The Walking Bostonian

Bad design: Kenmore Square bus station

2012-02-23T23:01:00.001-05:00

Kenmore Square bus station (source)

The MBTA finished completely rebuilding Kenmore station just a couple years ago. They even added a fancy new bus shelter with a swooping glass roof (it leaks). But for some reason, a really basic passenger flow issue was either ignored, or completely mishandled.

Using my incredible art skills, I have concocted a diagram which shows a schematic of the Kenmore bus station. Buses arrive at the bottom of the picture, unload, and then move to the top of the picture where they pick-up passengers waiting. Most passengers who exit the bus will then proceed to the subway via the stairs. Passengers coming from the subway may use either the stairs or the up escalator. They typically wait near the bus pick-up point, but may sprawl out all along the platform when it gets crowded.

At rush hour, passengers in a hurry to connect to the Green Line collide with a crowd of people coming up or already waiting to ride the bus. The result: a mess!

The sad thing is, this could have been a much cleaner, safer, and quicker design if only the stairs and the up-escalator had exchanged positions! This is something that should have been caught early in the design stage.

Bike lane innovation

2012-02-23T20:33:00.003-05:00

Massholes have invented a whole new use for bike lanes: pass-on-the-right lanes. Just something I observe from time to time around here.

This is a good reason why it is, at best, hideously stupid to widen a road for the purpose of installing a bike lane. Drivers don't really care about markings on a road, and will use every inch of pavement they can. There's little to no traffic enforcement. Widening a road for a bike lane is just as dangerous as widening it for a car lane. And in a way, it's subject to a form of the empty lanes attack where the drivers just take advantage of the extra space whenever they feel like it.

MBTA service heat map

2012-02-21T00:07:00.000-05:00

As a quick follow-up to "experiments in mapping transit frequency" I've redrawn the data using a heatmap overlay on Google Maps. This looks a bit better. Sadly, the heatmap option in Google Fusion is too primitive to be used for this purpose.

The Prado and the Greenway

2012-02-17T22:00:00.000-05:00

I was walking in the North End this afternoon and I passed through the Paul Revere Mall (a.k.a. the Prado). There was a scattering of people: a family, a couple chatting on a bench, a dog walker, a man playing catch with his son. They were mostly clustered or sitting around the central fountain -- dry now. That brought to mind a similar scene in chapter 5 of Death and Life.

The fountain basin in New York's Washington Square is used inventively and exuberantly. Once, beyond memory, the basin possessed an ornamental iron centerpiece with a fountain. What remains is the sunken concrete circular basin, dry most of the year, bordered with four steps ascending to a stone coping that forms an outer rim a few feet above ground level. In effect, this is a circular arena, a theater in the round, and that is how it is used, with complete confusion as to who are spectators and who are the show.

On my way back, I passed through the relatively new Rose Kennedy Greenway. The part next to Hanover Street is one of the nicer sections. There's a lounging area, a bushy area with paths, some exhibits to peruse. When the weather is really nice, I've seen people sunbathing on the lawn. Today was not that kind of day -- it was warm only in comparison to the usual February weather. Still, there was quite a bit of foot traffic hurrying back and forth between the North End and downtown. But the park itself was otherwise mostly empty.

I decided to walk the long way around to see if I could find anyone enjoying the Greenway in a fashion similar to the Prado. After all, we've committed $22 billion to put the highway underground.

Some open space. It's required by law, in fact. Lots of green grass. Nobody here, though.

Not here either.

Wait, I thought the highway was supposed to be underground.

I finally found a couple of people actually inside of the park. It turned out that they were reading the names on the paving stones.

A jogger. Nearby, there were also some skate-boarders that found a use for all this open space.

Good thing we kicked Occupy Boston out of here. After all, they were preventing all of these people from using this space. Also: what are those things on the ground?

We spent $22 billion dollars for this?

I started to choke from the fumes of the waiting cars. Time to get out of here.

I'm told the Greenway is popular among the officer worker lunchtime crowd. No word on whether the perverts have moved in yet.

Experiments in mapping transit frequency

2012-02-16T23:24:00.000-05:00

A few months ago I spent some time playing with the data released by MassDOT, especially the MBTA schedules represented in Google Transit Feed Specification. I also started collecting data which I summarized in an earlier post about real-time Commuter Rail on-time performance. The MBTA publishes its GTFS data on a quarterly basis, so I downloaded the current version, and ran some queries on it, focusing on a normal working day's schedule.

I'm using the Google Fusion (beta) again. Here we see every MBTA transit stop represented as a marker on the map. I'm using a color scheme where blue represented stops that only average less than one vehicle every 15 minutes (cold), purple is at least every 7.5 minutes, yellow is at least every 5 minutes, and red is better than that (hot!). I'm assuming a 20 hour span of service, so rush hour-only buses do not count very heavily. You can click on a marker to find out what routes stop there, and how many times in a typical weekday.

It should be easy to pick out some of the corridors: Comm Ave, Mass Ave, Washington St (several of them), Blue Hill Ave, etc. The hottest spot is Dudley, as it should be, followed by Forest Hills, Ashmont, and Sullivan.

I was inspired to check out this data while standing around, earlier this week, in Somerville Union Square and realizing that there was not going to be any bus coming for at least 25 minutes -- even though many bus lines connect there. Sure enough, that part of Somerville is mostly blue, except at the very center where the infrequent and rush hour-only buses happen to add up to a yellow dot.

Anyway, I'm still learning how to use the Google Fusion data visualization tool, and hopefully I can come up with some better maps in the future.

Sidewalks are not like roads

2012-02-12T18:27:00.000-05:00

Beacon Hill

One of my favorite aspect of Jane Jacobs's writing is her masterful usage of anecdotes to illustrate a point. In chapter 3 "The uses of sidewalks: contact" she writes:

I have seen a striking difference between presence and absence of casual public trust on two sides of the same wide street in East Harlem, composed of residents of roughly the same incomes and races. On the old-city side, which was full of public places and the sidewalk loitering so deplored by Utopian minders of other people's leisure, the children were being kept well in hand. On the project side of the street across the way, the children, who had a fire hydrant open beside their play area, were behaving destructively, drenching the open windows of houses with water, squirting it on adults who ignorantly walked on the project side of the street, throwing it onto the windows of cars as they went by. Nobody dared to stop them. These were anonymous children, and the identities behind them were an unknown. What if you scolded or stopped them? Who would back you up over there in the blind-eyed Turf? Would you get, instead, revenge? Better to keep out of it.

The obvious criticism of such evidence is that they each constitute but a single observation in a vast and varied city. But no dull presentation of statistics is going to illuminate her point like a well chosen anecdote can. She relies on the reader to understand the context. The story about residents who leave their keys at the local delicatessen does not imply that this custom is integral to a lively urban neighborhood. Instead, it shows one instance of the separation between public personae and private life.

One of the mistakes the "Utopian minders" make is to treat sidewalks like roads. That is, they are purely ways to travel, and not destinations in themselves. People don't drive their cars to interact with other people -- and if they do it is likely to be a negative encounter -- rather, they are focused on getting to their destination. Nominally, a sidewalk does have the purpose of letting people walk to places. But when not encased by two tons of metal moving at high speed, people have a tendency to interact with their surroundings. Most people walking are not out to socialize -- they probably do have somewhere to be. But by being in the same place with other people and by moving at normal human speed, they contribute to a self-generating social situation that Jacobs describes as "sidewalk life." When planners gut neighborhoods, when they remove businesses and hide them behind acres of parking, then sidewalk life is strangled because it cuts down on the number of people around for any purpose. It is a self-perpetuating problem: nobody wants to go there because nobody wants to go there. Walkways are not highways for feet.

Nowadays, I think this point is relatively well taken, although not completely understood. Sitting in community meetings I sometimes hear about the plans from developers to create "interesting spaces" or "attractive street-fronts." I think they may be trying too hard. Very few people are going to be attracted to a street just because the buildings are "varied in styles", "have floral planters in front", or an "eye catching design." There seems to be almost a consensus that there is an "architectural solution" to the problem of boring streets. Alternatively, the plans might include a coffee shop or convenience store on the corner, as some kind of outpost of urbanism. I find these to be expressions of a "cargo cult" approach to city planning: imitate the superficial features of successful districts in hopes that the liveliness will come along too.

San Francisco

Developers may still be trying to figure out what makes a neighborhood successful. Tenants vote with their dollars. Jacobs observes what would soon be coined as "gentrification":

But nevertheless, many of the rich or near-rich in cities appear to appreciate sidewalk life as much as anybody. At any rate, they pay enormous rents to move into areas with an exuberant and varied sidewalk life. They actually crowd out the middle class and the poor in lively areas like Yorkville or Greenwich Village in New York, or Telegraph Hill just off the North Beach streets of San Francisco. They capriciously desert, after only a few decades of fashion at most, the monotonous streets of "quiet residential areas" and leave them to the less fortunate.

What's frustrating is that fifty years later, we still haven't figured out how to reliably increase the supply of urban districts with lively sidewalk life, and in many cases, have taken steps to squelch what areas do exist.

Massholes being massholes

2012-02-12T14:48:00.000-05:00

Boston drivers are well known to flagrantly violate traffic laws. I've debated whether to write about this topic, since it's such a frequent occurrence that it's pretty much just another fact of life here. But if nobody writes about it, then it just gets left unsaid.

I often have qualms with the pedestrian signals around here. Many times, the beg buttons simply don't work. In this particular instance, they did work, but it didn't matter. Standing at the corner, I waited for a car to complete its right turn. I saw the pedestrian signal light up: Walk. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw another van that was not stopping. It was going to turn on red illegally, despite the sign: No Turn On Red. How typical, I thought, and so I stepped into the roadway and waited for it to pass. Were that all, it would be unremarkable. But then I continued to try and cross the street, and I realized that yet another van was trying to push through. A red work truck, with some lettering on the side: likely a contractor or similar business vehicle. Was he going to stop? My usual approach is to try and get eye contact with the driver. I step out far enough to assert my presence -- the pedestrian signal is Walk, this is my right-of-way -- but not so far that I can't get out of the way of a lunatic. In this case, he changed his mind and stopped short. Made some kind of gesture with his arm. I don't know what, and I don't care. The moment I passed, he stepped on the gas and blew through the crosswalk, heedless of the law.

Just another day in Boston. I'm sure many others can relate similar stories. Despite this, I've only been hit by a car once, a few years ago, and it was minor. I was walking along the sidewalk down Newbury Street in the Back Bay when I noticed that a car was trying to pull up into the driveway I was crossing. I saw the driver; she didn't stop. As the car rolled up to me, I put my hands onto the hood of the car and lifted myself over the top; she stopped abruptly and tossed me back onto my feet. I wasn't hurt so I let it go.

We've been rated the safest walking city which might be hard to believe after reading this post. My theory is that pedestrians don't trust drivers, and drivers don't trust pedestrians. This mutual distrust keeps everyone on their toes. You can't trust Walk signals, or traffic lights: this forces people to be aware of their surroundings. In the Sunbelt cities where fatalities are high, the roads are designed for cars only, and pedestrians are trained to rely too heavily on signals for safety: when someone violates a signal, they catch someone else off-guard. In Boston, drivers blow through red lights all the time, and pedestrians disregard signals as a rule. The result: safer conditions than the best laid plans of traffic engineers. Of course, we could still do better yet. Cars are driven too dangerously in this town. Yes, there does seem to be a counter-intuitive safety effect -- but it only works up to a point. And I think we are already beyond that point and down the slope of diminishing returns. In cities where the drivers are truly reckless and chaotic, those who venture out without a two ton coat of armor are the ones who suffer most.

'A wild kid from the suburbs'

2012-02-07T19:36:00.002-05:00

It's week 2 for the reading group and the chapter is 'The uses of sidewalks: safety'. Heather and Steven have already covered some interesting ground on this chapter. While re-reading it, I was struck by one passage in particular:

One night a young man came roaring along, bellowing terrible language at two girls whom he had apparently picked up and who were disappointing him. Doors opened, a wary semicircle formed around him, not too close, until the police came. Out came the heads, too, along Hudson Street, offering opinion, "Drunk ... Crazy ... A wild kid from the suburbs."*

* He turned out to be a wild kid from the suburbs. Sometimes, on Hudson Street, we are tempted to believe the suburbs must be a difficult place to bring up children.

Then later, as if on cue, I read this report in the paper:

A 19-year-old Andover [N.H.] man allegedly punctuated the end of a Super Bowl party at the Residences at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Boston by beating two other men with a pistol, authorities said today.

Then and now, this is an common kind of story around Boston, and I would suppose in many other cities. It's only natural for people to come from out of town for 'recreational' purposes. But some blow it out of proportion, and then they end up in the next day's papers.

