Urbanism « Isegoria

SimCity’s Evil Twin

Saturday, April 20th, 2013

Dwarf Fortress is SimCity’s evil twin, Gabriel Winslow-Yost says:

Dwarf Fortress puts the player in charge of a fledgling Dwarven colony, initially comprising seven dwarfs — a number that can, with the births and immigration that come with successful play, rise into the hundreds, but just as easily plunge to one or zero. You watch from above, pausing the action at will to give orders using a byzantine array of menus, but never directly controlling any of the dwarfs. The central principle of the game is an attention to detail that is frankly obsessive. Dozens of plants and animals are simulated, and hundreds of types of ore are modeled in the soil. Every dwarf has individual character traits, religious beliefs, affections, moods, and skills, and every limb and tissue layer of their bodies is modeled and tracked. (For a while, the melting point for the fat layer of the dwarves’ skin was set too low, resulting in instant death for any creature that got damp and then entered a warm room — baroque and violent bugs like this are very much in the spirit of the game).

Your dwarves can marry and reproduce; suffer from P.T.S.D.; bond with pets; or be taken by “fey moods” and lock themselves away to create artworks. They need constant alcohol intake to remain happy, and if they stay underground for too long will become allergic to sunlight (leading to the classic F.A.Q. entry, “Why is my fortress surrounded by vomit?”). Just starting up a new game requires a few minutes for the computer to randomly generate miles of terrain and thousands of years of local history. And this is it in its embryonic, alpha incarnation. Adams keeps an elaborate public to-do list for the game, whose entries vary in scale from the minute (“Wheelbarrows to haul more objects than can be carried”) to the truly grand (“Have religions in the game correspond to forces or deities and let you play one”), and estimates that version 1.0 won’t be finished for another twenty years.

As in SimCity, there is no real way to win the game. Instead of a series of comfortable equilibria, however, a game of Dwarf Fortress tends harshly, inevitably, toward ruin. The colony is overrun by invaders, or succumbs to disease, starvation, blood-feuds, or madness; a dragon takes up residence in the dining-hall, slaughtering every dwarf but one, who waits out the winter sealed in his room; a vast lava trap, constructed to deal with these threats, malfunctions, killing everybody; and so on. It is played alone, but its brutality, complexity, and unpredictability give its players a need for community — an urge to bear witness, to commiserate, to trade tips for using kittens as poison-detectors. Elaborate written accounts of Dwarf Fortress games, sometimes incorporating art or even animation, have become popular Internet reading material, perhaps more popular than playing the game itself.

One especially successful dwarf fortress demonstrates two important aspects of the game:

The first is that, for all his success in the game — and FlareChannel is about as successful as any Dwarf Fortress creation yet seen — QuantumSawdust does still not feel it is secure. He writes in the Dwarf Fortress forum that the vast families his dwarves have created make him “see the danger of tantrum spirals” — a well-known phenomenon in which an injury to one member of a family causes the rest of that family to run amok with grief and anger, potentially injuring members of other families, and so on — and that “I just have to hope my amenities for the dwarves make up for any disasters that occur.”

The second is that the game is so intricate that many of the events it creates were intended by neither the player nor the designer. In one of the online accounts of FlareChannel’s history, the fort’s creator relates his “favorite story,” which he calls “The Fable of Catten and Eagle.” He tells of a single semi-tame giant eagle — one of many that fill the fort — who took an intense, inexplicable liking to Catten, a particularly competent dwarf, but also one entirely indifferent to the eagle. Twelve game-years later, Catten was caught outside during a dragon attack. The eagle rushed to his aid, blinding the dragon and then helping him kill it. They became friends, eventually died of old age, and “during the finishing of the Temple to Armok, Catten’s clothes were mysteriously found on the roof, where no path could possibly have led.” The writer theorizes that “on a rare night when others were asleep, Catten would climb aboard his old friend, strip naked, and fly around the towers.” Though some part of all this was no doubt embellished in the telling, this account is still, crucially, more a report than a story; its origins are behaviors generated by the game, and observed and interpreted by the player.

