As seen during this week’s NACTO conference, hosted at NYU’s Kimmel Center:
Oh, shit.
I post this both as an homage to Lydia DePillis’ ‘pit stops’ series when she was writing Housing Complex, and to the pending doom of Hurricane Sandy advancing upon the Northeast. Let the panic commence.
(for actual NACTO coverage, check out summaries from the commissioners, Bruce Katz, Secretary LaHood, and more)
Portland parking meter. CC image from Ian Broyles
Several tangentially related articles on parking over the past few weeks:
In a previous post on zoning and unintended consequences, I linked to an Oregon Public Broadcasting piece on zero-parking development in Portland, OR – taking advantage of a clause in the zoning code that removes the requirement to provide off-site parking in developments around high-frequency transit corridors. The key word is in removing the requirement, as the developers are free to provide on-site parking if they wish, but are no longer required to do so. And may have decided to forgo off-street parking entirely.
Portland’s Willamette Week followed with a feature piece on the same issue a month later. Unfortunately, the writer frames the rule as letting developers off the hook for something they ought to pay for, like they were building bathrooms without toilets:
The Portland City Council more than a decade ago created this exemption—a huge financial benefit to developers—to increase density and discourage people from owning and driving cars.
If there’s a single fragment in the zoning code that encapsulates the ambition of city planners and the ethos of Portland, this may be it.
But the policy has its costs, and nearby residents such as Gold-Markel are paying for it.
Throughout the article, the ‘problems’ of this policy are presented in terms of spillover parking – that is, the residents of the new parking-less developments did not get rid of their cars entirely, and now park them on the street. One obvious solution would be to manage parking on the street via pricing, permits, and many other available tools – rather than the blunt instrument of parking space requirements in the zoning code. The zoning code works best when roughly governing broad land use and built form. It is not a particularly strong management tool. Nothing is mentioned about the cost to residents and to the city as a whole of requiring this expensive construction.
Along the same lines in DC (which does have some residential parking management programs in place), a local ANC recently signed off on a parking-free development near a metro station – but only in exchange for the promise that residents of the new building would not be allowed to get Residential Parking Permits for their vehicles. On the one hand, the existence of a management program ought to help mitigate the impacts of such construction; on the other, the fact that the DC project had to negotiate to build without parking in the first place opens the door to “excessive localism” in Matt Yglesias’ terms.
Back in Portland:
Hales tells WW that when the city was rewriting the zoning code in 2000 to eliminate the parking requirement, he never thought developers would actually build apartments without parking.
“We were trying to get developers to put in one [parking] spot instead of two,” he says. “I certainly wasn’t smart enough to anticipate that banks would finance projects with no parking whatsoever.”
The simple fact is that parking doesn’t always pay. Often, the economic case for it is quite weak if it isn’t seen as an absolute requirement (in either the legal sense or in terms of feasibility). Another interesting (but very different case) is Yankee Stadium, where several large new parking garages adjacent to the new ballpark have defaulted on their bonds thanks to low utilization.
This situation is different from a run-of-the-mill zoning case, but it dramatically shows the cost (and the lack of a return) in building too much parking. With that kind of cost in providing parking when demand is low, it’s no wonder that one of the developers in the OPB piece made the claim that “Parking a site is the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment.”
In a more quantitative analysis of parking reforms, the Atlantic Cities looks to London:
In an upcoming issue of Urban Studies, researchers Zhan Guo and Shuai Ren of the Rudin Centre for Transport Policy and Management at NYU consider two core questions when it comes to London’s reform. First, does the parking minimum truly create more parking than people want? Second, is a parking maximum necessary to promote sustainable transport, or will the market alone take care of it?
On the first question, Guo and Ren returned a pretty definitive yes. They examined parking supply at 216 residential developments in London approved from 1997 to 2000, when the parking minimum was in effect, and then roughly 8,250 developments approved from 2004 to 2010, after the minimum was removed and the maximum imposed. Before parking reform, developers created 94 percent of the required minimum; after it, they created just 52 percent of the old minimum.