Looking at real-time Commuter Rail data

2012-02-04T15:36:00.001-05:00

Last year, the MBTA began releasing real-time GPS tracking data for the Commuter Rail. This data contains the current locations of trains in service, as well as the predicted times of arrival for the following station stops. An important note: the data feed is still considered to be in "beta" testing and therefore is not entirely reliable.

In anticipation of yet another tough winter, I began recording the real-time data into a PostgreSQL database on a personal server, starting in mid-November. With over a million rows stored, representing nearly three months of data, I have started to do some preliminary analysis. One important caveat: while looking through the database, I noticed that there are some gaps. Certain trips do not have the expected amount of data recorded. The reason for this is unknown, but I speculate it may have to do with the GPS device onboard certain trains being broken or misconfigured.

First I looked at an overall measure of lateness, taken by looking at all trips and measuring the difference between scheduled arrival time at their terminal destination, compared to actual arrival time. All times are represented as "hh:mm:ss".

Average Lateness	Maximum Lateness
00:03:05	02:08:00

Then I broke it down by line:

	Line Name	Average Lateness	Maximum Lateness
1	Greenbush	00:01:36	01:38:00
2	Kingston/Plymouth	00:02:08	01:26:00
3	Middleborough/Lakeville	00:01:43	01:34:00
4	Fairmount	00:02:54	01:51:00
5	Providence/Stoughton	00:03:47	01:50:00
6	Franklin	00:03:48	01:37:00
7	Needham	00:03:35	01:29:00
8	Framingham/Worcester	00:00:40	02:08:00
9	Fitchburg	00:04:06	02:02:00
10	Lowell	00:03:08	02:05:00
11	Haverhill	00:02:30	01:38:00
12	Newburyport/Rockport	00:05:02	01:44:00

And also by day (using a Zoomable Line Chart showing average and maximum lateness measured in seconds):

Click "Load all content" if this doesn't show

The previous three tables look at lateness of a trip by comparing the final scheduled station stop against its actual time. But what about all the other stations? It turns out that trains can often make up time enroute, so that they may arrive on-time or early to their terminal but were late to intermediate stations. The following two maps look at average lateness, according to the real-time predictions of every train, of each station stop on the way. I have split the data into two parts: the first map displays inbound trips, and the second map displays outbound trips. You can view the average lateness in seconds by clicking on a station marker. The color codes are divided into four buckets: green dots average under 1 minute late, yellow dots average under 3 minutes late, purple dots average under 5 minutes late, and red dots average over 5 minutes late.

Average lateness of inbound trips

Average lateness of outbound trips

These charts were created with the help of the Google Fusion (beta) tool. I uploaded my data with a KML field containing the geographic points and lines, and Fusion was able to "geocode" that directly onto a map.

What stands out? I see that the Rockport line is pretty late on average. It seems that trains that arrive in Worcester often do so much earlier than scheduled, even though they may be late to previous stations. The bad average at Porter Square outbound is explained by some really horribly (1.5hr+) late trains in late January. The south side may be getting better on-time performance than the north side. Comparing the two maps, it would appear as if the Commuter Rail is better at bringing people into Boston than sending them out.

These numbers and charts are preliminary and highly unofficial. They are based upon the still-in-beta-testing real-time data feed of the Commuter Rail which should be expected to have gaps and possible mistakes in output.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

2012-02-01T23:51:00.000-05:00

I learned via Human Transit that the City Builder Book Club is conducting a group reading of Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities. This week covers the introduction, with a nice discussion by Mary Rowe. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the health, livability or economics of cities.

The first time I read this book, I originally picked it up from the library along with The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch, a contemporary of Jacobs. I began reading Lynch's book first. Several days later, I happened to open the first page of Death and Life, just to see what it was like. I couldn't put it down. I finished several chapters that afternoon. Her writing style is incredibly compelling and bold. Consider the very first sentence: "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." She wanted to show people that modern city planning was to science what bloodletting was to medicine. More from the introduction:

There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend--the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars--we could wipe out all our slums in ten years, reverse decay in the great, dull, gray belts that were yesterday's and day-before-yesterday's suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wandering tax money, and perhaps even solve the traffic problem.

But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering places than others. Commercial centers that are lackluster imitations of standardized suburban chain-store shopping. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Boston's West End, July 1958 (source)

She dwells on several examples, including Morningside Heights in Manhattan, and the North End in Boston, 1959. Places that defy the expectations of planners. Boston neighborhoods will make a frequent appearance throughout the book, with descriptions that will be familiar to anyone from this city. In the North End she talked about walking through a wonderful neighborhood, with newly renovated buildings, people outdoors, stores thriving. She called up a friend in the planning department of the city and asked about how this prosperity was achieved. He told her: "Why [the North End], that's the worst slum in the city." This only illustrates just how nonsensical the planner's criteria were. And these misconceptions were dangerous -- it had only been a short time since the adjacent West End neighborhood was demolished, and before that, a brand new elevated highway was constructed that cut-off the North End from the rest of the city.

The West End, demolished, by September 1960 (source)

The introduction also covers the sources of various influences in city planning, from the Garden City visions of Ebenezer Howard to the Radiant City Utopian monstrosity of Le Corbusier. Reading her descriptions of their ideas, I began to realize just how far they had penetrated into our society. Cities designed to look pretty from an airplane. Massive highway projects cutting through neighborhoods. High-rise residential towers with humongous parking lots. A fanatical devotion to the notion of "open space" at all costs, and grass everywhere. Separation of uses: residential here, commercial over there. Free parking as a birthright. You can trace much of this kind of thinking back to some authors from the 19th and early 20th century. A reaction against the problems of cities, especially back then, when health and sanitation were minimal. Their solutions were designed, regardless of intention, to destroy cities. To fix the problems of cities by ripping them apart and re-creating them according to some kind of orderly and sterile vision. That these ideas became the foundation of the field of city planning is a scandalous shame.

Jacobs introduced this background to contrast their approach with hers. She was not interested in an ideology which dictated the right answers. She wanted to learn the principles behind successful cities, and the failures of others, through observation and investigation of the reality of cities. As she wrote:

I hope any reader of this book will constantly and skeptically test what I say against his own knowledge of cities and their behavior. If I have been inaccurate in observations or mistaken in inferences and conclusions, I hope these faults will be quickly corrected.

Skyscrapers, open space, and highways (source)

In the fifty years since she originally published this book, it remains timely and telling that her observations and inferences continue to be remarkably accurate and even prescient. There are many points when reading this book that I sat back and wondered: if I took this passage and quoted it out of context, would anyone know what year it had been written? Would they have guessed 1960? 1980? Or possibly 2000? Or even later? Some things simply have not changed. In a way, that's an unfortunate fact. Although she became somewhat of a folk hero for being part of the backlash against Robert Moses and the highway builders of New York City, the rest of the nation continued to pave over cities for decades to come. In Boston, it was not until the mid-70s that we finally got a moratorium against highways, and by then it was almost too late. Despite that moratorium, we still managed to sink $22 billion into the Big Dig. You can walk down Market Street in San Francisco and discover that Civic Center is still suffering in quite nearly exactly the same way as she described it all those years ago. Downtown Pittsburgh was and still is drained of vitality, cut off from diversity of use by well-meaning but witless planners. It is the only place I have ever seen a major bookstore that closes at 5pm sharp on a weekday.

Many people do not want to have to think about issues of urban planning. They just want to get on with their lives and leave planning to the experts. But Jane Jacobs exposes the so-called experts as charlatans, with little useful knowledge, and a hideous history of malpractice behind them. Instead she implores readers to look for themselves, and "also listen, linger and think about what you see." As people, we live in cities, and are economically dependent upon cities. We cannot escape their importance, and so it behooves us to pay attention to their vitality.

Stupid wastes of money

2012-01-30T15:59:00.000-05:00

Part 1 in this never-ending series:

The 57 bus travels from Watertown Yard through Brighton, Allston, and down Commonwealth Avenue until Kenmore Square. The penultimate stop on this route is at Blanford Street on Boston University's campus. It is also the site of the nicest bus stop on the route.

Not only does it have a new sign (showing the Stop ID number!) but it also gets a brand new shelter. This would all be wonderful except for the simple fact that the bus route terminates one block further, in Kenmore Square. In the past, this stop used to be listed as "drop-off only" but that disappeared at some point. Why did the MBTA have a bus shelter built here, instead of at heavily used stops such as Harvard Avenue or Packard's Corner? How did such a waste come about?

About the only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that this might be used as a shuttle bus stop for the Green Line during substitute busing service. But that's a rare occurrence and they haven't shown the same consideration at other more popular stops nearby.

The narrowest street in the South End

2012-01-28T19:08:00.000-05:00

Ghost sign

It was a nice day today, and as I was wandering around past Back Bay station I noticed an old painted billboard on the side of a building. Not being in a hurry to get anywhere, I decided to poke around the South End some more in search of these so-called "ghost signs." I don't normally find myself in the South End much these days. It's a curious neighborhood in some ways. The first thing that comes to mind when I think about it is the omnipresent red brick. The second impression is that of overly wide streets laid out on a regular, grid-like scheme. Historically, much of the South End is built on landfill and was planned like the Back Bay, in the 19th century. That explains why the character is so much different than "Boston Proper."

Something different

I did end up finding a few more ghost signs, and I'm sure there's plenty of others too. I even spotted one of the "controversial" new street signs. But I ended up turning away from the broad arterial streets and poking around some of side roads. You have to be careful when walking around here. The red bricked sidewalks are quaint but bumpy. The neighborhood is fairly pleasant to walk around but the monotonous red brick gets tiresome after a while. I did stumble on some unexpected sights however. One person decided to cover their front entry with curious little statues. I hope they weren't harassed too badly for it by the neighborhood association around here.

Taylor Street

Then nearby, I spotted a real outlier: a narrow street! Almost as narrow as the famous Acorn Street in Beacon Hill. Not too shabby. Shame that about half the length of the street is taken up by a park that isn't open to the public (currently, at least). I wonder how this street came to be. It's fairly close to Washington Street, so it is possibly one of the oldest in the area. There were a few more relatively narrow streets close by, as well, though they had at least one lane of street parking on them. Quite a few parks or playgrounds in the immediate vicinity, and they were pretty popular on this warm winter day.

The narrowest street in the South End!

I thought I'd have to do some more combing to see if any other streets were narrower in other parts of the South End. But then I walked past this little gem, which I doubt can be challenged at all. It's so small that it doesn't even get graced with a name, not even something as generic as "Public Alley" like in the Back Bay. But there's entryways, connecting "alleys" and even a streetlight on it. And no cars. Maybe it's too small. But it's a nice change of pace. Most modern regulatory regimes would forbid the creation of these small streets, even ones wide enough for a car like Taylor Street. That's a shame.

I walked back along Washington Street. I've been past here several times, but never noticed this particular view of the Hancock buildings. The parking lot makes a big contrast with the rest of the neighborhood, although it is sadly typical of Washington Street, which is strangely desolate in this part of town.

New and Old Hancock buildings from Washington Street

Improving the Green Line: Fare Collection

2012-01-26T18:41:00.001-05:00

Coolidge Corner on the "C" line (source)

One of the issues that came up in the recent MBTA public hearing was fare evasion. There's three major categories of evasion on the Boston system: fare-gate piggy-backing (see 00:38), rear-door boarding on the surface and fraudulent tickets. At the hearing, one person complained of seeing 25 tourists board a trolley without paying, at the Fenway surface station. Anyone who rides the Green Line knows that this kind of thing happens all of the time. The "B" and "C" branches are especially notorious for this, due to a combination of crowded, tiny platforms and harried operators.

Many times, the trolley driver will give up on collecting fares because the demand is so enormous that it would take too long to process everyone waiting. As it is, trolleys on these branches tend to fall behind and bunch up because boarding procedures are too slow. The MBTA instituted a Show'n'Go policy for monthly pass-holders, where they were expected to wave the pass as they boarded in the rear.

Monthly pass-holders boarding the rear doors (source)

Naturally, this is easy to subvert, and doesn't work for CharlieCard holders anyhow. They also tried issuing handheld validators to employees posted at the busiest surface stations, allowing people to pre-pay using their CharlieCard. This is a rather expensive "solution" however. Some operators have taken up a habit of refusing to open the rear doors -- but of course this just winds up trapping the riders wishing to disembark, and slows down service even further. Nowadays, standard procedure seems to be simply to issue a call for people "to come up front and pay your fare" if they spot someone sneaking onboard.

As seen at the meeting, people tend to have strong feelings about this issue. Slogans such as "It's only fair to pay your fare" and general sentiment seems to be tilted towards a matter of justice for those who do pay. Personally, I have a cold economic view towards fare evasion. Nobody seems to really know what the true costs of fare evasion on this system are, though it is estimated at millions. Meanwhile, there is a cost to enforcement that is also rarely considered. Constructing fare-gate restricted stations is expensive. The Green Line Extension stations will be $13.4 million each because of this. Even if you don't have fare-gates, forcing the driver to handle fare collection also incurs costs operationally. Increased dwell times due to slow fare collection hurts headways, and ruins the supposed core product of the agency: "rapid" transit. These issues, among others, are why some people advocate for free public transit.

