Why Suburbs Should Love Urbanism

We often see transit planning and urbanist design cast as a fight between suburban and urban interests: spending money on transit in urban areas, for instance, as an attack on suburban drivers, as in Ontario politics, or congestion pricing as an attack on suburbanists, as was widely suggested around New Jersey opposition to NYC's recent implementation of a congestion zone in lower Manhattan. But as this article reminds us, it's never that simple: suburbs are part of their urban design, and what benefits the latter often also benefits the former, no matter how much they complain beforehand.

Here I want to highlight a few ways in which urban development is good, actually, for surburban interests. These may seem obvious, but somehow they often get missed in the contrived binary between the two.

1. Suburbs Use Urban Amenities

Look, I'm not saying there's no one who primarily remains within their suburb. In fact, if we really built quality fifteen-minute city design into our suburbs, there could perhaps be many--and if we count people with limited mobility and car access, there undoubtedly are.

But by and large, suburban areas exist because they are "outside the walls" of urban areas, and they draw on the benefits of those cities in larger conurbations and metropolitan areas. The Patriots may play in Foxboro, but the Red Sox are in Boston proper; NYC congestion pricing operates precisely because so many people come across from New Jersey (and down from Connecticut and upstate New York, and over from Long Island); London has grown again and again up from the single square mile "City of London" out to what we know as Greater London today and still manages to have massive entanglement with the suburbs even beyond that. Imagining that what's good for the city is bad for the suburbs is like pretending that killing an oak tree would be good for the fungi growing on its roots. It's a mutualistic relationship: the city benefits too, of course. But it often makes more sense to concentrate building and development in the city itself, which allows every suburb to benefit, rather than focusing building in each suburb to make them equal.

There's a reason most of Sound Transit's first stage of building (and the second, and in theory the third) is focused in Seattle, even if the Board of Directors has required representation from the suburbs as well.

The expansion has taken these guys out of Seattle, and there was always an airport line, but service is still concentrated in the urban core--for good reason! 

This goes even for suburbanites who don't directly use the urban transit themselves, as in the NYC example linked above: suburban drivers in the city get to go faster if there are fewer others using the roads.

2. Virtuous Cycles

As we've discussed before in terms of Paris and London, extensive transit (and other urban development) builds on itself to something greater than the sum of its parts.

I love the Milwaukee HOP tram, but its downtown-only, limited functionality makes it less effective as transit. It implies a potential without delivering on it fully. I say that with love; I really enjoy using the HOP. But it's not a full-scale system.

Free her!

Also not a full system on its own? The Paris tramways.

But the Paris trams, unlike the HOP, are not the only intra-city rail service. They can be partial (albeit significantly more extensive than the HOP) because they are part of something greater. This particular tram pictured above is pulling into a stop at a station for the RER, which looks like this:

The integration between them makes both of them more effective: a heavy-rail can't go everywhere, and neither can a tram, but they can work together in a virtuous cycle to make the whole city easier to transit.

And before anyone points out that the HOP also goes to a train station, I know. Here's a sign about it, in fact:

But Amtrak at Milwaukee Intermodal Station isn't the RER. It's an intercity rail station, like this one in Paris too: Gare du Nord.

The tram doesn't go here, but the RER line does (in fact, I took line B between them on the trip where I took this picture). So Milwaukee has two but not three of these links in the Paris system (both stripped down to have fewer connections and less track as well), and thus has less access to the cumulative benefits of that kind of urban infrastructure.

What does this have to do with urban vs suburban? Well, the RER and the tram in Paris actually go primarily to suburban areas, because the virtuous cycle is so powerful that it enables transit outside of the urban core. Milwaukee's HOP is purely downtown. Heavier investment in the urban space allows suburban connections to that urban center become more viable, and thus benefits the suburbs as well.

I'm not dissing Milwaukee here. It punches well above its weight in US terms. I'm saying that the more we allow this kind of virtuous cycle anywhere, the more powerful it becomes.

3. City Borders Are Semi-Arbitrary

OK, quick quiz: what city is this photo from?

What about this one?

They're from the same metro area, but different legal entities. And neither is the city that most people actually associate with this metro area. The first is Cambridge, MA; the second, Somerville, MA. Both are part of the Boston Metro Area--there's a reason that Harvard graduates, who went to school in Cambridge, stereotypically say they went to school in "Boston," and its not just weirdness about saying they went to Harvard.

