Los Angeles and the 'great American streetcar scandal'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Streetcars were too fun, so they had to go.
Europeans do not have significant amounts of space to build housing supplies, that's why space/m^2 is much higher than here in the states, witness San Fancisco's trolley system that caused suburbanization (or at least enabled it).
Gas Taxes in Europe are double than here in the states[1], US gas is taxed at relatively low rates when compared to other nations. Used as a user tax here in the states, its predominant purpose is to fund roadway improvements and maintenance; however, it is used to fund transit and other items. In Europe, the higher gas tax is used to drive (good one Agustus) less travel and subsidize rail lines.
The trams / streetcars in Europe work because the suburbanization was stopped by high government taxes and forces the populous to pay more for a lower comparable standard of living.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fuel_tax_in_OECD_countrie...
*Edited for why, if you disagree, please provide an alternative opinion. I have taken the time to provide a discourse, if a downvote to it is necessary, then please provide a reason.
My guess is where the downvoting come from :)
The US also focuses on extremely local school funding which promotes heavy economic segregation and is extremely harmful for the overall economy.
PS: Early on post WWII it was assumed to be a good defense from the at the time low yield nuclear weapons. But, this is hard to trace back and might not have had significant impact.
Just yesterday there was a post on here about London's bus numbers, those had been inherited from the horse and cart days, been used on horse drawn trams, been used on electric trams, been used on trolleybuses (trams with little rubber wheels instead of proper steel ones) and now used on regular bus routes. Seems that London upgraded transport stock to get rid of trams without there being some huge conspiracy. A plausible scenario could happen elsewhere.
This seems like a peculiar way to describe them? A trolleybus is just a bus with normal rubber tires, that's powered electrically by a caternary.
They're still used in some cities in China and eastern Europe. They're quiet, have flexible routes, and zero pollution in the City, and are lightweight.
A few years ago they rebuilt the entire network with new modern stock and track, with new disabled friendly stops. It's sort-of a success. They halved the number of stops (due to needing platforms for disabled access), so it's less convenient. They increased the prices, making it more expensive than the bus following the same route.
Many other UK cities have brought back modern tram networks, with mostly great success. It's often proved horribly expensive to do - Edinburgh being the example of how not to buy a tramway. The UK is also bringing back some of the axed rail networks as roads become increasingly gridlocked. Of course this is expensive to do, especially as sections of many lines have now been built on.
Other parts of Europe, though not all, seem to make consistently more intelligent transport choices, and have long provided more integrated transport solutions.
All it took was a look across the sea to the Netherlands we'd see integrated bus/rail/tram terminals and some degree of planning and intelligence still being applied to transport. We got to sit breathing traffic fumes.
That makes me think it was more about politics and policies than money.
European streetcars typically have separated lanes and loading areas and thus don't mix with automobile traffic. That way they aren't in conflict. When roads had largely low speed and uncontrolled use, streetcars worked fine because people were used to and able to stay out of each others' way. The automobile was dramatically faster and more dangerous, and the laws and infrastructure were gradually adapted to it (e.g. traffic signals, left hand turn rules etc).
Streetcars in the US, and I suspect in other places where they have failed, had to intermix with automobiles, which lead them into a deadly spiral.
The other factors mentioned in the article (reluctance to spend, reluctance to run a centralized system, regulation, etc etc) applied in Europe too -- we have a survivorship bias when we see the streetcars in Europe. Look at Berlin as a great A/B experiment: in the west the streetcars were torn up while in the east they were retained. I much prefer living in the east (today!! not under communism) because the Straßenbahn is so convenient. My kid took it to school.
Some streetcars survive or have been revived in the US -- it's called "light rail" because I suppose "streetcar" is a laden word. They pretty much all have dedicated right of ways, and if not (I'm thinking of parts of San Francisco's MUNI) they have dedicated loading areas and exclusion zones -- except for cable cars :-)
European cities also came into being before the car did, so their layout is often more streetcar friendly: Higher density, no room for six lane highways, etc.
In any city with a streetcar system these are constantly being replaced, bit by bit, to keep the system working.
Rail/streetcar public transportation is quite popular in the region and well-used, though it doesn't stop auto traffic from being a nightmare with increasing frequency.
Edit: spelling.
But your point about rolling stock is correct. The PCC street car was designed in the 30's to address that, being a mass-produced, modular system.
Also, the European streetcar systems went through the same economic hardships (and some much larger ones - the wars), even using the same PCC cars, but still thrive to this day.
So it is more about a policy driven by lobbying and intervention from auto manufacturers than purely business model and economics. Robert Moses had a really big hand in this as well...
Use rail for high-density areas that change only over multiple decades, and buses for low density, mutable areas.
If I'm looking for a house and access to reliable public transit is important to me, I'm going to want to buy in an area well served and expected to be well served 30 years from now as well.
Track and train stations mean this is likely to be true. At least far more true than a bus route.
In this manner city planners can't pull the social contract rug out from under you as easily.
The key reasons buses are better is that they can go where people need to go and are not locked in to where they are built out at.
