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Elevated rail vs. road, and…monorails?

I started reading Fogelson’s Downtown with the intention of learning more about elevated trains, and though I’ve been slightly disappointed in that regard (more to come on that after I finish and attempt a more comprehensive review), he does include a lot of interesting history. I’m posting this more so that I remember it, but the first paragraph offers an interesting rejoinder to those who say that els could never be viable because of the blight factor, and the Second Avenue elevated line makes a cameo towards the end: In view of the longstanding and deep-seated opposition to elevated railways, the construction of elevated highways is more than a little puzzling. This opposition has grown so vociferous that by the 1920s most Americans had come to believe that elevated railways should never have been built in the first place. Despite assurances by several leading engineers that it was possible to build els that were quiet, clean, and attractive (and would not reduce property values), they remained convinced that under no circumstances should any more be constructed. The cities should not only stop building elevated railways, many Americans insisted; they should start demolishing them. This idea, which had surfaced in the first two decades of the century, caught on in the 1920s, especially in New York and Boston. In favor of it were abutting businessmen and property owners, who believed that the removal of the els would improve trade and raise values. Allied with them were public officials (among them Julius Miller, borough president of Manhattan and chief advocate of the West Side Elevated Highway), who thought the demolition of the els would foster economic development; traffic experts (including New York City Police Commissioner Enright, another advocate of elevated highways), who assumed that the removal of the elevated structures would facilitate […]

Parking lots as tax arbitrage during the Great Depression

I’ve learned a lot from Fogelson’s Downtown, but one thing that I had absolutely no idea about before I read this book was how Depression-era tax policies encouraged downtown landlords to tear down their buildings and replace them with parking lots (emphasis mine): By the mid 1930s the owners of Detroit’s Temple Theater, a nine-story office building that had once been the home of the city’s most successful vaudeville house, had had enough. In a city reeling from the Great Depression, the vacancy rate for office buildigns was running between 35 and 40 percent. With tenants hard to find – and rents, which had been falling steadily, hard to collect – the Temple Theater no long paid. In an attempt to lower property taxes and operating expenses, its owners did what other downtown property owners in Detroit and other cities had done. They demolished the building and turned the site into a parking lot. [These] were commonly referred to as “taxpayers.” The “taxpayers” were as much a legacy of the depression as the “Hoovervilles,” bread lines, soup kitches, and dance marathons. They symbolized downtown in the 1930s as much as skyscrapers, department stores, and high-rise hotels had in the 1920s. […] Things were much the same in downtown Los Angeles, where so many buildings were torn down and replaced by parking lots or “taxpayers” in the 1930s that by the early 1940s roughly 25 percent of the buildable land was used to store autos. In a business district of less than one square mile there were no more than nine hundred parking lots and garages, with space for more than sixty-five thousand cars. […] By tearing down the buildings, the owners could lower their tax bills and reduce their operating expenses. By replacing them with parking lots or one- and […]

Calling your opponents “socialists” and “un-American” is as American as skyscrapers

It’s pretty amusing to me that liberals today are still whining about being called “socialists,” considering the charge is at least a century old. Here one example from Robert Fogelson’s excellent Downtown chapter on height restrictions around the turn of the century: The Post voiced especially strong objections to the argument that a height limit was necessary to prevent new buildings from undermining the profitability of old ones and to deter the business district from moving from one location to another. That was “Municipal Socialism,” it declared. The city had no more business regulating development than running a department store. Municipal authority was already encroaching on private enterprise in too many ways. “And if it be permitted to limit the economic development of the city it might as well buy the city outright and conduct it as a Socialist Elysium.” And here’s another example later in the chapter about comprehensive zoning, with an extra “un-American” mixed in there: In some cities, the efforts to impose height limits through zoning ran into strong resistance. Sometimes the resistance was fueled by the opposition to zoning, which, it was charged, was “unfair, undemocratic, and un-American.” It was unfair because it discriminated among property owners. As Horace Groskin, director of the Philadelphia Real Estate Board, declared: “By what right has a zoning commission to set itself up as the judge and distributer of property values? To take the value away from one property owner and give it to another, or not to give it to anyone but to destroy it entirely for the imaginary benefit of the community, strikes me as coming mighty close to Socialism.” And while I’m in the mood to fill posts with others’ work, here’s another good (unrelated) quote from market anarchist Kevin Carson, as a Christmas Eve bonus: As […]

