Free Exchange challenges my interpretation of European vs. American population density:
But high American wages also made the country an attractive place for European emigrants, and millions did opt to make the trans-Atlantic journey, swelling the size of American cities, increasing American urban population density, and reducing upward pressure on densities in Europe. In fact, by the beginning of the 20th century, there were not significant differences between the density of urban populations in America and those in Europe. The massive, dense industrial towns of the American Northeast and Midwest didn't look all that different from the massive, dense industrial towns of the Midlands and the Ruhr Valley. In cities on both continents, transportation technologies were similar, and so limitations to the size and scope of cities were also similar.The important differences result from what came next. America systematically starved and disassembled its public transportation and rail infrastructure and spent rather extravagently on highways, both within and between cities. While Europeans also increased their spending on roadways, they nonetheless maintained strong national commitments to rail and public transit. Americans also chose to leave their petrol taxes at levels far below those in European nations. These differences are key to explaining recent urban experiences. Certainly the differences in urban area and density in cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Chicago relative to Berlin, Madrid, or London are not due, in any direct sense, to patterns in medieval agriculture
I don't think the relevant criteria is the density of cities at the turn of the century; it's the distance between them. Much of Europe looks like the denser bits of the American east coast because those densely populated urban centers were relatively close to each other, limiting the scope of urban expansion. Both are areas that were fully agriculturally exploited pre-industrialization, and have the resulting small distances between major cities. On the Richmond to Boston route, ten hours long you've got seven or eight cities that were major population centers in 1830. And just as in Europe, everywhere you look along the train line, there are people.
Most American cities, on the other hand, had huge, practically unlimited, tracts of farmland to expand into outside of the East Coast, and forthwith did. One reason that the East Coast and San Francisco are the places seeing a return to urban living is that those places are, like Europe, rapidly running out of space to build new suburbs.
This also affects the cost-effectiveness of trains. The way that Americans use land obviously makes trains less cost-effective. But while the favourite culprit of much of the left is federal highway money, this lacks sufficient explanatory vigor to account for the massive differences in density. It seems obvious to me that Americans used land profligately in the 1950's and beyond because they could, and Europeans didn't because they couldn't: because they were too poor to buy cars; because there wasn't that much land to be had; because the Common Agricultural Policy, along with impoverishing third-world farmers and producing mountains of butter and lakes of wine, encouraged the preservation of farmland near cities. This has nothing to do with virtuous development policy.
That matters not because I'm interested in debating which continent has the nicer people, but because it goes directly to the assumption that if we just had more virtuous development policy, we'd get Americans out of their cars. I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong, but both Americans and Europeans seem to really like tooling around in their cars, and living in detached houses with yards, and it seems to take more than the gentle bonds of development policy to restrain them.
Drive through the middle of the US sometime.
I can't imagine a economically reasonable system of public transport servicing the Midwest. There's just too much space, too many divergent places to go. Cars are the only efficient way to do it.
A lot of people, especially europeans, don't get how frigging big and low density lots of the US is. This is the root of all sorts of things imo, like why the US has a really crappy cell phone system compared to high density countries. I think we've all heard the stories of europeans who think that you can take a nice little car trip from Virgina to the Grand Canyon and back over a weekend; or that you can pop over to the Grand Canyon from Oklahoma and get back in time for an evening out. Their concept of distance just doesn't apply in the US.
Toxicroach, of course the midwest can have both if we divert some taxes that currently go to roads to intercity rail and some intracity rail. Both systems require heavy subsidy; roads get it all right now. Driving everywhere wouldn't seem so efficient if all the roads weren't in disproportionately good condition and disproportionately high capacity vs. their use.
If I might suggest another book, Megan, Ken Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier (and many since) illustrates the heavy government subsidies (local and federal) that have made that overconsumption of land possible.
Even on the East Coast, current subsidy policy dramatically favors roads over rail - so what's the excuse? And once again, most people don't live on farms in the Midwest. The rural parts of Europe don't operate on rail transit either.
because the Common Agricultural Policy, along with impoverishing third-world farmers and producing mountains of butter and lakes of wine, encouraged the preservation of farmland near cities. This has nothing to do with virtuous development policy.
Uh...come again? Sentence 1 seems to contradict sentence 2.
