Monthly Archives: July 2013

Miscellaneous information and visuals about Dulles International Airport

MWAA IAD signage standards

In the process of scouring the internet for sources for my previous post on growing air cargo traffic at Dulles International Airport, I came across a whole host of interesting documents and information that I couldn’t find a way to fit into the narrative. So, here’s a smorgasboard of some tangentially related items I found interesting.

The image above is one example, showing spacing for wayfinding signage at IAD. Some signage uses the ‘Saarinen’ typeface, designed by Eero Saarinen specifically for the airport. The graphic is from IAD’s extensive Airport Design Standards and Signing Guidelines document, a document that not only establishes standards for the aesthetics of the airport, but also reveals the future plans for expansion at IAD.

The challenge of costs: The cost per enplanement at Dulles has risen above the median for peer airports as MWAA engaged on IAD’s capital construction program. DCA’s constraints don’t provide room for growth, but don’t require large capital expenses, either:

MWAA IAD CPE forecast

Growth potential: Dulles has room to grow and handle 3x as many passengers as it does today, and with a significant increase in airfield capacity as well.

MWAA IAD plan gates

MWAA IAD plan airfield

Future layout: While the planning consistently shows four tiers of midfield concourses, the schematic from the Design Guidelines re-names the terminals to follow the sequence of an Aerotrain trip, rather than the current nomenclature:

MWAA future terminal layout

Regional competition among Washington-area airports: Dulles handled the most passengers in 2012, but all three airports are very similar in overall traffic levels. Dulles has the most connecting traffic (42% of passengers connect) and the fewest number of origins/destinations in the DC area. Dulles also has (by far) the international traffic:

MWAA regional traffic connect intl

At the same time, the FAA forecasts for growth show Dulles taking the majority of the incremental air traffic for the region:

MWAA regional traffic FAA forecast

Development opportunities: An illustrative example from MWAA’s strategic planning documents showing the land available for development at the airport:

MWAA IAD dev opps

The northern-most of those orange blobs is a potential transit-oriented development project at the Route 606 Metro Station.

Parking symbols: From the Design Guidelines, examples of sky-related symbols for parking wayfinding:

MWAA parking symbols

MWAA parking symbol example

Growing cargo traffic at Dulles – the challenges of realizing the value of an aerotropolis

Dulles International Airport - from Google Maps

Dulles International Airport – from Google Maps

In DC’s western suburbs, two related battles concerning growth are at the forefront. One is a plan for a new highway, the other is the desire to expand air cargo operations at Dulles International Airport. Both concepts seem to be hitched to one another, but they ought to be considered separately on their own merits.

The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority has expressed a desire to grow cargo traffic at Dulles. At the same time, sprawl interests are pushing the bi-county parkway, pitching the road as a benefit to Dulles. Jonathan O’Connell’s profile of several road advocates in the Washington Post shows how much of the advocacy is another verse of the same song.

Looking to untie the road interests and airport interests David Alpert asks why MWAA is pushing all things Dulles in a Washington Post op-ed, when passengers seem more interested in DCA:

Virginia and airport officials seem to behave as though their mission is to make more stuff happen at Dulles, whether that stuff wants to happen there or not.

A quick glance through an MWAA powerpoint from their strategic planning exercises explains the logic of focusing growth on Dulles. DCA is constrained (physically, legally) with room to grow only on the margins. DCA can never be the full-service International airport that IAD can; and MWAA fears maximizing value at DCA would hurt IAD’s currently fragile position – the FAA’s recently approved slot-swap gave JetBlue a foothold at DCA, with a corresponding reduction in flights at IAD (slide 16).

MWAA revenues 2012

Dulles relies on air traffic for approximately 75% of its revenues. While Dulles has tremendous capacity to grow, realizing that potential requires additional capital investment, such as Dulles’ Aerotrain and other elements of the recent D2 program. Now, Dulles finds itself trapped with a higher cost per enplanement than other airports due to the capital program, and a revenue stream overly reliant on aviation revenues.

Increased air cargo has the potential to help on both counts. More freight means more flights, boosting aviation revenues without requiring new airport facility investments. More freight also means increased demand for revenue-generating uses of airport land that currently lie fallow.