Those parking spaces that were formerly required obviously were not free to build. As for parking maximums (that is, a requirement that a development not build more than a given amount of off-street parking):
Onto question number two: the effectiveness of the new maximums. Since the purpose of London’s parking reform was to promote alternative transportation, the researchers looked at how parking supply fluctuated in areas with high density and transit access after 2004. What they found is that that the actual parking supplied was higher in Central London, where density and access are greatest, compared to adjacent outer areas.
Guo and Ren call this finding “unexpected.” They suspect that local authorities may want to keep a high maximum (and therefore allow more spaces) to avoid a parking spillover onto already crowded streets in Central London. Another explanation is that the market simply wants more spaces there: people who can afford to live downtown are willing to pay a premium for parking.
I can’t see much problem in allowing parking to be built where the market is willing to bear the cost of construction and operation. Likewise, a developer of a non-residential property could easily see value in providing a great deal of parking as a draw to their development.
None of this changes the fact that a robust system for managing on-street spaces will likely be needed in any case. Such a program in Portland could easily soothe the concerns of nearby residents (though many of their concerns seem to be about the very existence of the newer, dense development in the first place); and a more market-responsive system in DC (hypothesis: most of DC’s RPP stickers are far too cheap relative to the demand for on-street spaces) might have avoided some of the negotiations in Tenleytown.
VRE train at Franconia-Springfield. CC image from nevermindtheend
DC’s existing (yet fragmented) commuter rail network is a huge low-hanging fruit for expanded and improved transit service (see this previous post). Writing at Pedestrian Observations, Alon Levy makes the statement that nobody likes riding North American commuter rail. Alon compares two locations in New York that have both subway and commuter rail service – and in each case, the subway ride wins a much larger share of riders despite often faster rides on commuter rail.
Though the data isn’t easily available for the commuter rail operators, the differences in ridership are substantial. The Rockville Metro station alone has more boardings than the entire MARC Brunswick line.
Alon identifies four reasons – a poorly structured network that does not serve non-downtown destinations; poorly designed transfers, often with financial penalty; cost differential and a lack of an integrated transit fare structure across all modes; and low frequency service.
Addressing the DC region specifically, some of these are undoubtedly true. A lack of through-routing prevents serving non-downtown destinations on the other side of Union Station MARC could easily serve dense employment clusters in Crystal City and Alexandria, VRE could offer service through to Rockville, Silver Spring, Fort Meade and others. Likewise, train frequency isn’t good – structuring it more like urban rapid transit could be a huge improvement.
Alon’s four points open the door for a comparison between Metro and the area’s commuter rail services. The commuter rail network shares several stops with Metro. Shared stops are as follows (stations in bold are those along the shared track segment of a conceptual through-routed network):
Maryland:
DC:
Virginia:
While transfers aren’t particularly easy, some of the physical connections aren’t terrible. Some stations share the same basic platform access (New Carrollton), while others easily could do so (King Street) with a little construction. The Crystal City connection is a bit of a stretch – it involves several blocks of walking, either along Crystal City’s streets or through the warren of tunnels and underground retail space. L’Enfant Plaza does not have an actual connection to the Metro platforms, just adjacency.
Financial transfer penalties are another story. MARC offers an add-on TLC pass (at the cost of $102/month on top of the cost of a monthly MARC pass) that allows for unlimited use of local transit (rail and bus) in both DC and Baltimore; VRE offers a similar product with a similarly-large surcharge per month.
Using MARC’s $102 per month figure, and assuming 40 last-mile Metro trips per month, that would require a minimum of a $2.55 peak fare to make the pass break even on commute trips alone (roughly the equivalent of a ~15 minute Red Line ride from Union Station to Van Ness).
The fare structures aren’t entirely integrated either, though the disparities aren’t as large as in Alon’s example from New York. Thanks to Metro’s time-and-distance based fare structure, you don’t find the same disparity of a flat-fare subway system up against a graduated fare commuter rail system. The example of Far Rockaway shows the disparity – a subway ride to Midtown is a flat $2.25, while the LIRR to Penn Station is $10.00 at the peak, $7.25 off peak.
Compare that to the single ride fares for MARC/VRE and Metro – all fares to Union Station as a point of comparison.
