TOD Pays
The biggest obstacle to doing mass transit right is the cost. And the cost is high. There’s just no way around it. A well-done mass transit line is expensive. But it really is worth underscoring the point that these are the kind of expenditures that pay off. They’re not worth doing because they’re cheap, they’re worth doing because they’re really valuable. In the DC area, we have a great example of the difference as the Orange Line goes out in Virginia. In distant Fairfax County they built Metro on the cheap, in the I-66 median, and wound up with what amount to park-and-ride venues for a commuter rail network. That’s a useful asset for the county, but it’s nothing compared to what they got in Arlington County where they buried Metro beneath Wilson Boulevard and built a series of relatively close-packed stations, creating an extended corridor of walkable neighborhoods.
Dave Alpert explains that “Arlington’s Rosslyn-Ballston corridor covers only 7.6% of the county’s land area, but generated 33% of its tax revenue.” Impressive. And note that nobody who’s not insane ever walks around New York City and says it’s too bad that they wasted all this money building the Subway.
44 Responses to “TOD Pays”
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June 3rd, 2009 at 5:10 pm
What percentage of the county’s tax revenue was generated by this corridor prior to the metro? What was the cost of building the metro line? I’m not asserting that it wasn’t worth it, but this stuff is more complicated than this sort of analysis.
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Arlington Co. has just released a 52-minute video, “Arlington’s Smart Growth Journey,” that surveys the county’s decades-long efforts to utilize mass transit, particularly Metro, to provide a solid basis for its future growth & development. You can watch it at:
http://arlington.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=4&clip_id=1206
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:27 pm
OK, I don’t really disagree that subway stations have a great benefit, but, for a city like DC, using property tax revenues generated as a way to tout the system ignores DC’s unique standing as a federal city. By this logic, then the Capitol South Metro or the Pentagon stop are utter failures because these are basically on federal property that generate no revenue.
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Is this an argument in favor of paying for transit with tax-increment financing? Such a proposal was floated a couple of years ago by a city council member in Austin, but it didn’t really go anywhere for some reason.
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:31 pm
What percentage of the county’s tax revenue was generated by this corridor prior to the metro? What was the cost of building the metro line? I’m not asserting that it wasn’t worth it, but this stuff is more complicated than this sort of analysis
I remember walking down Wilson Blvd in the mid-1970s – almost all 1-2 storefronts that looked like nothing new had been built since the 1940s. And probably I would be generous if I said that probably two out of every 5 storefronts was empty. It was a very depressing scene. And most of the residential area around it were either small bungalow type houses or 1940s era garden apartments – no high rises – very little new or high end development.
To see the difference in the Rosslyn/Ballston corridor, compare to other faded commerical districts that never get Metro access – any of them bigtime success stories now?
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I can confirm what andy said about Wilson Blvd in the bad old days – it was exactly as he says.
Another stop, this one on the Green Line, has a similar problem to the I-66 stops. The Suitland stop is landlocked in a triangle bordered by Suitland Parkway, the Suitland Federal Center (SFC), and six-lane Silver Hill Road. There’s really no way to build retail to benefit from foot traffic from the Metro stop, so it basically is a commuter stop, getting us bureaucrats to the SFC, and getting the residents of Suitland to jobs elsewhere.
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Fair enough, andy, but I am very familiar with several cities that didn’t and don’t have subway lines, which have areas that were blighted in the ’70s that are not blighted now. No, I’m not surprised that a multi-billion dollar public investment has resulted in this corridor attracting more private investment than other parts of the county, but that doesn’t prove that the multi-billion dollar public investment has produced outstanding results.
I have little doubt that such investments produce better results than, say, building stadiums for professional sports, but that is damning with faint praise.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Of course, CBO scoring methodology would have built a very strong case against the NYC subway. It was an unproven technology, the returns on the investment were speculative and difficult to quantify. On the other hand, the costs were very clear.
