How do you solve a problem like Edifice Complex?
The New York City subway system just got more expensive on Sunday. Service is also getting worse as a 110 year old system that was cobbled together over the course of decades buckles under the pressure of handling 5 or 6 million riders daily.
Andrew Cuomo does not seem fond or willing to spend the money that is required to update and modernize the subway system though. He called MTA’s capital plan “bloated” and his main concerns are for the necessary updating of the Tappan Zee bridge and the very unnecessary creation of an AirTrain to take people from a subway stop to LaGaurdia airport.
The MTA argues that the Capital Plan is necessary and will go to replacing cars and tracks, updating the signal system, and working on the next phase of the Second Avenue subway which will help relieve congestion on the East Side of Manhattan from the overcrowded 4,5,6 lines. For non-New Yorkers, the 4, 5, and 6 lines handle most of the subway traffic on the East Side of New York and it only goes up Lexington Avenue which traditionally marked the start of the East Side of Manhattan. Building a Second Avenue subway, would allow people who lived between 3rd and 1st Avenues, a closer walk to the subway and help create more space on the 4,5, and 6 lines. By contrast, the West Side of Manhattan has subway lines that go up and down 6th Avenue (D,M,F,V), 7th Avenue (1,2, and 3), and 8th Avenue (A, C, and E).
Transport Politic reports that Cuomo’s Airtrain will barely save anyone time when getting to LaGaurdia Airport (Hat Tip: Lawyers, Guns, and Money)
Sadly I think that Cuomo is likely to win on this and the NYC Subway is likely to lose out. The NYC Subway is not the only system that is rapidly aging and needs a serious increase in funding. Boston’s system has been been seriously damaged especially because of their very horrible winter.
I think there are a few reasons for this. One is that there seems to be something in the American DNA that creates a love-hate relationship with big cities. We depend on them economically but we hate them and big players like NYC or LA or SF get more hate than most. Upstate New York would be in even tougher economic decline if it weren’t for NYC but the MTA is controlled by New York State’s government and not NYC’s government and this always creates budget woes even if the Republican Senate conference is dominated by suburbanites whose voters take the Long Island Rail Road or Metro North to the City for work and recreation and this is almost certainly going to require a subway ride too. Many people don’t get to get off at Penn Station or Grand Central and then walk to work.
The other problem is that our politicians and other elite leaders and rich people always tend to suffer from Edifice Complex. It is always more sexy and attractive to build something new than to do updating and upkeep. There are very few chances for photoops for modernizing signal systems or chances to place your name or others on things. There are also very few lucrative contracts to reward. Building an Airtrain requires hiring engineers, inspectors, construction companies, and other things which leads to jobs, jobs, jobs, and helping your donors. Buying new trains and tracks, requires placing orders with companies that are already in existence and jobs and projects already in existence.
This is not something that is unique to politics, edifice complex seems to infect all sorts of organizations. Colleges and Universities have an edifice complex for building new gyms and fancy dorms while underpaying adjunct faculty and relying more and more on adjunct faculty. The Performing Arts also seems to be the victim of edifice complex. I went to a dance performance at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts yesterday and noticed that there was a plaque that said “Staircase was funded by….” It was nice staircase but I wonder why it feels better to fund something physical over underwriting more performances that would create more opportunities for audiences to see interesting performance troupes. The Flea Theater in New York is building a shiny new theatre while relying on unpaid actors for their performances. The Public Theatre needed to cancel a performance of the critically acclaimed Fun Home because they spent money on their lobby and could not afford an understudy.
This seems to be a constant issue for humanity and the person who comes up with the answer and a solution to edifice complex will deserve a Noble Prize of some sort. If he or she can’t be fit into an existing category, we should create a new one though I think Peace and Economics will work well. Why is it that we are so adverse to the unsexy worlds of upkeep and just want to build new things. Why can’t we put up with a shabby lobby and spend money on salaries for people?
One problem is that most of the rest of America is car-oriented so it really doesn’t occur to them why they should their tax money go to transit users in the big city. Since there are all sorts of cultural politics revolving around transit use in the United States that really do not seem to exist in other countries, additional difficulties are added to the problem.
Most infrastructure isn’t really doing that well. Highways, streets, bridges, and rail systems through out the United States are in desperate need of maintenance. Our infrastructure is failing and failing fast. Since repairing this will require taxes and taxing people or things is difficult right now, nothing gets done even if it is essential.Report
So Americans don’t even want to pay for the infrastructure that they are using on a daily basis? This is probably true. Though the Bay Bridge got a recent span replacement. The Tappan Zee really does need to be fixed up because it was originally meant to last for fifty years.
What is rather interesting to note is how American society has changed in those past fifty years. Seemingly back then it was uncontroversial to design a bridge with a 50 year lifespan because it was assumed “Of course, people will pay to maintain and/or replace when the time comes” but that changed.
I wonder if we are going to have a story about a very big accident like a bridge collapse or a subway derailment before the funding is put in place.
Or we can just start war with Iran…..Report
I’m currently paying a lot of taxes for my state’s transportation fund….which is habitually raided to cover the deficit from the general fund and isn’t re-payed. That’s why I’m unwilling to support higher taxes when it comes to this type of thing. If the money had been left in the fund, there wouldn’t be a problem.
Additionally, our local ‘crats can’t even seem to manage to administer many of these mass transit organizations in the state with any level of competences. It’s been in the news frequently about all kinds of problems. When the money that’s been taken is put back and used to maintain the roads/bridges, and some incompetent folks are fired, then we can talk about the proper funding of the fund and whether an adjustment is needed.Report
Given the limited resources made available by elected politicians and tax payers, I’d argue that our civil servants are doing a fine job administrating our mass transit systems all things considered. People complain about the MTA all the time but I find that they do their best to maintain the system in the least intrusive way possible for subway and train riders by doing the repairs very late at night when usage is low or at worst, on weekends when inconvenient is less so than if service was suspended on a weekday. The MTA also provides alternative transport when they do need to close a section of track for maintenance and repair work.Report
What does this mean? Resources are almost always limited; that is what makes them resources.
Are you saying that civil servants ought to be getting unlimited resources to do their jobs?Report
Jr, what I meant was that given the amount of funding they get in the budget from elected politicians, the MTA is not doing a bad job. I think that New York state probably does have the resources to fund more of the MTA from tax revenue.Report
@leeesq
Interesting piece here (PDF) about NY state revenues and expenditures by area from a few years ago. NYC and the five counties closest in — for a city that size, I suppose those are “inner ring suburbs” — subsidize the rest of the state to a substantial degree. Looks to me like about $10B per year. The suburbs more, but NYC is definitely a donor. They almost certainly have the votes to stop the subsidy if they want.Report
” the Bay Bridge got a recent span replacement. ”
It’s interesting that you bring this up, because that project took three times as long and cost four times as much as it was supposed to, and they couldn’t even do it right. Failures in supply-chain management led to the wrong steel being used to make a lot of the bolts, and they snapped like toothpicks when installed; and the people responsible for getting the bridge sections fabricated believed the exaggerated quality claims of Chinese manufacturers and now we’ve got bare metal with a lick of house paint sitting in the middle of the San Francisco Bay.Report
Saul, you left out a pretty important part of the story. MTA’s Capital Plan is underfunded to the tune of about $15 billion. If Cuomo wanted to support it, he would have to figure out a way to close that gap either by raising taxes, raising revenues from somewhere else (imposing tolls on all the East River crossings for instance), or cutting spending from somewhere else. In other words, it would involve doing some very heavy political work.
And the sense that I get from Cuomo is that he’s not so much interested in governing New York as he is in keeping relatively unencumbered and putting himself in a position to jump on a national ticket if the chance arises. The upside of the LaGuardia connection is that it would be relatively cheap to build and, yes, he’d get to stand in front of something new and shiny with a shovel in hand.Report
How much would subway fare actually be if it were entirely user-supported? Is there any way to know?Report
The budget shows $15.046 billion in cash operating expenses for 2013. A press release indicates that total ridership in 2013 was 1.708 billion. I can divide those, and get a fraction of a cent smaller than $8.81 per ride. Which is more than three times the publicly-posted regular fare of $2.75 a ride.