Maryland (Penn Line fares, Camden and Brunswick line fares; Metro fares from Union Station):
Virginia (VRE fares – single ride price used; Metro fares from Union Station)
MARC fares are all rather close to Metro; VRE fares have a different problem of the LIRR-Subway comparison at Far Rockaway; the longest possible competing trip (from Franconia-Springfield) has the smallest fare differential, it’s the shorter trips that are out of whack (a one-station VRE ride from L’Enfant to Union Station costs $5.55 on VRE, compared to the minimum Metro rail fare of $2.10). This structure obviously reflect’s VRE’s role as an AM-peak-inbound, PM-peak-outbound operation, but certainly discourages usage within the core of the region for rapid transit.
Commuter rail isn’t always more expensive, either. Looking at Rockville, (which, again, draws more boardings than the entire Brunswick line) a monthly pass to Union Station costs you $125 with the various discounts, while 40x trips per month via Metro at $5.75 a pop totals $230 ( !!! ); a weekly MARC pass totals $37.50 compared to $57.50 for ten peak-hour rides on Metro. A person who was dropping $230 a month on Metro fares could easily purchase a $125/month MARC pass, add on the $102/month TLC pass and still get unlimited Metro usage off-peak for about the same cost.
A unified fare structure would likely involve lowering fares within the inner VRE territory (further integration would assume a single fare table for a through-running merged S-Bahn-like operation between MARC and VRE) to better mirror the various Metro fares for similar distances. I would imagine this to be an easier organizational lift than, say, trying to bridge the gap in peak fares at Far Rockaway between $2.25 and $10.00.
The biggest difference in usage (thereby indicating usefulness) would appear to be frequency. MARC’s Penn Line features the most frequent service, and even that is 20-40 minutes between trains at best during the peak, hourly trains at mid-day, and longer headways in the evening – plus, no weekend service. Frequency is freedom, after all. Thus, the purpose of any effort for through-running commuter rail services should be to help the transition of DC’s commuter rail network into a frequent S-Bahn-like network of interlined rapid transit services.
Roosevelt Island Tram - CC image from The Eyes of New York
A couple of items that came across the internet about technology, innovation, the economy, and urban form:
Tech & the City
Nancy Scola pens a long piece in Next American City about the future of the technology industry in the city. The piece looks at how policy can shape an industry cluster – or not. New York’s tech university on Roosevelt Island is a key piece of the puzzle in helping shape an industry within a city:
Fortunately, by the late 2000s, the tech sector was on an upswing. Venture capitalists were nosing around the city. Talk of a “Silicon Alley 2.0” was in the air. Start-ups were starting up in DUMBO. But, says Pinsky, when the city held hundreds of conversations on economic development with everyone from academics to business leaders to community groups, they came to the realization that while there was, in raw terms, a good amount of applied science activity afoot, New York City’s economy is a huge one. There simply wasn’t the critical mass needed to create the sort of idea sharing and hopping from company to company that helped spread innovation in Silicon Valley. They concluded that there was a dearth of trained technologists able to do the heavy lifting.
Now, far be it from me to dissuade an investment in education – but there’s a concern about focusing too closely on chasing a specific sector rather than setting the rules and conditions to be ripe for innovation:
So what worries her? It’s the way government is getting involved. Along with Stanford, Silicon Valley had a mess of government contracts in the 1950s, particularly in the fields of naval research and aerospace. “Silicon Valley was never a purpose-built science city,” says O’Mara. “Dwight Eisenhower didn’t say ‘We’re going to build a tech capital on the west coast.’” Sure, there was a ton of money injected into the region. But there were few strings attached. It was pure profit that went to building out iconic tech companies like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox PARC. “In a way, it was a happy accident,” says O’Mara. “Part of my skepticism about this whole enterprise is a belief that government can have this great market impact. In the case of technology, it’s just a little more slippery and unpredictable.”
One common theme is the rejection of the idea that the strip-mall office park of Silicon Valley is critical to the kind of technological innovation seen there – that linkage of form and innovation is spurious:
Cities have, of course, made a comeback in recent decades, and much modern thinking — O’Mara points to Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From — “really emphasizes the urbanity of innovation,” with the accidental encounters and collision of ideas that are the product of density seen as creative fodder.
The Boston area’s high-tech corridor that grew along Route 128 pioneered what became known as the East Coast model: Giant firms that did everything in-house. But in New York, real estate costs alone might encourage that tech firms stay small, says O’Mara, in keeping with “the other industries that have been in New York for so long that have a similar small-scale communitarian [culture] — the creative industries, fashion, media…” In that way, even a tiny start-up can be part of something bigger: An industry, an economy, a city.
