Unintelligible Caterwauling Embraces Urbanism

Today’s post was planned to be about the “missing middle housing” in my neighborhood, the incremental housing units that add residents, thereby supporting walkability, without detracting from the feel of the neighborhood.  Unfortunately, a rainstorm arrived ahead of schedule, before I could collect the final photos I planned to share.  I’m not complaining about the rain, only its hasty onset.

In the absence of the photos, I’ll juggle my schedule and write instead about opera.  It may seem an odd fit for an urbanist blog, but all will soon be clear.

My sister loves opera.  One of her great joys in life is spending a Saturday in an ornate downtown theatre, watching a simulcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.

Personally, I don’t get it.  I find enjoyment in most forms of music, often having a broad range of music playing as I write these posts, from jazz to blues to rock to classical.  (My December playlist is a farrago of holiday music ranging from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Bing Crosby to Jethro Tull to Big, Bad Voodoo Daddy to the Puppini Sisters.)  But opera leaves me cold, most often sounding like unintelligible caterwauling even when in English.

I’m not making fun of those who enjoy opera, such as my sister.  I’m sure there’s value in opera.  I’ve known too many folks who loved opera and whose judgments I otherwise trusted.   They surely couldn’t have all been wrong.  It’s probably just that, much like with cricket, I don’t choose to spend the time educating myself to find the value in opera.   I’d rather ponder land use.

However, I may need to temper my thinking on opera because it and urbanism are about to meet.

I’ve written too often in this space about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs to tally the mentions.   But this is my review of “The Power Broker”, Robert Caro’s master work about the decades that Moses wielded power in New York City, often unscrupulously, transforming the city to accommodate the automobile.

This is my review of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, Jacobs’ master work on how walkable urban neighborhoods work, written in her New York City home, shown above, at the same time that Moses was dominating the city.

And this is my review of “Wrestling with Moses”, Anthony Flint’s account of the clashes between Moses and Jacobs over plans of Moses that would have trampled New York City neighborhoods held dear by Jacobs.

(Note: All three posts were written in the early days of this blog, so give an opportunity to judge if my compositional capabilities have improved.  Personally, I find that my writing style and my ability to conceive and articulate complex, nuanced thoughts have both improved, but neither as much as I would wish.  Self-improvement is hard.)

The Flint book documents battles of titanic wills, a kind of stories that often attracts opera and now has.

As described by Sarah Goodyear in CityLab, a creative team with histories of past successes is developing an opera, “A Marvelous Order”, based on the conflict between Moses and Jacobs.  A preview is planned for the spring, with a full run then scheduled for a theatre in Brooklyn.

The structure of the opera is a love triangle with Moses and Jacobs both vying for the affection of New York City, although with the two figures not as towering ideals, but as real people.

However, the team seems to have more affection and respect for Jacobs.  As described by the director, “It’s more interesting artistically to see them both as human beings with strengths and weaknesses.  We are figuring out how to do it with Moses more easily.  Jacobs is more difficult.  She is just so darn right, so much.”

If the concept intrigues you, watching the video embedded in the CityLab article would be worth your time.  However, the operatic singing still doesn’t work for me.  I know it’s in English, but it still comes across as unintelligible caterwauling to me.

Given my apathy toward the art form, I won’t be booking a flight to Brooklyn to see “A Marvelous Order”.  But if the opera is successful enough to tour, or to offer a simulcast, I’ll partake, especially if I have a chance to review the libretto in advance so I’ll have a clue what’s being said.

Even if I never see “A Marvelous Order”, it still makes me smile to think that urbanist battles are now thought worthy of the operatic stage.  It’s proof that others see the value in the questions that matter to me and hopefully also to you.

In my next post, weather permitting, I’ll return to missing middle housing.  And if the weather doesn’t permit, I’ll figure out something else.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Induced Traffic Comes in Different Flavors

On several earlier occasions, I’ve written about the phenomenon of induced traffic.  In one post, I used a hypothetical Yosemite campground to illustrate the theory.  Several months before that, I yielded the floor to walkability expert Jeff Speck for a video explanation of induced traffic.

But for those who aren’t yet familiar with the concept, I’ll offer this short explanation.  Drivers have a limited tolerance for congestion.  When they encounter congestion above their tolerance, they find another route, defer their trip to another time, or redirect themselves to a less congested destination.

Therefore, when new traffic capacity is provided, perhaps through the construction of additional travel lanes, drivers who were previously avoiding trips began again to take those trips.  The result is that congestion, after an initial drop, soon returns the same level that it had before the construction, even in the absence of new development creating new trips.

