Category Archives: bicycling biotically

Shorts: Climate Ride, shouting, Reston, Toronto, brew boom

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Ah, 20° = shorts weather! (Celsius, of course.)

1. Speaking of great biking, I’ll be riding 300+ miles, from New York to Washington, as part of the Climate Ride in May.

Sponsor my ride and you’ll give to a host of organizations working to heal the earth — from global and national environmental organizations down to local bike advocates — by sponsoring me for the 2012 NYC-DC Climate Ride.
Your sponsorship will make a difference globally and locally: funds will underwrite bike/walk advocacy in DC, Chicago, and NYC, as well as the Alliance for Biking & Walking nationally, plus the great environmental news service Grist and the international agitators at 350.org. Upon arriving at the Capitol, I’ll be taking the message to NC’s Senators. (That covers most of where my friends live.) Thanks, all!

2. “PowerPoint presentations were no match tonight for good old-fashioned chanting” when anti-transit hacks were paid to speak in Honolulu recently. Oahu’s dense corridors (of sprawl) are uniquely suited to transit:
Fingers of sprawl

3. For a class project, I recently spent a day wandering around old and new Reston, Virginia: Lake Anne and Reston Town Center. The photos are here.

4. See 25km of streetcar urbanism — along Toronto’s famed 501 Queen Street line — in 1 minute of video Note the overwhelmingly low-rise densities (and it pretty much goes through the middle of “downtown”) but the very high mixed uses throughout.

5. No, it’s not just you; the number of craft breweries is growing exponentially. Per the Brewers Association:
craft breweries in USA

Promising developments

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Five new developments around town that will hopefully set new standards for welcoming pedestrians and cyclists:

1. Giant apartment REIT Archstone will outfit its new NoMa tower with a DIY bike maintenance facility and an outdoor movie screen. Evidently, these are the amenities that today’s luxury apartment renters want, and the REIT shareholders are going to give it to ’em.

2. A few blocks north, a “Metropolitan Branch Trail Atrium” will feature “an automatic bike pump for maintenance; a water fountain; a refreshment area with vending machines, tables and chairs; indoor bike parking and a natural ventilation system… stairs will have a bike trough” to encourage cycling to work from the elevated Met Branch Trail (which shares said Branch with the Metro and the Amtrak/MARC Northeast Corridor trains) to the Washington Gateway office complex.

Speaking of “NoMa,” everyone should quit complaining about the name. It’s not derivative of “SoHo,” and anyone who claims that obviously suffers from a goodly dose of NYC provincialism; SoHo itself was copied from Soho in London. Besides, no one seem to have no trouble with NoVa, at least written. Granted, I would have preferred a name like Union Quarter or Union Yards to reference its location behind Union Station, but maybe that would’ve kiboshed its appeal to Republican firms. Anyhow, elsewhere in northeast DC:

3. Over in Brookland, the new Bozzuto-Abdo “college town” connecting Catholic University down to the Metro will face the station with an “Arts Walk” pedestrian plaza lined with ground floor studios and convenience retail. The ground floor uses are flexible enough to work regardless of the level of foot traffic, and can evolve as the site develops.

The combination sounds like Liberties Walk in Philadelphia, whose scale and merchandising I’ve admired before:
west block
The emphasis on artisans also sounds like some of the “alleys” in LA’s Old Chinatown.

4. Speaking of pedestrian passages, a proposed Georgetown development would bring secondary retail entrances around to a 10′ wide alley, a la Cady’s Alley between M St and the C&O Canal. Developer Anthony Lanier from EastBanc: “We believe that today’s alleys can be tomorrow’s courtyards, shopping streets, or accesses.” (More on alleys, including a short history of DC coach houses’ removal and potential renaissance.)

5. Annals of ambitious private-sector redevelopment attempts: a developer has offered to buy out a full block of 1970s townhouses — purchased by the tenants as condos in 1998 — along 14th St near Logan Circle. The three-story townhouses now stick out as a relic along increasingly mid-rise, commercial 14th Street. (Heck, just the parking lots could be worth a lot if developed in situ.)

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.

That challenge almost makes redeveloping a single-family subdivision, as at MetroWest at the Vienna Metro station, look like a picnic by comparison; in a single-family subdivision, a single hold-out can just be built around rather than holding up the entire process. Add into that contentiousness the added elements of class struggle and, inevitably, race — most of the current owners are moderate-income families of color, with some having lived there for a generation — and, well, I can’t imagine that the condo board meetings go very smoothly.

P.S. Post #1000!

Cool ideas from TRB (1)

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[Obviously, I heard a lot of interesting ideas at TRB, so I’ll try to let them speak for themselves with some brief paper excerpts.]

What would happen if the suburbs walked & biked as much as the cities did? How much healthier would retrofitting suburbia make suburbanites?