The catch is this: it’s not easy creating a freight business out of nothing. Dulles does not have the central location like Memphis or Louisville, the central US hubs for FedEx and UPS, respectively. The area does not have a huge manufacturing base, either – air cargo shipments originating or terminating in IAD would need to focus on consumer goods. Likewise, the airport does not currently have a major cargo presence that would lure the manufacturing that does exist in the area to cluster around the airport. Chickens and eggs are both missing.

There are opportunities, however. Dulles does have huge tracts of land, the ability for 24 hour operations, and lots of airfield capacity. Both FedEx and UPS operate regional hubs in the US to avoid the need to route all cargo through their core hubs in Memphis and Louisville. On the east coast, FedEx operates out of Newark while UPS operates their east coast hub in Philadelphia. Linda Loyd profiled the UPS operation in the Philadelphia Inquirer: 

Starting at 7 a.m. each day, UPS planes arrive in Philadelphia from Cologne, which is UPS’s European hub, and from England and Paris. International flights from Louisville, Ky., stop in Philadelphia heading to Europe, and planes leave Europe, stopping in Philadelphia, bound for Louisville, which is UPS’s air headquarters. Each afternoon, flights arrive here loaded with packages from Dallas and Southern California.

UPS is the world’s largest transportation company, and the Philadelphia facility – second in size only to Louisville – handles 70,000 parcels and documents per hour. That number reaches 95,000 at peak times like Christmas, with parcels headed to and from 18 states, as far west as California.

…

Just before midnight, as passenger terminals and commercial flights are winding down, operations are heating up at UPS. Package sorting largely happens at night. More than 1,000 UPS workers report at 11 p.m. for the “night sort,” which continues until about 3 a.m., or until all packages are unloaded and sorted and put back into trucks, trailers, and planes to leave again.

Cargo moves around the world in multiple stops, not one long journey.

At each stop, planes and trucks are emptied, and packages are sorted and scanned, and reloaded on other flights. The network tracks packages on each leg of the trip, in order to maximize the weight and loads, through constant sorting and resorting. While a lot of the work is automated, it requires an army of people, along with bar-code scanners and a city of conveyor belts that crisscross like freeways.

Philadelphia’s UPS facility might be ripe for poaching: As Loyd’s article notes, the 212 acre site lies in the way of a proposed runway expansion at PHL. The airport’s proffered alternative location is smaller, closer to residential neighbors, and without room for expansion. Unsurprisingly, UPS does not favor the expansion (nor does PHL’s anchor tenant, US Air – fearing the increased fees that currently hurt an airport like Dulles).

In the case that UPS is looking for alternative airports, MWAA Board Minutes show the courtship in progress. Dulles can offer an east-coast location with room to grow and unconstrained flight operations, and hooking an anchor cargo integrator like UPS would be attractive to other air cargo operators, as well as businesses with lots of air cargo shipments.

While increased cargo is one option to grow non-aviation revenues through land development, it is not the only option. Increasing non-aviation revenues is important to provide a counter-cyclical revenue source for airport operations. It also represents a change in MWAA’s practices – while most airports have been increasing their share of non-aeronautical revenues, MWAA has been going in the opposite direction (page 28).

The options under immediate consideration, however, sound awfully uninspiring (if functional): more parking, another gas station, and an additional hotel (page 29). On the western side of the airport, near the proposed highway expansion, MWAA envisions industrial development that can benefit from direct access to the airport’s ramp.

MWAA supports road expansion near the airport because MWAA is not in a position to argue against improvements to airport access. However, that doesn’t mean the shape of development on and around the airport can’t move in a more sustainable direction. There are a great deal of opportunities to green the airport, but perhaps the most promising would be re-thinking the shape of airport development with the arrival of Metro into something akin to other ‘airport city’ concepts around the world – capitalizing on the real estate value Metro will bring, the on-airport location, and the virtuous cycle of improving IAD’s airport experience – certainly more ambitious than a second convenience store.