But I don’t know if I’m missing something when I reach those figures.Report
@burt-likko
That number sounds right. The New York Times article estimated that the MTA receives 40 percent of its operational budget from fares.
What you need to figure in is that the MTA covers more than subways. They also do buses, Long Island Rail Road, and Metronorth which goes to the Northern suburbs of NY and Connecticut.
Wikipedia tells me that the MTA was founded in the 1960s by the New York government in order to purchase and save the privately operated Long Island Rail Road. Wikipedia further tells me that the LIRR was unprofitable more often than profitable and basically survived because Pennsylvania Railroad had a controlling interest and subsidized the lines.
What I would be interested in finding out is how many people live and work in Long Island as compared to living on Long Island and working in NYC. Penn Station is always packed during rush hour and trains have always seemed pretty packed to the gills to me. Even non-rush hour trains can get pretty filled up.
There are a lot of places where commuter rail is kept to rush hours only but this is because the commuter trains lease line space from freight services. LIRR and Metro North have their own dedicated lines. There is probably also enough demand of people going to and from NYC to justify trains during non-rush hours. I’ve taken plenty of non rush-hour trains to and from NYC and they always packed enough to justify service and this is not just in the evening for people going to concerts, events, and other nightlife in the city. This can be at 2 PM to the suburbs.
I don’t think NYC could handle the amount of parking if people from the suburbs needed to drive and park in the city for work and play.Report
Manhattan is still the center of business, entertainment, and shopping for the New York region. Parking is also expensive and rare, especially in the areas that people in the burb will want to go when visiting the city like Madison Square Garden for a Knicks game or a concert, Broadway for a show, or Fifth Avenue or SOHO for shopping. Taking an LIRR train or Metro North train into the city is a lot less stressful than driving for many people.Report
According to this farebox recovery is under 50% for the entire MTA enterprise. (there are older dead link sources that show the subway itself at around 67%). (typically, subways have the highest recovery ratios in combined systems, buses the lowest) So anywhere from a 50% to a 100% increase gets close (for the subway alone), but one would have to add the drop in customers from the increased price.
Otoh, New York City subways at 2.75 a pop are on the low side for the nation, (BART and WMATA are far more) and goes a lot further than anywhere else. Plus, the NYC subway system is a unique (in the US) captive market just due to the sheer size and density of Manhattan – i.e. you’re less likely to seek alternate arrangements there for a too high priced, too poorly serviced mass transit line, than you are anywhere else. (e.g. DC which has been hemorrhaging subways riders in the middle of a modest nationwide mass transit boom).Report
Even when the New York subway system was built, owned and operated by two private companies, it was well understood that it would have to operate on a flat fare system rather than charging by distance. The IRT and BMT realized that the less well off residents would move to to the outer edges of Manhattan and the five boroughs because of the subway but would still need to travel to Manhattan for work while the rich would remain in Manhattan. This would mean that the people who needed the subway the most would have to pay for higher ticket prices if you charge based on distance. Therefore, it was decided that a flat fare was a necessity for a viable subway in New York City.
I also don’t understand why people hate the DC metro so much. I used it for four years in college and still use it when I have to travel to DC for work. It really isn’t bad.Report
As someone who lived in DC area from 197x until around Bush-Clinton Uno, then moved back in the past few years, trust me the system has gone way downhill. Even the GreaterGreaterWashington transit
nerdsadvocates acknowledge this, as everyone agrees the system rested on its laurels (and spent no money on maintaining capital stock) for the 5 to 6 years on either side of the turn of the century. In any case, it’s ridiculous that some lines now have 12 minute headways during rush hour because of a complete failure in foresight and management.On charging for distance, it wasn’t until the time Bart and the DC metro were built that the electronic farecards were available with the tech level of society that made distance charging practical. The only other way to do it is to have conductors like the full blown (commuter and long haul) railroads do. Otherwise, it was far more practical to treat the system like one big huge general admission theater. (or mosh pit) . It has nothing to do with where the rich and poor people live in and around NYC, which has shifted dramatically (and sometimes there and back again) over the past 100 years.Report
Yeah, WMATA ain’t that bad. They haven’t even killed anyone this ye…
Never mind: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/1-dead-dozens-hurt-on-metro-car-filled-with-smoke/2015/01/12/e832c0f0-9aa8-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.htmlReport
Kolohe, in Europe and Japan distance charging was the norm for decades before BART and the DC metro were built on metro systems. I don’t know how they did this in Europe before electronic fair cards but in Japan they do it by having the ticket vending machines issue different tickets based on the price.Report
jr, yes I’m aware that a series of accidents occured on the DC metro.Report
That’s more due to the other aspects of the MTA. The subway is closer to 75%.
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/17622/does-metro-ask-riders-to-pay-too-much/Report
The pie charts (ugh!) on page II-1 of this MTA financial plan (from February, 2013) can give you an idea. Fares and tolls make up 53% of the $13.5 billion in revenue for the 2013 budget, or close to $7.1 billion. Fares alone make up 41%, or almost $5.5 billion. Using these numbers (I assume they’ve all gone up a bit, but the percentages may be the same or similar), you’d have to just about double toll and fare revenue to get you the full budget. So assuming you increase them both equally, double the fares and double the tolls to fund the MTA.
This is actually not bad. A lot of smaller cities (and by smaller I mean Austin or San Antonio-sized, maybe even Dallas-sized, and smaller, so pretty much every city) rely primarily on taxes and subsidies, with fares producing a much smaller portion of their transit revenue. If Austin were to pay for its bus and train system by fares alone, it would have to raise them by many times, not just double them. Of course, riding the bus is much cheaper here than in New York.Report
This assumes, of course, that you won’t lose a substantial number of rides when you increase the fare, which of course you will. You’d probably have to raise fares by more than double to make up for the loss of ridership, which won’t reduce costs as much as it will reduce revenue (since the buses and trains are running regardless of how many riders are on them). If you just increased them by the amount needed to make up the 2013 budget deficit from eliminating non-fare/toll revenue using 2013 numbers, but today’s fares, and assuming the same ridership (an obviously false assumption), you’d have about $5.25 for a one-way bus/subway ride, $12.40 for an express bus ride, and $550 for a monthly LIR ticket.
I assume that would push commuting from Long Island via the rail road out of the reach of many if not most working class families.Report
@chris
http://web.mta.info/lirr/about/TicketInfo/Fares03-22-15.htm
Montly LIRR train passes are done via zones and distance. The big terminal stations are in Zone 1. The far end of Suffolk County is Zone 14. Monthly passes to and from Zone 1 range from 184 dollars to 485 dollars. I don’t know how many people get subsidies via work or use monthly passes instead of one-way tickets. A trip from Penn Station to Zone 14 is about 2 or 2.5 hours one way. I lived in Zone 4 and the trip was about 30-35 minutes one way. Living in Zone 4 is much more expensive than living in Zone 14 of course. Zone 14 probably gets a lot of traffic during the summers when people head to the Hamptons over the weekend.Report
Yeah, sorry. I should have noted that I used Massapequa to Penn Station to get that number. For many of the working class residents of Suffolk County, the monthly ticket would be at least that (when R. lived on Long Island and worked in Manhattan, she was in Fare Zone 10, which would be even more expensive, around $720 for a monthly ticket, using those numbers).Report
Ah okay.
720 a month would be too much for many people but this does not necessarily mean that it would be easier to bring many jobs to the people.Report
Are you including initial capital expenditures being amortized and maintenance and operating costs or just M&O?Report
I divided operating expenses before debt servicing (which seems to diminish net outlays by way of some public entity accounting magic I cannot comprehend) by ridership.Report
@burt-likko
I don’t think that’s correct. Frankly, I’m not sure how public sector transport is handled, but if it was private, you’d have to include the debt service (initial capital expenditure) and the O&M by the ridership.