This doesn’t make CBO bad guys, it just points out the limitations of their hyper-quantified approach. Most of the major innovations that only government can do, the innovations that have the greatest and longest return, the CBO doesn’t do a very good job of scoring. And that’s not the CBO’s fault, it’s that while it’s pretty easy for forward thinking people to see the general direction of progress, it’s very hard to quantify it due to the future being uncertain and all.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
It’s also pretty easy for forward looking people to make grave errors when trying to fortell the general direction of progress, and harm huge numbers of people in the process.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:08 pm
And for those like me who didn’t know what Matt meant by TOD:
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Um, isn’t that the whole point of forecasting? The CBO takes various scenarios into account and weights them by their probability. The fact that the cost is more certain than the benefit doesn’t mean that the CBO will necessarily find it not worth doing! Go read their report on climate change if you don’t believe me.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:17 pm
An interesting transit question: the relative advantages of subways and bus lines. Buses are obviously much cheaper, but they’re also generally less pleasant, mostly because even in a shelter you have to wait outside, exposed to the elements and also to whatever is going on in the street.
Are there any cities out there though that combine designated busways with climate controlled bus-stations, spaced evenly throughout a coverage area (not as a regularly as standard street stops, more like the spacing of a subway system). I would think this would make the bus option more appealing and would work well in distressed cities where budgets are tight and storefronts are empty, ready to be converted to ’stations?’
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Fair enough, andy, but I am very familiar with several cities that didn’t and don’t have subway lines, which have areas that were blighted in the ’70s that are not blighted now.
In this particular case, it is not just a matter of a blighted area that is no longer blighted. It is a blighted area that became one of the region’s most important commercial centers and essentially a second downtown for a major metro area.
To some extent, Rosslyn-Ballston probably has to be seen as an outlier… it was a uniquely good location for transit-oriented redevelopment, and the success of the neighborhood was likely enhanced by the failure of neighboring jurisdictions to do the same thing. But it’s difficult to imagine anyone who lives in the area expressing the opinion that this public investment was a waste of money.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Actually, about half the NYC subways were built by private enterprise and produced good profits in the early years.
By 1870 Manhattan was fantastically congested. You have to read about this to believe it. So they built overhead railways. The problem here was the coals, soot, and water falling on everyone below. The streets with railways became almost unusable. Even after electrification New Yorkers were fed up with overhead railways, hence the last great public construction of another subway and the dismantling of the last El.
Now in Seattle we are seeing something that might be related to TOD. Seattle had a ferocious housing balloon which had to pop sometime. But in the last set of real estate sales figures, two areas still have rising house prices- Beacon Hill, and Martin Luther King Way South, where the new rail transit line will open on July 18th.
Apparently there are some people who can see the handwriting on the wall.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Arlington’s real growth has been in the last 10 years. I lived there as it was really taking off in the early 2000s onward, and left in 2004. When I return, I’m really impressed. But if you walked up and down Wilson Boulevard in 1998 to 2000 you’d pretty much get what the post above describes he saw in the 1970s: a lot of pretty run down stores, not much activity on the streets, and certainly nothing at night.
In fact, one of my favorite bars, Galaxy Hut, was basically an oasis in a see of nothingness as late as 2004 when I left.
Today it’s a different story with new construction in the past 8 years between Clarendon and Courthouse metro stops.
The larger point is that it wasn’t completely obvious, until the last bunch of years, that Arlington WAS in fact the best bang for the buck. For about 20-25 years between the time Metro was completed in the late 70s to the relatively recent construction boom in Arlington, it looked like the cheaper Park and Ride option was much more sensible.
And given how wealthy Fairfax is, it’s unclear to me that Fairfax really did take the wrong path.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Harn, @ 12- Detroit has been working on ‘Bus Rapid Transit’ since 1919. You can see where it got them.
Will Allen, it seems fair to say that even huger numbers of people have been harmed by backward-looking reactionaries who didn’t realize times have changed, and saddled their peoples with disastrous wars, archaic religions, or incompetent royalty.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Dave Alpert explains that “Arlington’s Rosslyn-Ballston corridor covers only 7.6% of the county’s land area, but generated 33% of its tax revenue.” Impressive.
I don’t see that this really proves anything. A building that otherwise would have been built on Glebe Road or Chain Bridge is instead built on Wilson Boulevard. This is worth the multi-billion dollar Metro investment… why?
