit, versus(2) inter-city transit, that is bringing people to and from the city.

Typically, cities haven't been good proponents of intra-city transit subnetworks, especially with economic development considerations, because (1) transit is seen as a service of last resort, for people who can't afford cars; and (2) because usually transit service is provided as part of a regional service and in that context service within the center city is not necessarily prioritized, even though center city residents tend to make up the greatest proportion of riders.

Detroit had a lot of other economic revitalization problems before the People Mover was created, and in such an automobile-centric place, rebuilding the center city around transit is counterintuitive, so it's probably not a good example of how these kinds of focused transit services can help spark Downtown improvement, but it led me to begin thinking about a typology of these kinds of intra-city transit services:

Bus
1. Bus transit malls--Portland, Minneapolis (Nicollet Mall), Denver

2. Circulator bus services in various iterations--the latest have modern, more comfortable buses, better branded services, and more frequent headways (DC, Baltimore)

3. Various lane priority schemes

Rail
3. People Mover type services (Detroit, Miami) [note that Nigel points out that such services within airports demonstrate that campus serving opportunities for people movers can make sense, such as for a hospital center spread out over many acres, like the medical center in Houston)

4. Monorails (earlier truncated line in Seattle, more modern service in Las Vegas, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and other systems in Asia--Nigel, being in New Zealand, has experience with these systems too, which mostly have a limited number of stations)
5. Heritage streetcar systems (McKinney Street, Dallas, Little Rock, Tampa, etc.)
6. Modern streetcar systems (Portland, Seattle, plans for Washington, DC and Arlington, Virginia and many other cities)

Three articles over the years in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by Bob Firth, "The Long Squiggly Line That's Killing Our Transit System (and News of a Brazilian Cure)," "The Big Leap in Transit We Didn't Get -- But Could" and "The Next Page: Ditch the Port Authority -- and start over fresh," explain the value of the focused "circulator" concept but more in terms of the benefits to transit efficiency, not so much on the economic development and placemaking value.

Similar to how bus rapid transit is being marketed, by distinguishing the circulator buses with more modern, attractive, comfortable buses versus more traditional, value engineered buses, bus service, at least in the context of circulator service (but not traditional bus service), has been repositioned as a premium service.

Images from the first Bob Firth article, which is primarily a set of illustrations explaining what a Circulator does.

Bus transit malls are good for focusing transit services and making people aware of where to go to catch the bus, but they don't always work out on placemaking considerations, given the noise and exhaust and dominance of the streetscape by many large vehicles. This wasn't helped by early iterations which had "heavy" bus shelters which also overwhelmed the streetscape.

Top photo: Nicollet Transit Mall, Minneapolis. Photo by Jerry Holt of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Bottom photo: Old Portland bus mall shelters. Flickr photo by Jason McNuff.

Focused transit services downtown often start with transit malls, which serve both intra-city and inter-city functions. Circulator bus systems are the next generation of this kind of service, more focused on intra-city service, and a lot cheaper to implement than streetcars.

The question remains however on whether or not bus-based Circulator systems can spark economic development the way that fixed rail transit does. It will be interesting to see how this works in Baltimore as opposed to DC, where it's harder to separate out the impact of subway service on economic development vs. any impact that might come from enhanced bus service.

Top: Las Vegas Monorail photo on Flickr by Richard Pilon. Detroit People Mover photo below by cmu chem prof from Flickr.

People Movers and Monorails haven't really worked out in terms of sparking economic development. The Detroit People Mover never had that much ridership, while the Miami Metromover, with 22 stations, gets more than 30,000 daily riders. The Las Vegas monorail system went through bankruptcy and the Seattle one is truncated, and the above-ground systems, while not impeded by traffic, can be a drag on the viewshed.

The Las Vegas monorail may become successful over time, because of people's desires to get between various casinos in the city--on the other hand, if people stay within their hotel-casino complexes, maybe there isn't that much demand for this kind of service. Given that roughly 2,000 people ride the the monorail daily, maybe that's the case.

Maybe the relative lack of success has to do with their being in the air, just as the skywalks in Minneapolis, while successfully moving people between buildings in bad weather, end up removing people from the street, so success comes at the expense of vitality at the street level.

