While many metropolitan markets around the country are enduring steep increases in vacancies in their office and retail sectors, the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington is an oasis of stability — and even of prosperity.

ved by five Metro subway stops within four miles, the corridor continues to attract new tenants, buyers and developers in the face of the deepest recession since the Great Depression. “It’s really an anomaly, considering the tough economy we’ve been in since December 2007,” said Sigrid G. Zialcita, managing research director for Cushman & Wakefield, a global real estate services firm. [...]

While Wilson Boulevard, a main artery, helps define the corridor, the key element in its success has been the subway. Planners had wanted to place it in the median of Interstate 66, on a more northerly alignment. But Arlington officials fought to have it run underground in the corridor to spur development.

It costs money to build a proper grade-separated heavy rail line with closely-packed stations. A lot of money. And consequently, it takes time for the benefits to be fully reaped. But the benefits are large. Nobody walks around London or Paris or New York and says “it’s too bad they wasted all this money building subways.” And nobody walks the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and says it’s too bad they didn’t build park-and-ride stations and surface tracks in a highway median.

Yesterday I found myself reading with interests about the Chinese government’s plans for expansion of the Shanghai Metro. Very sensibly, there’s not only an ongoing expansion plan designed to last through 2020, but there’s also an even longer-range plan looking forward to 2050. This seems like the right way to do it—everyone expects Shanghai to continue growing throughout this period, so it’s only sensible to operate with a long-run plan in mind. A plan that’s subject to revision, to be sure, but that can guide current decision-making and ensure that there’s always some more projects ready to come online if the resources become available.

What’s striking is the extent to which we don’t operate like that here in the United States. I think everyone believes that over the next couple of decades the Washington, DC metro area will continue to add population. And people likewise clearly envision there being additional square feet of office space in the District and they’re also envision an increase in the District’s population. On top of that, we’re also trying to envision a less carbon-intensive future. All this pretty clearly implies that there ought to be some sort of plan in place for building additional Metro capacity through the central city. After all, the system is currently near its capacity for moving people, and the lack of any redundancy is already hurting us badly whenever any kind of problems arise.

Of course with plans in place the question would still arise of whether or not it’s possible to find the funds necessary to execute the construction of a new core-serving line. But my point would be that first things should come first, and you should always have plans in place so that you can be prepared to make the case for funding and think logically about the design of the metro area and the role transit can play. Instead, though, when we finish building something we tend to just . . . finish . . . as if further population growth somehow took us by surprise.

This problem of the short-term probably only has a good solution in the long-term. If we want to get out of the trap of oil price shocks, we need to transform our economy and transportation system to less reliance on cheap oil. But there are also things we can do in the short term. The mass transit operating expensive provision added to the war supplemental is good, and congress could do more in this regard.

On the issue of “do only poor people ride the bus” I’m basically in agreement with Atrios.

The key point to start with, though, as with everything else regarding transit and class is the simple reality that buying a car is expensive. And in most crowded urban areas, parking a car downtown at work is also expensive. This leads immediately to the conclusion that a cheaper alternative, like riding the bus, will be disproportionately appealing to people of lesser means.

But beyond that, you’re left with a big question of where’s the intersection point. What happens in most cities is that most bus lines are really bad. They arrive infrequently, and they move slowly. Consequently, even though taking the bus might be cheaper than driving, it’s a much lower-quality experience. Well, what kind of people are interested in sacrificing a huge amount of quality and time in order to save money? That’d be poor people, primarily. But it’s not a law of nature that bus service needs to be really terrible. The 42 line that I used to take to work pretty regularly came frequently, as did the S1/S2/S4 line that I sometimes used. And you had a pretty diverse class mix on the lines. Not coincidentally, however, these were lines that served some relatively prosperous parts of town. Wealthier people have more political clout and get better public services; meanwhile, better public services are more appealing to wealthier people. I imagine that with the inauguration of the new S-9 express bus service on the same basic 16th Street route used by the other Ses, that a more and more bourgeois crowd will be drawn to the line.

If the city were to go further and carve out more space for dedicated bus lanes (or properly enforce the existing lanes on 7th Street and 9th Street downtown) then bus travel could be more rapid and more frequent and more people would want to do it.