The problem is that when people's emotions run high on an issue of "fairness" they neglect to consider such bloodless items as cost/benefits analysis. Seeking 100% enforcement of fares is insane and a negative value proposition in any realistic scenario. The proper way to do this is to choose fares, evasion penalties, and collection mechanisms to maximize expected value based upon practical experience, and to accept that no system is perfect. The marginal cost of a single fare evader is extremely low because the operational costs are fixed -- the trains are going to run regardless of whether that one person is riding it. If allowing the fare evader takes a car off the roads, that would be a net benefit. But almost none of this is ever considered when people get upset about fare evasion, and it turns into a political circus instead.

Waiting for the SF Muni N (Judah) in mixed-traffic (source)

Having written all of that, I think that the pragmatic "optimal" solution is based on the idea of Proof-of-Payment (POP). It is used successfully by SF Muni light rail, among others. When I visited I got to observe their system up close. Muni operates light-rail vehicles which branch out into surface street-running trolleys in the outer neighborhoods, then combine into the central Market Street subway downtown. Sound familiar? While riding I noticed several things: multi-car trains have only a single operator, people can board at any door, if you pay with cash you must take a receipt with you, and transfers are free for up to 2 hours. The result was a much more smoothly operating system, despite the fact that most of the trains operate in mixed-traffic, unlike the MBTA which seems to be deathly afraid of dealing with that.

Advantages:

Operator is not stressed by responsibility of collecting fares.
All doors boarding -- much faster.
Single operator per train is a major cost saving measure.
Transfer system is simple and easy to understand.
Easy to tweak: if fare evasion is too high, then increase patrols and/or increase fines. If fare evasion is low, then cut back and save money.

Disadvantages:

Might be confusing to newbies (good signs are crucial).
Requires occasional patrolling fare enforcement officer (already exists, though).
Penalties must be stiff, which may be politically difficult.
Relies on expected-value to recoup costs. The probability of getting caught may be low, but the fines should be set to recover that value. However, this tends to trigger a psychological backlash in the people who do get caught (the "why me?" effect).

I think the advantages easily outweigh the disadvantages, but it is also easy to underestimate the difficulty of getting any public agency to change its ways in Massachusetts. I do foresee the possibility of increased fines in the future, which may bring about a kind of half-hearted POP system where enforcement officers target people they observe sneaking onboard, as they do today, but with more teeth than the current laughable $15 ticket.

One thing everyone agrees about: the "B" and "C" lines are too sluggish and must be improved operationally, somehow. Following the advice of "Organization before electronics before concrete" it seems that the simplest thing to do is to open all the doors at every station stop. Whether this would result in too much fare evasion is a matter of contention that unfortunately becomes more emotional than economic. But I believe that Proof-of-Payment is a mature and reasonable fare collection strategy that has significantly lower implementation costs than fare-gates, and is easily suitable for medium-traffic transit such as the Green Line.

Response from MBTA

2012-01-24T17:36:00.000-05:00

I sent my comments by e-mail on January 5th. Today, I received this response:

Dear Matthew,

Thank you for your comments on the proposed fare and service changes for the MBTA. We have reviewed your comments regarding the proposed fare increases. In FY2013, the MBTA is facing a budget deficit of more than $161 million. To balance our budget, the MBTA has proposed a combination of fare and service changes. In crafting these changes, our goal has been to find the best solution for the most people.

The MBTA has not raised fares since 2007. In both of the proposed fare and service change scenarios, MBTA fares would remain below transit prices at other major US transit agencies such as New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC.

Your comments will be considered as we determine the final proposal for fare and service changes. We also welcome you to attend one of the more than 20 upcoming public meetings on fare and service changes. For meeting times, locations, and updates on proposed fare and service changes please visit mbta.com/jointhediscussion.

Sincerely,
Jonathan R. Davis
General Manager

I wonder what took them so long to send out this obviously canned response. The biggest meeting was yesterday. Did they wait until now to open their mailbox?

Rally at MBTA Public Hearing

2012-01-23T19:26:00.001-05:00

Rally in front of the State House

I attended a rally today to protest the MBTA's plans to cut service and raise fares. This was organized by the Transit Rider's Union and Students Against T Cuts. There was a fairly diverse crowd of about 50 or so people at the rally, and several members of the media including Boston Globe online and a local TV news crew. They handed out some posters to carry and buttons to wear and led the crowd in several chants (admittedly, I had a hard time understanding some of what they were saying). This was followed by some short speeches from various organizers. A couple state representatives showed up to give their support as well. Then we headed into the Common and over to 10 Park Plaza for the 1pm public meeting.

Going to the MBTA public hearing at 10 Park Plaza

When we got there it turned out it was already quite crowded. It looked like they had anticipated a sizable group and the conference room was fairly large, but they ended up needing an overflow room. If you wanted to speak you got a number, so I picked mine up and found a seat.

First Deputy General Counsel Gerald Kelly explained that this was a Public Hearing and there would be no Q/A session as a result: it was to satisfy a particular Federal Transit Law, and all comments would simply become part of the public record to be reviewed later. He pointed out several individuals who would be conducting discussions and answering questions, outside the event. Then he introduced the first speaker, Josh Robin, Director of Innovation. I remember that I've spoken to Josh on a previous occasion, about adding the Stop ID to bus stop signs so that it was easier to use NextBus. He is also the guy behind the MBTA's twitter feed. This time, he was apparently supposed to give a PowerPoint presentation about the MBTA and its budget woes. He got a few slides in, talking about how the sales tax revenue did not meet expectations when he was interrupted by a lady up front. She protested that they were wasting time and they should move onto the public comment period, since there were so many people, and the slides weren't telling us anything new. There was a bit of an awkward moment as Josh attempted to continue giving his presentation, while the crowd sided with the lady. Eventually Gerald stepped in and opted to end the presentation and started the comment process.

One by one, people came up in order of their numbers and gave comments. There were many, some spoke too quietly, some too fast, but I attempted to record the gist of what they were saying. Here is what I heard, and I apologize for not getting people's names, it was hard to hear most of the time:

E-line and Mattapan HSL are serving environmental justice communities and will be cut.
The 39 bus has higher operating costs than the E line.
Several seniors with disabilities from revere, living on SS check / fixed income, will be stranded with cuts
A lady from The Fairmount Indigo line organization says 90,000 people live in that corridor, many transit dependent. Why cut service after building $160mil of station expansions? Also, zones make no sense - up by $4 to go to Hyde Park even though it's all within the borders of the city.
Handicap accessibility is important, many route cuts affect hospital service.
Arlmont Village will be cut off from transit.
People can't get around, they don't have cars.
Assembly Square losing almost all service, and still several years to go before subway station.
The T never fixed a programming bug in the CharlieCard system with regard to bus-subway-bus transfers costing double, and that will be made even worse by changes. e.g. Traveling from Somerville to Southie.
Dudley operations are mismanaged - buses pull in, park and leave riders out in the cold instead of leaving immediately or at least letting people board.
Big Dig alleviates traffic for people who drive cars, why are transit riders paying for it? Commuter Rail cuts on weekends lead to more drunken driving. Ask drivers to pay for the Big Dig.
Fellow was born in Boston, lived whole life here, never bought a car because of T. He asks: What about Bruins and Celtics games? Lots of people use North Station for those.
Cost $1.5 billion to build Old Colony CR recently. Now cutting service? Kingston has empty parking lot on Wednesday afternoon - re-examine parking policy?
Eastern Service Workers Association: T's debt because of Bechtel/Parsons-Brinckerhoff failures. The $2 billion price became $22 billion on Big Dig. Recover some [more] of the cost from B/PB.
Seniors fares cannot be raised so much (100%). Not enough E line service currently - often cannot board as it is too crowded already.
This is not a solution, it is another problem. If we were trying to destroy public transit, this is the way. Work with us, not against us. Marblehead is losing 3 of 4 routes.
Someone says their rep from Somerville has a plan. [NB: Maybe Rep. Provost?]
Sat/Sun E-line is packed on weekends, why cut it and replace with polluting 39 bus?
Natick needs CR on nights and weekends. Sports fans driving will just lead to more cars on the roads. Green line needs to stop fare evaders.
Unfair for Worcester, getting fare raised because of Big Dig. Meeting not listed on MassDOT calendar, was hard to get people from Worcester informed. Where is Rich Davey, why isn't he here?
When she heard the RIDE increases from $2 to $12 she nearly fainted.
Rep. Gloria Fox sent statement to be read: She cannot support this proposal to raise fares. Her district has some of the lowest subsidized, highest ridership routes but will be affected badly, and is in a disenfranchised section of Boston.
This proposal shuts off Weymouth from transit.
Legislature needs to provide funding including raising gasoline taxes, it's been 20 years. Losing $400 million a year due to lost value from inflation.
PowerPoint is not a good educational device. $5 billion in debt on MBTA, $3 billion in interest. $2 billion is Big Dig related. Need transportation financial plan so benefits don't just go to bankers.
Alienating lots of people by raising fares - lost ridership.
Transportation for America: these scenarios are not acceptable. Scraping it out of the hide of riders is like asking Varitek to split the uprights [NB: Boston sports reference]. We need to talk to our elected officials. There are problems across the board.
MassPIRG: these proposals are bad public policy. Reduction in ridership: 30% of bus riders lose out. Short term fixes won't help in the long term.
Millions of people shaped lives around public transit. Sympathy votes don't win bills. Need pragmatic solutions. Real lack of creativity when it comes to cuts. [Shows schedule with penciled changes] Convert Rockport expresses to locals and eliminate 3 trains without losing service. Early Sat. morning trains are packed with service industry workers. Tourists ride Rockport on the weekends to see towns on the north shore. Many late night trains have drunk Celtics fans. Snow days see increased ridership, that makes it easier to clean roads.
TransitOnTheLine blogger spoke about importance of transit. [See also http://twitter.com/transitmatters]
MBTA Ridership Oversight Committee: It's asinine to build expansions and cut service.
Orange Line falling apart. Stop fare jumpers.
State can borrow cheaply. State of MA should deal with this.
Liveable Streets Alliance: this is a backwards plan. Boston won't attract young people. Are there any state reps in the room? [NB: Nobody answered]
This choice is like shooting ourselves in the head with a .38 vs a .25. We need debt forgiveness.
Raise taxes on income and gas to pay for Big Dig debt.
This plan won't work. We'll be here next year. May as well call it "Jan 3rd, MBTA Fare Increase Day."

At this point, they were trying to get as many people to speak as possible, so they asked everyone to keep it under a minute and a half. Then it was my turn to speak, and I also submitted them to the written record later on outside the conference room.

In 2007, the TFC report found that $1.8 billion dollars in MBTA debt was due to the court-ordered Big Dig mitigation projects. They formally recommended that this debt - which is the responsibility of the Commonwealth - be taken off the MBTA's books and given back to the Commonwealth where it belongs. This action alone could save up to $120 million a year in debt service costs.
The forward funding legislation in 2000 made predictions about revenue which turned out to be almost completely wrong, in addition to putting the Big Dig debt on the T. It is time to go back and fix forward funding first, before considering fare hikes and service cuts - and put the Big Dig debt back where it belongs.

I also tracked down Josh outside and asked him what he thought of the whole ordeal. He said that they must try to find some way to balance the budget within these constraints, and that these proposals would technically do the job. I asked him why they did not pursue the removal of the Big Dig debt, and he said it was out of scope for them at the T. At this point he had to leave, but I also asked if they were trying to get the public involved to do something about the Big Dig debt, but he didn't have anything to say about that except a shrug.

Drinking and Parking

2012-01-18T22:06:00.001-05:00

A local music venue and bar wants to increase capacity by about 150 people. They are located in the heart of one of the most densely populated and busy neighborhoods of Boston. Management from the business came to a community meeting to talk about their plans. After having a discussion about the changes they made to satisfy fire and building codes, an older gentleman posed the question: "But will there be enough parking?"

The response: "The vast majority of our customers don't drive to get here." And that settled it. But it is amazing to observe how people think about parking. Even in this part of town - dense, walking and transit-friendly - the discussion quickly shifts to parking. At a bar, of all places.

Perhaps we need a companion campaign: "Drinking spaces and Parking spaces - they don't mix!" Just don't hire me to write the slogan.

