Category Archives: urban affairs

Going the distance [updated]

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High gas and jet-fuel prices have fueled a lot of interest lately in high-speed rail. The usual counter-argument to “why can’t America have the same train service that Europe has?” focuses on population density, which happens to be something I know too much about. Surprisingly, it isn’t just the Northeast Corridor which has city pairs close enough to rival the TGV. I’ve also provided aggregate populations of the central cities (not metro areas*) connected; the TGV’s success is not because French cities are all that large.

Chicago-Milwaukee: 86 miles; 3,421,405
Paris-Brussels: 193 miles; 2,257,784
Chicago-Indianapolis: 196 miles; 3,626,636
Atlanta-Charlotte: 258 miles; 1,190,733
Paris-Lyon: 267 miles; 2,557,100
Chicago-Detroit: 281 miles; 3,729,189
Chicago-St. Louis: 284 miles; 3,196,355**
Chicago-Cincinnati: 319 miles; 3,173,828
Paris-Bordeaux: 354 miles; 2,329,600
San Francisco-Los Angeles: 390 miles (via I-5)
Chicago-St. Paul: 417 miles; 3,490,479***
Paris-Marseille: 490 miles; 2,928,100
Chicago-Kansas City: 567 miles; 3,287,483

Paris-Lyon, the first TGV line, has consistently run an operational profit. Within three years of its introduction, it had increased rail’s mode split by nearly 60%, from 47% to 74%. Paris-Bordeaux takes three hours (vs. 8:15 to St. Paul), and the TGV has a 60% mode split (vs. 40% by air). Such mode splits are even possible in the Midwest: for Chicago-Milwaukee, rail ridership in 2007 was 617,799 vs. 282,000 by air (already accounting for onward connections).

The TGV has proven so successful that Air France (with a putative air travel monopoly at home, and sometimes called “the world’s most profitable airline”) has decided “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” The IHT reports that it and Veolia have begun the process of launching a passenger rail operation; the article quotes several analysts who laud the decision.

* I’m usually not a fan of using municipal boundaries to define things — e.g., Indianapolis-Marion County [capital of Indiana] has 784,118 residents vs. la Ville de Bruxelles [capital of Europe] with a mere 144,784 — but one could argue that greater suburbanization in the U.S. would impact rail ridership, since origins and destinations are likely to be scattered throughout large metro areas. For reference: population of Chicago is 2,842,518; Paris, 2,113,000. Estimates for U.S. 2005, France 2002, and Belgium 2006.
** 2006 St. Louis special census
*** includes Minneapolis; the train station sits near the border

Downriver

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This seemed strange at first glance — although as an “Easterner,” I do get a bit prickly when Westerners (as in Texas) call creeks (or worse yet, dry beds) “rivers” and boast about “lakes” that you can easily holler across.

I spent my early years back East, in what an Easterner might call the land of “real rivers.” French Creek, which joins the Allegheny River in my Pennsylvania hometown, is about as big on average as the Colorado River gets in Colorado; and the Allegheny River, at its junction with the Monongahela to create the Ohio River — still more than a thousand miles from the ocean — runs as much water on average as the entire Colorado river.

(George Sibley, “Does a River care if it doesn’t get to the Ocean?”, Mountain Gazette, May 2008, p. 26)

However, it’s true. The average flow of the Colorado, over the past 300 years, has been around 13.5 million acre-feet, or 18,630 cfs (1 acre-foot/year [AFA] = 0.00138 cfs). The Allegheny, at Pittsburgh, has a mean discharge of 20,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). The Mississippi surpasses the Colorado’s flow at about Red Wing (below L&D 3), within its home state of Minnesota — over 1,700 miles from the sea.

Now, that’s not a small river by any means — the Allegheny is 800′ wide at the Ft. Duquesne Bridge, and the spring flow over mighty St. Anthony Falls in Minneapolis is just 10,000 cfs — but 25 million Americans depend on Colorado River water. In a final irony, the Colorado/Great Basin will likely see flows drop by over 10% over the next generation, while the Ohio basin could see flows increase by over 10%.