For the scenario with the highest levels of physical activity (ATC), I-THIM predicted a 15% reduction in disease burden due to cardiovascular diseases and diabetes and approximately 5% reductions each for breast cancer, colon cancer, dementia, and depression. Risk reduction of this magnitude would rank among the most notable public health achievements in the modern era, and reduce the estimated $34 billion in California annual costs from cardiovascular disease and other chronic conditions such as obesity.

In the most ambitious active transport scenario, this potential harm [from road traffic injuries] is approximately 14% of the benefit from physical activity. [i.e., benefits outweigh harm by 7X]

The other principal finding is that wide scale adoption of active transport could have as large an impact on carbon reduction as strategies based on… reengineering automobiles and fuels.

From the California Department of Public Health, “Health Co-Benefits and Transportation-Related Reductions in Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Bay Area” by Neil Maizlish with James Woodcock, Sean Co, Bart Ostro, Amir Fanai, and David Fairley.

Late November shorts

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Indeed, it hit 70F today, so I did indeed wear shorts!

1. mqVibe looks interesting: it rates neighborhoods “in terms of edginess, residential, burbiness (i.e., how many chain businesses dominate the blocks), and other dimensions,” according to John Hendel in TBD. The rankings of local neighborhoods appear about right; will have to check out other cities’ rankings to see how it differs vs. Walk Score.

2. Old news, but since Fox News has instituted a rule stating that any discussion of global warming should be preceded by a “discussion of the debate,” I suggest another new rule: any report about radio waves (like those involving mobile phones) must also include a segment where a man in a tin foil hat presents the debate about whether such devices are actually government mind control waves. Hey, if you’re going to distort the science…

3. Street enclosure ratios make all the difference in the world — they could make even the worst excesses of mini-mall LA avenues look human scale. (Original: David Yoon)

4. “[J]ust about every one is complaining about bikes and stop signs. But the fact of the matter is, those stop signs are there to regulate speed, not right of way; two way stops actually do a better job of that. And bikes have a hard time beating the speed limit.” – Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger. Indeed, the 4-way stop is actually a very poor way of regulating right of way. In many cases, it’s difficult to tell who has the right of way, since “first to approach the intersection” and “first to get to the stop bar” are often different.

October shorts

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It’s no longer shorts weather, but quick links endure!

1. Capital Bikeshare just turned one, and surprisingly has doubled its initial ridership projections and is currently running an operating surplus. [via GGW/WashCycle]

2. Economists like Ed Glaeser (and Ryan Avent, although I haven’t read his new treatise; reviewed by Rob Pitingolo in GGW and Lydia in CityPaper) often make the mistake of overly simplifying how housing markets work. Instead, numerous other important factors complicate matters, including:
– as Rob points out, housing is a bundle of goods whose utilities vary for different audiences
– housing construction can induce demand, particularly by adding amenities to a neighborhood
– housing construction can also remove amenities from a neighborhood, like a low-rise scale, thus changing other intangibles included in that bundle of goods
– construction costs don’t increase linearly; rather, costs jump at certain inflection points, like between low- and mid-rise
– housing and real estate in general are imperfect markets, since land is not a replicable commodity
– the substantial lag time for housing construction, even in less regulated markets, almost guarantees that supply will miss demand peaks

Pro-active planning remains the best and most time-honored way of pre-empting NIMBYs. Get the neighborhood to buy-in to neighborhood change early on, and then they won’t be surprised and upset when it happens.

3. Very interesting to see (via Dan Mihalopoulos/CNC) that Inspector General Joseph Ferguson has put a lot of sacred cows on the table for increasing revenue in Chicago — particularly several implicit subsidies to drivers. A downtown congestion charge, tolls on Lake Shore Drive, a commuter income tax, privatized parking enforcement, higher water/sewer fees, and higher garbage collection fees all would substantially impact suburbanites, single-family homeowners, and drivers.

4. How important are street enclosure ratios? As this gallery of reconstructed L.A. traffic sewers shows, they’re so important that almost nothing else matters if you get them right. (Photo-illustrations by David Yoon.) Back when I was reading comments on LEED-ND 1.0, a lot of complaints centered on the street enclosure requirement; I think that thinking about such urban design factors is just foreign to the architects & engineers who typically do LEED submittals. Yet it’s absolutely fundamental to defining urban rooms.

Hmm? links

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1. Is WaPo Style really writing about “hipster glasses”? [Original article by Ned Martel.] I had a bear of a time with my most recent glasses purchase, ultimately reverting to special ordering a pair of frames that I’d seen a while back in Chicago. They’re a tad larger than my last pair, with which I was explicitly rejecting the aviator-sized frames that were then just coming into vogue. I’ve never liked that style: the outside corners hide the cheekbones and magnify any under-eye puffiness.

