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.

Bright green suburbs

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There’s been a lot of press attention lately around the “green cities” theme, especially in regards to climate (which, of course, I’ve been writing about for years). Much of the attention has been heartening but sometimes it’s brought out some of the usual misconceptions.

Alex Steffens, who can be reliably counted on for wordy strokes of brilliance over at WorldChanging, posted a draft article (to be delivered to auto-design students, no less!) titled My Other Car is a Bright Green City. (A version appeared this week in BusinessWeek.) One of the more interesting gems: car ownership (and particularly SUV ownership) appears to be wholly incompatible with the notion of “one planet living”:

Teresa Zhang of UC Berkeley, in a recent environmental analysis of the average American car (PDF), found that the tailpipe emissions from the average car alone equal 50% of a one-planet footprint. “The actual footprint,” she notes, “may range from 30% to over 100% of one’s ecological budget, corresponding to fuel efficiencies between 55 mpg and 12 mpg.”

The response I posted.

I’d like to echo the praise and the caution: changing our settlement patterns requires collective action — which 20+ years of the Reagan/Thatcher Revolution has taught us to not just distrust, but to deny. You’ve written eloquently before about how environmental solutions inherently cannot rely solely on individual choices, and borrowing some of that language might help here. Similarly, it’s a challenge to juxtapose different potential solutions against one another; when faced with a crisis of global warming’s proportions, our society will need to learn to speak of “both/and” rather than “either/or.”

Thank you in particular for pointing out the rate at which our built environment changes. Perhaps it’s because I’ve lived in fast-growing places for most of my life, but the cities I’ve seen have changed immensely in the past decade. In fact, our built environment will probably change more, 2008-2030, than our electric generating mix over the same time period — and although everyone has ideas for future inventions to revolutionize “the other people” who run the oligarchic electricity sector, we are overlooking a proven and cost-effective technology that we the people can use to effect similar change in the broadly-held building industry.

Density by itself is a necessary, but insufficient, part of a “bright green city.” I like to sum up the New Urbanist vision as “compact, diverse, and walkable,” and more alliterative sorts say “compact, connected, and complete.” Even I won’t walk if I have nowhere to walk to, nor a pleasant way to walk there. A thriving, resilient human ecosystem (err, community) must house a full range of people and a complete array of activities, all arrayed along streets designed to make walking enjoyable — both traits of which require density beforehand, but which do not necessarily follow from it.

I hope that those who understand this message, and perhaps who further understand that such communities do a superior job of fulfilling the triple bottom line, will help to fight NIMBYism on the ground. With some prodding from the citizenry, the vast machinery that churns out conventional suburban sprawl with breathtaking efficiency can be re-trained. However, even in the tiny slice of America where a developer can legally “do the right thing”, the political and social realities (from block-club politics to municipal infrastructure decisions) can still make doing so nearly impossible.

@Donald Jackson, the lower housing costs in far suburbia typically balance out against higher transportation costs, especially as fuel prices increase. Many residents of sprawling suburbs spend more on their cars than their houses, and those of us living closer in can ditch that money-pit of a car and spend more on housing instead.

@Brave New Leaf, yes, indeed, the American landscape is littered with dead malls, dead subdivisions, dead office parks, dead towns, dead cities, the works. Detroit is but the largest example of a city that’s been left to the dogs, but hardly alone; I’ve seen long stretches of abandonment and decay even in several Sunbelt boomtowns. If you thought disposable plastic bottles exact an immense environmental toll, how about throwaway cities?

Steffens’ post was referenced in Andrew Revkin’s NYT blog earlier this week, which (since it reaches a somewhat broader audience) drew some less favorable responses. Mine:

No torch-wielding mobs of Deep Greens are roaming the exurbs, setting fire to wastrels’ McMansions and forcing their occupants at knifepoint into dingy cement high-rises. However, from some comments here, you’d think that simply altering the immense social constructs that drive suburban growth would be tantamount to violence. For decades, government policies (or the lack thereof) have made low-density living seductively cheap and easy, partly by ignoring the plumes of pollution it created: most of America’s carbon dioxide emissions either come from buildings, or from people moving between buildings.

