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Sunday, May 20th, 2012

New York Considers Parking Meter Privatization

According to the Wall Street Journal, New York City is on the verge of soliciting interest in some form of parking meter privatization.

In considering this, it is important to understand the nature of parking meters. Parking meters aren’t a capital asset like a bridge or highway. Nor are they a real government service like garbage collection or parks. Rather, parking meters are an urban planning tool that cities use to manage access to precious on street real estate for the benefit of the city and neighborhoods. Because neighborhood business conditions are dynamic, and because the best rate to charge and even the best use of that real estate (which may not be parking) change over time, this makes parking meters an extremely bad fit for privatization in the style of Chicago.

Fortunately New York says that they are “not looking to sell the system” and that they will not relinquish control over setting rates. Those are both positives. While Chicago got it wrong, I think there is certainly plenty of scope for involving the private sector in the management of parking. For example, who cares who takes the quarters out of a meter? I sure don’t.

Also, the private sector could potentially implement new technology better and faster. We are on the cusp of a sea change in parking management. One of the key rationales for parking privatization has been the political difficulty of raising rates. But a new system being piloted in San Francisco, embedding ideas from UCLA professor Donald Shoup, points a better way forward. The idea is to bring congestion pricing to parking, by letting the market decide the value of the spot. The computerized meters there dynamically vary parking prices to maintain 80% meter occupancy. People who want and need a spot can then always find one, but spaces don’t go to waste. It gets the city council out of the business of setting parking rates, and depoliticizes them. There could conceivably be many other ways to both more efficiently manage parking and better deploy technology.

However, the devil is in the details. Private companies aren’t in the business of making investments unless they get a return. So what do you promise them to invest in new technology? The WSJ quotes a NYC official as saying, “Our process has been to consider locking in the current performance, and, if it makes sense, transferring the risk to a third party.” This sounds nice in theory, but to get someone to take on risk requires compensating them to do so. I always saw risk transfer as a key benefit of privatization, but through compensation clauses in contracts, it is clear very little risk is often transferred in these deals.

Thus beyond the concept of doing privatization right, there’s the enormous focus that must be brought to bear on contracting. As I’ve come to discover, too many of these agreements are copy/paste jobs with clauses that really disadvantage the public. New York needs to do better. A key is to make sure the term is limited. I’d say anything longer than around seven years is inappropriate.

In that regard I’m sorry that former Deputy Mayor Steve Goldsmith is no longer around. He’s someone who did many privatizations in Indianapolis nearly 20 years ago. While he’s perhaps more favorable to parking meter privatization than I am, I think he appreciated the need to get the details right.

In any case, New York City is probably right to give this a look, but they should realize that they are playing with fire. More than anything else, the most important thing is to make sure the public of New York doesn’t end up getting burned.

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

Density, Vibrancy, and Opportunity Zones by Tory Gattis

[ Here's the second part of Tory Gattis' take on vibrancy and car based urbanism. - Aaron. ]

Last week I tried taking Jane Jacobs’ four tenants of vibrancy and applying them to the car-based city, describing the concept of the mobility/draw zone. It can be roughly summarized in this excerpt:

So the four tenets of vibrancy transformed for the car-based city get reduced to two:

1. Loose zoning/permitting constraints to enable both a wide diversity of businesses as well as population density where there is consumer demand (apartments, condos, townhomes)
2. Maximized mobility with a well-designed, high-capacity arterial and freeway network

These two principles maximize the population within the largest possible mobility/draw zone, which gives vibrancy its best chance of reaching critical mass and flourishing.

The next day, I promised these two topics (among others) in a future post. This is that post.

• Rename “mobility/draw-zones” to “opportunity zones”, since they represent the opportunity region for a consumer, explorer, job seeker, or business owner – and the larger it is and the more people it has, the larger the opportunity and the resulting vibrancy.
• How Manhattan and Houston have very similar opportunity zones despite dramatic differences in urban form, and have the potential for similar levels of vibrancy in some respects.