Streetcars (and bus-based circulators) integrate better into the built environment than monorails and people movers, but their in-street operation creates a lot of opposition (at least by motor vehicle operators) who see the addition of streetcars as a competitor for scarce street space, even though by comparison a streetcar can carry 100 or more people in the same space as 3-5 cars.

Heritage streetcars are a variant, more focused on tourism and out-of-region visitors rather than repositioning an area within the regional landscape for residential choice and commerce. The Little Rock streetcar seems to have had more success in terms of sparking economic development than the Tampa equivalent. Likely this is due to greater focus and integration with economic development revitalization planning in Little Rock versus the planning in Tampa, which provides service to Ybor City, a major entertainment and tourist destination.

Streetcar at the River Market (a newly constructed public market which is also very successful in its own right) in Little Rock, Arkansas. Flickr photo by Skyline Scenes.

Articles about streetcars in Portland and Seattle and how they respectively helped focus redevelopment of the Pearl District in Portland and the South Lake Union district in Seattle, supporting billions of dollars of economic development, are numerous. The experiences there demonstrate that when intra-city transit systems are developed in a purposeful way to promote economic development, placemaking, and the repositioning of the center city as a residential and business location of choice, they can have incredible return on investment.

-- Portland Streetcar

-- Understanding the Impacts of Transitways The Hiawatha Line: Impacts on Land Use and Residential Housing Value, Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, research brief, full document

-- Street Smart: Streetcars and Cities in the 21st Century, Reconnecting America

This page from the Oakland Streetcar webpage has links to a number of articles and reports on economic impact from streetcars. "Portland streetcar success has fueled interest elsewhere" from USA Today, two articles from the Seattle Times, "New streetcars no trolley folly for Portland," and "A streetcar to inspire, in Portlandthis case study on the Portland streetcar provide information on the links between well defined intra-city transit systems and local economic development and placemaking.

The typology is important because there are so many plans for streetcars around the country, in various stages of development, including cities like Cincinnati, New Haven, San Antonio, Baltimore, Oakland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, etc. that it's almost impossible to keep track of all of them.

But because so many people, especially elected officials, see transit as a service of last resort, not as a positive force that supports a more sustainable, urban lifestyle where transit, rather than automobility, complemented by walking and/or bicycling, is the primary means for getting around the city, getting forward movement on such systems--despite the successes in Portland and Seattle--is very difficult.

Even though New York City has typified a transit-centric lifestyle and mobility paradigm for many years, many people have a hard time grasping that it is possible in a country that has prioritized automobility for the past 90 years.

Even so, Washington, DC and the Wilson Boulevard corridor in Arlington County, Virginia, as well as the areas served by the streetcar in Portland (Nob Hill, Pearl District, Downtown) show that this kind of pro-urban lifestyle is exportable to more places in the U.S. than previously thought.

But it's still a struggle (even in places like Washington and Arlington, which are part of a region where the subway--heavy rail transit--is very successful).

While in Detroit they aren't thinking about what else needs to be done in order to refocus development around transit and downtown, New Haven provides another example of disconnects over planning for the long term.

The city just received a planning grant from the Federal Transit Administration for a streetcar study, but the City Council won't appropriate the 20% match that is required. See "FORUM: New streetcar system an investment in future" and the negative counter, "FORUM: Trolley nice to have, but city must focus on priorities," from the New Haven Register.

Things to do in Baltimore

1. Tomorrow (Thursday October 27th), acclaimed landscape architect Laurie Olin is speaking about his firm and design philosophy in the talk, "Civic Delight: Landscape, Cities, and People," sponsored by the Baltimore Architecture Foundation and held at 6:30pm at the Walthers Art Museum.

2. There is a conference on "Fair Development," from Friday October 28th to Sunday October 30th. See "United Workers harness protest energies with their Fair Development Conference: Baltimore-based coalition of low-wage workers has been campaigning on behalf of workers at the Inner Harbor" from the Baltimore City Paper.

