Category Archives: Links

Weekend Reading – Hauling Freight

Amtrak-UP

Amtrak and Union Pacific trains pass each other. Photo by SP8254.

While American passenger rail often leaves much to be desired, our freight rail network is second to none.  This privately owned and operated network often finds itself at odds with desires for increased passenger service and high speed operations.

Hauling the Freight: Freight rail companies have been reluctant to embrace the recent enthusiasm for high speed rail.  In a recent article from the Economist, railroads expressed all sorts of concerns, from technical considerations for offering mixed-speed service along shared passenger and freight lines to a complete re-regulation of the industry, which was de-regulated in 1980.  One such pending requirement will be use of Positive Train Control (PTC) on all routes where freight and passenger trains share the same tracks.

Freight railroads fear a return to the bad old days.  From the Economist article:

Federal and state grants will flow to the freight railroads to help them upgrade their lines for more and faster passenger trains. But already rows are breaking out over the strict guidelines the [Federal Railroad Administration] will lay down about operations on the upgraded lines, such as guarantees of on-time performance with draconian penalties if they are breached and the payment of indemnities for accidents involving passenger trains. The railroads are also concerned that the federal government will be the final arbiter of how new capacity created with the federal funds will be allocated between passenger and freight traffic. And they are annoyed that there was little consultation before these rules were published.

There have been some heated meetings between freight-railroad managers and FRA officials. Henry Posner III, chairman of Iowa Interstate Railroad, ruefully notes that freight railroads, in the form of passengers and regulation, “are getting back things that caused trouble”.

Prior to de-regulation, American railroads had obligations to offer money-losing passenger services, dealt with heavy taxation, and paid for their own infrastructure in the face of heavy subsidized interstate highways undercutting their core markets.   Mark Reutter documented these challenges back in an excellent 1994 Wilson Quarterly article entitled “The Lost Promise of the American Railroad.”  One core issue is defining the best balance between public and private interests.  America’s railroads are private enterprises, and back in the day where they dominated all travel and enjoyed de facto monopolies on various markets, they were regulated accordingly.  As transportation infrastructure financing shifted towards public funding (such as the interstate highway system), the regulatory structure did not evolve to meet the new realities.

The current debate is essentially one of re-defining the proper roles for each of the partners in this mother of all public-private partnerships.  Yonah Freemark at the Transport Politic suggests that the Economist’s take isn’t as dire as the railroads might make it seem:

If the public is committed to the funding of improved tracks along privately owned freight corridors, it has the right to demand that those companies allow passenger trains to run along them. From that perspective, the freight companies have little room to complain.

But the federal government does have a long-term interest in promoting investments that offer improvements in both freight and passenger offerings. Freight lines that run through the center of cities should be moved to new routes that detour, allowing passenger services to take over these access corridors much more essential for people than for cargo. Lines running both passenger and freight trains should be expanded to three or more tracks to allow multiple running speeds in both directions. Projects could theoretically be sponsored by public-private partnership, using both government and freight company funds directed to investments that benefit both.

These changing roles are not without tension.  The California High Speed Rail project has run into problems in their negotiations with the Union Pacific Railroad.  Likewise, DC has been involved – CSX’s rebuilding of the Virginia Avenue Tunnel to a double track, double stack standard is a direct example, and the impacts on passenger rail in the region are unclear.  CSX is poised to see a huge jump in traffic with the opening of new, larger locks at the Panama Canal.  MARC has big plans for future expansion and Amtrak has an eye on electrification to Richmond – how these projects will all fit together is unclear, indicative of the larger dialogue and coordination that needs to happen regarding freight and passenger rail.

Coordination needs to encompass technical questions (standards for train control? shared track? dedicated track? electrification?) as well as financial ones (who will pay for these infrastructure upgrades? what kind of control will come with public dollars?).

Get on the Bus: Aaron Renn writes about bus service improvements over at The Urbanophile, building off of this New York Magazine piece on New York’s new select bus service.  The article outlines many relatively cheap and easy to implement programs that can vastly improve the bus experience – fare pre-payment, limited stops, exclusive lanes, multi-door boarding, etc.  Renn writes:

[C]learly there is enormous opportunity in the US to start transforming the transportation infrastructure of our cities with high quality bus service in a way that is faster, cheaper, and much more pervasive than we’d ever be able to achieve with rail.