Sunday’s article by Alex Williams closes by noting that “the eco-friendly, futuristic, post-automobile suburb” interestingly resembles the old-fashioned city. I applaud Mr. D’Souza for recognizing that we don’t need to wait around for future technological breakthroughs to start fighting global warming. Instead of pondering a fuel cell car powered by cellulosic ethanol, he’s already largely switched to a clean, renewable (and tasty) fuel source: food, which powers walking. And instead of waiting for a fully automated personal rapid transit train to be built to his front door, he moved his door close to the existing, mostly-automated rapid transit. Amazing, huh?

Interestingly, this gradual re-urbanizing of the suburbs — with mixed uses, more transportation choices, and higher densities — is something championed by not only New Urbanist architects and planners, but also by many of their best-known critics. Joel Kotkin calls his version “New Suburbanism,” but it’s still the same.

Meanwhile, Trevor Boddy of the G&M sees Vancouver’s future as a walking-biking city tied to new crosstown transit corridors featuring a balanced mix of uses and an even more diverse array of housing types than downtown’s towers & townhouses. (One of EcoDensity’s most interesting features is its focus on dense low-rise housing.) The most obvious location for a first test seems to be the False Creek Flats, which is about as well transit-served as downtown.

“we have seriously erred in balancing job with living spaces downtown – with space running out there, arterials are where we can set things right. Copenhagen demands a fifty-fifty split of work and living spaces in its redeveloped zones, and putting both close together makes the walking and biking city so much easier, reducing costly transit investments.”

Many European and Asian cities have a form of dispersed, low/mid-rise style development which doesn’t focus all employment into a single core. It would be interesting to try such an approach on a corridor basis in North America.

Talk is cheap

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Certain prominent politicians have been touting their commitment to the environment (and thus to environmentally minded voters) by signing their governments up for carbon-cutting promises.

Of course, the instant those targets come due, the politicians have moved on to the next promise without any substantive action — because signing ceremonies are easy, but actually cutting carbon, the lifeblood of industrial economies, is not. Last summer, the Economist noted that California is nowhere near track to meet its self-imposed, easier-than-Kyoto targets, even though it does have a fairly thoughtful plan to achieve emissions reductions on several fronts:

Despite making some optimistic assumptions about future contracts, the public utilities commission has concluded that the state will miss its target for renewables. And the aim of cutting emissions from electricity production to 1990 levels by the end of the next decade may be just as unrealistic… It is a bad sign that California’s electricity suppliers are struggling, because electricity is something over which the state wields considerable control. It has less power over carmakers, who are fighting to prevent California imposing emissions standards on them. If they succeed, even temporarily, California’s goals will become unreachable… The state has even less power to slow the growth of its population, or to dictate where people live. It hopes “smart growth” policies (which encourage people to live closer together, and to take public transport) can get it a whopping 15% of the way towards its overall 2020 goal. But the news from that front is discouraging.

Even more off the mark, of course, is Chicago; the Tribune revealed city government’s energy use to be spiraling almost inexplicably, even as the mayor eagerly accepts awards touting his “pro-active steps to address climate change“:

Records show that officials fell well short of targets for curbing electricity usage by city buildings despite the construction of energy-efficient buildings and the installation of green roofs across the city.

Most recently hurricane-, drought-, and heatwave-stricken Florida has signed on to carbon reductions. We wish them the best of luck, but fully expect future journalists to expose the false promises therein.

Perhaps local action on climate change, while admirable, ultimately has to be ineffective; after all, the promises signed aren’t binding targets with penalties, and most state and local governments work in isolation, without control over broader issues like the electric grid or auto emissions standards. As Felicity Barringer in the Times points out, most localities don’t have the authority or resources to effect big changes requiring, yes, social engineering:

Constraints on budgets, legal restrictions by states, and people’s unwillingness to change sometimes put brakes on ambitious plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions… “It’s really hard,” Ms. Hancock said. “It’s like the dark night of the soul.” All the big items in the inventory of emissions — from tailpipes, from the energy needed to supply drinking water and treat waste water, from heating and cooling buildings — are the product of residents’ and businesses’ individual decisions about how and where to live and drive and shop.