Frankly, the cost of non ridership is irrelevant, @zic, for determine the true cost of the mass transit since they aren’t riders. Nor would the “shifting them to autos” scenario be relevant as what you’re trying to do is determine the minimum fares that the existing ridership would need to pay for the system to operate successfully. Factoring the impact of drivers switching would be relevant IF you were considering ending the mass transit.Report
The calculation is far more complex, @burt-likko and would have to include the cost of those people not being on the subway; the big factor here would be shifting them to automobiles.Report
That point makes me think that if you covered all MTA costs with fares and tolls, you’d essentially be building a wall around Manhattan.Report
@chris – Sounds familiar.Report
Only this time, Long Island and Connecticut would be the prisons, and Manhattan would be full of rich people.
I would much rather be in prison in Manhattan than Connecticut. Just sayin’.Report
I’d take northwestern CT any day, if I had to be in prison.
Farms are very healing to the convicted mind, I’ve read. Repeatedly.Report
@chris
I was wondering in your situation how much it would break Manhattan.
Groceries, cabs, and other transport will make it into Manhattan without a problem. The issue comes with the people who can afford to live in Brooklyn but work in Manhattan and this includes everyone from the very poor to the very well off. The middle and upper-middle classes will be able to take the extra charges but what about the support staff, service workers, etc.Report
@chris I’ve had planners tell me that the best pubic transit system is free; removes the most cars from the street and eliminating the most traffic congestion; I’d suspect there’s some optimization point of fare that maximizes ridership.Report
@zic
I don’t think there is a free transit system except on New Years Eve when people are going out drunk (SF Muni and I think Bart are free then) and 24 hours of service as well. The only other free buses I know of are done more in a “Please don’t drive drunk” kind of way.
You also have to combine with amazingly hard driving tests. Countries don’t cut down on driving by having good public transportation, they cut down on driving by making it very hard to get a driver’s license. At least much harder than the United States does.Report
“The middle and upper-middle classes will be able to take the extra charges but what about the support staff, service workers, etc.”
maybe you got to pay them more to get them to work for you? Or is it only Walmart that gets blamed for relying on public assistance to underpay their workers?Report
@saul-degraw we have one here. Small busses that are free. In the summer, they run in Bar Harbor and Arcadia National Park, in the winter they run here between the village I live in and a ski area six miles away. (Next to Arcadia, we’re the second-largest bed base in the state.)
It’s financed by local businesses and towns; and it helps our town maintain a ‘small town’ feel, decreasing the traffic that congests a lot of ski towns in the winter. It also provides transport for workers at the mountain; my kid worked at a pizza place for a while this winter (they were short handed, he helped out,) and used it; he also uses it when he goes up to ride his snowboard.Report
Zic, Austin tried free buses for a while (and still tosses the idea around now and then), and ultimately abandoned it because it didn’t make much of an impact on traffic, if any, and filled the buses with homeless people riding for hours to avoid the elements, which Cap Metro, our transit authority, did not like. Even when they tried free only on Ozone Action Days, it increased ridership on those days largely through the homeless.
And recall the transportation conversation we had a while back, about anti-bus bias. Cap Metro has seen an increase in ridership mostly on its most expensive lines: the train and the two BRT-esque lines, increases produced by enticing middle class car owners to park and ride.Report
@kolohe
Maybe they will but I don’t think you will ever have a form of transport (including cars) that is not government subsidized in some way, shape, or form. For trains and subways, the best you can hope for is maybe Japan where the privately run trains are done as loss-leaders.Report
We’ve got free transit here, in a small band around downtown, which includes some subway stops across the Allegheny river to the Northside. Steelers are currently paying for it (partially) but I think the parking garages are going to pay for it in the new year.
Homeless around here are tough, though, and we’re working pretty industriously to get ’em in out of the cold (or the ER).Report
It seems important to note that NYC has a residency-based income tax. The tax is paid by everyone who lives in NYC and earns income, regardless of where they work. If you work in the city and live elsewhere, you don’t pay the tax (though a bit of sleuthing tells me city employees hired after 1979 who live outside the city also owe the tax). I wonder if any of that money goes towards the mass transit system. If it does, than it serves as a subsidy paid by city dwellers for commuters. At the same time, most (if not all) of intracity transit is flat rate; traveling into the city is not only more expensive but increasingly so depending on how far one is coming from. So maybe it all balances out.
Regardless, NYC has some interesting little wrinkles.
For a while, Bloomberg pushed hard for ‘congestion pricing’, basically charging additional fees to enter ‘midtown’ Manhattan during busy times of day. It never got very far, but there was a lot of dialogue about it at the time. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing_in_New_York_CityReport
While the subthread on train subsidies is interesting, it doesn’t solve the problem of Edifice Complex. The LaGaurdia Air Train is a horrible and horribly expensive idea.Report
The solution to the edifice complex is that it’s allowed to either break or reach a critical point where the people monitoring it say “we have to shut it down or peeps is gonna die” at which point rebuilding/repairing it becomes pretty much the same priority and visability as building something new. This is highly inefficient since proper maintenance and prevention is massively more effective and inexpensive then triage repair- but it’s how people seem to want to get it done.Report
I wonder how much of this is people taking a gamble and that they will be retired in Florida instead of on a bridge when it comes crashing down?Report
Humans are immediate creatures, beings of the present, they have a high opinion of their immediate interests and are blind to future threats. See global warming, HOA reserve funding, and edifice complexes.Report
The LaGuardia Air Train doesn’t sound like a particularly wise use of resources, but here’s what it has going for it from Cuomo’s perspective:
1. It’s expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as filling the $15 billion gap in the MTA’s Capital Plan.
2. It has some shot in hell of making demonstrable progress before Cuomo has to face his next election.
Perhaps your Edifice Complex is really an Ambitious Politician Complex.Report
Saul
Try changing human nature first and them i’m sure you’ll be able to solve the edifice problem, not to mention most other human problems.Report
I’d deal with the Edifice complex by ending the practice of naming anything after any public servant, hired or elected, until after they are long dead & buried (like, at least 20 years post-mortem). I figure, if people still think highly enough of you 20 years after you are gone, you can get a building named after you.Report
I think this is good especially if you have a broad definition of public servant that goes beyond “elected official”.
Now can you solve it for privately funded things like university and arts building capital campaigns 🙂Report
I did say “hired or elected”.Report
That really doesn’t solve the edifice complex. Most new buildings and projects aren’t named for their sponsoring politicians. You have to get rid of the photo op opportunities to reduce the edifice complex and the electoral draw of saying I’ve built something new rather than maintaining the shop.Report
If you’re in the photo op, you are publicly accepting liability for incidents & cost over-runs?
Bet you’ll have no one holding a shovel at the ground breaking.
But in all seriousness, it’s a PR/marketing problem (i.e. so not my field…). Find a way for current ego-monsters to photo-op themselves into a ceremony for the upgrade commencement, one the public is excited about, & they’ll do it.Report
When I was peripherally involved in Orange County (California) politics a few years back, there was a particular politician so desperate for publicity that it was said that he/she “would go to the opening of an envelope.”
O&M is boring. (needs more emphasis — boooooring.) Nothing happens. You can’t get federal share dollars. You can’t get photo ops. Good O&M requires competent career civil servants to get have a major say in state / regional / local budget decisions, and their needs get to take precedence over stuff that’s fun! Good O&M requires competent legislative staff to review the budgets of public agencies and look for featherbedding, gold plating and other waste. That’s an arcane specialty!
Smart infrastructure spending, in other words, requires hard work from career public servants and politicians who are willing not to grandstand. And THAT, my colleagues, is a commodity in very short supply these days.