Roads and highways are heavily subsidized

2012-01-15T15:03:00.000-05:00

Interstate highway I-93 in Boston, part of the Big Dig (source)

Many people who own cars believe that they "pay their way," through the gas tax, when it comes to road construction and maintenance. That impression is a myth. To begin with, every single state in the country receives more highway funds than they contribute in gas taxes. Congress has appropriated an extra $30 billion to build and maintain interstate highways since 2008, taken from general funds. Many toll roads run deficits. The United States has one of the lowest gas taxes in the world. The Federal gas tax has not changed from the early 90s, it is a flat 18.4 cents per gallon. It is far too low to cover costs. According to the BLS inflation calculator, the buying power of the original tax has diminished by about a third, to 11 cents.

The situation at the Massachusetts state level is just as dire, if not more so:

The Finance Commission estimates that there is a funding gap of approximately $9 billion between what will be needed to bring the road and bridge system to a state of good repair and expected state and Federal funds.

Some have proposed a pay-per-mile tax (or VMT tax). As I've discussed before, this is a somewhat creepy and overly intrusive solution. It is much more reasonable to require only that commercial vehicles pay for VMT. Since commercial vehicles (trucks, buses) are already tracked by their operations managers, and they are not private passenger cars, it should be much easier and less objectionable to implement. Long-haul large trucks are already restricted to certain roads. Also, trucks and buses do the most damage to the roads, while passenger cars do relatively little.

Rocky Mountain Double (source)

Arguably, it should be car owners who have the most interest in this kind of proper taxation. The damage done to the road appears to be approximately proportional to axle load raised to some power between three and four. That means trucks and buses do extreme amounts of damage to roads compared to passenger cars. Only a few states even care about truck weight, and none of them come close to recovering the costs proportionally. So, ordinary drivers are paying much of the costs of trucking.

Modern freight rail container shipping (source)

There is a wider benefit to having roads. I'm not opposed to using public funds for road projects, I'm opposed to people who pretend that we don't do that. Roads are not free, and they are heavily subsidized by state and federal governments. To claim otherwise is dishonest. The gasoline and diesel fuel taxes must be brought into line with year 2012 costs, and set on a solid track for the future. States should strongly consider recovering the true cost of supporting heavy freight trucking on their roads through a commercial VMT tax, instead of putting the burden on the ordinary taxpayer. Businesses that need to transport freight long distances would go back to more appropriate modes, such as the railroads, which have improved their operations tremendously in the last 30 years. Not only would this reduce the cost of maintenance on our highways, but it would increase safety and reduce congestion at the same time.

The current, nearly 20 years old, Federal gasoline tax rate should be indexed to inflation, and raised from 18.4 cents per gallon to 28.8 cents per gallon (38.2 cents per gallon of diesel). This data on trucks and VMT in 2002 suggests that the majority of trucks are in the 60,001lb to 80,000lb range, traveling about 77 billion miles on our roads, out of approximately 145 billion truck miles overall. Presumably, these numbers have only gotten larger in the last ten years. Still, at those rates, an average tax rate of 10 cents per mile would recover over $14 billion that would be directly correlated with road damage. To be fair, lower weight trucks should pay significantly less than higher weight trucks - perhaps even following the power law to some extent. For example, if 80,000lb trucks pay 20 cents per mile, then 10,000lb trucks could fairly pay 0.04 cents per mile, given some simplifying assumptions. Of course, to get a real idea of the effect of VMT fees, it will be necessary to model the reduction in truck traffic (and reduction in road damage) that would result, as well as the costs of administration.

Open Public Comment Letter

2012-01-05T20:14:00.000-05:00

Regarding the plan to raise fares and cut services on the MBTA:

The public transportation services provided by the MBTA are crucial to the region's economic success and quality of life. Yet, the Commonwealth's plan for handling the funding of this agency has failed. In 2000, the legislature attempted to put the agency on its own financial footing through the passage of "forward funding." This plan was to provide 20% of state sales tax revenue to the agency, and in return, the agency would henceforth manage and discharge its own debt. The newly reborn agency was handed the responsibility for its existing debt -- but was also forced to takeover $1.8 billion in Central Artery/Tunnel commitments.

Since 2000, the predictions that "forward funding" was based upon have turned out to be wrong. Sales tax growth was conservatively estimated at 3% a year. In fact, it has been approximately 1% a year. Energy costs to run the system have sky-rocketed, as well as health care costs for employees. The legislation that was supposed to make the agency independent has instead hamstrung it with an unsustainable debt load.

In 2007, the Transportation Finance Commission issued this following recommendation:

The MBTA has over $5.2 billion in outstanding principal debt and paid $351 million or 27 percent of its operating budget on debt service in FY 2006 – more than the total of all fare revenue collected. About 35 percent of the principal amount of the outstanding debt ($1.8 billion) is directly attributable to carrying out Central Artery/Tunnel commitments. That debt is rightly the responsibility of the Commonwealth, not the MBTA. Level-funded over a 20-year period, this would shift about $117 million in debt payments from the MBTA to the Commonwealth. It should be emphasized that this debt must still be paid. The substance of this recommendation would transfer this obligation from the MBTA to the state budget.

This $1.8 billion in Central Artery/Tunnel debt was incurred by court-mandated projects that the Commonwealth was required to fund, in order to receive approval for the Central Artery/Tunnel in the first place. It is time to enact the recommendation of the Transportation Finance Commission, and put the Big Dig debt on the Commonwealth budget where it belongs. This action alone would go a long way to closing the budget gap for the next fiscal year.

(mailed to the public comment address found in the MBTA news article)

Fix Forward Funding First!

2012-01-04T16:14:00.000-05:00

The MBTA has over $5.2 billion in outstanding principal debt and paid $351 million or 27 percent of its operating budget on debt service in FY 2006 – more than the total of all fare revenue collected. About 35 percent of the principal amount of the outstanding debt ($1.8 billion) is directly attributable to carrying out Central Artery/Tunnel [Big Dig] commitments. That debt is rightly the responsibility of the Commonwealth, not the MBTA. Level-funded over a 20-year period, this would shift about $117 million in debt payments from the MBTA to the Commonwealth. It should be emphasized that this debt must still be paid. The substance of this recommendation would transfer this obligation from the MBTA to the state budget.

From the State Transportation Finance Commission recommendations in 2007.

It's abundantly clear from many sources that the Forward Funding legislation of 2000 has been a failure and needs to be revisited before considering fare hikes and service cuts. In 2009, the MBTA Advisory Board published a review of the MBTA. This report explained, with excellent charts, how the Forward Funding failed to live up to expectations. In short,

Sales tax revenue was far more anemic than ever imagined in the 1990s.
Energy costs have increased dramatically more than expected.
The Finance Plan inexplicably did not predict any increase in health care costs.
Paratransit expenses increased due to growth, increased vendor fees, and fuel costs.

The granted portion of state sales tax revenue was supposed to make up for the debt obligations that were shoveled onto the agency. As the debt was paid down, the MBTA could manage its own finances "forward" from there, independently from any further state support. Instead, the plan backfired on all parties, and the MBTA began digging itself into a hole just to pay for maintenance and operations on top of the existing debt service. More from the review:

The only major long-term operational success of Forward Funding is the fact that the riding public paid three fare increases in the last eight years. That resulted in a cumulative $95M gain. Asking that same public in 2010 for yet another fare increase because Forward Funding did not work defies credibility. The riding public deserves to have tangible evidence that the MBTA is improving safety and service—not deteriorating further.

It is now 2012, and the MBTA is formally proposing a fare increase as well as service cuts, to cover a $163 million deficit. It is time to follow the Transportation Finance Commission's recommendations and fix forward funding first, by moving the Big Dig debt commitments back to the state budget where they belong. This could cover approximately $117 million of the projected deficit, leaving a much more manageable $46 million shortfall to be addressed.

MBTA plans service cuts and fare increases

2012-01-03T15:23:00.000-05:00

The big story today is that the MBTA has published their proposal to cover a $161 million budget gap by cutting service and raising fares. They have put forth two scenarios: the first one raises fares higher, and the second one cuts back buses further. Both will end weekend and late-night service on the Commuter Rail, as well as weekend service on the "E" branch and the Mattapan line, among other things.

The broken forward funding legislation, from over ten years ago, continues to put the squeeze on public transportation in this state. There will be 20 public meetings, and opportunities for the public to comment on this proposal. It's time to get the Big Dig debt off the MBTA. Please try to write to the MBTA and attend these meetings if you can, and also write your state representatives.

The Big Dig, part 3

2012-01-03T14:19:00.000-05:00

Were the Big Dig cost overruns unpredictable, due to the tricky nature of tunneling through the heart of a city? Or was it something else? From A History of Central Artery/Tunnel Project Finances 1994 - 2001:

Records and interviews reveal a Big Dig cost history at odds with publicly disclosed information. Most significantly, records show that B/PB presented Big Dig officials with an excruciatingly detailed total cost forecast of $13.79 billion in November 1994, a figure close to the $13.8 billion revised estimate announced by Big Dig officials in October 2000. [...]

Anxious to avoid the sticker shock effect of B/PB's estimate, Big Dig officials undertook a nine-month initiative between June 1994 and March 1995 to decrease B/PB's total cost estimate from $13.8 billion to $8 billion. At this time, the Secretary of Transportation and Construction publicly announced that the on-time and on-budget figure would not exceed $8 billion. Documents cite a directive from Big Dig officials telling B/PB to "hit the target" of $7.98 billion. [...]

B/PB managers insisted that local FHWA officials be told about all deductions, assumptions and exclusions that had been used to reduce B/PB's cost projection. Records show that B/PB and Big Dig officials did so. [...]

Once local FHWA officials learned of, modified, and sanctioned the use of these multi-billion dollar accounting assumptions during the 1994-1995 CSU-Rev.6 budget review process, the accounting assumptions became a permanent, tacit feature of the budget. [...]

Put another way, once local FHWA officials gave their approval to the use of these accounting assumptions in 1995, they became part of the "semantic" definition of the Big Dig's total cost. The accounting assumptions became a multi-billion dollar minimizing factor for every cost estimate that followed.

Starting in 2000, the Massachusetts Office of the Inspector General began investigating the cost cover-ups behind the Big Dig, and they published their findings in a March 2001 report. They found that state officials ordered Bechtel/Parsons-Brinckerhoff to arbitrarily cut $6 billion from the estimated cost, in order to meet a political goal.

Page 44 of the OIG report

The report concludes that since the FHWA was made fully aware of the reductions and their nature, it is responsible for accepting the bogus $8 billion number and giving respectability to it. Therefore, the Federal funding cap should be raised, since it was based on information the FHWA knew to be unrealistic, and that when the Massachusetts Legislature provided state funds, it did so "in the absence of critical information." (p. 16)

Frankly, although the Mass OIG report is revealing, I think it is somewhat self-serving by implicating the FHWA so heavily. Was the FHWA complicit in hiding the true costs of the project? Yes, it appears. But the duplicity was the direct result of orders from Big Dig officials. Shouldn't they be the ones held responsible for manipulating numbers for political reasons? As for B/PB, they did do the shady accounting they were ordered to do, they also provided all the information about it to the FHWA and investigators. Anyway, there is a whole sordid list of errors to charge B/PB with aside from this.

The OIG report was published over ten years ago. What happened? According to this report (pp.15-18), the Attorney General determined that the report was not sufficient to make a criminal case, and it appears that the remaining cost recovery effort was rolled into a larger lawsuit over a collapse in the I-90 connector. But at least we know that the cost overruns were largely just a return to B/PB's original prediction, which turned out to be pretty accurate.

Don't Walk

2012-01-02T19:17:00.000-05:00

There is an intersection along Commonwealth Avenue, at Babcock Street, which always puzzles me when I am walking there. At one corner, there is a pizza shop. Catercorner to that is a charter high school. The other two corners have bus stops. When you cross Commonwealth Avenue, there are pedestrian signals to guide you. But when you cross Babcock Street, there are no pedestrian signals. What's worse, there is a green arrow telling drivers that it is always OK to turn right -- next to the high school -- but no safe phase for pedestrians. Children are given the option of crossing against a green arrow, crossing against the light, or not crossing at all.

I figure that it is only a matter of time before a tragic accident occurs: when someone comes speeding around the corner, and doesn't slow down because they are given a green arrow. I finally got around to taking pictures and filed a Citizens Connect report about it last month. A few days later I received this response:

status: Closed. Case Noted. Pedestrian walk indications will be installed under a massachusetts department of transportation project which is in the final design stages.

That is interesting. They did not link the project, but I believe that they are referring to MassDOT #606284 based on the description: Improvements to Commonwealth Avenue from Amory Street to Alcorn Street. I haven't found any more information on this, and it doesn't look like much has happened yet. I know this intersection has already existed in this state for at least three years, and it looks like it will be awhile yet before it is fixed.