It's because the city-suburb division is a continuum, not a binary, and the lines are sometimes almost as arbitrary as some diplomats carving up the Middle East along straight lines. Inner suburbs of New York in New Jersey can be just as or more urbanist than the city proper. 

Yes, there are suburbs that differ widely from their city in terms of transit use and density. But there are also ones that are fundamentally part of the same place. And while politicians might have incentives to emphasize the latter, and I'm not advocating for wanton, willy-nilly absorption of suburbs into cities, we all benefit when we realize that "suburban" and "urban" investment in transit, development, and urbanist infrastructure is not a zero-sum game.

Build EV Charging Better

 I use two electric cars on the regular, and I've noticed a real problem with how we're deploying EV charger technology as a country here in the US: we're treating it like gasoline car filling technology, which it emphatically is not.

1. Better Places

Most basically: gasoline is toxic and so we have dedicated gas stations with tanks under the earth. Gasoline flows very quickly, so those stations are equipped for a light pitstop but not usually much more; where they are prepared to offer more, it's usually in the context of long-haul trucking (like our QCA neighbor the World's Largest Truckstop). And we're building out EV charging on the same model, often at the same locations. EV charging is often found at car dealerships and gas stations, spaces you would only go to for the charging, not on their own.

This is a serious mistake.

EV charging is not like gas: while I'm sure the batteries and electric charge can be dangerous if something goes wrong, they don't poison the ground, and they take much longer to charge (even at a Tesla Supercharger). 

So we should put them in spaces that people already want to visit, or will already spend a long time at. There are places this is already happening: Tesla has done some of its build-out here in the Midwest at Hy-Vee and other grocery stores; the Musser Public Library in Muscatine has a charger; around Rockford, IL a couple of Dairy Queens have chargers. But we're missing out on a lot of serious potential, especially if we treat EV charging as both a draw and an amenity (a reason to visit and a benefit of choosing one entertainment or location over another). Why don't movie theatres have EV chargers, since you'll be there for 2-3 hours anyway? Why not restaurants beyond fast food--since the longer the dining experience, the more you'll successfully charge? Why not more museums, libraries, and other venues where, again, the literal point is for people to spend hours there at a time?

To be clear, at this point we're not, in the US, at the level where any EV charging at all can be taken for granted. I'm not ungrateful for the EV chargers at rest stops, dealerships, and so on--but they could be better.

2. Everywhere

The real trick, though, is to go beyond specific-location-based charging. This is somewhat true in Iowa City, where every parking ramp has charging for EVs (though only 2 spaces/ramp, usually). There are proposals, already being piloted, to allow in-transit EV charging on highways (again, primarily aimed at long-haul trucking). But what I'm really suggesting is what I saw in a few European cities: EV charging available just...on the street. Where you'd park to visit any particular business in any area. Because an EV charging station isn't dangerous to the public in the way gas fumes are, you can do this, just like you can have a level-2 EV charger in your home but not (usually) a gas station there.

This kind of infrastructure really frees up EVs as a legitimate option, since they require more time to charge than a gas car does to be filled, but also have much more flexibility in where that time can be spent.

3. At Least A Place To Sit

Usually I try to build up in these little subsections, but here I'm going to go to a bare minimum: if we're only going to build out our EV infrastructure in places you don't want to spend your time, can we at least get somewhere to sit? Gas stations are really not built for spending even half an hour there (the minimum for the fastest EV charging, usually) let alone several (if you have a slower charger or a bigger battery--or more distance to the next stop). Can we at least get somewhere to be when it's raining, snowing, or freezing?

Basically, treating EVs as if they were gas cars in terms of where and how they fill means that the transition to EVs becomes less attractive and therefore slower: if we build it better, we can actually move in that direction.

Weaponized Vehicles

Recently, we have heard an increase in claims that cars are deadly weapons; specifically, from ICE claims that someone driving a car near them constitutes a "weaponized" vehicle and thus a justification for lethal force.

Now, no one will be surprised that I do believe cars can be dangerous, even deadly. We should have fewer on the roads. 

But I want to discuss how despite that a car is not, inherently, a weapon--and discussions of "weaponized vehicles" are actually the opposite of a helpful discussion of the real dangers of cars.

1. Cars Are Dangerous, But Not Weapons

I'm not claiming someone cannot run someone else over if they choose to use their car that way. But what makes cars dangerous in the aggregate isn't deliberate road rage or ramming of people the driver is targeting. It's the sheer speed and lack of care with which they are typically driven, and the way our system bends around them.