Density is a big focus of debate in today’s urban planning. Again, if your assumed mobility mode is 3mph walking, or walking plus mass transit, you need a lot of people in a small area to create vibrancy within the mobility zone. In Jacob’s world, mobility is basically fixed and density is variable. In the car-based world, density is relatively fixed (well below Jacob’s standard of >100 dwellings/acre because of the need to accommodate cars and parking plus the majority desire for single-family residential living or mid-density apartments), but mobility is variable depending on the road network and traffic congestion – which can substantially affect the size of the mobility zone. Since what really counts is the population within the 10-20 minute mobility zone – as a proxy for easily accessible diversity and vibrancy – lets take a look at some estimated mobility zones in Manhattan and Houston:

* Average Manhattan taxi covers 1.9 miles in 10 minutes, ~12 mph (source)
(note that some Manhattan scenarios actually show a mobility zone population larger than the actual population of Manhattan, due to the circular nature of the model vs. Manhattan’s actual long, thin-island geography – but it still serves its illustrative purpose)

Several interesting observations come out of this table:

• A car-based city with a strong freeway network has the potential to match the vibrancy and diversity of a high-density city like Manhattan. This is not to say that Houston and New York are equivalent. This is an analysis of the diversity available in a typical, everyday 15-minute trip. Special occasion trips (museums, sporting events, concerts, theater, etc.) have a much higher acceptable commute time, and therefore draw on a larger area. New York is a much older and larger city that can draw on a regional metro population of 21 million, substantially more than Houston’s 5 million.
• The classic “monotony of the suburban edge cities” phenomenon is explained by looking at the all-arterial drive scenario, which is common on the fringes. The fringes also drop population density rapidly as they get farther out, further reducing the mobility zone population and therefore diversity/vibrancy (ex: the mobility zone of interest for suburban Sugar Land in southwest Houston is to the north and east, not south or west).
• Los Angeles was the first large-scale car-based city, and it is often not held in high regard. Why? LA has many arterials with overloaded, slow freeways and no frontage roads (although they do have higher density to somewhat make up for it). That drives LA towards the “all-arterial” scenario, or the middle scenario at best. Houston has a strong frontage-road network with substantial retail, office, and other commercial services – the car-based city equivalent of “vibrant street retail.” Even commercial/retail space not on the frontage roads is often within a couple minutes of a frontage road. This allows Houston to make the third scenario a relatively common one, with it’s attendant high access to diversity within the mobility zone.
• Jacobs describes a “density dead zone” of greater than 12 dwellings per acre but less than 100 dwellings per acre – too dense to be suburban but too sparse to be really urban. These areas almost never achieve vibrancy or diversity. Arterial-driven car-based cities with weak freeway networks seem to be the car-based equivalent of this “dead zone” with low density and relatively low-to-moderate mobility.

Comments welcome and encouraged.

This post originally appeared in Houston Strategies on May 11, 2006.

Thursday, March 29th, 2012

The Great Reordering of the Urban Hierarchy

My latest blog post is online over at New Geography. It is called “The Great Reordering of the Urban Hierarchy.” In it, I look at how the relentless expansion of the US federal government and the “spiky world” forces of globalizations are revamping the urban hierarchy of the top tier cities in the United States. While not a definitive view, it seems that New York is going from strength to strength, while Washington, DC emerges as America’s new “Second City.” This has been to the detriment of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston. It’s controversial to be sure, but I hope you’ll enjoy it. Comments definitely encouraged on this one.

Update: Richard Florida has more to say on this topic over at The Atlantic Cities..

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

Manhatta

That great site How to Be a Retronaut pointed me at this great 1921 silent film of New York City by Paul Strand. It’s called “Manhatta” and provides a unique look at NYC at the early part of the 20th century. If the video doesn’t display, click here.

Also on the Retronaut recently was this 1925 “infographic” from Popular Science Monthly about how we may live and travel in 1950, and how this new world might solve congestion problems…..

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

NYC Energy Use Infographic

The Guardian data blog is running a very cool interactive infographic of energy use by block in New York City. Apparently it originated at the Modi Research Group at Columbia University. Here’s a non-interactive screen shot to whet your appetite:

Sunday, March 11th, 2012

The Sorry State of American Transport

We constantly read about the infrastructure crisis in America. I’ll have more to say on this at a future date, but it is pretty clear that we need to spend more money in a whole lot of areas: airports, roads and bridges, public transportation, and more.

Yet it’s very easy to see that so much of what ails transport has nothing to do with a lack of funds and everything to do with a lack of will. I took a train ride on the Northeast corridor last week that really drove it home to me.

Start with the sorry state of Penn Station in New York City, America’s busiest train station. (In fact, it’s the busiest transportation facility of any type in the United States, if Wikipedia can be believed). Yes, the place is a depressing underground dump. Yes, there used to be a glorious train station there that was demolished in the 1960s. Yes, we probably need to invest many billions in upgrades.

