You are right about the quality of life. Some people chose suburbian Houston rather than urban NYC because they get a better quality of life for their dollars. But that only holds true if you have dollars, but not a lot of dollars.
If you either have a lot of money, or no money, this does not hold true. For the rich, NYC can give you a much higher quality for life. Being poor is also much easier in NYC than in a Houston suburb. So right now NYC manages to cater to the poor and the rich, but failing somewhat with the middle class.
> What is your point? That there is voting? That there are no objective truths? I
> don’t see where this line of argument is going.
Yes, there is such a thing as objective truth. My point is that you don’t necessarily have a lock on it. I don’t see any reason to believe that you’re a super-genius who knows much more than anyone else in the world about how cities should regulate their growth. The cities are making their own decisions about how they should grow. The fact that you disagree with them doesn’t prove that you’re right and they’re wrong. You have one vote like everyone else.
> Actually I think it IS stopping people from moving into the cities.
No, it’s slowing down the change from people moving into the cities from the suburbs. Despite the higher prices, they continue to move into the cities these days faster than they move to the suburbs. This is how the market works. People decide they want A instead of B. A becomes more expensive than B because it’s possible to charge a higher price. This slows down the market for A, but despite this, people still want A instead of B. So not quite as many people buy A instead of B, but it’s still true more people buy A rather than B.
I think it could be argued that the U.S. made some bad decisions from the late 1940’s till today that made suburbanization go faster than it should have. There were a number of incentives from various governmental bodies for buying bigger houses on larger plots. Letting people write off their interest payments on their taxes was one of them. I might have voted against such things. I also only have one vote.
> I wrote it because it is true and I think it is relevant, the reason for most
> everything I write.
No, suburbanization is slowing down. No, it’s not completely disappeared, but it’s less than it used to be. If it’s not slowing down fast enough, change the laws to slow down suburbanization still further and increase movement into cities still more. Change the tax laws. Change the bank lending laws. Change the zoning laws. Since this turn-around from suburbanization to gentrification has happened on its own without any need so far to change laws, I’m not convinced that it is going to be necessary to increase the rate of this turn-around.
Pointing out that I could be wrong is pointing out the obvious. Pointing out that I am not a super-genius, likewise. Same goes for everything else you wrote there. I don’t see the point. I’m trying to have a discussion here, and in order to do so I need to present what I think and why. I interpret your contribution as counter productive, arguing that there is no point in having a discussion because I could be wrong and decisions are made by voting. Also, I don’t have one vote like everyone else. Some people have a lot of influence, some have none.
What I ment is that it is stopping some individuals, and you are arguing that it is slowing down a trend. We are both correct. My arguments are based on how the market works, so no point in repeating that. I am arguing that we need to remove obstacles that lead to sub-optmizing this market and replace negative incentives with ones that have a positive result.
I agree. The tax incentives towards home ownership (creating huge incentives for single-family units) is a strong anti-urban policy. I’m glad to hear that you might have voted against it, unfortunately I think you are in a minority.
And now we enter the twilight zone where you and I are arguing for the same thing but still manage to seem like we are disagreeing. I don’t share your conclusion that since it is already happening, nothing needs to be done (if that is your conclusion). Literacy rates are raising in most places, child mortality is going down in most places, that to me is not a reason for inaction, but rather something to attempt to reinforce.
People are confusing several concepts. First, “Number of people living in suburbs and cities”. Second, “Number of people moving to those areas from the other.” Third, “Population growth within the two sections.”
Actual “city core” populations , which is mostly what you’re talking about as “urban” here. This represents something like 10% of the population, a distinct minority of Americans. But you could increase your city population at a slightly higher rate than the total urban population* for a very long time without making much of a dent.
*Suburbs are usually counted of the “urban area” of a city, and suburban populations are part of the 80% of Americans usually counted as urbanites.
[rant]You’re basically fooling yourself if you think we who don’t live in your carefully crafted rathole desperately want to move there. I could enjoy the big-city life, and frankly, still have no desire to go live in the warrens of shitty schools, bad transportation, and tiny, overpriced apartments leftists love stuffing people into. Even better - we don’t need you, but you DO need us. We’re the ones outside your little fantasyland who actually produce all the shit you consume. You couldn’t exist without us actually doing the work to make your “sustainable” paradise happen, and it wouldn’t be “sustainable” without us.[rant]
Excellent points (no irony). I’d like to discuss them one by one.
