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Tag Stephen Smith

The Great American Streetcar Myth

by Stephen Smith Among liberals in the planning profession today, the story of the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy is widely known. There are more nuanced variants, but it goes something like this: Streetcars were once plentiful and efficient, but then along came a bunch of car and oil companies like General Motors and Standard Oil, and they bought up all the streetcar companies, tore out their tracks and replaced the routes with buses, and ultimately set America on its present path to motorized suburban hell. Although the story dates back to a 1950 court conviction and was retold by academics and government employees throughout the ’60s and ’70s, the theory leapt into the public consciousness in 1988 with both a 60 Minutes piece and a fictionalized account in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Even today it resonates with liberals – The Atlantic casually mentions it as the reason America abandoned mass transit, The Nation wrote a whole article about it a few years ago, Fast Food Nation discusses it, and in the last week I’ve seen two references to the theory in the planning blogosphere. Though the story has embedded itself in the liberal worldview, it has little basis in reality. A cursory look at transportation history shows that motorization was already well underway by the time National City Lines – the holding company backed by GM, Firestone Tire, and Standard Oil, among others – started buying up transit companies in 1938. Other factors, often championed by progressives, had already driven the industry into decline and it was really only a matter of time before buses took over. Although General Motors and other car-centric companies were certainly lobbying the government in their favor, the progressive tendency to vilify private transit companies had already turned the public against streetcars, and […]

Building what you can

by Stephen Smith BLDG blog has a cool post about a book by two architects about “minor development,” or small construction projects that don’t require planning permission – things like sheds, garages, and extensions. It talks about recent legal changes in Europe that have encouraged this sort of development, and has some neat pictures of the sort of small changes that can add a room or just extra space to existing houses. The article doesn’t mention it, but this immediately brings to mind laneway housing – basically converting garages into inhabitable buildings and sometimes building in existing parking spaces. Vancouver legalized laneway housing last year, and though you still need a $899 permit, you don’t have to file for a variance and the process seems streamlined (although curiously, the article says the units can “only [be] used as rental units”…does that mean you’re not allowed to tear down your garage and build extra space for yourself?). These are small sorts of infill allowances that aren’t going to radically alter a city like parking, zoning, or road reform could. But although we’d prefer complete property rights with the ability to build on (or not build on, or sell) as much of your land as you’d like, this is at least a step in the right direction.

A comment on rolling stock protectionism

by Stephen Smith In response to an article I posted yesterday about protectionism in public transit procurement, frequent commenter Alon Levy left this great comment about the history of rolling stock procurement in the US: What happened in the 1970s was that the rolling stock market shrank, leaving American transit agencies with just a few US vendors. St. Louis and Pullman were fully protected by Buy American. As such, New York City Transit had no choice but to buy trains from them; the trains turned out to be defective, leading to breach of contract lawsuits that bankrupted both companies. Since then, NYCT has bought from foreign companies, following Buy America to the letter but not to the spirit. The first order after the St. Louis and Pullman disasters was imported from Kobe, as Reagan cut all federal funding, and went without a hitch. Subsequent orders required the vendors to establish US plants, but often only the final assembly is done in the US. In the most recent order, the car shells were made in Brazil. Buy America does the opposite of leveling the playing field for foreign firms. It favors big players, which can land big contracts and establish US plants. The same is true for the regulatory structure: the various globally unique [Federal Railroad Administration] rules benefit companies that are big enough to be able to modify trains for the American market. Just recently, Caltrain’s request for an FRA waiver involved consultation with just the largest companies in the industry. There are a lot of smaller manufacturers that are shut out of the US market; they don’t have the capital to establish new overseas factories or pay lobbyists to write rules in their favor. Those include Switzerland’s Stadler, Spain’s CAF, the Czech Republic’s Skoda, all Chinese firms, and all […]

Internalizing positive transit externalities

by Stephen Smith The Wall Street Journal ran an article a few days ago claiming that the MTA’s recent NYC transit cuts have lowered real estate prices along train and bus lines that have been axed. While it’s not a quantitative study, the anecdotes are compelling: “The buyer who buys in Astoria is looking for a cheaper price and to get into Manhattan quickly,” said Ms. Palmos, adding that she is having the same problem with a condominium building in Upper Ditmars, north of Astoria. Apartments there that she said would have easily sold for $500,000 with the express bus nearby are now languishing on the market at prices about $420,000. ” ‘How far is it to the train?’ That’s the first thing people ask me,” said Charles Sciberras of Realty Executives Today, a longtime Astoria broker. “The closer to the train the higher the demand… Two to three blocks away from transportation is very easy for me to rent.” […] “The best areas in Brooklyn have great transportation into the city—the most expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn is Brooklyn Heights—you can get just about anywhere in the city easily. You go out into where there is less transportation, the prices go down,” Mr. Giordano said. “It’s one of the many emotional decisions that people make that can add or detract value from real estate.” What’s most striking to me is that a simple express bus route can raise prices by $80,000 for a single apartment. Multiply this by the thousands of apartments along the bus route and it appears that the lost value from the cut bus route ought to exceed, by orders of magnitude, the cost of maintaining the route. But of course, since the MTA doesn’t see a penny of the value it creates, it isn’t surprising that […]