In the piece, Jarrett Walker highlights Jay Walder’s quote on taking bus lanes seriously.  He also notes, however, that such seriousness is not without compromises.  Others, such as Cap’n Transit have noted that while these bus improvements are tremendous, we should be careful to not oversell them, as many often do with terms such as a ‘surface subway.’

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington

Weekend Reading – “Taking my talents to South Beach”

"we are all witnesses" - partie traumatic

"we are all witnesses" - partie traumatic

I’m back from a summer blogging vacation.  It’s still damn hot in DC.

“I’m going to take my talents to South Beach.” The inescapable news in the sports world last week was LeBron James’ decision on where to play professional basketball.  James spurned his current (and hometown) team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, in favor of joining forces with multiple, talented free agent players in Miami.   The hoopla, as well as James’ decision to leave his hometown for greener pastures raises several interesting points about sports, place, labor mobility, and the economic benefits from professional sports and athletes.

Talent migration: Richard Florida takes note of how LeBron and his compatriots took control of their situation in picking a new location to showcase their talents, framing the decision as an entrepreneurial coup in the controlled world of professional sports.  The decision, he argues, isn’t all that different than the ones that many talented and skilled workers go through – minus the media circus.

Most people attempt to optimize their interests within the constraints imposed by their existing environment – what the great economist Joseph Schumpeter dubbed the typical “adaptive response.” But at critical junctures, certain kinds of entrepreneurs step outside the bounds of what is given and undertake to shape and actively construct an new environment of their own – what Schumpeter called the “creative response.”

Miami offered the best place where these three savvy, talented, and surpassingly entrepreneurial young men could create their own kind of space – a more open-ended space, where they could realize their ambitions and dreams.

Teams tied to place: Florida’s argument, however, doesn’t do much to dispute the common criticisms of LeBron’s decision (including one from the Cavaliers owner) – one that was selfish and about ego more than anything else.   While professional athletes may be individuals free to chose between teams, the teams themselves are rooted in place.  Teams profit from their connection and emotional bonds with local fans.  It’s no surprise that fans see this as a direct insult to their sense of place – in Richard Florida’s context, they are the ones attempting to optimize their interests within given constraints.

The narrative that ties teams and cities together is extraordinarily strong.  The recent passing of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner offered a chance to reflect on that complex connection between city, fans, team, and players:

The life of George Steinbrenner is a ramp across modern New York, a bridge that spans the whirlpool of one man’s spinning psyche and the transformation of America’s biggest, baddest city… He championed ordinary New Yorkers, then took them for every last penny…

He remembered the elation of the city when the Yankees won the World Series in 1978, a troubled time. “We put the trophy in the rotunda at City Hall,” [former Mayor Ed] Koch said. “I knew, as the Romans knew, that the people require circuses and theatrics.”

Economic impacts: Perhaps George Steinbrenner’s crowning achievement as owner of the Yankees has been the creation of New Yankee Stadium, on the backs of substantial public subsidy.  Plenty of economists consistently argue that stadium subsidies are not wise investments, but the emotional connection between team and city is difficult to quantify.

Likewise, there is a question of geography.  Sports teams might not have an impact at the metropolitan scale, but many in Cleveland have seen a direct impact from LeBron James in the area immediately adjacent to the arena.  A similar narrative exists for DC’s Verizon Center and the subsequent revitalization of Chinatown.

However, accurately calculating all the costs and benefits of the intangible, emotional connection between a city and their team might be next to impossible.

There is no ‘Next Big Thing’: Aaron Renn uses LeBron’s departure from the Midwest to take a long, hard look at the strategic decisions behind the move and the reaction:

In a sense though, Cleveland’s disappointment was inevitable. LeBron James was never going to turn around the city. No one person or one thing can. Unfortunately, Cleveland has continually pinned its hopes on a never-ending cycle of “next big things” to reverse decline. This will never work. As local economic development guru Ed Morrison put it, “Overwhelmingly, the strategy is now driven by individual projects….This leads to the ‘Big Thing Theory’ of economic development: Prosperity results from building one more big thing.”