The problem with “public” transportation

  The blog 2nd Ave. Sagas has written something that I think sums up pretty well transit advocates’ poor knowledge of private mass transit history: Of course, public transit is vital to the city’s well being. Because Manhattan is an island, it can’t handle the traffic. It’s a commercial hub in a geographically isolated area that needs the subway — and requires people to travel for a while — to thrive. That our city’s forefathers had the foresight to build a vast public transit system is a minor miracle, and it’s sort of silly that we have such a love-hate relationship with the subway and the public transit system. Without it, New York City as we know it simply wouldn’t exist. The biggest problem here is the conflation of “public transit” with “mass transit.” When New York’s rail lines were first built, they were private enterprises, not public ones. And Benjamin Kabak doesn’t explicitly say it, but when people talk about a city’s “forefathers,” they’re almost always talking about lawmakers. And in the late 19th and early 20th century, when New York’s massive transit networks were being built, lawmakers did pretty much everything they could to stifle the budding transit market – the idea that any of them had any “forethought” is absurd. But secondly, Benjamin Kabak’s reverence for New York City’s subway system ignores the far more important contributions to the city made by streetcar and elevated train lines. As I’m learning in Robert Fogelson’s Downtown, NYC’s publicly-built subways paled in comparison to the privately-constructed elevated trains and streetcar networks that crisscrossed the five boroughs. Even today, NYC buses, which mainly run along the old streetcar routes, have twice the ridership of the Subway. And although the Subway was heavily subsidized by the government, the truth is that it […]

Parking politics in the 1920s and a bleg

While doing research for something totally unrelated, I came across this paper by Asha Weinstein (.pdf) on parking policy in Boston in the 1920s. One of the things she (?) discusses is the political feasibility of charging for the right to park downtown: Despite this general consensus, however, there was no shared view on what might constitute effective downtown parking policies. On the one hand, most people supported modest policy changes such as modifying existing regulations, improving motorist compliance with those regulations, or building more off-street parking, but even the strongest advocates of such policies never claimed they would significantly impact congestion. At the other end of the spectrum, a few people called for the drastic options of banning all street parking during business hours, or charging a fee to park on the streets. These proposals were touted as highly effective congestion relief, but they garnered little serious support and generated storms of opposition, and were never treated as serious proposals by the larger community. […] So you might think to yourself, “Banning parking entirely seems kind of draconian, but pricing parking at least sounds rational.” But you’re not a Bostonian living in 1926: Even less popular than a parking ban was the idea of a parking fee. In January 1926, this new approach to parking was proposed by a sub-committee of Boston’s Ways and Means Committee and Mayor Nichols. The proposal called for keeping the existing parking regulations, but charging drivers an annual fee of $5 to $10 for the right to park on city streets. The opposition from business and automobile advocacy groups was decisive and adversarial. All the city’s newspapers ran scathing articles. For example, the high-society Transcript immediately published an editorial warning that the proposed fee would be counterproductive as a revenue-generator because it would likely […]

Stadtluft Macht Frei (city air makes one free)

Thomas Schmidt wrote a great article for LewRockwell.com that covers a lot of urbanist ground, with some help from a broad selection of Jane Jacobs’ work.  Here’s a snippet: Though you might blame any number of obvious villains and historical processes for this, the name Ebenezer Howard would probably not come to mind. Howard created the Garden City idea of moving population out of concentrated urban areas like London and into a country setting, (inspired by the socialist polemic Looking Backward) and proved a major influence on urban planning; Radburn, NJ, where perhaps the cul-de-sac was invented, is an example of a place constructed to his ideal. He is one of the villains of Jane Jacobs’ magisterial classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, although she takes pains early on in the book to avoid overt criticism of his motives. Check it out the whole article, I think you’ll like what you read.

Tolling NY’s East River Bridges Back on The Table?