I'm not sure about every European country, but certainly in France and the Netherlands, encouraging the preservation of farmland near cities was a big part of a virtuous development policy. In the Netherlands they called it "The Green Heart".
I think you're completely correct that it's largely a matter of density and distance between population centers. We're seeing a similar phenomenon on the Colorado Front Range: The 'burbs have expanded about as far as they can and still allow a reasonable commute into Denver. While the housing bubble has burst in the suburbs, you wouldn't believe the construction activity in LoDo, most of it in high-rise, dense housing.
Then again, it doesn't help that many of those multi-billion public transportation projects built out west don't run from where people live to where people work. We just had lunch at Wyncoop's, across from the railyard, and watched light rail trains coming and going with no passengers. None. But then, I suspect that Denver's light rail system was constructed primarily as a pork barrel project, not to provide transportation.
They even call it "Park & Ride". You're supposed to commute by car into Denver as always, except you're supposed to park on the outskirts and take the train the last few miles into town. But if you've already driven an hour, why not drive another 10 minutes and just be there? That's what we do.
If they had light rail running all the way out to the bedroom communities it might work, but they don't, which makes me think that the whole system is about employing bureaucrats and public employees, rather than transporting people. That there have been complaints about the train not stopping in the residential areas it does go through speaks volumes.
In short, if the interstate and heavy rail systems didn't connect the towns & cities people would starve, and just might complain. But public transportation, no matter how much money is thrown at it, has become a toy for the bureaucrats. They're not even seriously trying to make it work, so why give 'em even more money?
Swen, one thing about public transit is that you have to get developers on board to make sure the stations work. In Hong Kong, the city pays for the subway system and tunnels, but the stations are built by commercial developers, who put office, retail and residential complexes on top of them. Rail systems have to be thought of not just as lines that connect where the people already are, but as structural elements that guide where they will eventually be.
I should add that most of Denver's bedroom communities lie north and south along I-25, so it's not like they'd have to construct a vast network of railways. Also, there already is a rail system running through these communities, it just doesn't carry passengers in any useful way.
It's not that a cummuter rail system would take much or cost much, it appears to be that the planners haven't planned beyond employing their brothers-in-law.
Disproportionately high capacity v. use?
Guess you never try to drive during rush hour. Even in the boonies the highways can get pretty crowded.
And no, there is no viable railway system. If highways are expensive to maintain, train stations are every 50 person village in Missouri would be vastly more expensive to maintain and frankly wasteful. And you'd still need a car to get to where you're actually going, since it may well be some farmhouse thats another 20 miles down the way. Whats great about a car is that it doesn't have to suit the masses. It specifically tailors the journey to what you need to do. It's not a matter of diverting a bit of tax money from inner city light rail, its that a rail system for a rural area would dwarf the cost of a city light rail system and yet still totally suck ass.
Well, I don't know, Swen. Maybe you're right. It's just that I remember when the DC subway started up in the late 70s, and there were tons of empty trains for exactly the same reason -- it didn't reach out to residential areas. That was because they had to build the downtown sections first, so there'd be someplace to go to. By the late '80s, half the city was commuting via Metro. In the long run, the system has not been a flaming success story, for reasons I haven't read enough about, but I wouldn't be surprised if a failure to get developers involved enough in the process (including disincentives NOT to be involved) weren't the prime culprit.
Most American cities, on the other hand, had huge, practically unlimited, tracts of farmland to expand into outside of the East Coast, and forthwith did.
There is still plenty of developable farmland or forest between Boston and New York, between New York and Philadelphia, between Philadelphia and Baltimore, and definitely between D.C. and Richmond.
What constrains expansion is the practicality of long commutes, but that's not the same as a lack of land. Even with these commutes, you still have big development of open land in southern New Hampshire, central Jersey, southeast Pennsylvania, etc.
A lot of the suburbanisation of the US was explicit urban planning. Cities were very much destroyed by planners.
In Europe, there was a lot more resistance to those things.
It doesn't fit the traditional narrative, but in the 50's European were a lot more resistant to having bureaucrats design cities than Americans were.
brooksfoe said:
"one thing about public transit is that you have to get developers on board to make sure the stations work"
It's even better if you can leave the whole thing to the developers. So let's distinuish between "mass" transit and "public" transit.
