Matt Yglesias

Sam Yoon Running for Mayor in Boston on Transportation Reform Agenda

Boston is, in the scheme of things, a pretty well-governed city with a low crime rate and a public school system that, unusually for a big city, performs above the national average when you control for demographic factors. That’s all probably part of the reason that incumbent Mayor Thomas Menino has been in office since 1993. But that only means there are new issues people need to talk about. For example, City Councilman Sam Yoon is running on a strong platform of transportation reform:

Transportation isn’t just cars

The Menino administration has finally started to introduce limited measures that will make the city more bike-friendly. But gestures are not enough. The real problem is that we have an outdated transportation department and mixed up planning. If we want to be the cleanest, greenest, 21st century city in America, then we must get this right. Street design that moves people – on bike, on foot and on rapid public transit should be the focus. Cars are just one part of the breadth of transportation solutions and Boston should be leading the way.

He’s also right about charter school caps. Obviously, there are other issues in play and lots of local-to-Boston details I’m not on top of, so don’t take this as dispositive. But since this blog likes to cover transportation and urban reform issues, I thought it was worth noting this.

Deregulation I Can Believe In

Here’s a sad-but-typical tale of life in the big city:

The owners of Columbia Heights Coffee, located on 11th Street between Park and Monroe, informed me this weekend that they will not be expanding after all. I feel really bad for them because they told me they had paid two years rent for nothing. It seems that the permitting process was just way too cumbersome. Oh well, at least the original spot will remain. For those curious the for rent sign says $1K per month.

I’m someone who believes that regulation is necessary in a variety of fields to protect public health, public safety, the environment, etc. But it’s unquestionably my experience that the volume of regulation on retail establishments—especially in urban areas—is completely beyond any reason. A city has a strong interest in making it possible for people to open businesses. Huge numbers of DC neighborhoods, including Columbia Heights, are plagued with a bizarre situation in which existing establishments are unpleasantly crowded and yet there are plenty of vacant storefronts. Life would be much better if those storefronts were filled with shops, cafes, bars, and restaurants offering people some goods and services.

Recommended Reading

Reader V.C. writes: “I really want to make a pivot into the Urban Policy/Planning/Transportation world. Are there any basic texts or publications that you think would be good to read”

There are! In particular, Christopher Leinberger’s The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream is a good, short, readable, policy-oriented brief for, you know, stuff I’m in favor of. Donald Shoup’s book The High Cost of Free Parking is also good, but it’s both extremely long and quite expensive so you might want to not read it and just listen to my blog posts on the subject. Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us?) is so readable that I actually bought my copy at an airport bookstore, and not so policy-oriented, but it contains a lot of well-explained presentations of rigorous research on this oft-counterintuitive subject. I also hear good things about Alex Marshall’s How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken, though I haven’t read it. Last, Doug Rae’s City: Urbanism and Its End is really just a case study of New Haven, but it makes for fascinating reading and employs theoretical concepts that have enduring relevance as to why the next era of urbanism can’t (and won’t) just be a return to how things were back in the proverbial day.

Outside of books, I recommend a great little magazine (and website) called The Next American City and also blogs! In particular, you should check out the Streetsblog Network and other avenues to find good urbanism-related sites in your local area — Greater Greater Washington for DC, and others for other cities.

Learning to Love the Big Box

As far as this issue goes, I think urbanists ought to wholeheartedly embrace “big box” chain stores. When there’s a problem with an urban-situated big box store, which there often is, it’s because (like the Home Depot near the Rhode Island Avenue Metro station) the site has been laid out in a way that’s inappropriate for an urban environment. But such inappropriate structures are hardly unique to big box retailers (the CVS at 7th and Florida has a strongly suburbanist design quality) or to national chains. What’s more, these problems are often caused by misguided regulations (which of course should be fixed, but are not the fault of the big box chains) or else relate to a general lack of experience financing and constructing stores in an urban environment.

But you can make a physical structure, like DC USA in Columbia Heights, that works in an urban environment. And it would work even better if it didn’t have so much shopping.

But the bottom line is that successful chains are successful because they’re good at bringing to market products that people want to buy at the offered price. If you want people to live and shop in cities, you need to open the cities to the firms that are good at bringing to market products that people want to buy at the offered price. It’s probably in the nature of things that big box stores can never be as successful in a big, crowded city as they are in the suburbs and that will be especially true if you insist that they house themselves in urban-appropriate structures. At the same time, the density of well-designed urban neighborhoods naturally supports a much larger array of niche retailers, where the economics point to independent ownership. Both of those things are all to the good.

But trying to keep large retailers out, as such, is a silly goal. It’s just not the case that the alternative to major chains being in the city is for people to do all their shopping at high-cost, low-selection local independent retailers. Instead, people drive to the suburbs. Better to bring some of that commerce into the city, where people can get to it on transit or on foot as well as by car, and where it becomes part of the urban economy.

Main Street

One result of the extended bailout debate has been to make me pretty sick-and-tired of metaphorical invocations of “Main Street.” This isn’t 1908. Normally in the present-day United States, I see a traditional Main Street being the center of activity when I’m in a picturesque vacation spot for rich people. Aspen, Colorado and Blue Hill, Maine are both focused on their Main Streets. But just about everyplace else you go, people are shopping and working either downtown, or else in a suburban mall or office park. We need an economic recovery plan that works not only for Wall Street, but also for people shopping at big box stores.