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Well, it’s not exactly the same thing, but it’s not like Georgetown faded because it didn’t get a Metro. There is also some development in Shirlington that was never had (and probably never will have) Metro access. Lastly, Tyson’s Corner probably doesn’t fit with MattY’s idea of fun (no offense it’s not mine either), I would suggest it is fantastically profitable.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Progressive, for all I know your analysis is spot on. I mostly was calling for a more rigorous analysis than was presented.
I have some familiarity with what is happening with mass transit in the Twin Cities right now, and it is case of interesting contrasts. The first project, a billion dollar, 10 mile light rail line from the Mall of America, to under the airport, to downtown Minneapolis, is questionable, even with greater than projected ridership. The second project, a 40 mnile commuter line roughly paralleling I-94 northwest from Minneapolis, for about 600-700 million, I think, is likely a bargain.
The next line, between downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, through the University of Minnesota campus, might end up a billion dollar-plus disaster, in good part because it is being done to cheaply, to avoid tunneling costs. Putting the line on the surface through the campus will be a mess, and will likely destroy a lot of successful small businesses on the major thorughfare, University Avenue, without enough stops to attract a lot of investment. A projected line, mostly along an old rail right of way that is also near existing development, from Minneapolis into the the southwest suburbs, has a decent chance to deliver good bang for the buck.
This stuff is extremely complicated, and defies broad generalizations.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:53 pm
You hear plenty of people walking around New York City calling the 2nd Av line a waste of money. That’s, in part, because the economic benefits — from consumption, let alone operation — are so difficult to estimate:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/the-second-avenue-subways-economic-impact/
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:54 pm
That’s “construction.”
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Serial, a couple of hundred hundred million corpses were stacked to the horizon over the past hundred years by people who were described as forward looking folk who, it was said, could fortell the general direction of progress. Just making omelettes, I guess.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:57 pm
It’s not exactly the same, but LA County’s Orange Line between Hollywood and the Warner Center is pretty close to what you’re talking about. It’s had some problems.
But then again, LA has tried almost every transit option and hasn’t managed to make any of them work well, so maybe it’s not a great example.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:11 pm
It’s also pretty easy for forward looking people to make grave errors when trying to fortell the general direction of progress, and harm huge numbers of people in the process.
Yes, this is pretty much the story of highway development through our cities, including the cross bronx and the anacostia freeway.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Personally, if my local/state/national government had to be in debt, I’d like it to be because of an ambitious rail project.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Serial, a couple of hundred hundred million corpses were stacked to the horizon over the past hundred years by people who were described as forward looking folk who, it was said, could fortell the general direction of progress. Just making omelettes, I guess.
That’s true. Even though I’m mostly sure we have nothing to fear from the pro-commuter rail movement, I’d keep your gun loaded and a wary eye out for those red parachutes.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:56 pm
@CGI. Nice link. I guess there are multiple aspects o the experience dynamic – what it’s like waiting for the bus to come and how fast it goes when it does (and whether it gets there on time, etc). If rail is just that much more efficient over time, maybe in many cases it justifies the added cost over bus lines. But there are many rail boondoggles out there. Busing may be less sexy, but if good design is applied I think much can be done to make it more viable. Then it becomes a numbers game, I guess – running CBAs on buses vs trains over time BUT also factoring in what funding’s available to a given project. This is where I think buses+ might make the most sense.
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:57 pm
As an everyday user of both LA County’s Orange Line (busway) and Red Line (subway), and occasional light rail user, I can vouch that the Light Rail Now website linked to by CGI in #23 does a pretty accurate job of pointing out the deficiencies of busways compared to light rail. They’ve done their homework. Basically, while operations of the BRT are similar, as advertised, to a light rail line, the experience of using the system is not quite as good, as the ride is somewhat slower, rougher, more crowded, and less handicapped-accessible than light rail.
It is, however, far superior to any bus that rides in regular traffic, even the Metro Rapid buses. It’s just not as good as real light rail.