Posted in Games, Urbanism | No Comments »

Phalanstère

Wednesday, April 17th, 2013

What does Fitzhugh mean by a phalanstery? He’s referring to Charles Fourier’s utopian building concept, the phalanstère:

Fourier believed that the traditional house was a place of exile and oppression of women. He believed gender roles could progress by shaping them within community, more than by pursuits of sexual freedom or other Simonian concepts.

The structure of the phalanstère was composed by three parts: a central part and two lateral wings. The central part was designed for quiet activities. It included dining rooms, meeting rooms, libraries and studies. A lateral wing was designed for labour and noisy activities, such as carpentry, hammering and forging. It also hosted children because they were considered noisy while playing. The other wing contained a caravansary, with ballrooms and halls for meetings with outsiders. The outsiders had to pay a fee in order to visit and meet the people of the Phalanx community. This income was thought to sustain the autonomous economy of the phalanstère. The phalanstère also included private apartments and many social halls. A social hall was defined by Fourier as a seristère.

Le Corbusier adapted the concept of the phalanstère when he designed the Unité d’Habitation commune in Marseilles.

Posted in George Fitzhugh, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

What Did the Cameras See?

Tuesday, April 16th, 2013

Boston is saturated with cameras:

Nine cities — Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Revere, Quincy, Somerville and Winthrop — are all interconnected, and the system is designed to instantly share surveillance images between the municipalities.

If the bomber(s) took public transportation, there’s a good chance those steps can be retraced through video footage. As of 2012 there were nearly 500 cameras in the subway alone, and more on busses. If they drove, cameras on bridges and tolls could help retrace a perp’s steps leading up to the bomb’s placement.

The cameras are pretty slick and the information on them is available immediately — they transmit data wirelessly via an Internet connection. “Stored video can be easily shared with other [Police Departments] over standard web browsers using a system protected by a basic username and password,” the ACLU says.

Posted in Crime, Technology, Urbanism | No Comments »

Drivers vs. Pedestrians

Thursday, March 21st, 2013

While visiting Frankfurt and Moscow, Peter Turchin found himself thinking about social norms governing interactions between drivers and pedestrians:

These norms vary dramatically between countries, and even regions within countries. In New York City, for example, pedestrians pay no attention to traffic lights — you check the traffic and cross the street. In Seattle, on the other hand, you are not supposed to do that, and cops will actually write you a ticket for jaywalking (at least, they did in the 1980s, when I did my post-doc there).

In Germany pedestrians are very disciplined and will wait to cross the street until they get the green light — even if there is no traffic. For somebody raised in New York (and many other places outside of Germanic countries), this feels really weird, and even unnatural. I noticed that many tourists crossed illegally, with natives looking upon such ‘antisocial behavior’ disapprovingly. Frankfurt is not a big tourist destination, but I wonder whether the norm prohibiting jaywalking is sustainable in cities where the majority of pedestrians are foreigners. Theoretically, if enough people disregard a norm, it should collapse.

Then there are norms regulating when drivers should yield to pedestrians. In many countries, including Russia, pedestrians have the right of way on zebra-crossings. But, as we all know well, just having a law on the books doesn’t mean that it is actually followed. When I again started visiting Russia regularly in the 1990s, I noticed with dismay that drivers paid no attention to pedestrians trying to cross a street. Using zebra crossings became a deadly game of the Russian roulette (sorry about the cliché).

When asked, my friends offered several explanations. One obvious possibility was that the behavior of drivers simply reflected the general unraveling of cooperative norms that accompanied the civilizational and societal collapse of the Soviet Union. Another explanation was that the 1990s were the first decade when the Russians began using automobiles massively, and the norms of civilized behavior simply had not had a chance to spread though the population of new drivers. The third one pointed to the influx of drivers from the North- and Trans-Caucasian republics (then, as now, most taxi drivers in Moscow came from that region), who brought a different set of norms with them.

A more general (ultimate, rather than proximate) explanation is suggested by recent theoretical research on the evolution of cooperation. Cooperative equilibria tend to be fragile, and can collapse in no time at all. A more interesting and difficult question is how we can go from a noncooperative equilibrium to a cooperative equilibrium. This is where the story gets interesting.