Glad to hear that “the nation’s public wonks[‘] glasses are getting smaller and smarter,” although as long as I’ve known MSNBC’s foxy Chris Hayes, he’s always worn little, squarish glasses. (Hopefully, this is the only article which compares him to Eric Cantor and Milhouse.)

2. “Flood insurance is the federal government’s second-largest fiscal liability after social security,” writes Jay Gulledge for Pew Climate. Unfortunately for the Know-Nothings, that particular ledger item will not magically decline anytime soon.

3. Speaking of the Know-Nothings, the Skeptical Teacher decries how their maddening contempt for science continues to spill into ever more policy matters. In particular, unverified anecdotes appear to be the basis of public health policy.

4. Hmm! A new idea for a DC bicycle tour, maybe incorporating interpretive performance art: famed local sex scandals. I’d add Marion Barry’s hotel room(s), the 14th St whore march, and infamous bygone strip clubs.

A caution for bike sharing in NYC

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The Bixi bike share system chosen by NYCDOT is a proven platform that addresses a lot of concerns that New Yorkers might have about bike sharing. Thefts have been low in recent Bixi installations; 0.0002% of bikes checked out in London over the first year never returned. The footprint of the system is pretty well centralized, which will ensure that plenty of daily users are around to foot the bill.

My principal concern with launching bicycle sharing in NYC is that it will be very difficult to keep the bikes/spaces balanced, the biggest operational problem that’s emerged in urban bicycle sharing. Alta has acknowledged its challenge in DC and it’s been a leading complaint in London (watch the striking daily inflow/outflow here); so far, these are the two biggest CBDs that have bike sharing. The operational environment for rebalancing in all other bike-share cities is far simpler than in Manhattan.

Bike share works best in areas of medium-high density and very high mixed-use, since it requires that a large number of people circulate bikes around the system, around the clock. That way, the bikes naturally circulate themselves without much intervention. Many European and Asian cities are organized in a way that’s fairly conducive to bike sharing. Their density curves are not that steep, and many neighborhoods have 18- or 24-hour street life. Moving a lot of people to a single point — i.e., very high density, single-use concentrations, is a job most efficiently done with transit whether that’s shuttle buses for sports stadiums or rail feeding a CBD. The capacity numbers speak or themselves: at any given moment, ~1200 people can use Capital Bikeshare, while Washington Metrorail runs enough trains at peak to move 153,000 people at once.

Even in London, the City is overwhelmingly mid-rise, and high-rise, office-heavy Canary Wharf is outside the bike share footprint. North American bike sharing programs so far are either in comparatively small cities (Minneapolis, Denver, a fraction of Toronto) or in cities with an exceptionally “European-style” mid-rise and/or mixed-use core (Washington, Montreal, that fraction of Toronto).

A bike share system attempting to serve Manhattan’s highly centralized employment density will be quite difficult to manage. DC and London both struggle with office cores twice the size of Montreal’s; NYC has a CBD that is seven times as large. A vast number of docks will be demanded within the office cores, where street space is already at a steep premium. Rebalancing vehicles will not be able to easily cycle bikes amidst streets already clogged with delivery vehicles. Without an ability to rebalance bikes, it will be difficult to find bikes in Brooklyn, or open docks in Midtown, during the day. Paying customers who are thus kept out of the system will get very upset.

What might work? Unfortunately, we can’t know which sites will have a fairly balanced flow of coming and going throughout the day, but that could be inferred based on observation of adjacent land uses. A high-density or vertical racking solution like the (as yet theoretical — I’ve only seen a mock-up) Bike Dispenser might come in handy for swallowing, or ejecting, vast quantities of identical bike-share bikes at key locations like rail terminals.

A class that I’m in this semester will investigate bike share rebalancing worldwide; keep an eye on the class blog for updates and the final report.

I recently got to ride with Tom Bertulis on Boston’s “Hubway”; he pointed to Seattle’s helmet law (among the few for adult cyclists in North America) as a serious impediment to introducing bike sharing there. I have to admit that although I wear a helmet 99% of the time with my own bike — since I keep helmets near my bikes and typically plan such trips — I often neglect to when riding bike share. Tom Fucoloro from Seattle Bike Blog notes bike share’s exemplary safety record, and (as Tom B. also did) Mexico City’s repeal of its helmet law in favor of bike sharing, to argue for at least modifying Seattle’s law.

Turn one traffic lane into four, instantly!

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Since driving is in decline, perhaps removing car lanes for bike lanes could free up room on space-constrained urban streets. How much more traffic could these streets serve? In spite of grumblings to the contrary, bike lanes are much more efficient at moving vehicles than traffic sewers are. (Remember that bikes are vehicles, too.) Consider first that a single road lane can typically move at most 1,000-2,000 cars per hour — the upper end for expressways and the lower end for arterials. (Local streets move fewer than 1,000.)