Hello, criminal!

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A Trib blog post (by Gary Washburn) about Da Mayor’s proposal to increase fines for drivers who break the law and endanger cyclists brought out the usual blame-the-cyclist crowd in the comments. I couldn’t resist snarking.

Hello, sanctimoniously angelic, devoutly law-abiding drivers! Ever gone 31 MPH on Ashland, 46 MPH on LSD, or 21 MPH in a school zone or on a side street?* Criminal! Ever crept one inch over the stop line — much less into the crosswalk — while waiting at a stop? Criminal! Ever crept one inch into the sidewalk while waiting for a break in traffic as you exited an alley or driveway? Criminal! Ever made a turn, or even changed lanes, without engaging the turn signal 100′ beforehand? Criminal! Ever made a left turn after that yellow light changed? Criminal! Ever made a right turn on red (even from an off-ramp) without first watching that speedometer hit zero or letting *all* pedestrians pass? Criminal! Ever double parked for two seconds, for instance at a valet stand? Criminal! Ever pulled into a bus stop to let someone out? Criminal! Ever turned right in front of a bus? Criminal! Ever honked a horn while stopped? Criminal! Ever driven right over a crosswalk without even looking to see if a pedestrian was waiting, much less stopping for same — even at the countless crosswalks that aren’t at stop signs or lights? Criminal!

These are just the traffic law violations that I see every time I walk two blocks to the “L.” Many of these crimes endanger cyclist or pedestrian lives. Your car is a lethal weapon; cars kill more Americans than guns do. That’s why we license drivers — but not bicycles, which kill fewer Americans each year than beds do. Yes, beds.

Oh yeah, and the cost of roads? Wear & tear on a road is proportional to the fourth power of a vehicle’s weight. Since an SUV pays $120 a year for a city sticker, that means that a fair price for my city sticker would be… $0.00005. Yup, one penny every 200 years. After 1,600 years, my payments would be worth the paper they’re printed on!

Yours truly,
A bicyclist who obeys most of the rules, and certainly all the rules necessary to ensure everyone’s safety.

* A 2005 study found that 80% of drivers on Chicago’s major streets speed in school zones! Think of the children!

Obviously, as someone who looks at sleeping cats with unabiding envy, my favorite bit is about beds. Here’s the truth about the vicious, deadly, hungry monster that lurks beneath you every single night! In 2004, 843 “pedalcyclists” were killed in the USA — most of them [about 90%, by some estimates and studies], we can surmise, were actually killed by cars, but a bicycle was still involved. That same year, 774 Americans were killed in falls “involving bed, chair, other furniture” and 596 from “accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed.” Attributing even 32% of the falls to beds (those instruments of terror are, after all, listed ahead of those wretched chairs) results in more deaths from beds than bikes. Meanwhile, cars kill more than 50% more Americans every year than guns do.

[A prior post about traffic laws’ ultimate origin, and why bicycles can follow the intent but violate the letter of the law.]

All this brouhaha, of course, relates to car drivers’ feeling that the world revolves around them, and that bicycles are toys and not vehicles — a notion that Alan Durning refers to as “car-head.” He gives a nice example of a car parked in a bike lane, but I can go one better: Mark Counselman’s wife opened her car door one day, only to have it blown away by a passing dump truck. Now, no one would argue who should pay for that smashed door. On the other hand, I once hit a car door and wrecked a fork and wheel; the driver first asserted that damage was my fault (of course, she was squealing about the damage to her new car long before she got around to asking if I was alright), and relented only after the insurance adjuster gave her a talking-to.