I wonder. Is there any think tank around that does need-based federal/state/local budgets? i.e., look at the laws in place and infrastructure demands and pension obligations and all the rest and try to figure out the tax burden needed to pay for what’s (theoretically) required?Report
Yeah this is probably the problem. The work with O&M is boring, unsexy, unglamorous, and requires dedicated workers willing to stay in the background.Report
European and Asian civil servants are usually more politically powerful than their American counterparts. The politicians seem less prone to grandstanding as well. That might explain why O&M is handled better in Europe and Asian countries.Report
Asia – there is famously not quite but sort of still autocratic Singapore, still relatively low cost of labor South Korea, and large industrial democracy Japan. So basically, Japan. Everybody else is either not a democracy, or still in the ‘developing’ level of economic, for lack a of better word, maturity, and thus are not comparable to the US cost of doing business.
Europe does seem to do better than the US on these things – or at least, problems don’t make the English language press.Report
You forgot Taiwan, a small but prosperous island republic that is very densely populated. Its basically the population of Texas in a place the size of Maryland.Report
“Asia – there is famously not quite but sort of still autocratic Singapore, still relatively low cost of labor South Korea, and large industrial democracy Japan. So basically, Japan.”
I don’t know if this is precisely what you’re doing, but there’s a tendency to wave away the idea that there are lessons to be learned from how we do things in Asia. Singapore, S. Korea, Japan, plus Taiwan have a combined population of more than 200 million, or two-thirds that of the US. Each of those countries has cities (or is a city) comparable in size to NYC-metro, and in Tokyo and Seoul’s case, far larger. No, they’re not perfectly comparable to the US, but, come on.Report
I said Japan was worthy of comparison. And I did forget Taiwan – in fairness so does official US diplomatic posture.
But both ROK and (esp) Singapore are sufficiently sui generis and sufficiently different from a continent spanning 300m+ mutiethnic nation to make most comparisons moot. But heck, I think most cross country comparisons are suspect – I additionally think NYC itself is sufficiently exceptional to make lessons on works there (and lessons on what works everywhere else) to be not often applicableReport
I think we just get used to having things shabby, and don’t want to fix it until it’s broken.
Redefine broken in terms of what the system is supposed to be able to accomplish; can it do that job efficiently? Then it’s broken. But if it’s just shabby? Why bother? It’s part of our whole depressed/shopping/hoarder/landfill complex.Report
I think this is exactly it. In the US at least, we’re heading to a near future where people will argue that bridge collapses are just one of the risks you take when you get in your car.Report
“Why is it that we are so adverse to the unsexy worlds of upkeep and just want to build new things.”
Why do people prefer sexy to unsexy? Really? How much do you spend on shirts? Or shoes? Why not donate that to struggling theater troupes?Report
I think the analogy is “Why are you buying new shoes when your pants are so worn-out that your junk shows through?”Report
@mike-schilling
I disagree. The question, at its simplest, is, “Why do people spend money on the things they do?” With a hint of, “…instead of the things I wish they’d spend money on?” implied. Given that Saul is on record as enjoying ‘sexy’, expensive clothing (and bully for him for indulging in what makes him happy!), I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask him why even he doesn’t focus all his funds on what he wishes others would spend funds on, instead electing to splurge on stuff that makes him feel good and happy.Report
So if, say, a school district stops paying for counselors and resource teachers, and uses the savings to build a state of the art computer lab, your only response would be “Whatever, that’s want they wanted to buy.”Report
@mike-schilling
The question of “What to do about this?” is an interesting one.
The question of “Why do people spend their money that way?” is not only uninteresting (to me) but the way in which Saul posits it is ripe with all sorts of value judgements about what certain people do with their money.Report
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that people responsible for spending other people’s money should spend it responsibly. That applies both to businesses and to government.Report
@mike-schilling
I don’t disagree. But that still gets at the question of, “What do we do about it?”
Saul asked no less than three times in the OP “why” people tend toward this way of thinking, as if only certain people are prone towards so called edifice complex. If we think of the people who do this as some sort of uniquely flawed brand of humans, it is going to be much harder to come up with an effective solution. Calling it “edifice complex” instead of “human nature” takes us further from a solution.
If Saul were able to consider what might cause him to change his spending habits, it is possible he could extrapolate from there to think about how we can get others to change theirs. But if we point fingers and say, “Well, those people have some sort of complex,” we’re like to view them and thus treat them differently.
What was one of Hanley’s ‘rules’? Don’t think about the desired outcome, think about the incentives you create for people? Something like that?Report
Is that a NORMAL wear pattern for pants?Report
“Why is it that we are so adverse to the unsexy worlds of upkeep and just want to build new things.”
Isn’t that the problem lots of folks have with American culture? “Shiny thing? Getoutamyway!!! Shiny works really well for certain types of markets (like ipods and talking watches) but not so well for the bland stuff that makes shiny markets possible. Like roads and bridges and subways and stuff.
On the other hand, cutting taxes and privatization is shinin right up.Report
@stillwater
Isn’t this just really part of the human tendency to prefer tangible over intangible, concrete over abstract? Developmental psychology tells us it takes a reasonably long time for young children to even gain a true understanding of the intangible, the abstract and that it is possible that some people (most people?) — even into adulthood — never really solidify this conceptually. And, even when we do, there is still a natural tendency towards the tangible, the concrete.
Concrete, tangible outcomes simply resonate with our brain differently than abstract, intangible ones.
Are there ways we could structure decision-making processes to account for this tendency? Probably. But we’re dealing with some pretty powerful forces that are inherent to humanity (and maybe other species… I really don’t know).Report
@kazzy is right. What’s the point of raising the questions if you are only going to answer them with, “cause Americans” or as below, “cause Republicans?”Report
Suburbs are predominantly inhabited by Republicans. Suburban Republicans tend to want to have all the benefits of a large metropolitan area without paying in the taxes for it.
This is a well observed phenomenon in large cities across the USA, just look at Detroit. An edifice in which a generally poorer 0.7 million people were paying the taxes for the major infrastructure used by 3.7 million and in which most of the 3 million external to the metroplex were the wealthier whites who’d managed to move into segregated suburbs during the era of redlining. It was doomed to failure no matter how economically well run it could have been.Report
This isn’t true in a lot of blue state metropolitan areas. I doubt that San Francisco’s suburbs have that many Republicans. Same with New York or Boston’s suburbs but to a lesser extent. You still have the same issues that Detroit has though.Report
By and large, suburbs in blue states are blue and suburbs in red states are red. That’s what makes them red states and blue states.Report
I think it also depends on how we define suburban. The town I grew up in (Teaneck, NJ… 10 mins from Manhattan, approx. 40k population, several commercial districts, etc.) is considered a suburb there but would be considered urban by much of the country.Report
Most New York City suburbs would be urban by the standards of most the country. Some of the suburbs are actual cities like Hoboken or Jersey City. Most have at least some urban features like retail relatively near residential and walkabilityReport
Dude, most places have residential near retail and some areas of walkability. I think a city has to be reasonably large before its suburbs can be specialized enough to lack those features.Report
I live in an unmistakable suburb and I have lots of shopping within easy walking distance.Report
@alan-scott
That still implies a relative definition of suburb. In the NYC metro area, my hometown was undoubtedly a suburb. But plop it down in North Dakota, and it is arguably a moderately-sized city.
I mean, Bethesda, MD is a suburb of DC. But plop it down next to Fargo, ND and it likely becomes a ‘twin city’ of sorts.
I think it is reasonable to have a relative definition most of the time. But if we want to talk, on a national scale, about what does or doesn’t happen in “suburbs”, we need a more uniform definition.Report
@alan-scott, the average suburb of a city in the North East is a lot denser and more built up than most suburbs elsewhere in the country.Report
The quick-and-dirty way to distinguish for the sake of this sort of thing* is looking at county density. If there are more than 1000 (or 1500) people per square mile, and over 700k people, it counts as urban. Less than that, it counts as suburban (if attached to a city)
Since Teaneck is in a county with Hackinsack, for the purposes of this it is urban. As is Hackinsack, even though most would consider it a suburb.