The ‘Big Thing’ theory has usually been applied to things like sports stadiums and arenas, not the individual players that use them.  Nevertheless, the comparison is illustrative.  The push to keep a team or even a player by giving them a new stadium might not make economic sense, but losing that player can be painful.   And even though a new stadium might not make economic sense for a metropolitan region, that doesn’t mean the team itself – despite being deeply rooted in a single place – can’t also migrate to greener pastures and better opportunities.  Unfortunately for Cleveland, that’s something they also know far too well.

There are a few other items of note, only semi sports-related:

LeBron likes bikes: One thing LeBron does like is bikes – he’s a partial owner of Cannondale and hosts a bike-a-thon for kids in his hometown of Akron, OH.   Given the negative reaction in Cleveland to his professional decision to play basketball in Miami, it’s unclear what will happen to events like this.

New York and Barcelona are boring: Mayor Bloomberg and others were on hand to see the final push of the tunnel boring machine for New York’s 7 line extension.  Second Avenue Sagas notes the challenges of urban tunneling, even with the advanced technology available today.   A few weeks ago, The Transport Politic took an in-depth look at Barcelona‘s massive subway expansion, also making extensive use of tunnel boring machines operating in dense urban environments.

Paris, automated: Jarret Walker, of the Human Transit blog, offers some observations from Line 1 of the Paris Metro.  The line is in the midst of an upgrade to fully automatic, driverless operation – no small feat for a line initially built in 1900.

Cross posted at Greater Greater Washington

Weekend Reading – The Group Stage

Soccer in the Circle, from M.V. Jantzen

Soccer in the Circle, from M.V. Jantzen

The World Cup is underway.

England in Roo-ins: The cup means large gatherings of fans and sweet commercials (even the older ones).

Infrastructure: Jarrett Walker takes a look at some of the transit improvements for South Africa, building off the notion that large scale events like the World Cup can provide a kind of focus for infrastructure investments and other benefits that will last well after the conclusion of the games.  Infrastructurist looks at the stadiums.

Last week’s screening on the Mall of PBS’ documentary of Daniel Burnham focused a great deal on his role in the creation of the White City at the 1893 Columbian Exposition – another special event that focused a great deal of infrastructure investment – highlights two issues: the temporary and often fleeting nature of these kinds of events, as well as the ability to focus investments in one area.  Chicago focused on a park, Vancouver’s investments in one region – South Africa’s investments are spread across an entire country.

Ryan Avent’s post on infrastructure investments in mature cities versus growing ones also gets at the comparison between Chicago in 1893 and Vancouver in 2010.

Representative Space: Mammoth takes a look at soccer as a representation of urban space – a diagram of the strategies for using space.  Very interesting.

Framing the Issue: Cap’n Transit disagrees with the idea of framing bus operating improvements in New York as a ‘surface subway.’  This is an important tension – selling a project to various stakeholders is vitally important if you ever want to actually get something done, but overselling the benefits of some projects can dangerous.

Home Ownership and NIMBYism: Ryan Avent dissects a recent paper from the Federal Reserve on home ownership and ‘investment’ in the community, both literally and figuratively.

It’s clearly right that homeowners take an active interest in local policy in an effort to protect and enhance local services and the value of their homes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that homeowners are generating societal benefits…

It’s also not clear that homeowners are necessarily maximizing the value of their properties. Homeownership, as I’ve mentioned before, is an undiversified, highly-leveraged, immobile, illiquid financial bet. Having made such a bet, homeowners become very risk averse. We can imagine situations in which new developments are likely to benefit local homeowners and increase the value of their properties, but have benefits uncertain enough that there is a small but real probability of a negative effect on local property values. Highly risk-averse homeowners may opt to oppose the project, despite the good chance that they’d benefit from it.

Balancing individual and collective interests is one of the key tensions in any urban environment.  That tension also illuminates the problems of pushing home ownership as the be-all and end-all for one’s living situation.

Politically Correct: Bike lanes?

Couch Criticism: Architecture critics take on forts made of couch cushions.

Weekend reading

DC-Streetcars-Planned-Streetcar-Radius-Map

Excuse my timing on this, as this doesn’t leave much weekend to play with – but here are some items worth noting from the previous week or so:

Streetcars bridge the gaps: Yonah Freemark has an excellent post on DC’s evolving streetcar network and its ability to fill the gaps in Metro’s network.  Yonah’s excellent visuals (as usual) help frame the discussion.

