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Anthony Ling on private buses

A guest post from Market Urbanism’s Brazil correspondent, Anthony Ling, who blogs in both Portuguese and English at renderingfreedom.blogspot.com… For a long time I’ve been thinking about why collective transportation is a synonym to public transportation. Is there anything special about the activity of taking people from one point to another that makes it valid to prevent competition, prohibit entrepreneurship and end with different types of services in a city according to passengers’ needs? Public transportation in Brazil is known to be inefficient, and it is the poor, the most dependent on this service, that ends up being harmed. How could a company enter the market or technologically innovate in collective transportation? Far beyond the basics that are missing in the Brazilian bus lines, such as a route identification system, both online and on the bus (in Porto Alegre you have to know what codes like T1 and T5 mean as a route), knowing which buses pass in each bus stop would already be a start and a great comparative advantage to a new company on the business. While we depend on the inefficiency of the public sector, the group from Porto Alegre Shoot the Shit has started a collaborative initiative to find out which bus passes at each stop, action that was initially seen by the EPTC as an act of vandalism. Another strategy would be the identification of which routes are overloaded with passengers, trying to profit with one more bus to be used by people that aren’t being served on the margin. Or do just the opposite: try to find out if there is demand to nonexistent routes through market research. Still, a much simpler way would be what many schools use for the transportation of their students, but in different types of establishments. A company could go to […]

Anthony Ling
August 9, 2012

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The Zoning History of Barcelona’s Eixample

Server glitch wiped the last few articles, so here’s a repose of the Barcelona one. Also, comments should be working now, should you deign to leave one… Somehow I managed to visit Barcelona a few years ago and not learn about the history of the city’s Eixample (x pronounced sh in Catalan), or extension/widening (ensanche in Castilian). So to spare you all that fate, I’ve assembled a short history of Barcelona’s Eixample, which has parallels in eixamples/ensanches/zabalgunes (Basque!) across Spain. So here’s the history, as told by Eduardo Aibar and Wiebe E. Bijker! (.pdf) It starts in 1714, when Philip V, the Bourbon King of Spain based in Madrid and supported by the Castilians, conquered the Catalan capital of Barcelona, creating modern, unified Spain. Catalan culture and language was suppressed for more than a century, but more relevantly for urbanists… The technical shape of society was also checked. An enormous military engineering project was launched to put the city under continuous surveillance of the Bourbon troops. A huge pentagonal citadel, designed by the Flemish military engineer Prosper Verboom, was built near the harbor to dominate the city. The army thus could bombard any target within Barcelona with heavy mortars. A high wall, fortified with bastions and fronted by a moat, zigzagged from the western face of the citadel up the north side of the city, around its back, and down south again to the port, meeting the sea at the ancient shipyards. This way, Barcelona became an enormous fort in which the military installations covered almost as much space as the civilian buildings. The result of Philip V’s project was to enclose Barcelona in a rigid straitjacket of stone that prevented any further civic expansion and industrial development. The walls soon became the main urban problem of Barcelona, and the […]

Stephen Smith
August 9, 2012
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NYU 2031: Rise of the Mole People

A few things. First of all, the New York Times in 1992 on the postmodern skyline blight that is the Sony Building (then still the AT&T Building): This proposal marks the latest instance in which landlords have tried to recreate ill-conceived or little-used arcades and plazas, which generated lucrative bonuses for builders but not much in the way of genuine public amenities. In one of the most dramatic cases, a dank arcade under 2 Lincoln Square, an apartment tower on Columbus Avenue, between 65th and 66th Streets, was enclosed in 1989 and turned into a home for the Museum of American Folk Art. The Sony plan is likely to provoke wide debate on whether the public will gain or lose through the renovation, given the celebrity of 550 Madison Avenue itself, which was designed in 1978 by Philip Johnson and is marked on the skyline by a Chippendale-style broken pediment. Sony’s proposal calls for a net reduction of 8,727 square feet of space at ground level that is now devoted to the public; space that could conceivably be rented to retailers for about $200 a square foot. And now the New York Observer in 2012, on NYU’s 2031 plan, which will involve upgrading the quality and quantity of open space while adding new buildings to their modernist superblocks in the Village: “We are making publicly accessible [existing] open space that is not—and is not perceived—as publicly accessible now,” university spokesman John Beckman told The Observer. Still, this ignores the fact that this is already N.Y.U. owned land, and many of the impediments in place that the university cites, such as fences and locked gates and requisite visitor passes, could merely be done away with by the institution. The public space would not be the best, but it still underscores the […]