It’s not always accurate, but it gives you an idea of what Lee and I are talking about with regard to suburban voting patterns. (Doing it by county helps because, apart from state, that’s where we have the best subnational voting data.)
Once you get away from major cities, you look more at county populations and you get “small city” voting patterns, which start mattering if you have a lot of them and/or a lack of major cities (Idaho vs Maine). ACIS’s comment aside, it’s often said that the Republicans are the “rural party” but they actually have far larger numbers in suburbs and cities. Except where they don’t have the suburbs… and then they lose (because not only are there usually not enough rural voters, but voters in the sticks don’t vote as monolithically as voters in urban cores.
* – On the other hand, if you’re looking strictly at metro areas and trying to distinguish between urban and rural parts of it, county-level is too imprecise to be very useful.Report
This makes a lot of big cities giant suburbs or at least a collection of suburbs under one government but I think that a place should have a population density of at least 4000 people per square mile to be urban. Anything else really feels to spread out to count as urban.Report
Lee, depends on what you’re looking at. If you’re talking about comparing the numbers of people who live in urban and rural areas, I think there’s something to that. That’s what I was trying to get at with the asterisk. However, we tend to look at voting data on a county level, so for the sake of this discussion it makes the most sense to look at counties as being urban or rural, and judging based on relatively loose density requirements.Report
It’s not like the suburbs lack this problem. Driving around Westchester you will find the roads pockmarked with potholes so deep you can see the white underneath them. The solution is to just bandage it up with some fill in that will last until December of the next winter. Wash, rinse, repeat.Report
When I lived in Mount Kisco, we would occasionally go to the Danbury Mall in Connecticut and we’d joke about the difference of the roads. You could tell within about 20 seconds that you’d crossed the border.Report
ACIS
Get real, it was a string of crooked Dems that ran Detroit into the ground. Then after running it down they went hat in hand to the state and fed government begging to be bailed out.Report
Now, when the entire financial system fell apart and went hat in hand to the federal government begging to be bailed out, that was crooked Republicans. (Except for the ones that were libertarians.)Report
Mike
It is really sad to see you grasping at anything to change the subject or avoid holding your own responsible for their actions.Report
Notme,
Are you really on the bears side?
Bearbaiting went out in the 1600’s, so maybe I ought to just have a bit of tact here…Report
It actually depends upon WHERE the suburbs are. I’ve lived in a nominally republican county inside one of the most reliably democratic states in the union and the repubs there were, shall we say, very similar in their political viewpoints to the liberals living in the rest of the state. This applied to various hot button topics like gun control, abortion, etc.Report
Assorted thoughts…
The Denver light rail system is being funded in large part by the surrounding suburbs. As is the scientific and cultural district (funds the Denver performing arts center and other venues). As was the Rockies’ ballpark and the Broncos’ stadium. Denver might be an exception in terms of the suburbs paying for the amenities they want — the regional council of governments goes back to the 1950s. Although my suspicion is that “the suburbs are willing to pay” applies fairly broadly in the part of the country from 100° W to the Pacific.
These things are not static. My suburban Colorado county’s voting has shifted about seven percentage points more Democratic since I moved here 27 years ago. This is part of the reason that Colorado is a purple-leaning-blue state these days, rather than the red state it was when I got here.
By Will’s rule of thumb, there are no urban counties in Colorado, as none of them reach 700k population. By that rule, there are very few urban counties in the West: four or five in California, and one in Oregon (barely), and I think that’s it.Report
@michael-cain
Why wouldn’t Denver’s county be considered urban? Or King County (Seattle) in Oregon?
What are the urban counties? SF, LA, Multnomah (Portland), San Diego?Report
Denver and “Denver County” are coterminus. The suburbs of Denver are in different counties. (Really, really small “towns” (or whatever they are) like Lakeside, Glendale, or Edgwater might be exceptions….I’ve never really understood what those were.)Report
@saul-degraw
I said “by Will’s rule of thumb”: >700k population, >1500/sq mi density. Denver (City and) County fails on total population. King County fails on density. Multnomah County (Portland) makes it. In California, San Francisco, Orange (bet that pisses them off), Los Angeles, and Alameda. Sacramento comes close. All the rest fail on density. Much of the problem is large western counties. Maricopa County in Arizona, population almost four million, still comes in at only 415 per square mile.Report
@michael-cain That should have been “or” and not “and”… (I mean, using “and” then Washington DC isn’t urban.) I was specifically thinking of Seattle, in fact, when I added the population option. (Also, those numbers were spitballing examples. Cases can be made and would be heard to reduce or increase thresholds.)
But outside of Denver, Colorado mostly has entities in the “Small Cities” category.Report
@gabriel-conroy
The tiny towns are artifacts from the evolution of Colorado’s constitution and laws on annexation, and some special situations. Edgewater was, and Lakeside still is, controlled largely by amusement park owners who didn’t/don’t want to be part of Denver. Glendale was a hotbed of night clubs at one time — on the order of one liquor license per 100 residents — that also wanted to avoid Denver control. For the most part, Denver’s suburbs follow the standard western model — few in number and relatively large.Report
I sometimes ponder how things might be different if we hadn’t gerrymandered our cities as much as we have. It’s not difficult to imagine Republicans having more of an urban policy if they actually had a stake in urban governance. Right now, of course, they’d be minimally competitive, but they’re not remotely competitive in some cities where they are competitive at the county level, and it would likely lead to a coalition that would have more of an urban component. In other countries, the conservative parties have some significant mayorships that they utterly lack here. It’s hard not to look at the partitioning of cities as a reason as to why that is the case.
(On the one hand, liberals would like this because a lot of the partition is based on suburban desires to tax-and-spend on their own and a desire to shield themselves from the city. On the other hand, cities would not politically be quite the liberal playground that they are presently.)Report
It isn’t exactly liberals who geryymandered the cities. Distrust of cities in the United States stretches back to Jefferson. Social conservatives hated cities in the 1920s too when they were more white-ethnic (but not Protestant). Al Smith was the urban candidate of his day and Hoover was able to bash him as such. The next urban President was J.F.K. (maybe!) but I would argue President Obama is really our first urban President in a long time. He might be our first real urban President.Report
@will-truman
I think I prefer it with “and”, although reducing the population requirement somewhat might be appropriate. For example, Colorado has two counties that satisfy the rule when you use “or”: Denver and Broomfield both meet the density requirement. Denver’s population is 650,000 and parts of it are definitely urban (although there are large swaths that are indistinguishable from the neighboring suburbs). Broomfield’s population is 55,000 and there is absolutely no question that Broomfield County is purely suburban. Problems also for other western states. Consider Maricopa County, AZ. Yes, there’s downtown Phoenix that’s urban. But most of the people live (and most of them work) in the large surrounding suburbs.
I recently read Carl Abbott’s The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West, and have been rereading Joel Garreau’s Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Both of them describe the common western phenomenon: metro areas with multiple cores. Generally, at most one of those fits the traditional “urban core” model of both high density and large population. In the rest, the “core” is more likely to be sprawling corporate campuses, the assumed local transportation model is the car, etc. Often, political boundaries are of lesser importance, with a single “edge city” spread across multiple jurisdictions, possibly including county lines.Report
Saul, I never said it was liberals who gerrymandered cities. This is an area where I think my views are more in-line with liberals than conservatives (and libertarians). I mentioned that last bit just to say that it wouldn’t be “cost free” for them. Liberals sometimes – only sometimes! – would do away with the suburbs more generally, and by keeping people in core cities believe that they would be more liberal. Under that, there wouldn’t be costs. If it were true. But with what I’m talking about, which is mildly more feasible – though still unlikely – it would mostly be a matter of redrawing city lines, which would have some negatives along with the positives to go with it, from a liberal perspective.Report
@michael-cain I’d need to look at the edge cases to know where the numbers should be. I was mostly wanting to err on the side of inclusiveness (I was initially going to make it 500k or 1000ppl/mi2, though I decided not to be that inclusive).
