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Month October 2010

No ARC without TOD

A lot of fuss has been made by urbanists about how important the ARC transit tunnel under the Hudson is to curbing sprawl in North Jersey, but frankly I’m not convinced that more commuter rail into Manhattan is the cure for what ails New Jersey. The state’s fundamental problem is its reliance on two cities outside its borders for providing jobs to its people, and it’s used the existence of New York and Philadelphia as excuses to remain a sprawled, suburban oasis in the middle of a dense Northeast Corridor, which can’t continue once it runs out of land and money. Commuter rail in post-WWII America has never quite lived up to transit activists’ hopes, and the NJ Transit service and the ARC tunnel will be no different. Instead of viewing suburban train stations as smaller versions of city stations, locals like to think of them as their own personal portals into downtown business districts. Suburbanites don’t want transit-oriented development – they want lots of parking so they have access to the station, since most of them don’t live within walking distance.  Increased density and less parking might benefit future residents who would move in to new developments, but they don’t show up to zoning board meetings and don’t get a vote. As an example of how many towns waste their transit, I grew up in Bryn Mawr, a suburb of Philadelphia, and a town which has better transit access than the Upper East Side. It’s part of a string of towns collectively known as the “Main Line,” after the train tracks that run through the area, there’s a light rail line that runs south of the main commuter line, and there are a few bus lines (both SEPTA buses and private college shuttles) that connect the towns. Despite its […]

Sunday links

1. Planners in the Twin Cities have decided to “back away from the age-old compact in which the state tries to keep pace with suburban expansion” (i.e., they’re canceling new outer road projects) and add toll/bus lanes to highways in the inner metro area. Republican governor and business on one side, Republican voters on the other – we’ll see who wins. 2. Philadelphia and Washington, DC try (and mostly fail) to account for and sell off their vacant plots. 3. While DC’s “impervious area charge” that finances for the sewer system makes sense in theory, it does seem a bit inefficient to mandate that people and businesses build parking, and then charge them a fee on something they might not even have wanted to build in the first place. I guess it’s better than California’s solution. 4. NYT architecture critic Nicholas Ouroussoff rails against the NYC Planning Department’s decision to cap Jean Nouvel’s planned Midtown skyscraper at 1,050 feet (he wanted to build it 200 feet higher) and what he views as a mentality that “risks transforming a living city into an urban mausoleum.” According to the planning commissioner, the design was rejected since it failed to live up to the Empire State Building’s grandeur, which it would have rivaled in size.

Cap’n Transit comes out of the closet as a market urbanist

…sort of. He never quite cops to it, but he says he “appreciates” libertarianism’s arguments (unlike some people), and gives this great summary of what we here call the market urbanist narrative: In the past, private companies ran the trains, interurbans, trolleys and buses. They were usually able to make a profit providing freedom and personal mobility to people of all ages and income levels. Then the government interfered in the market, forcing operators to charge fares that were too low, and subsidizing roads, garages and oil so that private cars had an unfair advantage. The private operators went out of business, and since then a skeleton transit system has been operated by the government at great public expense. Government subsidy of driving has also destroyed our traditional small towns and cities, leaving hard-working families with a difficult choice between long drives and a gentrified urban lifestyle surrounded by intellectuals and criminals. A conservative solution would gradually phase out driving subsidies and allow entrepreneurs to start new bus and train services. As publicly-owned transit routes become more profitable, they could be sold off to the highest bidder. He put our beliefs more succinctly that I could – when you’re as passionate about the history of transit and land use in America as we are, it’s hard to distill it to a few short sentences. I should also note before continuing that I don’t really agree with lumping libertarian and conservative ideas on transit/land use together – “conservative” these days is nothing more than shorthand for Republican-leaning, and Republican constituents are almost all suburban/exurban/rural and are highly dependent on cars and will always vote for cars and against transit and density. But anyway, something I also found interesting was his typology of conservative/libertarian tendencies other than market urbanism. He finds three […]