One of the most effective possible uses of stimulus funds would be to cover gaps in the operating budgets of mass transit systems. The downfall in state and local tax revenue is forcing transit cutbacks across the country that have both a direct contractionary impact and also make it harder for people to live their lives and conduct their business. But currently stimulus funds can be used only for new capital projects rather than for operating costs. So you can have bus drivers being laid off even as new construction workers are hired.

Friday, Pete DeFazio (D-OR) and 26 other House members launched an initiative to try to change that:

Passenger rail and bus advocates are pressing conferees on the war supplemental bill to include a Senate-passed provision that would allow public transit agencies to spend some of their stimulus dollars on operating expenses, instead of capital improvements. The language in the Senate version of the bill (HR 2346) would let transit agencies use as much as 10 percent of their funding from the economic recovery law (PL 111-5) to fend off personnel and service cuts. Transit received $8.4 billion total in the stimulus.

Pat Garofalo argues at the Wonk Room:

Since one of the goals of the stimulus was to preserve jobs, it makes little sense to prevent cities from saving the jobs of transit employees, particularly as more and more people are turning towards public transportation. Hopefully, Congress makes a better decision this time around.

Summer’s coming and gasoline taxes are rising. One of the simplest things the government can do to push back on that situation is expand transit offerings. Really fundamental expansion requires capital expenditures and takes time. But increasing the number of bus routes, and the frequency of service on existing bus and rail routes, can be done fairly easily. It just takes money. But it’s a good use of stimulus funds.

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.

Elana Schor writes up a new survey of international transit usage:

Sadly, only one nation can boast that a majority of its population rides transit at least once a day… the surprising answer comes after the jump.

Russia ranked the highest on the Greendex scale, with 52 percent of respondents reporting daily or near-daily use of transit. Hot on its heels was China, where 43 percent reported very frequent transit rides. More than four out of five Chinese surveyed ride transit at least once a month, according to the Greendex.

I wasn’t surprised by this, Russia has excellent public transportation and a highly urbanized population. The Moscow Metro is absolutely lovely, and the Nizhny Novgorod Metro is pretty good, too, and at least when I was there Nizhny also had a good system of streetcars and trolleybuses.

And when you think about it, none of this should be that surprising. Without real market prices, the Soviet Union was horrible at producing mass market consumer goods. But when it comes to things for which there is no real free market, Soviet production was fine. Soviet nuclear missiles, fighter planes, etc. were just fine. That’s why the USSR wound up falling apart over popular discontent rather than an inability to militarily deter the west. Cars, of course, are a consumer good. But there’s no free market in subway systems. So the Soviet Union had crappy cars but great subways, which led to transit-oriented lifestyles, and that legacy continues today.

Lane Kenworthy makes a point that’s simultaneously a bit obvious and also widely overlooked—high-quality public services are a highly egalitarian measure even when they’re not at all “targeted” or explicitly designed to curb inequality. The reason is that even in a pretty flat tax system, the bulk of the tax money comes from rich people (since they have the bulk of the money) whereas the value of the services is distributed more equally:

Imagine an America in which high-quality public services raise the consumption floor to a high level: most citizens can put their kids in high-quality child care followed by good public schooling and affordable access to a good college; they have access to good health care throughout life; they can get to or near work on clean and efficient public transportation or roads with limited congestion; they enjoy clean and safe neighborhoods, parks, roads, museums, libraries, and other public spaces; they have low-cost access to information, communication, and entertainment via reliable high-speed broadband; they have four weeks of paid vacation each year, an additional week or so of paid sickness leave, and a year of paid family leave to care for a child or other needy relative. Even if the degree of income inequality were no less than today and we still had CEOs, financiers, and entertainers raking in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year, that society would be markedly less unequal than our current one.

Something missing from this list that I would add is public safety. The prevailing high levels of violent crime in the United States have an impact that’s very strongly borne by people in the bottom half of the income spectrum. That the poorest people would live in the less-safe part of town is more-or-less built into the structure of income inequality, but it’s very possible to have a country where the “less-safe” part of town is still dramatically safer than are the unsafe parts of the contemporary United States.