The sad part is that in many parts of the world ridership doesn't increase much with the cost going down, even to free. hopefully autonomous fuel cell / battery cars and buses will make point to point more manageable and viable overall.
That is not true in some places. MN built its light rail in such a way that interacts with normal traffic quite a lot (including killing people because of a really badly designed interaction on a former turn). I get the feeling someone in the planning office had taken no lessons from street cars.
- You can invest around them. Because unlike a bus, a tram can't just be upped and moved somewhere else developers are able to build housing and services confident that there will be service.
- They are easier to segregate and run at speed so that you can run limited stop services that are credible. I suspect this is what you are getting at with airports, but I'm not sure why you think an airport is the only reasonable use for fast limited-stop operation
- They can carry more people easily. 2 or 3 car trams are the norm, and the smoother ride and increased safety means that it is much safer to carry lots of standing passengers
- People like them. You can actually get people out of cars onto a tram, where faced with a bus they will assume that it is going to be dirty and they will be robbed (however untrue that is)
Businesses, especially consumers, are helped more by the mobility of a car than public transport
>improved mental health of passengers
1. This is not an external benefit. This, if true, should mostly be reflected in people's willingness to take public transport. Of course, people taking public transport are in my experience usually of the most dubious mental health. So that's concerning.
> reduction in pollution and traffic
Fair points.
Traffic is by far the best case for running public transit at a loss, IMO. Though it must be weighed against spending that money on more freeways.
There are benefits, though not as many as you are listing, and we should be weary of running them at too much of a deficit.
In general the idea of running things as a business is not to say they should be run at a profit, it's to say they should be run efficiently like a free competitive market typically does.
What you'll find is that people use public transit in cities where its convenience outweighs the convenience of a car. In cities where that is untrue, only those who can't afford a car use public transit.
Which is to say that public transit isn't somehow magically better than auto travel by virtue of some fixed aspect of public transit.
It's better when it's better, which may sound like a tautology, but is actually just kind of an obvious truth, evidence for which is available all over the world.
In big Russian cities it is way more convenient, cheaper, quick, and as pointed out -- mentally relaxing -- to take a tram or subway than to drive your car in the insane traffic. The clientele on said public transport are, for the most part, friendly, and you will see men scrambling to help old ladies or women with strollers onboard.
This assumes that everyone has access to a car, and that all automotive commutes are possible during "rush hour". Many businesses directly benefit from public transportation by expanding the labor pool to those who would otherwise be unable to commute.
For a brief moment I thought Mrs Thatcher had risen from the dead and signed up to HN. Whew.
Sure, but the alternative to inefficient government spending on mass transit isn't some free market solution; it's inefficient spending on automobile infrastructure.
Do governments have to be inefficient? Can they be designed better?
In general, a free market competitive approach is always preferable where possible, but I think there is room to add better incentives in government as well.
- The Expo light rail line is scheduled to open 5/20. This is the first rail line to go from downtown to the ocean since Pacific Electric.
- The Purple line (HRT)--formerly the "subway to the sea" until budget cuts caused it to be trucated to West LA--is the first east/west fully-underground subway to go from downtown to the west side.
- Metro's R2 plan[1] will invest $120B to construct new rail lines such as the Sepulveda Pass tunnel (bypass the infamous 405 freeway), West Hollywood light rail (one of the most walkable, transit-friendly areas in greater LA), direct rail access to LAX and more.
It's an exciting time to be an Angeleno. I have no doubt that--if these projects aren't cancelled--it will be transformational for our city.
1. http://thesource.metro.net/2016/03/18/metros-bold-plan-to-tr...
IIRC, there was an account of an issue with Coca-Cola's vending machines and them not wanting to raise prices and finding all kinds of convoluted workarounds, including asking the treasury to issue a 7.5 cent coin.
So just build taller buildings in a small area like Manhattan, there is plenty of space up there, it is cheaper that way and no need for roads and automobiles to move from one floor to another.
Living in a city is more humanistic anyway because there are more humans around you. There is no reason not to grow food in the sky-scrapers too. The only reason it is not done more is the zoning laws, which should be changed.
"Just build tall buildings" is a necessary but insufficient condition for an effective city. Manhattan works not just because it builds up (in fact many parts of it are limited to 6-story buildings) but because it has mastered the complexities of creating livable, workable spaces.
The other downtowns across America saw Manhattan, and took only "build tall buildings" away as a lesson, and they are for the most part deserted, ill-occupied spaces. Simple density and height is not the most important factor - it's not even among the top-10. "Manhattanization" became a dirty word across the country not because Manhattan is bad, but because so many places copied it thoughtlessly and incompetently.
A study of what makes New York City tick that examines Midtown over long-standing neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, and even more outlying ones like Harlem and Washington Heights, is doomed to fail, because you're seeing a complex, functional city and the only lesson you're seemingly taking away is "density = good", despite nearly every other urban center in the US being evidence otherwise.
tl;dr: Density is a necessary component of a functional city, but you don't need Midtown Manhattan-level density, and having density is not enough. High-density failed urban spaces are a dime a dozen.