Removing one car lane can create enough space for two buffered bike lanes, or for one bidirectional cycletrack. Each of those lanes, in turn, could easily move almost twice as many vehicles as each car lane:

[T]he saturation flow for a single 1-m (3.3 ft) to 1.2-m (4-ft) bicycle lane appears to be between 1,500 and 5,000 bicycles/hr with a majority of the observations falling between 2,000 and 3,500 bicycles/hr. (D. P. Allen, N. Rouphail, J. Hummer, J. Milazzo, TRR 1636)

In other words, converting one lane to a cycletrack can quadruple the capacity of that lane of traffic. It’s like adding three lanes of traffic, just with some paint. The inverse of that statement: even if the lane “looks” 75% less busy than the old lane of traffic, it’s still moving about as many vehicles and just about as many people (since average car occupancy is ~1.25).

Shorts

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1. No, we cyclists don’t approve of how stupid riding, either:

The above video adheres to the bicycle messenger video style manual, which mandates that any video must include messengers talking about how dangerous their job is while simultaneously including footage of them doing their job in the most idiotically dangerous way possible…. I’d like to see a video from the IBEW in which electricians talk about how dangerous their job is, intercut with footage of them randomly stabbing at wall outlets with forks. – BSNYC

2. On the eve of the government shutdown:

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) drew cheers by saying, “If liberals in the Senate would rather play political games and shut down the government instead of making a small down payment on fiscal discipline and reform, I say, ‘Shut it down.’” – reported by John Avlon, Daily Beast

I’d like to see these Ayn Rand-worshipping teabagger extremists survive a true government shutdown. End Social Security and Medicare payments, garrison the forts, abandon the airports and ports and border crossings, freeze defense contractors’ payments, stand down the poultry inspectors, turn off MedLine, rope off the Interstates. See how your constituents feel after a few days of living in the Stone Age. Those taxes we pay are (h/t Oliver Wendell Holmes) the price of civilization, and without them we’ll descend into anarchy — which ain’t pretty.

3. David Roberts says of a nifty LLNL flowchart of America’s energy consumption: “Holy sh*t we waste a lot of energy! Well over half of the raw energy that enters our economy goes to waste.” Less than 1/3 of the fuel going into electric plants actually ends up as used energy; generator losses and line loss accounts for much of the rest. (Smart grids and better transmission lines should go a ways to solving that.) Yet the huge waste is in transportation: just as much energy is wasted in transportation as is provided by coal. Only 1/4 of the energy going into the transportation sector actually gets used. Increasing fuel economy will surely help matters a great deal, but surely a great deal of that inefficiency stems from America’s overreliance on the 20%-efficiency internal combustion engine for almost all of its transportation needs.

4. DCentric’s Elahe Izadi reveals how (in DC as in Chicago, although less dramatically since gentrification led to net gains in DC vs. net losses in Chicago) suburbanization rather than gentrification actually explains much of the decline in both cities’ Black populations.

Yesterday we spoke with demographer Roderick J. Harrison, a senior fellow at the Joint Center and a Howard University associate professor, to get a better understanding of the city’s shifting demographics. He framed D.C.’s loss of 39,000 black residents in this light: gentrification wasn’t the major driving force in Wards 7 and 8, where population losses were the greatest. Rather, it was by-and-large classic suburbanization in which people left the city’s poorest wards “that are often considered the worst neighborhoods,” Harrison said.

“The force behind it probably is seen as a positive force. These are people who are some way or another, they are upwardly mobile, they are improving their housing and neighborhood conditions, they are making personal decisions that they see, on the whole, as an improvement,” he said.

5. I’ve previously despaired over whether Continental Airlines’ marketing strategy might win out over United Airlines’ — and yes, it seems that CO’s Kaplan Thaler is behind the new company’s branding. As Lewis Lazare wrote in the Sun-Times:

A golden age in the annals of airline advertising officially ended Tuesday when the merged United Airlines unveiled its first ad campaign from Kaplan Thaler/New York ad agency… does away with the elegant, illustration-centric print ads and television commercials that for the past four years were a hallmark of the United advertising created by the Minneapolis boutique shop Barrie, D’Rozario Murphy. Those print ads and story-driven commercials were always smart and sophisticated — the finest examples of airline advertising since the landmark ‘World’s Favorite Airline’ campaigns for British Airways from Saatchi & Saatchi/London in the late 1980’s… United’s ads from BDM helped elevate the carrier’s image even as the airline was struggling to right itself after a difficult bankruptcy filing… The new United advertising just now breaking incorporates much of the imagery associated with previous Continental campaigns, which have been handled for many years by Kaplan Thaler. It is certainly a functional campaign, if not hugely creative.