Durning writes:

[A]t some level, we do not consider bicycles real vehicles, and we do not consider bicycle lanes real roads. How could we, when we’ve been assimilated to the Car-head? [W]e don’t enforce traffic laws in ways that hold drivers accountable for the risks they impose on cyclists and pedestrians…

The presumption… seems to be that public roads are for cars, not bikers or pedestrians. You can test this yourself… by stepping up to any street corner… By law, every street corner has a cross walk (unless it’s specifically marked otherwise). The cross walk is there whether it’s painted on the asphalt or not. And any pedestrian standing in or at the entry to such a crosswalk has the first right to proceed (unless the intersection is regulated by a traffic light, in which case pedestrians must wait for the signal). As a pedestrian, all you should have to do to cross any street in Cascadia is go to the corner and stand at the curb. To a driver, the sight of you there should be, legally, the same as a red light. Drivers should halt immediately and wait until you’re on the opposite curb. If they don’t, any police officer who witnesses the act should write them a fine.

Instead, stopping for pedestrians is considered courteous, polite—not obligatory, not something to do or face punishment. Consequently, to cross many Cascadian streets is to run a gauntlet, and tickets for not stopping at crosswalks are rare… The lack of crosswalk enforcement—and the absence of outrage over that lack — is a manifestation of the same condition that prevents outrage over parking in bike lanes.

Now, about that raise

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posted at The Swamp

It’s odd that people are surprised by the dollar figures involved. Michelle Obama is a VP of an organization with a $1.6 BILLION annual budget. The community that UCH addresses extends far beyond Hyde Park to the whole South Side, which usually views the university and its hospitals with a great deal of suspicion.

It doesn’t matter whether her employer is a for-profit — it does in fact clear operating income — or not-for-profit corporation; regardless, its a huge and complicated organization which requires great management talent, and that deserves proper compensation.

I say this as someone who quite willingly, and knowingly, earns about 60% less money at a non-profit than I could in the private sector.

Where we’re missed

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Years ago, when this kind of stuff was only in the back pages of the Reader (and when I was younger, less bitter, and more easily charmed by such romantic notions), I had the notion of totaling up and plotting out the location of Missed Connections. Perhaps it could provide an empirical alternative to the Tribune’s occasional christening of random bus lines (first the 151, more recently the 66) as “the Love Bus” — but more interestingly, one could see whether missed connections correlated with overall density of singles in a neighborhood (perhaps not, since shy singles might live apart from the gregarious types who don’t miss their connections), whether springtime really is for lovers, or whether we non-drivers really do interact more with our fellow (wo)mankind.

The internet makes such analysis much easier, of course. Sure enough, EveryBlock, the hyper-local aggregation service just launched in three cities, also includes the locations of Craigslist Missed Connections posts, plotting them based on business names. In the past 11 days, 60657 (Lake View) accounted for fully 50% more MCs than 60622 (Wicker Park) — which might follow, since 61% of 60657 households are non-family, vs. 29% in 60622.

The other way of looking at that, though, is that 60657 has fully twice the proportion of non-family households but only half again as many MCs. Thus, it appears that the highest density of “MCs per single” might actually be right here. Fancy that.

Also, probably for the same reason that call center volumes peak early in week (weekends are busy!), people tend to post MC ads on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.

Twenty years

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(The usual winter travel schedule means fewer updates. Flickr is probably the best way to follow me around; see the photostream at right.)

A follow-on. “Even if you don’t move, the city will move around you.” — Mary Schmich on Chicago Public Radio, 7 January 2008

1987. My mom looks up from under a wide straw hat to scan the horizon for her two sons, romping with buckets amidst rows of strawberries planted atop sandy little ridges. I grabbed fat berries, sure, but mostly focused on plucking out the vigorous, blossoming runners that had taken root in the aisles — the better for propagation at home. (To this day, the occasional strawberry pops up as a weed in the back lawn.) Scrubby pine trees frame the farm on all sides, except for an old farmhouse with a gravel apron, now serving as gas station and general store.