But the flip side of their argument is cost — they claim to be debunking the argument that BRT is “just like light rail, only cheaper,” but I haven’t seen anything on their site that directly compares the costs of the two different systems. I think a more accurate summary of the Orange Line is that it is cheaper than light rail, and, correspondingly, like the discount versions of most things in life, it’s not quite as good. But it goes a long way towards providing many of the benefits of light rail at a fraction of the cost.
Just weigh all of that honestly in a cost-benefit analysis.
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:18 pm
I just want to second your point Matt about the New York City subway. I’ve lived in New York for more than twenty years. I grew up in Sacramento and lived in the SF Bay Area before this. I have loved not having to own a car since moving here. It saves me lots of money and I don’t miss sitting stuck in traffic when I need to get to work or drive across town. The subway is reliable, fast and safe in my experience.
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Even after electrification New Yorkers were fed up with overhead railways, hence the last great public construction of another subway and the dismantling of the last El.
Honey, you need to ride the #1 up to its end at Van Cortland in the Bronx – you’ll see plenty of places in NYC – in Manhattan even – where the El is still running.
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Basically, while operations of the BRT are similar, as advertised, to a light rail line, the experience of using the system is not quite as good, as the ride is somewhat slower, rougher, more crowded, and less handicapped-accessible than light rail.
The impression I get is that development does not follow busways the same way development follows rail lines. If the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor were a BRT line instead of a metro line, it’s likely that development wouldn’t have been quite as vibrant around there, in part because the BRT line would have less capacity but also because it would have been viewed as more temporary and thus a poorer bet than the metro.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:14 pm
The tradeoff to more station stops in the suburbs is a longer running time into the city.
Here’s a timely, interesting alternative look at TOD from General Motors.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:24 pm
This is a pretty funny statement from someone whose support for mass murder was based on evaluating only the benefits, “freedom” and “getting rid of Saddam Hussein”, and completely ignoring the costs – widespread devastation to not just the infrastructure but also the populace.
Will, what is it that makes you think you have something to contribute?
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Wait, I hadn’t read further down the thread where he condemns others for “making omelets”. It’s like Will “kill them for their own good” Allen has no sense (well, we could just stop there) of irony or self-reflection.
How many “eggs” were broken, Will, to provide your fat ass with cheap entertainment and the illusion of advancing the cause of “freedom”?
June 4th, 2009 at 9:28 am
chappy,
You have to look at transportation as a system. All of the growth that occurred around the U Street station and the Dupont Circle station et al. wouldn’t have happened if there weren’t stops at Capitol South and the Pentagon.
June 4th, 2009 at 9:51 am
> Actually, about half the NYC subways were built
> by private enterprise and produced good profits in the early
> years.
Well, much as with the predecessors of the London Underground in the same time period good _dividends_ were taken out of those companies in the early years. Whether or not there were any _profits_ in those companies then, now, ever in the past, or ever in the future is a question that has been debated endlessly and without resolution and probably never will be answered.
June 4th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Another example is Columbia Heights. And Eastern Market/Barracks Row. H St probably will have trouble flourishing unless they get the street car line going.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:16 am
but it’s not like Georgetown faded because it didn’t get a Metro. There is also some development in Shirlington that was never had (and probably never will have) Metro access. Lastly, Tyson’s Corner probably doesn’t fit with MattY’s idea of fun
You’re absolutely missing the point though – “Rosslyn-Ballston corridor covers only 7.6% of the county’s land area, but generated 33% of its tax revenue.” We’re not necessarily talking about ‘profitability” – we’re talking about how TOD as a planning tool created a situtation where with smart planning they created a situation you have a much larger share ratio of tax revenues to land area. I don’t think you can say that either Georgetown or Shirlington have quite the economic impact as the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor – and Tyson’s – while never a faded commerical area and quite the economic engine by itself – also consumes a huge amount of land area that is devoted to cars. Which is more wasteful in exchange for the economic success – Tyson’s or the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor. Compare development along the corridor to development along Columbia Pike if you want to see what the Metro has done.
June 4th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
[...] Yglesias: TOD Pays [...]