Yet we in the Great Lakes are truly spoiled. The “Chicago diversion” draws 2.4 billion gallons from Lake Michigan every day, dumping all of it down the Mississippi (via the Chicago and Illinois rivers). That’s 2,688,240 acre-feet, close to the 2.8 maf that the entire state of Arizona receives under the Colorado River Compact.

Gaaah.

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I had another hard disk die on me this week. Luckily, more of my life has been drifting onto the cloud recently, but it still puts me out of commission for a few days while I piece together various backups and such. (Most annoying: backing up your user data doesn’t always capture the various settings for this and that.)

Oh yeah, and no bike-sharing news to report from DC. Drat.

It’ll cost ya

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Every once in a long while, users might have a pleasant experience with America’s infrastructure, but by and large we Americans take for granted that our daily interactions with public works will be miserable. Perhaps we need a sharp reminder (from John Gapper, writing in the FT) that subpar infrastructure impacts our economic well-being by forcing us to forego productivity:

The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness… At times I wonder whether the world’s biggest economy has the will to solve its challenges or will end up wandering self-indulgently into the minor economic leagues. I expect it will get serious when the crisis is too blatant to ignore, but it has not done so yet…

There are lots of ways in which infrastructure inadequacy matters to the US but I would focus on two.

First, it imposes a drag on economic growth. The private infrastructure is poor enough – broadband speeds lag behind other countries and mobile coverage is spotty. But much of the public infrastructure is unfit, a fact that was becoming clear even before Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and a Minneapolis bridge collapsed during rush hour last year.

Second, it presents an awful image of the US to investors and other visitors. The state of transport and communications infrastructure is a symbol of a nation’s economic development and the US is starting to look like a third world country. In fact, scratch that. Many developing countries look and feel better.

Of course, they are in a different phase of development. The US invested 10 per cent of its federal non-military budget in infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s as it built the interstate highway system – at the time, the envy of the world. While US investment has fallen to less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product, China has been matching its double-digit postwar record.

The bigger problem is that, unlike European countries including the UK, the US shows little sign of finding the will or the funding mechanisms to maintain what it has or to build anew.

As the recent failure of congestion pricing in NYC demonstrates, we Americans would rather pay with our time than pay with our dollars.

Wholesome walk score

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Who knew that walkable neighborhoods were so All-American? The Brady Bunch house gets an astonishing Walk Score of 80, according to the site’s blog.

Yet America’s landscape has changed for the worse since then: adults’ daily walking trips have fallen by nearly half just within my lifetime. Restoring just one or two daily walking trips to everyone’s lives could cut CO2 emissions by the equivalent of 16 coal power plants — and help Americans lose three billion pounds of fat. [Dashka Slater in NYT].

Also of interest: how well are you living up to the Charter’s principles? (I got to trumpet a rare 100, which led to several accusations of cheating. However, I do go to my building’s outdoor movie nights, which, with nearly 40 units, should count as a block party — and about as good as we’ll get on a state highway.)

Thou shalt have no historic sites before me

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And I thought the Japanese had a curious philosophical approach to historic preservation. Zvika Krieger in the New Republic reports on the shockingly nihilist attitude of Saudi authorities toward maintaining countless historic sites, including many directly connected to Mohammed:

“It is not permitted to glorify buildings and historical sites,” proclaimed Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz, then the kingdom’s highest religious authority, in a much-publicized fatwa in 1994. “Such action would lead to polytheism.” […] The clerics’ stance permits the Saudi government to play it both ways, in a perfect marriage of the secular and spiritual. It can destroy ancient sites and still maintain doctrinal credibility; the massive, capitalistic accumulation of wealth becomes a religious necessity, not an evil. “The government has finally woken up to the commercial value of religious tourism,” Sfakianakis says, “and they are really the ones driving this construction boom in Mecca.”

Super hotel!

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An NY Times article about urban hotels incorporating green construction technologies mentioned the first in what could be a chain of ALT Hotels, now under construction in Brossard, as part of a lifestyle center on Montréal’s South Shore. Several features — the building’s straightforwardly boxy look and uniform, $129-per-room pricing — raised my suspicions, confirmed by this:

In order to offer a quality hotel at the lowest possible prices, Groupe Germain and its Quebec partners have developed a totally new construction concept: the prefabricated room. Prefabricated rooms are currently being built at Rénova in Plessisville, one of the Group’s long-standing partners.

