Stephen Smith

I graduated Spring 2010 from Georgetown undergrad, with an entirely unrelated and highly regrettable major that might have made a little more sense if I actually wanted to become an international trade lawyer, but which alas seems good for little else. I still do most of the tweeting for Market Urbanism Stephen had previously written on urbanism at Forbes.com. Articles Profile; Reason Magazine, and Next City

Joined: May 21, 2025
Articles: 282
Comments: 41

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A quick primer on CBTC and driverless trains

While doing some research for an article about driverless trains, I came across this document by Mircea Georgescu (who most recently worked at Thales [I think?] and whose email I can’t track down! Mircea, if you’re reading this, trimite-mi si mie te rog frumos un email la [email protected]!), that’s a sort of primer on CBTC and its application in driverless train operation. The paper is very short as far as these things go, and surprisingly readable, even if Mircea’s English ain’t the best. You can download the PDF here, and here’s the abstract: Reliable driverless operation requires specific features implemented at system and subsystem levels of the train control system. Communications-Based Train Control (CBTC) is now proven as the best choice for driverless systems due to inherent high levels of safety and reliability with a low life cycle cost. This paper proposes a systematic approach that may be used to determine the most efficient way to fulfil the requirements specific to each customer faced with driverless operation (green field or re-signaling). It also defines “must have” requirements (functionality) to obtain the desired performance and cost. The paper also addresses issues related to the operability, maintainability, and availability of different types of driverless CBTC systems implementations, and the advantages and disadvantages of each solution. By the way, the article references another written by Mircea Georgescu and Firth Whitwam called “Moving to Full Automatic Operations,” whose citation is “IEEE Hong Kong 2005.” Anyone know where I could get my hands on this? [email protected], as always!

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Where is the Canadian real estate bubble going to hit hardest?

We’ve been hearing for a while now about a coming crash in Canadian property values, and it’s really reached a fever pitch lately – seems like denying a Toronto bubble, at least, is pretty rare. What’s interesting to me, though, is how different the bubble seems to be from the American one about five years ago. In the US, urban real estate definitely took a dive – tons of people went bankrupt, cranes got taken down – but ultimately it recovered much more quickly than the suburbs, and especially exurbs and sprawling Sunbelt cities. What from what I can tell about Canada, the overvaluation is focused on urban properties, epitomized by the glassy blue towers going up in Vancouver and especially Toronto, and to a lesser extent Calgary. The Vancouver market has cooled and all the worry now is about Toronto, where sales volumes are still up from last year, but I’m not hearing too much worry out of Vancouver, even months after sales supposedly started cooling. Anyway, the worry in Toronto is really rising. In a very widely-circulated Financial Post opinion piece last week, Diane Francis advocated placing restrictions on foreign (read: Asian) buyers. Despite the jingoism it was an interesting piece, but this chart is more interesting: Complicating things is the mining energy boom in central Canada, which is also being felt in North Dakota and nearby states. As you can tell, this is less of an informational post than a post calling for information. Canadians – what do you think is going to happen? Where is the bubble going to hit hardest, who’s going to recover first, and who’s never going to recover? I want your opinion! (Yes, yours!) Or is there in fact no bubble at all, and all we’re seeing is that Canadians are falling (back) in love […]

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Transpo bill gridlock staves off federal transit regulation

There are two general attitudes among urbanists towards the transportation omnibus bill that Congress has been struggling to pass in recent years (?). Some, like Streetsblogs and a number of political advocacy groups, hope for swift passage because of the bill’s transit spending. Others, like Cap’n Transit, balk at all the highway spending, and cheer on the gridlock. And here’s one other reason to be on Cap’n Transit’s side: no new bill means no federal regulation of rapid transit. Right now, the federal government only has the power to regulate safety on rail lines that feed into the national mainline network, and could therefore, at least in theory, run into a freight train. This includes all intercity trains (Amtrak and possibly All Aboard Florida), commuter trains (Metro-North, Caltrain, etc.), and the occasional light rail line using an older right-of-way that’s still connected to the national network (e.g., New Jersey’s River Line). Self-contained “rapid transit” networks – subways, elevated trains, and new light rail and streetcar lines – are beyond the feds’ reach. To many legislators, the Fort Totten crash on DC’s Red Line in 2009, operated by WMATA, was evidence that federal regulation is needed. (WMATA’s MetroRail is actually one of the most technologically advanced systems in America – or at least it was, until after the crash when they turned the ATO off, which drives the train while the operator opens and closes the doors.) There was a big outcry about it right after the crash and a few times since then, and the debate seems to be coming up again. But despite the liberal leanings of most transit enthusiasts, you’d be hard pressed to find one who thinks that federal regulation will do WMATA – an admittedly heinous agency that needs to be reined in – any good. […]

Stephen Smith
June 23, 2012

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Libertarians at the Reason Foundation oppose latest California parking minimum reform bill