The Osaka metropolitan area has several privately owned commuter railways I've ridden on. Among the clever synergistic things they do are:
* Build department stores at their urban termini and major interchanges. They make money not only from sales at the department store but also from people traveling to the department store.
* Build movie megaplexes near their stations, allowing them to collect money off of two kinds of ticket sales, and increase ridership in normally-slack evening and weekend times.
* Build and rent out light retail space at all their stations. Anything a commuter might want to buy is available within 100 yards of the platform. Not like, say, a Long Island Railroad station in the evening, where the nearest convenience store is in a strip mall across a 6-lane major road. Plus the eyes of a few shopkeepers help make people feel safe, which would be worth even more in the US than it is in Japan.
* Line all underground pedestrian passages with retail booths.
* Build amusement parks at the far ends of their commuter lines. Again, this boosts profits two ways, directly from the park, and indirectly from increased weekend ridership on otherwise unused tracks.
* Rent out the space under their elevated train lines as light retail, manufacturing, storage, or at the very least parking. Not a single square foot is wasted on the gravel and weeds typical of so much of the space under the Long Island Railroad.
Every one of these things increases profits by increasing urban density. If you let a profit-making institution profit from all the different network effects of building transportation infrastructure, they'll have a pretty strong incentive to do it and do it thoroughly.
because the Common Agricultural Policy, along with impoverishing third-world farmers and producing mountains of butter and lakes of wine, encouraged the preservation of farmland near cities. This has nothing to do with virtuous development policy.
Amen to that!
My favourite way of explaining the size of the US to Europeans is to point out that the drive from Portland, OR to Phoenix, AZ (around 1450 miles) is approximately the same distance as from London to Moscow.
And the country's twice that big east-westwards.
But ralph, don't you know that profit is a dirty word and corporations are eeeeevvviiiiiilllllll!
While the US lags Europe in passenger rail, we are far ahead in commercial rail usage. Europe has around 8% of shipping by rail vs 40% in the US (based on ton-miles). Road shipping (trucks) is far higher in Europe, 44% vs 28% in the US.
I can't easily find a comparison of per-capita passenger vehicle miles driven but I am pretty sure that numbers in Europe are increasing faster than the US.
It's certainly not true that
. . . if we just had more virtuous development policy, we'd get Americans out of their cars.
but its almost certain that
. . . if we just had had more virtuous development policy, we'd get Americans out of their cars.
Swen:
I also live in Denver (happen to live in the Uptown region, so I can walk into downtown for work). But a couple things in regards to your analysis of our light-rail system:
(a) You were having lunch at the Wynkoop (in LoDo) and saw no one on the train at lunch-hour? Duh…Denver’s light rail was built not for the intention of lunch goers traveling from downtown to a close locale to eat lunch (such as you might find in larger cities). The light-rail system in a Western or Mid-Western city is going to be designed to facilitate the ease of traffic congestion for the daily commute. So of course it was empty then. Take a look at that train from 7:00 – 9:00 AM and 4:30 – 6:30 PM. You will see a much different picture.
(b) The current Denver light-rail stations (except for Downtown stations, the DU station and the Littleton station at the mall) were built specifically as commuter stops. You see the same thing actually in Boston. Go to the Braintree station on the Red Line. It is just a giant parking garage, and no one rides the train to that station in the middle of the day. I work at a large accounting firm, and no a bunch of people who live in the Littleton/Highlands Ranch area who ride the rail-line daily. They love it because they get to handle e-mails and other tasks while riding the train so they can get into work and get right to work. They do not waste time sitting in a car.
(c) If you want to see a lunch-time train full, then the upcoming proposal to re-install the trolley from Colorado and Colfax into Downtown would be full at lunch. This is because that transit goal is not for commuting from home to work. Its purpose is to traffic people from place of business A to place-of-business B. Much in the same vein that downtown subway stations operate in larger cities such as Chicago, New York and Boston.
a. The one extension of the line where it actually functions much like an East coast transit system is from downtown north into the 5-points area. This is because you have a train running directly into high-density neighborhoods (versus the line south of Denver where it runs parallel to I-25 and I-225). Plus, many of the residence in that area work in Downtown for restaurants (it is heavily populated by immigrants who do not own cars).
