Tag Archives: infrastructure

The evolution of infrastructure: 4-track subways and parking decks

With Rail~volution complete, several recaps of conference sessions have sparked some interesting discussion.  One panel posed the hypothetical question – what would DC look like today if we had never built Metro?

WMATA’s Nat Bottigheimer emphasized the linkage between high capacity rapid transit and the ability to support dense urban development, drawing a contrast to the spatial inefficiency of automobile-based systems:

Bottigheimer gave an analogue for Washington, DC, saying that the parking needed to serve all the cars that would come in place of Metro could fill the entire area from 12th to 23rd Streets, Constitution to R (including the White House) with 5-story parking decks.

That’s a lot pf parking.  It’s an absurd amount, really – but it shouldn’t be a surprise.  Consider an auto-oriented business district like Tysons Corner:

Tysons’ dependence on the automobile, and a place to park it, is dramatic when compared with other areas. With about 120,000 jobs, Tysons features nearly half again as many parking spots in structures, underground and in surface lots. That’s more parking, 40 million square feet, than office space, 28 million square feet. Tysons boasts more spaces, 167,000, than downtown Washington, 50,000, which has more than twice as many jobs.

Of course, downtown DC never would’ve developed in such a fashion.  Bottigheimer’s hypothetical is meant to draw a contrast rather than represent a plausible alternate universe.  Never the less, the ratio of space devoted to parking compared to space devoted to other stuff (offices, retail, housing, etc) is striking.  An auto-based transportation system requires the devotion of half of your space to just the terminal capacity for the car.

While acknowledging Metro’s power to shape development and growth when paired with appropriate land use and economic development policies, the GGW discussion turned (as it often does) to Metro’s constraints.  Several commenters ask – why not four tracks like New York?  Why not have express service?

Sample of Midtown Manhattan track maps from nycsubway.org

New York’s four-track trunk lines are indeed impressive pieces of infrastructure, but it’s worth remembering that they are essentially the second system of rapid transit in the city.  New York did not build those four-track lines from scratch, they built them to replace an extensive network of elevated trains. Consider the changes from 1904 (left), to 1932 (center), to present (right):

Red lines are elevateds, blue lines are subways – source images from Wikipedia. The process of replacing older elevated trains with subways is clear, particularly in Manhattan and around Downtown Brooklyn. The relevance to DC is that four-track subway lines don’t just happen.  The circumstances in New York that desired to get rid of most of the elevated tracks provided an opportunity to rebuild all of New York’s transit infrastructure.  Metro is not provided with such an opportunity.  Adding express tracks to the existing system would require essentially rebuilding the entire system, and without a compelling reason to do so (such as New York’s removal of Els), it’s simply not going to happen – no matter if it were a good idea and a cost-effective idea or not.

Perhaps the single biggest opportunity for an express level of service would be the conversion of MARC and VRE into a through-running S-Bahn-like transit service. Portions of the Red Line do indeed have four tracks – its just that two of them are for freight and commuter rail.  Likewise, should there be future expansion of Metro within the core (such as a separated Blue line) there would be the opportunity to study making such a tunnel a four-track line.  That concept would have to include a number of different ideas, however – future expansions to link into that capacity, surface/subway hybrid service for streetcar (such as in Philadelphia or San Francisco), etc.

Global transit logistics

Matt Johnson at GGW has a short post with a wonderful video documenting the logistical process of delivering a new dual-mode Bombardier locomotive to NJ Transit after manufacture in Germany.  The video raises several interesting issues:

Logistics – the ALP-46, being built for North American rails, is too heavy to use existing rails for transport from the manufacturing plant in Kassel to the port in Hamburg.  As a result, a coordinated ballet of precise movements is needed to get the locomotive to the dock.

The coordination is fascinating to watch.  I’m reminded of some of mammoth’s recent posts on the global logistics supply chain, ranging from the world’s new largest vessel, the shape of infrastructure without architects as exemplified by a rail and container yard in Illinois, and commentary on the concept of the aerotropolis (breaking down the BLDGBLOG interview with Aerotropolis author Greg Lindsay).

The precision involved in moving cargo like this is always fascinating.  The connection/competition between seaports and airports (obviously, you’re not going to fly a locomotive like this for delivery) is also interesting, particularly in the vein of the role of just-in-time delivery and potential disruptions of supply chains from Japan’s recent earthquake/tsunami.

Manufacturing – The fact that such a journey for an American commuter railroad locomotive is even necessary is puzzling.  The vehicle is manufactured in Germany by Bombardier, a Canadian company.  It reminds me of the somewhat perverse consequences of Buy America provisions for US Transit systems, as well as the general lack of investment in transit.

Market Urbanism has commented on the impacts of these types of regulations, citing frequent commenter Alon Levy:

What happened in the 1970s was that the rolling stock market shrank, leaving American transit agencies with just a few US vendors. St. Louis and Pullman were fully protected by Buy American. As such, New York City Transit had no choice but to buy trains from them; the trains turned out to be defective, leading to breach of contract lawsuits that bankrupted both companies. Since then, NYCT has bought from foreign companies, following Buy America to the letter but not to the spirit. The first order after the St. Louis and Pullman disasters was imported from Kobe, as Reagan cut all federal funding, and went without a hitch. Subsequent orders required the vendors to establish US plants, but often only the final assembly is done in the US. In the most recent order, the car shells were made in Brazil.

Buy America does the opposite of leveling the playing field for foreign firms. It favors big players, which can land big contracts and establish US plants. The same is true for the regulatory structure: the various globally unique [Federal Railroad Administration] rules benefit companies that are big enough to be able to modify trains for the American market. Just recently, Caltrain’s request for an FRA waiver involved consultation with just the largest companies in the industry. There are a lot of smaller manufacturers that are shut out of the US market; they don’t have the capital to establish new overseas factories or pay lobbyists to write rules in their favor. Those include Switzerland’s Stadler, Spain’s CAF, the Czech Republic’s Skoda, all Chinese firms, and all Japanese firms other than Kawasaki. Those can occasionally land a US contract, but are usually unable to compete with Kawasaki, Alstom, Siemens, and Bombardier, whose US market shares far exceed their global market shares.

Transportation – As noted in the video, these locomotives are far too heavy to travel on German rails.  The fact that they can do so on American rails is a testament to the strength of our robust freight network, but it is also indicative of the unnecessary ‘tank’ mentality of US rail vehicles.  This kind of excessive weight (and the regulatory perspective that requires it) is biased towards heavy freight and detrimental to passenger rail of all kinds in the United States.

Vestiges of DC’s streetcar network

IMAG0148700 Block, 8th St SE

Winter’s freeze/thaw cycle chipped enough asphalt away from 8th St SE to expose the remaining vault of DC’s old streetcar system.  The rails themselves are gone, but the underground vault that provided power for the system remains, as does one of the square access panels in the street.   The rest of 8th Street contains discolorations and visible stress in the asphalt where more of the square access panels would have been, indicating more of the vault structure remains just below the surface.

New York’s streetcars used similar conduit technology.  The extensive website nycsubway.org has some fascinating pictures from New York’s streetcar infrastructure remnants, as well as this handy explanation of the system:

line-linear

This isn’t your basic track of two rails and wooden crossties. The track structure extends some two and a half feet into the earth. Under the paving blocks are cast iron yokes 5 feet apart, the trapezoidal shape shown here and in the previous line drawing. The yoke holds the shape of the lengthwise pieces, keeping the rails the right distance apart and keeping the conduit open.

The diagram above shows a double-track cable installation, but the basics are the same on Broadway. There is a yoke every 5 feet, and a pair of insulator covers around the conduit every 15 feet, and a cleaning manhole cover every 105 feet, of which every fourth one (420 feet apart) was also a slightly larger feeder manhole. It’s a lot of cast iron and concrete.

The exact diagram used here is actually for a cable car track, not a streetcar conduit – but the engineering is essentially the same.  Some of DC’s old cable cars were converted to electric power.

Wikipedia also has a great image of track work at 14th and G Sts NW, showing the extensive cast iron underpinnings of these underground conduits:

DC_Streetcar_construction

GGW and PoP have also taken note of remnants of DC’s streetcar infrastructure in the past, some of the last remaining signs of a once extensive network.

Ad-hoc internet infrastructures

CC image from sarnil on flickr

CC image from sarnil on flickr

In this week’s City Paper, Lydia DePillis has a story about an ad-hoc wireless broadband internet network that emerged out of community discussions in DC’s Bloomingdale neighborhood.

Finally, the group gave up on city assistance, turning to a local IT company that could get them a commercial broadband subscription. They set up “gateway” routers at Big Bear and in Rustik Tavern and then started knocking on doors to ask whether homeowners wouldn’t mind hosting a free “repeater.” For a few hundred dollars in hardware and about $800 a year for broadband, a six-block long stretch of houses now has WiFi access—for much less than the cost of individually subscribing each area household to Verizon or Comcast.

For Youngblood, wiring the neighborhood is worth it because of what he can then build on top: Through his company, Youngblood Capital Group, he hopes to develop a “smart grid” in the area that could support things like solar energy systems. “You build the network, and then you’ve got this fertile field you can grow everything in,” he says.

The application on a neighborhood basis is interesting.  I can speak to plenty of anecdotal accounts of similar networks on a smaller, apartment building basis where neighbors will chip in for one internet connection and share it via a wireless router – or even less formal ones where dwellers simply ‘steal’ wireless from unencrypted networks within range.

Lydia’s follow-up blog post addresses some of the competitive concerns that the to-the-curb providers might have:

But community wireless projects in America haven’t taken off to the same extent as they have in Europe, in part because of pushback from the big carriers. (Although, as Youngblood pointed out, resistance is sort of silly: Expanding wireless to underserved areas is a good thing for cable companies, since some new users will inevitably want the stronger connection they can only get from “fiber to the curb.” In that way, free or low-cost wireless is like a gateway drug. “We get people addicted,” as he puts it. “If you want the strong stuff, go get it from the man.”)

The decentralization (and democratization) of these kinds of infrastructures is an intriguing prospect.

Low impact development near the Navy Yard

Near the soon to be opened and fantastic Park at the Yards, there’s a lot of new low-impact development infrastructure.  These bioretention areas should be a great example of the new kind of both urban and environmentally sustainable infrastructure can be.

IMG00071

These are not ordinary tree boxes.  Instead of draining into a standard storm sewer, these gutters drain into the tree boxes, where stormwater then naturally drains into the ground instead of into a storm sewer.  This reduces the amount of water entering the combined storm and sanitary sewer, and thus can help reduce the number of combined sewer overflow (CSO) events.  Since the combined sewer system mixes storm water and regular sewage, substantial rainfall will force the system to overflow into area rivers, dumping raw sewage mixed with stormwater directly into the Anacostia and Potomac.

From the street side:

IMG00072

Storm water will slowly absorb into the ground, aided by the various plants soils that can capture pollutants though the process of biofiltration.  Look at other rain gardens and tree boxes under construction – note the drainage layers of soil and gravel to be added.

IMG00073

IMG00075

In this completed rain garden/tree box, note the grade of the soil in the box, below the grade of the curb:

IMG00070

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington

Where the water comes from

Back in March, the New York Times featured DC WASA’s (now DC Water) new director, George Hawkins, talking about the challenges of dealing with aging water and sewer infrastructure in American cities.  The piece lays out the challenges facing most American cities, currently resting on our laurels of the investments from previous generations:

For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.

Mr. Hawkins’s answer to such problems will not please a lot of citizens. Like many of his counterparts in cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta and elsewhere, his job is partly to persuade the public to accept higher water rates, so that the utility can replace more antiquated pipes.

The problem is serious, and Hawkins is here to spread the word:

“We’re relying on water systems built by our great-grandparents, and no one wants to pay for the decades we’ve spent ignoring them,” said Jeffrey K. Griffiths, a professor at Tufts University and a member of the E.P.A.’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council.

“There’s a lot of evidence that people are getting sick,” he added. “But because everything is out of sight, no one really understands how bad things have become.”

To bring those lapses into the light, Mr. Hawkins has become a cheerleader for rate increases. He has begun a media assault highlighting the city’s water woes. He has created a blog and a Facebook page that explain why pipes break. He regularly appears on newscasts and radio shows, and has filled a personal Web site with video clips of his appearances.

Part of Hawkins’ ‘cheerleader’ duties included a recent blogger roundtable, with several local blogs (DCist, Greater Greater Washington, District Curmudgeon, We Love DC, Hill is Home, etc) offering detailed insight into the the most seemingly basic aspects of city life.  For me, the most interesting visual to come out of these meetings is this map from the Curmudgeons of DC’s water mains in 1985.

DC WASA map 1985

The system is based on gravity and pressure, each color represents a band of elevation served by certain reservoirs in the city.  There are two separate systems (for the most part) east and west of the Anacostia river.  The width of the lines represents the diameter of the water mains under the street.   When seen from afar, the color bands give a rough approximation of DC’s topography – the red and blue colors clearly show the extent of the L’Enfant plan, for example – which L’Enfant specifically limited to the flat parts of DC.

A closer inspection (click the image for a larger version) shows the fantastic level of detail in the various water main routes, the large mains that connect reservoirs to areas of similar elevation, as well as the local distribution to the end users.

DC WASA map 1985 cap hill

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.

Hacking the city

Times Square

Mammoth’s excellent series of posts covering any and all topics on The Infrastructural City recently touched on chapter 5 – Blocking All Lanes, the first of the book’s section on the fabric of this city of networked infrastructure.  Mammoth notes a couple of big themes from the chapter, each with profound implications for how cities are built and how they evolve.

The interesting fact that arises from the complexity of these co-evolved systems (and, as noted in Varnelis’s introduction to The Infrastructural City, from the primacy of individual property rights in L.A.’s political culture) is that, “as the possibilities for adding new highways — or even lanes — dwindle in many cities, most new progress is made at the level of code”.  This shift which the authors identify is a part of a systemic shift in the methodology of urbanism, from plan to hack, that we’ve been fascinated with for some time now.  In a mature infrastructural ecology, like Los Angeles, the city has developed such a persistent and ossified physical form that, barring a radical shift in the city’s political culture, designing infrastructure becomes more a task of re-configuration and re-use than a task of construction.

The idea is simple – big moves, such as new highways, new subways, and other massive infrastructure investments are much harder in a developed city than in a greenfield site.  I’d also argue that such challenges are not solely physical or political, but also financial (see previous discussions of the limitations of nostalgia for private-sector transit funding).

Mammoth continues:

Initially, this may seem an extraordinarily frustrating condition for urbanists, who have of late been so interested in the possibility that the design of infrastructures might offer an alternative instrument for shaping cities, combining the intentionality and vision of the plan with the vibrancy and resilience characteristic of emergent growth.  Infrastructures, we’ve noticed, can be a stable element which mold and manipulate the various flowing processes of urbanization which produce cities: economic exchange, human migration, traffic patterns, informational flows, property values, hydrologies, waste streams, commutes, even wildlife ecologies.  Historically, governments and private developers have sought to harness this potential, whether by profiting from the sale of land along a new infrastructure or by supplementing existing infrastructure to reinforce growth and density in a locale (the initial growth of Los Angeles along privately-owned streetcar lines being one of the classic examples of the former sort of infrastructural generation).  But if, as the authors of “Blocking All Lanes” suggest (and, I think it is fair to say, The Infrastructural City suggests as a whole), opportunities to plan and design new infrastructural frameworks are likely to be extremely rare in mature infrastructural ecologies, should urbanists abandon their interest in infrastructure as an instrument for shaping the city?

There’s no doubt about urbanists and their interests in large scale infrastructural investments (see the various transit fantasy maps at Greater Greater Washington –  spilling out to reader submissions, for example – and even my own contribution here).  Many of these ideas are financial non-starters, but the overall ideal is not something to be completely dropped.  Instead, the focus should be on encouraging those infrastructures to evolve within this urban context, while also continuing to use the useful parts of the old infrastructure plans and ideas of capturing increased land value, etc.  Mammoth seems to agree:

I don’t think so […]

First, the rarity and scarcity of those opportunities does not mean that they should not be seized when they are realistically presented.  And when opportunities for the construction of new infrastructures within a mature city do occur, they are likely to appear in hack-like guises: concretely, like Atlanta’s Beltline, which utilizes a defunct rail right-of-way as the foundation for a new commuter rail line1, or Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System, which redirects the flow of cleaned wastewater in Orange County from ocean to aquifer; speculatively, like Velo-City’s Toronto bicycle metro (which, as it happens, has a less-speculative southern Californian counterpart, the Backbone Bikeway Network).  Go over, go under, re-deploy, tag along, piggyback.

