Monthly Archives: April 2013

Capacity on the Northeast Corridor

Tucked into the testimony of Amtrak President Joesph Boardman at last week’s Senate hearing on the future of the Northeast Corridor is this graphic demonstrating the number of daily train movements by operator at different locations along the spine of the Northeast Corridor:

One interesting thing to note is the difference in the volume of Amtrak trains (light blue) north of New York, compared to south of New York. This also makes it easy to see the relative volume of Amtrak intercity trains and commuter trains, as well as a few freight movements per day north of Washington Union Station. Capacity improvements are needed to allow for a combination of increased intercity and commuter services (or even better), and other bottlenecks are likely in need of greater capacity for freight expansion on adjacent corridors.

In other Amtrak news, Systemic Failure takes note of the US rail regulatory apparatus continuing to shoot itself in the foot on even allowing efficient high speed rail and learning from everyone else around the world that has already done this hard work. The FRA rejected Amtrak’s reasoning below, with emphasis added by Drunk Engineer:

The assumption that the standards simplify the design process of the equipment and would save $2,000,000 per train set is false. The Acela example indicates the exact opposite to be true. The FRA rules, as existing and proposed, eliminate the possibility of purchasing off-the-shelf equipment. The engineering work required to design new compliant equipment alone would far outstrip any possible savings from the rules if there were any to be had.

For background on the previous history of the Acela’s regulatory weight problems, see posts here, here, here, as well as a GAO report here.

Metro’s ‘station of the future’ – why mess with what works?

This week, WMATA unveiled a concept for their “station of the future.” The press release and accompanying video flythough of the pilot station (Bethesda) for these improvements lists the reasons for these changes, including “improved lighting, better information and improved customer convenience.” And who would be against those things? All three have been criticisms of Metro in the past, particularly station lighting.

However, what they’ve shown in the ‘station of the future’ looks a lot more like a wholesale redesign of some of Metro’s iconic station architecture. Dan Malouff at BeyondDC lists the six concepts to be tested:

  • New wall-mounted lights along the length of the platform, and new information pylons with larger signs and more real-time displays.
  • Reflective metal panels along the vending wall will be brighter, eliminate shadows, and reduce clutter.
  • Smaller manager kiosk will make room for more fare gates, which will be reflective metal instead of “Metro brown”.
  • Anti-slip flooring at the base of the escalators.
  • Overhead lighting in the mezzanine.
  • Glass walls replace concrete, allowing more light through.

All together, that’s a mix of sensible station improvements, but also some serious assaults on the system’s architecture and design.

Some of these shouldn’t be controversial at all, such as the non-slip flooring at the base of escalators instead of Metro’s notoriously slippery tiles. Likewise, ticket vending and customer information displays mounted into the mezzanine walls seems like a welcome change. Smaller station manager kiosks in order to provide more faregates makes sense; however, the current renovations on the Orange/Blue lines in DC are putting in larger kiosks, not smaller.

Other changes aren’t new concepts, but rather long-standing challenges Metro has looked to address. The overhead lighting in the mezzanine appears from the flythrough to be the same light fixtures Metro tested at Judiciary Square. The quality of the lighting tends to be cool and harsh (a common trend for WMATA recently), but it’s certainly brighter for mezzanine users (and not nearly as abrasive as WMATA’s Friendship Heights experiment using Metro’s outdoor pylons indoors).

Glass parapet walls have been used in other stations, as well – most recently in the baseball renovations at Navy Yard. That staircase, however, is a rather surgical change to the station, cutting a hole in the mezzanine floor where there was none before. This concept proposes replacing an existing concrete parapet with glass.

The ‘station of the future’ proposes three really big changes to Metro’s design: eliminating ‘Metro brown’ in favor of stainless steel; a completely new winged pylon design; and indirect lighting provided by new wall-mounted fixtures that can double as station signage.

It’s not clear to me what’s wrong with Metro Brown. Given the multitude of other options available to improve lighting, blaming the limited amount of brown metal panels in the stations seems like a stretch. Given the cost to Metro’s architectural legacy, it’s hard to see how this is worth it.

Metro’s desire to distance itself from the color brown isn’t new. The three newest stations in the system (and not part of the originally planned system) make use of glass and stainless steel, but still use Metro brown for signage and entrance pylons. Metro’s newest railcars will ditch the brown stripe at window level in favor of a gaudy disco-ball logo.