Food deserts and zoning

by Stephen Smith The other day I put up a post detailing the restrictions that small-scale restaurants and food carts face, but I should mention that grocery stores and supermarkets also face similar restrictions.  Like restrictions on restaurants, they end hitting poor, urban, black neighborhoods the hardest, creating the phenomenon known as “food deserts.”  Aside from traditional Euclidean zoning that forbids building commercial structures like corner grocers in residential neighborhoods, developers also face a raft of minimum parking regulations and mandatory reviews.  NYC’s FRESH initiative has been trying to overturn some of these restrictions (although it also offers developers a bunch of subsidies and tax breaks), but the restrictions they describe are still applicable in much of the city and in cities around the US: Other regulations can drive up the cost of developing grocery stores. The Zoning Resolution currently applies a higher parking requirement for food stores over other types of neighborhood retail and service uses. The current regulations also restrict grocery stores to 10,000 square feet in M1 Districts. These regulations have cost implications and reflect outdated assumptions about the impacts of new food stores.  New grocery stores may be required to purchase more land to accommodate parking than would be justified by the demand, in commercial districts where prevailing market rents are high and larger tracts of land are scarce. In M1 Districts where development costs are lower than commercial districts and larger tracts of land are more available, full-line grocery stores are subject to a time-consuming and costly public review process at a very low size threshold. These M1 Districts encompass light manufacturing areas in Mixed Use Districts where residential uses are permitted and light manufacturing areas directly adjacent to underserved residential districts. Supermarkets are difficult to build even in more suburban areas – zoning approval […]

Deregulating food

by Stephen Smith Urban planners like to discuss heavy things – roads, buildings, cars, trains. Food, though an integral part of humans’ lives, generally doesn’t enter into the equation as more than a footnote. This may be because food service is governed by different departments than buildings, streets, and vehicles, or perhaps because the regulation of food has acquired a quasi-scientific veneer that planners are afraid to impinge on. But that might be a mistake, considering how strongly food fits into the urban fabric of cities and how unlivable a place can be if it lacks the kind of food that people can afford and pick up on a whim. Though cheap and filling and an integral part of cities, towns, and villages around the world, street food in the United States has traditionally been thought of as dirty and backward. Twin Cities food magazine Heavy Table traces Minneapolis’ lack of street food to turn-of-the-century local regulations which regulated vendors out of existence with onerous fees and requirements, and outright bans in many high-traffic areas. The magazine ties the demise of street food in the Midwest to “the advent of automotive culture,” and notes the “uncomfortable whiff of pervasive institutional racism” that dogged the mostly-immigrant peddlers of bratwurst and tamales. Street food’s reputation has been on the mend, though. Urban foodies have embraced it, Anthony Bourdain has championed it on his Travel Channel show, and Top Chef contestants have been challenged to cook it. Cities across America are throwing street food festivals – an urban take on the quintessentially-American county fair. In the late ’90s, formidable public opposition forced Rudy Giuliani, who was supported by established restauranteurs and local business groups, to reconsider plans to ban food vendors from hundreds of blocks of Manhattan streets. Even urban planners are getting […]

Exporting (sub)urbanism: Kuala Lumpur and the communist world

by Stephen Smith Adam Martin at William Easterly’s development blog Aid Watch has a post up warning about the tendency among developing nations to adopt Western styles wholesale, even if such styles are not even efficient in their countries of origin. He posits this as a sort of developmental Whiggishness, and cites education policy and intellectual property law as possible examples of the trend. We here at Market Urbanism, by virtue of language and location, tend to focus on urbanism in North America and Europe, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss the state of urbanism in developing countries. The starkest example of misplaced developmental Whiggishness in planning I can think of is the city of Kuala Lumpur. The city was practically brand new when it was made capital of the Federal Malay States in 1895, and as a British protectorate, the Crown sent New Zealand planner Charles Reade to the Malaysian capital in 1921 to head its planning department. Schooled in the methods of the nascent Garden City movement in the UK, Reade made a name for himself by spreading the sprawling, proto-suburban style throughout Australia and New Zealand before his posting in British Malaya. Under Reade’s aegis, Kuala Lumpur became a test case for the movement’s applicability outside of the industrialized West. Unlike in the West, where dense, built-up urban cores relegated Garden City developments to small new towns and the outskirts of large cities, Kuala Lumpur offered an opportunity to build a metropolis from scratch as a Garden City. Charles Reade eagerly set to work building sprawling, low-density housing estates alongside wide roads which anticipated widespread private vehicle ownership. Residential, commercial, and industrial areas were segregated and separated by grassy, undeveloped parkbelts, characteristic of the Garden City style. Following independence, a nationalist Malaysian […]