Friday links

1. Miller-McCune (what a bad name for a magazine) has an article about a possible VMT tax, and points out that more fuel-efficient vehicles will lead to less gas tax revenue. 2. Streetsblog has an extremely unflattering profile of Republican nominee for NY Governor Carl Paladino. He made a name for himself politically by detolling a major highway near where he was a real estate developer, and has continued to oppose new tolling projects throughout the state. He’s promising to cut the gas tax rate, and apparently once said, “It’s time we started looking at parking as a public service.” I should note that his Democratic opponent Andrew Cuomo ain’t no slouch when it comes to encouraging sprawl – Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice fingered his tenure as HUD Secretary as one of the “starting points for the mortgage meltdown.” 3. Paul Barter at Reinventing Parking has a guest post about parking reform in Bogotá that was concurrent with their much-vaunted TransMilenio BRT system, and he promises us more about it in the future. 4. Quoteth the Los Angeles Times: “At least 120 municipalities [in California] — nearly one in three with active redevelopment agencies — spent a combined $700 million in housing funds from 2000 to 2008 without constructing a single new unit, the newspaper’s analysis of state data shows. Nor did most of them add to the housing stock by rehabilitating existing units.” 5. Vancouver learns the hard way that luxury public housing is a bad idea. You could call it inclusionary zoning at its finest.

When will New Jersey reverse its sprawling ways?

by Stephen Smith New Jersey has always been an odd state – it’s the most densely populated of the fifty, and yet it lies just outside of the core of both of its metro areas (Philadelphia and New York). North Jersey does have a formidable number of mid-sized cities, but the biggest – Newark – is a posterchild for urban neglect, and New Jersey’s urban areas play a tepid second fiddle to their much larger counterparts across the Delaware and the Hudson. New Jersey’s appeal lies undeniably in its suburbs, which are connected by a network of government-built roads and enabled by anti-density development rules. Despite New Jersey’s predilection for sprawl, the New York Times reports that the state may literally be running out of horizontal space. A Rutgers study claims that around the middle of the 21st century New Jersey will become the first state to develop all its unprotected land development trends remain unchanged. The NYT article then claims that denser redevelopment is on the rise and cites a few of anecdotes as evidence, but frankly I’m not convinced that the state is very reform-minded when it comes to its density-limiting regulations. Even among the examples given by the Times we see the limits of reform: a 217-unit luxury rental apartment building near the Morristown NJ Transit station – an area that was supposedly rezoned as a “Transit Village Core” a decade ago – was only allowed to go forward after the developer agreed to build 722 new parking spaces. On a more general level, New Jersey’s experiment with zoning reform in the ’70s and ’80s has been severely disappointing in terms of liberalization. Researcher James Mitchell used decisions handed down around the same time by both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Supreme Courts to compare the effects on […]

A comment on NYU’s proposed superblocks

Benjamin Hemric left an interesting comment about my remark about NYU’s expansion plans in Greenwich Village. First of all, I should admit that I was lazy and got NYU’s plans totally wrong – they are going to add towers to the three that I. M. Pei already built, not tear them down, and they’re going to be in a similar style. But more importantly, Hemric sees NYU’s towers-in-the-park plan as anti-density fallout (emphasis mine): […] I’d like to say that I support more intense development of the NYU sites, but disagree with NYU’s current plans, which put the planned added density in an anti-city, tower-in-the-park form. It appears to me that NYU has developed this tower-in-the park approach, in large part so it seems to me, because it believes it will eventually help win over community opponents and government officials. So, in other words, this bad plan seems to me to be a result, to a large extent, of NYU trying to cater to anti-development community activists (although these activists are still up in arms about it) and government officials. I think a more market-oriented approach (one where a municipality takes care of its basic duties and needs and where private developers take care of their own needs), similar to what existed in cities prior to the urban “renewal” era, would likely produce a much better, more urbane plan. So I think that, to a large extent, it is the visible hand of “planning” that is mis-guiding this project and that more reliance on an invisible hand of the marketplace approach, where developers try to maximize their benefits and where municipalities focus only on limited “legitimate” (in my opinion) duties, like providing streets and parks, protecting landmarks, etc., would produce a much better result (here and elsewhere). […] Under its […]