-- Conference Website

Missing the point on what matters to real estate developers and financiers and local vs. federal Washington, DC

Marc Fisher misses the point big time in his piece in today's Post, "How scandal-plagued D.C. is attracting investment dollars worldwide," about the commercial real estate economy in DC vis-a-vis the Keystone Cops nature of local government. From the article:

Oil-rich gulf states, German investment partnerships, Canadian pension funds — the foreign investors who visit real estate adviser Joel Coren uniformly savor the District’s growing population, increasing affluence and relatively stable jobs picture. Scandal and dysfunction in the D.C. government never even come up: “It’s funny,” said Coren, who opened a Washington office for Savills, a global real estate firm. “When we’re educating our clients about how far D.C. has come in a very short amount of time, the city government just doesn’t factor into it. Politics is really not essential.”

Here's why relying on statements from Mr. Coren is a bad idea.

First, the real estate market in the central business district (which isn't just downtown, but includes other areas which revolve around the federal presence in the city) is a national-international market, even if it has strong regional players like JBG or Akridge. Even the locals rely on national/international financing. (See the argument in this blog entry from 2007, "Avoiding the real issues with DC's property tax assessment methodologies.")

Second, in this context, investment in DC is judged vis-a-vis other international markets. Because of the federal presence--the fact that the national government is located here and the bulk of non-military operations are located in the DC metropolitan area--the commercial real estate market is steady, because government tends to expand, not contract.

So on an international basis, this makes DC one of the strongest markets in the world. E.g., have you read the papers about Europe lately, or the overbuilt Chinese market, or Dubai's real estate crash? etc.

Until recently anyway. As I mentioned yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reports in "Washington's Office Market Dials Back," that the commercial real estate market here is starting to contract because given the current political situation, contraction is a real possibility. E.g., two million square feet of federal office space that was planned for leasing is not being leased, because of changes in political conditions.

Third, because DC is a national-international real estate market, so long as the local political conditions aren't too f***ed up, actors will continue to invest, because the functioning of local government isn't a factor in the valuation of property and the willingness to invest in an international context--provided that the local political and economic actors are committed to a pro-Growth pro-real estate development agenda, and the government is functioning on the basics in terms of the provision of public services (cf. places like Harrisburg, PA, Central Falls, Rhode Island, Vallejo, California, Jefferson County, Alabama, etc.).

Again, this is merely yet another application of the Molotch Growth Machine thesis:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine.

Fourth, local political functioning matters to national-international real estate actors on three dimensions: (1) the provision of municipal services, such as public safety and crime, maintenance of roads, trash pickup, etc.; (2) the economic viability of the local government (which is why ratings by bond firms matter, but DC is helped by the fact that it collects and keeps all of its income taxes); and (3) the level of predictability and corruption in real estate development and building regulation specifically.

Under Marion Barry, eventually the failure in the ability of the local government to provide the most basic provision of services and especially the rise in crime became so pronounced, along with the failure of the local government to manage its finances, meant that even if corruption and self-dealing wasn't much of a factor for real estate development, the commercial real estate market had to tank, because it was risky investing in DC when the local situation was so negative and unpredictable.

Today, municipal services are provided--even if to wonks like me they fail on many respects in terms of best practices, the murder rate is dropping (although columnists like Harry Jaffe believe that other crimes are increasing, see "Dropping homicide rate masks deadly streets in D.C." from the Examiner), people think schools are improving ("Survey: Parents, students happier with D.C. schools" from the Examiner) even if I don't, etc.--so the steering of various local contracts, corruption in elections, absconding with money, getting offered piddly bribes (Jim Graham), converting public funds into private use (Harry Thomas Jr.) doesn't really matter.

cf. my op-ed article from 2003 in the Philadelphia Daily News comparing DC to Philadelphia and the lessons for Philadelphia.

What does matter, providing that local government is functional, is if the federal government shrinks.

Then, if the provision of local services continues to degrade, and the quality of local political management continues to degrade, it's very much possible that more business and real estate development will re-locate to Virginia in particular.

Virginia real estate interests are already trying to get the big law firms to rightsize their office use comparable to how the NYC-based financial firms have divided up their organizations into "front office" and "back office" functions, relocating the back office functions to places like Jersey City, NJ, which is booming.

And the extension of the Metro subway system to Fairfax and Loudoun Counties will help to reposition Tysons Corner and Reston as primary locations for "federally-related" business location.

Not to mention the continued efforts of Senators and Representatives from Virginia and Maryland to get federal agencies to locate in their jurisdictions, even if that means leaving DC.

So DC can't rest on its laurels as it relates to the commercial real estate market.