Madrid Rio: Highway Tunnel Project

2011-12-29T13:43:00.000-05:00

I was lying flat on my back, sprawled across a marble platform, looking at the high ceilings above. I had just stepped off the escalator to the Metro terminal at the brand new (ridiculously large) Madrid Barajas airport, when I slipped and fell. I was in a hurry: I could see that the next train was about to depart, but at this point I wouldn't make it in time. A custodian was mopping nearby, he came over, helped me back up, and asked me in Spanish if I was OK. I summoned up the little language training I had and asked "¿Cuando proximo tren?" He pointed wordlessly at the other track, where the doors were open on yet another train. I sheepishly schlepped my bags there, and within a few minutes, we were moving.

Riverside promenade, Madrid (source)

That was my introduction to the city of Madrid, in 2010. This past year, they completed their own version of the "Big Dig", putting the M-30 beltway underground, and restoring the Manzanares River. The project is called "Madrid Rio" and tunneling was started in 2003 as an effort to reclaim the riverfront land and improve the busy M-30 at the same time.

When I visited for a conference in 2010, I got to spend my free time exploring. I remember there being a river on the maps, and I did visit points on both sides of it, but I do not remember ever seeing the river itself. Apparently, I'm not the only person with this experience. Up until recently, the river was treated as a neglected median for the M-30. The park is so new that Google's satellite imagery still shows it under construction (as of this writing).

A highway runs beneath (source)

Already, comparisons have been made between this project and others around the world. Let's start with the basics.

Madrid Rio
Ten kilometers of tunneling, seven years of construction, 300 acres of new parks, €400 million (~$550 million) to build the park, out of approximately €4 billion (~$5 billion) for the entire project.

The Big Dig (Central Artery/Tunnel)
Over eight kilometers of tunneling, 10-20 years of construction (depends what you count), 26 acres of reclaimed space, $15 billion (or $22 billion with interest). This was really two mega-projects rolled into one, so it is difficult to compare directly. This site attributes $6.5 billion to the I-90 extension, leaving about $8.5 billion for the 5-km Central Artery.

Spain, it seems, is really good at building infrastructure cheaply. But to be fair, the project in Boston was a lot more complicated. The M-30 ran alongside the Manzanares River, which had never been an important part of the modern city of Madrid. The Big Dig took place in the heart of downtown Boston. It appears that the tunneling for the M-30 was relatively simple: not much to worry about except for some subway tunnels underneath. The Big Dig required the relocation of underground utilities, it had to thread below South Station, around both the Red Line and the Blue Line, all while supporting the weight of the Central Artery above. Madrid was willing to screw over residents during construction, in ways that would be unacceptable here in the States. I do not know to what extent this made it easier for them.

Madrid highway network (source)

The most effective way Madrid saved money, however, is by never building a city-dividing highway in the first place. The M-30 is the inner belt, and the highways that lead into the city end there. It may be hard to tell from this map, but the region within the M-30 beltway is quite large. It includes the heart of the city, and many of the inner neighborhoods. However, the outer barrios are crisscrossed by highways, and I have heard that traffic on them is quite heavy.

To counter this, Spain has been pro-active about building and maintaining public transportation. The Madrid Metro is currently sixth in the world in terms of length. I can attest that, when I visited, the system was largely clean and modern (having undergone renovation in the last ten years) and very extensive for a city of that size. This is complemented by buses as well as commuter, intercity and high-speed railroad operations.

I don't know if Madrid Rio will be successful. The alleged benefits are the creation of a new river park, the revitalization of many properties abutting it, and new development to go alongside. Will Madrileños still stroll the riverside when the novelty has worn off? Perhaps: the park includes many new bridges and connections to Casa de Campo, which was cut off from the city previously. Even so, it may not be worth the cost -- which was fairly high by Spanish standards.

The Big Dig, part 2

2011-12-23T23:29:00.000-05:00

The Greenway

A prescient Boston Globe article:

The year is 2010, and tourists are scurrying across the surface of the submerged Central Artery, avoiding cars and checking maps to get from Faneuil Hall to the Aquarium. Mothers with strollers are leaning into a gusty wind, passing through a barren park where no one lingers.

I have made one small change to the quote. The authors felt they were exaggerating when they wrote those words in 1999. However, a mere ten years later, the Rose Kennedy Greenway has already become the barren park that they had envisioned.

But you don't have to take my word for it. In late 2011, a political movement known as Occupy Boston took over the open space near South Station called Dewey Square -- part of the southernmost portion of the Greenway. Eventually a Suffolk Superior Court ruled that the city could evict them. As part of that ruling, the judge provided a description of the space:

Developed as parkland, the locus in quo is a hundred-foot wide median strip, which covers an interstate highway tunnel and is bounded by an exit ramp and heavily trafficked streets. It is operated by the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, Inc. and is known as Dewey Square.

Many decades and dozens of billions of taxpayer dollars were spent on designing and constructing the Big Dig. It was supposed to open up nearly 30 acres of prime downtown real-estate, and reunite the city. But when former environmental secretary John DeVillars approved the plan, he inserted an arbitrary stipulation that 75% of the land be used for "open space." Also: as it is constructed, the tunnel underneath will not support any building taller than a few stories. As a result, nearly all proposals for the land focused on different ways to turn it into a park, or worse, a parking lot. And in the end, what have we got for all of the effort? A six lane divided highway, at-grade, with "open space" in the middle. See for yourself:

$15 billion buys you a tunnel, a new at-grade highway and a glorified median strip (source)

"Pedestrian friendly" connection to the North End (source)

Northernmost section - perhaps the nicest part but still very highway-like (source)

We didn't get redevelopment of the urban fabric to replace what was demolished fifty years ago. And we didn't get much of a park either. Just a barren "open space." Or as Charlie Gardner put it: they made a desert and called it a park.

He also asks: did anyone consider the option of removing the Central Artery, and not replacing it? After all, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake forced San Francisco to do that to the Embarcadero Freeway, and the result has been overwhelmingly positive for them. While people have made comparisons between that highway and Boston's Central Artery, nobody seems to consider if what worked for them might have worked for us as well.

Consider this segment from a fascinating interview with Fred Salvucci, where he explains how the idea for the Big Dig came about:

Initially Bill Reynolds, who was a highway builder and the head New England Road Builders, came up to me and said that, "This big ugly elevated road is like a neon sign flashing, 'Roads are bad.' And it's just a bad advertisement for our industry and I'm convinced that the only way we'll fix this anti-highway attitude is by correcting the mistake and putting it underground." And my first reaction was, "This is crazy. You know, how are we going to shut the city down for ten years while we build a new road?"

Two things: perversely, the Big Dig project grew out of the anti-highway movement (the interview discusses this at length), and Salvucci felt that shutting down the Central Artery was tantamount to shutting down the city. As far as I can tell from my research, that presumption -- spoken or not -- is never questioned.

See also: The Big Dig, part 1 and part 3.

Nathan Lewis continues to embarrass himself

2011-12-14T22:18:00.001-05:00

I've written about this before. Nathan has written an excellent and inspiring series of articles about traditional urbanism, beginning with The Eco-Metropolis. But he's also a gold-standard crank. This poses a difficulty for me. How can I recommend his site to people, when they will find some really bad writing on economic issues there?

Let's take a look at his latest offering:

The distinguishing characteristics of a Keynesian are easy to identify. In response to a recession, they recommend expanded government spending – they usually boast outright that it doesn’t matter what the money is spent on, even egregious waste — and some sort of “easy money” policy. [..] Keynesians generally don’t have any ideas except for these. None at all.

Wrong, Nathan. This theory of macroeconomics draws from the work of English economist John Maynard Keynes who surmised that it was possible for individual "rational" decisions to add up to an inefficient overall outcome. In other words: markets were not perfectly self-regulating and they could lead to extended human misery for no good reason. Therefore, an active government policy role -- both fiscal and monetary -- was required to tamp down the excesses of the business cycle. Keynes was especially interested in solving this problem because of the Great Depression. Many of the ideas found in his work are older, but have been grouped under "Keynesian economics" because he put them together into one general theory.

What does all this mean in practice? The simplest answer is this: the government plays a counter-cyclical role relative to the private sector. When times are good, and the economy is booming, the government should take steps to pay down its debt and reduce inflation. When times are bad, and a depression is looming, the government should do whatever it takes to prevent unemployment from passing a critical level, even if that requires taking out loans and providing "stimulus." The former principle is just as important as the latter.

Keynesian economics provided models that were successfully used for the following forty years to manage the economies of many countries, including the United States. However, those models were unable to explain the phenomenon of hyper-inflation in the 70s, so they went out of favor, and some alternatives have come and gone, including monetarism, the Austrian school and Real Business Cycle theory. Other economists responded to critiques by producing New Keynesian models, instead. Since 2007, as we nearly dipped into a second Great Depression, Keynesian-style economics has been re-popularized, as the alternatives have all failed to explain the conditions we are seeing today.

For example, Nathan goes on to make this claim:

Today, Keynesianism is in its era of final absurdity. With governments now running into their borrowing limits across the globe, the idea of deficit-spending your way to prosperity is mostly off the table.

If Nathan and his cohort of Austrian economist friends were right, US treasury rates would be sky-high. Unfortunately for him, he didn't bother to check the facts. If he had, he would have learned this:

Far from running into any kind of "borrowing limit", United States Treasury bonds are more popular than ever. People are willing to loan the government money at a zero percent interest rate! Even when real interest rates have dipped into negative numbers, people are willing to effectively PAY an interest rate in order to hold bonds. So much for final absurdity.

Still obsessed about gold:

The United States used a gold standard system for 182 years, 1789-1971, and became the wealthiest country in human history.

Except, of course, when FDR abandoned it in order to save the economy during the Great Depression. And then there's the period of economic growth following WWII, when Keynesian thought guided the creation of the Bretton Woods system, based heavily on capital controls.

More silliness:

At that point, a gold standard system will seem straightforward and inevitable. Once you decide that you want Stable Money, instead of Ben Bernanke’s funny money fiesta, the solution is obvious.

And reality:

Inflation as measured by CPI has trended low and stayed under 2.5% since the beginning of the crisis. It nearly dipped to zero, and by some measures, we saw deflation for some months in the last couple years.

I have been talking generally about Keynesian macroeconomic theories, and how they have been successful in recent years compared to other theories, while objecting to Nathan Lewis's characterization. To be fair, the issue is far more complex than this: there are many models, and none of them are perfect for every situation. If you are interested in learning more about this, you should go ahead and read about how real economists work. Whichever way you go, the most important thing is to check predictions against the real world data, which is easier than ever to do nowadays.

It is really frustrating for me to have to debunk Nathan. I really like his writing on cities, his style is a lot of fun to read. But these economic matters are also important. And sadly, he is better known for his crank writing than his good writing.

The Big Dig, part 1

2011-12-10T16:30:00.000-05:00

The Big Dig (source)

The most expensive highway project in the United States was built here in Boston. It was nicknamed "The Big Dig", a name that became notorious and synonymous with massive cost overruns and delays.

So when the highway segments were finally completed, many people were eager to put the whole mess behind. The cost was high, but at least we had some shiny new bridges and tunnels to use. Also, the space formerly occupied by the Central Artery had become open land, with grass and marginal roads.

However, the Big Dig did not live up to its promise, and may have made some traffic patterns worse. The Boston Globe conducted an investigation and published an article in November 2008:

Ultimately, many motorists going to and from the suburbs at peak rush hours are spending more time stuck in traffic, not less. The phenomenon is a result of a surge in drivers crowding onto highways - an ironic byproduct of the Big Dig's success in clearing away downtown traffic jams.

The State of Massachusetts has spent $15 billion on a fight against "The Fundamental Law of Highway Congestion," and the Law won. The original paper was published in 1962. There has been plenty of research over the years on this subject, and there was no excuse to be unaware of the dilemma by the early 90s when the Big Dig planning was underway.

Proposed Green Line extension

The trouble does not end there. The State agreed to mitigate the pollution from the additional vehicle traffic induced by the Big Dig. To this end they made legally binding promises to build several public transportation projects, including: Green Line extension to Medford, Arborway trolley restoration, and Red-Blue subway connection. However, the MBTA has weaseled out of Arborway by substituting improvements to the 39 bus, and has moved on the other projects only when threatened by lawsuits. The Green Line extension was recently pushed back, yet again, causing widespread anger among residents and elected officials. The State government apparently thinks that, with the completion of the highway segments, it can brush off any further obligations to the citizens.

In 2000, in an attempt to fix the finances of the MBTA, legislation called "Forward Funding" was passed. This law dedicated 20% of sales tax revenue to the MBTA, and in exchange, charged the agency with issuing and paying its own debt. People were assured that this would be sufficient to run operations. However, the legislature also did something sneaky: they moved $3.3 billion of debt from the State onto the books of the MBTA. Part of that debt was from the Big Dig. The reformed agency was "[Re-]Born Broke:"

Legal obligations debt ($1.688 billion) corresponds to state implementation plan (SIP) commitment projects. These were public transportation projects the state agreed to build as part of the Big Dig. [...] The State also transferred the responsibility to finish many SIP commitment projects, and the T borrowed to do so. In 2007 the State agreed to re-assume responsibility for outstanding SIP projects, but not the debt for such projects borrowed before 2007.