New maps: New York gets a new map – Second Ave Sagas has the breakdown.  The map decreases clutter, though nothing compared to the more schematic designs for other systems.

Metro too cluttered: Speaking of clutter, Massimo Vignelli thinks Metro’s gotten too cluttered since he and Harry Weese came up with the signage scheme for the system decades ago.

Congestion pricing:

Grid vs. Sac: David Alpert notes a (perhaps the only) redeeming quality of the cul de sac; Jarret Walker notes the many advantages of gridded street networks.

Changing suburbia

Some suburban items to share today:

Design: Infrastructurist takes a look at the problem of culs-de-sac (which I believe is the proper plural of cul de sac).

cul-de-sacs

Commenters take note of some serious issues with this particular study, but the general point still stands – culs de sac remove key links from the street network, requiring longer and more circuitous routes to get to the same destinations.  Developments of these kind of street patterns are no small part of America’s long history of vehicle miles traveled increasing far faster than the rate of population growth.

Diversity: The Washington Post has an article on the changing face of suburbia – more socially and economically diverse, and dealing with new sets of problems that many of these communities have never had to deal with before:

Demographers at Brookings say suburbs are developing many of the same problems and attractions that are more typically associated with cities. And cities, in turn, have been drawing more residents who are young and affluent, so the traditional income gap between wealthier suburbs and more diverse cities narrowed slightly.

“The decade brought many cities and suburbs still closer together along a series of social, demographic and economic dimensions,” said the report, titled “State of Metropolitan America.”

The other substantive point is about how Americans perceive their surroundings (urban, suburban, rural) compared to how their city and their urban economy actually functions:

The report outlines a decade in which several demographic milestones were passed as the nation’s population topped 300 million midway through. About two-thirds of Americans live in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, virtually all regions with populations of 500,000 or more.

“We think we’re a small-town nation,” Berube said. “But small towns exist because they’re connected to something bigger, which allows residents to make a living.”

Density: Ryan Avent has long marked the economic benefits of density and the nature of urban agglomerations, but he has an interesting point on the marginal benefits of added density, noting that modest increases in the less dense suburbs could have a troubling impact, while modest increases in the already dense core, already designed at a walkable scale, would have serious benefits for local retail.

So let’s think about the effects of doubling density in Fairfax and the District. Now on the one hand, the benefits to doubling density in Fairfax are likely to be larger than those in Washington for reasons of scale alone — in the Fairfax example, more people are added. That makes for a deeper labour pool, a larger skills base, and so on. On the other hand, Fairfax density is likely to be less effective density. Fairfax is built in a fairly standard, suburban way. It’s not built at a walkable scale, the road system is arterial rather than gridded, transit options are limited, and so on. Doubling density, absent major infrastructure improvements, might actually reduce the metropolitan access of Fairfax residents.

Not so in the District. Yes, with more people roads, buses, and the Metro would be more heavily taxed. At the same time, every neighborhood would become individually more convenient. Brookland is fairly low density for a District neighborhood, but it’s basically built to be walkable. Were density in Brookland to double, the retail and commercial options within easy walking distance of Brookland residents would more than double.

The problem with doubling the density in a place like Fairfax County, aside from the infrastructure issues that Ryan highlights, is that you’d end up with a place that’s stuck in the no-man’s land of density – too dense for the auto-oriented infrastructure to function smoothly, but not dense enough to really tap into the critical mass and benefits of walkable urban places.

Briefly noted

7000Series

Some items of note today:

Weekend Reading

CC image from sabeth718

CC image from sabeth718

There’s a whole host of good stuff out there this weekend, covering the economy, smart growth, transit, high speed rail, and more:

Smart growth is nothing to fear: Roger Lewis aims to quiet the fears of Washington Post readers:

In fact, as new long-range plans are implemented in the coming decades, your property’s value will probably go up, your way of life and neighborhood character will be enhanced, and traffic congestion will not worsen. Indeed, it may ease. Also remember that such plans primarily serve future generations.

