Parking requirements

This is Joseph.

Okay, I read this article on Mike the Mad Biologist's site and I wanted to comment because I think the author is completely missing the implications of the piece.  Consider:

But at Velo Apartments—a new, 171-unit, fully leased building located at 3635 Woodland Park Avenue North in Seattle's Fremont area—just 100 out of 128 parking stalls have been rented, according to Rob Hackleman, associate development and asset manager for Mack Urban, which developed the building. Using the estimated $20,000-to-$50,000 per-stall calculation, that's about $560,000 to $1.4 million worth of unnecessary parking spaces. Ironically, Velo Apartments is marketed as "bike-friendly," with "bike-focused amenities" and close access to the Burke-Gilman Trail. The development's logo includes an old-fashioned bicycle, and its website states, "Your Ride Starts Here." Hackleman said five unused parking stalls were converted to create more bike storage because the existing bike storage wasn't enough to meet demand.

I work in Seattle with a lot of young professionals.  Many of them bike commute.  I struggle to find any without cars.  My wife and I share a single car.  This is actually the most common pattern among those with low rates of car ownership.  So why are stalls going unsold? 

Because on street parking is free.  Drive around Fremont and try to park.  I dare you.  Especially on an evening or weekend.  I avoid things I really like in Fremont because bus service is terrible and it's simply impossible to park.  Side streets tend to be three cars wide -- you can end up facing another car with no room to go around because both sides of the street are completely full of cars.  Driveways are often blocked (another reason one might not want to pay money to have one).  If many people pay > 30% of their salary on rent they may be economizing by trying not to have to pay for a parking stall.

Now Seattle wants to increase density.  But the state of Washington keeps cutting public transportation.   So how are people supposed to get around?  Biking is a nice idea, but the weather isn't always that good and many people may be elderly or disabled.  It is scary to be on a Seattle bike trail if you are not a fast rider. 

The real reason that costs are suddenly rising is a not a policy that has been in place since the 1950's.  It is that more people are moving to Seattle, often for well-paying jobs, and increasing the demand for housing.   This isn't a complicated issue.  Now, how one handles it might be.  But I would suggest that the place to start is figuring out a sensible transit policy.  But Seattle is the fastest growing city in the United States -- does it not make sense to decide how we are going to handle transit.  I would love more bike lanes (which, to be fair, is happening) and better transit services.  But I want to see a plausible way for this to happen (given it is the state that keeps cutting public transit) before I think that we should make the parking issues worse! 

As for bike lanes, the current city trick to make them work is to get rid of the on-street parking (to make it two lanes, a turn lane, and two bike lanes).  One might suspect that simply doing more of this (and making biking safer) could well lead to fewer unrented stalls. 

It is not that I think that parking requirements, as is, are necessarily optimal.  But it is worth thinking about these issues. 

A smart post from Felix Salmon

Felix Salmon:

My point here is that technology has a tendency to create its own norms. The classic example is the automobile — a technology which kills more than 30,000 Americans every year. From the 1930s through the 1990s, societal norms about who roads belonged to, and what people should do on them, were turned on their head thanks to the new technology. The dangerous new activity allowed by the new technology became the privileged norm, to the point at which just about all other road-based activity — and roads have been around for thousands of years, remember, since long before the automobile — essentially ceased to exist. Eventually, we reached the point at which elected representatives were happy saying that if a bicyclist gets killed by a car, it’s the bicyclist’s fault for being on the road in the first place

.I think that this is a very interesting point at two levels.  One, is that it does point out that society can change around innovation just as much as innovation can change society.  I think that this will be broadly applicable to innovations like driverless cars that are legal nightmares now, but could easy become the standard with enough adoption.  It's never clear when a technology will win this sort of breakthrough success (the innovation grave-yard is full of such examples).  But it does point out that some classes of argument are less likely to succeed.

But the second point is also really salient -- it is often amazing how much we overlook the subsidization of activities are social norms.  We don't see the use of roads for cars and not bicycles as a subsidization of the car.  Heck, I am often annoyed by bicyclists who can't decide what set of rules they are following (when they switch back and forth between being a fellow vehicle and a pedestrian it makes me nervous as I have a life-long goal to never hit a cyclist).  But the roads could just as easily be claimed by walkers, horses, bicycles and so forth in a much easier form of mixed use. 

Airline non-innovation

As mentioned before, getting people on and off of different modes of mass transit adds a tremendous amount of time to the process, not to mention annoyance. One of the many things people hate about air travel is the waiting in line, first to get your boarding pass* then to get through security and finally standing in the unairconditioned jetway and the even stuffier plane itself (not to mention the wait to get off the plane once you've landed)

What if there were a way to cut that boarding time in half?

Kenneth Button, a George Mason University professor of transport economics (and editor of the journal that published Steffen’s 2008 paper). Airlines want a boarding scheme that works for every flight, not one such as Steffen’s that might save time on some flights but cost minutes on others. “They want something that can consistently save two-to-three minutes on every flight,” Button says. In terms of pure speed of cabin loading, Button suggests airlines use both front and rear airplane doors, as some European carriers do.

Actually, since we're talking about a double queue, I would assume it would on average more than double the speed since more people would end up in the faster line..Faster loading and unloading would save the airlines some money and they would greatly improve customer experience.