In other words, the State of Massachusetts had made a binding agreement with the citizens that, among other things, it would improve the public transit systems managed by the MBTA in exchange for constructing the Big Dig. But less than ten years later, Beacon Hill was able to completely twist the logic of this agreement around. Now the MBTA alone is being forced to bear the debt burden that the State was supposed to pay in the first place. And the revenues from sales tax never met the original expectations. The result is a system that is breaking down and cannot pay for desperately needed repairs. We are looking at possible fare increases, up to an outrageous $3.25 per ride using CharlieTicket, and severe service cuts. This plan could demolish ridership on the system, leading to a spiral of further deficits. And if that happened, it would not only hobble mass transit, but also the entire economy in the Metro Boston region which depends on the T.

Touring the Commuter Rail Maintenance Facility

2011-11-30T21:00:00.001-05:00

Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes at the T? Now you can experience it for yourself - the MBTA is inviting customers to explore what it′s like to keep America′s First Transit System up and running — from maintaining vehicles, to trafficking subway cars during rush hour, to maintaining over a thousand miles of tracks — all in an effort to get you where you need to go every day.

Today, I participated in the pilot program of the "MBTA Opens Its Doors" which allows interested members of the public to join guided tours of T facilities. I selected the tour of the old Boston Engine Terminal, now known as the Commuter Rail Maintenance Facility. While clearly this is somewhat of a PR stunt, it was cool to see what goes on at the massive repair complex which is tucked away in an industrial area between Charlestown and Somerville.

About a dozen of us went on the tour. I took lots of photographs, as did several others. We saw several coaches having trucks repaired, locomotives being refurbished and refueled, a look inside the cab, and even got to watch up-close as a full trainset moved from its berth out to the yard.

Some of the locomotives were pretty beat up. The guide showed us several parts on the trucks which had to be replaced because they wore off too easily. 1028 had its windshields removed because the metal around them was rusting off. And many featured damage on the front -- apparently it is quite common for trains to hit small obstacles that haven't been properly cleared.

It was a lunch break while we toured so things were relatively quiet. According to the guide, every train comes through here every few days for refueling and maintenance. Even from the south side, which seems rather incredible because they must navigate the somewhat decrepit, largely single-track Grand Junction to get here (and back). He said they need 62 sets to provide a typical weekday service. That means they handle upwards of 30 trains per day. I asked about the winter, and he agreed that it could get really tough, "but that it will be better this year." We can only hope.

One curiosity I noticed was that in every room there was a digital display scrolling some informational text. That included the "on-time performance" of the north and south sides. The guide said that Davey had those installed in order to motivate the employees. In a limited sense, it measures the effectiveness of their work. I don't know if it really means anything to anyone, though, since there are so many other factors which come into play.

I hope the pilot was deemed a success and that other people will get a chance to visit. Thanks go out to the MBTA and MBCR staff who patiently waited for us and showed us around.

The Constitution

2011-11-29T19:52:00.000-05:00

The USS Constitution (Navy)

I visited the USS Constitution Museum over the weekend. It is a nice museum, with free entry. You are encouraged to provide a small donation instead. I encourage visitors to take the ferry from Long Wharf for a nice ride on the way. For $1.70 each way, and a few bucks in donation, you can spend a couple hours seeing exhibits about the Barbary War and the naval battles of the War of 1812. And of course, plenty about the USS Constitution itself.

One of the exhibits celebrated the 1925 restoration and subsequent three year tour that the ship made of the United States coast during the early 30s. There is a plaque listing the dates that the tour stopped at each city, starting around Boston, proceeding down the East Coast, through the Panama Canal, up the West Coast and back. Apparently, it was very popular. One particular destination stood out. While being towed from the East Coast to the Panama Canal, the USS Constitution made a stop at Guantanamo Bay.

I do not know how the ship was received in 1932. It does not say. But since 2002, it has been the US Constitution that stops in Guantanamo Bay.

Parking parking parking

2011-11-18T22:00:00.000-05:00

I attended an interesting community presentation recently. A developer is looking to build another apartment building on a street in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, replacing an old disused factory site. The architect showed some renderings of the proposed building. I wasn't sure what to expect, but they actually looked pretty decent, considering. The amount of setback ranges from zero to a few feet. He explained that it was this way because of the other buildings on the street. Apparently the BRA likes this kind of consistency. While I am in favor of these kind of urban buildings that have little to no setback, I am a little concerned about the process that got to the good result. On the other hand, I have seen new construction go up with zero setback on streets which do have setbacks, so perhaps this isn't a big problem in practice.

Development site (image: Google).

The really contentious issue came about, as it always seems to, about parking spots. The developer is building one off-street parking spot per dwelling unit. Someone asked whether the parking spots were included in the cost of the apartment -- a seemingly innocuous question that I knew would lead to plenty more discussion as soon as the obvious answer was given -- "no". Estimates ranged from an additional $100 - $120 a month. A tad low, based on what I know of surrounding lots, but not unreasonable. The immediate concern raised was that this might drive residents to seek street parking permits and further crowd the already busy on-street parking spaces. Now personally, I think the developer is well within his right to charge for parking, but he opted to respond in an interesting fashion. He gave two answers (and I paraphrase):

"Standard response:" Parking isn't free to build, so I need to charge money for it. As it turns out for other apartment complexes on the street, about 40-50% of the residents don't own a car anyway. The building is very close to the Green Line and there will be bicycle parking too.
"Enlightened response" (a.k.a. contingency plan): We really want to work with the community on this and don't want it to become a problem in case we're wrong about the car ownership rates. Therefore we're willing to subsidize the usage of our own lots in order to entice residents into using them. There's a lot of advantages to them and they won't want to give it up when we charge full price eventually.

I agree with the first part, the second part not so much. But I can see where he's coming from and it seems to be an expedient approach that strikes a balance. Sadly, in our society, getting development done on private property is as much a political process as it is a construction one.

There is a larger issue lurking in the background but it is left unsaid. Namely: why is street parking so contentious in the neighborhood? The city uses a residential parking permit system which is pretty strict. You cannot leave your car for any period of time in the residential areas without one. In order to get a sticker you must be registered in MA. Therefore, the city should know the home addresses of every sticker user, and hopefully they are also aware of how much curb real estate is available. When I lived in Pittsburgh, they were very particular about this. I noted that they kept track of how many people were expected to use a certain street for parking, and if they had a driveway available. I lived in one apartment building where the city refused to grant residents parking permits because the apartment complex had its own parking lot. They were a pain in the ass (for that and other reasons), but I suppose it did work. I don't know if the city of Boston does this, because I have not applied for parking here ever.

The problem is simple, really: you have a limited resource and many people competing for it. The natural way to solve this is with a free market pricing system. I propose that Boston figure out and charge market rates for its street parking. OK: politically that will never sell. People love parking socialism. However, if you don't charge market rates, then you have to impose permit caps. That was Pittsburgh's solution. Then parking permits are cheap -- until they run out -- in which case they become infinitely expensive. For some reason, people understand this when applied to bread, electronic gadgets, or even cars themselves. But they completely rebel against the market system when applied to street parking.

The Green Line is one block away. (source)

When asked whether he would prefer to trade parking spaces for additional dwelling units, there was a big chuckle all around, of course, and his partner stated that they were already below the BRA requirements. But if he were allowed to ignore those requirements, the response was a shrug, "it'll never happen" was the general gist. Still though, I think the developer understands that he is building in a well-served transit area and lots of people here walk and ride bikes. That is a good sign for the future, at least.

About the VMT tax idea

2011-11-16T17:19:00.001-05:00

Some have proposed a "Vehicle Miles Traveled" tax as a replacement for the gasoline tax. The idea is that as cars get more fuel efficient, they will pay less gas tax for road repair, but they still do the same road damage.

Should we require vehicle tracking? Or not? (source)

The problem with VMT is that in order to measure it, you need some sort of tracking device. The odometer is one possibility, and it already must be reported in various ways. But it is a fairly crude way to measure, and doesn't distinguish between different types of roads. For example, I have friends who race their street vehicles on private speedways. That would count against them, even though public funds are not paying for the repair of that road. The other tracking device proposed is a GPS unit of some sort. However, this raises all kinds of nasty questions about privacy.

Let's take a step back. What are we trying to pay for?

Funding of road repair
Mitigation of gasoline pollution
Reduction of congestion (trading money for time)
Paying some of the capital costs of roads

And some of our options for paying these costs?

The gasoline tax is pretty directly linked to issue (2). More gasoline used, more pollution emitted. There is a correspondence between gasoline used and road damage incurred, but it is somewhat shaky and complicated by the fact that there are many kinds of vehicles out there. Same for (4). It does not help with congestion except by possibly discouraging people from making wasteful trips.
A VMT tax would largely behave like a gasoline tax depending upon implementation, except that it could more fairly handle issue (1), and it might be possible to integrate congestion pricing, though that is not necessarily the case.
Paying for everything from the general funds would imply that income, sales and/or property taxes would have to rise to cover automobile-related expenses. You can do (1), (2), and (4) this way, but not (3) at all. The justification for this is that everybody benefits from cars, therefore everyone should pay extra taxes for them. I find this justification weak, and I'm pretty sure it would be a hard sell if it had to be made on the merits. On the other hand, this method has basically taken over a large portion of the costs of (1), (2) and (4), as general state and federal monies get poured into projects that are not able to be funded by the currently anemic gasoline tax.

My preferred solution is to bring the gasoline tax back into line with current costs. The federal gasoline tax hasn't been raised since 1993 and it is a flat 18.4 cents per gallon, not a percentage like most other taxes. This means it falls behind inflation every year. Additional state taxes are similar. It is well known that the current gasoline taxes do not even pay enough to cover the highway system, much less local roads.

However, for fairness sake, the gasoline tax should not be the only mechanism. The fact is, trucks damage roads far more than private cars. In fact, analysis has shown that axle weight raised to the 4th power is approximately proportional to road damage. That means a fully loaded tractor semi will do 1000 times the damage of a fully loaded passenger van. Trucks, and to some extent buses, are getting a free ride on the nation's interstate highway system and local roads. There are only a few states which attempt to recover those costs, and most fall short. It needs to be done at a federal level and consistent nationwide.

Heavy vehicles damage roads. (source)

Trucks and buses are commercial vehicles: businesses want to know where their vehicles go. There are already many limitations on where they can travel, as well. Therefore GPS-based tracking is already used by many commercial vehicles. Measuring VMT for trucks and buses should be fairly uncontroversial, unlike personal automobiles. The usage of these heavy vehicles is also much more significant towards causing road damage than that of small cars. The external costs of private vehicle usage can continue to be recovered through a percentage-based gasoline tax, which stays up to date, which also has a side benefit of encouraging people to buy automobiles with fuel-efficient engines.

That leaves issue number (3), how to address congestion in cities. Currently, most people pay for congestion by sitting in their car and fuming at traffic. I would prefer seeing a system where you pay a market price for using a roadway, and that price would be set at a rate which keeps traffic flowing smoothly. Therefore, you effectively save time by spending money. The first argument most people make against congestion pricing is that it is unfair to poor or middle class households. However, that is a weak argument because of two things: (a) lower income folks value their time just as much as anyone else, and (b) you can offset those costs using tax credits or other programs that help the truly needy.

The high cost of free roads. (source)

The fact of the matter is, we already have a solution for moving large amounts of people around cities without causing congestion: it's called public transportation. However, mass transit has high fixed costs and low marginal revenue, so it cannot effectively compete with government subsidized roads. If roads were priced according to their true costs, then mass transit would be a lot healthier in this country, and possibly even profitable for cities to operate (as it is in Hong Kong). Congestion pricing can be enacted at a local level and without massive government intrusion into cars. It is a free market solution to a resource scarcity problem.

Why Republicans hate trains

2011-11-02T23:06:00.000-04:00

It's a well known fact that most Republicans proclaim a loathing for passenger trains. On the other hand, it may just be spiteful propaganda directed blindly against whatever the Democrats happen to support, and not a deeply held belief. After all, railroads were once considered the backbones of capitalism, operated by gilded age robber barons and glorified by iconic writers such as Ayn Rand.

New York Central's 20th Century Limited locomotive.

Since those times, it has proven nearly impossible to run a profitable private passenger railroad, in competition with government subsidized automobile roads. The dearth of private railroads in this country could certainly turn off a principled conservative. But something doesn't quite add up about that explanation. If that were the only objection, then such bitter vitriol would not be used. Instead we would see an article written about the benefits of privatization and of cutting highway subsidies.