The voiceover in WMATA’s video expresses concern about brown representing a dated look, but I’m not sure anyone really objects to the color and the role it plays in Metro’s overall visual brand. The brown pylons and signage have aged well compared to Metro’s original car interiors or the idea of carpeting. Why change what works?

It’s hard to tell the extent of the use of stainless from Metro’s flythough of what looks to be a Sketchup model, but the voiceover makes it seem possible that the new pylons could be stainless; the Sketchup signage in the flythrough is the same color as the pylon, making it hard to tell which elements are steel and which would be Metro brown.

The stated benefits of the pylon re-design seem dubious. The winged directional signage seems unnecessary to me, and putting wings on each and every pylon clutters the space created by Metro’s vaults. Adding more PID displays is a positive, but I’m not sure that many displays are necessary. Two or three along the length of any platform would probably suffice.

System wayfiding is important, but there are lots of other ways to accomplish that goal without adding wings telling you which side of the platform is for outbound trains to every pylon. Likewise, one of the benefits to Metro’s spacious vaulted stations are the clear lines of sight in most stations – alighting passengers can usually see their exit mezzanine within direct view, providing intuitive wayfinding within stations.

I’d bu curious to know if the goals of improved lighting from the indirect fixtures mounted into the walls could be just as easily met with better maintenance of the existing trackbed lighting, cleaning station vaults more regularly, and looking into the use of newer technologies like LEDs in existing lighting locations for both higher lighting levels and lower maintenance requirements.

Disasters: the more things change, the more they stay the same

CC image from davecito

Two pieces on the challenges in re-building following a disaster. The first, from Lydia DePillis at the New Republic, on the challenges Brad Pitt has encountered in his rebuilding efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans:

But for a while now, Make It Right [ed- Brad Pitt’s charity foundation] has been having trouble enticing people to buy their made-to-order homes. The neighborhood has turned into a retirement-community version of its former self; the ward’s other former residents are dead or settled elsewhere. Construction on the cutting-edge designs has run into more than its share of complications, like mold plaguing walls built with untested material, and averaged upwards of $400,000 per house. Although costs have come down to around half that number, Make It Right is struggling to finance the rest of the 150 homes it promised, using revenue from other projects in Newark and Kansas City to supplement its dwindling pot of Hollywood cash. Now, in a wrenching deviation from its original mission, the non-profit has decided to open up to buyers who didn’t live in the neighborhood before Katrina.

But there’s a Catch-22: The neighborhood doesn’t have enough residents to attract many stores and services, and prospective buyers end up elsewhere because the neighborhood doesn’t have enough stores and services. So about 90 households, primarily elderly people like Guy, are living in futuristic homes that most Americans would covet, and yet there’s not a supermarket—or even a fast food restaurant—for miles.

The core challenge is meshing the reality of what conditions are required to successfully re-build a neighborhood following a disaster with the desires of the community, who (understandably) would like things to be simply a better version of what was there before:

If the Lower Ninth has any chance at becoming a livable community, new people are going to have to move in. But the young people who flooded the city after the waters receded are still finding plenty of room in the hipper neighborhoods, like the Marigny and the Bywater, that retained more of their historic housing stock. And the city seems determined to maintain the Lower Ninth’s structural disadvantage in this regard: Although a 2009 analysis of residential market potential showed that only about 20 percent of the existing demand was for single-family detached homes, that’s how the neighborhood has seen itself, and how it wants to remain. Even when a developer proposed the kind of dense, multifamily project that would attract the kind of amenities everybody says they want, residents howled in protest.1

“It’s always been a single-family neighborhood, and that was the community’s desires were after Katrina, and I think it will go back as a single-family neighborhood,” says Jeff Hebert, director of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority.

The second piece is from Bob Ellickson on street grids (hat tip to David Schleicher), including a substantial discussion of the permanence they have over time – particularly noting how street grids rarely change much following substantial disasters (examples include post-war Hiroshima; post-fire Chicago; and post-Katrina New Orleans) that open the door for re-imagining and re-building the city.

The abstract:

People congregate in cities to improve their prospects for social and economic interactions. As Jane Jacobs recognized, the layout of streets in a city’s central business district can significantly affect individuals’ ability to obtain the agglomeration benefits that they seek. The costs and benefits of alternative street designs are capitalized into the value of abutting lots. A planner of a street layout, as a rule of thumb, should seek to maximize the market value of the private lots within the layout. By this criterion, the street grid characteristic of the downtowns of most U.S. cities is largely successful. Although a grid layout has aesthetic shortcomings, it helps those who frequent a downtown to orient themselves and move about. A grid also is conducive to the creation of rectangular lots, which are ideal for siting structures and minimizing disputes between abutting landowners. Major changes in street layouts, such as those accomplished by Baron Haussmann in Paris and Robert Moses in New York City, are unusual and typically occur in bursts. Surprisingly, the aftermath of a disaster that has destroyed much of a city is not a propitious occasion for the revamping of street locations.