But this entire phenomenon tends to get discussed pretty exclusively in the field of education. And, obviously, the uneven quality of America’s public schools is an important topic. But it’s only one aspect of the broader situation. Public transit is another. In DC, the Metro stops running at midnight on weekdays and bus service that late tends to be extremely sporadic. So when I’m out after midnight and want to go home, I’ll often hail a cab. That’s not the most expensive thing in the world, but it’s a good deal more expensive than a Metro fare. I can afford it easily enough, but many people can’t. A higher level of tax subsidy to WMATA in order to finance later Metro hours or more frequent bus service would be, in effect, an egalitarian measure.

The “rapid transit” elements in this “bus rapid transit” plan are “signal priority, some exclusive lanes or queue jumpers in congested areas, bus stops with fare prepayment and electronic real-time bus information, and low-floor buses” which could be done for about $200 million.

My only concern about this is that I don’t understand why the Orange Line of this network stops in Foggy Bottom when it seems like you could add a lot of value by extending the line slightly to Georgetown.

As the global economy recovers, so too will oil prices, and fast. That increase is going to cut the legs out from under a recovery; a rise in oil prices is like a tax increase, which is contractionary. And if we nonetheless manage to grow through the rise, the increase in prices and oil demand will expand the trade deficit once more.

I don’t think it’s that hard to work around these issues. We could pass a substantial gas tax increase now to take effect in two or three years. In expectation of the increase, consumers would purchase more fuel efficient automobiles, potentially boosting auto sales and reducing vulnerability to high oil prices. And I’m sure I don’t even need to say that a program of rapid expansion of transit and passenger and freight rail capacity, funded immediately by deficit spending and after recovery by gas and congestion taxes, would kill multiple birds with one stone — providing stimulus, facilitating structural shifts, and reducing exposure to rising oil prices.

This is exactly right. I find it very disappointing that there doesn’t seem to be legislative work on this happening. It’s clear today that economic conditions are worse than they were in February when the first stimulus package was being outlined, and the headline number on that package was too small given even the macroeconomic projections we had back then. What’s more, there’s near-universal agreement that even if optimists are right and growth returns in Q3 or Q4 of 2009 that it would still take years to re-achieve full employment. Under the circumstances, I think there’s a strong case for investment in rail infrastructure (both freight, intercity passenger, and commuter) projects beyond the merely “shovel ready.”

Beyond that, there remains a very strong case for a federal role in funding mass transit operating costs. All across America, transit systems are hiking fares and cutting back on service. That’s directly contractionary. It’s taking a lot of money out of the pockets of people with high marginal propensities to consume, and it’s also create a perverse situation where we’re laying-off or furloughing bus drivers with one hand, even as we’re trying to employ people in new transit starts. Meanwhile, once the service is cut back, there will be difficulty ramping it back up to speed when growth returns. Which means a lot of people could end up caught in the oil price hike trap. We ought to be doing the reverse. Cutting fares and expanding service. That would work as short-term stimulus, and it would also create a situation where we’re better-prepared for the next oil price spike.

Remember high gasoline prices? It all seems so six months ago. Then came the crash, the collapse of the economy, and with it down went the price of oil. But Ryan Avent observes that in some ways oil hasn’t gotten especially cheap, “It’s worth pointing out that the most significant collapse in global economic activity since World War II barely managed to push oil into the $30 per barrel range. Even now, as economic outlooks remain dim, prices have edged back up into the neighborhood of $50 per barrel.” Meanwhile, the crash has brought investment in new exploration and refining capacity to a grinding halt. And even in a crash year, we take a fair amount of oil out of the ground. All of which is to say that the demand curve for oil seems, at this point, to have a pretty steep slope. In other words, an economic recovery could cause prices to skyrocket.

In most of the world, and in some of the United States, that will lead people to resume their 2008 trend of less driving and more transit. But as is well known, many Americans live and/or work in places with no reasonable access to mass transit. Meanwhile, the market for—and therefore price of—oil is global. Which means that a global recovery could spark a rise in oil prices that hits America specifically very hard and in effect strangles our recovery in the crib. At that point it becomes an open question as to whether we drag the world down with us, in which case the cycle repeats, or if we just get left behind as continued global growth keeps pushing the price up and pinching American consumers harder-and-harder.