(d) If Denver really wanted to eliminate some of the congestion, they would try to run a line from Downtown to Cherry Creek to the I-225 highway.. In between is the Capital Hill Neighborhood and the Cherry Creek shopping/residential district (the richest area in Denver). You have tons of young professionals, all of whom live too far to walk to work from downtown), but who are equally open to riding the transit to get to work if it means not having to pay for parking. In addition, due to the development in downtown, most of the parking lots now are so far away from downtown, that a walk to the train station in Capital Hill and Uptown would both be safer and quicker
Edit: when I stated that Cherry Creek was the wealthiest area in Denver, I meant Denver proper, not the entire Denver metro area. I think that goes to the Cherry Hills area.
Ralph - That sounds great, but it really only works for pretty dense areas. Nassau County is a dense suburban community, but its not Osaka. Suffolk County is less dense than Nassau (it has a slightly larger population, but its about 5 times the size). The LIRR isn't going to become like Osaka railways. According to Wikipedia Osaka has a population density of 11,869/km², the Osaka prefecture has a density of 4,657 /km². Comapre to Nassau County (1798.5/km²), or Suffolk County (617/km²)
cdeegan:
The reason the US relies more on freight train is that on the one hand, ships can reach pretty most major cites in Europe. On the other hand, distances are longer in the US which makes freight train more viable. Very little of it has to do with transportation policy.
I don't see why it's so hard to believe that the differences between Europe and the US are due to transportation policy.
1) Gas is heavily taxed in Europe, so it is typically 3-4 times more expensive than in the us.
2) Rail and mass transit get a lot more funding.
There's plenty of room for most European cities to sprawl, but there has been a conscious effort to limit it. And guess what? it works.
Talking about rural areas is irrelevant in this context since rural areas can never rely on mass transit and they certainly don't in europe.
You should read Sprawl by Robert Bruegmann. Interesting contrarian take on the topic.
Brad,
I don't live in Denver and have no idea how well the trains are set up, but to your first point, if the trains are empty during the day, then why run them during the day? Duh.
Allow me to attempt to further debunk the illusion that Europe is so lacking in space.
The Netherlands is one of the most dense countries in Europe, such that Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and the Hague are considered one economic area. However, if you drive between them, you drive through miles and miles of marshland and fields, along which you can spot beautiful marshbirds. The difference between the United States and Europe is not that Europe lacks this farming space, it is that they have insisted on preserving these areas while we are content to pave them over.
I don't imply a judgment in this. Europe is nice in that you can start cycling from the center of Amsterdam and within half an hour find yourself pedalling through field after field of lusciuos green. On the other hand, you probably have to live in an extremely cramped space. So, it is a simple trade-off. However, we should not fool ourselves that there was no choice - and no possibility of our making a similar choice - when discussing this empirically.
Cal:
your reaction about running trains during the day misses the point of demand for the train service.
First of all: there is some demand. Albeit low, there is demand.
Secondly: if the City of Denver were to shut down the service for specific periods of time, the lack of flexibility offered riders of the transit would be a disincentive to use it. For example, if every rider had to risk not being able to get to their car in the middle-of-the-day (for whatever emergency or reason), they would likely not use the service. And if people become accustomed to NOT riding the train, then you have the situation where people stop getting into the habit of riding the train.
So the opportunity costs in terms of savings in operating costs if you shut down the train during the day do not outweigh the likely decrease in demand for the train during peak hours.
Brad,
I must have. I thought the point was that there wasn't enough demand to justify the service. Swen says he sees empty trains and you say they are meant to be empty. Some demand. At the very least, spike the price sky high during the day.
If someone needs to get back to their car in a hurry, they aren't going to hang around at the train station anyway. They will get a cab if they can't bum a ride from a co-worker. If the ticket price were correctly set for the cost of running the nearly empty trains, the cab is probably cheaper anyway.
Cal:
this is just going to be a disincentive to users of the train. You guys are missing the point of these trains. They are much like commuter lanes during rush hour. The entire point is to reduce congestion and emissions during peak commuting hours.
If you either deny service during non-peak hours or charge extraordinary amounts to use it during non-peak services, this will become a disincentive to anyone using it. Why take the risk of needing to go home at 2:00 and either have no way to get to my car or have to pay through the roof. It would be easier to just drive and not take on the additional restriction of movement risk.