Speaking of the building that will house your enterprise…
A couple of items on Facebook’s planned Frank Gehry HQ. First, from Allison Arieff in the NYT:
The choice of Gehry might have been “game-changing” — to use the parlance of the start-up community — two decades ago. Today, it’s a safe bet, representing Facebook’s true transition from rogue start-up to the establishment (no matter how strenuously they might dispute that designation).
Writing at the New Republic, Lydia DePillis (she’s back) sounds off similarly:
That’s a frustrating response. As shrouded in moss as it might be, the 10-acre campus is fundamentally no different from the tech parks of old: Single-use, completely isolated, and shamefully wasteful of the kind of space that commands such a premium on the other end of the Bay. The designs highlight the accommodations they’ve made for pedestrian and bike access—like an underground tunnel to its other campus across the highway!—but only glancingly mention the subterranean lake of parking, with 1504 spots for a projected 2800 employees (that’s a really high ratio, even for a suburban office). The horizontal layout might comport with Mark Zuckerberg’s conception of a social universe in which relationships exist independently of any physical reality. But from a practical standpoint, it ignores one of the most important qualities of a creative place: Density, activity, and exposure to the ferment of ideas.
Arieff notes that the designer and the client both want to foster the kind of interaction and proximity that comes naturally in cities – taking note of the fact that Facebook has no offices for anyone, regardless of rank – but something is still missing:
But so very unlike a city, the New Urban-ish campus is populated not by folks from different walks of life but solely by Facebook employees. For all the talk in startup circles of “serendipitous interaction,” it’s not the sort celebrated by Jane Jacobs. There may be a place to get a latte there but there is no Third Place, those accessible anchors of community life like bars, farmer’s markets or barber shops that help foster civic engagement and interaction with both regulars and new faces. Yes, it’s stating the obvious, but Facebook workers interact with other Facebook workers. There’s next to nil outside influence to be found on a corporate campus. Indeed, many tech employees (Facebook’s and others) have observed that many of their most meaningful encounters occur not at work but while waiting on city streets for the now-ubiquitous corporate shuttles from San Francisco that take them south to Silicon Valley.
Now, it’s tricky to separate some of the urban planning issues (transportation access, urban design) from the interior design ones (office layouts, use of internal space) from the economic geography issues (Silicon Valley is dense, even if filled with stereotypical office parks). That said, the themes are interesting to track. Add in the region-wide issues of housing costs and other drags on the local economy, and things can get murky quickly.
It’s not like the denizens of Silicon Valley are happy with the built environment…
Two pieces in San Jose’s MetroActive (the intro, the full piece) lament the lack of urbanism and the impact it has on innovation in San Jose. The author, Michael Malone, talks about San Jose’s inability to embrace the values of Silicon Valley while similarly stumbling in creating a big, authentic city:
And there is one more thing I would expect our elected leaders to know something about: Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship built Silicon Valley; entrepreneurship is the source of this valley’s economic power; entrepreneurship is this valley’s only hope of a prosperous future. San Jose claims to be the capital of Silicon Valley—and Silicon Valley is the world’s capital of entrepreneurship . . . so why is it that the leaders of this city appear to have no real understanding of entrepreneurship?: Who does it. How it happens. And what it needs to survive.
I know they don’t understand because their actions tell me so. Here are three truths about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs:
1. The big fancy buildings and famous company names don’t matter. The future is in the hands of men and women working on business plans in Denny’s and Starbucks.
2. Entrepreneurs don’t need support. They need benign neglect.
3. You can’t pick winners in advance. There are too many variables. Winners pick themselves.
Compare that with the approaches debated in New York.
Instead, you give the start-ups cheap office or warehouse space, tax breaks and the fastest broadband you can deliver. Then you get the hell out of the way and trust them to do the rest. Ninety percent of them will fail, but that last 10 percent will change the world—and the fortunes of the city of San Jose.
“Giving” cheap office space might not need an actual subsidy – and it likely speaks to a broader policy change that follows on the work of the Econourbanists.