All of which raises the question: if it's such a great idea, why don't we see twin jetways all over the place? The answer certainly has something to do with up front costs but I think there's a bigger reason. I'll spell out the theory this weekend.


For more airline news, check out this NPR story.

* yes, I know you can print those at home but if you have to check you bags there's no time savings.

Choke points

As a companion to the earlier post on room for innovation in transportation, there's also a lot we can do with existing technology:

Let’s start with the small-scale stuff that needs doing. There are many examples around the country where a relatively tiny amount of public investment in rail infrastructure would bring enormous social and economic returns. Why is I-95 so congested with truck traffic that drivers divert to I-81 and overwhelm that interstate as well? One big reason is that railroads can capture only 2 percent of the container traffic traveling up and down the eastern seaboard because of obscure choke points, such as the Howard Street Tunnel in downtown Baltimore. The tunnel is too small to allow double-stack container trains through, and so antiquated it’s been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973. When it shut down in 2001 due to a fire, trains had to divert as far as Cincinnati to get around it. Owner CSX has big plans for capturing more truck traffic from I-95, and for creating room for more passenger trains as well, but can’t do any of this until it finds the financing to fix or bypass this tunnel and make other infrastructure improvements down the line. In 2007, it submitted a detailed plan to the U.S. Department of Transportation to build a steel wheel interstate from Washington to
Miami, but no federal funding has been forthcoming. 

The Howard Street Tunnel is the worst of some seventy rail choke points in the mid-Atlantic region alone. According to a study commissioned by the I-95 Corridor Coalition, a group of transportation officials along the highway’s route, fixing these choke points would cost $6.2 billion and return twice that amount in benefits. The returns would include $2.9 billion in reduced freight transportation costs, $6.3 billion in direct savings due to reduced highway congestion for vehicles still on the road, and $3.7 billion in indirect economic benefits generated throughout the economy by these transportation savings. Importantly, rail capacity can often be improved substantially by relatively low-cost measures such as adding signals, occasional switches, and new, computerized train control devices, whereas with rubber wheel interstates the only way to add capacity is to add lanes. This is another reason why the social rate of return on rail investment is much higher than on most highway projects. 

Another notorious set of choke points is in Chicago, America’s rail capital, which is visited by some 1,200 trains a day. Built in the nineteenth century by noncooperating private companies, lines coming from the East still have no or insufficient connections with those coming from the West. Consequently, thousands of containers on their way elsewhere must be unloaded each day, "rubber-wheeled" across the city’s crowded streets by truck, and reloaded onto other trains. It takes forty-eight hours for a container to travel five miles across Chicago, longer than it does to get there from New York. This entire problem could be fixed for just $1.5 billion, with benefits including not just faster shipping times and attendant economic development, but drastically reduced road traffic, energy use, and pollution.

And as a companion to another post, if you really wanted to take the analogy of running government like a business seriously, the first thing we should do is borrow all we need to get our infrastructure running to capacity.

Tyler Cowen argues against more regulation with an example that calls for more regulation

Tyler Cowen has a piece in the New York Times on how regulation inhibits innovation in transportation using the example of driverless cars. I'm not sure he's made his general case (that's the subject for an upcoming post), but his specific case is particularly problematic.

In case you haven't been following this story, Google has been getting a lot of press for its experiments with self-driving cars, especially after statements like this from Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun:

"Think about the car as a medium of mass transit: So, what if our highway-train of the future meant you go on the highway, and there's a train of very close-driving cars with very low wind drag, fantastic capacity, is twice as efficient as possible as today, and so there is no congestion anymore?"

Cowen is clearly thinking along the same lines:

Furthermore, computer-driven cars could allow for tighter packing of vehicles on the road, which would speed traffic times and allow a given road or city to handle more cars. Trips to transport goods might dispense with drivers altogether, and rental cars could routinely pick up customers. And if you worry about the environmental consequences of packing our roads with cars, since we can’t do without them entirely, we still can make those we use as efficient — and as green — as possible.

Putting aside the question of the magnitude of these savings in time, road capacity and fuel effeiciency (which, given the level of technology we're talking about here, aren't that great), where exactly are these savings coming from?

Some can certainly be attributed to more optimal decision-making and near instantaneous reaction time, but that's not where the real pay-off is. To get the big savings, you need communication and cooperation. Your ideal driving strategy needs to take into account the destination, capabilities and strategies of all the vehicles around you. Every car on the road has got be talking with every other car on the road, all using the same language and rules of the road, to get anything near optimal results.

Throw just one vehicle that's not communicating (either because it has a human driver or because its communication system is down or is incompatible) into the mix and suddenly every other vehicle nearby will have to allow for unexpected acceleration and lane changes. Will driverless cars be able to deal with the challenge? Sure, but they will not be able to able to do it while achieving the results Thrun describes.

A large number of driverless cars might improve speed and congestion slightly, but getting to the packed, efficient roads that Cowen mentions would mean draconian regulations requiring highly specific attributes for all vehicles driving on a major freeway. The manufacture and modification of vehicles would have to be tightly controlled. Motorcycles would almost certainly have to be banned from major roads. Severe limits would have to be put on when a car or truck could be driven manually.

This would seem to be another case of a libertarian endorsing a technology with less than libertarian implications.