From Baruch Feisenbaum, who’s the Reason Foundation’s transportation analyst (disclaimer: I did an internship at Reason magazine a few years ago), surprising agreement with the American Planning Association’s California branch on the parking minimum reform bill (or at least, it surprised me): The proposed bill has both positives and negatives. The positives include introducing a market-based approach to parking, allowing local governments to set higher standards if it is appropriate for the community, granting certain exemptions to the law including rent control and deed-restricted housing and using substantially more quantitative standards than the old ITE approach. (Under the ITE standards, there were multiple categories for each business using insufficient data points and low r-squared values. For example, adult entertainment had multiple categories. The nude dancing category had separate subcategories for different types of nude dancing including fully nude, partially nude, etc.) However, there are significant problems with the bill that outweigh its positives. First, the bill sets a statewide standard. California is one of the largest, most diverse states in the country. What is effective in San Francisco may not work in Truckee, CA. He also takes issue with the fact that the bill was sponsored by the California Infill Builders Association (disclaimer: I’m friendly with Mott Smith, who runs the group), which obviously stands to gain from reduced minimum parking requirements: The bill is sponsored by the California Infill Builders Association. The association is a trade group working to increase infill housing. As parking spaces cost money, for developers to be able to build these apartments/houses they need something in return. The something could be lower parking standards. Parking should be priced and I understand the desire for infill housing. However, the bill would be best originating from someone without a stake in the game. Such legislation can then be reviewed by a university […]

rent control

Ending rent control may not lower prices for non-regulated units

That’s one takeaway from a paper sent to me by one of its co-authors, Andy Garin, at MIT, on the effects of the end of rent control in Massachusetts in 1995 on property values in Cambridge. Fascinating topic, and much thanks to Andy for sending it to me – it’s always nice when other people write my blog posts for me! Andy assures me that they “went through great pains to make sure our results do, in fact, have a causal interpretation, and meaningful,” but as always, I don’t have the statistical background to fisk its methods, so feel free to go at it in the comments. Here’s the abstract of the working paper, available on NBER, called “Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge Massachusetts”: Understanding potential spillovers from the attributes and actions of neighborhood residents onto the value of surrounding properties and neighborhoods is central to both the theory of urban economics and the development of efficient housing policy. This paper measures the capitalization of housing market spillovers by studying the sudden and largely unanticipated 1995 elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts that had previously muted landlords’ investment incentives and altered the assignment of residents to locations. Pooling administrative data on the assessed values of each residential property and the prices and characteristics of all residential transactions between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent control’s removal produced large, positive, and robust spillovers onto the price of never-controlled housing from nearby decontrolled units. Elimination of rent control added about $1.8 billion to the value of Cambridge’s housing stock between 1994 and 2004, equal to nearly a quarter of total Cambridge residential price appreciation in this period. Positive spillovers to never-controlled properties account for more half of the induced price appreciation. Residential investments can […]

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“This is the dirty secret of California’s Density Bonus law…”

Inclusionary zoning – everyone wants to talk about it! Dave Alpert at GGW started the discussion with his pro-IZ piece, and hot on the heels of Emily’s post earlier today, I got an email from a California developer who wishes to remain anonymous: This is the dirty secret of California’s Density Bonus law: it’s primarily a way to give 100% affordable projects easy land use concessions. It has barely any effect on market-rate projects, despite all the attention it gets from affordable housing advocates. Incidentally, the number of affordable units in market-rate density bonus projects – 212 – over the total number of units produced in L.A. during the same period – 53,000 – is 0.4%. Vanishingly few. The number of units produced exclusively with the parking concession – the 6 condo conversion units – is 0.01%. Statistically the same as zero. If people really want to get affordable housing built, they would do much better to find more direct ways to pay for it – like through property tax revenues or other sources where everybody pays. Trying to pay for affordable units by constraining market-rate development and trying to the capture value that is “created” when those constraints are released is not only a pretty ineffective way to create affordable housing, it’s an excellent way to make market rate housing more expensive. I’ve got some thoughts of my own on inclusionary zoning and the anti-density sentiment it can engender among some affordable housing activists, which I’ll hopefully post tomorrow.

Stephen Smith
June 22, 2012
1 Comment

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Florida East Coast looks to hook up with Orlando International

The mystery of why in the hell Florida East Coast Industries would want to start private passenger service from Miami to Orlando just got a little bit clearer: they may also be getting an intermodal freight connection to Orland International Airport! A press release from the airport authority (.pdf): Demonstrating a vision for the future, the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, which operates Orlando International Airport, has already invested in infrastructure for a station that could accomodate up to four rail systems. In discussing the integration of rail [Phil Brown, Executive Director Orlando International Airport] explained, “We have planned our intermodal facility in a central location to service both the north and the future south terminal and All Aboard Florida is vying to be the first rail system to operate from it.” […] After considering FECI’s proposal, the Board approved the request and authorized the Executive Director to develop an agreement with FECI to provide commercial passenger service to Orlando International Airport’s Intermodal Facility to be presented to the Aviation Authority Board. The railroad clearly wants to continue to grow its freight business while introducing passenger service, which will make them one of the few private constituencies for FRA crash safety reform. They already have very good signaling because of their reliance on time-sensitive intermodal freight (most American railroads carry slow bulk freight like coal, chemicals, and grain), which will help them when they get in front of the FRA and have to prove that they can prevent and mitigate crashes without bulking their trains up like tanks. A cynic could say they’re only starting passenger service to get subsidies from the government for their freight business, but for the moment I’d like to be optimistic and think that it’s a genuine synergy. And then there’s this out of Rep. John Mica’s […]

