Reading Between the Lines

From Stephen Smith:

The Guadalupe-Lamar corridor was, Project Connect conceded, by far the most popular option at the three public information sessions held throughout the city. Still, the team contended that based on the crowds’ preferences for priorities — congestion and development potential, for example — the Highland and East Riverside routes were actually better fits.

What does this quote mean? Well, the context is that we are discussing Austin's light rail proposal. Unfortunately, this quote cuts to the quick of everything that's wrong with our mass transit engineering process today:

The Guadalupe-Lamar corridor was, Project Connect conceded, by far the most popular option at the three public information sessions held throughout the city.

There's a reason for this: this is the highest-ridership route in Austin. In European mass transit planning, the rule is: reinvestments get priority. If you have sardine-can packed buses and empty light rail, you're doing something wrong. Light rail, as a mode, has higher capacity than buses and so is best used alleviating pressure on high-demand corridors. That is, a busy bus route is a demonstration of the need for light rail.

So what's going wrong? The statement

...the team contended that based on the crowds’ preferences for priorities — congestion and development potential...

suggests an intrinsic failure of the planning process. While I agree that we the professionals need to listen to members of the community, I fear this is the point when things start to go to far. If we tried to give the public their every demand, we'd wind up with a fat, blatantly self-contradictory, service-intensive set of asks and not a single new penny to pay for it (indeed, our coffers would likely be lighter). Part of the point of being a professional, of actually spending the time and energy learning the discipline, is to be able to winnow what the public actually needs out from what it thinks it needs. Of course, as Jane Jacobs helpfully pointed out in Death and Life, and Chuck Marohn points out on Strong Towns today, bad professional priorities cause their own problems, so this drives a professional ask: accountability that our priorities and standards are current and reflective of reality.

Seemingly in the (misguided) belief that the first half of the 20th century was a golden age in the development of architecture, urban planning, and transportation engineering, however, our professional priorities skew towards prescribing the ideals of Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, etc., and proscribing the traditional development pattern that they rejected. These ideals have, over the past fifty years, proven to be remarkably far from reality.

But of course the final statement (there is some overlap)

...priorities — congestion and [economic] development potential, for example — the Highland and East Riverside routes were actually better fits

is where the hammer really hits. The Boomer buzzwords "congestion" and "economic development" were never the crowds' priorties--they're the engineers'. In fact, the crowd has made it clear what their priority is: better transit down the busiest route in the city. The problem is that this priority doesn't jive with the consultants' priorities--the Suburban Growth Experiment build-it-and-they-will-come idea instead of maintenance and intensification of a proven success; it doesn't jive with the City's priority, as they wish to service a new-build district; and it doesn't jive with U. of Texas' administration's priority, which for some asinine reason wants to keep the light rail away from the campus's west side--exactly where the greatest student concentration (and hence ridership) is. These all converge in the northeast corridor.

And the futon

So you're consultants with years of experience developing in suburbia caught in pitched battle. On one side you've got proven ridership and public desire for light rail in Corridor A; on the other administrators galore breathing down your necks for Corridor B. So what do you do? Why, you split the difference, of course, and roll out a compromise Corridor C!

...Except that this corridor is like the stroad of transit investments. It's too far from the ridership core that gives Corridor A its strength; it's too far from the underutilized infrastructure that gives Corridor B its strength. What it is, instead, is a corridor that is of use to the people living along it, but fails to capitalize on either of the (opposing) corridors being advanced. It is, in every objective sense, a failure, a futon.

Austin already has one mass-transit futon. Does it need another one?

More Cogent than I

While still an undercurrent in urbanist media, people are starting to take note of our fundamentally broken approach to passenger rail safety. This item from the usually-libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, for example, hits the nail on the head. It's extremely short, only seven pages, and describes more cogently and Steve Smith, or Alon Levy, or I, the challenges facing American rail transportation professionals.

The problem remains that this remains an issue that is unknown, and hence unremarked-on, by most people outside the profession and geeks whose interests tend that way. It also doesn't help that, as Business Insider points out, politics get in the way. This is an ongoing problem with land-use issues: it is very difficult for technocrats to reevaluate and rebuild fundamentally broken regulations when they are opposed by people who know those regulations are broken, and fundamentally just don't care, who would rather leave them in place to laugh at them and say they should be repealed outright* and say "this is why government is broken" rather than pitching in, lending a hand, and fixing them.

All that said, I find myself nodding in agreement with Edmonson and Scribner in their recommendation that

[i]f the FRA insists that the operational environment of the Untied States is uniquely dangerous, it should overhaul its regulatory mandates and take a step back from the prescriptive rules currently in place. Instead, it should create a series of performance metrics that would allow train designers to innovate. It now asks, “Does this train fit our rules?” It should ask, “Is this train survivable in a crash?”