Stationary, it isn't a threat.

Practically speaking, that goes to the absurdity of the claims of weaponizing cars in Minneapolis: those cars have usually been stopped and just starting up, which is when they are least dangerous.

Cars are dangerous because of their speed, weight, and the way they get or assume right of way in all situations; to claim they are most weaponized when least actually being driven is ridiculous.

2. Definitions Get Hypocritical Fast

In recent years, several states made it easier for drivers to defend themselves legally from driving through protests. Or in plainer language, they've made it legal to run over protesters (in some cases).

The idea that it's OK to run people over when they're protesting, but a "weaponized vehicle" to drive anywhere near an ICE agent, is sheer hypocrisy. One is clearly a greater danger; it's the one where the car is moving faster and the direct impact with a human being is intended, rather than merely possible (or even being avoided).

Protesters do not have fewer rights (or at least should not) than immigration enforcement does. If a car is a weapon to one, it cannot logically not be a weapon to the other.

And yet, here we are.

And in an additional hypocrisy, of course, in the US the right to keep and bear arms is actually in the constitution; if a car is a weapon, that should not mean a reduction in the driver's rights.

3. Who Actually Hits Who?

Remember how I said cars don't usually ram people? The exception, ironically, is law enforcement. And claims that ICE cars are getting rammed are highly questionable.

Indeed, in several cases it seems ICE had claimed to have been rammed but may actually have done the ramming (as part of their larger habit of violent arrests).

So if a car is being weaponized--who is really doing it?

All in all, the claims that cars are dangerous are true--but they're not true in the way they're being presented. I'm all for changing our attitudes towards cars for being dangerous. But not in this way!

Congestion Pricing

 This little article, concisely summing up that congestion pricing looks like it has really really worked in New York, and suggesting that perhaps, just maybe, it might be worth trying in other US cities (like, as the title of that blog suggests, San Francisco), sparked a couple of points in my mind.

1. Congestion Pricing Is Good

OK, let me start with the obvious: congestion pricing does seem to work, and I like the results. For those who might think it is overly aggressive, there are still enough cars in NYC (and London, and other cities that use congestion pricing) that you can't really say that people aren't driving; they're just only driving when they actually need to, and a lot of those trips are going non-car modes. But there are still cars!

See? It's not a no-car-zone, just a congestion pricing zone because there were so many cars there before. 

That means congestion pricing works on both its axes: reducing car use and raising funds, which in NYC are being used for transit investment. This ensures both that people can use non-car modes when they need to, and that fewer cars are on the roads--a win-win, frankly.

2. Good Downtowns Are Better With Fewer Cars

Note that in neither London nor NYC are congestion zones covering the whole metro area, or even the whole legal entity of the city (well, other than the tiny, square-mile "City of London"). Rather, they cover the most downtown portions--technically, the car in the above picture isn't even in the congestion zone (it will be if it goes straight through the intersection past the British Library though, as the zone starts south of Euston Road). NYC's is only Manhattan, not the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, or Staten Island (let alone the very dense suburbs). 

So when we're talking congestion charges right now, we're talking the most downtown-y parts of these big cities. These cities already have great downtowns. They're already spaces you can walk, bike, transit, etc. to and through, without a car. The congestion charge just makes it more likely that people will do that. 

Pictured: a non-car way to transit Manhattan.

The reduction in cars in these spaces is a positive, but we can't just throw a congestion charge at every downtown because not all downtowns are set up to allow this. Doing this to downtown Davenport would just piss people off and make them park one block outside the congestion area. In NYC and London, they can leave the car at home in the first place, in many cases. 

In New York, at least during decent weather, you can expect a whole host of people walking around anyway--that's a good sign of a place where this kind of charge might work.

(It certainly could be expanded in London, as this Camden Town picture might suggest).

So congestion charging is the sort of thing that can make a good space better--which makes it a good candidate for places like SF, Boston, Toronto, etc., even if not for all cities.

3. It's A Virtuous Cycle

All of this means that congestion charging is part of a virtuous cycle of encouraging non-car modes of transportation, rather than a panacea itself. 

Build transit, bike lanes, and walkable spaces->reduce car use->improve other options->further reduce car use.