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The Zoning History of New York’s White Brick Apartments

The rehabilitation of the postwar glazed white brick apartment building continues apace, with the condoization of 530 Park Ave., a 1941 (okay, almost postwar) 19-story white brick building. I happen to like New York’s postwar white brick buildings, and am even warming up to the red brick variants – I’ve always consider anonymous white brick to be the most New York of New York buildings. One reason that I like them is that because of the history of New York City zoning, they have the form of prewar buildings, with the embellishments (or lack thereof) of the postwar era. Up until 1961, New York’s developers were still building under essentially the 1916 code. While the 1916 code definitely restricted and guided growth in the dense commercial core, where it encouraged set backs and discouraged Equitable Building-like dense massings, developers in residential neighborhoods like the Upper East Side generally did not bump up against the zoning limits. The setbacks on 530 Park are slight and decorative, and likely built according to the style of the day (which was heavily influenced by larger buildings downtown whose shapes were dictated by zoning). So buildings erected before the 1961 code took effect tended to be lower than those that came after, but they covered more of the lot and their façades were flush with the sidewalk. Some of them included garages for the newly-motorized middle- and upper-classes, but they were small compared to those that came after. Above all they were governed by the laws of supply and demand. If you ignore the materials and lack of ornament, they were a lot like prewar buildings. But the brick apartment buildings of the ’40s and ’50s were the last in New York City built according to supply and demand, which is why I think we’ll come to hold them […]

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What I learned today about SNCF and California HSR

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ll know that I spent this afternoon on the phone with folks in California, looking into the recent SNCF-CHSRA bombshell. To summarize: SNCF, the highly experienced French national high-speed rail operator, apparently had a plan for California’s HSR network, but was turned off by the highly politicized routing. Namely, they wanted to make a straight shot from LA to San Francisco by running along the flat, government-owned I-5 corridor with spurs out to the eastern Central Valley, whereas the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) and state politicians wanted the main line to go through every little town in the Central Valley, directly. Now, all of this wouldn’t be a scandal, except for the fact that nobody at SNCF ever mentioned it to the public or the media. That’s what the LA Times reported, but David Schonbrunn, a pro-HSR, anti-CHSRA activist, says there’s more to the story – SNCF not only advocated I-5, but they actually had private investors lined up! Here’s his letter to the LAT: Your otherwise excellent story “High-speed rail officials rebuffed proposal from French railway” was far too kind to California High-Speed Rail Authority officials. At the time of its proposal, SNCF had the investment backing to actually build the LA-SF line, in a deal that sheltered the State from the risk of subsidizing an unprofitable project. The Authority’s 2012 Business Plan covered up this offer, instead insisting that no private capital would be willing to invest until the first high-speed line showed a profit. The $6 billion Central Valley project approved last week by the Legislature thus exposes the State to unlimited operating losses. Worse yet, before that line can be completed, it will need an additional $27 billion from the federal government–quite unlikely in today’s political climate. I’d […]

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En bloc condo redevelopment in Japan and Israel

So this weekend we learned that condos are bizarre and pretty much guaranteed to cause problems in the longrun, when maintenance bills skyrocket, the buildings are out of date, and the land beneath them appreciates, but you can’t redevelop the property because all the owners will never agree. You guys posted some great comments, but I wanted to highlight a few. This weekend we learned that Singapore has a method called “en bloc” redevelopment, whereby a condo building can be sold in its entirety to a single developer, with the idea that he’ll soon tear it down, if 90 (now 80) percent of the building agrees. Canada, on the other hand, is just starting to deal with the issue, but so far the only option for redevelopment is going to court – much messier compared to how it’s done in Singapore. And today, Japan and Israel! Turns out they’re dealing with the issue of aging condos pretty much the same way as Singapore. First comes Philip Brasor’s comment about Japan. Philip has a great blog and writes a column for the Japan Times about real estate in the country. In his comment he sums up a JT article he wrote on the topic which covers pretty much everything you wanna know about redeveloping condos in Japan: The problem is that many of the condos built in the 60s and 70s are now quite old, and unlike in the West, where it’s expected that property values will always increase over time, many in Japan are not worth much of anything unless they’re in the center of major cities. Until 2002, there was no specific law dealing with redevelopment of resident-owned condominium buildings, so if residents wanted to tear their building down and put up something new they had to gain 100% […]

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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 […]

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