However, what worked for Continental might not work for the new United: the two competed in very different market spaces. Continental faced very little competition for its “hub captive” travelers, and has been able to profit immensely from that. That’s highlighted in Nate Silver’s recent analysis of airports with “unfair fares.” Legacy Continental’s hubs are , , and #6 on his list of most overpriced large airports, with megahubs IAH and EWR taking the top slots. Of United’s hubs, IAD and ORD are and , but United’s other three hubs are apparently at least fairly priced — and United has at times been to American at ORD.

Five quotables

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1. My comment on Felix Salmon’s rebuttal to John Cassidy in the New Yorker on bike lanes, echoing some previous comments about externalities and vicious/virtuous cycles in transportation:

Cars are unique among all common modes of *urban* transportation in that their sheer size — particularly in cities, which by definition have limited, expensive ground area for a large population to share — leads to a competitive, vicious circle of congestion when they’re overused. When more people drive, congestion gets worse for everyone, potentially destroying the positive economic effects of agglomeration, and as such the state has a vested interest in reducing congestion by discouraging driving.

Cycling, walking, and transit use are so much more space-efficient that, at typical urban densities, they are subject to a cooperative, virtuous circle of congestion that reinforces the positive externalities of urban agglomeration. More cyclists make for safer cycling conditions [P.L. Jacobsen, Inj Prev 2003;9:205-209], more foot traffic leads to lower crime rates, more transit riders creates demand for more frequent service. Looked at another way, each of these modes is subject to much higher thresholds where the virtuous circle turns vicious. The space occupied by three cars can easily fit 30 bicycles, one bus with 70 passengers, or hundreds of pedestrians.

Drivers tend to blindly bring their competitive outlook to all urban transportation, which is why Cassidy and others end up with such inane arguments.

[Commenter Olaf Storbeck puts it this way: “parking is a private good which the free market can easily provide… To a certain degree bike lanes are public goods,” since they are non-exclusive and non-excludable.]

2. Nick Kristof remarks on how Japan’s remarkable social solidarity helps it cope in times of trial:

Uncomplaining, collective resilience is steeped into the Japanese soul. We sent our eldest son to Japanese school briefly, and I’ll never forget seeing all the little kids having to go to school in shorts even in the dead of winter. The idea was that it built character. I thought it just gave kids colds. But it was one more effort to instill “gaman.” And it’s “gaman” that helped Japan recovered from World War II and tolerated the “lost decade” after the bubble economy burst in about 1990. Indeed, it might be better if Japanese complained a bit more – perhaps then their politicians would be more responsive… [after the Kobe earthquake] Japan’s social fabric never tore. Barely even creased.

Timothy Egan after a California earthquake last year, with a reminder that mountains and water, that most scenic of landscape combinations, erase one another, and the two cannot coexist peacefully:

“It is precisely because of these earthquakes that the most nervy ground is also the most sublime. The mountains, the deep harbors, the valleys and vistas we love are products of the same turbulence that can deal a mortal blow to a city.”

3. “Upski” now sounds like a Brookings metropolitan white paper.

4. Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of car site Edmunds, raises the idea that the certainty of a “gas price stabilizer” could be almost as good as a federal loan guarantee — and thus better smooth out the ups & downs of car market:

Taxing gas an additional $0.15 is a missed opportunity. We have seen that to move demand, gas prices need to climb much higher. Raising the price by $2 per gallon seems about right.

5. Select quotes from the 2011 issue of Emerging Trends:

For the first time since the early 1950s, no regional malls are under construction in the United States. “That’s stunning!”

[S]chools will con- tinue to be drivers in parent decisions of where to raise families. “But where are schools heading?” Will it matter as much where you are in the future? Will kids join classes from remote locations…? “It won’t necessarily be the same.” Some cities make strides in improving public schools and providing charter-school alternatives, while certain suburban districts falter under shrinking tax bases…

“Younger professionals want walkable centers where they don’t have to get into a car to have lunch or do errands,” says a Sunbelt developer… “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to own a suburban office building… It used to be back offices went to the suburbs. Now they go to India, Guatemala, Warsaw, or wherever.” These “easy-to-build assets” turn into a “trading commodity.”

It’s not kind to Chicago, where, once again, feelings of emptiness are rising in suburbs. (Perhaps my favorite Trib headline of all time.)

“Tomorrow has come to the suburbs,” where vacancies, including shadow space, “approach 30 percent.” […] Locals, meanwhile, find the condition of “state and municipal finances hugely troubling,” weighing down the market with the likelihood of higher taxes and fewer services.

This is honestly the nicest it’s ever been to Pennsylvania, describing it as “Not that Bad, Really.” I remember that years ago, when I worked for a subconsultant on ET, Philadelphia’s economic development authorities wooed us with a constant stream of good news about Center City — hoping that it would upgrade them to being a 24-hour city. It didn’t work then.