[edit] Side note: elevators aren't actually very efficient at high density. They are great for low-mid buildings because they add a lot of floor area and don't occupy much space themselves.
For very tall skyscrapers it inverts - the number of elevators needed to properly serve the building starts increasing dramatically, eating up valuable floor space. There is a level at which you lose overall floor space for each floor you add to the building.
Some of the supertall skyscrapers currently in existence/being built are in fact taller than they economically should be - and this is subsidized by pride, ego, government, rich benefactors, or some combination of the above.
Tall skyscrapers make all kinds of optimizations to minimize this - destination-based elevators (where you punch in your destination before getting in) are popular, as are express elevators segmenting certain floors, but all of these grant modest gains in elevator capacity at best, and in modern times skyscraper heights are limited not by materials or architectural engineering but by this function of elevators vs. floor space.
No doubt there is an optimum height somewhere there. And it's not only about building up, but building closer in general. When people work and live closer together there is less need for transportation overall.
I assume that assumes that every time I take the elevator I am going take the trip to the ground floor to exit the building. But work and stores and cinemas could be on floor 40 of an 80-story building meaning the average distance traveled in elevator would be shorter than if I need to get out to the street every time.
More important than the reduction in density (which IMO for the most is not actually particularly bad), is the disruption in the street graph that parking lots represent.
Parking lots are awful places that are psychologically destructive on top of being literally hazardous to pedestrians. A parking lot is a good way to make sure you remove any trace of pedestrian travel in the area, and they represent black holes in the street.
One thing I alluded to in the earlier post is that graph connectivity is tremendously more important than density. If the street graph is disconnected (or just too difficult or hazardous to traverse), people will stop doing so, and there goes your urban life.
Small American towns (that resisted the suburban blight of the 50s) have very low density but manage to be extremely livable and functional by virtue of being well connected. Density is truly a red herring - livable, walkable spaces can be created at most densities short of completely rural.
Some New Urbanist developments have moved towards a model where the buildings directly face the street with parking lot "courtyards" in the middle - this model works. It's still heavily dependent on car culture, which is unfortunate, but is tremendous more functional than the suburban American status quo that is the opposite arrangement, where parking lots face streets and there might as well be a cavernous canyon between the sidewalk and the building (if there even is a sidewalk).
Since you mention New Urbanism, have you heard of the Old Urbanist movement? New Urbanism is an attempt to return to 19th century American patterns, while the Old Urbanists advocate going back to an even older pattern of low-rise and mid-rise buildings on really narrow streets, which is a pattern that has worked well for millenia, and indeed still works well in places like Japan. The narrower streets mean there can be more of them for the same usage of land area, which can mean a much better connected network at a pedestrian scale.
The rule of thumb I've heard about construction is stick-built SFR is considered relatively baseline cost. Multi-Family Residential (MFR) with a few stories that requires some more robust structural elements is about 2X SFR per square foot. Mid- to high-rises are about 2X MFR (4X SFR) and up per square foot.
Economically living in high-rises is a non-starter in most of the US for many working-class and middle-class families, and you won't see Krugman's touted beneficial effects unless that middle of the population bell curve is in high-rises. I advocate dense urban development, but I have yet to figure out how it can be economically implemented without compromising quality of life, especially with the multi-decade long asset inflation we're experiencing in real estate that is ongoing.
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In the end, the detective said the villain must be a cartoon, because just a cartoon would have the stupid idea of replacing the efficient and cheap L.A. public transport system, and to build highways.
If my fried could have just summoned the nearest self driving car, an entire one way trip wouldn't ever occurred.
A self driving car takes the pain out of driving so unless society changes a lot we will see more cars driving around (often empty) and people will have longer commutes while sleeping their car.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanisette
[2] http://www.eatmedaily.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/...
In addition to this, on surface streets, traffic lights meter traffic through intersections. With self-driving cars, the cars will be able to go through intersections without the need for a traffic light, eliminating that metering effect.
In my cynical opinion SDCs will likely precipitate a ten year pause in new road construction as drive times drop dramatically. But at some point we'll catch up to the additional capacity and spend another five or six years suffering as roads are built and expanded.
But the newly constructed roads will be more efficiently utilized than roads at present, so it will be cheaper per passenger mile.
This is a fallacy - self-driving cars may reduce car ownership and may reduce traffic fatalities, but they could only reduce traffic if speeds were extraordinarily high.
That _might_ happen, but it'd also make every street a freeway. It's unlivable, and I will fight against that world.
That's not true at all. A ton of traffic congestion is caused by people making suboptimal decisions in traffic. Blocking intersections, not merging properly, stooping and going instead of coasting at a set speed, etc. really reduce the speed of traffic.
If you created a self driving only traffic system that guided the cars in an optimal path and speed you could increase traffic throughput by a lot.
But the current generation of self driving cars aren't even close to that task. If anything they will clog traffic even more when they panic and stop in the middle of traffic. That prevents accidents but it also will clog streets during rush hour.
But eventually they may solve traffic jams.
Not that you could increase speeds safely - SDCs still need to brake in time, and they're bound by the same laws of physics, and there are still blind corners in the future.