Optimism is justified. Stable, low-density residential neighborhoods and subdivisions will remain untouched. Transportation network plans do not depend on routing future traffic through subdivisions and local residential streets, many of which are loops and cul-de-sacs. And redeveloped areas actually will provide new, desirable conveniences for residents able to walk or bike to buy a quart of milk or sip coffee in a cafe.

Daniel Gross puts that into a larger context: Complete with quotes from Richard Florida, Mr. Gross looks to optimistic visions of the future and the chance to re-shape our economy, using the pending economic rebound to re-shape things – putting those kinds of smart growth plans into action:

So what will our new economy look like once the smoke finally clears? There will likely be fewer McMansions with four-car garages and more well-insulated homes, fewer Hummers and more Chevy Volts, less proprietary trading and more productivity-enhancing software, less debt and more capital, more exported goods and less imported energy. Most significantly, there will be new commercial infrastructures and industrial ecosystems that incubate and propel growth—much as the Internet did in the 1990s.

Not everyone is so optimistic: Reihan Salam at The Daily Beast isn’t nearly as optimistic about our economic prospects, despite the good intentions and aspirations of folks like Roger Lewis.

But one could just as easily argue that we’ve been furiously spending taxpayer dollars propping up the McMansion-and-Hummer economy. To protect homeowners, we’ve launched an extraordinary series of interventions designed to buttress housing prices, an approach that effectively transfers wealth from those who rent to those who own. Collapsing housing prices could prove a boon for less-affluent households or cautious investors who were reluctant to buy at the top of the market. That can’t help unless we accept that housing prices can and should collapse, even if that hurts key constituencies in the short term. And the same goes for efforts to keep the domestic automotive industry on life support.

So, are we in a moment of change or not?  The point about renters and owners is well taken, it reminds me of plenty of discussion around tax day about the perils of the mortgage interest deduction.

Beyond these big, national-level policy questions, there’s plenty of room to debate the local impact.  Housing Complex notes that DC has lots of jobs (relatively) and high rents, circling back to the notion that the ability to change things won’t be uniform across the nation.  Places like DC are positioned well to make the transformation – provided the Federal framework enables these kinds of changes.

On that note, Aaron Renn looks at a potential city-friendly federal policy framework, emphasizing talent, innovation, and connection – looking at policy areas of transportation, housing, the environment, and immigration.  Perhaps the key takeaway is the requirement of flexibility – many of today’s problems stem from federal policies that are too rigid to be of much use in urban environments.

Density discussions: Density is good for cities.  It’s also often misunderstood and feared – see Roger Lewis’ calming of fears regarding smart growth.  A few posts on the subject:

  • Yonah Freemark questions whether streetcar suburb densities are enough to get real urbanism and transit use.
  • Aaron Renn asks if density is overrated for smaller cities, as they can still compete without it, taking advantage of highways and cars that work well at lower densities.
  • Cap’n Transit criticizes both thoughts, emphasizing the bigger picture about why we want to encourage urbanism and transit use in the first place – arguing that Renn’s rationalization isn’t helpful in the long run.

Miscellany:

Enjoy the journey

Metro-North Bar Car

The New York Times has a couple interesting pieces on transportation, one dealing with volcanoes and the other with booze.

First, the obligatory volcano story: Seth Stevenson thinks the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull and the subsequent shutdown of air travel across the continent offers an opportunity to really enjoy travel, rather than just flying over the landscape (and all the interesting stuff) at 35,000 feet.

In the five decades or so since jets became the dominant means of long-haul travel, the world has benefited immeasurably from the speed and convenience of air travel. But as Orson Welles intoned in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “The faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare.” Indeed, airplanes’ accelerated pace has infected nearly every corner of our lives. Our truncated vacation days and our crammed work schedules are predicated on the assumption that everyone will fly wherever they’re going, that anyone can go great distances and back in a very short period of time.

So we are condemned to keep riding on airplanes. Which is not really traveling. Airplanes are a means of ignoring the spaces in between your point of origin and your destination. By contrast, a surface journey allows you to look out on those spaces — at eye level and on a human scale, not peering down through breaks in the clouds from 35,000 feet above — from the observation car of a rolling train or the deck of a gently bobbing ship. Surface transport can be contemplative, picturesque and even enchanting in a way that air travel never will be.