Sure, DTD would like the trains to run full 100% of the time, but this is unrealistic in almost every city save for the cities on the Northeast corridor, where it is impossible to get around anywhere near downtown. But you are not going to change land density and land usage in Denver anytimes soon.
As such, the goals of any massive transit system in other US cities is to reduce congestion during the peak commuter hours. As such, it has been an amazing success, and during football, baseball or hockey/basketball games, many people take the train from the south in order to avoid the parking and traffic.
Cal:
maybe the last post was not as clear as I would have liked:
Lets put it this way: if you do not make the train convenient for commuters, commuters will not use it during the time Denver wants commuters to use it most ~ rush hour.
The demand during the rush hour IS THE JUSTIFICATION for keeping it running during non-peak hours, as this convenience to be able to grab a train anytime makes it easier for someone to justify taking the train versus driving into Denver.
Tim Fowler said
"Ralph - That sounds great, but it really only works for pretty dense areas. Nassau County is a dense suburban community, but its not Osaka."
So why is the strip mall across the street instead of under the elevated station?
The Keihan line halfway between Osaka and Kyoto runs through what passes for "countryside" in Japan, which about as dense as Nassau County, and even there they apply some "densifying synergy" tricks.
"Go to the Braintree station on the Red Line. It is just a giant parking garage, and no one rides the train to that station in the middle of the day."
I don't know about the one at Braintree, but the reason nobody gets on at Alewife after 9am or sois that the parking lot is full. It's an example of a "park and ride" approach that consistently runs at 100% capacity.
Of course it's feeding a dense urban core that's already very much pedestrian/mass transit oriented. If your city center is car-oriented as I suspect Denver's is, it's not going to work.
Tim
I forgot to reiterate the other half of my point - a privately owned railway has both the incentive and some means to actively promote ever-increasing urban density.
I was curious about one thing that is missed when talking europe... Seems like most of their infrastructure, and industry were destroyed in the recent past. Given that rebuilding begun in the late 40's would have taken into account wholesale re-planning, lack of vehicles, and already known densities, the re-plan proceeded more easily than it would have with already existant cities. They were rebuilding old cities in place and making improvements as needed.
Most of the US is a whole other thing. It's a patchwork based on organic growth patterns. By that I mean there isn't any overarching government to force planning a certain way, local groups do what seems reasonable to them. You have to build the roads anyway. From an individuals perspective, and a local govt. perspective why would you want to pay extra for a mass transit system? At the time much of Denver Metro was built [waves to the Denverites] Late 50's through the 80's fuel was cheap, land was cheap and there was no INCENTIVE to build transit.
Then there was the oil bust, and recessions of the 80's. Even IF people wanted the transit, taxes were down, and Tech businesses finally started migrating out of downtown to the Tech Center [build it and they will come]...
Much of the US, in terms of geography, is like that. You really have to get above a certain number of people in an area, before transit is feasable, and that has only happened recently. That means that ALL of the building in place is designed for individual transit. Couple that with the fact of flex-time, and suddenly? There is too much inertia to go back without a fight.
What I find the most amusing is the idea that this is a failure of policy. AS IF there is some kind of monolithic government to impose transit policy. NO, there are lots of little entities that have to interact, that have their own biases and so on. IF the federal government had a policy based on funding, perhaps there would be some movement. But to put that in perspective... in the late 70's when the writing was on the wall about the south suburbs of Denver [Littleton, and the soon to be built Highlands Ranch, which actually WAS a Ranch then] There was some interest for putting in Heavy Commuter Rail on existing tracks from Littleton/H-R to downtown. Basically they would have had to build a few stations, and buy the passenger cars, and engines. Other than that the infrastructure was there, and that is saying something.
It was killed because the fed wasn't interested, and nobody here was willing to foot the entire bill.
30 years later they rip out those existing tracks and build light rail to the same places at a cost of 20-50X more depending on whose numbers you believe. The fed chipped ~40% of that. How stupid IS IT that instead of paying a smaller amount, you wait and wonder and pay something like 10x that amount, even though the fed is ante up? PLUS you have a whole generation of people that would have been used to riding the train to work, and you could have simply extended the service south to castle rock when those bedroom communities were built. The Tech Center would likely have been done differently or not really built at all, because there would have been greater incentive for business downtown.