The answer, of course, is to take advantage of this period of “output gap” and low Treasury rates to invest in expanded mass transit capacities. But while the stimulus bill does do some good stuff for transit, it’s not even enough to make up for the rate at which state and local governments are curtailing transit services, much less to really leave Americans in a position to ride the bus to the new jobs we’re hoping to see created in 2010.

Note that this is precisely analogous to certain tired arguments over mass transit. It’s true that given the U.S.’s low average population density compared to the Netherlands, that it’s not realistic for us to have as much mass transit as they have. But this doesn’t do anything to explain why a fairly dense city like Los Angeles should have third-rate mass transit. LA doesn’t have modern streetcar lines because instead of upgrading the old ones to modern technology over time, they tore them up! Everyone understands why there’s no subway in Montana—that’s not the issue.

A reader asks what I think about Irwin Kellner’s argument that mass transit ought to be free. Broadly speaking, I agree.

To understand how to think about this, it’s easier to start by thinking about roads. Say there’s no road between Washington, DC and Frederick, Maryland. You can go from the one place to the other, but it involves going way out of your way even though it could be a pretty quick trip on a direct road. What you need to ask yourself about building such a road is what would it cost and would it be worth it? You don’t build the road expecting to turn a profit. And you shouldn’t really build it expecting tolls to finance it. You should build it because you want to encourage people to drive from DC to Frederick. But if you build the road and it comes to pass that it’s choked with traffic during certain periods of time you don’t respond by making the road wider. Just like with building the road in the first place, you make it wider if you want to increase the number of people driving. If you want to eliminate the congestion problem, then you charge people to drive on the road during the peak times. The transit situation is similar. If you don’t want people to take the Metro from Bethesda to Gallery Place, then you shouldn’t build the Metro. But if you do want people to take the Metro from Betheday to Gallery Place then you shouldn’t charge them to ride. But if it turns out that your route is too popular at certain times of day, then you want to charge them in order to prevent overcrowding.

That’s how things should be in principle. In practice, politics is much messier than that, and budget politics is especially messy. There are all kinds of dedicated revenue stream issues and various other factors that mean that reliance on fares is typically a second-best option in a world where the realistic alternative isn’t free transit, it’s no transit. In theory, however, transit and roads should both be free most of the time but perhaps quite expensive at particular times when otherwise there’d be dramatic crowding.

Interesting. So what can DC teach us as an example?
What we’re learning about the DC area is that there are 30 of these walkable communities here. I’m only talking about regionally significant places, not individual neighborhoods. So, for instance, downtown DC, Reston, Bethesda and so on. Of these places, 90 percent are on the metro system and most of the rest will be linked into it in the next five years. So that’s a pretty obvious correlation right there. But most of these walkable places are in the suburbs.

What’s the lesson?
This structural trend is about the transformation of the suburbs into something else. I’ve been doing some research looking at the price premiums on a per-square-foot basis for walkable communities. They get a price premium between 40 and 200 percent. I’ve also been looking at what I call the “penumbra.” A walkable place is typically 50 to 500 acres in size. The penumbra, that area around it, can be even bigger.

Almost like micro suburbs.
Yes. These places are still suburban but they are within walking distance of the walkable places. This “penumbra” is seeing premiums of 20 to 80 percent over the rest of the market.

The future of a well-done metro area wouldn’t be everything looking like this particular block. Rather, what they have in Arlington is a long high-density, highly-walkable corridor stretched out along a metro line. That then creates lots of more traditionally “suburban” space that’s still within walking distance of the corridor. A metro area should, ideally, have a whole bunch of corridors like that which then converge to create a downtown. Then the wedges between the corridors serve the way traditional suburbs do today. The result is a real mix of housing options and neighborhood types.

Petey’s asked me a couple of times if the Second Avenue Subway project in New York shouldn’t qualify as a stimulus-eligible shovel-ready project. I think the issue here is that the project is too shovel-ready and the funding and work is already in place. And I think you can’t just do it faster because of the limited supply of tunneling machines—they’re trying to minimize “cut and cover” construction since this is a very built-up area, and the equipment for this kind of boring isn’t something you can pick up at a hardware store. But if that’s wrong, then, yes, this is definitely the kind of thing that deserves to be in line ahead of new highway construction in terms of infrastructure money.