MWAA forecasts slide

Part of the challenge is in counting on growth – the accuracy record of forecast traffic doesn’t exactly build confidence, but the future for more urban development, walkable places, and transit-oriented development in the region is promising. The challenge will be in taking the city approach to the airport; thinking beyond just infrastructure, cargo, and agglomeration economies. Airport terminals are already, by necessity, pedestrian-oriented environments between drop-off and the gate. Extending that mindset beyond the terminal is the next step.

The costs of moving Madison Square Garden from atop Penn Station

CC image from wallyg.

CC image from wallyg.

The New York City Council recently voted to approve Madison Square Garden’s operating permit for a period of just ten years, with the goal of expediting the arena’s replacement and thereby easing the potential renovation of the city’s main inter-city rail station. Given that operating permits are frequently handed out indefinitely, and given the emerging consensus of the city’s elites that the station needs to be replaced, it’s not surprising to see this characterized by some as an eviction notice.

MSG, unsurprisingly, is pushing back. They argue the arena cannot “be forced to move” through the permit process, as they own the arena and the air rights it occupies outright. The government can certainly force MSG (with proper compensation) to move through eminent domain, though the cost of buying MSG out could be prohibitive, and Mayor Bloomberg has ruled out using eminent domain to do so.

Regardless of the method, moving MSG will require a great deal of money. Taking the property would be plenty expensive; luring MSG to move with a new arena would be similarly pricey. Unlike the previous plans for a new MSG as a part of a Penn Station redevelopment plan, the arena’s operators are finishing a large renovation, essentially a complete re-building of the interior of the venue. With the renovation complete, the promise of a modern arena is less lucrative – particularly when a re-located arena would likely require a less-valuable location.

Proponents of the short extension of the operating permit assert that ten years is enough for MSG to amortize the investment of their renovation. When considering the value of the property alone, that claim is dubious:

Further, under these projections, if MSG were forced to move in 15 years, it would have earned back only $375 million. To recoup its entire renovation cost would take 40 years—which is about equal to the useful lifespan of the rehabbed arena. The building had undergone only minor updates since it opened in 1968.

This analysis, however, is the most conservative way of looking at MSG and isn’t at all the way the business community has seen the Garden since Madison Square Garden Co. was spun off from Cablevision three years ago.

To the Wall Street crowd, MSG is not merely an arena, but a fast-growing media company whose crown jewel is the MSG Networks, which broadcast games for the teams that call the Garden home, plus the New York Islanders, New Jersey Devils and Buffalo Sabres. Operating margins in MSG’s cable business are 68%, based on data from research firm SNL Kagan. The robust revenue stream explains why the company has been able to renovate its signature arena without taking on debt.

For the purposes of valuing a piece of real estate to be taken for public use, considering the value of the entire media business would not make sense. Either way, even if the costs of the renovation are fully amortized, MSG would still be owed just compensation for its property.

 

The high costs of relocating MSG against their will make the outcome unlikely. Even with MSG as a willing partner in a relocation, completing a deal would be complicated and expensive. Realistically, the likely outcome will involve station improvents that fall short of demolishing the arena. These can address some of the staiton’s design flaws, rather than mere aesthetic concerns.

Parking is in the news: the trend of cities rolling back zoning requirements for off-street parking

CC image from Peter Rosbjerg

CC image from Peter Rosbjerg

It’s hard to miss the discussion these days about parking, from sources as varied as Grist and the Wall Street Journal. Some links and brief discussion:

Each article highlights the challenges parking presents in an urban environment, and the additional challenges of inflexible rules requiring it. Matt Yglesias makes the case for the straight-up removal of all parking requirements as the simplest option, rather than the selective reductions in certain districts or reductions in the numerical requirement itself. He writes (quoting extensively):

First on a concrete level, this is a form of compromise that really fails in its goal of de-mobilizing opposition. If you are a street parker and your priority in parking policy is to defend your access to cheap street parking, then any reduction in parking mandates should spark opposition. Watering the reform down doesn’t lead to any genuine reconciliation of interests. What you need to do is recognize that street parkers have a real reason for wanting to keep mandates in place and find a way to buy them off. I think what I propose at the end of the column would do that. But once you’ve managed to configure reform as a win-win, then you should go whole hog.