In this weekend’s Washington Post, Jonathan O’Connell writes about the increasing urbanism of the suburbs. The Post‘s editors title the piece: “Can city life be exported to the suburbs?” serving as yet another example of how the term ‘suburb’ is increasingly worthless. The article generally discusses the trend of shopping malls and other greenfield development projects to take on explicitly urban characteristics, whether in terms of form or use.
The article’s main example is the Village at Leesburg, but also draws on other town center developments in the area such as Reston Town Center. Where things fall apart in terms of relying on the ‘suburban’ terminology is in citing Clarendon – an area that would be within the core city’s jurisdiction if not for retrocession.
The Village at Leesburg is about 33 miles from the heart of DC. The layout of the development is a fairly typical autocentric pod, adjacent to a grade-separated freeway interchange and high volume arterials that separate it from cul-de-sac residential developments. Grade it on the basis of the characteristics of the development, and the changes towards a more urban condition might seem merely cosmetic.
O’Connell asks: “But can a city be a city if it’s built in the middle of a cornfield?” Sure it can, if it actually has the characteristics of an urban place. A place like Reston takes a much stronger step in the direction of urbanism than the lifestyle center depicted above. However, the thrust of the article isn’t wrong by any means. As Richard Layman notes, ‘urban’ places need not be in big cities alone. Even the smallest farm town can be urban, if you define urbanism in terms of the characteristics of the built environment.
Part of this seems to be a mindset of pitting ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’ as opposites, despite the fact that they are anything but. Perhaps the true foil for ‘urban’ is ‘rural,’ but it certainly is not suburban – whatever suburban might mean.
The end of the piece gets at some of the key differences, speaking less in terms of the hype about a place or how cool it might seem, but about the fundamentals of the underlying city. What our current urban places have is character thanks to their age (all else being equal), and an ability to adapt, evolve, and change:
The buildings were erected over decades, when different architects and designers were in vogue. Every owner has his own vision — one wants a bar, another wants an art gallery or a furniture store. Together, they create a chaotic mix that might not be as functional as what is dreamt up in a developer’s marketing office. But a city’s character, Lanier argues, will be a draw for much longer.
The real question is if the surrounding context allows a place like the Village at Leesburg to evolve or not.
Surface parking in Minneapolis. CC image from Zach K.
Writing in MinnPost, Marlys Harris asks why (seemingly) nothing is getting done in Minneapolis. She comes up with three broad reasons: a negative attitude towards new development, economic justifications that don’t pencil out for new projects, and the impact of zoning and land use regulations – often unintended impacts or perverse outcomes. While all three are certainly factors, the real interesting implication is the interplay between them: as an example, regulations that dictate long and uncertain processes, enabling those opposed to new development to organize in opposition, thereby adding time and cost to a building project to the point where it’s no longer feasible.
In the comments, Max Musicant offers an example of these chain reactions on the regulatory side:
[T]he zoning code is very often in conflict with how multi-story buildings are actually built – which also drives the almost constant demand for variances. If one wants to build a multi-story building, you are required to provide an elevator. If you need an elevator, you need to build 4-6 stories to spread out the cost. If you are building that high, you will likely be required to build parking on-site. If you have to build parking on-site in an urban location, it will have to be underground – which is very expensive. All of this can be avoided only if 1) you build one story suburban style or 2) your price points are affordable only to the wealthy.
The parking requirements are particularly onerous. Oregon Public Broadcasting took note of parking-less apartment building projects in Portland back in August. New buildings are going up without off-street parking, taking advantage of a change in the zoning code that allows exemptions from parking requirements under certain conditions. While the article’s narrative focuses on the kinds of people who would live without a car or without a designated parking space, this cultural focus is misplaced – as Max Musicant noted later in his comment, these kind of walk-up apartment buildings without off-street parking were commonly constructed in American cities in the not-so-distant past.
The real takeaway from the OPB piece isn’t about the behavior of the tenants, but of the impact on the bottom line of the builders:
One of those developers is Dave Mullens with the Urban Development Group. He opened the Irvington Garden in a close-in Northeast Portland neighborhood last year. It’s 50 units with no parking places.
“The cost of parking would make building this type of project on this location unaffordable,” Mullens says.
Mullens calls the difference “tremendous.”