This is a non-intuitive result that conflicts with our instinctive expectation that additional traffic capacity should result in reduced congestion.  But if we seriously consider our own travel decisions, deferring trips when possible to avoid congestion, the validity of the theory soon becomes clear.

This is also where I mention Robert Moses, who grabbed the reins of New York City public works and held them for more than four decades through the middle of the 20th century.  Moses was known for claiming that just one more expressway, freeway, or bridge would make New York City traffic flow freely forever.  He passed away still believing the argument, having failed, despite forty years of contrary examples, to have realized the error in his thinking.

Luckily for us, the lesson that eluded Moses has finally been grasped in the years since his passing.  As I’ve previously written, California is changing its environmental assessment rules to reflect the reality of induced traffic.  And there is a wealth of research and writing spreading the story of induced traffic.

Writing in City Lab, Eric Jaffe offers a simple graph showing the induced traffic effect.  And he notes that the only solutions that can seriously address the phenomenon are transit, transit-oriented development, and congestion pricing.

In Wired, Adam Mann also takes a look at induced traffic, reporting the work of researchers who note that the reverse of induced traffic is also true, that reducing travel lanes doesn’t necessarily cause additional congestion.  (Referring back again to Robert Moses, those who have studied the tussles between Moses and pioneering urbanist Jane Jacobs, may recall their fight over Moses’ plan to run an expressway through Washington Park, claiming that the failure to do so would result in gridlock.  Jacobs won the battle, Washington Park was preserved, and congestion didn’t noticeably change.  It should have been a lesson to Moses, but he wasn’t good at lessons.)

Mann also reports the warning that induced traffic may only be true over a limited range of traffic conditions, although the range likely covers most real world situations.  If a city were to take a two-lane Main Street and convert it to a ten-lane thoroughfare, it’s likely that congestion would be slow to return.  But it’s also likely that the downtown would have been destroyed.

Into this increasing understanding of induced traffic, Adam Millard-Ball, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, notes that, even before considering induced traffic, many of the trip projections for new development may be flawed.

Writing in Access, the transportation journal of the University of California, Millard-Ball reports on his research into the trip generation rates reported by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the bible on which most traffic studies are based.  He finds that the ITE numbers are consistently and significantly higher than the actual traffic generation results.

He points to several possible causes for the discrepancies.  ITE standards call for only successful projects to be measured, ignoring that a percentage of land development projects fall short of full success and therefore generate less traffic.  Also, the ITE only reports absolute trip numbers when marginal rates would give a better picture in many situations.  As an example, a new grocery store in an underserved portion of town might result in fewer vehicle miles traveled as shoppers can drive fewer miles to serve their needs, but the ITE manual only reports the absolute number of trips.

Combining the growing understanding of induced traffic and the Millard-Ball insights on the ITE numbers, yields a paradoxical view of a possible land development.  A hypothetical developer could be obligated to pay for traffic improvements based on ITE rates.  But when the project stumbles, fewer trips are generated.  However, induced traffic quickly claims the unused new capacity, resulting in congestion being the same as before the project.  The public now complains that city hall failed to require sufficient traffic improvements of the developer, even when the reality is that he was probably docked for too many improvements.

It’s a tangled mess, which only serves to reinforce the need, as noted by Jaffe, for congestion pricing, better transit, and transit-oriented development.

And to add one final twist, most of the analyses look at lane capacity as being the traffic improvement being claimed by induced traffic study.  But other traffic improvements could apparently also be subject to the same phenomenon.

Here in Petaluma, the intersection of E. Washington Street and S. McDowell Boulevard is the busiest intersection in town and is often heavily congested.  There are frequent public calls for improved signal timing, including a recent article in the Argus Courier noting the concerns about the intersection and reporting the comments of City staff on the signal timing options.

I have two comments on the story.  First, I know the City staff quoted and believe that they’re truly doing their best to improve the intersection.  But even more importantly, the traffic signals would be subject to the possibility of induced traffic.  Even in the unlikely event that a change could magically add 20 percent more capacity to the intersection, induced trips would soon claim that capacity, returning traffic congestion to its current level.

There are no easy answers.

Next time, I’ll add another insight to the E. Washington Street and S. McDowell Boulevard intersection challenge, an insight that has broad applicability and tells us much about how we view traffic.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Urbanist Thinking on the Rainier Avenue Connector

The connection of Rainier Avenue (possible alignment to the right) between McDowell Boulevard and Petaluma Boulevard North has long been an item of contention in Petaluma.  Much of the political spectrum has supported it, with a handful of notable holdouts.  In the most recent City Council elections, every candidate publicly supported its construction, some with more vigor than others.  And the public has been consistently, although not unanimously, strong in its support.