“We’re going to see a lot more places end up like Pittsburgh, if they’re lucky,” says a senior investment executive. “Here’s a city that used to be a major manufacturing center with many corporate headquarters. Now it’s cleaned up, the high-paying factory jobs have diminished dramatically, and a high ratio of workers have government or quasi-government jobs in education and medical fields.” Forbes magazine ranked it as America’s most livable city in 2010. However, “Property values and rents have essentially been flat and development has been sporadic.” […]

Interviewees lament how [Philadelphia] “suffers from its proximity to New York,” but others hope for gains from positioning as “a cheaper alternative.” […] If only high-speed rail—traveling 150 miles per hour—could be developed to link with Manhattan, the city might get a major boost… But institutional investors never muster much enthusiasm for the overall scene.

And finally, private sector investors are indeed griping about a lack of government investment in infrastructure, but somehow the politicians would rather care

Infrastructure Neglect. Economic travail and government deficits distract attention from dealing with the nation’s archaic and deteriorating infrastructure. Twentieth-century interstates and in sufficient mass-transit systems can no longer support population growth and commerce in many increasingly clogged metropolitan areas. Newer Sunbelt cities, developed through road and highway grids, strangle in congestion while older 24-hour metro areas desperately need to replace crumbling bridges, overpasses, and tunnels… Financing a makeover will cost trillions of dollars over the next three decades—money the country does not have or does not want to spend… Eventual decisions and costs related to infrastructure could force monumental changes in where people choose to live and work.

Shorts

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1. Commenter Future Bus Riders Union Member over at Human Transit points out that the recent installation of a cyclist Green Wave on Valencia St — San Francisco’s Hipster Highway — doesn’t just save cyclists energy, but it also reduces potential conflicts with buses:

“I suspect this is probably the best way to reduce the problem of bikes and buses continually overtaking each other. While bikes and buses often travel at roughly the same average speed, they don’t have the same acceleration profile. When you set traffic lights at the same speed you tend to ameliorate the jockeying for position problem.”

Speaking of green waves, something I hadn’t really noticed until last week: Chicago, probably due to its Midwestern scale and density, sometimes doesn’t have that many stop lights. I rode 3 miles down side streets from Ukrainian Village to Logan Square and encountered only one red light. As much as I like 11th St NW to take me downtown from Columbia Heights, the lights are always against me — and they’re every two blocks, well outside downtown. (Particularly frustrating is the light at Florida, at the base of the 100′ ridge; I very rarely have managed to not have that turn red as I’m going downhill.)

2. Blair Kamin writes about how public space and virtual space have reinforced one another in the Mideastern revolutions — and, ironically, that the incident that started it all involved an internet cafe, that rare space which stands at the border of both:

“There was a time when some viewed the Internet and social media as the enemies of public space. These critics had nightmarish visions of a world where people lived in lonely isolation, lured away from the public square by the seduction of Internet chatrooms. The picture was of people sitting in the dark, in the basement, staring at the computer screen, always by themselves.

“But if Friday’s resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak proves nothing else, it is that social media and public space can be complementary, rather than in conflict. The social bonds built in the virtual world can spill over into the physical world–and with such seismic force that they can topple an autocrat.

“The revolt is Egypt is said to have begun with the killing of Khaled Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian businessman who was hauled out of an Internet cafe by plainclothes policemen last June and beaten to death. As the New York Times reported last week, a graphic Facebook page tribute to Said provided an outlet for people’s rage.”

3. One possible bright side to Chicago’s steep population decline: people largely seem to have moved away from several hypersegregated neighborhoods, from gentrifying neighborhoods, and from the formerly racially homogenous Bungalow Belt. (See this tract-level map, from the Tribune.) The net result is that segregation on the south & southwest sides may have declined from its former levels.

4. Like Donna Dubinsky, writing in the Times recently, I recently had a discouraging experience securing an individual health insurance policy:

“how broken the market for health insurance is, even for those who are healthy and who are willing and able to pay for it… I have no doubt that the system is broken and reform is absolutely essential. If we are not going to have universal coverage but are going to rely on employer plans, then we must offer individuals, self-employed people and small businesses a place to purchase insurance at a reasonable price.”

I’ve always suspected that at least part of the reason why Canadian cities are filled with small businesses while American cities are “food deserts” (besides their superior, investment- and entrepreneur- oriented immigration policies) is because universal health insurance unleashes their entrepreneurial potential; Americans are tied to their big-company jobs by health insurance. If even successful, hundred-millionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneurs find that going it alone proves perplexing, then how can we expect others to navigate the system?

5. Speaking of socialized medicine, socialism sure seems to work in the imperfect market of HIV transmission, where treatment is prevention. Vancouver gets headlines for its supervised injection sites, but the other half of its successful anti-HIV strategy (infections have fallen by over half, yielding incalculable long term cost savings for everyone) is to eliminate free riders through widespread testing and treatment, as Donald McNeil Jr. reports:

By offering clean needles and aggressively testing and treating those who may be infected with H.I.V., Vancouver is offering proof that an idea that was once controversial actually works: Widespread treatment, while expensive, protects not just individuals but the whole community.