“Parking a site is the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment. Or, the difference between apartments and condos,” he says.
In other words, these kinds of regulations have severe costs. Taking Mullens’s price figure at face value, it’s not hard to see how removing a requirement like this would help market rate development target demand at lower price points. Likewise, it’s not hard to see how seemingly narrowly-focused and well-intentioned regulations can have much broader consequences when layered with other constraints.
Of course, these points are all on the micro scale of an individual project, but the macro scale also matters. The regulations have to allow the market to increase supply in order to meet demand – otherwise bad things happen. In the Washington Business Journal, Montgomery and Fairfax counties in metropolitan DC are concerned about housing becoming unaffordable even for those with six figure incomes.
It’s not until the end that simply relaxing zoning requirements to a) increase supply, or b) lower the cost of development (see the parking requirement discussion) is mentioned. The article does not mention option c), all of the above. Since there would still be a need for deeply affordable dwelling units, relaxing or eliminating parking requirements would be a good place to start in striking the balance between good, well-intentioned, and effective regulations and an efficient marketplace for new development.
Williamsburg Bridge. CC image from Kev Gilmour
(Building off the previous post, in response to this Atlantic Cities piece)
If Feargus O’Sullivan isn’t really moving to a “suburb” as his article is entitled, but rather to a different urban neighborhood – then what’s the reasoning behind this? O’Sullivan complains about “hype” and “supposed edginess and creative ferment”, instead arguing that they are “increasingly as banal, antisocial and plain dull as any suburb.”
Maybe I’m reading too much into O’Sullivan’s piece – it’s one thing to be a lament over a supposedly cool place not living up to the hype, or for a personal experience in a place to fall short. Drawing conclusions beyond that seems dubious, but nevertheless interesting fodder for discussion.
So, is this really an indictment of urbanism, or just one of hype? O’Sullivan’s complaint is focused on “fashionable” neighborhoods, and given the fact that O’Sullivan’s destination in the suburbs isn’t really all that suburban (or, rather, it’s quite urban under a reasonably broad understanding of the term). This makes me want to discount the idea that it’s the city – rather, the critique seems to be focused about what’s cool.
Some quotes:
For all their reputation as hives of individuality, neighborhoods like my own city’s Broadway Market offer almost identical businesses to those you’d find in currently hip city neighborhoods anywhere. While the base materials (streets and houses) may be different in, say, NYC’s Greenpoint, Berlin’s Neukölln, or Madrid’s Malasaña, the trappings of gentrification – expensive coffee and bike shops, junk sold at a premium as “vintage” and, soon after, bitterly resented chain outlets – make these places seem increasingly homogenous.
So, it’s about gentrification.
Even accepting this description of the problem seems to be setting up a straw man to be beaten down, however. O’Sullivan claims “people are being asked to buy into an urban myth whose claims don’t always stand up to scrutiny.” Are they really? Are people really being asked to buy in to this? Or perhaps, do they just want the basic characteristics presented by the physical urban environment?
As O’Sullivan delves into “the myth’s central tenets,” he cites the idea of creative people living near the heart of the city. However, his definition of ‘creative’ is awfully narrow, limited to “starving artists, wannabe writers, thinkers, eccentrics, [and] aesthetes.” But we know (through empirical evidence) that innovation and density are linked. O’Sullivan admits this is a narrow definition (both of creativity and, previously, of urbanism), but points out that his myth holds out for “more exciting neighbours.” This seems to be a critique not of the places O’Sullivan visits, but of the trendiness that colors his experience.
Indeed, what is the actual myth here? At Salon, Will Doig writes about Williamsburg, Brooklyn, asking: “Are urban bohemias, you know, so over?” Doig notes”Pre-hipster Williamsburg was a neighborhood of working-class ethnic groups, crack dealers and violence — but also, crucially, post-industrial vacancy: boarded-up factories, weed-choked lots, an abandoned waterfront, train tracks to nowhere.” The answer draws on a similar line from an Atlantic piece by Benjamin Schwarz entitled Gentrification and its Discontents, noting similar critiques from other authors:
He doesn’t recognize that the SoHo he yearns for was precisely the product of that rapid industrial decline, which made economically available to artists and their hangers-on all those cool industrial spaces that in more industrially vibrant times would have been used by, well, industry.