Yet is it a lack of funds that make the three agencies that call it home – Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and the Long Island Railroad – act as though the others don’t exist? The three railroads have completely separate ticketing areas, signage systems, etc. This is hardly the only case in America. For some reason, Amtrak seems to despise sharing ticket agents with other carriers. There are separate windows for Amtrak and commuter lines everywhere I’ve been. Given that many journeys include both commuter and inter-city segments, this seems crazy. If you can’t have integrated ticketing (and actually, I don’t see why you can’t), at least you should be able to have a single agent help you.

The worst example of this I know is in Providence, where Amtrak monopolizes the four ticket windows. If you want to buy an MBTA T ticket, you have to go to a cafe next door. This tiny little coffee shop found a way to sell both pastries and train tickets (albeit from separate registers), so why can’t Amtrak figure out how to sell two kinds of tickets?

Also, as near as I can tell, there’s no way to actually get your Amtrak ticket online. You can book a reservation, but then you need to get a physical ticket printed at the station, either from a kiosk or an agent. (If there’s a way to avoid this, please let me know).

I decided to get my ticket at the window. The line was very short and I was early in any case. When I got there, some guy with his kids was at the window screaming at the agent about a problem with their tickets. I chalked this up to one of those cases where the frustrations of travel just cause somebody to snap. But then as I walked up to the window, the person next to me was also having a similar problem with their ticket and was having an animated discussion with an agent who didn’t seem to care. Fortunately, I had no such issues, but the agent I had to talk to was extremely surly and kept asking me to repeat myself over and over. Who would want to put themselves through such an experience? Customer service is clearly something that should also be within Amtrak’s control.

Amtrak markets themselves as having wi-fi. But on the train itself, as anyone who has ridden the NEC knows, the wi-fi is basically unusable. How much capital investment would it take to get working wi-fi?

In short, though the facilities can somewhat be excused as resulting from insufficient capital funding and bad decisions decades ago, there’s so much that could be done right now to upgrade the passenger experience it’s not even funny.

It’s the same with airports. While a few American cities like Indianapolis and Detroit have upgraded their terminals, too many key gateways remain depressingly dreary and non-functional. While some overseas places like Heathrow certainly would give any American airport a run for its money in the Hall of Shame, the general experience of flying to someplace like Madrid, Singapore, or Tokyo is like night and day versus the US.

Key among the worst offenders again is New York City, especially LaGuardia. Matt Chaban at the New York Observer recently wrote a piece that is a good overview of the depressing state: “Terminal Condition – How New York’s Airports Crashed and Burned.”

This is certainly not news to anyone who has flown to New York. But again, the vast billions it would take to replace these decrepit facilities is only part of the problem. Nobody forces America to put its passengers through the “TSA experience.” Last time I flew I was delayed at security while agents patted down some guy that looked like he was around 85 years old who apparently hadn’t stripped down quite far enough to go through the full body scanner. Somehow other advanced nations manage to run safe air travel systems without resorting to this.

While we are waiting around for funding issues to be resolved, wouldn’t it be nice if our governments and various travel companies actually focused on fixing some of these straightforward problems with coordination, ticketing, and customer service? It’s hard to take their capital requests seriously if they aren’t going to do what they can now.

Thursday, March 1st, 2012

Transit Use Up, Commute Times Down in New York City

My latest blog post is online over at New Geography. It’s called “Commuting in New York City, 2000-2010.” In it, I examine some of the trends in commuting over the last decade in New York, discovering that transit use and commute mode share rose strongly, while commute times (including the percentage of people with ultra-long 90+ minute commutes) declined. I’m not sure we can draw a direct causal link between the two, but the trends are encouraging generally. I would expect future ridership gains to be constrained by the overcrowded state of much of the system and the high cost and extreme difficulty of adding mainline capacity. Some of the current mega-projects may help though, albeit at ruinous prices.

Here’s a look at transit commute mode share:

Here’s a look at the percentage of commutes that are 90 minutes or longer:

There’s a lot more charts in article, include a look at mode share for biking and walking, vehicle ownership, etc. So check it out.

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

The Software of Placemaking by Rod Stevens

Using the tech metaphors so common now, we have tended to focus on the “hardware” of place, the land, bricks and mortar. But maybe it is time to think more in terms of the “software”, of how we program and run places day to day.

There are two masters who have done this with real estate, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, and they have both been at this with single properties for more than 20 years. One is Dan Biederman of the Bryant Park Corporation, who has made that Midtown Manhattan space one of the world’s most densely used parks. The other is Ron Sher, who has turned the Crossroads Mall in Bellevue, Washington into the kind of active public people place that suburban communities lust after.