Finally! A modular hotel! A “Super Hotel” saved me late one night in Matsumoto: a tidy and super-efficient (bunk beds!) room for $67. All rooms were exactly identical, and the hotel appeared to have been built, Lego-like, from modular blocks; only the ground floor differed, and it housed a walk-through lobby, a continental-breakfast bar with lunchroom style seats, a business center, a little onsen and locker room, and the ubiquitous vending machines. The bathrooms, in particular, were definitely prefab, but still incorporated the latest in Japanese integrated bidet technology.

Super Hotel modular bath

Not only the prefab construction cut costs, but the relative lack of unnecessary frills: the front desk staff doles out towels and toiletries upon check-in; a keycode printed on your receipt replaces actual keys; and everyone’s forced out of the hotel for cleaning during midday. (This being Japan, robots were undoubtedly involved.) I’ve always been an undemanding but cheap traveler, and this no-frills approach matches that pretty well.

The road up and ahead

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Last week, Kirk Johnson reported in the Times about the I-70 corridor that rises up into the mountains west of Denver — a four-lane rural road which now faces many of the same congestion issues as any urban commute corridor: crushing traffic loads for a few hours a week, with sort of capacity enhancement proving to be frightfully expensive. Much of this results from settlement patterns that resemble nothing so much as the old “pearls on a string” commuter rail towns: dense, pedestrian-friendly nodes clustered along a single corridor, although unfortunately a freeway rather than a railroad in this case.

Appropriately, many of the solutions that have been implemented to date are similarly incongruous urban fixtures dropped into stunning mountain wilderness: HOV lanes along Hwy 82 into Aspen, all-day transit equipped with advanced ITS, and even several proposals for rail service. (The principal difficulty: I-70 follows an available rail alignment west of Vail, but the section through Summit County and east to Denver is too steep for conventional rail service — and would likely require an additional tunnel at the continental divide.) Now, the ultimate in urban congestion solutions is on the table:

[Colorado State Senator Chris] Romer’s suggestion — congestion pricing using financial incentives to encourage people to drive or not drive at peak times on I-70 — drew 500 e-mail messages in the first 24 hours after it was reported in The Rocky Mountain News. About 70 percent opposed the plan, he said, and many of those called him exuberantly bad names… “But we’re not going to solve this problem by being cautious, which is what government does best,” he said, explaining that reliance on gasoline taxes and highway construction will not work… “We have to get creative,” Mr. Romer said. “And if we fail, we adjust and we try again.”

The long shadow haunting the Sunbelt’s growth (and any future long-term infrastructure investments), is the potentially disastrous changes in precipitation that will accompany global warming. Some climate models predict that snowpack in much of the Rockies could become un-skiable during my lifetime. (I’ll be 70 years old in 2050.) The result would destabilize existing ecosystems in an area where human settlements closely abut wilderness; increasingly catastrophic floods, mudslides, and wildfires would further threaten . Economically, the resulting economic losses could be monumental, similar to a hurricane wiping away another beach city.

Meanwhile, cities across the nation’s southern tier, like Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Raleigh are all already sinking deeper straws to suck up even the pond scum from their drought-ravaged reservoirs. Georgia has resorted to desperate new lows, some of which actually date from the 18th century — not just praying for rain (perhaps more of a strong-arm tactic to embarrass Florida to reduce its claim to downriver flow), but recently seeking to move its Tennessee border. Yet these areas continue to grow; as with electricity, the expectation is just that water will be provided regardless of cost or future prospects — and reporting on the crisis continues to focus on such short-term thinking. Sure, conservation pricing has resulted in higher water bills for many (Mayor Franklin in Atlanta pays about $100 a month for water) — but how high would water bills have to go in order to dissuade new arrivals, or to convince non-water-intensive industries (e.g., not manufacturers) to begin looking elsewhere? My guess is that prices would have to go very high indeed.