But despite thirty years of discussion, the connector hasn’t been built.  And that’s largely for one very good reason.  With the need to pass under Highway 101 and over the Petaluma River, the Rainier connector is expensive.  There are numerous alternative configurations and project elements, all of which have their own price tags, but $90 million is a good round number for finishing the Rainier connector, including an interchange with Highway 101. 

And $90 million is a huge chunk of money, nearly three times the current annual budget for all city services.

Despite the cost, Petaluma continues to toy with the possibility of the Rainier connector.  Most recently, a draft environmental impact report was delivered to the City Planning Department.  Construction funding still seems a remote possibility in the near future, but the Rainier connector remains a hot topic.

With the Rainier connector an on-going topic, it’s reasonable to ponder what an urbanist should view the proposed road.  It’s not an easy question to answer.

To begin, the primary rationale for the Rainier connection, traffic congestion relief, can be rejected.  It’s the argument that Robert Moses offered to New York City for forty years worth of roadway projects, only to have traffic become increasingly worse.

The problem is induced traffic, the trips that current local residents would have been making for the last few years, but have been deferring because of traffic on E. Washington Street.

Under the theory of induced traffic, the validity of which has been observed in many settings, a newly-opened Rainier connector would likely flow easily for a few months or even a couple of years, but would eventually become just as congested as E. Washington Street, even without any new local residents.  (Note: A dramatic increase in the price of gasoline or a vehicle-mileage tax might slow the uptake of new road capacity, but only the first of those seems even remotely possible.)

Simply put, if the Rainier connector was available, a family that has been happily patronizing a Mexican restaurant on their side of town would find a new favorite Mexican restaurant on the far side of town.  And they would drive there using the new roadway capacity.  As the sales tax revenue from a burrito is the same on either side of town, there would be no net gain to the city, but the primary reason for the Rainier connector would be gradually consumed.

On the pro-Rainier side, cities work best when there is a road grid that allows traffic to find more logical routes around town.  In the absence of the Rainier connector, and also of the proposed bridge across the Petaluma River between end of Caulfield Street and Petaluma Boulevard South, the Petaluma traffic pattern looks like an hourglass, with E. Washington Street as the choke point.  The Rainier connector would allow more logical routes between destinations. 

On other hand, completing the Rainier connector, like many major roadway projects, would likely spur new development.  And it seems likely that the development would be drivable suburban rather than walkable urban.  If the land along and near the Rainier connector was within the Central Petaluma Specific Plan, I’d feel better about the likely development pattern, but it’s not, at least as of today.

Lastly, the routing of Petaluma Transit is impeded by the absence of a Rainier connection.  Especially given the location of the transit yard at the intersection for McDowell Boulevard and Rainier Avenue, a connection to Petaluma Boulevard North would allow more effective routing and less deadhead time at the start and end of shifts.

So, with the traffic relief argument discarded, the balance comes down to improved routing for transit and private vehicles versus the risk of sprawl inducement.  It’s a close call, but I’ll come down on the side of improved routing and in favor of the Rainier connector.  And I’ll pair that decision with a hope that future City Councils will resist the siren call of sprawl and find a way to make Rainier an urban, not suburban, corridor.

But the decision was close.   Given that the net benefits are slight, is the Rainier connector worth $90 million?  To me, it’s not.  I can point to far better uses of $90 million.

If the infrastructure fairy tapped on my shoulder tomorrow and gave me a check for $90 million, how would I prioritize the dollars?  At the top of my list would be infrastructure needed to get urbanist projects, such as the Station Area and North Water Street, underway. 

Next, I’d address the deferred maintenance of streets near downtown and other areas of potential walkable development.

Only with those two needs met would I look toward the Rainier connector.

Now, I need to find that infrastructure fairy with the deep pockets.

 

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Book Review: “Wrestling with Moses”

In my last two posts, I reviewed first the book for which Jane Jacobs is best known and then the most comprehensive biography of her frequent adversary, Robert Moses.  Today, I’ll bring the two together in a third book review.

“Wrestling with Moses, How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City” (2009) by Anthony Flint contains abbreviated biographies of Jacobs and Moses and accounts of the three fields on which they did battle.

The author doesn’t pretend to be impartial.  Jacobs is clearly his hero and he presents her as the valiant underdog to the shadowy overlord.  And, of course, he celebrates when she wins all three battles.

