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Just give Access-a-Ride users cash!

The New York City MTA is starting a paratransit pilot program whereby it seeks to control skyrocketing Access-a-Ride costs by basically handing out unlimited vouchers for cabs for handicapped residents traveling below 96th Street in Manhattan, who would only have to pay $2.25 for each ride. I’m no fan of enormous and amorphous unfunded mandates like the ADA in the first place, and it does seem very unfair to force cities to offer huge public transit subsidies to the elderly and disabled, while not forcing towns without transit to do a damn thing to increase mobility for those who can’t drive. (I should note that the pilot program only applies to the 75% of Access-a-Ride users who aren’t in wheelchairs.) But if we’re going to have these mandates, it seems to me that a better way to achieve mobility for those who cannot climb steps or walk long distances is to simply hand out cash grants. This pilot program brings us closer to that ideal, but there are two main problems with it: the scope of alternatives offered, and the unlimited manner in which they’re offered. Let’s start with the unlimitedness. This was clearly already a problem with Access-a-Ride, as its costs have been exploding ever since it was implemented, but it will be an even bigger problem when using the subsidies becomes even easier. My understanding of Access-a-Ride is that it’s unreliable and difficult to use – while not an ideal rationing device, at least this gave people an incentive to limit their use of it. But when claiming the subsidy is as easy as hailing a cab, I can foresee some definite abuses and overuses. The current program is incredibly expensive ($49 for each door-to-door ride!) compared to estimates for taxicabs ($15/ride), so it probably won’t become more […]

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 […]

Midweek link list

1. Mumbai is rethinking its density bonuses for developers who build parking lots and hand them over free of charge to the city. 2. Tort liability driving away possible MARC operators. 3. San Mateo County legislators threaten to charge San Franciscans a congestion charge similar to the one that the city is proposing to charge San Mateo (and East and North Bay) commuters. Bring it on, I say – it’s about time drivers were charged for using local roads. 4. The Supreme Court refuses to hear West Harlem business owners’ appeal against the city’s decision to use eminent domain to hand Manhattanville over to Columbia University. 5. The NYT has a story about a commercial kitchen-for-rent in Queens, calling it a “lifeline” for for “100 small businesses.” It’s a nonprofit, but even renting a space there for 6.5 hours in the middle of the night costs $154. I’m still waiting for the Times story about the many more people who cook illegally out of their own homes and whose businesses are therefore stunted and precarious, all because they can’t afford to comply with the city’s onerous health and zoning codes. 6. The US may have 1 billion parking spaces. This does not in and of itself prove that we have too much, but for those of us who already believe that zoning codes mandate more parking than the market would provide (for which there is good empirical evidence), it’s a horrifying thought. 7. Yonah Freemark discusses how Hong Kong’s transit agency uses property development to internalize positive transit externalities and maintain (relative) independence from the municipality. 8. The WSJ reports on the strong market for downtown office space, especially compared to declining suburban office parks.

Free parking outside the $1,000/mo garage

This $1,000+/mo. parking space (without the 18+% parking tax! but one Curbed commenters calls bullshit) on the Upper East Side has been bouncing around the NYC blogosphere, and Curbed commenter low baller just about sums up my thoughts on the matter: And people howl because street parking is going up to $1 / hour (but of course free after 7pm and mostly free all the time off the avenues)? So let me get this straight – Upper East Side apartment: $4,000 a month, parking $1,000 a month, parking spot outside said apartment free, or at most $1 an hour. And oh, how they howl!