The second is that gradualism, by focusing reform on the places that are most indisputably well-served by transit and pedestrianism, actually denudes parking reform of its main promise—transforming neighborhoods. If you imagine a neighborhood that doesn’t have great bus frequency or amazing neighborhood-serving retail and add some housing with less than one parking space per adult, then you’re going to get the additional customers that would be the basis for more frequent buses or new stores. Why would anyone in a neighborhood like that want a unit with no parking space? Why would a couple want a unit with just one space? Probably most people wouldn’t. But some non-zero quantity of people would do it for the main reason people everywhere put up with sub-optimal housing situations—to save money. But those initial people with fewer cars than adults become the customers for the services—whether that’s carshare or the bus or a walking distance store—that make the neighborhood more attractive down the road.

The way things work right now is that parking minimums risk destroying existing walkable neighborhoods through the reverse dynamic where subsidized car ownership leads to excessive car ownership leads to further auto-oriented development. Selective liberalization of parking rules can break that vicious cycle, which is nice, but only citywide liberalization drives the virtuous process forward.

The partial reductions in requirements are certainly due to political opposition to the idea. Even in places like Portland that had no requirements in some areas of the city have since re-instated limited requirements, ostensibly due to political pressure. However, while removing the offending language is unlikely to win any supporters, keeping it in might rile up even more opposition due to the inherent asymmetry to the procedures of changing regulations such as zoning codes.

On the merits of policy, removing the requirements would be a simple solution. Given that there is no ‘right’ answer to the number of spaces that should be required given the diversity of market segments a developer might build for, and given that in many cases, the ‘right’ number of spaces for a site and market segment could be zero, selecting any one number as the requirement (and getting it ‘right’) is an impossible task – unless that number is zero.

 

Cities as complex systems – with scientific research to show it

False-color satellite image of China's Pearl River Delta. Top image is from 1973, bottom image from 2003. CC images from NASA.

False-color satellite image of China’s Pearl River Delta. Top image is from 1973, bottom image from 2003. CC images from NASA.

Building off of previous research working towards a universal theory of cities, Luis Bettencourt is back in the news with a new paper (working paper version here) that argues cities are a new kind of network not easily captured by analogies to natural systems. Rather, cities are “part social reactor, part network.”

Based on this theory, Bettencourt identifies the basic patterns of how cities grow. From that observation, Bettencourt builds his theory, allowing for the determination if cities are under or over-performing.

From the Santa Fe Institute’s article on the paper, this theory of cities is described as follows:

o what is a city? Bettencourt thinks the only metaphor that comes close to capturing a city’s function is from stellar physics: “A city is first and foremost a social reactor,” Bettencourt explains. “It works like a star, attracting people and accelerating social interaction and social outputs in a way that is analogous to how stars compress matter and burn brighter and faster the bigger they are.”

This, too, is an analogy though, because the math of cities is very different from that of stars, he says.

Cities are also massive social networks, made not so much of people but more precisely of their contacts and interactions. These social interactions happen, in turn, inside other networks – social, spatial, and infrastructural – which together allow people, things, and information to meet across urban space.

Ultimately, cities achieve something very special as they grow. They balance the creation of larger and denser social webs that encourage people to learn, specialize, and depend on each other in new and deeper ways, with an increase in the extent and quality of infrastructure. Remarkably they do this in such a way that the level of effort each person must make to interact within these growing networks does not need to grow.

The argument that cities can be partially explained with natural analogies sounds similar to the use of the constructal law to explain cities, but Bettencourt is arguing that there is a similar, but different relationship here.

Emily Badger summarizes and explains Bettencourt’s research at Atlantic Cities:

But Bettencourt is basically describing interconnected relationships between the population growth of a city; the incremental expansion of the infrastructure networks that more people require; the socioeconomic outputs that come from our social interaction; and the density that necessarily develops over time so that we can still benefit from ever-more social connections without spending ever-more energy to reach each other.

As cities grow, Bettencourt says, the city comes to you. This is a high-minded way of talking about infill development. If cities continued to grow but only grew outward, you would never get any benefits out of knowing or working with new people, since you’d have to sit in traffic for two hours to reach them. Density, however, allows us to reap the benefits of more social connections without adding too many costs in congestion and energy (like gas). All of this enables the amazing growth and benefits of cities to be open-ended.