“Wrestling with Moses” is the most lightweight of the three books.  It is a light and easy read.  Despite the less intense nature of the book, there are still valuable insights to be gained.

The first is the amount of momentum that can be acquired by someone like Moses.   By the time Jacobs first opposed him, he had been the dominant personality in shaping the configuration of New York City for nearly three decades.  He had developed an aura of inevitability.

Most New Yorkers shrugged when they learned of Moses’ his next plan and assumed that he knew best.  Many of the remainder assumed that he was unstoppable.  Very few were like Jacobs, willing to fight his proposals.  And those who fought found a playing field that was stacked overwhelmingly again them.  Planning commissions were filled with people who owed allegiance to Moses.  City Hall was filled employees who knew that their careers could be sidetracked, perhaps forever, if they failed to support Moses.

From the perspective of a half century, we might look at the three battles won by Jacobs, over Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village redevelopment, and the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and assume that Moses regularly sustained defeats.  He didn’t.  These three lost battles were so inconsequential in the scope of his life that they were omitted from his biography, a biography that ran over 1,100 pages but still couldn’t find room for Jane Jacobs.  Nor are there many defeats mentioned in the pages that stayed in the book.

Next, it is insightful to look at the tactics employed by Jacobs.  Mostly she and her adherents relied on grassroots organizing and mobilization.  But Jacobs was willing to slip into civil disobedience when required and was arrested on multiple occasions as a result.  If she was still with us today, she’d likely be in the “inner fringe” of the Occupy movement, willing to proudly march when the masses hit the street, but looking with abhorrence at the Oakland City Hall break-in or the near-violence at the Port of Oakland.

She respected the fabric of civil society.  Indeed, she celebrated it in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”.  But she was willing to test its margins when she felt that the situation called for it.

Lastly, it is interesting to note the story of Jane Jacobs as developer.  Following the defeat of Moses’ urban redevelopment plan for Greenwich Village, Jacobs and other local residents formed an organization to build housing that they thought would fit better within the context of their neighborhood.

One of their proposed buildings was eventually constructed, but as the costs rose, various building features had to be eliminated.  The architectural critics panned the final result and many Village residents were unhappy with the resulting rents.  Jacobs fell prey to the same issues that trouble many developers.  Even the best-intentioned developer can’t avoid the pressure that the marketplace imposes.  It’s something to remember the next time a development in your community falls short of ideal.

One weakness of the Jacobs versus Moses premise is that nowhere in the book do Jacobs and Moses come face to face.  Indeed, they probably never met in life.  However, we are given two humorous stories of their distant interplay. 

Publisher Bennett Cerf sent an advance copy of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” to Moses for his review.  Moses returned it with a note reading, “I am returning this book you sent me.  Aside from the fact that it is intemperate and inaccurate, it is also libelous. … Sell this junk to someone else.”

On the other side, Jacobs and her husband Bob received an advance copy of “The Power Broker”.  They lay in bed, trading sections back and forth, alternating between horror and amusement over the depth of Moses’ duplicity laid bare for the first time.

If you have the time, either “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” or “The Power Broker” is worth the effort.  But if time doesn’t permit, then “Wrestling with Moses” is a fine introduction to the urban planning antipodes represented by towering personalities of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Book Review: “The Power Broker”

Robert Caro’s monumental work on the life of Robert Moses is a long and often difficult read, over 1,100 pages of frequent slow going though myriad details.  But “The Power Broker” (1974) is compelling throughout.

Moses is a fascinating case study and Caro explores him well.  As a young man of status, Moses was an enthusiast for municipal reform.  He devoted long, virtually unpaid, hours toward the cause of better government.  But his efforts went nowhere, leaving him with little apparent future.  When a new door opened into state government, he charged in, discarding his earlier beliefs and becoming everything that he abhorred in his earlier life.  For much of his career, people would interact with him, thinking that he remained Robert Moses the Reformer, only to realize too late that he was Robert Moses the Power Broker.

It’s often said, mostly in jest but with a small kernel of longing, that what this country needs is a few years under a benevolent dictator.  The best response to that yearning is Robert Moses.   In many ways, he was benevolent.  He didn’t accumulate power for the purpose of using it for personal gain.  But he built an indestructible power base and failed to use it for the betterment of his city.

As the Administrator of the Triborough Bridge Authority, and with ties of mutual financial benefit to other local Authorities, banks, contractors, and labor unions, he was impregnable.  And from his position of clout, he could force New York City to conform to his vision.  Unfortunately, as a child of privilege in the early years of the century, before the automobile began to choke the city, his vision was being rapidly outdated by the burgeoning metropolis.  Also, he never learned to drive, but instead worked productively in the backseat while being driven around town.  Thus, he had neither empathy nor sympathy for the drivers stuck in traffic around him.