It’s difficult with counties because they can really run a gamut in terms of size. The problem with any “And” is that it wouldn’t include San Bernardino County, which was one of the things I was keeping an eye on, and I think should count as “urban” for the sake of this. Or, at least, shouldnt not count on the basis of being in a huge county.Report
Are we deliberately avoiding the phrase “white flight” or is that incidental?Report
@will-truman
Certainly the SW corner of San Bernardino County is urban in Garreau’s Edge City sense of the term. At the risk of being presumptuous, I would guess that there’s nothing in the county that Saul would consider urban. My natural tendency would be to go with the Census Bureau’s 381 MSAs, whether they have a traditional urban core or not (that corner of San Bernardino falls in the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA, which crosses at least one county boundary). For doing maps, the MSA outlines aren’t as readily available as outlines for counties — another thing for the to-do list…Report
Yeah, but I don’t find that definition particularly useful in the context of the original discussion, and my own take, which involve voting patterns. Even if we had a metro area map, it would be less than useful because metro areas almost definitionally cover both urban and suburban areas. If we were to isolate the truly urban-urban places within cities, and thus eliminated cities and metro areas with millions of people that don’t even have them, we are eliminating too much of the population to be useful or we’ve reduced “urban” to an abstraction.
It’s not accurate to put an entire host county under the “urban” mantra, but looking at the surrounding counties at least can be useful to get a feel for voting patterns. Not as useful as voting locations within a city, of course, but at least a general idea of my pet issue, which is the difference between how suburbanites vote in Seattle vs Houston, Philadelphia vs Atlanta.Report
@will-truman
Point. More than one, actually. Still, better classification isn’t that much harder. All of the data to do a rough weighted average by municipality is in Wikipedia, it’s just not organized or labeled in a consistent fashion. That sort of calculation would almost certainly classify San Bernardino as urban. Probably Maricopa as well.
Have I mentioned the need for
minionsgraduate studentsvolunteers with a slavish desire to do data organization for me lately?ReportWhat a dreadful pun.Report
Those who focus on the edifice blind themselves to the underlying problems.Report
Would it be going to far to say that beneath the edifice lies the mother of all problems?Report
Those aren’t just awful, they’re motherfishing awful.Report
I simply cannot think of a way to work in patricide.Report
For one thing, your web site would have to be hosted overseas.Report
This is an electrafying sub-thread.Report
I see a lot of pro-edifice politicians, but where have the anti- gone?
(Booya!)Report
He’s ripping off a James Bond movie.Report
“Building an Airtrain requires hiring engineers, inspectors, construction companies, and other things which leads to jobs, jobs, jobs, and helping your donors. Buying new trains and tracks, requires placing orders with companies that are already in existence and jobs and projects already in existence.”
Come on. The argument that infrastructure spending will help the economy and create jobs is an obvious one that advocates never fail to make. Do you really believe this second sentence is true, or that anyone thinks it is?Report
@krogerfoot
I was more trying to get into the head of someone who does the edifice complex. I think it is partially right. I doubt that any politician is seriously supported by a company that builds subway trains (most of which I think are located abroad and not in the States). There are plenty of local construction companies and firms that can benefit from building a AirTrain line though or endless improvements to the L.I.E.Report
And also: Gov. Cuomo is not fond? LaGaurdia? A Noble Prize? We are adverse to the unsexy?
The problem with careless writing is that it’s hard to tell when you’ve made a typo and when you’re talking about something you know nothing about. It’s hardly a crime to be a sloppy writer, especially if you’ve got the stylistic or journalistic chops to pay the bills. For the rest of us, it’s worth it to check your goddamn work.Report
Butt spill chick fund new thing rung…Report
New definition of bipartisanship: an infrastructure maintenance program that makes the bridges to last long enough so that Rep Peter King has his choice when he jumps off one after Senator Cruz gets the GOP nomination.Report
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rep-peter-king-threatens-to-jump-off-a-bridge-if-cruz-gets-gop-nomination/Report
Man, talk about mixed emotions.Report
There’s also a lesson here. You know how we all make fun of people who think that Iran and ISIL must be allies because they’re both anti-Western Muslims? I honestly had no idea that Peter King and Ted Cruz are different kinds of nuts,Report
It’s a simple solution MIke, Cruz gets the nomination, King jumps, Cruz looses in a landslide, we celebrate.Report
Part of the problem is that the downtime requirements for a bridge are significantly different than downtime requirements for a server.
If you’re upgrading a server you can, presumably, build it at leisure in another part of the building, get it just right, restore the data from a current backup from the present server, and then, at worst, have a mere hiccup of downtime as you fail over. (And if you’re dealing with virtual boxes, have even less than a hiccup. A gut rumble of downtime.)
There’s no way to do that with a bridge or roadway or the like. You’ve got to come up with detours, or widen the road before you narrow it again, or do all sorts of obnoxious crap that will slow a driver down and turn his 92 minute commute into a 108 minute commute.
A new bridge? A new bridge is just sexy.Report
Do many people run non-replicated servers? Because if your servers are replicated and you do a rolling upgrade, you’ve got (N-1)/N of your capacity up and running at all times.
Impossible to do with bridge. Less than 100% is always a nightmare because auto traffic expands to fill whatever the road capacity is, and then refuses to contract.Report
Easy to do with Bridge, at least in Pittsburgh. We’ve got enough of them that you can mostly reroute. ;-P
Yes, experimenting with steel was fun, and made cool infrastructure.Report
At small companies? Yeah. Perhaps even at mid-level ones.
The only companies that I’ve seen that did stuff “right” were the ones that could afford to and I haven’t seen one of those since the mid-oughts.Report
Jay,
we run things pretty nice around here.
I know people who run better… (The third backup costs money to access, so there’s profit in it).Report
@mike-schilling Could you expand on that last paragraph, please. Traffic congestion tends to ease with road reductions.
Do you mean for a short-term reduction (during repairs), meaning there wouldn’t be time for traffic patterns to adjust? That’s likely correct.Report
@jaybird
The solution in the Bay Area seems to be to pick a weekend, shut down the bridge, and work around the clock so it can be open for business quickly. This can often be a three day weekend. I’ve seen it done to the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge during my time here.
And servers seem to go down all the time for upgrades. I’ve received a lot of e-mails along the lines of “we are shutting down the server for maintenance between hours X and Y”Report
Yeah, lives don’t depend on THOSE servers.
They do where I work, and I’m not working on the “life-critical” stuff (I don’t maintain life support), just the stuff that’s easy to botch and hard enough to keep track of.Report
Actually, most of the new Bay Bridge was built next to the old Bay Bridge, specifically to avoid disrupting so much traffic. That’s why the new eastern span has a weird kink right as you get to Treasure Island.Report
If there’s one thing San Fransisco is known for, it’s weird kinks.Report
Puget Sound Interstate work tends to happen at night. They have to bring in massive work lights, and pay shift differentials, but when you can close all but one lane of traffic, you can make improvements & repairs a lot faster.Report
It’s curious that the Airtrain for LaGuardia is considered a boondoggle, but the DC Metro extension to Dulles is considered the most important thing the system has done since the initial buildout – and that one will only save about ten minutes from core to airport. (the current time per the wmata transit app, using a combo of train and buses, is 1 hour 3 minutes. And the new station at the airport will be slightly (1/4 mile iirc) further away than where the bus currently drops you off)Report
@kolohe
Right or not, some people just prefer busses/trains to busses. These tend to be the people with more money, more power, and more influence. So rather than saying, “Hey, that only saves me 10 minutes,” they say, “Now I can finally get to the airport via public transportation.” I found this true in both NYC and DC. If you told people you could take the bus to LGA, they’d look at you like you were crazy.Report
*nods* we’re not even talking the 30 miles out of the city that’s Pittsburgh’s airport…
So, cost-benefit should be done based on “how many more people are going to be NOT storing cars at the airport” among other things.Report
It’s worth pointing out that people preferences can be tricky. It’s not uncontroversial to frame it in these terms, but it’s been my impression that back home the drive towards rail has had something to do with giving well-to-do a method of public transportation that includes a minimum of poor people. And perhaps more importantly, avoids the perception of “poor people transportation.”