During the early 2000s, drivers gradually started treating pedestrians more considerately. This trend became very noticeable last time I was in Moscow, a week ago. Now when you come to a zebra crossing drivers routinely stop for you (a major exception, however, is zebra crossings across very busy roads with four or more lanes). This seems to be a true equilibrium, because all players expect drivers to stop for pedestrians. This includes other drivers, which is important because previously a major worry was that if you stop at a zebra, you could be hit from behind by another car that did not expect you to do it. Pedestrians now start crossing fairly confidently, whereas during the 1990s they behaved like deer during the hunting season. And even cops started enforcing the law, which is probably the most amazing development, given how notoriously corrupt the road police are in Russia.

It’s interesting to speculate how this positive change came about. A part of the explanation is that there were several well-publicized cases of drivers killing pedestrians on zebra walks. Two years ago a law was passed that required drivers to stop when a pedestrian approached a zebra crossing (previously they were required to stop only when someone was already crossing). But while this is undoubtedly part of the story, I feel that laws by themselves are insufficient; there must also be a cultural change that enables laws to become effective.

I queried my local informants and I heard a similar story from three independent sources. Basically, the claim is that this is a case of cultural diffusion of social norms from European countries, carried by Russians who visit them as tourists and businessmen. One of my friends related to me the story of how he was driving in Germany several years ago, and habitually did not stop for pedestrians at a zebra crossing. He particularly noted how those people looked at him as he was whizzing by.

Humans are very good both at conveying the information that a norm is being violated, and are also very sensitive to receiving such signals. Maintaining cooperative norms is much easier if signals are sent to norm violators by third parties. In Moscow now pedestrians expect cars to stop for them, and they will look pointedly at those who don’t do so. This bodes well for the stability of the new cooperative equilibrium. Additionally, while cops should fine violators, my guess is that it is more important that society at large clearly expresses its disapproval of norm violators. We have a legal speed limit of 65 mph on highways in the United States, yet despite millions of tickets handed out, the majority in the state where I live drives at around 80 mph. There is simply no social stigma associated with driving above the speed limit.

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Modern French Architecture

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

Theodore Dalrymple is not in favour of the guillotine — except prophylactically for modern French architects:

They should, of course, be given the choice between the guillotine and the fate of the architects of St Basil’s Cathedral and the Taj Mahal. The latter had their eyes put out so that they would not build anything as beautiful again. Modern French architects should have their eyes put out, but for precisely the opposite reason. They do not use them anyway.

Just as in England you cannot bring up the question of public drunkenness without someone piping up about Gin Lane, as if nothing had happened in England between 1740 and 2010, so you cannot mention the depredations of modern French architects without someone mentioning Baron Haussmann who, at the behest of Louis Napoleon, refashioned a lot of Paris, in the process pulling down a huge number of ancient buildings, mainly so that troops could take easy pot-shots at revolutionary rabbles gathering in the new boulevards. Whether the Haussmannian reconfiguration of Paris was a good thing or not, an important, indeed vital, distinction between him and modern French architects is that he not only had taste but humanity, in the sense that he knew what a civilised urban life consisted of and required. He didn’t pull down old Paris in order to build Rostov-on-Don or Pyongyang.

Posted in Theodore Dalrymple, Urbanism | No Comments »

London in the 1980s

Tuesday, February 19th, 2013

Michael Lewis introduces John Lanchester’s novel Capital with his own memories of London in the 1980s:

When I moved to London for graduate school back in the early 1980s, the city felt as if it existed for just about every purpose other than for people to make money in it. Everyone was either on the dole or on strike, or about to be — and not just working-class people. No one appeared, or wanted to appear, all that interested in what they did for a living, except for the taxi drivers, who were better than those in the US. In the middle of any work day an extraordinary number of grown-ups looked as if they had just gotten out of bed.

Nothing functioned properly; everything that wasn’t broken was about to fall apart. The food was almost deliberately inedible, an inside joke cooked up by the locals to see what human beings would willingly consume. (I had a friend from Manhattan who said that every time he passed a British sandwich shop “I want to go in and strangle the owner.”) And the most extraordinary anticommercial attitudes could be found, in places that existed for no purpose other than commerce. There was a small grocery store around the corner from my flat, which carried a rare enjoyable British foodstuff, McVities’ biscuits. One morning the biscuits were gone. “Oh, we used to sell those,” said the very sweet woman who ran the place, “but we kept running out, so we don’t bother anymore.”