Being isolated within his power base, he was also isolated himself from criticism.  He couldn’t realize how flawed his vision had become.

Among the mistakes in his approach to public works, he always favored cars over transit.  He frequently didn’t allow acquisition of a right-of-way width that would allow rail transit to later run alongside his freeways.  On the expressways serving his string of parks on Long Island, he specified bridge clearances that effectively excluded buses from the routes.

When doing routing studies, he was willing to undermine solid, working class neighborhoods, even if alternative alignments were available.

He always preferred bridges over tunnels, even when engineering analyses showed that a tunnel was the superior alternative.  Perhaps he wanted to view the massive structure that he brought into being.  Or perhaps he wished to gaze out over the city, his city, from the elevated deck of a new bridge.

When it came to urban redevelopment, he preferred leveling blocks of housing which could then be replace with the massive towers that posterity has proven to be so flawed.  Moses knew how the poor should live, even if the poor had different ideas.

Nor were Moses’ effects limited to New York City.  As his prestige grew, he was often asked to consult for other large cities.  His teams would quickly sketch plans obliterating working class neighbors to accommodate grand freeways to far-flung suburbs.

To some, Moses is still remembered as “the man who got things done”.  And he did.  But if much of what he did was increasingly wrong-headed and failed to adequately prepare New York City for the future, “getting things done” doesn’t seem like a favorable encomium.

Two indelible images from the book revolve about the preservation of Castle Clinton, a long-decommissioned battery near the lower tip of Manhattan.  The castle, which was built for the War of 1812, never fired a shot in anger, but gained the affection of New Yorkers as the long-time home of the New York Aquarium and an even longer-time favored trysting place.

When the need for another crossing between Brooklyn and Manhattan became evident, Moses, to no one’s surprise, proposed that the crossing be a bridge.  Others proposed a tunnel.  One of many reasons to prefer a tunnel was that the bridge approach would have passed through the site of Castle Clinton, requiring that the old battery be demolished.

The tunnel proposal eventually won, one of the few losses that Moses sustained.  However, he had already barricaded the castle from public access.  In an act of spite, he now claimed that it had been damaged by the underground blasting for the tunnel and would still require demolition.

The bluebloods of New York doubted Moses’ claims, but lacked the information to support their case.   A pair of amateur New York historians, one of them in his 80s, clambered over the barricades under the cover of darkness to assess the actual condition.  They found that much of Castle Clinton remained in place and was fully restorable.

Moses was again forced to yield.  But the Mayor of New York remained concerned that that Moses’ rapacious grasp would overcome the temporary setbacks and eventually claim Castle Clinton.  To stop Moses, he asked that the Federal government accept ownership of the castle.  The national government, under long-time Moses adversary Franklin Roosevelt, quickly agreed.

From the most powerful mayor in the world asking for the Federal government to restrain a public servant to a pair of respectable but aging New Yorkers feeling around in the dark to uncover Moses’ duplicity, this story shows the range of efforts that were required to deter Robert Moses from his goals.  It’s an indication of how badly Moses was able to contort the world of public works to his own ends.

Castle Clinton remains in place today.  It’s now overlooked by lower Manhattan skyscrapers, but still serves as a favored meeting place.

When I picked “The Power Broker” from my bookshelf, there were two episodes of Moses’ life that particularly interested me, his battles with Jane Jacobs and his refusal to accommodate Walter O’Malley that resulted in the Dodgers moving west.  (For Giant fans, if the Dodgers hadn’t moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season, it’s not clear that the Giants would have moved to San Francisco.  So you owe a bit of thanks to Robert Moses for the 2010 World Championship.)

To my surprise, neither O’Malley nor Jacobs received much mention in the book.  In an online interview I found after I’d finished the book, Caro said that he’d written detailed sections on Jacobs and O’Malley, but his editors felt that he had to reduce the length of the book.  So the two stories that most interested me were left on the cutting room floor.

I may have picked up the book for the wrong reasons, but was rewarded with an engrossing read.   If you’re willing to work your way through it, you’ll be rewarded with images and lessons that will remain with you for years.  And will likely affect the way you look at urban planning.

As a far as a lesson for new urbanism, it would be to never trust an overly powerful public servant, or for that matter an overly powerful private developer.  Even if they can “get things done”, their vision may run astray.  Even if the progress runs a little slower, listening to and acting upon regular public input is essential.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)