It is about the bike, apparently

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Lance Armstrong decides to do his part by opening a bike station in Austin, although it won’t be open in time for my forthcoming visits (twice in a month!). He apparently really gets it, too, from the land use connection to the need for safe facilities to the importance of having a rich cycling culture. Pamela LeBlanc reports in the Austin American-Statesman; video of the interview is also available. Emphases added.

“This city is exploding downtown. Are all these people in high rises going to drive everywhere? We have to promote (bike) commuting,” Armstrong said Wednesday, gazing up at the towering 360 condos rising next to the site of his new shop. “This can be a hub for that…”

Armstrong said he’d like to see Austin evolve into a place like Portland, Ore., where biking is part of the culture and people pedal to work, to restaurants and to run errands. “Walk outside, and the streets are lined with bikes — because they have a safe place to ride,” Armstrong said of the city long known for its bicycle-friendly amenities and policies.

So how does Austin get to that point?

“The (Lance Armstrong Bikeway) is a big start,” he said. Armstrong and his general partner in the project, Bart Knaggs, said they’d like to see Austin create bike lanes separated from vehicle traffic and a system like a new one in Paris where people can use a credit card to rent a bicycle from a bike rack station and return it at any of the dozens of other stations around the city.

“There are times I ride in Austin, and I’m afraid of cars,” Armstrong said. “Imagine what the beginner cyclist must feel like? I think (Mayor) Will Wynn’s dream was this whole revitalization of downtown, which we’re getting, but it’s going to make it a lot easier if people can get around on bikes.”

Mellow Johnny’s… focus won’t be on selling the newest, lightest racer. The shop will celebrate the culture of biking, from the historic memorabilia hanging on the walls to a counter where customers can sip coffee and ask questions as they watch bike mechanics at work…

Showers and a locker room will allow commuters who don’t have facilities at their offices to ride downtown, store their bikes at the shop, bathe and catch a ride on a pedicab or walk the rest of the way to work…

Armstrong predicted that Mellow Johnny’s will be “the coolest bike shop in the world,” but said he’s not trying to put any other Austin bike shop out of business. “It’s not us versus them,” he said. “We’re all about the cycling culture.”

The mellow group hugs between spandexed roof-rackers, testy commuters, curious townies/gownies, lost tourists, dirty messengers, filthy hippies, and maybe even pedantic Vehicular Cyclists (“Afraid of cars? Weenie!”) will commence in May, on Republic Square in the southwest corner of downtown Austin.

Brides

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Several complaints about downtown Coral Gables being chock-full of bridal shops brought this little story to mind:

Las Tunas Avenue (silly name, no?) in Temple City, Calif. is lined with Asian bridal shops with cheesy names like Love City. The Anglo neighbors began to get suspicious of drug fronts, not unexpectedly wondering where exactly the demand for bridal gowns was coming from.

What was happening, of course, was just a natural aggregation of businesses: the inevitable intersection of a young and growing immigrant population (many of whom spend quite lavishly on weddings) with time-pressed young brides who like to spend a lot of time comparison shopping. As word of the bridal shops began spreading, more began opening to cash in on the trend. And since bridal boutiques run high margins on low volume (and often do “house calls”), they appear to be “suspiciously” low on customers.

J-diversification

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Two video games that I spent much time with during high school suddenly make so much more sense — after wandering around Japanese cities for a few days. A-Train and SimTower, both of which were published in the USA by Maxis (creator of SimCity), have at their hearts urban and business models that respond to conditions quite unique to Japan — a society that, despite its considerable automotive might, practically defines “transit oriented development.” Both games were fascinating looks into the integrally interlinked role that transportation, both horizontal and vertical, plays in a densely populated society.

In A-Train, the game player is put in charge of a for-profit commuter and freight railway system serving local travel within a growing metropolitan region. As with Japanese rail systems, the lion’s share of potential profits stem not from railway operations but from the two “ancillary” businesses also in the simulation: property development and stock market speculation (based on the “keiretsu” cross-holdings model that was an integral part of the “Japan Inc.” business model).