Stephen Smith
June 21, 2012
1 Comment

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Before the landmarks…

The other day I was stumbling around Wikipedia when I found pictures of what was apparently the first iteration of New York’s Grand Central train station, called Grand Central Depot. The “depot” opened in 1871 and was built in the neo-Renaissance style that was popular back then (as opposed to the final, neoclassical incarnation), and stood for less than 30 years. It was partly torn down and reconstructed in 1899, and then totally demolished “in phases” between 1903 and 1913 to make way for today’s Grand Central Terminal. This got me thinking about the old Pennsylvania Station whose demolition was a catalyst for the modern preservationist movement. Like nearly every big old building in New York, it was of course not the first building to stand there – development in cities during the prewar era was as much about redevelopment as it was about building in greenfield sites. It was a given that building would come down and new ones would be built – a city that’s been disrupted in most American downtowns. (Midtown Manhattan is of course one of the few places in the U.S. where this still happens – the Drake Hotel was of course torn down a few years ago by Harry Macklowe, on the site of what is now 432 Park Ave., and the Hotel Pennsylvania across from Penn Station will likely be replaced with an office tower once the market comes back.) Anyway, I put out a call on Twitter for pre-Penn Station history, and lo and behond @enf alerted me to a panel at an exhibit at the Transit History Museum in Brooklyn, which I managed to find some pictures from on Flickr. Here’s a wide shot of the panel (though you can zoom in pretty close), and here’s some of the text that […]

Development, housing, Zoning

Look beyond Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn for solutions to a lack of retail

Robbie Whelan’s got a column in today’s Wall Street Journal on Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue, which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about since I moved to Brooklyn earlier this year. If you don’t recall, last year the City Council passed a zoning amendment to require new residential developments on the transit-rich, pedestrian-unfriendly avenue in South Brooklyn to include a certain amount of ground-level retail, to appease the ghost of Jane Jacobs and to stop burning the souls of all who walk the avenue. Robbie’s column is outwardly critical of the city (he blames “bad decisions by Amanda Burden’s City Planning Department”), but on another level, he’s just cheering on what DCP already did (“the city finally got wise and passed another zoning change last year”). But walking down Fourth Avenue, and seeing all the vacant retail storefronts in apartment buildings sprinkled around the neighborhood from the last development cycle, it seems obvious that the real problem is a lack of demand, which Robbie derides as “the profit-above-all-else motive of some developers” (“some”…ha!). Namely: the neighborhoods around Fourth Avenue are too auto-bound and not dense enough to support the retail and pedestrian traffic that would make Fourth Avenue a vibrant place. (The lots bordering Fourth Avenue may one day grow dense enough to support retail without the help of their side streets. But for now, only mid-rise development is allowed, so I don’t see Fourth Avenue being self-sustaining any time soon.) Perhaps the biggest problem is the industrial zoning around the Gowanus Canal and Bay, a few avenues over from Fourth Avenue. Capital has replaced labor in U.S. non-service-sector jobs over the last century, and the only business that can take advantage of the zoning around Third Avenue are auto-oriented (manufacturers these days ship their goods by highways, not canals!). […]

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New York transit officials grudgingly consider using existing track more efficiently

Now that Chris Christie killed the ARC project, which would have built another rail tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan, Transportation Nation is reporting that MTA boss Joe Lhota is asking the different New York area railroads to do what they were supposed to do half a century ago when they were nationalized: cooperate! What to do in the meantime? Lhota tossed out three ideas, each aimed at boosting capacity at Penn Station in Manhattan, the hemisphere’s busiest railroad station and a terminal for New Jersey Transit trains. He said the station’s 21 platforms should all be made to accommodate 10-car trains, which would mean lengthening some of them. He also said that the railroads using the station—Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and Long Island Rail Road—should do a better job of sharing platform and tunnel space. Each railroad currently controls a third of the platforms, which sometimes leads to one railroad having too many trains and not enough platforms at the same time another railroad has empty platforms. The railroads also vie with each other for access to tunnels during peak periods. Lhota said capacity would be boosted if dispatchers in the station’s control room could send any train to any platform, and through any tunnel, as they saw fit. Lhota’s third suggestion was the most ambitious. He said the three railroads—plus the MTA’s Metro-North line, which connects Manhattan to Connecticut and several downstate New York counties—should use each other’s tracks. In other words, trains should flow throughout the region in a way that sends them beyond their historic territory. For example, a train from Long Island could arrive in Penn Station and, instead of sitting idly until its scheduled return trip, move on to New Jersey. That way, trains would spend less time tying up platforms, boosting the station’s […]

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