You can say “Well, if that’s what gets people to use public transportation, we have no choice but to roll with it”… and that may be true, to an extent. But it also plays a game of hide-the-ball, where you if you start getting the transportation to the people who need it most, you run the risk that it will start being avoided by the others. (Though that itself could have a “The rich suckers thought the train would be theirs but who cares if they go because now we have transportation for poor people” advantage… but only if the ropes are taken down.)Report
Right, but this is a rare case, in my experience, where transit advocates/new urbanists are *against* a train, saying ‘the bus is good enough’. Like I said, it’s curious. (and that’s not to say they’re wrong or inconsistent – the article strongly implies that they would be fine with a train with a more direct routing from a different spur line).Report
I’d prefer a good buss to a train any day.Report
@will-truman
Haven’t I written about this before? 😉
Transit advocates seem to love buses more than trains. They are in fact in love with the idea of rapid bus transit.
I think ordinary commuters like trains and light rail for the reasons that trains and light rail are hated by transit advocates and city planners. Once you build a light rail or train stop, it is hard to take said light rail or train stop away. A bus route is easily changeable.
The problem with rapid bus transit is that wonks don’t realize how easy it is for the system to go on the cheap. You take about dedicated bus lanes but then one day a politician says that High Occupancy Vehicles should also be allowed to use the Rapid Bus lanes. And sooner than you know, it is just a regular old traffic lane.
Lee has pointed that the problem with buses is that they have been seen as more of a social service than a transit service for decades. This is true for the proponents and opponents of buses. L.A. has or had a group called the Bus Riders Union which basically became an advocacy group for the poor and like many left-wing groups managed to alienate themselves and loose support by being unable to keep on track with issues. They ended up demanding action on things that were really beyond the scope and control of Los Angeles government.Report
Saul,
Cite some sources. 30 years and we’re getting more BRT not less. And the police do use the FULL ROADS we have here, not just single lanes that toolish fourists get in.Report
That last paragraph is more or less what I’m talking about.Report
Funny, I think the BRU has been pretty successful over the years.
What have they demanded that was/is “beyond the scope and control of the Los Angeles government”?Report
Most of our transportation infrastructure got messed up because it got mired in Americsn racial and social justice politics from both liberals and conservatives. Transportation infrastructure should be about moving people and goods. That’s it.Report
Most of our transportation infrastructure got messed up because it got mired in Americsn racial and social justice politics
Huh?Report
@chris
Successful in other countries but I think the U.S. can find ways to fuck it up. IIRC BRT took off in places with no money and buses were the cheapest possible option.
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/9600/brt-creep-makes-bus-rapid-transit-inferior-to-rail/Report
“Transit advocates seem to love buses more than trains. They are in fact in love with the idea of rapid bus transit.”
You read different transit advocates than I do. Which is weird, because you just linked to GGW, who are my go to people for reading the party lions on transit advocacy, who made the point right there – and everywhere else on their site – that they like trains (& light rail, and streetcars) better than bus rapid transit.Report
K,
And I read the logistics guys who want gondolas.
Even pipedreams have a use in politics…Report
That’s GGW also. (though even they realize that a Roslyn Georgetown one may be a solution in search of a problem)Report
BRU, not BRT (recall you brought them up, and I quoted your comment about them).
Since you bring it up now, the U.S. is getting better at BRT. There are only a few proper BRT systems in the U.S., in Eugene, Vegas, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh (and the Eugene system is pretty limited, but it’s not really that big of a city). However, cities are implementing BRT-like systems at a high rate, because they’re much, much cheaper than rail. They’re still pretty expensive in the U.S., though, which is why (ironically), you see the best systems in the world in countries like Colombia, Peru, China, Brazil, and Guatemala: it’s just cheaper to build stuff in there. Plus in those countries the lines are being built in cities that are developing rapidly, so they have the opportunity to build dedicated lanes and the rather elaborate stops that make BRT more efficient without having to deal with all of the regulations and pissed off stakeholders that transportation projects have to deal with in the U.S.Report
Looks like I was wrong, ITDP has given Seattle’s BRT system a bronze rating since I last looked:
https://www.itdp.org/library/standards-and-guides/the-bus-rapid-transit-standard/
All things being equal, transit advocates tend to prefer trains, because they have all sorts of benefits that buses don’t. However, I’ve yet to meet a transit advocate who didn’t advocate for BRT in lieu of trains when BRT was more appropriate, which it frequently is, particularly in poorly planned American cities like, well, almost all of them. You see arguments now and then about whether BRT or trains are more appropriate for a particular corridor, but that’s to be expected, because it’s not always obvious.Report
@kolohe
I’m just talking about where the push for the Air Train is likely emanating from. If you ask New Yorkers how to get to LGA, most of them will insist you have to take a cab; public transportation doesn’t go there. Because, as far as most of them are concerned, it doesn’t: public transportation = trains of one form or another.
Plus, I’m pretty sure the bus from Manhattan leaves from East 110th or East 125th… good luck getting people weary of the bus to begin with to hop on a bus there.
I don’t AGREE with this mindset… I regularly took the bus around Manhattan much to the chagrin of people I knew. I’m just pointing out that saying, “Hey, the bus runs there,” is going to fall on deaf ears for a good number of people.Report
Chris, a lot of public transportation initatives from after World War II to the present were defeated out of racist beliefs that public transportation were for “those” type of people that live in the cities and that “those” people will use public transportation to come to the suburbs and commit crimes.* You can guess who “those” people are. Car based transportation was seen as one weapon racists could use to effectively maintain de facto segregation after de jure segregation ended. It was the transportation extension of white flight.
On the left, at least some public transportation advocacy became about social justice for those too poor to own a car. This is all well and true but it doesn’t help sell the need for better public transportation to the general electorate. It makes the general electorate see public transportation as a social service rather than part of the transportation infrastructure like highways and airports. For public transportation to be funded, it needs to be supported by most of the electorate and this is easier if it is seen as an infrastructure rather than social justice issue.Report
The GGW article makes a good point about BRT, but I don’t think it makes rail superior to BRT, since rail has its own analogous issues.
Their anti-BRT point is that it’s too easy to remove or simply not build features, which is exactly what happened here in Austin: the city built a system that was supposed to have dedicated lanes, signal-priority, covered, more efficient stops with real-time arrival-time updates, and limited stops. What they ended up producing is a system with about 14 blocks of dedicated bus lanes (on 9+-mile routes), no real signal priorty (Cap Metro swears they have it, but have provided no evidence that they use it, and the city has denied them access through the busiest parts of the two routes), partially covered but otherwise ordinary stops that are frequently shared with non-BRT buses, and on top of that they’re about to increase stops because they fished up by reducing local service and instead of increasing that again, they’ve decided to make the BRT more local and less rapid. It does have free wifi, though, sometimes.
Anyway, this is less an argument against BRT instead of rail than it is an argument for real BRT. It’s hard for me to imagine that a city that’s unwilling to go all-in on BRT is going to spend the hundreds of millions of extra dollars to build rail lines. And here again, Austin is a great example: instead of building a rail line where it was needed, they went cheap and built a line on existing freight rail from a place where it wasn’t needed to downtown and back.Report
Lee, do you have evidence for those assertions? I ask because they’re assertions I frequently hear, but I’ve never seen the data.Report
Lee,
and somewhere, in the cold cockles of my heart,
there’s a grim sort of laughter, heedless of, well, everything.
how the worm turns, ashes to ashes and dust to dust.Report
“Car based transportation was seen as one weapon racists could use to effectively maintain de facto segregation after de jure segregation ended. ”
Car based transportation is also how the Montgomery bus boycotters were able to do their thing.