My speculation is that what we are witnessing is actually the petulant response to one sad fact: the twentieth century decline of the American railroad. Once, long ago, American inventors such as Frank J. Sprague, Thomas Edison, among others, helped pioneer the electric railroad technologies that we still use today. Today, we do not even have the expertise to build, provision and operate a true high speed passenger line, but must import it from Asian or European countries (or reinvent it, badly).

The sting of this slap in the face of American ingenuity must hurt so badly that Republicans like George Will are simply unable to handle it. Instead they lash out with ridiculous lines like this one:

[The] real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

According to this rather strange remark, the selection of steel wheels over rubber wheels is tantamount to killing freedom! To dig into it a little further, he is implying that fixed guideway vehicles are less "individualistic" than free-roaming rubber tired cars. At a highly superficial level, this is correct: trains run on tracks. But trying to derive any further conclusion just leads to nonsense. By Will's reasoning, the usage of buses, airplanes and ferry-boats is also "diminishing individualism" because these vehicles also follow fixed routes -- despite having no rail. Of course these systems have not led to the downfall of our way of life, nor do they hurt anyone's freedom of choice to ride or not.

High-speed rail. Not Invented Here. (source)

Further analysis of his remarks is likely a waste of time. They're not rational, and are rooted in an emotional backlash against the decline of the American railroad. For some people, the response might be a positive or optimistic determination: we can do better. But for George Will and Republicans like him, they would rather denigrate and tear down the enterprise itself. After all, why become proficient in something that you have deemed worthless?

It reminds me of the behavior of certain sports fans, who when confronted with the unsuccessful end to their favorite team's season, turn and say: Why care about them anyway?

Sad.

Autonomous self-driven vehicles

2011-10-20T21:33:00.000-04:00

Stanford's autonomous car. (source)

About fifteen years ago, it seemed ridiculous that everyone would be running around with a personal communication device in their pocket that would allow access to anyone else in the world as well as the Internet. Right up there with flying cars. The rapid increase in computer technology paired with a decline in prices allowed it to happen.

In a similar fashion, I think we are seeing the beginnings of true autonomous vehicles. That article is a little old now, as the problem has been attacked for a while, and even has had some high-profile demonstration solutions from Stanford, CMU and Google. I remember seeing the Red Team's Hummer sitting around when I was working nearby, back in 2005. It seems that people have been quietly working on other projects since then. It's one of those problem that can be effectively addressed by throwing more computing power at it -- which means it will get easier over time. And it could result in such a huge convenience that -- like cell phones -- we may wonder how we lived without it.

Leaving the technical details of implementation aside, what are the implications for public transit if everyone has access to an autonomous vehicle? Keep in mind, I think the first and most obvious application for this is cheap driver-less taxi. It will be as if there was a private bus that operates on exactly the route you need, anytime you call for it. Will that eliminate demand for public transit? It certainly sounds convenient. There are a couple problems.

Will the public be comfortable with autonomous vehicles? Probably not at first, even absent legal issues. It is likely that the computer controlled vehicle will be safer than having a human driver, but there will be an instinctive resistance to the idea. There could also be some confusion for pedestrians as they cannot look inside the car and read the face of the driver -- maybe indicator lights on the front could resolve this. However, there are several big potential benefits for pedestrians. Eliminating distracted or impaired drivers is one. More subtly, the need for proximate parking is reduced by sending cars to remote lots, or even obviated with extensive car-sharing. This is one path to lifting the scourge of automobile storage off the streets of cities.

Introducing many vehicles onto the road will cause a congestion problem. The autonomous vehicles can probably be smaller, and pack more tightly using by guide-ways, but it will reach a limit at some point. Larger vehicles such as buses will still be the kings of capacity. Of course, without having to pay and accommodate a driver, buses can run many more and varied routes, at all times of day. Frequency will be limited not by operational costs, which will drop significantly, but just by capital costs of acquiring a sufficient fleet. It could also be the case that software may identify outstanding transit requests which largely overlap, and then dispatch a van or a bus to handle multiple passengers. If such a service costs less than ordering a private vehicle, I can see many people signing up for these "car-pooling" systems. It could even suggest that a permanent bus route is appropriate if the same demand is issued along the same route every day.

Then there is the matter of fuel efficiency. If we continue to use the internal combustion engine, both the direct and indirect costs of operation of these vehicles could still prove to be prohibitive. Luckily, autonomous vehicles are well-suited to electric operation. They can be programmed to find themselves a parking spot with a power plug when not in use. It is even possible to conceive of electrified roadways that function similarly to electrified railways. With computer guidance, it should be possible to safely transition from being an automobile to a "trolley" and back. These kinds of roads could even make long-distance all-electric autonomous operation possible.

Of course, by that time we could also have high-speed railways linking cities with much faster speeds than any road vehicle could safely achieve, and airplanes for further distances. The last mile problem would already be solved by the presence of driver-less taxis and other transit vehicles. Unless you are particularly attached to your personal car, there is no reason to spend all that extra time riding in it, when you can have all the same convenience wherever you go without it.

Of course, there will always be people who want to drive their own cars. Fair enough, I used to be one of them, I know how it feels. I am not sure how the transition will work, but I can't imagine that people will be too comfortable with autonomous vehicles at first. There could be restricted autonomous-only roadways. Or perhaps the technology is so successful that it can safely drive and accommodate being on the road with humans. In the latter case, there will probably be intense pressure to replace the legacy vehicles with new ones capable of autonomous operation (in addition to manual operation, perhaps). I imagine there will be a rise in private motorways where people can manually drive cars either for sport or enjoyment, without fear of traffic congestion, while leaving the day-to-day grunt work of dealing with public roads to computers.

I know this whole article sounds like pie-in-the-sky talk, but I think that autonomous vehicles, more than anything, will transform our society and cities. One worry is that we may end up repeating the mistakes of the 20th century and try to develop Hypertrophic cities all over again, like something out of Metropolis. But hopefully we will have learned better this time around, and instead try to take advantage of the characteristics of self-driving cars in ways that can alleviate their impact on the city.

Tokyo and Beijing, SF MOMA edition

2011-10-09T19:48:00.000-04:00

Tokyo

Beijing

I'm not entirely sure what the artist was trying to say in these photographs. Perhaps he was just leaving it to the viewer to draw conclusions. The picture of Tokyo is remarkable for the vast low-rise stretch of buildings, marked by a few tall buildings; the picture of Beijing focuses on a neighborhood of tall apartment complexes in parks. When I saw it, it seemed to be a comparison of a more traditional city built at human scale against the "Radiant City" of Hypertrophic buildings.

From the aerial vantage point, the Beijing picture is more interesting: the Tokyo picture just appears to be a flat space. But if you look close up, then things are the other way around. The tall buildings in Beijing are surrounded by empty green space and parking lots. There are few people. The streets and avenues in Tokyo are busy and alive with people.

It's probably unfair to completely characterize these two cities this way: Tokyo has Hypertrophic buildings (I've been around some) and Beijing has traditional neighborhoods. But I think by-and-large, Tokyo planners and residents understand the virtues of their city and don't try to wipe it out. I cannot say the same thing of the Chinese, who are learning the hard way that central planning can often be quite horrible, especially when it comes to city planning. They seem ashamed of their cultural heritage, sadly, and they attempt to imitate Western practices. Unfortunately, they never bothered to check if those practices are sound. So they wound up copying from urban planning disasters such as Brooklyn housing projects, and the rest of Le Corbusier's "Radiant City" garbage that has poisoned American cities for the past century. Speaking of the devil...

Also on display: Le Corbusier, destroyer of cities!

Lewis Mumford put it best:

By "mating utilitarian and financial image of the skyscraper city to the romantic image of the organic environment, Le Corbusier had, in fact, produced a sterile hybrid."

Wide streets in San Francisco

2011-10-08T12:21:00.000-04:00

Noe St

I noticed some curiosities while walking around town one day. There are streets with head-in parking where you would normally expect parallel parking. I have noticed this on some of the steeper streets, and I assume that it is used there to avoid parking brake failure. But on a flat, level street, it seemed out of place. I also noticed that there were little parks on the corners occasionally: the sidewalk juts out into the street, a few trees and benches are placed for enjoyment.

Originally, I thought this was a somewhat strange way to plan a street: why not reclaim that space in the first place and make the street narrower? Then I realized that the decision to add the park and do head-in parking was probably made long after the original street was laid out. This seems to be a local effort to convert an arterial street into a friendlier walking street. Instead of 5-6 lanes, cut it down to 2 traffic lanes and 2 head-in parking lanes. Add some parks on the corners which also function as pedestrian crossing helpers. It almost fools you into thinking this is a small street. And it might be the only practical solution. On the other hand, just after I took this picture, someone raced up and passed another car while honking. So the message hasn't quite gotten through to everyone.

In defense of "dumb" traffic lights

2011-09-29T23:57:00.000-04:00

A pedestrian "beg" button (source)

After spending some time in the Bay Area, one thing I noticed was the ubiquity of "smart" traffic signals. These are equipped with sensors and gadgetry to detect cars, and sometimes bikes, and make decisions based on that. In contrast, most intersections I can recall in East Coast cities are not augmented in this fashion. Smart signals have the advantage of dynamically adjusting phases according to traffic. They also take into account pedestrian button boxes.

I also noticed that the city of San Francisco eschews the smart signals in favor of "dumb" signals which merely operate on a timer. Most intersections do not even require pedestrian buttons, the Walk phase is always included.

Almost needless to say, San Francisco is a much friendlier walking place than anywhere else in the Bay Area. There are many reasons for this, including density, public transit accessibility, and well-connected streets. I think that the "dumb" street lights are also part of this advantage. Predictable, short phase signals allow pedestrians to cross safely without waiting for interminable periods of time. They also provide the same advantage for drivers. While you do lose the advantages of "smart" signals for automobile traffic, those same "smart" signals provide no help to pedestrians.

Being forced to press a button in order to beg the system for a Walk signal is tantamount to relegating pedestrians to second-class status. When walking, you may have to stop at every single intersection, press a button and wait. That is assuming the buttons work, which based on my experience, is often not the case. Then while waiting you find yourself trying to guess whether or not the button is working, or whether you have simply not waited long enough. One time in San Jose, we waited for two whole cycles of the light phases before giving up on the button and crossing 8 lanes of traffic anyway. Luckily it was very quiet that evening.

In Boston, there are not many "smart" signals but they do use buttons ubiquitously. However, the traffic signals and pedestrian "beg" buttons are so unreliable and so often out of order that most people don't even look at them and cross along with the parallel car phase. That is, if they don't just jay-walk. There is a great deal of cynicism about the traffic signals, and a great deal of pride in Boston's status as a walking city. It has even been rated the safest walking city in the country. I just wish that City Hall would get its act together and realize that pedestrian "beg" buttons do not belong in any real city.

Drivers should also appreciate the fact that they do not have to "find the sensor" in the road in order to get a green light, nor that they miss phases because "they weren't there in time." I know that people will speed up as they arrive in front of "smart" red lights because they want to activate the sensor before the next phase begins. That is simply not an issue with the old-fashioned system. Sometimes we out-smart ourselves.

Street lights and safety

2011-09-29T23:32:00.000-04:00

(source)

Just read in a local paper that the town of Palo Alto is installing new LED streetlights on Alma Street somewhat nearby to where I was living last month. Apparently there have been some problems with criminal activity and some already existing impetus to upgrade the lights. The residents feel that better lighting would help. I think that it will not make a real difference.

The street in question is a 4 lane shoulder-less road with an occasional extra parking lane. One side abuts a busy commuter railroad right-of-way, fenced off. The other side has a skinny sidewalk strip and typical suburban households. The road is not technically a highway, but it feeds one, and is treated like one by drivers.

There is no question that this is an unpleasant place to walk, day or night. I personally would go out of my way to avoid it, especially since the sidewalk that does exist is overgrown. Walking it at night set off many of my internal alarms about dangerous areas. It is dark, there are lots of gray areas, and nobody is around save for cars speeding by in the night. Addressing the darkness issue is one step, but I am worried this will create a false sense of security. The reason is simple: extra lighting does nothing if nobody else is around to see. The fundamental issue is the lack of pedestrian traffic and the lack of eyes on the street. This is a self reinforcing problem: nobody goes there because nobody goes there!

Admittedly, this is a difficult problem to resolve within the parameters that currently exists. In a better world, the street would be reduced to two lanes of traffic and the sidewalk upgraded. An 8-lane thoroughfare already exists just a couple blocks away as it is, and a highway not too far either. Then there would be space for a shoulder and bike lanes. I would also like to see zoning relaxed and commercial activity permitted on this street. As it is, it is very pedestrian-unfriendly, and anyone wishing to do shopping must currently head north past Middlefield, or go around to cross the tracks at one of the few possible places. The Caltrain/CAHSR grade separation project should offer the opportunity to redo this road, and also to introduce additional crossings for pedestrians and bicycles (and even cars). With a little bit of forward thinking, this street could be transformed from highway-like gray area into a pleasant pedestrian passageway.