ALL THAT SAID. There is no magic wand to wish this away. The savings of fuel and so-on would be more than offset by having to rip down and reconfigure cities for mass transit in flyover country, because tearing down lots of houses IS WASTEFUL on a grand scale. That's even IF there was some kind of political will to do it.
SO? This is missed - alot. How low hanging is the telecommuting fruit? If you could take most workers who COULD telecommute off the roads, how much would that improve everything? There wouldn't need to be such angst about building stuff, or making people go to work in a way they don't like. AND you could do it tomorrow, without 10 years of environmental impact statements and lots of taxation questions. Sure it dosent work for EVERYONE who works, but probably most people who commute to office buildings. Do a few tax breaks for business to get them off the fence, tax credit for a home office. They don't have to be big. viola, big drop in traffic, change in traffic patterns, and maybe even happier people.
Two items are missing from the discussion:
- The mindless zoning that exists in so much of America that says that Work and Living exist in two separate domains. DC is a great example of this. Until very recently office buildings and housing existed in separate universes as if they were approved by two separate planning commissions. Hence we have morons living in Loudon county jumping in their cars at 6 and not arriving at work in downtown DC until 7:30. Tax policy and zoning encouraged this until the recent backlash from far-suburb residents that suddenly saw that the developers had no desire or intent to build the urban services the residents thought they deserved. A wiser push for intelligent zoning around metro stops would have encouraged business growth with residential growth ringed around these stations in a way that would make cars irrelevant. Certainly I'm citing extremes, but I think where you find strict separation of residents and businesses, generally, you find gridlock in-between. 'Open' space in these suburbs is a joke since the developers often control the land-use and the political clout to do as they wish, the incentive to keep open space is nil so the new residents bring along what they originally intended to leave behind, namely: traffic, crowding, and competition for scarce open space.
- The second item missing is something I'll call 'civic virtue'. You can find loads of it in Europe. The sense of place so evident in London, Paris, Berlin or even small cities like Geneva. Residents feel a vested interest in seeing their city maintain its character and liveliness. I live in NY now but still own in NW DC and find its renaissance refreshing, yet, as noted elsewhere DC has a transient population without much long-term interest in building cohesive neighborhoods. I don't believe anyone, short of recent immigrants, would believe that living in a far suburb of Amsterdam would qualify them to say they live in Amsterdam. Instead, they would say that they live in whatever village or city they actually occupy and they could cite the village pub as part of their social fabric. Imagine that from comeone living in Leesburg, Loundon County, Virginia.
"The mindless zoning that exists in so much of America that says that Work and Living exist in two separate domains."
It's not mindless. It was a conscious policy choice based on the theories of "modernist" architects and city planners.
It maw have been extremely unwise to follow the advice of internationally admired experts like Le Courboisier but it wasn't exactly mindless. In fact it was lauded as enlightened and progressive at the time.
Michael W:
I live in NY now but still own in NW DC and find its renaissance refreshing, yet, as noted elsewhere DC has a transient population without much long-term interest in building cohesive neighborhoods.
So, what's your plan to cut down on transience? Free movement restrictions? Voting restrictions? Who loses when you get what you want?
The kind of development you're looking for around Metro stops has happened in Arlington county, I think, and there were policies in place encouraging that, certainly. But, you know, the Metro system doesn't go that far into the suburbs, even now, and the vast majority of the metro stops (including the Arlington stops) were put into places that were already built out pretty much when the stations were built. In other words, the development you're talking about involves replacing whatever is there with new stuff, and the people who are already there almost always fight that, and who can blame them? Again, who loses when you get what you want?
"I don't know about the one at Braintree, but the reason nobody gets on at Alewife after 9am or sois that the parking lot is full. It's an example of a "park and ride" approach that consistently runs at 100% capacity.
Of course it's feeding a dense urban core that's already very much pedestrian/mass transit oriented. If your city center is car-oriented as I suspect Denver's is, it's not going to work."
- Ralph
Actually, the parking lots are full at many of the stations for the DTD Lightrail, including the Station near Chatfield Resevior (the main stopping point for commuters from Littleton & Highlands Ranch).