Per Square Mile offers a summary as well:

Bettencourt believes there are four sparks that cause cities to form—the mixing of populations, the incremental growth of networks, the bounds of human effort, and the relationship between socioeconomic output and personal interaction. According to these assumptions, cities are founded and grow primarily so that people can interact frequently and on a personal level. As demand for face time swells, cities expand, incrementally adding to the existing network. Eventually, those networks reach a limit, bounded by the amount of effort we are willing to expend to expand and maintain them. The greater the benefit of living in a city, the more effort we’re willing to expend to sustain it. Bettencourt’s final assumption may be his most astute—that cities aren’t just agglomerations of people, but also concentrations of social interactions.

The formulas Bettencourt derived could prove powerful. His most muscular equation, that which models city growth, identifies cities that punch above and below their weights. Others show how substandard transportation can hold a city back, or how transportation networks tend to grow incrementally (perhaps that’s why automobile sprawl seems so intractable). But his formulas also highlight some perils, like how energy loss in transportation increases superlinearly—the more you move, the more energy it takes to move something. In sum, they appear to build a solid theoretical framework by which further questions can be asked and hopefully answered.

Questions immediately come to mind about matching our policies to this theory; what the trade-offs between growth and the benefit of living in cities look like in the real world beyond the theoretical framework. Conversely, how might such a theory influence policy? Could an understanding like this help with proposed policy frameworks such as the zoning budget? What about the qualitative elements of a place and the influence they have on these dense, social networks?

Development and the path of least resistance

A quick link that builds on a couple of themes I’ve written about here – development following the path of least resistance, and the need for cities and urban areas to grow in the face of demand for additional development in those places.

Winchester, MA - aerial image from Google Maps

Winchester, MA – aerial image from Google Maps

Zoning makes Massachusetts housing expensive – from the Boston Globe editorial board

Outside of Boston, developers often run into the challenges of regulatory requirements on new development, while city officials come to terms with the fact that the regulatory path of least resistance does not lead to the city’s desired outcomes.

Tidy downtown Winchester, just 20 minutes by train from North Station, should be a prime target for new development. According to one recent study, Greater Boston may need 19,000 new housing units every year just to keep pace with demand. And Winchester would welcome new residents: Town Manager Richard Howard says downtown restaurants and stores are eager to see new residential development on the city-owned lots, and that a planned upgrade to the commuter rail station next year could bring new vitality to downtown. The style of transit-oriented housing would also fall in line with the state’s environmental goals, which call for concentrating residential and commercial development near rail stations.

The obstacle, though, is the state’s dysfunctional ’70s-era zoning code, which sets the parameters for how individual cities and towns plan for development — and, in practice, sets up complex permitting rules and creates numerous opportunities for litigation. The process of securing approval to build new housing in downtown Winchester is so onerous, Howard says, that developers simply won’t bother. And in suburban towns where anti-development sentiment is stronger, the path is even steeper.

The end result? Most development follows the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance leads to sub-optimal outcomes:

What it amounts to is the worst of all worlds. Sensible, smart-growth housing plans often languish, while single-family homes proliferate on large lots in sprawling suburban subdivisions — one of the few types of housing that can be easily built in Massachusetts under current law. State officials rightly fear that the housing market dynamics squeeze middle-class families so much that they’re endangering the state’s economic health. It also ensures that much of the growth that does occur is unplanned, expensive, and environmentally harmful.

Matching the functional outcomes of a host of complex regulatory processes to a planning vision is difficult, but necessary. It’s also not enough to look at incentives for particular planning goals. Instead, one must look at the entire development process. One must understand the tensions within real estate investment, between city-building and financial performance, how those tensions impact the decision-making of developers, and how the regulatory process creates a choice architecture for those developers.

Parking: often ugly, expensive

CC image from Joe Shlabotnik

CC image from Joe Shlabotnik

A few items on parking, and zoning requirements to provide it.

A case study of absurd and pernicious parking rules – from Grist (as part of a series)

Alan Durning documents many of the absurdities of zoning code requirements for off-street parking, focusing his own experience in Seattle. Durning does not own a car and wanted to renovate his existing attached garage into extra space in his house, but such alterations would not comply with the zoning code. Worse, the curb cut for his one-car garage meant one less on-street space.