If you had to pick a city on earth where the American investment banker did not belong, London would have been on any shortlist. In London, circa 1980, the American investment banker had going against him not just widespread commercial lassitude but the locals’ near-constant state of irony. Wherever it traveled, American high finance required an irony-free zone, in which otherwise intelligent people might take seriously inherently absurd events: young people with no experience in finance being paid fortunes to give financial advice, bankers who had never run a business orchestrating takeovers of entire industries, and so on. It was hard to see how the English, with their instinct to not take anything very seriously, could make possible such a space.

Yet they did. And a brand-new social type was born: the highly educated middle-class Brit who was more crassly American than any American. In the early years this new hybrid was so obviously not an indigenous species that he had a certain charm about him, like, say, kudzu in the American South at the end of the nineteenth century, or a pet Burmese python near the Florida Everglades at the end of the twentieth. But then he completely overran the place. Within a decade half the graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were trying to forget whatever they’d been taught about how to live their lives and were remaking themselves in the image of Wall Street. Monty Python was able to survive many things, but Goldman Sachs wasn’t one of them.

The introduction into British life of American ideas of finance, and success, may seem trivial alongside everything else that was happening in Great Britain at the time (Mrs. Thatcher, globalization, the growing weariness with things not working properly, an actually useful collapse of antimarket snobbery), but I don’t think it was. The new American way of financial life arrived in England and created a new set of assumptions and expectations for British elites — who, as it turned out, were dying to get their hands on a new set of assumptions and expectations. The British situation was more dramatic than the American one, because the difference between what you could make on Wall Street versus doing something useful in America, great though it was, was still a lot less than the difference between what you could make for yourself in the City of London versus doing something useful in Great Britain.

In neither place were the windfall gains to the people in finance widely understood for what they were: the upside to big risk-taking, the costs of which would be socialized, if they ever went wrong. For a long time they looked simply like fair compensation for being clever and working hard. But that’s not what they really were; and the net effect of Wall Street’s arrival in London, combined with the other things that were going on, was to get rid of the dole for the poor and replace it with a far more generous, and far more subtle, dole for the rich. The magic of the scheme was that various forms of financial manipulation appeared to the manipulators, and even to the wider public, as a form of achievement. All these kids from Oxford and Cambridge who flooded into Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs weren’t just handed huge piles of money. They were handed new identities: the winners of this new marketplace. They still lived in England but, because of the magnitude of their success, they were now detached from it.

Posted in Economics, Media, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

Can Mass Transit Save the Environment?

Friday, November 23rd, 2012

Can mass transit save the environment? It’s not likely:

At any given time, the average auto has somewhere around 1.6 passengers, and the average (typically 40-seat) bus has only about 10. Rail vehicles typically have more passengers (on average about 25), but then again they are also typically much larger. Thus their average load factor (percentage of seats filled) is also not high, at about 46 percent for heavy rail systems (think subways in major cities) and about 24 percent for light rail (think systems that mostly run at street level).

It is not clear that moving around large and largely empty vehicles is much of an improvement over moving around smaller ones. In fact, it may be worse. According to the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book, in 2010 transporting each passenger one mile by car required 3447 BTUs of energy. Transporting each passenger a mile by bus required 4118 BTUs, surprisingly making bus transit less green by this metric. Rail transit admittedly fares better, at 2520 BTUs per passenger mile, but even this is not the kind of slam-dunk advantage over the auto that transit advocates might hope for.

[...]

For the most part, any new transit service has to go to relatively low-density cities and low-density areas within cities, meaning that new investment would drag transit’s overall efficiency down, not up.

To give an idea of how this phenomenon works, the heavily used New York subway system (58 percent of seats are typically filled) produces .171 pounds of CO2 per passenger mile, less than 1/3 the average for cars nationwide. However, the much more lightly used Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Memphis light rail systems actually produce considerably more CO2 per passenger mile than cars do.

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It’s time we ended this mendacious cycling hysteria

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

It’s time we ended this mendacious cycling hysteria, Alexander Boot says:

When bicycles first appeared in the 19th century, they revolutionised Britain’s country life. Suddenly farmers acquired an easy means of courting girls in other villages, thereby reducing inbreeding and improving the nation’s genetic stock.