It is an opportunity Palo Alto residents should be welcoming. Unfortunately, that will probably not be the case, as resistance to any kind of change -- even good change -- is a neurosis that infects the whole community, it seems.

Around the block

2011-09-27T21:57:00.000-04:00

After reading the excellent article Debunking the Cul-de-Sac it occurred to me that there was one advantage to the cul-de-sac that the author missed. This one requires a story: I was about 14 years old and visiting my first cousins' home in Wayne, NJ. We were playing together when they suggested a challenge: a race around the block. No problem! I often did a jog around my block back at home, just for exercise. We took off, and I was keeping a good pace, staying ahead. My cousins had dropped back, and I figured I had them beat for sure. One problem kept cropping up though: we kept turning away from the starting point! About a half a mile later I lost the lead, since I am not and have never been a long distance runner. I lost sight of the two of them in the distance. I finally came around, exhausted, to the finish line to find them grinning. A clever joke! Around the block! Only 2 miles!

With that in mind, in a world without the cul-de-sac, you could not play this cruel joke on your unwitting cousin who comes from a town built before 1900.

Multimodal trip planning

2011-09-27T18:05:00.000-04:00

I recently took a trip from San Francisco to New York City to Boston and back to San Francisco. To arrange this I booked two airplane tickets separately, and one Amtrak ticket.

One of the greatest revolutions in travel planning took place when it became possible to easily search and book trips, including multi-stage ones, together at once. Had I made my trip entirely by air, I could have used the multi-city options at any one of the flight search engines. However, since I did not want to deal with going all the way back out to any of the notoriously inaccessible NYC airports, I chose Amtrak instead for convenience.

Hopefully in the near future, this kind of multi-stage trip planning will be extended to multi-modal trips as well. Perhaps with the advent of Google Flight as competition to Bing Travel, and the other preexisting engines, one of them will jump on this.

A cautionary tale

2011-09-13T21:03:00.000-04:00

One of the few remains, in the sea of asphalt

Charles River Park at 35 by Robert Campbell was published over fifteen years ago. But little has changed. I have spent a couple of frustrating afternoons attempting to find my way into the remains of the West End. Now I know why I was unsuccessful.

The subject of the article, Boston's West End, is one of the sites upon which mid-century urban planning visited mass destruction and tragedy. However, the article deals primarily with the aftermath: what became of the land once it had been razed to the ground. After the bulldozers, the main antagonist is one Victor Gruen. An Austrian immigrant and architect hired by the city to redevelop the former "slum."

Gruen decided American downtowns were being destroyed by the automobile. He argued, in such writings as "The Cellular Metropolis of Tomorrow," that the solution was to carve them up into auto-free zones. Each such zone or cell would be a pedestrian precinct, free of cars, filled with happy people on their feet. All the traffic, public and private, would circulate on arterial roads around and between the cells, without entering them. Gruen identified shopping malls, college campuses and Disneyland as good prototypes for such cells.

Self-inflicted wound, not a bomb (source)

Noble sounding goals, yet as he retired to live out his last couple years near Vienna, he must have been bitter, broken, and largely forgotten. Nevertheless, his legacy does live on, in shopping malls, college campuses, and Disneyland even. Enclosed worlds where pedestrians are free to roam; but surrounded by a sea of parking lots and highways. The very definition of suburban hell. Where did he go wrong?

Perhaps he overlooked the fact that cities grow and thrive on connections? His design was about forming islands inside cities, where people would feel safe, instead of promoting interconnections between people from all over. This is the suburban mentality, and applying it to the city only resulted in a mismatched failure.

Victor's goal was to eliminate automobiles from cities. The way he went about it resulted in terrible traffic, and even worse neighborhoods. His life forms a cautionary tale for would-be urban planners on the dangers of idealistic visions and unintended consequences.

The thin line between genius and insanity

2011-09-06T20:46:00.000-04:00

How can one person be so incredibly correct on one issue, and so utterly wrong on another? Instead of tearing my hair out I've decided to write a blog post for the first time about this particular author, Nathan Lewis. I will begin with the positive aspects.

I was introduced to his writings by a link from The Old Urbanist, and I was hooked almost instantly. The essay Place and Non-Place is a typical example of Nathan's writing on this topic. The presentation is simple, maybe too simple, but that is fine by me. The style is clear, effective, and to the point. Brutally so. And it is illustrated by pictures from real-world examples. These pictures are so illuminating that they nearly make the argument on their own.

Compare and Contrast. Genius!

The basic thrust is simple: Traditional Cities (e.g. Paris, Tokyo) are wonderful places to live, while Hypertrophic Cities (e.g. Las Vegas, Dubai) are horrible places. Of course, there are many places with both facets (e.g. New York City, Seoul). The picture on the right depicts the kind of stark contrast that is expressed so well in his essays: comparing a Hypertrophic portion of Seoul to a Traditional portion of Paris. The Hypertrophic City has a grid, tall buildings, and cars. The Traditional City has narrow streets, walk-up apartments, and multitudes of people who love it.

This aerial view doesn't even begin to capture the whole story. As he relentlessly points out, the Hypertrophic City is at its best when viewed from a helicopter. The people in a Traditional City largely disregard this perspective: after all, nobody had an airplane prior to the 20th century! Day to day life is conducted on the ground, and that is where you will find the reason that Traditional Cities succeed and Hypertrophic Cities fail. The difference can be captured in three words: Really Narrow Streets.

Narrow Streets in Osaka

I have only one slight quibble with this principle, and it is not an objection at all. Really Narrow Streets is a wonderful idea, but it needs to go together with Really Small Blocks. When land is valuable, the two ideas should be corollaries, but it is important not to forget them both. In this way, Nathan is making part of the same argument made by Jane Jacobs fifty years ago. Certainly, the same goals are shared. Jacobs goes on to describe further conditions for successful city growth, including mixed uses and density. These are also important, but should largely arise naturally if not explicitly regulated out of existence by misguided or malignant local government. Really Narrow Streets combined with Really Small Blocks make a pedestrian-friendly, automobile-hostile environment that is conducive to building Really Nice City environments.

I cannot say enough about how wonderful Nathan's essays on cities are. Some might be put off by the casual or even arrogant tone, but I find it to be engaging because his arguments are so well backed up by compelling real-world examples. And great photographs. Instead of having me copy further arguments from him, just go ahead and read. Here is a sampling of essays and series of essays. This stuff should be obvious, but for some reason, we've gotten it incredibly wrong over the past century.

Having read a bunch of his essays up-front, I decided to find out more about this author and clicked on a link to his main page.


Oh No! He's a Crazy Gold Bug!


My immediate reaction. Rendered in kitten form.

How could someone who writes so well on cities and makes such great arguments be so staggeringly foolish to think a return to the Gold Standard is a good idea? To go so far as to even write a published book, and numerous articles in magazines on the subject?

It is madness in this modern age to think that we would want to tie the fate of the world's largest economy to the fluctuations in one malleable, yellowish metal commodity.

What is especially striking is not necessarily the gold-buggery, but how it flies in the face of many of his same arguments that are successfully applied to urban issues. Let us consider his recipe for successful "Traditional-style" city growth. Really Narrow Streets, naturally, and also Low Taxes, Stable Money. (See for example, No Growth Economics)

Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and Switzerland, among others, are often cited as supporting many of the most wonderful Traditional Cities in the world. What else do these countries have in common? High Taxes and Government-backed Paper Currency (of some form). In other words, when it comes to economics, the real-world examples he wielded before are now in complete disagreement with him!

To be fair, he does seem to understand and attempt to address many of the basic objections, such as in Gold Standard Fallacies.

In short, a gold standard is a system which connects the value of money with the value of gold. The simplest way to do this is to make coins out of gold, which trade at their full commodity value. But that is a very archaic approach, and not well suited to today's world.

Well at least we can agree on that. He addresses the shortcomings of most gold standard proposals in various writings, such as A Gold Standard is a Value Peg, where he writes:

The gold standard was never a rule that said: "The number of dollars in circulation will be fixed at $600 million" or something like that. It should be obvious that if you fix the supply of dollars, but demand fluctuates, the value of the dollars will go up and down. Thus, you can't have a value peg, like a gold standard, and a fixed supply of money. It's the adjustment of supply -- i.e. a changing amount of dollar base money -- that allows us to make an otherwise worthless paper chit have a market value equivalent to gold.

In order to maintain a fixed price for gold, it is up to the central bank to increase or decrease the amount of currency in circulation. This could be arranged in several ways. Perhaps the head of the central bank wakes up each day, takes a look at the current price for gold, and then issues an order to add or remove some amount of currency based on that price. The next day, presumably, the price of gold is closer to the target and further adjustments may or may not be necessary. In this way, the price of gold can be kept stable over the course of population and economic growth.

This is a wonderful way to ensure that the price of gold is stable. If that is all we cared about then certainly we should do it. However, most people don't care about the price of gold. Most people care about buying the things they need and earning enough money. Entrepreneurs are concerned about attracting investment and potential customers. Business owners are concerned about profit margins. And the government is concerned with keeping the economy growing and at full employment. None of this has anything to do with the price of gold.

The problem with Nathan's analysis is that he only looks at one side: he is concerned about the central bank injecting large amounts of currency into the system which devalues it. However, there is another way this could happen: if the supply of gold in the world begins to overwhelm demand, then the price will fall. In order to prop up the price of gold, the central bank begins printing currency. The price of gold may return to its previous value, but now we've instigated inflation on every other price in the system. And for what reason? Just because of an overabundance of some shiny metal? How does that have any bearing on the economy at large?

The story is worse for deflation. Demand for gold may outstrip supply, or perhaps speculation drives the price up. Then the central bank responds by removing currency from circulation, driving prices down overall. Suddenly, businesses aren't making as much money and can't afford to meet their obligations. Employees are being forced to take wage cuts, never an easy thing. The price of goods they buy may have fallen as well, but any loans they have are suddenly much more burdensome. The interest payments continue at the same nominal amount but there is suddenly less money to pay them. People begin to default on loans. This causes a chain reaction as banks lose money, and businesses depending on those banks can no longer do so. More people default. This is the story of deflation. And it was driven not by anything fundamental, but just a change in the price of gold. This outcome must be avoided, but with the gold standard, there is no way out.

Of course, Nathan does devote some words to the matter of gold stability. I think he realizes that without stable gold, there is no stable money in his system.

If we look at the past 40-odd years of floating currencies, we find that gold (and floating currencies) still behave AS IF gold is stable in value. In other words, when the "price of gold" changes, it is the floating currency changing value, not gold. If we look at the past 40-odd years of floating currencies, we find that gold (and floating currencies) still behave AS IF gold is stable in value. In other words, when the "price of gold" changes, it is the floating currency changing value, not gold.

Unfortunately for him, that's simply not true. The price of gold has skyrocketed in recent years. However, other prices have not, as we struggle with disinflation overall. This indicates a case where demand is outstripping supply -- likely driven by speculation. Let's take a look: Inflation over the last ten years, notice in particular how we dipped into deflation throughout much of 2009. And now let's take a look at gold prices from the London Bullion Market Association. Notice how much variation there is? Check out 2009: it ranges from an average of $857 in January to $1135 in December, while over the same period the inflation rate of the dollar according to Consumer Price Index (CPI) was measured at 0.1%. This is not just about the dollar, as the price in euros was also hiked by a proportional amount. Inflation has recently (mid-2011) picked up again compared to 2009, but this appears to be a temporary spike due to a bubble in commodity prices. Gold prices continue to show no real relationship to CPI, a far more relevant measure to everyday people.

If the dollar was pegged to gold during this time, we would be suffering in a horrible deflationary spiral, and likely the Second Great Depression.

That's enough crank debunking for me. If you need more to read, then check out Barry Eichengreen's recent article further demolishing arguments for a gold standard, including a good amount of historical perspective.

I still haven't answered the original question, which is: how somebody so sensible in one area can be so misguided in another? It's not a question of being impossible, as it is not, but rather: why not apply the same reasoning skills to both areas? I probably can't know for certain without being able to read minds. But I think it comes back to this desire for simple slogans. Really Narrow Streets and Low Taxes, Stable Money. Easy to repeat. Easy to put on a bumper sticker. But also too easy to oversimplify. Too easy to get caught up in the purity of the slogan. Too easy to bend perceptions to fit a neat idea. And too easy to overstep the thin line between genius and insanity.

I will continue to read Nathan and other authors with whom I disagree on some matters, as long as they remain fun and intriguing. It is good to be able to enjoy articles and to pick out the mistakes, as it keeps my mind sharp. I hope that in turn, they are able to adapt and fix their errors, in order to stay relevant and interesting.