June 4th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Sometimes I wonder how many commenters here ever curl up with a good non-fiction book at the end of the day.
WRT NYC subways, one of the wonders of the transit world is the four-track subway line in NY with express trains on the inner track that skip many local stations. IIRC, this was built by a Belmont cartel to develop properties in the Bronx. I don’t feel like looking up the chapter and verse this morning, but I think anyone who does will find that this was TOD (and profitable) beyond the wildest dreams of any transit advocates today.
Apologies to Will Allen for stepping on his thought balloon when, for the first time in my experience, he was actually considering transit in a thoughtful manner.
I suspect that, before the federal government began subsidizing roadbuilding, TOD was the rule rather than the exception in America. I don’t think a lot of people realize that in the 30s the federal government, in addition to the Lincoln Tunnel, the NYC Triborough Bridge Complex, and many other bridges across the nation, built 700,000 miles of roadway.
Suburbia didn’t ‘just happen’- it was one of the largest social engineering projects the world has ever seen.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
A couple of factors complicate attributing the Ballston-Rosslyn corridor development to the rail line.
1) The time lag between metro completion and corridor growth (more than 20 years),
2) The proximity of Route 66 as an alternative way to access the area, and
3) The fact that Arlington (and much of the rest of the DC region) didn’t really boom until the post-9/11 big government Bush spending took off.
Greater density didn’t happen until demand for development took local political channels and manifested as revisions in Arlington’s zoning procedures. The area surrounding the metro stations is so valuable precisely because greater density was inhibited elsewhere in the county, thus leaving the metro neighborhoods as the only significant opportunities for development.
June 4th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
The impression I get is that development does not follow busways the same way development follows rail lines … it’s likely that development wouldn’t have been quite as vibrant around there, in part because the BRT line would have less capacity but also because it would have been viewed as more temporary and thus a poorer bet than the metro.
This is probably true, but I should point out a few characteristics of L.A.’s Metro Orange Line. First off, yes, there has not been much development around the Orange Line stations. But it has only been open since October 2005. Also, most of the land it passes through is zoned for (and already developed as) low-density residential, as its route was dictated by the route of an existing abandoned rail right-of-way.
The big exceptions are at the two ends, with smaller pockets of commercial or medium-density residential near the Reseda and Van Nuys stations, some industrial near Sepulveda and Van Nuys, and a bunch of open space in the Sepulveda Dam basin.
And there is, in fact, ongoing higher-density residential development going on in those pockets at the ends. The Warner Center area has had a lot of 4 or 5-story luxury apartments built over the past five years and still being built today, and the area around Noho Station (where the Orange Line meets the end of the Red Line subway) has been undergoing a radical transformation, with some high-rises and some true mixed-use.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see some smaller-scale dense development near the Reseda and Van Nuys stations in upcoming years, even with the depressed housing market.
June 4th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
> IIRC, this was built by a Belmont cartel to develop
> properties in the Bronx. I don’t feel like looking up the
> chapter and verse this morning, but I think anyone who does
> will find that this was TOD (and profitable) beyond the
> wildest dreams of any transit advocates today.
No doubt the overall projects were profitable because the money made then still supports many of the richest families in New York and the US. But the costs of the transit portion of those projects – the infrastructure that made them possible – was almost always dumped onto the City or back to the bondholders when the transit company filed bankruptcy. Everyone made money (”I’m talking about profit” – Boss Tweed in “Gangs of New York”) except those foolish enough to be holding the bonds as each money-machine expansion started drawing to a close.
June 4th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
That’s exactly right. Between 1870 and 1970 railroads went into receivership about as regularly as they pulled into the station. Inevitably, the lesser shareholders were offered a lower grade of stock, new bonds and preferred share were issued for the favored few, and new loans taken out for the railroads to default on in the years to come. Almost any good corporate history will provide a blow-by-blow for this process occurring many times in the history of the company.
Probably to some extent this was a result of a ‘too large to fail’ mentality that ended when trucks, airplanes, and barges could provide alternate forms of transportation.
Still, no understanding of American capitalism is complete without some idea of how many people lost their shirts buying gilt-edged bonds.