Rich Mintz  

From the Brooklyn Paper via Curbed: downzoning fever is  coming to my old neighborhood Boerum Hill.  The worst of the sore-thumb inappropriate development is probably over for a while, given that the money stopped flowing 18 months ago, but it will still be good to have clearer rules in place.

Once you’re looking for it, you see it everywhere. Clearview’s starting to show up on ordinary street signs (the green ones on every corner that say, e.g., “Broadway” and “Fulton St”). Just this evening I saw a “Clinton St” Clearview street sign here, and multiple Clearview street signs in Chatham Square, all looking spanking new.

Also, the green point-of-interest signs I mentioned are called “trailblazer signs” by the DOT.

Regarding the decades-out-of-date Ed Koch sign: we visually pinpointed the location tonight as we went past at 60mph, and it’s within a block or two of Southern Boulevard and Leggett Avenue in the Bronx.

I’m in an Amtrak train in Penn Station waiting for departure to Washington. This is train number 95, a through train to Newport News, although most of the passengers appear to be ordinary Northeast Regional travelers like me.

Three observations today:

(1) Who is the woman on the main PA system in Penn Station during the day shift? I really like her voice: authoritative, knowledgeable, confident, calm.

(2) I don’t understand the point of the ticket-checking in the Amtrak terminal at the track gates. It obviously isn’t security, because all the tracks are accessible via unguarded open doors on the lower concourse.

Most people wait for their trains to be posted on the big board, and then rush to a chokepoint of a gate to stand in line and show their tickets — but why? If you go down the escalator and stand at the little monitor, you can see the train posted at the very same time it appears on the big board — and then walk right onto the track through the open door, beating most of the crowd.

Even better, the ticketed waiting areas have separate terminals showing arrivals as well as departures, just like in the airport. The departure terminal shows what’s on the big board, but if you’re waiting for a through train (as most Penn Station Amtrak passengers are), your train will show up on the arrivals monitor five or ten minutes before the track is posted on the big board. (See train no. 95 in the photo below.). If you trust the laws of physics — as I do — then you can assume that a train that arrives at track no. 10 will also depart from track no. 10, and head for the lower-level door as soon as the arrival track is posted.

(3) Hooray for the quiet car — which not only exists on most Amtrak trains nowadays but also seems to be enforced, often to library standards — from which i am writing you now.

Via BNET: utilities are eager for the coming of electric cars — nothing would make them happier than to have a meaningful fraction of the country’s transportation energy flowing through their delivery systems. But there’s a systemic disconnect that you may not be thinking of (I didn’t, until I read this).

Most of the trends in favor of plug-in vehicles are strongest in densely populated urban cores. The city is obviously where the people are. It’s often where the disposable income is, where the densest “green” sentiment is, and where the willingness to spend the one in the service of the other can often be found, It’s also, frankly, where you’ll find people who can most easily tolerate the compromises associated with electric cars (smaller passenger and cargo capacities, shorter ranges), because their lifestyles are already organized around less frequent trips and less hauling. This in part is due to the presence of alternatives, in the form of community infrastructure that’s already built and paid for, social habits like “walking your own groceries home,” and traditional market responses like neighborhood delivery.

Unfortunately, electric cars will only begin to gain market share with the advent of a charging infrastructure that’s as convenient (all things being equal) as the existing filling station infrastructure. That’s a very high bar to clear, and it’s much higher in congested urban areas like New York, where even filling stations (whose economics are clear and long established) are disappearing, crowded out by other land uses with (presumably) better short-term returns.

What this presumably means is a couple of things:

(1) In the US, initial electric car adoption will start off highest in certain affluent suburbs, and will be driven largely by in-home garage charging infrastructure, at the will of individual homeowners. This isn’t optimal for society: on balance, electric cars probably do more social good per unit in Hoboken or Somerville, where average trips are shorter and the marginal congestion externalities are greater, than in Santa Monica or the San Fernando Valley. But Santa Monica and Studio City are where the “green” money is, so expect the fun to start there.

(2) There’s a network effect at play here, so if you believe that widespread adoption of electric cars sooner rather than later would be good for society, you should also support subsidies for early development of public charging infrastructure so that the tipping point comes sooner. It probably doesn’t matter how those subsidies are structured — the more active the public sector is able to be, the more quickly the public charging infrastructure will grow.