Amsterdam, for instance, doesn't have this--those cars above don't pay to be in downtown. It has a low emissions zone (as London also does, which is much, much bigger than the congestion zone) but it doesn't need a congestion charge specifically because it's done other things to cycle down car usage in the inner city.

Bikes, local trains, metro, trams, walking: they don't need a congestion charge to work. They can be supercharged by one, but they can function to reduce driving on their own.

So while I love congestion charging, I think in the US cities that aren't NYC could mostly benefit from working on the earlier part of that virtuous cycle--with a few exceptions (SF and Boston perhaps most significant of those). I'm not opposed to it in big cities--I like it!--but outside of a few cities we're not there yet.

The Perils of Light Snow

 This week in Iowa we've been getting a lot of light snow, and it made me have some thoughts about which kinds of transportation are best (or least bad) in such conditions.

Surprising no one, I don't think it's the car that's best here. And that's a shame because I kinda had to drive in these conditions a lot this week.

1. Walking Is Actually Fine

The two main differences, to me, that mark the distinction between light and heavy snow are as follows:

A. The city plows for heavy snow and not light

B. Heavy snow is thick on the ground, while light snow is only slippery, not deep

Look at those tracks: not too hard to walk through.

Both of these make walking much easier in light snow than in heavy snow, the former because it means that there aren't huge ramparts of snow at the intersections blocking the crosswalk, and the second that you don't waste huge amounts of energy shoving through deep drifts or unplowed/unscooped sidwalks.

It's really not that much different than walking a bit in the rain--except that you usually don't actually get that wet in light snow. 

Is it ideal to walk in light snow? No, but it's not actively bad, unlike heavy snow. 

2. Driving and Biking Are Worse

The above two differences between light and heavy snow actually make driving worse, though, because an unplowed street is worse to drive on, and the slippery street (combined with most drivers not driving much differently, in my experience) means that there are high potentials for crashes and other dangerous situations.

Not exactly clear, is it?

Seriously, I'd rather drive in snow that's going to be >1 inch than snow that's going to be <.25 inch, even though the snow itself is not ideal. 

Yes, blizzards are bad, but light snow is often blowing snow, which can create whiteout or near-whiteout conditions even with light snow. 

Biking is also bad, because it also has major issues with slippery roads and unplowed streets mean drivers don't understand why you have to take up more of the lane. At least when there's a rampart of plowed snow some people do seem to recognize that a bike can't magically go where that snow is. In light snow, they expect you to be in the gutter even though that gutter is both snowed in and extra slippery because of things like grates in the road.

3. Transit Helps

This is the real takeaway here: because walking is not as much worse as driving or biking, transit is also better, relatively, because you can walk to and from it. And on top of that, transit in light snow has some other advantages over other transportation in light snow (not in ideal conditions, of course). 

A. The worst part of driving or biking in light snow is being the one who has to control the vehicle--and in transit, you can hand that over to someone else, a trained professional. 

B. A difficulty in plowing or otherwise treating roads for light snow is that it's inefficient given the low volume of snow--but when you can specifically target a bus route or train tracks, you don't need to commit large amounts of effort to clear the route to get good results.

Places like this intersection with two bus routes and a hospital are easy to prioritize.

C. And the fewer people on the roads, the safer it is in light snow--so transit, by taking people off the roads, makes it better for all of us.

Sure, there are times that you might want a personal vehicle in bad weather (primarily when you're going to a destination that you do not want to or cannot walk to in those conditions) but light snow is the opposite. In light snow, we should emphasize transit and walking, so that even those of us driving can benefit.

What To Build, When

This post about ST3 (the third installment of the Sound Transit Link expansion) interested me in its own right, but I want to use it as a jumping off point to discuss general principles for how to build (or perhaps based on experience more avoiding how not to build) transit under constraints like budget and timeline.

1. Build The Good Stuff

Let's start with the article's own argument: build the good stuff first. This means prioritizing the parts of the project with the most impact and the most significance to the overall transit program. 

This sounds obvious, but it competes with other ideas, like finishing one subsection of a project before continuing on to others, or doing the hardest, longest part first (or the easiest, quickest!). 

Say, the 1 Line in Seattle, which was a success for earlier phases of Sound Transit--but you do have to follow it up with the promised expansions on time!

What it contributes, though, is the sense that the tax dollars being spent are actually having impact: that they were worth supporting, paying, and spending. And it avoids a problem like I'd suggest Sound Transit is seeing where as time goes by you end up dropping really key elements because of spiraling costs.