Cycling quickly became essential transportation for some, entertainment for others, a competitive sport for others still. So far, so good. Now fast-forward to our own time — only to observe that cycling has become downright pernicious.

Rather than simply being good exercise and a cheap way to travel, it has claimed something to which it isn’t entitled: moral ascendancy. Cycling has taken a place next to wind farms, solar panels, public foreplay with trees and hoodies, not smoking, not driving after a pint, not using private medicine and other merit badges of PC modernity.

Overnight a Londoner riding a bike to work stopped being an irresponsible miser willing to risk his life to save a few pennies, or else a health freak prepared to die for stronger leg muscles, or perhaps an impatient chap outracing a bus in rush-hour traffic. He’s now a secular saint doing his bit for environmental and personal health.

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Should the Northeast Bury its Power Lines?

Monday, November 19th, 2012

Hurricane Sandy left 6 million people without power. Irene left 7.4 million homes without power. So, should the Northeast bury its power lines?

Fallen trees, snow, and ice are major causes of power outages, so putting electrical infrastructure underground means customers have fewer service interruptions. According to data from the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), between 2004 and 2008, customers with aboveground electrical infrastructure experienced 1.3 power outages per year, on average. In contrast, customers with underground electric networks experience an average of 0.1 outages per year. In addition, underground lines seem to cause fewer injuries than overhead lines.

Yet 80 percent of our power lines are located aboveground, and the main reason for that is cost. “It’s tremendously expensive to bury power lines,” says Mark Garvin, president of the Tree Care Industry Association, whose members are often hired to clean up fallen trees after a big storm.

It can be somewhat affordable to use underground power cables when you’re starting from scratch, he says; developers building new housing tracts can install buried power cables alongside fiberoptics lines and water systems.

But retrofitting is much pricier. “If you’re talking about a built environment where the lines are already up and you’d have to dig through peoples’ lawns and driveways, it becomes prohibitively expensive,” Garvin says.

For example, in a new suburban neighborhood, installing ordinary overhead power lines costs about $194,000 per mile on average. Installing underground power lines would cost $571,000 per mile. And to retrofit an older suburban neighborhood with underground lines, the costs climb up to an average of $724,000 per mile.

For high-voltage transmission lines—the thick cables typically slung between towers that carry electricity across long distances—new underground installations can cost as much as $23 million per mile. Those costs get deflected to the consumer.

[...]

Underground power lines aren’t infallible either; damage from flooding, dig-in events, and other accidents can occasionally cause power outages. And when power outages do occur across underground systems, the damage is harder to locate and requires more time and money to repair. In July 2006, thousands of people in the Queens borough of New York City went without power for nine days during a heat wave. The electric company blamed the blackout on underground cables. Underground power lines can also be less adaptable, harder to upgrade, and have longevity of about 20 years less than overhead power lines, according to the EEI report.

Posted in Technology, Urbanism | No Comments »

Big signs and flashing yellow lights alert drivers that the railroad trestle at Gregson and Peabody streets in Durham, North Carolina is 11 feet and 8 inches tall. A local man named Jürgen Henn has decided to record all the tall trucks ignoring the signs:

Posted in Urbanism | 1 Comment »

Forget About Helmets

Saturday, October 6th, 2012

If you fall off a bike, a helmet can reduce your risk of serious head injury — but ordinary cyclists rarely fall, which is why cyclists rarely wear helmets unless forced:

On the other hand, many researchers say, if you force or pressure people to wear helmets, you discourage them from riding bicycles. That means more obesity, heart disease and diabetes. And — Catch-22 — a result is fewer ordinary cyclists on the road, which makes it harder to develop a safe bicycling network. The safest biking cities are places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where middle-aged commuters are mainstay riders and the fraction of adults in helmets is minuscule.

“Pushing helmets really kills cycling and bike-sharing in particular because it promotes a sense of danger that just isn’t justified — in fact, cycling has many health benefits,” says Piet de Jong, a professor in the department of applied finance and actuarial studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. He studied the issue with mathematical modeling, and concludes that the benefits may outweigh the risks by 20 to 1.