Toronto’s new zoning code

by Stephen Smith Matt Yglesias points to an article about Toronto’s new zoning code. The story is short on details, although the lowering of parking minimums near transit and overall simplification of the code seem like appealing features to Market Urbanists. I did, however, find a blog post from last year about the proposed changes, which has a lot more details. Keep in mind that this is from last year and so it might not still be relevant, but if anyone’s interested in digging a little deeper into the new code, there’s a good place to start. This part, though, is not very encouraging: The new zoning also takes a more coherent approach to minimum parking provisions, requiring a lot less parking for condos/apartments or office buildings that are in the downtown core or on heavy transit lines. Many new projects don’t need the amount of parking required by zoning, and developers would be glad not to pay the extra cost to provide it. But the overall reduction in minimum parking requirements is disappointingly limited — the planner in charge of the project, Joe D’Abramo, estimated it at about 10% less compared to previous requirements. There also seems to be a lot of New Urbanist-style regulation – for example, making it more difficult to build drive-thrus and driveways – that we don’t necessarily support. When you look at the revisions as a whole I doubt that there’s more urban-forcing than urban-allowing, but I do wish that they’d work harder on repealing things like parking minimums and density restrictions before trying mandate density. Even if the mandatory New Urbanist regulations are minor, they give ammo to people like Randal O’Toole and the Cato/Reason bunch to claim that urbanism is being forced down people’s throats rather than simply being allowed. New Urbanist […]

Parking round-up

by Stephen Smith At the risk of beating the parking theme deader than the Ground Zero Mosque, here are some recent parking-related stories published around the world: The NYC DOT’s Park Smart program has been called a success in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, and officials are considering making the program permanent and expanding it to more streets. Donald Shoup is quoted as saying that rates may still be too low, and the DOT has suggested raising the rate even further. The Park Smart program also expanded to Manhattan’s Upper East Side in June, with rates ranging from $2.50 to $3.75/hour. As Streetsblog points out, though, this is still a steal compared to the $22/hour that one private garage charges, indicating that street parking is still massively underpriced. Towns and cities across the UK (“at least 150 councils”) are raising the price of on-street parking and yearly parking passes in order to plug budget deficits. The Telegraph article makes no mention of any Shoupian benefits, and small businesses and “motoring organisations” are, predictably, opposing the moves. The Independent claims that many cities, including Bristol, York, and Leeds, are planning “to charge for parking at workplaces.” Pittsburgh is considering a 50-year concession agreement for its on-street and garage parking assets, which would almost certainly involve raising rates, although “the city would retain the right to revise fees.” City-owned garages currently charge 25% less than private garages. As in the UK, this deal is mostly out of fiscal necessity. Here is an article comparing the proposal to Chicago’s parking concession, which we discussed in 2008. Philadelphia apparently has about 400 illegal parking lots according to local news reports. The city’s Licenses & Inspections office, charged with regulating lots, apparently doesn’t have a single inspector looking for them. This wouldn’t normally bother […]

Why does the Infrastructurist hate libertarians so much?

by Stephen Smith Among urban planners, libertarianism gets a pretty bad rap. Melissa Lafsky at the Infrastructurist goes so far as to call libertarianism “an enemy of infrastructure,” and dismisses entirely the idea that private industry can build infrastructure with a single hyperlink – to a poorly-written article on New Zealand’s economy written over a decade ago that barely says a word about transportation, land use, or infrastructure. She goes on to criticize the Reason Foundation’s transportation writers (something we too have done), and with it, negates entirely libertarianism’s contributions to urbanism. Here at Market Urbanism we’re used to these sorts of attacks from the left, and we work tirelessly to disassociate ourselves (well, mostly) from Reason’s brand of (sub)urbanist libertarianism. Normally I wouldn’t expend so much effort, but the Infrastructurist is a blog that I read daily and we’ve linked to them approvingly over the years, so I figured it merited a rebuttal. To start, I would recommend that Melissa bone up on her history. At least in North America, every great intracity mass transit system was build by private enterprise, almost without exception. From subways to streetcars, private enterprise showed a willingness and eagerness to build and profit from rail-based transit. Sure, the systems weren’t totally private and unregulated (exclusive franchise monopolies were often granted by municipal governments, among other interventions), but the system was far more “private” than the current mostly-suburban road/automobile transportation system that Reason and many other self-identified libertarians champion. While many progressives today like to blame the demise of rail-based transit on GM, Firestone Tire, and Standard Oil (what I like to call the Who Framed Roger Rabbit theory of urbanist history), the truth is that progressives themselves were the ones who really did mass transit in. Through populist measures like the mandatory five-cent fare […]

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