BP - good point, but there was a lot of re-development that went on in Arlington over old homes. A beloved Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian was in the way of I-66. It was moved many miles away (to far south Fairfax Co)..the rest was scraped up by a bulldozer. If they can obliterate a neighborhood for a freeway, then surely we can adjust development over decades (with the help of smarter zoning) to make more Ballstons (part of Arlington County and over a metro stop).
I have no desire to limit people's desire to live where they wish, but as we see with Logan Circle in downtown DC, some smart development incentives will attract trailblazers which attracts the Caribou Coffee and the Whole Foods which attracts the people which attracts the nightlife......you get the picture.
Ralph - yes, but a thinking society updates what is "enlightened and progressive". A mindless one always/only looks backwards. It would go against my liberterian analytical sensibilities to force people to do something they don't want and causes me little harm (notice I didn't say "no" harm). When work was more of a dirty, industrial affair, it made more sense. No more.
'"the reason nobody gets on at Alewife after 9am or sois that the parking lot is full"
Actually, the parking lots are full at many of the stations for the DTD Lightrail'
And if these lines were run by a profit-making enterprise they'd be expanding the parking lots already! Even if they first had to raise the parking fees and fares to the point where the lots just barely fill up to fund further construction.
Ralph Phelan:
And if these lines were run by a profit-making enterprise they'd be expanding the parking lots already! Even if they first had to raise the parking fees and fares to the point where the lots just barely fill up to fund further construction.
Well, that could be, but it's hard to know for sure. Parking garages are VERY expensive to build compared to surface lots. Land acquisition for surface lots might also be very expensive. You may think the demand will go down in a nice linear way as you raise the prices, but it might fall off a cliff too.
There'd also probably be local opposition. I know, I know, that only matters because of evil government infringement on property rights, but it's a real world concern.
Orson Scott Card took this up in April of this year in his columns Life Without Cars and Walking Neighborhoods.
The gist:
It's as if government looked at the beloved old neighborhoods that people drive through with yearning and nostalgia, and banned them.
The result is that the poor are shunted off into isolated islands, where crime thrives, employment is remote, and the poor have to own cars just to get a job. Meanwhile, most people can't walk or bike to any useful destination, because the law has forbidden retail or office buildings anywhere near where people live.
and ...how many rider-miles would it take before we start saving the lives of teenage drivers or family breadwinners who aren't driving cars? How long before the money saved by leaving cars at home turns into an increase in retail sales?
And you who scream about increasing subsidies, think of this: A bus system that lets more of the working poor get to better paying jobs is a lot more worthwhile than subsidies for rich corporations.
Besides, we're already heavily subsidizing the car traffic that's literally killing us, stealing our time, polluting our air, making us fat, and funding our enemies. Tax money goes to building and widening roads and installing traffic lights and patrolling them.
Eventually, subsidies for public transit to bring it up to a competitive level of quality will save us the huge amounts of money we currently pay to support needless cars.
Read the whole thing. And email both columns to your local government agencies.
Orson Scott Card (via Stephen above):
It's as if government looked at the beloved old neighborhoods that people drive through with yearning and nostalgia, and banned them.
The key phrase here is "people drive through with yearning and nostalgia".
Everyone wants to leave home to see bigger and better things, and then they want the home they couldn't leave fast enough to stay exactly the same. Call it Chryssie Hynde Syndrome.
Raplph - Let me be more specific. You'll only get the full extent of those benefits you describe if you have a higher population density. That doesn't mean you can't get some of the benefit in lower densities, esp. if a clever private rail-road owner is setting up the system and the stations in the first place. (Just transferring the existing LIRR, or Washington metro to a private owner would cause far less change)
Michael W.
Obviously you think Loudoun residents are among the lowest forms of life, what with their long commutes into DC, probably using I-66, and preference for houses with yards. How dare they drive! How dare they buy a home that costs less/sq. foot and has generally higher quality public schools! I don't see the venality of it that you apparently do.
And FWIW, suburbanites only say they are from the city when they are talking to people who don't know the area well enough to care where, for example, Leesburg is. Even saying I'm from Northern Virginia is too difficult for most people to understand. I have to say I'm from the Washington DC metro area or all I get are blank stares.