Still, I mostly don’t have a problem with there not being huge new transit construction in a stimulus bill. New need to reform the overall infrastructure policy for the long run, not just for an economic emergency. But what really does deserve hefty stimulus funding is transit operating expenses which would be both fast-acting, progressive in distributional impact, environmentally sound, and high-multiplier. What’s more, unlike new construction it’s the kind of thing you could phase out relatively easily when it becomes unnecessary.

Nicholas Beaudrot asks:

Without citing Portland, OR as a model, what is a reasonable goal for transit adoption and transit-oriented development in cities who haven’t had serious rail or streetcar investment in 50 years? Clearly we’re not going to turn St. Louis (popn density ~5500 people/sq.mi.) into Manhattan (60,000), but can we even turn it into DC (10,000) or Baltimore (8,000) within fifteen years?

I’m not really sure why I should be prohibited from citing Portland as a model. We have a somewhat unfortunate situation in this country where the main example people are familiar with of a transit-oriented city is New York, which is one of the very biggest in the world, while obviously most of our cities are much smaller than that. So it’s worth saying that the developed world is full of examples that are neither New York nor sprawl. That’s not just Portland, Europe is full of decently walkable medium-sized cities.

On to St Louis. It’s hard to talk in too much detail about places I’m not very familiar with. But the pace at which things can change is going to be dictated, in part, but the extent to which there’s actual interest in building anything in the metro area. At the moment, clearly, nobody is going to undertake large new building projects—dense or otherwise—in St. Louis or anywhere else. And a small city in the midwest is under no particular obligation to turn itself into a particularly dense metropolis. But what you want is to avoid a situation where you’re preventing density. St Louis has a couple of decent rail transit lines and it’s important to allow dense projects to be built near those stations and along the corridors that are served by rail. These things are expensive to build, and once they’re there it’s important to utilize the served areas in the most efficient way possible. That doesn’t mean forcing people to build extremely tall projects near them, but it does mean letting such projects go through without demanding vast fields of parking to be placed around everything.

In general, I would also just note that it can get misleading to look at citywide density averages. The relevant issue for a city that (like St. Louis) has some transit is whether or not you’re achieving density at your transit nodes. Additional consideration that are important is that ideally the stations will be close enough together to create not just pockets of density but whole corridors of density, even if the corridors are surrounded by pretty traditional suburbs. The stretch of Arlington County running from Rosslyn to the Metro stations at Court House, Clarendon, Virginia Square, and Ballston are a great example of how this can look.

Elana Schor’s got the quotes from Representative Jim Oberstar (D-MN) that indicate that the reason rail got so little funding in the stimulus proposal is that they were cut to make room for more tax cuts:

The reason for the reduction in overall funding — we took money out of Amtrak and out of aviation; we took money out of the Corps of Engineers, reduced the water infrastructure program, the drinking water and the wastewater treatment facilities and sewer lines, reduced that from $14 billion to roughly $9 billion — was the tax cut initiative that had to be paid for in some way by keeping the entire package in the range of $850 billion.

Not good. I would also note that there are plenty of ways to do mass transit stimulus funding that have nothing to do with breaking new ground on projects and thus get around the “lag” concerns or some alleged lack of new projects. All around the country, after all, we have people paying fares to go ride on buses, commuter rail lines, light rail, and heavy rail systems. In many jurisdictions, those fares are currently rising even as service is cut back because state and local funding streams for operating costs are drying up amidst the recession. The federal government could make funds available to transit agencies—a certain amount per passenger carried in 2007—that can be used to finance fare cuts or service expansions. That’s the kind of stimulus that would be very fast acting since even though it might take some months for the money to start flowing, agencies could start planning to receive the funds right away. It would have some direct employment effect through the agencies, and would also in effect put extra money into the pockets of transit users. And since in most cities, transit is primarily used by the poor it would be a highly efficient stimulus. And also environmentally friendly.

I see no sign that this kind of thing has gotten serious consideration from the administration or from congress, which is odd considering that they claim to be searching far and wide for reasonably efficient uses of stimulus funds.