In some respects, it’s not a big deal. A cliché is just a cliché. But I do think it’s harmful in some ways that American political culture continues to have such a small town orientation long after the country ceased being primarily rural or small town in nature. Most people live in suburban portions of large metropolitan areas and participate in an economy that operates in part on a global scale and in part on a metropolitan scale. It’s important, it seems to me, for our basic language about our politics and our society to reflect reality and not some dimly recalled echo of the past.

What Drivable Suburbanism Takes

Tyson’s Corner is an area of Fairfax, County Virginia famous for its excellent mall but also for the fact that it’s become a major center of employment, turning the Greater Washington era into a kind of binary downtown system. But whereas the Washington, DC central business district is a walkable urban area served by a decent subway system, Tyson’s is a hard-core subarbanist “edge city.” But plans are under way to build a Metro extension that will run from the city out to Dulles Airport (good idea) and the route will also include four stops in Tyson’s Corner (good idea) and planners want to change land-use rules in Tyson’s to promote sounder development strategies, with the planned stations as foci:

At any rate, I’d been thinking over the past few days that some of the discussion in the blogosphere that I’ve been very much a part of around what you need to do to create walkable urbanism creates a somewhat misleading impression. In particular, I worry about giving people the idea that successful drivable suburbanism is a default state, whereas walkable urbanism is this delicate flower that needs to be cultivated with careful regulatory measures. In reality, while there are regulatory structures around essentially all communities in the United States, it’s important to understand that it’s the suburbanist model that crucially depends for support on on careful regulations. This Examiner article looks at plans to allow higher-densities in Tyson’s as part of the Metro expansion scheme and observes:

The Tysons Task Force wants to allow a FAR of six, rising as high as 7.8 for residential space if a developer meets green-building and affordable-housing thresholds.

That upper limit worries Ted Alexander, chairman of the Greater Tysons Citizens Coalition, an umbrella group of community officials and activists.

“We support development and growth, but the thing that we don’t want to happen is see the growth grow faster than the infrastructure,” he said.

And there you have it. Fairfax, as it currently exists, doesn’t contain any walkable urban areas because it’s actually illegal to build any communities that are dense enough to really provide for walkable urbanism. There are plans under way to let people build denser in one corner of the county, but still not all that densely, and those plans are facing regulatory opposition from people who want to ensure that the tender fabric of car-dependent suburbanism stays in place. If you did something crazy like let people build however densely the market will support, then you’d see a lot more walking, biking, taking the bus, etc. but driving would become unpleasant. That would be annoying to people who love driving, nice for people who like walking, and better for the environment and public health along with being substantially more economically efficient — boosting overall productivity and incomes.

The New Broadway

Incidentally, for a great example of what I was talking about in the post below about choosing how to allocate space on our streets, check out Streetsblog’s photos of the makeover Broadway’s getting in New York City — fewer traffic lanes, more of everything else. That kind of treatment isn’t right for every street or for every city, but it’s the kind of thing that should be considered much more widely and at least be in the mix. It’s crazy to dedicate so many resources to car transportation that everyone goes everywhere in cars, and then throw up our hands and decide that because everyone’s driving everywhere we have no choice but to dedicate more resources to cars.

NYC is a pedestrian town. If it apportions its streets accordingly, suburban commuters will find themselves more inclined to take commuter rail into town and suburban politicians will find that agitating for better commuter rail service — rather than for more highways — is their new transportation funding priority.

The Streets We Choose

An interesting Boston Globe Magazine article by Billy Baker looks at state-of-the-art information about how to design streets that are safe and inviting for pedestrians. I understand the journalistic considerations behind doing it this way, but I kind of wish Baker hadn’t led with the nutty-sounding Mondermanite prescriptions for eliminating pedestrian-vehicle separation and road striping altogether. I think those are interesting ideas that people should learn more about, but at the same time it’s worth emphasizing that the bulk of the relevant considerations here are pretty much commonsense.

But to make a long story short, a town or city needs to decide whether or not they really think that maximizing vehicle speed is the right priority for the design of their streets. If you decide to make it the priority, then you’ll wind up with a city that’s bad for pedestrians — narrow sidewalks, wider roads to cross, walk signs that only work if you press a button, intersections where walkers defer to turning traffic, etc. — and at the same time you’ll have fast-moving vehicles that tend to collide with human beings in a relatively deadly manner. If you decide not to make it the priority, then you get the reverse — wide sidewalks, narrow road crossings, adequate walk signals, and intersections where turning traffic defers to pedestrians. Cars will move slower through your city and there will be fewer car-person collisions and those that do occur will be less lethal.

There are some exotic considerations that get a bit weird, but the basic shape of things, as Baker makes clear down the road, is pretty simple. And to me it’s a pretty easy choice. Shifting resources in a pedestrian-friendly direction helps save lives directly. It’s also good for the environment and boosts public health. If you live in a city with a walkable downtown, it might be instructive to go to a block that has heavy automobile and pedestrian traffic and just look at the amount of space dedicated to cars versus what’s dedicated to people. Even in places like New York and Washington, DC where only a minority of city residents commute by car to work, more space is dedicated to the cars than to the people. And in DC, the central business district dedicates almost no space whatsoever to bikes. Not only are those choices that I think are mistaken, but most people barely even realize that the choices are being made at all — but it’s not like it would require magic for the central business district in DC to feature bike lanes on all streets, wider sidewalks, and fewer traffic lanes. And you can bet that people’s preferences about commuting methods would shift in response to a shift in space allocation.