You’re not entirely wrong, but you’re being overbroad. The end of WW2 and the (re-)kickstart of automobile travel and suburbanization found the legacy, mostly privately owned mass-transit systems hemorrhaging money. So, during the 50s & 60s, they either consolidated, were bought out by other industries, went completely out of business, or were turned over to government control – often a little of each. (this is among other things, how we eventually got PATH and the World Trade Center)
It wasn’t until the 60s (after a lot of systems had been dismantled and repurposed) where the idea of federal contribution to mass transit systems – or building new ones entirely -became an idea. But that was still competing at the time with the limited access highways uber alles thinking typified by Robert Moses. Whose ideas weren’t racist, it’s just that the people that could successfully organize opposition to a freeway were going to be of a certain type of people, and those who could not, were going to be of another type. Likewise with mass transit stops, but some of the opposition has turned out to be urban legend (e.g. why there is no Georgetown metro stop – it’s the geography, not the community)
Then, cheap ass gas for 2 decades and a diffuse settlement pattern (and no one caring about externalities) made mass transit systems a hard sell for cost benefit analysis.Report
Also, what is the notional mental model of gentrification? Mass transit line comes in, younger, whiter people move into the neighborhood, older, less whiter people eventually move out. It’s nothing to do with cars, or their absence.Report
@kazzy
There is also a matter of convenience of having one bus that goes to the airport. It makes no sense if you live in Brooklyn or lower Manhattan to travel all the way up to Harlem, just to get a bus to get to an airport.Report
I see BRT as a great way to test for light rail viability, since implementing it is relatively easy. If you do BRT right & give it a few years to gather data, you can get an idea if light rail would be justified.Report
@saul-degraw
I’m not sure if that was the only bus that went to LGA, but I’m pretty sure it was the only or main bus from Manhattan. People from Brooklyn shouldn’t have to cross the river only to cross back again. But people form lower Manhattan need to head north anyway to get to LGA, so why not transfer via East Harlem? I mean, LGA is roughly due east of East Harlem. It isn’t out of anyone in Manhattan’s way to go through what is likely the closest point to the airport.
FWIW, I’ve used LGA quite a bit and mostly drove. One time I took a cab. I’ve used JFK far less frequently and always drove. I’ve used Newark a bunch and mostly drove and sometimes took NJT trains.Report
I see BRT as a great way to test for light rail viability, since implementing it is relatively easy. If you do BRT right & give it a few years to gather data, you can get an idea if light rail would be justified.
This is the wrong way to look at it for a few reasons:
(1) Most importantly, if BRT is successful in a corridor, you won’t need rail at all, as it will function as well or so close to as well as rail that you can’t possibly get a good ROI on the extra hundreds of millions you’d need to build rail;
(2) Rail and BRT have different strengths and weaknesses, so that, in order to best utilize each, you need them in different areas. This doesn’t mean you won’t have areas where both would be successful (really straight-line corridors with a lot of residential areas on one end and big employment centers on the other, no major water-crossings, etc.), but in such cases, see (1).
(3) Planners who treat BRT as a stepping stone to rail will likely cut corners on BRT, because they aren’t planning on keeping it around (this is the GGW argument for just going with rail to start with, in Saul’s link), thereby making BRT less effective (which, if we run with this, would mean it would provide less evidence for the potential effectiveness of rail).
Using Austin as an example once again, the city’s original rail plan, going back to the 80s, was for the busiest bus corridor (generally referred to by transit folks as Guadalamar). Rail initiatives for that corridor failed more than once, so the city put its first BRT-like route on the Guadalamar, in the hopes that its success would make people more supportive of rail there. But sine they saw BRT as a stepping stone, they cut a lot of corners (see my comment above), and the result was a pretty shitty system that’s basically a really long regular bus with higher frequency and fewer stops. It’s not only not going to make anyone more supportive of rail there (except, perhaps, by ultimately failing in its current form, but certainly they weren’t playing that sort of 11-dimensional chess, right?), just less supportive of Cap Metro overall.
Good BRT is valuable in its own right, and if done well in the right places, as valuable as rail. What it’s done in parts of Bogota and a few cities in Brazil is simply amazing, and I can’t imagine they could have done any better with rail. When you add in the fact that the maintenance of rail is much, much more expensive (as are, generally, the fares), BRT is frequently the better option.Report
Jaime Lerner, who helped pioneer BRT, said that the reason it was created because he and his staff were trying to combat autocentric development with no budget. They had to use busses rather than trains out of simple economic necessity. He thought that cities in the developed world would simply float a bond or receive funding from their national governments to build an actual rail system.Report
Austin’s first two “BRT” lines cost around $50 million to build (all new stops, new buses, and a new GPS system that will later be extended to all buses), almost entirely from federal grants. the most recent rail proposal, which failed (in a corridor which will likely now get a new “BRT” line also likely funded with federal and state grant money), would have cost upwards of $1.2 billion. That’s for 9 miles of rail covering two residential areas and two major employment centers. It would have been so deep into the city, on both ends, that park and ride wouldn’t have really made sense. In other words, even a pretty unambitious line that wouldn’t have affected traffic in the city core or the outskirts at all was going to cost over a billion, half of which would have been on the city’s residents. If BRT is an equally effective option, why the hell would you build rail there?Report
@chris
Well, I would not use BRT solely as a viability tester; as you say, it has it’s place all on it’s own.
Still, I can see your point about how it won’t be effective unless it’s done right, and if it’s done right, it could potentially be effective enough that the cost of rail would not be worth it.Report
I see this as a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. LaGuardia’s problem is that it is in the city, but in a part of the city where not much else is; therefore existing transit links are minimal. Dulles is, for all intents and purposes for most DC area residents, in the middle of nowhere.
The problem with the LaGuardia Airtrain isn’t so much that it is being considered, but that the route being considered does not appear to make a whole lot of sense. You’d have to take the 7 train well past where the airport is and then take the Airtrain back.
Also, when you have bags and you’re on a timeline, being able to take one train all the way there is a lot different than taking a combination of trains and buses.Report
The 7 train route might have been selected because it would be the easiest and cheapest to build even it makes no sense. The most sensible conenction to LaGuardia would be a short connections to the N, Q, R lines via Astoria. This would give LaGuardia a more direct connection to Manhattan than the selected 7 train route but it would probably be much more costly to build because of the street pattern.Report
That’s likely exactly why Cuomo supports it.Report
The point is not saving time, the point is saving a mode change (or at least a system change). If I can take the train the whole way to the airport, then I’m more likely to want to do that. And maybe I change lines in the middle of my trip and then take the Airtrain at the very end, but that’s different from having to leave the train station, walk down the street to the bus stop, figure out what bus I want to take, and sit through the surface traffic that I took the train because I wanted to avoid.Report
This is a great point, @jim-heffman . Transferring is annoying to begin with. Transferring between systems that probably don’t even attempt to align their time tables can be infuriating.Report
Transferring to systems that run frequently (e.g, when I used to take a bus to BART) is not an issue. Transferring to systems that run infrequently (the return trip, when a delayed BART train meant waiting an hour for the next bus) can be a deal-breaker. [1] Conclusion: if two systems both run frequently enough, transfers between them are not a problem.
1. I’ve been binge-watching 30 Rock, and it doesn’t matter how often it insists that Tina Fey is unattractive, it’s still nonsense.Report
I don’t know. If we start from the position that, other than having someone drive you up to the terminal, there is no good way to get to the airport, then having to change systems can be a problem.
I’ve flown out of Dulles a bunch of times, leaving from downtown DC. The existing system is not pleasant. It’s not unpleasant enough to get me paying $60 for a cab, but the Silver line straight there is likely to be a noticeable improvement.
And the frequency thing sort of begs the question of what makes changing systems so annoying. If this is a trip that you make frequently, it’s not such a problem. But if you don’t know how the systems work, then you have no idea whether you can trust the schedule or not.Report