6. The myopic cut-spending-at-all-costs agenda being pushed by Congressional Republicans now reminds me of the intergenerational warfare that typifies issues like school funding in Florida or Arizona. There, largely White homeowning seniors systematically veto taxes that would pay for schools educating a largely Latino student population — starving the future to feed the present. Of course, though, this is the natural result of a GOP that’s beholden to old white voters:

It is difficult, for example, to fulfill your promises to balance the budget and reduce the national debt without enacting substantive reforms to Medicare and Social Security, and it’s almost impossible to reform Medicare and Social Security if your most important constituents are the people who benefit the most from those programs. The result is a lot of hypocrisy—like Republicans resisting precisely the kind of Medicare cuts they’ve advocated for decades—and a potential split between spending-obsessed Tea Partiers and the establishment conservatives who know they owe their jobs to seniors.

This hysterical hue and cry of Republican stupidity drowns out any number of more reasonable proposals to reduce the deficit. The GOP is blind to the 800-pound gorillas in the room; they’re slurping up buckets of cash for seniors’ transfer payments and cushy security contracts. Extracting all of their spending cuts from the remainder of the budget is like a lobbyist fat on steakhouse dinner trying to diet by foregoing side salads.

Those transfer payments are so huge that Ezra Klein writes: “the business of the American government is insurance. Literally. If you look at how the federal government spends our money, it’s an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.” I guess it’s only appropriate that we own AIG, right?

(Seems like that “insurance” line was first used by Peter Fisher.)

One bipartisan panel has already advanced nearly $100 billion in cuts (that somehow magical figure that needs to be gutted out of existing discretionary programs) just to the Department of Defense, with appreciably no impact on Americans’ daily lives or long-term security. Instead, it stops the age-old practice of giving the Pentagon toys that it didn’t want. Obvious to me, but evidently many Americans don’t think that’s a folly.

The “cut & invest,” feed-the-future tone that Obama’s budget puts forth — one similar to what NYT columnists like Tom Friedman have been advocating — certainly sounds more promising to this young voter. It inspired me to try that NYT budget exercise again; my latest plan gets the spending cuts : tax ratio up to 77 : 23 — and still notably including a fully refunded carbon tax. (Or, of course, a fraction of that could be set aside for investment in market-tested decarbonization.)

Regional briefs

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1. After having looked at literally thousands of plans for New Urbanist developments around the world, I learned to to groan and roll my eyes whenever one had either (a) a green semicircle or (b) a “promised rail transit line” somewhere on the plan. These were cliches that every plan seemed to have, and those promised transit lines never actually seem to materialize.

Now, here we have a plan that was designed around a “promised rail transit line” — so much so that the retail and high-density residential are at the middle of the neighborhood, much to their detriment, instead of along the arterial at the edge — and now the promised transit is coming so late in the game that it’s facing NIMBYs from within the walkable neighborhood: “Rockville City Council votes to reroute CCT out of King Farm.”

Unlike yesteryear’s streetcar suburbs, we now can’t put the tracks in first. Today’s cost-effectiveness measures rightly demand that transit go where people live today, instead of where they might be living tomorrow.

2. A thought: bikeshare came in quite handy for a short trip out of town — I left via bus, from Chinatown, and returned via trail, into Union Station, and bikeshare is perfect for trips like that (different start and end points, falling outside usual transit operating hours).

While I was in Crystal City a few weeks ago, I noticed that there’s a bikeshare station near the airport access road ramp — which gave me an idea. Since National Airport is right next to the Mount Vernon trail and already has bike racks, couldn’t I use bikeshare to get to a flight out of/into DCA? Many flights — late weeknight or early weekend — fall outside Metro service hours.

The trouble is, all of the stations are on the west side of the CSX/GW Parkway corridor and the trail/airport are on the east, with few ways to cross. The two ways to do this now (until MWAA decides to add a bikeshare station within DCA, perhaps as an employee incentive) appear to be:
– Exit the Mount Vernon trail at the Aviation Circle “cloverleaf” and park the bike near the Crystal City metro. Walk back along the trail and Aviation to the parking lots and the airport.
– Ride around Crystal City, looking for a hotel with an airport shuttle parked out front. Return the bike near the hotel and hop on the shuttle. Tip the driver. (I don’t feel all that guilty about using hotel services since I do frequently stay in hotels, but others might disagree.)