Eventually, low functioning of our local government and political elite can have negative effects, but it is dependent more on the function of the federal government's demand for commercial space, and how competitive the submarkets in DC, Virginia, and Maryland will get with each other to get whatever business that's out there.

My lesson from the 1998 Mayoral election: Anthony Williams won, and Marion Barry was no longer key to the political functioning of the city

The biggest thing that residents, especially neighborhood activists, failed to realize with the election of Anthony Williams in 1998 is how much the real estate development climate would change from removing Marion Barry as the major player in local government and the re-righting of the dysfunctional municipal government toward a system that functioned, with a smaller number of employees.

Marion Barry, the number of city employees, and the failure of the local government to provide the most basic services, plus the escalating murder rate were the major issues in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, coinciding ("coincidence?") with the period when DC's real estate market ABSOLUTELY SUCKED.

From 1988 to about 2000 the market was moribund, except for federally-related development, including space for law firms and trade associations.

Arlington County and Alexandria significantly picked off associations and government agencies (e.g., the National Science Foundation moved to Arlington) because organizations didn't want to be located in DC. All they had to do was pick up the phone (aided of course by the proximity to the Pentagon).

The velocity of change took awhile to develop, but then it went into hyperdrive, which accounts for the state of real estate development in the city from about 2000 to 2008, and even today, the city's comparative strength vis-a-vis other markets nationally and internationally, as well funded actors like Brookfield and Equity Residential have bought properties at great prices from banks needing to get problem loans off their books because of concerns expressed by bank examiners or developers who lost their funding (e.g., the failure of Lehman Brothers) needing to sell to reduce debt.

Foreclosed properties like the apartments at the southeast corner of 4th and Massachusetts Avenue NW are thriving under the ownership of Equity Residential, which is doing so well it acquired property and will be building another complex not even one block away. Etc.

The question is how resilient is the city and the real estate market in the face of local political dysfunction and the threat of federal government downsizing.

Only time will tell.

But I am worrying...

Protest in the U.S.: challenging the system is not generally tolerated

John Friedmann's Planning in the Public Domain is an interesting book because he outlines how to do "radical" planning in the context of existing system of government and political action. He distinguishes radical from "revolutionary" planning, as the latter challenges the precepts and existence of the political system.

Government, especially the police/coercive power of the state function, is focused on system maintenance.

An "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrator is arrested during a demonstration in response to an early morning police raid which displaced Occupy Oakland's tent city in Oakland, California October 25, 2011. REUTERS/Stephen Lam.

Protest, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, in places including Oakland, California ("Ousted protestors marching back to Frank Ogawa Plaza" from the Oakland Tribune), Chicago, Illinois, Richmond, Virginia, Atlanta ("Atlanta police clear protesters from Woodruff Park" from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution), and New York City, has been challenged in terms of the ability to stay overnight--24/7 protest, to the extent where in Oakland, people were driven out by tear gas.

Focusing on the "rules"--parks are closed at night, etc.--is a classic bureaucratic perspective towards maintaining the system, rather than allowing for flexible spaces where challenge can be accommodated.

In college I was very much interested in cognitive, affective, and moral development theory. The "police function" of government is very much a function of Kohlberg's stage 4, with the focus on following the rules and maintaining social order. So the police oriented reaction is not a surprise.

Although it's ironic, given the support of political elites for challenges to government overseas, such as the Arab Spring movement.

This Ted Rall editorial cartoon from 2004 is still apt today.

50th anniversary of the publication of Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Image from "Downtown is for people," by Jane Jacobs, Fortune Magazine, April 1958.

Christopher reminds us that right around now, 50 years ago, Jane Jacobs' seminal urban studies and planning text, Death and Life of Great American Cities, was first published. The review in the New York Times was published 11/5/1961, and likely that was around when it came out. This is from that review:

Mrs. Jacobs' view is that people like to live, not just be, in such lively neighborhoods. Youngsters and elders alike need such surroundings. But she scoffs at our understanding of these requirements; for we continue to put up civic centers, low density residential areas and housing "projects" segregated by income. All these developments, she complains, combine to produce boring homogeneous cores which generate traffic for limited periods and then lapse afterward into dead or dangerous districts. Worse still, the new buildings with high rents squeeze out the marginal activities, the small business man just getting a start, the colorful shop with strange and exotic waves, the little restaurants and bars, almost everything deviant, bohemian, intellectual or bizarre-- in other words, all that the author believes lends spice, charm and vigor to an area.