He adds: “Statistically, if we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities.” The European Cyclists’ Federation says that bicyclists in its domain have the same risk of serious injury as pedestrians per mile traveled.

Obviously wearing a helmet to get into the bath is counterproductive, but wearing a helmet while climbing isn’t crazy.

Posted in Economics, Fitness, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

Rooftop Villas

Wednesday, September 12th, 2012

Four houses were built on the rooftop of the Jiutian International Square, a shopping mall in Zhuzhou, Hunan province:

The buildings, which have electricity and water pipes already installed, will be offices for the shopping mall developer’s 160 real estate management employees, said Li Li from the Zhuzhou city planning bureau.

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Streetcar Plans Plow Ahead

Friday, September 7th, 2012

Streetcars are making a comeback — with federal backing:

In 2009, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood pledged $280 million for urban-transit projects, such as streetcars. During the past four years, the Department of Transportation doled out more than $450 million to 12 streetcar projects across the country, according to the Federal Transit Administration.

Atlanta and Salt Lake City already have broken ground on streetcar projects with a total of $74 million in federal funding.

Minneapolis is preparing to apply for more federal money to get a project under way after receiving a $900,000 federal planning grant in late 2010, said Peter Wagenius, a policy director for Mayor R.T. Rybak. “These streetcar lines are short not because they should be, but rather because cities have been doing what was possible with available funding,” Mr. Wagenius said.

Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

How the Elites Built America’s Economic Wall

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

Regions with better economies tend to have higher real-estate prices, but now, Virginia Postrel warns, elites in those regions have artificially pushed prices prohibitively high with land-use regulations:

As I have argued elsewhere, there are two competing models of successful American cities. One encourages a growing population, fosters a middle-class, family-centered lifestyle, and liberally permits new housing. It used to be the norm nationally, and it still predominates in the South and Southwest. The other favors long-term residents, attracts highly productive, work-driven people, focuses on aesthetic amenities, and makes it difficult to build. It prevails on the West Coast, in the Northeast and in picturesque cities such as Boulder, Colorado and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The first model spurs income convergence, the second spurs economic segregation. Both create cities that people find desirable to live in, but they attract different sorts of residents.

This segregation has social and political consequences, as it shapes perceptions — and misperceptions — of one’s fellow citizens and “normal” American life. It also has direct and indirect economic effects. “It’s a definite productivity loss,” Shoag says. “If there weren’t restrictions and you could build everywhere, it would be productive for people to move. You do make more as a waiter in LA than you do in Ohio. Preventing people from having that opportunity to move to these high-income places, making it so expensive to live there, is a loss.” That’s true not only for less-educated workers but for lower earners of all sorts, including the artists and writers who traditionally made places like New York, Los Angeles and Santa Fe cultural centers.

In their paper, Shoag and Ganong don’t look at why high- income states tightened their regulations, thereby increasing segregation by education level. One possible explanation is that as people get richer and cities get more crowded, the tradeoffs between cheaper housing for newcomers and a pleasant (or at least stable) environment for current residents look different. When postwar developers were turning California orange orchards into suburbs, residents focused on the new houses rather than the lost landscape. Now opposition to new construction is not only common but institutionalized. Well-organized residents fear losing the amenities that attracted them in the first place.

Another consideration is the difference between housing as consumption — a nice place to live — and housing as an investment, promising high returns over time. Making it hard to build new housing in a place people want to live drives up the price of the existing housing stock. Old-timers reap capital gains. Regulation, Shoag notes, “takes what should be the gain for the worker who wants to move in and turns it into the gain for the owner of the house.”

Finally, there’s the never-mentioned possibility: that the best-educated, most-affluent, most politically influential Americans like this result. They may wring their hands over inequality, but in everyday life they see segregation as a feature, not a bug. It keeps out fat people with bad taste. Paul Krugman may wax nostalgic about a childhood spent in the suburbs where plumbers and middle managers lived side by side. But I doubt that many of his fervent fans would really want to live there. If so, they might try Texas.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

Take the C-Train

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

Incentives matter, and if you ended subsidies for roads, people would drive less, Josh Barro notes — but not much less:

An end to road subsidies would raise gasoline prices by about 50 to 60 cents a gallon. Over the last decade, fuel prices rose much more sharply than that, which led to a modest reduction in vehicle-miles traveled, but there hasn’t been any sea change in our transportation practices.