New York City links

There are a couple of NYC-related links that I’ve been saving up, so here they are: 1. Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indiannapolis and NYC’s new deputy mayor, appears to be interested in privatizing New York City’s parking meters in order to balance the city’s budget. We’re more interested in the extent to which it will raise parking prices closer to a market rate, but wary of the city locking in parking policy and therefore not being able to experiment with more radical reforms down the road. 2. Bruce Ratner’s new Lower Manhattan apartment building, designed by Frank Gehry, with studios starting at $3,000/mo., is receiving an affordable housing tax abatement. 3. Comptroller John Liu’s task force on “what the city can and should demand from developers of publicly subsidized projects” has collapsed in a series of public resignations and dissensions. Fortunately, it looks like a potentially lethal beast has been slain: In a letter to the task force co-chairs, four dissenters wrote that the task force’s recommendations would create “additional red tape and bureaucracy and ultimately waste taxpayer funds on a new set of city-funded consultants.” “In today’s increasingly competitive environment, a proposal like this would make New York a more difficult place to do business and to build,” the four dissenting task force members wrote in a letter reviewed by the Journal. 4. The Gotham Gazette discusses the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which should ring a bell for anyone interested in NYC real estate. The article claims that it’s the most significant planning entity in New York City, and that its rise has come on the back of inclusionary zoning and public-private initiatives. A lot of this is includes affordable housing mandates (usually about 20%) within otherwise private buildings, which the Gotham Gazette says are included in most […]

Zoning blighted Manhattanville before Columbia did

Something that always annoyed me about discussions of the state of Manhattanville and Columbia’s blight study is the fact that they usually leave out restrictive zoning as the original sin. We’re certainly no fans of eminent domain or Columbia’s plans for the West Harlem neighborhood, and while people are right to point out that Columbia’s neighborhood acquisitions and plans are key drivers of the further decline of the neighborhood, it would be stretching the truth to say that the neighborhood’s blight is entirely Columbia’s fault. The fact is that even before Columbia descended upon the neighborhood, its zoning classification just wouldn’t allow it to be a nice place. What else would you expect from an area that’s zoned mostly for industrial and manufacturing uses and is inhabited mostly by storage companies and auto repair shops? And the neighborhood organizations themselves weren’t doing the best job selling the alternatives. While their plan included some upzonings, it also would have hobbled the area with the onerous restrictions that are all too common throughout the city. There was an emphasis on preservation of the status quo, with some light industry retained. Inclusionary zoning and community benefits agreements would have driven up the cost of development further. They also took the stance that parking in the area was “insufficient” and “inadequate,” and called for “affordable municipal parking.” Clearly not being familiar with the work of Donald Shoup, they argued that “limited parking cause[s] drivers to circle blocks looking for on-street parking.” Again, while we’re no fans of eminent domain or Columbia’s heavy-handed tactics, it’s important to remember how difficult it is to do things “the right way,” and how much time and money is necessary to get plots of land rezoned. NYU, which doesn’t have the blight excuse for its Lower Manhattan acquisitions, is […]

More urban planning mismeasurement

Apparently I’m not the only one thinking about urban mismeasurement, because the planning blogosphere is lighting up with examples. In addition to my critique of per passenger-mile measurements and the aforelinked critique of average density (and the great follow-up post here), I’ve noticed two other discussions about mismeasurement in urban planning: 1. A report funded by the Rockefeller Foundation criticizes the standard measures of congestion used by the Texas Transportation Institute’s “industry standard” Urban Mobility Report. It cites the Travel Time Index in particular, or the ratio of average peak travel times to non-peak travel times (it’s unclear but I believe they’re only talking about cars), as being particular pro-sprawl, in that it rewards cities where it’s hard to get around to begin with. While measuring total time spent in peak hour traffic, apparently dense metro areas like Chicago, Portland, and Sacramento have the lowest peak travel times, with Nashville holding up the rear with the longest average time spent in rush-hour traffic. 2. Angie Schmitt at Streetsblog gives an excellent example of both mismeasurement and environmentalism vs. density: This summer I worked in the air quality division of the metropolitan planning agency in Northeast Ohio — known as NOACA. NOACA is the local agency responsible for disbursing federal highway dollars. To a certain extent, its actions are governed by a series of federal directives. While I was at NOACA, we hired an “air quality planner” whose main responsibility was to perform an analysis mandated by the feds to measure the air quality impacts of every proposed road project. The problem was, the analysis inevitably concluded — without fail! — that expanding a road would reduce air pollution. That’s because the formula only accounted for short-term air quality impacts. Any given road project was likely to reduce congestion in the […]

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