Stevenson is so dedicated to this idea that he and his girlfriend successfully circumnavigated the globe without leaving the surface of the earth.

Stevenson’s admonishment of the jet age also stands in contrast to a piece in Sunday’s Washington Post, instructing us to ignore nostalgia for the golden years of airline travel.  Brett Snyder defends airline deregulation and the seemingly inevitable fees for carry on luggage as a further step into the purity of free markets.

I have a copy of TWA’s flight schedule from June 1, 1959. The first jets were being introduced into the fleet, but the vast majority of flights were still on propeller-driven aircraft. There’s an ad in the timetable for TWA’s low coast-to-coast “excursion fares.” Los Angeles to New York was only $168.40 roundtrip, if you traveled Monday through Thursday in Sky Club Coach class. That bargain is roughly equivalent to $1,225 today, before tax.

These fares weren’t valid on the fastest aircraft, so you had only two options, neither of which went nonstop. There was the 10:10 a.m. departure from Los Angeles that arrived in New York at 11:41 p.m. that night or the 7:55 p.m. departure that arrived at 10:56 a.m. the next day — more than 12 hours in the air. This was on a Lockheed Constellation, which, while beautiful, bounced you around in the weather at about 20,000 feet, far below the 35,000 to 40,000 feet you’d cruise at today. Even when the weather was good, that trademark prop vibration left you feeling like you were sitting on a washing machine for hours after you landed.

It is curious that Snyder chose to contrast today’s deregulated jet age with the age of turboprops – he could have easily picked a schedule from 1973 instead of 1959 – flying on a brand-new Boeing 747, rather than a dusty old Constellation – and at least been comparing jet-age apples to apples.

Still, the contrast between Stevenson’s nostalgia and Snyder’s rejection of is interesting, even if both are speaking toward different ends. Snyder writes about the benefits of market efficiency and competition for passengers, while Stevenson writes of enjoying the journey.

Perhaps there’s no greater way to enjoy the journey than to enjoy happy hour at the same time.  With that in mind, the New York Times writes about the endangered bar cars on Metro-North trains from Grand Central to Connecticut.

A new fleet of cars will soon replace the 1970s-era models now used by commuters on the Metro-North Railroad line heading to Connecticut. But with money tight, railroad officials said they could not yet commit themselves to a fresh set of bar cars, citing higher costs for the cars’ custom design.

“They’re being contemplated,” said Joseph F. Marie, Connecticut’s commissioner of transportation. “But we have not made any final decisions.”

Defenders of the boozy commute say it helps raise revenue: After expenses, bar cars and platform vendors made $1.5 million last year, up from $1.3 million in 2008. (Officials would not say if a bar car makes more money than a car with the normal number of seats.)

The Times note that fellow bar cars in Chicago, New Jersey, Westchester County, and the Long Island Railroad have all gone the way of the Dodo – though LIRR trains still occasionally have bar carts that make it on trains.

Modeled after the private club cars of the early 20th century, the Grand Central bar car sought to bring a perk of high society to the everyday commuting class. Still, the car’s current incarnation is more bar-around-the-corner than Tavern on the Green.

The cars tend to break down, air-conditioning is creaky, and commuters have been known to sneak duct tape aboard for impromptu repairs.

The article’s accompanying slide show has great historical images of the bar cars in action.

Links – burrowing, tunneling

WaPo infographic on NATM for Dulles Metro

WaPo infographic on NATM for Dulles Metro

Curious about the tunnel progress for the Dulles Metro line? I ran across a WaPo infographic on the Dulles Metro line’s tunnel under the intersection of Routes 123 and 7 in Tysons Corner.  This tunnel is being completed via the New Austrian Tunneling Method – the graphic explains the process and shows the tunnel’s path under the highest point in Fairfax County.

Similarly, there’s tunneling in Russia. The English Russia blog has some great shots of new station construction for the St. Petersburg Metro.  Thanks to the geology of the city (built on fill, swamps, etc) the nearest reasonable strata to tunnel in is quite deep, making the Metro the deepest in the world.

Unhappier Hipsters? Matt Yglesias’s twitter feed is apparently feeding the beast.

Not in the erogenous zone? Ah, there’s nothing quite like the unintended consequences of land use law.