That’s because the real culprit keeping Americans away from mass transit and inside cars isn’t subsidies; it’s planning and zoning. Cities impose barriers to density that limit the number of housing units and offices that can be located near buses and trains, which reduces mass-transit usage. These barriers also drive up property prices in areas near mass transit, penalizing transit-oriented living and encouraging people to live farther from urban cores, in areas where they have to drive. Meanwhile, cities often require builders to include a minimum number of parking spaces in new developments, depressing the market price of parking and further rewarding drivers.

A better approach would take advantage of the fact that proximity to transit increases property values. Cities should allow dense development, collect the property taxes that are generated, and use them to finance transit. Increased development also means more transit users and more fare revenues. But locals tend to oppose greater housing density; they also often demand parking minimums, since they don’t want to face too much competition for free on-street parking.

Costs for rail-transit construction in the United States are egregiously high compared with costs in Europe and Asia, he says:

Smart planning decisions, like the ones that Calgary made when planning its C-Train light-rail system, can help lower the cost of building new infrastructure.

Calgary’s in neither Europe nor Asia, and Barro doesn’t explain what those smart planning decisions were, either — but Wikipedia does:

Costs were controlled during construction and operation of the system by using relatively cheap, existing technology. A grade separated system was passed over in preference of a system without significant elevated or buried elements and the trains and stations selected were of the tried and tested, utilitarian variety (for example, vehicles are not air conditioned, storage yards are not automated and stations are in general concrete platforms with a modest shelter overhead). This allowed more track to be laid with the available funds and contrasts with the Edmonton Light Rail Transit which buried the portion of the system in downtown and under the University of Alberta, increasing costs. The C-Train uses a self service model of payment, reducing fare collection costs.

In 2001, the US General Accounting Office released a study of the cost-effectiveness of American light rail systems. Although not included in the report, Calgary had a capital cost of US$24.5 million per mile (year 2000 dollars), which would be the sixth lowest (Edmonton was given as US$41.7 million per mile). Because of its high ridership (then 188,000 boardings per weekday) the capital cost per passenger was $2,400 per daily passenger, by far the lowest of the 14 systems compared (had Edmonton been included it would have been the next most cost effective at $8,900 per weekday passenger, while the closest American system was Sacramento at $9,100 per weekday passenger). Operating costs are also low, in 2005, the C-Train cost CDN$163 per operating hour to operate. With an average of 600 boardings per hour, cost per LRT passenger is CDN$0.27, compared to $1.50 for bus passengers in Calgary.

Planning for the C-Train also played an important role. Although the light rail system was not chosen until 1976, the city had reserved transit corridors for some form of high capacity transport in the 1960s, and planning for the system was done when Calgary’s population was less than 500,000. The city reached an agreement with CP Rail to build most of the south line along their existing right-of-way. The lines and stations were placed to serve large residential areas and business districts and to serve existing and predicted travel patterns. Feeder bus stations were established.

The city chose not to build major freeways into the city centre, forcing commuters to use the train as their numbers increased but downtown street capacity did not. Similarly, the city limited the number of parking spaces in the downtown core, making it prohibitively expensive for many people to drive to downtown jobs, particularly as surface lots gave way to development. Downtown unreserved monthly parking is amongst the most expensive in North America, behind only Midtown and Downtown Manhattan for business districts. As a result, in 2007 45% of Calgary’s 120,000 downtown workers used Calgary Transit to get to work, with a long term goal of reaching that mark to 60% of downtown workers in the future.

Although not generally grade separated, the C-Train is able to operate at high speeds on much of its track by separating it from pedestrians with fences and concrete bollards. Trains are also given right of way at most road crossings outside of downtown. As a result, trains are able to operate at 80 km/h (50 mph) outside of downtown, and 40 km/h (25 mph) along the 7th Avenue corridor. 7th Avenue is a free fare zone, encouraging use for short hops through the city. The city achieves high capacity on the 7th Avenue transit corridor by staging the traffic lights, so that all the trains move forward in unison to the next station on the synchronized green lights, and load and unload passengers on the intervening red lights.