Despite these lamentations about the change of the city (which Doig’s piece notes wouldn’ve been unthinkable for a city-dweller in the 1920s – particularly if one reads Robert Fogelson’s Downtown), Doig closes with this from the gentrifying ‘hood:
As the neighborhood begins to upscale in a way that fills Anasi with dismay, Napoleon opens Williamsburg’s first proper lounge and rides the crest of the transformation with purpose. His swanky club becomes a smash hit, and helps create a whole new scene on the sleepy south side. Moreover, it gives the young entrepreneur — a poor kid of color from a dangerous neighborhood — a chance at a life he might not have otherwise had.
Given the larger scale economic processes, it’s hard to understand what these writers are making a big deal out of, whether it’s a myth of urbanism or some sense of authenticity. On one hand, O’Sullivan’s embrace of a less-cool neighborhood would seem to undermine the fears of a lost bohemia and instead embrace the idea of a large pent-up demand for urban living of all stripes, myth or not.
1954 GMC Suburban Ad - CC image from Alden Jewell
Hot of the presses last week at The Atlantic Cities was a piece from Feargus O’Sullivan entitled “Why I Moved Back to the Suburbs.” Without touching on the reasons for O’Sullivan to make that move, the very premise depends on what you call a suburb. As it turns out, O’Sullivan’s destination ‘burb isn’t really all that suburban to my view of the term:
I should point out here that London’s outer districts are quite different from the average American suburb. For a start, they’re often pretty old – areas built no later than the 1930s still abut fields along some stretches of the city’s limits. They also tend to have medium rather than low population density, with decent transport links and broad, walkable sidewalks that mean car ownership is desirable but not essential. What they share with the U.S. however is their sprawl and their reputation for conformity – it’s often said that it was the dullness of suburbs a few miles beyond mine that helped spawnBritain’s Punk movement.
I don’t know that those ‘burbs are all that different from similarly aged American suburbs around the nation’s primary city, either. The further descriptors only serve to emphasize how useless the term ‘suburb’ is – this place has the key qualities of moderately dense development, strong transit links, and a walkable urban design. If you were to ask someone in the US to identify a place with those characteristics without using the label, I’ll bet the responses would identify outlying urban neighborhoods with good access to the city – or, in other words, places that most would call ‘urban.’
So, to get value out of the word ‘suburb’ it would help to define it in terms of characteristics (similar to this exercise in defining sprawl and using the term for more than just outward patterns of development). O’Sullivan isn’t the only one to fall for this. Joel Kotkin is notorious for praising the virtues of the suburbs while conjuring visions of Levittowns, while his analysis hinges on the political definition of a suburb (and all of the arbitrary boundaries therein) and ends up lumping Levittowns and McMansions in with Jersey City. And it isn’t just political boundaries – Cap’n Transit notes that the New York Times has called the Upper West Side suburban in the past.
Cap’n Transit also hits on the need to define these places in terms of the characteristics, rather than just relying on the label:
The problem is that there are several features of suburbs that catch our attention more than whether they are within the city limits. We often essentialize these features and assume that all suburbs are that way. When someone says “suburb” they may actually be referring to just a few of those features, or even a single one.
I don’t know if I agree with Cap’n’s categories, but it does raise the issue of separating broad categories of key characteristics: There physical factors, relating to density, design, land use, location, the built and natural environments, etc. – and I would posit that the physical factors are mostly the same as those used to define sprawl, just with different positions on the continuum of choices. There are social and economic factors, covering race/ethnicity, language, income, wealth, jobs, etc. There are network factors as well, looking at links to the core city, considering modes of transport and the quality of the links. I suppose there’s also a category for institutional considerations, perhaps including those arbitrary political boundaries and other quirks of governance.
No matter what term you want to use as the sum of those characteristics, at least the characteristics tell a more complete story. The New Urbanist transect model helps refine the thinking on some of these issues – at least with regard to the physical, built environment. That said, the transect zone labeled as “sub-urban” (T-3) wouldn’t match the terminology used by others in different contexts.
S-Bahn logo. From wiki.