In the second half of the paper, Ellickson discusses the path dependence of a street layout once it is established, finding that 88% of street centerlines from the 19th century in select cities remain the same today. Even in places like Chicago that saw near complete destruction of the city retained 99% of street centerlines from the 1850s. Ellickson suggests that legal reasons and property rights contribute to this path dependence, but the political costs of change and the sense of place from residents are also important considerations.

The link between Ellickson and DePillis emerges in Ellickson’s discussion of these reasons for the path dependence of street grids, stemming from a desire to maintain the status quo:

A second downbeat theory would attribute some of the stickiness of street locations to psychological dispositions that may be ephemeral. Most city residents, for example, have a “sense of place.” Most of them also have a bias that favors maintenance of the status quo. They appraise the prospect of a loss from a given reference point to be more momentous than the prospect of an equivalent gain. When contemplating a proposed rejiggering of local streets, city officials, landowners and residents thus are all likely to exaggerate the costs of losing a street right-of-way, and to undervalue the benefits of gaining a new one.

Another urbanist reason for everyone to read Thinking Fast and Slow!

Ellickson’s other discussion of street grids is well worth reading, but the implications of the path dependence of street grids (and the difficulty of changing the intensity of land uses) raise some interesting issues for places like Tysons Corner and the proposed street grid.  Adding more streets to a superblock layout is certainly a different challenge than removing/re-aligning streets in an existing network, but the central point about the path dependence of streets raises serious issues for the promise of retrofitting suburbia.

Perspective on pop-ups

Recently, everyone in DC has been hopping on the bandwagon to bash an extensive redevelopment of a 2-story rowhouse into a 5-story condominium. Headlines make liberal use of middle finger references, with photo angles to match the description.

In the comments of one PoPville post on the house, a representative from DC’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs confirms that yes, indeed, this egregious “middle finger to taste and scale” is allowed by right. From @DCRA’s comment:

We have reviewed the approved building plans for this project and found the following:

1. The property is not within a historic district or designated as a historic landmark; it is zoned as C-2-B and is within the ARTS Overlay zoning district.

2. The approved height of the building shown on the plans is 59 feet, five inches, which is within the 65-foot height limit applicable a C-2-B zone.

3. The three-foot projection at the front of the building was properly approved by both DDOT and DCRA, and it meets District Building Code requirements.

4. The structural supports of the project, including its foundation, were reviewed and verified as meeting District Building Code requirements.

5. Because the property is within the ARTS Overlay zoning district, it is granted additional density. The project’s Floor Area Ratio (FAR) was approved at 3.94, which is below the maximum FAR of 4.0.

While we understand some residents’ concerns with the project’s aesthetics, in a non-historic district, the District’s Building Codes and zoning regulations focus only on safety and density.

This sounds like a perfectly conforming structure, but one wouldn’t get that impression from the photos of it on PoPville. Dan Malouff at GGW and BeyondDC offered a defense of the project, complete with photos from a different angle, putting the building’s neighbors into context. In particular, there’s a six-story apartment building under construction three doors down.

I visited the site to add my own photo from yet another angle:

A different angle on the 11th and V development. Photo by author.

When you look at both of the new developments from the southwest corner of 11th and V, things look a bit different. Considering how extensive this zoning combination (C-2-B/ARTS) is in the area, this shouldn’t be a surprise:

DC zoning map of 11th and V and surrounding area.

As you walk down V and look back to the west, you get even more perspective of nearby buildings on both sides of the street of similar height and similar zoning allowances. What a difference a change in angle makes:

Looking west down V st, showing buildings of similar height along both sides of the street. Photo by author. 

Dan makes the case that this small-scale, lot-by-lot redevelopment is a good thing. He cites the example of Amsterdam’s narrow houses built one by one. While I think the comparison might be a stretch, the point about flexible zoning allowing this kind of by-right redevelopment is a good one.

I would also note that by virtue of the C-class zoning, this stretch of V street is able to host a variety of building types and uses. Restaurants like Tacos el Chilangro wouldn’t be allowed to operate without it.