NYC & DC links

New York City 1. A while ago I wrote about how Manhattanville’s blight, and therefore Columbia’s ability to use eminent domain, was the fault of bad zoning. The nearby neighborhood of West Harlem looks like it’s learned that lesson, and is seeking to protect itself against encroachment from Columbia by upzoning itself. Unfortunately it’s not a pure upzoning – there’re also affordable housing mandates, regulations against “sliver buildings,” and some unspecified protections for existing structures. The massive 100-block rezoning is the first in half a century. 2. A handful of buildings in Downtown Brooklyn may get historic district’d. 3. A massive parking garage in Jamaica, Queens is receiving huge tax breaks, ostensibly for reducing congestion. Why am I not surprised to see that it’s owned by an organization with “development corporation” in its name? 4. Janette Sadik-Khan wants to expand the “pop-up cafe” program that essentially lets businesses use parking spaces as seating areas. I personally think that anyone who’s willing to pay more than the current metered parking rates should be allowed to do whatever they want with the space. Washington, DC 1. Security expert Bruce Schneier suggests closing the Washington Monument “as a monument to our fears,” and Matt Yglesias wants terrorists to blow it up – something I’ve suggested before. Maybe if that boring obelisk were gone, people would give up on DC’s height restriction and consider turning the Mall into a place that’s actually pleasant to be. 2. Unsuck DC Metro on why the Metro’s escalators suck – it’s the unions!

A question and a link list

Hey guys, before I start this link list, I wanted to ask: Has anybody had trouble posting comments here with Disqus lately? Either you can’t post them, or once you do they disappear? I’ve gotten two complaints in the last few days, so if you’ve been experiencing any problems please don’t hesitate to let me know so I can try to get to the bottom of it. If you can’t post a comment, email me at smithsj[at]gmail[dot]com. 1. DC gets upzoned. Why the Washington City Paper chose to bury that behind items about “neighborhood branding” and “supporting the enactment of pending federal legislation to ensure that insurance reserves are held and invested in the U.S.” is beyond me. 2. DC has, unfortunately, also started to cap the number of cabs in the city. American politicians just can’t get enough of screwing over Somalis, I guess. 3. Jamaica, Queens gets downzoned. The Post tells us joyfully that the city is implementing the “innovative and critically important” FRESH initiative to deal with the area’s lack of supermarkets – which will be sorely needed now that the city is guaranteeing that there will be no new demand for food. 4. “Vertical parking lot” in Chicago, circa 1930. 5. Communism in America: Roosevelt Island. 6. Matt Yglesias and Megan McArdle discuss bars and clustering, but Ryan Advent has the best post in my opinion. 7. Chicago’s Metra boosts home values (duh). 8. India fails at urbanism. 9. One Tea Partier thinks that only property owners (read: homeowners) should be allowed to vote. “If you’re not a property owner, you know, I’m sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners.”

LI Dems to councilman: oppose density so we can get reelected

Earlier today I was reading this article about “cupcake moms” at the local PTA mobilizing online against TOD in Huntington Station, a hamlet in Long Island, and while it looked like your average suburban NIMBY story, this part of the Long Island Press story jumped out at me: [Supervisor] Petrone had reportedly wanted this revitalization project for the former urban renewal area as his legacy to the town, but he won’t get it now. Instead he was reportedly blindsided by Cuthbertson’s switch last Thursday. Sources told the Press that Cuthbertson withdrew his support because Huntington Democratic Party insiders wanted to take the housing issue off the table so Republicans couldn’t use it against the Democratic incumbents in the elections next year. Councilwoman Susan Berland, who had straddled the fence for months, finally came out against the AvalonBay proposal this summer. She wanted less density. I guess we can count this as a point in favor of Matt Yglesias’ suggestion to isolate local elections from party politics by making the races non-partisan. Another part of the story that I found interesting was all the people hearkening back to their childhoods and their parents’ motivations for moving out of NYC to Long Island and using these as excuses not to let developers build on this site. This is pretty ironic, considering that the development was to be built on a plot of land that was once occupied by housing that was razed in the 1950s in an urban renewal scheme. I’m a few months late to all this, but it was apparently an important battle in the broader war over land use in Long Island – so much so that there was a post mortem held by a Long Island smart growth group that Newsday covered here and here. The articles are, […]