Indeed, a 1997 study by Takahiko Saito comparing Japan’s “major private railways” found that 55% of operating profits (aka EBITDA, an earnings figure that excludes capital spending) stem from non-transportation operations. In most cases (and in the much larger case of Hong Kong’s MTR) property development, management, and operations were the largest contributor to profits — oh, and note that buses are usually run at a loss, presumably because they support profits elsewhere in the operation. (Even in U.S. regions with privately operated commuter buses, like Coach USA’s lines in New Jersey and Wisconsin, public subsidies play a key role.)

Ratings and Investment Information, a financial research firm, confirms that is still the case for the private railway sector: “transport’s contribution is… just under 50%” of EBITDA cash flow. The mainline railway business is just not that profitable, despite the railways being in a uniquely ideal profit-generating situation, with uniformly high densities across huge urban areas, and very aggressive management. Saito writes:

The fact that railway companies engaged in commuter transport in large cities could maintain sound management without government subsidy is remarkable to managers of railway companies in other countries. The traffic market in large Japanese cities is extremely favourable to railway management.

One strange “bug” that the game’s Wikipedia entry notes results from an anti-trust situation: the human player competes against the simulation to develop property, but only the player can place certain high-value developments (particularly recreational facilities like stadia, golf courses, and ski resorts). Since the player has a monopoly on these facilities, their market value is bid up tremendously, and their construction offers a ready source of cash and/or leverage opportunities. Indeed, winning the game seems well nigh impossible without exploiting this loophole; in particular, the capital cost of building new rail infrastructure simply cannot be recovered solely through railroad profits.

The game curiously omits the notion that freeways would compete with the rails for intra-urban traffic. The cost of driving in Japan — despite the lack of a Singapore-style conscious price-rationing system for road space, a combination of high tolls (a crosstown roundtrip can easily cost $40, as the expressways are also privately owned) and high prices for imported gas — discourages single occupant car trips.

(Of course, long distance rail companies in Japan still cheerily accept government subsidies for capital costs and to cover operating deficits in rural areas — a formula that could serve Amtrak well, except that almost all of America is “rural” by Japanese standards.)

SimTower gives the player a blank slate of land upon which to build a mixed-use skyscraper. Here, the transportation challenge is vertical, rather than horizontal: arranging a menu of wildly varying mixed uses (offices, condos, shops, hotel rooms, ballrooms, fast food, restaurants, cinemas, lobbies, a wedding chapel, a subway station, parking) around various circulation elements (local and express elevators, stairs, and escalators). Many of the simulated occupants were assumed to never leave the tower in the course of a day.

Mixed-use skyscrapers certainly aren’t unheard of in the USA, but the degree to which uses are mixed together and shoehorned in is far greater in land-short Japan: dozens of blocks in even small cities are lined with three-to-ten story buildings, perhaps on 3,000 square foot sites, stacked high with shops, fast-food joints, and bars. Underground retail concourses, second-floor shops, even food courts high inside skyscrapers and department stores don’t just exist, they thrive. One particular thing that surprised me about the game was the occupants’ seemingly insatiable demand for restaurants; true to form, Japanese shopping malls often have as many (or more!) eateries as shops — a nation of tiny kitchens and long working hours results in considerable demand for eating out. The main JR train station in Nagoya (one of the first large instances of a post-privatization JR company branching out into property) houses five floors with perhaps 50 eateries (from breakfast through cocktails) high above ground level, in addition to countless more food options at or below grade in several interconnected buildings.

The most ambitious mixed-use complexes surround or surmount railroad transfer stations, which offer the broadest market reach. Tokyo, with its longstanding decentralizing policy of terminating the private suburban railways at the circular Yamanote line (only subway and JR lines extend into the core), offers the most obvious illustration of this concept: each intersection between the Yamanote and a major suburban railway has spawned an urban node that surely rivals Midtown Manhattan in urban energy. And since the terminals are controlled by private railroads, they have a strong economic incentive to fill their station areas with a land-use mix promoting round-the-clock ridership — hence the preference for retail and entertainment over blank, faceless office towers.

To be sure, countless social and economic differences mean that these lessons can’t be transferred directly to America. However, the Japanese experience does demonstrate that private real estate interests — guided, of course, by public policy (e.g., the world’s highest farm subsidies) — can have tremendous success in profitably creating transit-oriented development, and illustrates the stupendous amount of urban value that transit infrastructure can generate.