Before looking at their work, however, consider the term “property management”, which practically speaking means “property maintenance”: the oversight of building systems, cleaning, security, landscaping and utilities. “Asset management”, on the other hand, is largely a financial function, overseeing fixed expenses like insurance and property taxes, lease negotiation, investor reporting and the occasional repositioning or disposition. Real estate is one of the few industries where many owners farm out marketing, to brokers, many of whom have only an episodic relationship with a property. That’s why these two men are so interesting – they have given special attention to the public space which usually gets only swept or blown. In doing so, however, they have created notable value around them.

Out in Bellevue, Washington, one of Joel Garreau’s “Edge Cities” on the east side of Seattle, the Crossroads shopping center went up at the intersection of two arterials in the first wave of growth in the 1960s. This was before a new freeway, Highway 520, would reach eastwards to a town that was virtually unknown then, Redmond. Crossroads was an enclosed shopping center, but with just 40 acres it was definitely a “junior regional”. When enclosed malls reached their zenith of construction in the 1980s, most would be twice that size.

That’s why, by the late 1980’s, Crossroads was like the flotsam on the beach left after the wave of growth had gone by. The new store chains had followed the freeways out to the new shopping centers. Apartment houses nearby had deteriorated, and gangs showed up in the mall.

When Ron Sher and his partners bought the mall in 1988, one developer had already tried to turn it around and failed. It is surprising, in fact, that Crossroads was not torn down, for this was a period when developers replaced many of the older junior regionals with serpentine power centers that ranged big box stores along one another facing a single parking lot. Lacking freeway exposure, however, this was not an option, so in many ways the centers own failure saved it. Fortunately the price was very low, so carry costs were much less of an issue than in most acquisitions.

Sher and his partners did make some large initial capital improvements, such as lopping off one end to build a new grocery store that connected with the rest of the mall, but his main emphasis was on fixing the basics of the center. Had Sher simply re-tenanted the shopping center, however, he might have failed, but he also began to program the shopping center for activity not just in the stores but in the malls themselves.

Every larger shopping center has its car shows and seasonal choirs, but Sher built a stage at the center of the mall and hired inexpensive bands on Friday night to play and draw in movie-goers an hour or so before show times. Near the entrance to the grocery store he installed a giant chess set now attracts some of the top players in the region. Just inside the main entrance, in the mall itself, he set a magazine seller up in business, and added a Starbucks and Half Price Books store that is an island of reading. On a typical morning there are about two dozen people sitting and drinking coffee there, an hour or two before the main mall stores open.

One of the most important things Sher did was to take back the marketing of the tenant spaces, by setting up his own brokerage house. This gave him early and first-hand knowledge which chain stores were in the market, so he could catch them before they signed with better-located but slower acting centers.

It was also about this time that Microsoft moved its headquarters to a freeway site about a mile north. Few people outside the area know how much Microsoft has done to diversity the region with highly skilled tech workers from other countries. Fully one-third of the people in the area now speak a language other than English in the home. Many of these new workers were young people sharing an apartment or a house.

Rather than leasing to Burger King, QFC or even Panda Express, Sher leased his food court spaces to locally-owned ethnic operators. Go there at a lunch hour and the place is crammed with hundreds if not thousands of Microsoft workers. Their presence in the area also led to the upgrading of the nearby apartment houses, which, over time, have filled with more and more middle-class families new to this country. Sher targeted their needs with stores like JoAnne Fabrics, Michaels, Reclinerland, Dress Barn and Old Navy. He also catered to everyday needs by signing a branch of the public library, a motor vehicles office and a community policing station. Ann Taylor and Z Gallerie might have brought more prestige, but these tenants brought more everyday traffic.

So did increased programming in the malls. The calendar for a week this January shows about two dozen non commercial events, including musical performances; free tax advice; CPR lessons in Spanish; translation clinics in Hindi, Korean, Chinese and Russian; and knitting and crochet classes. Outside, Sher has met the needs of nearby apartment residents by turning an under-used part of the parking lot into community gardens. Longer term, he plans to create a plaza that will be wrapped with mid-rise housing. It’s the kind of multi-hour gathering place envisioned in town center plans, but rarely realized.

If Crossroads is an example of a profoundly suburban place reborn, Bryant Square is a example of a profoundly urban place reborn. Located at 6th and 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan, right behind the main branch of the public library, it is hard to believe that this place was once known as “Needle Park” because of the number of drug users there.