The year I was born, the census counted 21,763 people in Cary, the sleepy town four miles down the road from this strawberry patch. The strawberries themselves were a sign of creeping urbanization. Years ago, this land was so prized for tobacco that J.B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company built a short-line railroad down this way from their Durham factories. However, the land was now too valuable for commodity crops, so the Sears family went with strawberries instead — aiming to profit off the burgeoning numbers of young families swelling the school ranks in town.

While I was in middle school, the adjacent forests began melting away to make way for development: hundreds of culs-de-sac lined with thousands of houses with brick fronts and gas grills behind, sand traps lining 7,011 yards of golf links, brown stormwater detention ponds tinted an inviting blue on maps displayed on model-home walls; long lines of brake lights arrayed at stoplights, obstructing a daily stampede of network operations controllers, plant geneticists, and copy-machine repairers to and fro their respective cubicles.

All through the Bush I economic downturn, Wake County chugged along with unemployment below 3% — a siren song calling across the land. The moving trucks kept pulling up to driveways, with the cinder-block walls of supermarkets, banks, and schools following close behind. Magazines proclaimed its charms in cover stories; later, eager refugees sought out answers to their thousands of questions on online forums.

Today, the country crossroads that I vaguely remember sounds more fiction than distant memory. The town of 20,000 now finds itself in the middle of a vast metropolis with nearly two million residents. A clock tower, fountains splaying at its base, announces the completion of the second of a planned quartet of shopping “villages” arrayed around the corner of High House Road and Davis Drive. Stone Creek Village takes the elements of a small strip mall and explodes them into an array of one- and two-story buildings surrounding a traffic circle, a broad boulevard, and other finely detailed if overly geometric public spaces. The entire ensemble squeezes into narrow downslope between the street above and a retention basin below — hence, perhaps, the ostentatious clock tower.

Across the way, the same architect placed blue gables atop Cornerstone — the first, and least fancifully embellished with urban ambitions, strip mall here — recalling nothing so much as the Magic Kingdom as they peek out from over the now-mature trees out front.

At the southeast corner and directly on the strawberry farm’s site, SearStone takes a more integrated approach (they even splash “New Urbanism” across their web site) to a senior development — with a few shops, a small hotel, and a continuing care facility among the walking-distance amenities promised to residents.

The newest, perhaps to begin construction soon, even provoked some dramatic political intrigue in what I had remembered as a town so sleepy and well-governed that the cops did away-on-vacation courtesy checks and pulled people over if their brake lights didn’t work. Charlotte-based Crosland, whose success with the Birkdale Village lifestyle center in Huntersville led CEO Todd Mansfield (recently appointed chairman of ULI’s board) led it to embrace mixed-use development, has plans for a similar development, although lighter on retail, at the northeast corner of the intersection. It went through months of acrimonious hearings as neighbors objected to its size. Ultimately, the threat of political backlash predicted at the final hearing came true: the ultimately approved development, even though it largely conformed with the existing comprehensive plan, became a contentious issue in the town council election and helped to contribute to swing the town’s political pendulum back towards slow growth.

It all sounds, and sometimes feels, completely random — countless other farms just outside countless other American towns look almost the same as they did 20 years ago. These farmers hit the lottery; but actually, they didn’t: the “instant city” was the work of many thousands of hands over several decades. How did this one intersection get to be the way it is? Why do cities arise in the places they do? Why do some regions prosper while others falter; why Cary, N.C. and not Napoleon, Ohio? And if smart people (of which the Triangle has no shortage) could design an instant city to house one million residents, to be built over the span of 20 years, would it look anything like what the Triangle looks like today?

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.

Red-eye escapes

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(To be crossposted at carfreechicago; please add comments there)

Got a free weekend? Like trains? Amtrak offers car-free Chicagoans plenty of chances to make a quick one- or two-day weekend escape with “red-eye” (overnight) trains from Chicago to several cities that are a few hundred miles away. I like traveling overnight, since it offers maximum sightseeing time at your destination and cuts back on expensive hotel stays.