Development as preservation

I don’t think it’s a secret that we here at Market Urbanism are skeptical of mandatory historical preservation of private property, but until recently I hadn’t realized how utterly counterproductive some of these efforts really are. I’m talking specifically about cases where historical preservation statutes forbid additions from being added to the tops of buildings – structures that increase a building’s value and floor space without detracting much from the history, facade, or even interior of the building. New York City, with its rapacious developers and entrenched preservationists, seems to be a hotbed of addition-induced turmoil. The enormous pent-up demand occasionally surges through the legal barriers, with unapproved additions and penthouses popping up throughout the city, and developers sometimes being forced to tear them down. A relatively innocuous penthouse on top of a hotel in TriBeCa that’s partly owned by Robert De Niro narrowly avoided this fate a few days ago, but a one-story addition atop a townhouse in Chelsea wasn’t so lucky – apparently slaves used the rooftop to flee when it was a part of the Underground Railroad, so the addition is being taken down and the roof is being restored in all its slave-fleeing glory. A few months ago a building in Dumbo lost six stories that were almost five years old because the owners never got a zoning variance to add residential space to the commercially-zoned property. Developers like Ramy Issac and Ben Shaoul have become infamous as “tenement toppers,” and while their tactics are sometimes unsavory and illegal, the fact that anyone is willing to take such a risk is indicative of the extraordinary unmet demand for density in the city. And with the city’s real estate market already heating back up, this demand is only going to become stronger. Even if the preservationists win […]

Almost-Thanksgiving list

Unfortunately, none of these things are really things to be thankful for: 1. 81% of Americans disagree with Kelo v. City of New London in a 2009 survey, with the wording being quite generous to the pro-takings side. 2. Who possibly could have thought this was a good idea? It’s like they took every bad publicly-subsidized megaproject idea they could think of and rolled them into one. 3. NYU’s plan to build a forth tower in the middle of I. M. Pei’s three towers in Greenwich Village (discussed here by commenter Benjamin Hemric) has officially died, the death kneel coming from Pei himself. NYU’s plan B is to build the tower on a plot that they already own and can develop as-of-right. They’ll be tearing down a supermarket to build it, but who still eats food these days anyway? 4. “…there isn’t a single grocery chain store within [Detroit’s] city limits.” 5. Apparently the kiosk tear-downs in Moscow were a result of nothing more than Mayor Sobyanin’s verbal order, and the kiosks are being allowed to reopen until the city can formally close them. The unaccountable government-by-fiat of the USSR dies hard.

NYC to raise on-street parking rates, local news freaks out

New York City has some of the most underpriced parking in the nation, and while there have been a few pilot programs (in the UES, the West Village, and Park Slope) to raise rates during peak hours, it looks like Bloomberg is finally pushing to implement Park Smart citywide.  Residential metered hourly rates throughout the city will be bumped up to $1 (they were 50¢ just six months ago) and commercial rates will rise to $3 (they were $2 six months ago). Beyond this, peak on-street parking in the busiest commercial zones will cost even more. The Post loads its article with driver outrage (headline: “Feed it and weep!  Meter$ jacked up”; opening line: “Park your wallet right here, drivers.”), but at least towards the end they suggest a benefit of the program: “More than half of the business owners and drivers in the area said parking became easier once the more expensive pilot program went into effect.” The CBS affiliate starts off interviewing a guy who lives on the Upper West Side who thinks that Bloomberg “should pay for [parking] himself.  Dip into his pocket […] and put it to the city.”  The interviewer then asks, “And pay for your parking?” and he answers, completely unashamed, “Right!”  The next guy complains about how tough it is to survive in the city, while he commuters by car from Rockville Centre in Nassau County (median household income: $99,299). He’s joined in this opinion by a fellow Long Island resident from Melville (median household income: $92,527). After a city representative notes that it’s a steal compared to off-street garages and an UES physician agrees, the presenter finishes by announcing plans to charge “sky high rates” on busy commercial streets during peak hours – so they’ll be higher than the $3.75/hour that they are now. […]

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