To brighten neighborhoods, "unslum" slums and reweave housing projects into the fabric of the city, Mrs. Jacobs proposes that we do most of the things urban experts tell us not to do: attract mixed activities which will generate active cross-use of land; cut the length of blocks; mingle buildings of varying size, type and condition; and encourage dense concentrations of people. Some of the most intriguing parts of this work involve the ingenuity with which she applies her ideas for enlivening districts such as Wall Street or Central Park after dark Greenwich Village where the author lives as her model par excellence. A few other favorite examples include the North End of Boston, Georgetown in Washington, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the "Back of the Yards" in Chicago, and Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.

Leo Kottke's blog quotes from her 1958 piece, "Downtowns are for people," in Fortune Magazine:

There are, certainly, ample reasons for redoing downtown--falling retail sales, tax bases in jeopardy, stagnant real-estate values, impossible traffic and parking conditions, failing mass transit, encirclement by slums. But with no intent to minimize these serious matters, it is more to the point to consider what makes a city center magnetic, what can inject the gaiety, the wonder, the cheerful hurly-burly that make people want to come into the city and to linger there. For magnetism is the crux of the problem. All downtown's values are its byproducts. To create in it an atmosphere of urbanity and exuberance is not a frivolous aim.

There has been a lot of reconsideration of Jacobs lately, including revisionism about Robert Moses.

I read a piece, I can't remember where, which made a good point, that maybe in part Death and Life was written at the very peak of the center city--actually the city was declining, and people knew it--but it described ideal community organization as that form of retail business, independent business, was about to shrink drastically as a result of the reorganization of various retail categories on a national scale.

I think the mistake is thinking that Death and Life solves everything. It didn't and that's too big a responsibility for one book. However, her four main precepts:

- density (or concentration) of population and activity enables a great deal of diversity of exchange;

- mixed primary uses enable a great deal of activity and efficient use/ability to share resources (such as parking) across multiple functions and dayparts;

- a network of small blocks and a street grid maximizes the opportunity for exchange and connection;

- a large stock of old buildings, with running costs low because the building is paid off, can be rented/owned cheaply, with the ability; to support innovative, new, start up, creative uses, which at their beginning stages, must minimize costs, including rent;

are key.

In the first chapter, "Jane Jacobs Revisited," of his book Cities in Full: Recognizing and Realizing the Great Potential of Urban America Steve Belmont strengthens JJ's arguments by putting numbers to the ideas, such as explaining why density matters to the success of commercial districts, neighborhoods and housing, transit, and cities and commerce more generally.

Work in urban design, such as by Jan Gehl (Close Encounters with Buildings) and placemaking (e.g., Project for Public Spaces) also amplify the concepts in Death and Life.

Not to mention, consideration of transportation-public transit-bicycling, which isn't addressed to a significant degree by the book, probably because in New York City, the subway service, at least in Manhattan, where she lived, is stellar.

The point is to build on and strengthen the ideas. (Two books that are good at illustrating the ideas are by Roberta Gratz, The Living City and Cities: Back from the Edge. I always say if you only have time to read one book on urbanism, Cities: Back from the Edge is the one to read--it illustrates the ideas of Death and Life through case studies and place profiles and this makes it a bit easier to grasp.

Numbers, innumeracy and mobility: part two, bicycling, walkability and mode split potential and the transportation bill

Today's Post has a piece, "Battle looms over transportation mandate," about how the Republicans are railing against mandated spending on walking and biking as part of state transportation programming of federal transportation monies. From the article:

The looming Capitol Hill battle over transportation priorities in a budget-slashing era may have found its lightning rod issue: bike paths, pedestrian walkways and wildflowers planted by the side of the road.

The question is this: With the nation facing a transportation crisis that has gotten little attention outside of policy wonks and Washington, should the federal government continue to mandate that states spend federal dollars on pedestrian safety, bicycling trails, landscaping and historic preservation?

Like many of the issues that get marquee attention in the partisan warfare in Congress, its symbolism outweighs the actual expense. And singling it out brings to the fore substantial philosophical differences over how to target transportation dollars and to what degree Washington should be allowed to set state priorities.