2. Break Ground ASAP

Now, I'm not suggesting Sound Transit specifically has dragged its feet. And in some ways this is a systemic not an individual agency issue. But we have got to stop having projects priced and approved in 20XX dollars and then having to wait to be paid in 20XX+5 or +10 or +15 dollars. We need streamlined environmental impact work (not ignored! Just work that allows things to actually go forward). We need more standardized planning processes so that station design, route choice, etc. don't end up delaying project starts.

Because frankly it sucks when projects get a vote, get approved, and then don't get built (or discontinued) because they take too long and the money isn't there anymore. 

The Montreal REM and its relatively quick builds with fairly standardized built forms is a good example of what to do here: break ground, don't get too fancy with it, and make it work.

3. Repurposing Is King

Many major, successful transit projects exist because they didn't try to produce the optimal system: they built a functional system on top of repurposing what was already there. Link itself did this with the Downtown Transit Tunnel, and the piece recommends doing it to produce a maintenance facility for a Ballard stub in the system. 

Not everything can be repurposed rather than fresh built of course. But it helps a lot to accelerate growth if you emphasize the areas where you have less new stuff to do.

These are all common sense, but they also end up by the wayside in some planning because they lead to systems that are not optimized, but rather effective; that is, they don't produce the best theoretical system, but a more practical, buildable system that may still have flaws.

But while there are white elephant systems, by and large the biggest problem in US transit is un- and underbuilt systems, not overbuilt or suboptimally expanded ones.

We should build better, faster--not by magically uncorking a new money tree, but by making sound (pun intended) decisions and acting on them, rather than dragging our feet and making the perfect or the fancy the enemy of the good and effective. 

Costs and Cars

 This study from Forbes suggests that car ownership costs a lot of money, relative to using bikes in particular. I think this is correct, but also more correct in large cities like London (which it focuses on) and less true in places like the Quad Cities. And I want to talk a bit about why.

1. Increased Car Costs

Big cities tend to have big car costs: higher insurance costs (for many reasons), higher gas costs (often due to taxes), higher parking costs, even higher license costs (Singapore being the extreme example). 

Smaller cities and rural areas have correspondingly lower costs, so the gap is less extreme.

This guy costs less in the Quad Cities than he would in a city like London--to get, keep up, and use.

2. Increased Bike Access

Conversely, the bike has much greater utility in cities that actually support it. I got my local temple to install a bike rack (thanks, folks!) but it isn't standard for houses of worship, grocery stores, or pretty much anywhere else you go in places like the Quad Cities to have bike parking--much less general public bike parking like you'll see general public car parking.

This is unusual.

This is unheard of (well, obviously it's heard of in Amsterdam, where I took this photo, but you know what I mean).

And that's just talking about what you do with the bike once you get there: the bike access to places is much harder in places like the QCA as well. 

My kingdom for a separated bike lane!

That makes the lower costs of bike use much more accessible, since it means that someone who wants to use a bike instead of a car actually can.

3. Social Expectation

And of course, part of why there isn't the bike infrastructure in places in the QCA that there is in bigger cities is that a car is just expected here, and a bike isn't. London may be struggling to get as many bike commuters as it would benefit from, but it's also doing a lot to improve that (hence the CityBracket win after all).

The QCA has implemented improvements, and the recreational biking around is definitely good and getting better, with long bike lanes on both sides of the river and along Duck Creek in Davenport. But for true bike replacement, it's not even really in the realm of possibility. 

Trust me, I'm trying.

I often bike to work, bike to get groceries, bike my kids to school, bike to services--but I can't bike everywhere, every day, safely, and do what I need to do without a car pretty frequently, because the social expectation is that everyone has a car, so everything is built around that.

This is one of the ways in which mass transit and bike infrastructure are mutually advantageous: both shift the baseline expectation of car to one of not necessarily having a car, which means that the world bends more freely to allow life without that particular kind of vehicle.

London's excellent transit creates space for better biking; similarly, Amsterdam's better biking creates mental space for better transit. They're co-constitutive.

That creates the great puzzle of a cityscape like the QCA: how do we go from neither to either, or both?

Well, the main thing I'm trying is just actually using what's here--biking where I can, using the bus when I can, and so on.

But community organizing--bending social expectations by actually talking to each other--is a key component as well.

And if you can get the local government on board like London has, well, that really kickstarts the process.