(3) What I’m waiting for: car sharing (on the Zipcar model) paired with electric vehicles and charging “docks” where the cars live. Zipcar is doubtless already heading in this direction. This will require consumer-friendly (i.e., idiotproof) “miles remaining” indicators and dependable batteries (you wouldn’t want to end up unexpectedly dead in the middle of nowhere because the car was mistaken about how much range it had left), not to mention some consumer retraining (“sir, before I complete your reservation, please acknowledge your awareness that this is a short-range vehicle by saying the word ‘yes’ after the tone”), and there will be hiccups, but in the long run this model will work, and an early version of it will probably be here relatively soon, in the context of the electric car adoption curve.

Remember when views of sweeping, empty new highways were visions of economic health and progress, emblems of the future? I do miss the simplicity of those days, which I’m (barely) old enough to remember…

I finished reading Metatropolis tonight, an anthology of interrelated dystopian-future urbanist short stories edited by John Scalzi. (I heard about it on his blog.) The book is just out in the US — I preordered it in hardcover, which gives you a sense of how eagerly I awaited it — and I bumped it ahead of everything else in the queue, even the books that I’d already started, and read it beginning to end.

I wasn’t disappointed. This is a kind of sci-fi I’ve always liked: urban and social in orientation, set in a future or alternative present that’s a recognizable evolution (or imaginary transformation) of our own. In this case the transformation is far less than you’d see in, say, Ursula Le Guin; this is fully recognizable as our realistic near future, the way that (say) Oryx and Crake is.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s nanotechnology here and there, along with Internet goggles (described in detail as to their function) that would fit right into a Rudy Rucker or Cory Doctorow story.

The basic premise is that we’re in a postindustrial near future, or at least that resource shortages and climate change and the inevitable social strife have started taking their toll. The oil-based industrial economy is obviously still functioning in the background, to some degree for some people, but we’re a fair distance along a long road of decline toward Jim Kunstler’s post-industrial America. And those who can are taking refuge in isolated, protected urban arcologies — built around or on the bones of the old American cities — that are very different from one another.

According to Scalzi’s intro, the five of them got together ahead of time to set the ground rules and define the rough social structure of their not-too-distant-future world, and although the five stories are very different, there’s enough thematic continuity running through them that you do indeed feel like they’re five different takes on the same set of social conditions in the same world at the same time. Great job.

Bonus: implied gay social relations in two of the stories, in both instances treated so matter-of-factly that I almost missed it and had to back up to be sure. Go team!

Incidentally, this project was an audiobook first and a book afterwards; to some of you that will be notable, but as I will never have either the time or the patience for an audiobook, it’s merely one fact among many others to me.

Via eBroadsheet: a 2-bedroom, 2-bath clapboard house has been erected on the World Financial Center plaza (by the marina, apparently). It’s a demonstration of green, efficient, cost-effective housing design. Tour info here; through June 17th.

Like a lot of people who came to New York from somewhere else, I owned a car when I got here. And unlike many others, I’ve kept mine. It’s city-sized (a VW New Beetle), has been well-maintained, and is cheap to insure; and it happens to be at that cost-effective point where it’s paid for, but still a few years away from starting to fall to pieces. I like driving it, and we use it 20 or 30 weekends a year to get out of the city and for local hauling and errands.

When I lived in Jersey City and worked at home, the car had practical usefulness: not only did I have it available for daily shopping and errands, but on evenings and weekends I was 10 minutes via the Holland Tunnel from Lower Manhattan, where evening and weekend street parking is pretty easy to find.

After that, in inner Brooklyn, I lived in a neighborhood where storing a car on the street was possible, if not convenient, as long as you resigned yourself to one street cleaning ticket a month; I got fewer than that, on average, and still had the car available not just for weekend trips, but also for on-demand use when the need arose.

Moving back into Manhattan, however, has pretty much eliminated the on-demand use, because my car now lives in a parking lot across the Brooklyn Bridge in downtown Brooklyn, 4 subway stops from my apartment or a $9 cab ride each way. Yes, dear reader, my car and I live in different boroughs, and as I write this, I’m just back from dropping the car off at the end of the weekend and coming home in a taxi.