A parking minimum of two (or more) is even worse public policy. Like a one-space minimum, a two-car minimum sometimes yields no net spaces: Many builders planning two-car garages install double-wide driveways, which block two on-street spaces. Worse, as I’ll argue in subsequent articles, off-street mandates tend to glut the market for parking spaces and trigger a chain of cause and effect that ensures massive subsidies to driving. Whatever the number, furthermore, required off-street spaces dramatically push up the minimum cost of building a house. Curb cuts, driveways, and parking spaces cost thousands of dollars. The requirements also result in more pavement getting poured, armoring our watersheds and increasing the quantity of polluted runoff reaching our streams.

In demonstrating the opportunity costs of parking, Durning compiles a laundry list of potential uses for his garage, other than automobile storage.

Ugly by law – from the Sightline Institute (also part of a series)

In the second installment of the series, Alyse Nelson documents the visual impacts of parking and parking requirements. The series also includes several examples of buildings erected prior to on-site parking requirements and those built after, demonstrating the impact of such demanding requirements.

Before parking minimums, buildings in Cascadia could be built to the property line because parking wasn’t a constraint. Now, developers must contend with building heights, setbacks for buildings, and parking regulations—all of which make it harder to develop affordable housing projects. This is especially true at medium densities and lower building heights because it’s harder to make parking garages or underground parking pencil for these smaller projects.

The economic argument is important. The space required to meet the requirements is both expensive to build and requires space to be used for parking, rather than the demanded use. Both of these factors serve to drive up the cost of urban development, but also make infill development difficult and more expensive. Meeting parking requirements in a greenfield site is not the greatest challenge, but meeting suburban-style requirements on an infill development site surrounded by existing buildings on all sides is difficult.

The parking garage, in practice – from Old Urbanist (also part of a series)

Charlie Gardner highlights several examples of garage parking used in practice around the world, providing a set of case studies for how developers deal with the spatial challenges of providing parking.

Outside of Toronto, a residential development features a fairly dense cluster of townhouses built atop of a common-use underground parking garage. Another typology is the ‘Texas Doughnut,’ featuring multi-family development wrapped around a shared-use above-ground parking garage:

This is of course the notorious “Texas Doughnut,” a mid-rise residential liner wrapped around interior structured parking.  The product of on-site parking requirements and building codes which permit cheaper wood framing for lower-rise buildings, these structures have proliferated throughout the Sunbelt, though they can be found, with less frequency, outside that geographic range. To the extent these cities are experiencing urbanization near their centers (hello, Dallas), this is the form that urbanism frequently takes, for better or worse.

Despite the prominence of the parking facilities and the transportation mode choices that suggests, note that many residents are required to walk non-trivial distances to reach their vehicles. In some cases, the walk may actually exceed three minutes for some residents.

In debates about parking in urban areas, pricing and availability tend to garner the majority of the attention, with proximity only a secondary concern (although many complaints about these first two issues implicitly involve proximity). Similarly, attempts to reduce reliance on the car through parking reform have tended to focus on eliminating or reducing parking maximums or establishing a market pricing mechanism for parking spaces, rather than considering the location of the vehicle itself.

It should be common sense, though, that in an otherwise reasonably walkable area with some transit options, the further the car is from one’s residence, the less use that car is likely to receive, since transportation is above all a matter of immediate convenience.
Charlie’s third installment discusses the challenges of building a municipal parking garage to boost a retail district, when all of the focus is on a handful of on-street spaces:
Washington Street itself offers only 22 spaces, in comparison to the over 1,000 public garage spaces in close proximity, plus many hundreds more in public and private surface lots. Although these spaces only supply a tiny fraction of the total, by their conspicuousness they play an outsized role, inducing many motorists to circle the block several times in hopes of winning the parking lottery, rather than simply proceeding to one of the garages.
The desire of merchants to compete with suburban shopping malls (easy, plentiful, cheap), contrasted with the spatial constraints of streetscapes planned well before the rise of the automobile results in “a parking policy at war with itself,”