[flickr: darren bryden] Congestion pricing schemes, touted as environmentally-responsible at the time of $4 gas, were defeated in New York City last Spring. However, as the market turmoil threatens to wreak havoc on tax revenues, fiscal necessity has lured New York State and New York City politicians to re-examine the political viability of charging tolls to drivers entering Manhattan. The NY Times City Room blog discusses the history of tolling on New York City’s East River bridges, but much of that history features plans to reinstate tolling and the popular resistance to those plans. How East River Bridges Stayed Toll-Free: On numerous occasions, politicians have tried to reinstitute tolls on the four bridges — the Brooklyn (completed in 1883), Williamsburg (completed in 1903) and Manhattan and Queensboro (both completed in 1909). After all, the Brooklyn Bridge charged horse-drawn carriages a toll from the time it opened. But by the Depression, the tolls were a thing of the past. The history shows that officials have failed again and again to revive tolls on the four bridges. (Other major crossings, including the bridges run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, already charge tolls.) Tolling being “the third rail of of New York City politics”, it will be hard enough to institute in the face of voter sympathy for road socialism. So, we shouldn’t hold our breath for the ideal solution, full privatization of the bridges and transit, but tolling may be a step in the market direction. Or is it?? Is tolling just away for politicians to let themselves off the hook for their irresponsibility, and will just result in another new tax? Or can we hope it will soften the resistance to market-based solutions. [thanks to loyal Market Urbanism reader, Benjamin Hemric […]

Block on Road Socialism

For quite some time, Economist Walter Block has been one of the more radical thinkers when it comes to advocating free market solutions. Many of his writings on roads and rent control are featured in the Links to Articles, Academic Papers and Books page. Today’s Lew Rockwell Podcast features an interview with Professor Block discussing Road Socialism. The interview begins with a discussion of the fact that certain socialist institutions exist in our supposedly free-market society, and Block mentioned that when he debated Milton Friedman, he accused Friedman of being a “Road Socialist”. Friedman eventually admitted, “Yes, I am a road socialist.” The discussion turns to deaths on highways, competition, congestion pricing, some history of private turnpikes and transit, eminent domain, and homesteading. Many of Block’s thoughts and ideas are highly controversial, but make for fantastic conversation. I can’t say I always agree with his point of view or ideas, but I like the unique perspective he brings that is always thought provoking and sparks interesting debate. I encourage readers to listen to the podcast and discuss their thoughts on the podcast. Also, check out his recent lecture at FEE on Privatizing Roads and Oceans, and articles on rent control and highways.

Abandoned Cities

Here’s a link to a very interesting article at weburbanist.com with photos of 20 abandoned cities and towns around the world – 20 Abandoned Cities from Around the World: Deserted Towns and Other Derelict Places

link: Medieval Cities

I have little expertise in Medieval Cities and have little input, but thought it was interesting: Marginal Revolution – Medieval cities: Europe vs. the Arabic world also, Econlog – Producer and Consumer Cities Cities in the Arab world were on average much larger than those in Europe, and the size of the “primate” city – the megapolis such as Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo or Istanbul – was much bigger; a fact that is indicative of a predatory state and low trade openness. Europe, on the other hand, developed a very dense urban system, with relatively small principle cities. Big cities in Europe were quite often located near the sea, being able to optimally profit from long-distance trade, whereas the largest cities in the Arab world were almost all inland. The sociologist Max Weber introduced a distinction between ‘consumer cities’ and ‘producer cities’. Using this classification, Arab cities were – much more than their European counterparts – consumer cities. The classical consumer city is a centre of government and military protection or occupation, which supplies services – administration, protection – in return for taxes, land rent and non-market transactions. Such cities are intimately linked to the state in which they are embedded. The flowering of the state and the expansion of its territory and population tend to produce urban growth, in particular that of the capital city. In Europe cities are instead much closer to being producer cities. The primary basis of the producer city is the production and exchange of goods and commercial services with the city’s hinterland and other cities. The links that such cities have with the state are typically much weaker since the cities have their own economic bases. It is this aspect that accounts for the fact that Arab cities suffered heavily with the breakdown of the […]

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