Paul Pickthorne, of Merrimack Park, has been hosting kink parties in his house for some time, and has been charging admission to defray the costs of hosting. His non-kinky (that we know of, anyway) neighbors complained to their county council representative, Roger Berliner, who responded that the county “has moved aggressively to put an end to this blight on your community.” This swift action took the form of a warning from the zoning inspector.

Charging admission might be a commercial use, eh?  Either way, it’s worth taking note of this particular case study of how zoning laws are used for all sorts of nitpicky regulations and impositions.

Streetcar wires and trees – not a problem. Streetcars 4 DC collects some case studies of how DC’s potential streetcars can get along just fine with neighboring trees.

The new Times Square will be around for a while. The folks at StreetFilms put together a nice piece showing off the transformation of Times Square in advance of Mayor Bloomberg’s decision on making the changes permanent.

Today, they did just that.  Streetsblog has the story:

After weighing a dramatic decline in traffic injuries and data from millions of taxi trips showing an average seven percent increase in west Midtown traffic speeds, Bloomberg characterized the results of the trial as very encouraging. Safety improvements alone, he noted, were “reason enough to make this permanent.”

In a rather extraordinary Q&A session that followed the announcement, Bloomberg fended off several questions from reporters who expressed skepticism that overall traffic speeds had improved. The mayor did not shy from the chance to frame pedestrian, bicycle and transit improvements in a way that New Yorkers rarely hear from their elected officials.

“Are the roads for pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists,” he asked, “or are they just for motorists?” When it comes to streets that safely serve all users and create vibrant public spaces, he suggested, New York has fallen behind its competitor cities around the globe.

Great news.  The final report and data that was evaluated is available here (PDF).

Snowpocalypse III – Linkage

Image from Wayan Vota on Flickr

Image from Wayan Vota on Flickr

Some more pleas for realistic expectations: Ryan Avent chimes in on the economics of it all, and Jon Chait notes the basic, physical problem with dealing with so much snow in such a short period of time:

In my neighborhood, like much of Washington, people park along the street. When it snows, plows go down and shove the snow away from the middle of the street and toward the sides. When it snows large amounts, the plows create massive snow barriers between the cars and the street. Digging out one’s car becomes a huge task. You have to scoop all the snow off the car itself, around the perimeter of the car, and this is just a tiny warm-up to the major task, when you have to breach the snow wall so that your car can get out to the street. This is even harder than it sounds. Every shovelful has to be carried back form the middle of the street and deposited on the front lawn.

Before the latest snowfall, the barriers in my street stood at around three or four feet. When the plow comes, they’re just going to get bigger. The nearly-intractable problem here is that there’s simply no place to put the snow. All the spare space along the side of the street is taken up by parked cars. The snow has nowhere to go.

One part of the solution is to truck the snow away to a remote location. Washington is already beginning to do this. With enough money to hire enough trucks and equipment, the government could probably remove all the snow. But this is a massive project that would take an unthinkable commitment to finish. I’m wondering if I’ll see my office again until spring, or spring-like weather.

This is the crux of the issue.  Where is it going to go?  Who’s going to move it?  Any solution requires participation from the city’s residents.

Gabe Klein agrees – where is it going to go? Dr. Gridlock’s blog has some good notes on the challenges:

“This is no longer just a plow operation,” said Gabe Klein, director of the District Department of Transportation. “There is too much snow accumulation on some streets for the plows to adequately move the snow, the snow has to be physically removed and hauled away. This will add some time to our cleanup efforts but we have crews working around-the-clock to minimize how long and to assist us in being as efficient as possible.”

In addition to 250 to 270 pieces of equipment for plowing and treating roadways, the city has deployed specialized equipment such as backhoes, frontloaders, dump trucks, and dumpsters.

Dumpsters, eh?  Sounds unorthodox.  Speaking of unorthodox…

Snow removal tools, realistic and not: The City Paper has some great suggestions for makeshift snow removal tools – but missed one of the obvious ones I’ve seen out there – the dustpan.  In previous snow storms, I’ve seen cutting boards and spatulas making their way from the kitchen to the front yard.  Still, that’s not as sweet as the flamethrower option (appropriately tagged under ‘cool shit‘).

Don’t bring the grill inside: Just don’t do it.  Seriously.

And then there’s this: