Tag Archives: Transit

Towards a DC S-Bahn

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:

Amtrak’s HSR vision and the SE HSR corridor
Amtrak’s NEC master plan
Virginia’s desire for expanded rail service

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.

Wayfinding challenges for WMATA’s Rush Plus

WMATA’s recent service change, branded as Rush Plus (probably over-promising things just a bit as “rush hour reinvented”), involved deviating from Metro’s fairly straightforward delineation of lines and services via color. Metro’s increasingly complicated service pattern is getting to the point of requiring a similarly robust nomenclature for services.

When a rider speaks of the Red Line, they refer not just to a set of tracks but also the service that operates on them. Even this wasn’t perfect, as many Red Line trains wouldn’t operate for the full line – they would short-turn at Grosvenor or Silver Spring. GGW’s Metro Map contest identified each of the separate services Metro regularly runs, counting ten current services, plus the future Silver Line. Ten services is obviously more than the five colors on Metro’s map.

More problematic is the fact that color and line terminus are no longer paired. Yellow line trains can terminate at both Franconia-Springfield and Huntington; Orange line trains can terminate at both Largo and New Carrollton.

When devising a new map to show these service changes and to prepare for the introduction of the Silver Line, Metro opted to keep the map (and service nomenclature) that riders know well the same. However, the increasingly complex service pattern demands nomenclature to match.

WMATA’s move towards using colored bullets to help identify train services helps:

However, those bullets still only identify the all-day services, not the ‘Rush Plus’ services. WMATA’s in-station signage uses something else:

YL Rush Only service bullet, GR bullet. CC image from justgrimes.

The striping within the bullet matches the pattern for such services on Metro’s new map, but it just doesn’t read well on in-station signage:

Rush Plus signage at Gallery Place-Chinatown. Photo by author.

From afar (or in the above case, just standing at the platform), you can’t tell the difference between the rush-only YL bullet and the regular service YL bullet. Which means that the bullet isn’t useful for wayfinding if the rider still needs to focus on their terminal destination. A different rush-only YL bullet adds nothing.

One potential solution would be to take a lesson from a system that has lots of different services, operating on different lines (both are distinct concepts) – New York. Differentiation among similarly routed services can be accomplished via graphical means.

For some rush-only, peak-direction-only services, New York’s diamond bullets might work as an example for Metro’s rush-only services. Regular Orange Line trains [identified as (OR) in shorthand] would go to New Carrollton, while rush-only trains [identified with a diamond <OR> bullet] would go to Largo.

This wouldn’t solve all of Metro’s service naming challenges – the fact that some rush-only services bring new service to places (like more trains to Largo) while other services do not (how most Yellow trains at the peak end at Mount Vernon Square, not the ‘regular’ listed terminus of Fort Totten) and that some service patterns are not rush-only (short-turning trains on the Red Line at Grosvenor and Silver Spring) makes a simple switch difficult. Still, there’s a need to change.

This isn’t the first time this issue has popped up, and so long as Metro’s services are getting more (and not less) complex, it won’t be going away anytime soon.

Streetcar lessons from France

Paris T3 - image from wikipedia - note the seven-segment vehicle, dedicated right of way, and grass tracks.

Last month, Yonah Freemark’s post on the rapid expansion of tramways in France caught my eye. These systems offer several key lessons for the streetcar projects popping up across the US, as well as here in DC. The thinking is to make the tram different from just a streetcar – a transit option that isn’t much different from a bus in terms of geometry.

In many ways, this is about further blurring the already fuzzy distinction between light rail and a streetcar.

Some key takeways:

Give transit the edge: For most cases, this would mean putting transit in a dedicated right of way. Taking advantage of the urban design elements with grass tracks is nice, but the key element is the dedicated right of way to speed operations and increase capacity (call it mostly Jarrett Walker’s ‘Class B’ right of way). Leaving an expensive investment to slog along in traffic like the bus would isn’t giving that investment the fullest chance to succeed.

One commenter notes the explicit trade-off:

US so-called light rail is more like a cheap suburban railway, with near absolute segregation, needing large compulsory purchases – again not endearing them to householders or shopkeepers. San Diego had one of the cheapest build costs, but even so had to pay $18 Million for the route – an old railway.

France seems to have decided, rather than buy up property, remove the cars which clutter up the street and replace by a tramway which more than doubles the street passenger throughput. A much better way of doing things.

Take advantage of capacity: One of rail’s clear geometric advantages over bus is capacity. The newer tramways in France take advantage of this with longer vehicles than the streetcars currently in service in the US. As an example, the T3 line in Paris makes use of 7-segment Alstom Citadis 402 trams, measuring in at approximately 140 feet long – more than doubling the per-vehicle capacity of the vehicles in use in Portland and Seattle.

Standardization saves money: These new tramways are, for the most part, fairly standardized in both construction and in rolling stock, allowing for substantial cost savings. Many of the vehicles feature modular construction, both adding flexibility while maintaining standardization and making procurement of replacement parts easier. Standardization doesn’t mean a similar look, however – customize-able front ends allow each city to personalize the look and feel of their trams.

Go big or go home: Well, sort of. Scale matters, both in producing a project large enough to be a successful link in the network and big enough to achieve some economies of scale. The wiki graphic shows the scale of the tramway network in and around Paris alone:

Building at scale (and with a predictable pattern of expansion and reinvestment) helps control costs.

Moving US systems to this kind of standard could be seen in one of two ways: either in terms of removing a great deal of the over-engineering of US light rail systems, or in terms of increasing the standards of US Streetcar systems. Given the length of some of DC’s proposed streetcar lines, offering this kind of advantage to transit would be a sure-fire way to give these investments every chance to succeed not just as economic development projects, but as transportation projects as well.

Driverless cars don’t change geometry

Via the Streetsblog Network, I came across this Salon piece from Michael Lind praising our future driverless car overlords. Angie Schmidt at Streetsblog did a nice job to take down some of Lind’s loaded language, particularly the bits about “rigging markets” (which rings just as hollow as the cries about “social engineering” – as Timothy Lee notes, there’s no such thing as an intervention-free infrastructure policy).

Those issues aside, the biggest thing that Lind misses isn’t about technology at all – but rather about geometry, land use, and the relationship between transportation and the built environment. Lind writes:

As the white windmills fade from the picture of the future, so do the bullet trains speeding past them. Even before the end of President Obama’s first four years, unrealistic fantasies about high-speed passenger rail had collapsed. Federal funding for high-speed rail demonstration projects has been minuscule and symbolic. State and local governments continue to conclude that the costs of high-speed passenger rail outweigh the alleged benefits.

In the longer run, robocars may be fatal for fixed-rail transportation, at least for passengers rather than freight. Google has been test driving self-driving cars in California and Nevada has become the first state to legalize driverless vehicles. No doubt it will take several decades for safety issues and legal arrangements to be worked out. But high-speed trains might find competition in high-speed convoys of robot cars on smart highways, allowed higher speeds once human error has been eliminated. And the price advantage of subway tickets over taxi fares in cities may vanish, when the taxis drive themselves. Point-to-point travel, within cities or between them, is inherently more convenient than train or subway journeys which require changing modes of transit in the course of a journey. Thanks to robocars, much cheaper point-to-point travel everywhere may eventually be cheap enough to relegate light rail and inter-city rail to the museum, along with the horse-drawn omnibus and the trans-atlantic blimp.

Paraphrasing Jarrett Walker (aside: his recently published book is an excellent read), technology does not change geometry. A driverless car is still a car, the geometry that governs the car is the same regardless of who (or what) is at the controls. Despite predictions about how this technology could change everything (see a whole series of GGW posts), I find the possibility for change to be marginal. Driverless Johnny Cabs, Total Recall-style might decrease the cost of providing taxi service, but that won’t fundamentally change the inherent capacity limitations of taxis compared against a subway system.

The choice of the taxi as a demonstration for the technology is interesting. Most taxis operate in big cities, and big cities tend to be dense. Density helps support high levels of transit service and ensures that lots of potential trip destinations are easily reached by foot or by transit, thereby diminishing the market for these automated taxis. Cars, regardless of who’s driving, don’t have an advantage in point to point travel over pedestrians, transit, or other modes in cities.

The other point Lind makes is in investment priorities for government-funded infrastructure (hence the earlier comment about “rigging markets”). Lind seems to view the built environment as static, rather than an evolving system that changes in concordance with the changes to the transportation infrastructure. New York’s subways fueled its dense development, and that density in turn provides the market for high capacity rapid transit. Given growing populations and constantly changing cityscapes, these infrastructure investments in transit are step along the process of letting out cities continue to grow.

(semi-related sidebar on growth patterns: check out this article in Scientific American on the patterns of growth among subway networks around the world. The authors concluded ” that the geometries of large subway networks are guided by simple, universal rules.” – reminiscent of Geoffrey West et al)

More thoughts on density, procedure, and neighborhood opposition

Downtown Seattle. Photo by author.

On land use procedure:

In the same line as my previous post about procedural hurdles to adding density, a similar discussion is happening in Seattle. Within the larger realm of procedural hurdles, this focus picks up on the idea of a ‘density’ party. While party organization is a part of the larger systemic issue, it does not address the true procedural issues ow how decisions on density are made.

On the impacts of density:

Matthew Kahn visits dense New York, sees some trash on the sidewalk. David Owen often talks and writes about urban places being counter-intuitively green, and this is a perfect example. New Yorkers end up producing less trash per capita than average Americans, but you wouldn’t get that impression from walking the streets.

Within this counter-intuitive reality is the seed of NIMBY opposition. The things that opponents of dense, infill development often come back to tangential impacts such as parking, traffic, trash, noise, etc. The logical response is to address each of those impacts, rather than put a stop to (or severely limit) development.

One of the items in these battles that is front and center is financial interest – yet it’s the developers that are characterized as greedy for acting in their interest, while neighboring homeowners acting in their own financial interests are pure. Seattle again provides an example of this discussion.

On the challenges of infill:

Payton Chung highlights several promising development projects in DC. One, the group buyout offer of an old condo along 14th St shows the challenges in assembling properties in a fractured ownership environment. Payton notes:

The buildings’ condo ownership structure makes redevelopment (in the absence of eminent domain) incredibly difficult. As Lydia DePillis writes, “each of the two separate condo associations would have to vote unanimously to dissolve themselves. Obviously, this would have been much easier with a single owner (whether a rental building or even a co-op, where only a majority of shares can dissolve the association), but condos’ recent proliferation as a way of making homeownership more attainable has the unintended consequence of hyper-fragmenting land ownership.

This reminds me of something impressed upon me in grad school: various decisions of urban form are incredibly sticky. Once roads are laid out, they are very hard to change. Residential land uses in particular are remarkably resilient, for essentially this same reason.

On implications for transit:

Alon Levy draws on Jane Jacobs’ distinction between micro and macro destinations. A macro destination is a large district or place (e.g. downtown), while a micro destination is a specific shop, store, or address. The implication is that transit-oriented places are spiky places:

It’s easy to just pronounce transit more suited to dense city centers than driving, but the situation is more complicated. Transit, too, thrives on good connections to microdestinations. It can’t serve employment that’s dense but evenly dispersed in a large area – people would need too many transfers, and the result would be service that’s on paper rapid and in reality too slow. Instead, it works best when all destinations are clustered together, in an area not many subway stations in radius.

While many of the contested transit-oriented developments aren’t on the terminal end (i.e. the work trip) of a such a destination, but rather the origin – the larger impact is the same. Transit networks have the centripetal force, while auto-oriented ones have a centrifugal force. Transit works best with density, density works best with transit – enabling the mitigation of those externalities that neighborhood opponents will harp on.

The most segregated cities in America

Salon.com has an interesting slideshow of the 10 most segregated cities in America. The data comes from the 2010 Census, and the methodology to determine the level of segregation is based on differences between census tracts:

We may think of segregation as a matter of ancient Southern history: lunch counter sit-ins, bus boycotts and Ku Klux Klan terrorism. But as the census numbers remind us, Northern cities have long had higher rates of segregation than in the South, where strict Jim Crow laws kept blacks closer to whites, but separate from them. Where you live has a big impact on the education you receive, the safety on your streets, and the social networks you can leverage.

The following is a list of the nation’s most segregated metropolitan areas of over 500,000 people. The rankings are based on a dissimilarity index, a measure used by social scientists to gauge residential segregation. It reflects the number of people from one race — in this case black or white — who would have to move for races to be evenly distributed across a certain area. A score of 1 indicates perfect integration while 100 signals complete segregation. The rankings were compiled by John Paul DeWitt of CensusScope.org and the University of Michigan’s Social Science Data Analysis Network.

Each of the 10 most segregated cities includes a narrative for the city. Several include observations on transportation and the linkages between land use and infrastructure.

# 10. Los Angeles

The L.A. riots of 1992, like the 1965 Watts riot, were sparked by police brutality, a steady concern in besieged neighborhoods like South Central. Nearly 20 years later, the jobless ghettos of black and Latino Los Angeles remain. Greater Los Angeles has been so big for so long — legion nodes connected by extensive highways — that it’s hard to say exactly what its borders are. Safe in their cars and behind their gates, most white people have gone back to not paying attention.

In short, transportation matters. Diversity without intermingling can be isolating.

# 2. New York

Ingrid Gould Ellen, an urban planning and public policy professor at New York University, says that New York City is somewhat more integrated than the data would suggest, because it is far denser than most cities. Since census tracts are made up by population, tracts in New York tend to be very small.

“What happens is that we’re not making apples to apples comparisons. The neighborhoods in Atlanta and Houston are 10 times the size of neighborhoods in New York City physically,” she says. “The census tracts are so much smaller, so you’re likely to cross over a number of census tracts every day.”

The daily commute of the average New Yorker also lessens racial isolation. Thanks to the dominance of public transit, intra-city travel tends to be a diverse experience.

New York, despite segregation, benefits from both density and transit.

# 1. Milwaukee

Nationwide, blacks have been concentrated in the inner city, far away from where new jobs are created. Yet the case of Milwaukee is extreme: 90 percent of the metro area’s black population lives in the city. Making matters worse, suburban whites are notably hostile to building any form of public transit to connect city people to suburban jobs, further exacerbating segregation’s ill effects.

If you’re wondering if this can somehow, some way, be blamed on union-busting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the answer is yes. Walker took the lead in a campaign against public transit to connect the suburbs to the city during his time as county executive. He thought the funds would be better spent on highways.

“There is virulent opposition in these exurban counties to any kind of regional transit system, particularly a regional rail system. There have been proposals over the years, but they’re always DOA,” says Levine. “Governor Walker’s big issue as state representative and county executive was ‘Over my dead body light rail,’ and he fought with Milwaukee’s mayor over funds for regional rail. He very much represents that suburban and exurban base.”

That map graphic says it all.

Frequency Mapping

Last week, Jarrett Walker had a great post illuminating the basic reasons for ‘frequency mapping,’ where a transit agency maps out transit routes that meet some threshold for frequent service (such as buses every 10 minutes, or 15 minutes, etc).

There are many degrees of frequency and span, but in general, most transit agencies’ service can be sorted into three categories of usefulness based on these variables:

The Frequent Network runs often enough that you don’t have to plan your trip around a timetable. That typically means every 15 minutes or better all day, but it needs to be more frequent than that where aiming to serve relatively short trips — as in the case of downtown shuttles for example. If you aren’t willing to plan your life around a bus schedule, you are interested only in the Frequent Network.

Infrequent All-day services are the rest of the service that runs all day. This network often relies on timed connections.

Peak-only service exists only during the peak period. It mostly takes the form of long commuter-express routes that add lots of complexity to a system map but represent very specialized services for limited markets.

These three categories are useful in such completely different ways that I would argue they are at least as fundamental as the three basic categories of urban road — freeway, arterial, and local — that virtually all street maps clearly distinguish.

We have some great examples of this in DC. The entirety of the Circulator network is, in essence, a Frequent Network. The Circulator aims for 10 minute headways, the routes are fairly simple and easy to understand, and thus people can look at the map and understand where the bus is and where it’s going.

WMATA’s bus map for DC, however, doesn’t make this distinction. While there is a extra color designation for Metro Extra service (meeting the Frequent Network threshold), the other color distinctions merely show which jurisdiction the bus route operates in.

The distinction between which services operate only in DC (in red) and those which cross into Maryland (green) isn’t really important for a rider. Furthermore, the overwhelming use of red for the DC routes makes it hard to follow those routes across the map, seeing where they turn and what streets they travel down.

Blue services with dashed lines, however, is indicative of MetroExtra (for some reason, a separate brand from Metro Express), and at least makes a effort at differentiation based on frequency – but that tends to get lost in the visual complexity of the overall map.

There’s a common phenomenon of ‘rail bias,’ (hat tip to The Overhead Wire) where riders will opt for riding a train rather than a bus. However, rail systems tend to have several key attributes that make them more attractive – the investment in the infrastructure both enables and requires a high frequency of service, and the route structure is almost always simple enough to convey in an easily-understood diagram or map.

The lesson from Jarrett’s post is that simple mapping based on frequency can help address some of the perceived shortcomings of buses. Even without addressing route structure, this is a relatively simple improvement in communication that helps riders a great deal.

Value capture & private transit financing

NoMA Development. CC image from bankbryan.

Jarrett Walker’s weekend links post directed me to this article in The Atlantic by Chris Leinberger, asking if we might return to the days when private interests invested in transit as a means to facilitate real estate development. Our own urban history is one of linked transportation and land use planning, accomplished through the market and real estate development:

How did the country afford that extensive rail system? Real-estate developers, sometimes aided by electric utilities, not only built the systems but paid rent to the cities for the rights-of-way.

These developers included Henry Huntington, who built the Pacific Electric in Los Angeles; Minnesota’s Thomas Lowry, who built Twin City Rapid Transit; and Senator Francis Newlands from Nevada, who built Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Railway up Connecticut Avenue from Dupont Circle in the 1890s. When Newlands got into the rail-transit business, he wasn’t drawn by the profit potential of streetcars. He was a real-estate developer, and he owned 1,700 acres between Dupont Circle and suburban Chevy Chase in Maryland, land served by his streetcar line. The Rock Creek Railway did not make any money, but it was essential to attracting buyers to Newlands’s housing developments. In essence, Newlands subsidized the railway with the profits from his land development. He and other developers of the time understood that transportation drives development—and that development has to subsidize transportation.

The result of these transportation and real estate investments were the now ubiquitous streetcar suburbs. Leinberger proposes to return to that model, where the value added to a given area of land from transit can be re-captured through some means and invested in the transportation network.

When the streetcar/real estate barons controlled the entire system, such value capture was merely an exercise in accounting. Additionally, the ease of developing greenfield sites on the rapidly expanding fringe of the city (Leinberger’s DC example of growth along Newlands’ Connecticut Ave rail line represents the first real urbanization of that space) makes things much simpler than dealing with already established urban environments.

With those key differences in mind, Jarrett throws a wet blanket over Leinberger’s nostalgia for the way things used to be. Rightly, Jarrett notes that we won’t be able to re-create the environment of those private real estate and transportation investments.

Nevertheless, Leinberger is talking about a broader concept – one of leveraging the value transit has and capturing that value as a means to finance the infrastructure itself. Jarrett’s follow-up on the subject concurs – the same basic concept of capturing that value is the core of the issue.

Leinberger cites a of local example, the New York Avenue Metro station and the subsequent development of the NoMA area:

How would the private funding of public transit work? Most states already have laws in place that allow local groups of voters to create “special-assessment districts,” in which neighborhood property owners can vote to fund an upgrade to infrastructure by charging themselves, say, a onetime assessment, or a higher property-tax rate for some number of years. If a majority of the property owners believe they would benefit from the improvement, all property owners in that district are obligated to help pay for it. These districts can vote to fund new transit as well (potentially, the transportation-financing agency could even receive a minority-ownership stake in the district’s private property in return for building new transit). In the late 1990s, property owners paid for a quarter of the cost of a new Metrorail station in D.C. using this approach; after the station opened, an office developer told me he believed his investment was being returned manyfold.

The idea of a transit or government agency owning a stake in real estate development is another interesting idea – Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation both operates the rail system and develops/manages real estate around stations. However, vesting this kind of authority in the government can be problematic, as mixing of eminent domain capabilities and the desire for private, transit-oriented real estate development can be a touchy subject, as some experience from Colorado shows.

Existing mechanisms for value capture, such as tax-increment financing (again, as Jarret notes) do work, but are limited. As one of the commenters at The Atlantic notes, Leinberger’s example of an infill Metro station only works because the value of such a station is that it provides a link to an existing, robust transit network. Such a mechanism wouldn’t work for starting a system from scratch.

The current battle over how to re-shape Tysons Corner is illustrative of many of the issues. In Tysons, many land owners have agreed to tax themselves in order to add transit. This works because they’ll be adding a linkage to Metro’s already robust and successful network. At the same time, the initial plans aimed to maximize the return on the transit investment by substantially upzoning the area and increasing density – but now some parties are getting cold feet.

The other piece that Leinberger raises (as well as several commenters on Jarrett’s post) is reforming the federal piece of transit financing to be more responsive and agile in partnership with private capital:

We could hasten the process by making a much-needed change in federal transportation law. The federal government typically provides 20 to 80 percent of the money for local transportation projects (with local and state governments paying the rest). Yet federal funding of projects that involve private partners is extremely rare—in large part because federally funded projects typically take years to approve, and private developers usually can’t tie up their capital waiting for the government wheels to turn. Over the past few years, private corporations and foundations in Detroit raised $125 million to help build a light-rail line, and have been working for some time to secure federal funds to complete the project. Fixing federal transportation law to expedite transit projects would allow faster development at lower public cost.

None of these mechanisms is perfect, but each will likely be a part of future transit financing discussions – value capture, tax-increment financing, public-private partnerships, upzoning, etc.

Enjoy the journey

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.

A day in the life of Metro

Metro’s definitely seen better days. The Washington Post had a lengthy piece in Sunday’s edition documenting the massive problems facing the system: aging infrastructure, missing leadership, a broken safety culture, amongst others. Metro’s been trimming the fat to balance budgets for a while, and it now looks like they’ve been cutting into the bone and impeding the system’s ability to function. WTOP notes that several internal and external candidates for the soon-to-be vacant General Manager position have turned it down.

At the same time, the Post managed to document the role the system plays in the daily lives of those living and working in DC.

At the same time, one of WMATA’s new Federally-appointed board members, Marcel Acosta, is asking for input from riders over at Greater Greater Washington. In looking at some of the responses in the comments, you can’t help but notice people speaking out about how Metro enables car-free lifestyles; how crucial good transit service is to urban life.

City Block

a work in progress…