This week, Greater Greater Washington has run a series of posts on the hurdles to implementing through-routed commuter rail services in DC. The technical reasons include many basic incompatibilities between the region’s two commuter railroads (MARC and VRE), ranging from type of locomotion to platform height, as well as the infrastructural shortcomings of DC’s rail infrastructure to handle high frequency transit-like operations.
Lost in the wash, however, is the reason to do this. The reasons are two-fold: First, through-routed service expands the transit network relatively inexpensively, offering mobility benefits to current and future riders. Second, such a service (and the technical changes required to implement it) help solve some of the other challenges of DC’s commuter rail network (such as insufficient storage capacity at Union Station for trains to layover mid-day). Through-running is both a means to an end as well as an end itself.
This isn’t exactly a new concept, as it has been raised in numerous places over the years:
Plus the southern intentions of intercity rail:
CSX’s plans for increasing freight traffic will also mean added capacity through DC, with implications for passenger rail.
None of these plans hints at even the possibility of the kind of S-Bahn integration potential that through-routing unlocks.
The goal should be to turn the core of DC’s commuter rail network into a system like Germany’s S-Bahns (touched on previously here and here). David Alpert essentially suggested the same thing with his conception of the ‘Metro Express.’ The level of service would be more like rapid transit than commuter rail. The geographic extent might not be as expansive as the current commuter rail network (there’s no sense in running rapid transit to Martinsburg, WV) but those outer extensions could easily be serviced by a service that mirrors today’s commuter rail. The core of the network (say, to Woodbridge in the south, Manassas in the west, Germantown or even Frederick to the north, and Baltimore to the east) would see higher frequencies, through-routed service, and all-day, full week service.
One common characteristic of S-Bahns is the use of interlining and shared tracks in the core of the system (this Wiki diagram illustrates), where interlining produces short headways on the shared portion while the outer parts receive less frequent service due to the branching of the network. The three MARC lines feeding DC, each running on 30 minute headways would combine for 6 tph in the shared segment (Union Station to Alexandria).
VRE’s timetable shows Alexandria-L’Enfant at about 17 minuntes; Alexandria-Union Station at about 25 minutes. There’s room for massive improvement here – Metro’s trip planner shows King Street to Union Station (Yellow to Red) as 20 minutes on Yellow, 4 minutes on Red; King Street to L’Enfant Plaza is the same 17 minutes on the Yellow line.
Give a DC S-Bahn transit-like service and that can be reduced. Electric multiple unit trains would accelerate faster; level boarding and more frequent service would shorten station dwells; etc. Then, the commuter rail infrastructure would function as a key part of the region’s rapid transit network.
DC Water's Blue Plains waste water treatment facility. CC image from erin m.
While perusing Twitter (hat tip to Jeff Wood), I came across this Guardian article about urban uses of natural processes to do the dirty work of urban pollution mitigation. The piece discusses all types of green infrastructure and the natural processes they emulate, such as bio-filtration. I’ve taken note of local examples before, but the phrasing of their summary of the concept caught my eye:
Gray infrastructure is the system of pipes and ditches that channel storm water. Green infrastructure is the harnessing of the natural processes of trees and other vegetation — so-called ecosystem services — to carry out the functions of the built systems. Green infrastructure often intercepts the water before it can run into streets and become polluted and stores the water for gradual release through percolation or evapotranspiration. Trees also clean dirty water through natural filtering functions.
While drawing the contrast between green and gray infrastructures, the idea of “harnessing… natural processes” sparked a memory of this extensive summary from Mammoth of DC’s Blue Plains wastewater treatment facility – gray infrastructure on a massive scale. In describing what goes on at Blue Plains, they note “the process of waste water treatment mimics — in an accelerated fashion — the natural cleaning processes of waterbodies.” The accompanying footnote:
Scott Huler explains this in his fascinating On the Grid, quoting a Raleigh wastewater treatment superintendent T.J. Lynch:
“All we’re doing is what a river would do… what happens in our plant is the exact same thing that happens in a stream. That’s exactly where the process came from. We’ve just concentrated it. It might take the river a couple hundred miles to accomplish what we’d do in a couple days.”
Figuring out where any given piece of green infrastructure might fall in the spectrum from a naturally occurring ecology to a engineered technology is an interesting mental exercise. Rhetoric about sustainability aside, the same physical process is occurring using mostly similar mechanisms.