3. Sadly, that brings me to this (during Restaurant Week, no less): “goddammit, DC is the worst food scene ever. anywhere else in the US this is just airport food and airport prices!” — seen on Wonkette

4. It seems that the most popular uses of Capital Bikeshare so far are for entertainment trips, rather than work trips. The densest routes are within the DuPont-Logan-U Street triangle, with intra-Capitol Hill and DuPont-Adams Morgan-Columbia Heights as other important corridors. I’m also surprised at how many trans-Potomac trips it’s getting, given that the pricing structure discourages such long trips.

Also interesting from Arlington’s transportation blog: planners are now soliciting public ideas for how to improve bike routes parallel to Columbia Pike. The Pike itself is undergoing a transformation into a transit boulevard, with wider sidewalks but without bike lanes; perhaps bike boulevards alongside the road (as along Shattuck in Berkeley or Broadway in Vancouver) can help make the corridor work better for all modes.

5. An updated version of a comment defending the notion of a new high-speed rail corridor in the Northeast from uninformed attacks at Megan McArdle’s blog.

1. New Jersey includes a lot of rural areas, like Cape May. The metropolitan counties that line the Northeast Corridor have a population density of 982/sq. mi., and growing (unlike Germany) to a projected 1,248/sq. mi. by 2040. Japan is blanketed by solidly profitable high-speed rail, reaching even its most distant corners, and has a population density of only 870/sq. mi.

2. High-speed rail turns operating profits all over the world, from France and Spain to Taiwan; in fact, even Acela generates an operating profit. Amtrak’s proposal for a new high-speed Northeast Corridor predicts an operating surplus of nearly $1B a year in 2040, and the medium-speed continuation south to Charlotte is similarly expected to turn a net profit.

Acela, in fact, is quite profitable for Amtrak. Preliminary 2010 figures put the operating margin at 29%, or $130.7 million, and revenues grew 16% over the past year. The rest of the Northeast Corridor regional services run at about break-even on this basis. (Amtrak excludes OPEB, capital, and other costs, so these are not readily comparable to airlines’ financial reports, and airlines obviously don’t report profitability on a corridor or route basis.) To put 2010 into perspective, airfares in some northeast city pairs (Boston-Washington, for instance) have been exceptionally low, the NEC was washed out by the Rhode Island floods, and the northeast’s intercity bus market has grown tremendously — and yet Amtrak’s existing and slow services are doing just fine.

3. No, high-speed services will not repay their capital costs. Very few passenger transportation investments do. The first railroad boom in America was underwritten by a giant speculative bubble which cost investors dearly, even after receiving immense federal subsidies in the form of land grants. Similarly, most older rail transit systems in the USA were built by real estate developers, hucksters, or both. Over the course of history, airlines have lost their investors countless billions even though they only pay a fraction of their capital costs — and create significant negative externalities (pollution) while operating with less than amazing reliability.

The subsidies that the public sector extends for infrastructure are repaid to the public in that they enable productivity gains that lead to greater economic growth down the road, so to speak. Which brings us to:

4. A growing population and growing economy (the Northeast’s GRP will double by 2050, assuming no constraints [like traffic] to growth) creates more demand for passenger travel. How do you propose to shoehorn ever greater passenger numbers down I-95 and through JFK? Or do you intend to stop economic growth in the Northeast, and thus for 20% of America’s economy? Isn’t unconstrained economic growth the Republican mantra?

Or, if you do wish to allow the Northeast to continue to grow and therefore assent to spending billions on transportation corridors, why would you not want to spend public funds on the mode which can deliver the most capacity, at the highest speed, with the best safety and reliability record, between the highest-value (highest productivity) center-city locations, at the least cost? Right now, we’re coasting off of infrastructure investments made 50 or 100 years ago (no new Hudson road tunnels have been built in 53 years, and no rail tunnels in the past century) — that’s only possible for so long before new investments need to be made to maintain and upgrade what’s there.

Moving 50 million riders a year, as a new Northeast high-speed rail line could do, would cost vast fortunes to do in cars, buses, or planes. Consider that the DCA-LGA-BOS airline shuttles move just 3 million passengers a year, that their use is eroding, and that the billions being spent on the region’s airports will just maintain today’s unacceptable delays. I-95 is about 450 miles from Boston to Washington. Adding surface-level HOT lanes to improve bus service in Virginia is costing about $136 million per mile; going to a double-deck format could almost double that. Doing this for the entire corridor would easily cost as much as a new railroad — Amtrak puts the cost of an entirely new NEC high-speed line at $70 billion — and at much lower speeds and much less safely.

5. Overspending on rural roads has persisted far out of proportion to need or any sense of equity. The Illinois DOT has long spent 40-45% of its statewide funds within the Chicago metro, even though the metro accounts for about 65% of the population, well over half the cars and fuel tax revenue, and has higher per-mile construction costs (due largely to that heavier traffic). As a result, bike lanes in Chicago carry more people over more potholes than smooth interstate highways downstate.