January 2010

Some years ago, people noticed that development clustered on transit lines, and that was good. It could be seen, on the ground, in statistics, or as a matter of common sense. Studies were even done that showed that rail transit attracted more development than bus transit, and this difference became known as “transit oriented development” or TOD.

So far, so good. But then TOD became known to hip young people who were just reading Jane Jacobs for the first time, and, like the mighty Hulk swelling up and bursting his clothing, TOD became a caricature of the imagination, vastly overshadowing the original and actual effect that had been noted.

Suddenly, TOD was a medicine for ailing cities, a starter yeast for virgin soils, a powerful tool of renewal. But, even better, like Mama Bear’s porridge, TOD was not too hot and not too cold. It is pedestrian oriented and encourages friendly small locally owned stores- better than the undeveloped stuff that was there, but not huge and faceless like bigger stuff to come. Well, who wouldn’t want a tube of this miracle urban development ointment?

From this point we can go directly to the current insanity of Seattle’s hipsters, that 12th Avenue needs or wants TOD and thus the First Hill Streetcar should run down 12th. It is widely assumed that 12th is a backwater that languished in an otherwise red-hot Seattle real estate market because it lacked transit.

In reality, something like 9 bus routes cross 12th in the area considered, and large amounts of the apparently vacant land are owned by large landowners who have their own plans, and own schedule, for development. If transit were to catalyze any of this, it would be largely as a huge gift to the Jesuits, the major landowners in the neighborhood, who can wait forever to develop because of their religious-school tax exemption, courtesy of Seattle’s hipsters- a denouement so hugely ironic as to merit consideration on artistic merit alone.

More seriously, transit oriented development simply isn’t a consideration for a neighborhood one mile from the city center in a town where the cheapest house costs $300,000- and any house in the neighborhood considered is probably over $500,000. The 12th avenue neighborhood is surrounded by major developments- if they’re not happening on 12th, it’s not because there are no developers who are interested. And development, when it comes, will be heavily loaded with institutional large and blank buildings housing Seattle University and King County Youth Correctional Services.

More generally, let TOD be TOD. It doesn’t need to leap tall buildings or outrun a speeding locomotive to be important. It just needs to be reality-based.

When steam locomotives pulled freight trains, the ruling gradient usually made or broke the line. In railroading, the expense of your toughest problems never ends. If you look at the ‘to-do’ list of the BNSF, you’ll find they are persistently working to remove a chokepoint or problem, each of them seemingly insignificant compared with the size of the system or of the trains, but each causing a minute or two of delay until the railroad can change it, often at huge expense- easing the effects of gradient or curvature, for example, may mean moving miles of track. Still, the railroad takes a very long view and may wait decades for the savings to pay for the investment.

A transit line in a city has any number of potential chokepoints. For example, a line from downtown Seattle to Ballard first needs a right-of-way, which will be expensive- so expensive, in fact, that the planners will be under continuous pressure to consider a single track. Other traffic will struggle for space where the corridor is narrowed by geography.

The temptation is strong to just bill the future- after all, they will be the ones using it. Hills? No problem, just use more juice! Use an existing opening bridge to cross the Ship Canal and run your trains in traffic (but you can forget about crossing the BNSF at grade). In fact, if you set your initial goals low enough, it’s easy to exceed expectations.

But what happens when you do that is you have now built in your own set of chokepoints, and improving one part of the system won’t help that much when the rest of the system is still slow. When you’re reasonably certain that demand will increase by an order of magnitude- and we know that will happen with transit because of the low market share transit has in America today- you want your system to be large and robust. In fact, you want the system to be engineered well enough to take advantage of the improvements to come in signaling, control, traction motors, and all of the physical plant of the rail and overhead.

Planners often seek grade separation because cars and trucks are still so dominant that it often seems better to make compromises elsewhere, in the interest of keeping traffic moving on the major arterials. Here, however, a little crystal-ball work is in order. The major arterials have staked out the best routes and development has occurred along them- in addition to the fact that we already own them. In most cases they are very clearly where you want the trains to run.

The thing to do here is to put in street-running trains and progressively take the other traffic out of the picture. Trains that move slowly in todays traffic will be positively spritely when the cars are gone.

Even today, most transit systems, with average speeds of 12-15 mph, are faster than a car moving at the incremental speed of less than 10 mph- the incremental speed being, of course, the miles you travel in the amount of time it takes you, not just to drive the car, but also to earn the money to buy it and keep it fed. The handwriting is on the wall and transit planners of the future should discuss the roads as though we already own them. Because, as a matter of fact, we do.