 

This would allow U.S. transit authorities to purchase not only European trains, but also Japanese trains, which are designed to different effective standards. The United States could be a melting pot of train designs from around the world.

It can be done. But do we have the political will to do it?
______________
* Although, with the current FRA regulations, and the (nonexistent) state of our domestic passenger railcar industry, one can actually argue for its dissolution (as Alon Levy has in the past); European and Japanese products, the bulk of the market, have proven safety records our lemons don't.

Bureaucracy and Subsidy

Last fall, Steven Smith noted that European mass transit is subsidized the same amount as its American counterpart. Yet Europe has extensive mass transit offerings just about everywhere, to the point where it is difficult to find anyplace that has mediocre access relative to density or none at all, whereas in the U.S. the picture is the obverse. What gives?

Most complaints fall against ill-structured subsidization packages: roads in the U.S. have substantially higher subsidies relative to their European counterparts; driving standards here are rather more lax; exclusionary land use promotes driver culture at the expense of transit culture; etc. Part of this is of course true. Road standards are excessive and promote speeding which in turn promotes lax enforcement; land use is not planned in a way to support transit nodes; and road subsidies are hidden while transit subsidies are often paraded front and center. DOTs want to do nothing but build roads, and politicians insist on micromanaging transit while at the same time ignoring the multitude of excessive standards (and entailed ballooned costs) in the road planning arena. It's as if they have a monocle on one eye and a log in the other.

But that isn't the key problem. Smith, in his article, points out that the Bay Area receives an equivalent amount of transit funding for an equivalent population as Switzerland--but Switzerland has incontestably excellent transit while the Bay Area's, while good by U.S. standards, is, ahem, lacking. As Elizabeth Alexis notes, in Smith's quote, "The problem is more of how we spend money, not the amount of money."

How is this money spent? In the Bay Area, it is allocated to a number of transit agencies, each with its own agenda:

BART
Caltrain
Muni
Amtrak California (Capitol Corridor)
ACE
VTA
AC Transit
Golden Gate Transit
etc.

Even when you take out the bus operators, that still leaves

BART
Caltrain
Muni
Amtrak California
ACE, and the
VTA.

By contrast, the vast majority of passenger rail in Switzerland is handled by the

SBB:

this includes all national-level passenger rail, the R-Bahn networks, and the S-Bahns. Some Swiss cities also have metros (Lausanne is the smallest) which are owned and handled by independent organizations. The Swiss

SBB

handles thus all the functions of

BART
Caltrain
Amtrak California, and
ACE.

And therein lies the problem. The Bay Area suffers from a bad case of bureaucratic redundancy, which means that multiple overlapping bureaucracies are handling things where only a single bureaucracy is really needed. So the basic problem is that, where in Switzerland,

1 bureaucrat

is needed to perform any necessary office job, in the Bay Area,

4 bureaucrats

are.

And you wonder where all the money goes!

That's not the worst of it, though. American transit agencies are incredibly territorial, and jealously guard their turf to the point of undermining the common need for improved transit access. How else can you defend Millbrae, which seems to have been spitefully designed to inhibit Bay Area high-speed travel via the Caltrain ROW as expensively as possible? Or spending money to reduce interlocking redundancy, which in its turn undercuts on-time performance?

Elizabeth Alexis is dead right. And in the U.S., we spend money on bloated redundant bureaucracy, on entrenching petty squabbles in concrete, and at the end of the day we find we have no money to actually run transit, let alone well.

Organization before electronics before concrete, the Germans say. But here we take concrete uber alles, and even use concrete to entrench organizational inefficiencies.

Tepid Urbanism At New Norris Apartments

*Author's note: I originally used the phrases "battery cages of poverty" to describe towers-in-a-park and "barracks and battery cages" to describe public housing's urban renewal-era efforts, producing towers-in-parks and garden apartments, when writing this post.

Wrapping up major construction, and soon to be rented, are the LEED certified Norris Apartments, a low-slung townhouse-and-apartment public housing complex replacing a dreary tower-in-a-park that loomed over the northeast corner of Temple University for the longest time. (See Naked Philly’s report HERE and Plan Philly’s HERE.)

On the outside, this ambitious project, designed by Blackney Hayes, is akin to other ... Continue reading at Hidden City Philadelphia.

Hidden City Philadelphia

I am a regular contributor on Hidden City Philadelphia now! Yay!

Going forward, expect link posts the way Steve Smith manages Market Urbanism now that he posts at Forbes for the most part.