The transportation enhancements portion of the federal transportation program is designed to focus on what we would call the placemaking opportunities inherent in transportation infrastructure, in linking transportation investments with land use planning and urbanism as a more focused economic development strategy.

Sure there is funding for transportation-related museums and bike paths and such, which makes it easy for people to criticize.

But the "complete streets" movement is derived from a number of different threads: balanced transportation, rather than an almost exclusive focus on roads and automobiles; shifting travel to more sustainable modes (walking, biking, transit);and doing so in ways that enhance places rather than reduce local quality of the life in favor of enabling traffic to move more quickly.

Rockville Pike, Montgomery County, Maryland. Washington Post photo by Bill O'Leary.

Presuming that people are willing to act logically, and most often they are not (you know the saying by Winston Churchill, "you can always count on America to do the right thing, after she has exhausted all the other possibilities"), problems come up in terms of getting to the heart of the matter.

I aver it has to do with flaws in our planning processes.

First, we don't have a national transportation plan, not really, where, like the equivalent of the Goals and Policies section of the Arlington County Master Transportation Plan, various goals, sometimes conflicting ones, get discussed and defined.

Second, so a complete streets policy--one that balances transportation needs across all modes rather than exclusively focus on automobility--as a component of national planning isn't there so much, at least not in the minds of conservative members of Congress, even though there are the refigured agendas of the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, the Dept. of Transportation, and the smart growth initiatives of the Environmental Protection Agency (which is getting major pushback from the Republicans).

Third, we don't have "history" sections in our plans, partly because history is contentious. But the Master Plan for the City of Baltimore does have a history element, and while I think it is a little too positive about urban renewal, it's interesting in that it does provide context for decisions. Transportation plans need such sections big time, because there are so many myths about transportation practice that need to be punctured, if we are to move forward in a substantive fashion.

Fourth, the same goes for transportation finance, there needs to be a section on transportation finance in every master plan, and that goes double for a national plan. Until we make it clear how transportation infrastructure is funded--local infrastructure is mostly not funded by federal excise taxes, and it is mostly spent on interstate freeways.

For example, the myth that road construction and maintenance is fully covered by payment of gasoline excise taxes is one that needs big time puncturing.

The real problem is that people aren't willing to raise the gasoline excise tax, which in the U.S. is significantly less than in Europe. The federal gasoline excise tax hasn't been raised since October 1993. According to an inflation calculator, just to keep up with inflation, the rate should be 27 cents/gallon. (State and local gasoline excise taxes have been raised in various jurisdictions. Virginia resists increasing theirs, while Maryland is fighting a major battle over a 5 cent increase.)

As Mother Jones Magazine says in "The GOP hates bikes," "States spend only about 1 percent of all transportation funds on projects devoted to cycling or pedestrian improvements. Yet Republicans see this as an area ripe for cutting."

If you want to fully fund roads, pay for the military-related costs of access to Mideast oil, public health costs, other environmental costs, etc., without subsidy (see the Brookings report by Martin Wachs, Improving Efficiency and Equity in Transportation Finance) then the gas tax has to increase not by cents, but by dollars.

With regard to walking and biking more specifically, I think that our bike and ped plans tend to be deficient also, in ways similar to our failures in lack of national plans and gaps in state and local transportation plans more generally.

The National Household Travel Study (League of American Bicyclists blog entry) finds that 64% of trips are 5 miles or less. About 25% of trips are one mile or less, and with the right infrastructure, can be achieved by walking or biking. 26% of trips are from 1 to 3 miles. And 13% of trips are from 3 to 5 miles.

With the right infrastructure, many of these trips can be shifted from automobile to bike. Or to transit.

And not only is it less expensive to support bike and transit trips (it seems like transit is more expensive but it isn't, because 3 cars take up the space of one 40 foot long bus, etc.), it is more efficient to do so, and in the places where walking, biking, and transit is optimized, such as in the core of Washington, DC, you find--except for a handful of streets which are major entry and exit points into and out of the city and they tend to be congested often, such as New York Avenue--that there isn't all that much congestion--roads are relatively empty.

Of course, this is aided by the city's dense street network which is organized in a grid fashion, with small streets, lots of alternative routes, and radial avenues which provide direct routes to and from key destinations and activity centers.