Thrifty, non-fidgety sorts can travel in coach for less than the price of airfare, and typically right into downtown. Those who prefer a little more pampering can spring for a sleeper, which offers complete privacy, a flat bed, and free meals. In either case, you’ll travel without road rage or air rage, and usually without worrying much about ground transportation on the other end. One drawback is that slow trains put most of the East Coast out of reach.

Some cities worth a weekend visit:

  • Memphis via the City of New Orleans
  • Pittsburgh or Cleveland (a long day) via Capitol Limited
  • Cincinnati (a long day); Charleston, W.Va.; Beckley, W.Va. (near the Winterplace ski resort); White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. via Cardinal
  • Cleveland (a long day) or Buffalo via Lake Shore Limited
  • It might be possible to arrange a long weekend, although with an early departure and late arrival, in Denver or Winter Park via the California Zephyr

The many short-haul lines out of Chicago can be used for day trips to locations too close for an overnight. Destinations include:

Megabus also offers many overnight trips for cities that are a little bit closer by, or for which Amtrak has inconvenient day schedules — and boasts its famously low prices. Granted, it doesn’t offer quite the space that Amtrak affords you, but its (mostly) clean, new buses certainly put a new face onto intercity buses. Their overnight destinations include Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati (a long day), Minneapolis, Kansas City (a short day), and St. Louis. Day trip options include Indianapolis, Madison, and Milwaukee.

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.

Dark sky

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From a Bloomberg article by Bob Ivry:

The skyline of Miami is visible from Key Biscayne, the barrier island where John Rosser lives. Some nights the real estate broker scans the new buildings and sees more dark windows than lighted.

That skyline — dozens of huge towers, some with lighted crowns, stairwells, and parking garages; others with silent cranes; most of them otherwise eerily dark shadows looming overhead — makes downtown Miami feel like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. Just saying.

Mismatched incentives for cycling

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[I’m leaving town in a few hours and NOT bringing a computer with me. Therefore, expect zero posts for at least two weeks!]

Alan Durning points out,
in another installment in his “Bicycle Neglect” series about cycling, an interesting cost-benefit analysis that examined just one of cycling’s many positive aspects and pitted it against one of the more obvious negative aspects — the purportedly unjustifiably high cost of bicycle facilities.

In Lincoln, Nebraska, the public cost to install and maintain a network of five bike and pedestrian trail was about $100 per year for each person who became more physically active as a consequence, according to an article in the journal Preventive Medicine. The cyclists and walkers who used the trail paid another $100 each per year, on average, for running shoes or bikes, bringing the total cost of the trail to about $200 per user. Meanwhile, the health benefits of using the trails – largely, savings on medical bills – were above $550 a year per trail user, according to a related journal article.

The trouble is that even if we know that the benefits of said facilities outweigh their costs, those benefits are far too widely dispersed across the economy to make sense to your average transportation policymaker — and to your average commuter with a choice. Indeed, the social benefits of cycling appear to exceed even the substantial personal benefits:

At rush hour, in town, a mile you bike rather than drive saves you a quarter dollar, plus the cost of parking, and adds about a quarter hour to your life. The same rush-hour mile biked provides even bigger benefits to your community: some 50 cents, just for quantifiable gains.

As with transit, this introduces a significant market failure: since the primary benefits are external and the primary costs (for most people, the fear of being hit by a car and the additional time involved) are internal, it doesn’t “seem” to make sense for any individual to take up cycling — unless society (those who benefit most from having people cycle) creates incentives to do so. In other words, governments has a responsibility to subsidize “good” behaviors (those that create significant social/external benefits, like cycling and transit use) to better balance individuals’ cost-benefit calculations — all while taxing “bad” behaviors (those with high individual benefits and high social costs), like driving.

Similarly, any discussion of the (de)merits of specific modes is incomplete if it solely examines that individual cost-benefit calculation.

Now that we’ve established that communities should spend lavishly on bicycle facilities, what should they do? The FHWA’s BikeSafe has a new “Bicycle Countermeasure Selection Tool” that will tell you with a few clicks!