…

[T]he key realization is that successful shifts in urban form will only happen when they are paired with successful alterations of the infrastructures, systems, and flows that generate those forms.  Attempts to construct a new vision for the city that fail to grapple with the underlying systems that, like traffic, constitute and produce the city will ultimately either be ineffective or collapse catastrophically.

Instead of using the hack to replace the era of infrastructure, hacking instead is the method to implement these infrastructural changes.  In the comments, faslanyc likens the hack (as opposed to the plan) to the tactic (as opposed to the strategy) – tactical urbanism:

by the way, i like your reading of this chapter and think that it is basically what the nyc dot is doing with a lot of their bike lane/pedestrian plaza initiatives. A while ago I likened it to tactics and strategies, certainly they are not mutually exclusive, though in practice they aren’t usually working in concert.

Reconfiguring extant street space for new and re-prioritized uses is a good example, with bike lanes and NYC’s ‘temporary’ pedestrian plazas representing the lower end of the spectrum in terms of investment.  I’d argue that streetcars in DC (when compared against the costs for new Metro lines) represent another level of investment.  Even large scale investments, such as the Federal stimulus money for High Speed Rail involves a hack approach – key investments in grade separation, signaling, and other small moves to offer incremental improvements rather than wholesale development of TGV-style trains from the onset.  Federal grant programs such as TIGER tend to focus on these kinds of investments, as well.

Large scale investments are still crucial to our urban systems, but as Mammoth notes, opportunities to capitalize on them will be both rare and scarce.

Infrastructural and industrial spaces

CC image from nathansnider

CC image from nathansnider

The Infrastructural City – Something I’m eagerly anticipating is a sort of on-line book club discussion of the infrastructural city, spearheaded by mammoth.

Over the course of the next several months, mammoth will be coordinating an online discussion of The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles (edited by Kazys Varnelis and published last year by Actar), as an experiment in the cooperative reading and discussion of a text.

As Varnelis explains in the introduction to The Infrastructural City, Los Angeles is perhaps the American city most fully indebted to infrastructure for its existence and survival:

“If the West was dominated by the theology of infrastructure, Los Angeles was its Rome. Cobbled together out of swamp, floodplain, desert, and mountains, short of water and painfully dependent on far-away resources to survive, Los Angeles is sited on inhospitable terrain, located where the continent runs out of land. No city should be here. Its ecological footprint greater than the expansive state it resides in, Los Angeles exists by the grace of infrastructure, a life-support system that has transformed this wasteland into the second largest metropolis in the country. Nor was this lost on Angelenos. They understood that their city’s growth depended on infrastructure and celebrated that fact. After all, what other city would name its most romantic road after a water-services engineer?”

Yet despite that history and the continued role of infrastructures such as the Alameda Trench and the Pacific Intertie in shaping the physical, social, and economic form of Los Angeles, the city has also developed an extraordinary resistance to the planning of new infrastructures.  A myriad of factors, including ferocious NIMBYism and empty state coffers, make it increasingly difficult to implement new infrastructures or expand existing systems.  Furthermore, the city’s infrastructures are increasingly inter-related and co-dependent, interwoven into what Varnelis terms networked ecologies — “hypercomplex systems produced by technology, laws, political pressures, disciplinary desires, environmental constraints and a myriad other pressures, tied together with feedback mechanisms.”

Free Association Design will also be participating, as will the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Speaking of CLUI – mammoth also points out CLUI’s spring newsletter, with some fascinating pieces on everything from ghost fleets and shipbreaking to urban oil extraction in Los Angeles.

Agglomerations – Paul Krugman has to give a talk in a couple weeks, and he found inspiration in northern New Jersey’s claim to be the embroidery capital of the world.

It’s an interesting history of individual initiative and cumulative causation — the same kind of story now being played out all across the world, especially in China. I still love economic geography.

Never Stop the Line – last weekend’s edition of This American Life featured the fascinating tale of NUMMI – a join GM-Toyota auto plant in Fremont, CA.  Toyota showed GM all their secrets to making high quality cars – lessons that GM couldn’t easily translate to other plants.

A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: how it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn’t learn the lessons – until it was too late.

Given GM’s current status and Toyota’s recent recall issues (many of which are attributed to growing too fast to control quality), it’s a fascinating tale for anyone interested in American industry and manufacturing.