L'Enfant Plan for the core of the City of Washington, 1791.

But for the most part bike plans don't discuss this to the level it deserves, nor the research findings of Roger Geller ("Portland's Bicycle Brilliance" from the Tyee) which state that of the 70% of the population that is willing to bike for transportation, only 10% does so, because the other 60% fear riding in heavy traffic and/or fast traffic--but with the right kind of infrastructure they will ride.

Instead, plans talk about all the infrastructure that is needed (and not enough on programming, but that's another issue), and when infrastructure is built it's done at the schedule and convenience of transportation departments, which usually retrofit bike infrastructure--if they do it at all--when they are rebuilding/resurfacing a road, rather than prioritizing bike infrastructure improvements in those places where biking is most likely to occur.

One way to show the difference in approach is to look at the (in draft) Montgomery County "heat map", which shows the places where biking is most likely to occur, based on population density, route options, and proximity to key destinations.

That's where bike infrastructure should be prioritized, but that's not the way it works for the most part.

So bike infrastructure is put in various places, based on the convenience of DPW/DOT planning, and not in what we might call the Biking Mode Split Opportunity Zone, and when bike infrastructure doesn't get used, because it has been installed in places according to the master plan and convenience of the DPW, but not in the places where it would be more likely to be used, people who are more likely to support transportation investments in automobility are quick to criticize the "waste" of spending money on bike lanes, when the real problem is that we aren't building bike infrastructure in the right places, where we know it will be used.

As long as this continues to occur, we are going to have problems with transportation funding being directed to bike-related uses.

-- Rep. Jack Kingston, Georgia, complaining about the flawly designed bike sharing program at the U.S. House of Representatives, using the opportunity to rail against biking

-- Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma, calling bike/ped funding pork and trying to get such funding removed from federal transportation funding in 2007, in 2009, and in 2011.

Of course, it doesn't help that people like Rep. Kingston and Sen. Coburn think of bikes as toys and not something you use for transportation. Rep. Kingston is from Brunswick, Georgia, where bike as transportation is more difficult. They might bike recreationally, but have no conception of biking as transportation.

As long as they don't focus rightly on biking as transportation, they are going to continually advocate in favor of the car.

And in the meantime, it's up to the sustainable transportation community (planners, advocates, etc.) to rework our processes and plans to make our points much more directly and clearly.

Another growth machine lesson: the David Wilmot edition

I frequently tout the Growth Machine thesis first discussed by Sociologist Harvey Molotch in a 1976 article in the American Journal of Sociology, "The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place." His basic point is that despite seeming intra-elite competition, local political and economic elites are united on a pro-growth, pro-land use intensification agenda.

More to the point, former GWU professor Howard Gillette's book, Between Justice and Beauty describes the tension in the local political economy over "social justice" vs. land use issues. Part of the definition of the social justice argument has to do with the development of a local African-American business elite.

This is also covered in the long out-of-print tome Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C., 1964-1994 (Washington Monthly review), which in chapter 4, brings these threads together over land use and the provision of pieces of the action to local players.

This argument has played forward ever since, as new administrations have their own favored players from their posses (e.g., Fenty vs. Gray and the Council about the lottery, Fenty's buddies getting parks department and other contracts, etc.)

David Wilmot, featured in a piece in the Washington Times yesterday, "A familiar face in D.C. Wal-Mart deal: Company lobbyist has financial interest in land chosen for store," about self-dealing with regard to a tract of land at New Jersey Avenue and H Street NW where a local group received development rights but left the land fallow for 20+ years, is perhaps the king of the kind of dealing described in Dream City.

He is a lobbyist, a lawyer representing clients with tough issues they need to express, he is a government contractor (his group homes have come under attack for poor service, but he gets big income as president of the organization and so do his friends, "Nickles Drags Wilmot Back to Court" from the Washington City Paper), he has a small piece of the predominately Hispanic owned Marriott Courtyard hotel next to the New York Avenue Metro Station (D.C.’s first Hispanic-owned Marriott set to open" from the Washington Business Journal ), etc.

There is another Washington Times piece today about the DC Government response to yesterday's reporting, "D.C. officials declare end to ‘land bank’: Developers must build or get out," but the reality is that this purported desire to strengthen procedures will never happen.