What makes this crazy-sounding situation rational is the pricing. Manhattan parking is priced like the scarce resource it is — in the $400-600/month range with very rare exceptions — and so I save upwards of $300 a month this way, even taking into account those taxi rides over the bridge. And this despite the fact that the category of parking I pay for, “storage,” requires me to fork over an additional 5 bucks plus a tip each time I pick up the car. (I can still get at the car 24/7, I just need to pay the 5 bucks each time I do.)

Now that I’m so used to the situation that I no longer dwell on its apparent absurdity, let me make a few observations:

Storage parking is a good idea. People like me are willing to live with a little inconvenience in exchange for saving a lot of money, and everybody wins: the garage keeps occupancy incrementally higher, the city gets a bit more parking tax, and I have a place to park.

My willingness to park in Brooklyn is evidence of a healthy market, not evidence that I’m somehow being “forced” to do something I “don’t want” to do. On the continuum between cost and inconvenience (given the underlying economics of providing this good in this city at this time), it so happens that a vendor is occupying the very position that I feel maximizes my happiness. Lucky me! This is a good thing, and in general, fostering new and creative ways of letting buyers and sellers “settle” their supply/demand transactions is a good thing. Let a million flowers bloom.

To whatever extent I’m typical, congestion pricing will work. I’m responding to a market disincentive (a $5 per-use fee plus inconvenience valued at $X) by using the car only when I really need it. I can afford the 5 bucks whenever I decide it’s worthwhile or don’t have an easy alternative, but every time I choose not to, that’s an incremental bit of public benefit in the form of foregone externality. There have been dozens of times when I opted for the subway because getting the car out seemed like too much of a pain. There have even been a couple of hauling jobs where, all things considered, it made sense to leave the car parked in Brooklyn and pick up a Zipcar on 7th Avenue, and I did.

It should be hard to have a car in the city! The infrastructure needed to support city cars is finite and expensive, and the land used for parking in Manhattan comes out of the same finite supply of land that’s used for everything else on this narrow island. We’ve made a philosophical decision as a society that most of our automotive infrastructure will be supported out of general revenues, but at the margins, whatever portion we can allocate back to the users will help keep the market for that scarce resource a little more honest, by discouraging whatever portion of demand can be satisfied just as well by less socially onerous means.

Work has taken me up and down the Northeast Corridor, mostly on Amtrak, a dozen times over the past month, which means it’s time for some Commuter Chatter:

Your price may vary. There may be times when that 25 minutes you save on the Acela between New York and Washington really are worth the extra money; but this morning I’m on the Keystone to Philadelphia, which is a good hundred bucks cheaper than the morning Acela, and (more surprisingly) 40 bucks cheaper than the Northeast Regional service that leaves and arrives 10 minutes later. I’m not sure why, since between here and Philadelphia it runs on the same tracks to the same station at roughly the same speed, but it doesn’t matter; I’m no fool, and a $46 ride beats a $150 ride any day.

Newark Penn Station is a secret that ought to get out. From Lower Manhattan, where I live, it’s an easy 20-minute PATH ride to Newark, where I can catch the southbound trains about 16 minutes into their routes. Given the inconvenience and general ugliness of Penn Station, this is much preferable; the Newark concourse has everything I care about that the Penn concourse has (including a Zaro’s) but your schlepping is cut by 80 percent. Not to mention the fact that in the early morning, I can leave my house half an hour before the train leaves Penn Station and still head it off at Newark, with time to spare to load up on coffee. Try that on the C train. Which leads me to…

Bring your own mug. It sounds ridiculous, but trust me. Navigating the station and negotiating a crowded train car is much easier if you’re carrying your coffee in a metal mug with a tightly seated lid, rather than whatever paper/plastic combo you happen to be handed at the coffee spot. I know you’re thinking “I don’t want to schlep that thing all the way back to New York later,” but, again, trust me, it fits in the bottom of your briefcase, and the morning benefit is worth the incremental evening inconvenience. Just try it. I use a nothing-special stainless mug with a plastic top, which I bought at the Edgewood Target in Atlanta about 5 years ago for under 10 bucks.

More news as it develops.

An interesting curiosity: Daniel Nairn’s poster-sized illustration of urban grid proportions in 33 American cities (his PDF links to a poster-sized version suitable for framing, if you’re the kind of urbanist goober that I am…).