Biederman is an unusual guy to be known for running a public park, for he has degrees from both Princeton and Harvard, and he seems to know people at the Bloomberg level. But Biederman doesn’t work for Bloomberg or the City of New York. He works for and runs the Bryant Park Corporation, which is a non-profit that contracts with the city to manage the park.

How is a person who is runs a public park able to operate at such high levels? Because he has created such value around him. A study by a major accounting firm found that his turn-around had created hundreds of millions of dollars of value around the park.

The interesting thing about this park turn-around is that it is the reverse of the classic redevelopment play in which governments use their powers of eminent domain to tear down and resell land at a discounted value, and then use the increased property taxes to pay back the financing. Financially, that strategy relies on leveraging just the land value of a place, and even when it works, it usually takes ten or 20 years to realize significant results. Biederman’s strategy was to focus on what wasn’t working, the public places, and to use the improvement there to draw people and value back to buildings that were already in place, leveraging their full value, both land and improvements. Not only was this lower risk, but the return period was much shorter. Today he takes no public money to run the place, operating solely on funds from a local improvement district. Are such improvement districts the wave of the future, in lieu of traditional redevelopment?

A couple of core principles guides his work. One is opening up the park to the gaze of passers-by, a kind of “eyes on the park” strategy that made it safer for everyday people. A second is a focus on programming, to create events and activities that draw people there “6/16/12” or six days a week, 16 hours a day, 12 months a year. A third principle is providing public services at private quality standards. The lobby of the restrooms, for example, has large, real flower arrangements worthy of a Four Seasons hotel. The bathrooms there have made it a nominee for the “America’s Best Restroom” award.

Like Ron Sher, with his Peruvian flute bands, Biederman has not been afraid to buy activity. Biederman paid a New Jersey bocce ball club to change its location and play in his park, for he realized that it would draw on-lookers. He has a seasonal outdoor skating rink that is free, compared to $15 at Rockefeller Center seven blocks north. Biederman knows who his customers are, for he sends people out with clickers at different times of the day to count them, and his goal is to fill in the slack hours with activity, like movies on warm Saturday nights in the summer.

One of the most important things about Bryant Park is that Biederman trusts the public, collectively. The bathrooms are one sign of that. Another is the chairs, which are not bolted down. You can pick them up and move them, but try take one away and people will stop you or call one of the maintenance people in evidence. In fact, like Disneyland, part of the perception of quality in this place is simply seeing those people moving around and working.

What Sher and Biederman have both done is to fine-tune the management of places, in such a way that people feel it is theirs. It is true that private coffee houses are gathering places, but there is a rush and hub-bub that with each whoosh of the cappuccino machine reminds patrons that they are essentially sitting on rented seats. Sher and Biederman have created ease.

Back to the computer analogy: one of the essential questions for the upgrade of Apple’s operating systems is backwards integration: how many old applications should they continue to support, and at what cost to speed and elegance and new features? This is the same question for effectively managing and programming real estate, be that a place to live, work, learn, shop or play. What Sher and Biederman have shown is the value and success that comes from paying attention to real and immediate needs. Get the basics right, and your customers will come along with you and draw new ones as well.

Also by Rod Stevens:
The 31-Flavors of Urban Redevelopment

Rod Stevens is a business development consultant on Bainbridge Island WA, specializing in urban ventures.

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Alley, Economic Security, Guadalajara

I have a few miscellaneous items for you today. First I’ll highlight this brief piece from Chicago reporter Tracy Swartz, who rode all 139 Chicago bus routes end to end.

Next, an interactive infographic on Silicon Valley (California) vs. Silicon Alley (New York). I clipped it slightly to fit my blog template, so to get a full sized version, or if it doesn’t display for you, click on over to the University of North Carolina site where it came from.

Economic Security Report Card

The Urban Institute also put out an interactive map that let’s you explore economic security in US metros. They’ve got various factors that go into this, and while you can’t add your own, you can adjust the weightings on theirs to create your own overall score. This one won’t fit on my page, so you’ll have to click on over to check it out. Here’s a static screen shot for you, however.

Via RecreActiva – Guadalajara’s Ciclovia

Streetfilms did a nice short piece on the the Ciclovia program in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second city. (If the video doesn’t display, click here).

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Planes, Trains, Automobiles, and Silicon Subways

Flowing Data carried a very interesting infographic showing Foursquare checkins on planes, trains, and automobiles across the United States. Check it out:

New York’s Silicon Subway

NYU’s Rudin Center also put out an interesting infographic, this one of technology startups in New York mapped along the R-train subway:

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