The "system" is set up to work the way it does to benefit developers and the well-connected, not to generate better returns for DC Government and the citizens of the city.

If it changes, I'll be incredibly surprised.

Numbers, innumeracy and mobility: part one, buses vs. fixed rail transit

Wikipedia photo of the Cleveland HealthLine BRT by GoddardRocket. The Cleveland HealthLine system is well designed with particularly attractive bus shelters.

Today's Post has some letters to the editor about riding buses, "[links will be added when the paper puts them online, there is a lag]," in response to an article, "Montgomery looks to busways to ease traffic," on Montgomery County's initiative around bus rapid transit, which has been initiated at the instigation of Councilman Marc Elrich.

I admit I am not a fan of bus rapid transit generally, because it is promoted most often as an excuse to not do rail-based transit. And the experience in the U.S. is that rail-based transit is the best way to get choice riders to give up their cars. Some criticism of BRT proponents is that they are just tools of the road-building lobby.

-- Bus Rapid Transit webpage, Montgomery County

-- Institute for Transportation and Development Policy report, Recapturing Global Leadership in Bus Rapid Transit

From the Post article:

Montgomery County is considering building a 150-mile network of dedicated bus lanes to move its growing population more quickly while easing traffic congestion, but even supporters won’t use the “B” word.

Planners, developers and local officials analyzing how to build and pay for the express bus network say they are acutely aware that buses conjure up images of slow, unreliable, second-class transit. Their pitch: Picture these buses as trains on rubber tires.

“We want riders to view it much more like rail,” said Dan Wilhelm, who oversees transportation issues for the Montgomery County Civic Federation and serves on a county transit task force.

This is the crux of my argument with proponents of BRT. The numbers of people that ride fixed rail transit are much greater than a bus, you need at least 2 very full buses to equal one train car, so you need many more buses to equal one train.

Generally, BRT is a kind of con job when it is promoted in the U.S.

To tout the possibilities in the U.S., they use examples from South America, from Curitiba and Bogota mostly, without making key distinctions, such as much lower wage rates--you need a driver for each bus, lower penetration of automobile ownership so more people are transit dependent, which also influences willingness to withstand crowding--called "crush loads" in the transportation field.

In South America, people are willing to withstand double the number of people on a transit vehicle as we are in the U.S. So a 60 foot bus in a BRT system in South America carries 150+ passengers during peak, while the same bus is rated for 80 passengers in the U.S. So you need double the number of buses and double the number of drivers in the U.S. to carry the same number of people compared to Curitiba or Bogota.

So BRT isn't equivalent to a train, even if the buses are nice.

OTOH, I do think that Montgomery County, more than most other jurisdictions in the U.S., has the ability to model best practice BRT deployment in the United States, in a spatial context where lack of density makes light rail and heavy rail uneconomic.

In this collection of papers from the Second International Conference on Urban Public Transportation Systems sponsored by the ASCE, there are a number of papers on BRT, which specify the definitional criteria for BRT. Most of what is provided in the U.S. is more what I call "rapider" transit, it isn't BRT from a hardcore definitional standpoint. OTOH, most of the places with true BRT don't have astounding ridership numbers, at least when compared to South America.

Montgomery County already runs one of the most successful suburban bus systems in the U.S., even if one of the letter writers notes that budget cutbacks means that service is degrading, and they aren't even printing schedules for some routes as another cutback.

So if anyone can make a suburban BRT system work, it might be Montgomery County. In North America, the model suburban BRT system is the Viva service in the York Region of Toronto. But the ridership numbers there are comparatively low. OTOH, in the outskirts of Toronto, they wouldn't have transit options without this kind of service.

Note that while slightly higher than the ridership numbers for the DC region's busiest bus lines, the Metro Orange Line BRT service in Los Angeles comes nowhere near the equivalent ridership numbers projected for the Purple Line light rail in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties in Maryland, for which there is a vociferous contingent of BRT proponents (mostly because they don't want the old rail line, in many people's backyards, to be converted back to rail.)

Note that comparisons to the HealthLine in Cleveland aren't accurate for Montgomery County because that's a city-based system, and note too that it was built in place of the fixed rail line that people preferred, but couldn't afford. Their ridership numbers aren't particularly stellar either.