The cost of an apartment in Manhattan says otherwise. You personally may not want to live there, but obviously the supply is much lower than the demand. The price of an apartment in downtown Detroit on the other hand is much lower than the price of construction. So people (in general, not you) seem to want to live in Manhattan but not in Detroit.
Inner city schools in the US seem to be inferior to schools in suburbs. I don’t know why that is, in other countries this does not hold true. I agree that creating better and safer schools in the cities is of great importance.
Another problem obviously. However, this arises from the fact that most planning for the last 100 years have been centered around the car. Low density and seperation of functions means that more transportation is needed. The bias towards sprawl and seperation, rather than concentration and integration has built up an insane need for idividual modes of long distance transportation (ie: cars). In a well planned urban area, the most effective mean of transportation is walking, because everything you need is within walking distance.
Overpriced apartments is exactly what we are discussing here, and I agree that the left is mainly to blame for that.
I’m not sure who “you” and “I” are here, but if you’re claiming that non-urban areas don’t need urban areas you are mistaken on a grand level. Cities are the producers of wealth and innovation that is driving all successful nations to date. New York doesn’t need the rest of the US, they can just as well import everything they need from the rest of the world. The US without NYC however would be a much poorer place, both economically and culturally.
Without cities, no universities, no hospitals, no innovation, no entertainment… the rural areas are good at producing the basics, like food and energy, but for everything else, you need cities.
smiling bandit, no, the statistics are not talking about urban areas vs. non-urban areas. They are talking about cities vs. suburbs. Read the article I linked to. They looked at the 51 largest cities in the U.S. In them, the cities are growing faster than the suburbs.
Stoneburg, the point is that you started with a OP that exaggerated your case. This is, unfortunately, pretty common on the SDMB. Instead of simply laying out the facts as you know them, you overemphasized the ones that illustrate your point. You never mentioned the fact that suburbanization is slowing down and gentrification is speeding up until I called you on it. This is typical of a certain sort of OP on the SDMB. You think that we’re all a little too stupid to understand that the situation is complicated, so you oversimplify your case. Yes, it would be good to speed up the movement from suburbs to cities a little. It’s not clear how much to speed it up though. All new governmental policies have to be carefully thought through. A policy might be good in that it speeds up movement toward the cities, but it might simultaneously be bad in that it causes other problems in the cities.
Of course, the fact that the cost of living is absurd is itself the best evidence you can possibly have that many people want to live there.
**smiling bandit’s **strange rant kind of misses the point. It’s not that EVERYONE wants to live in New York City, it’s that more people want to live in New York City than want to live in Utica, Syracuse, or Unincorporated Rural County, USA. That is self-evidently the case, as 8,000,000 people live in New York City, despite being free to leave, and far fewer people live in Utica, despite there being lots of room there. Which leads me to…
[QUOTE=Stoneburg]
The prices of living in the cities are too high, forcing people into suburbs.
[/QUOTE]
No, no, no, a thousand times no. This is just completely the wrong way to look at it.
The cost of living in New York City is high because so many people want to live there. Nobody is “forced” to move anywhere. People make a choice based on costs and benefits. The reason one of the costs of living in New York is so high is because many people think the benefits are also high.
Your focus on NYC’s growth is, to be honest, kind of inexplicable. New York City does not grow quickly for the rather simple reason that there are very few places to anyone to move into; as has been pointed out, the city is simply about as dense as it’s ever going to be. You could make it denser but in so doing you would make the city less appealing and would reduce the benefits of moving there. You could, for instance, instantly create lots of housing by bulldozing Central Park and erecting houses and apartment buildings on it… but in so doing you would make Manhattan a much worse place to live. The existence of Central Park is a huge attraction to living in Manhattan and if it was gone a lot of people would say “well, now I have no green space, so screw this, let’s check out the real estate listings in Garden City.” How many people living in Forest Hills or Richmond Hill would list proximity to Forest Hill Park as being one of the reasons they picked a house there? I’m guessing almost every single one of them. Take the park away and they want to live there less.
Bulldozing Central Park is an extreme example, I’ll grant, but almost any other densification strategy you can name will have the same effect. Replace a tract of houses with apartment buildings and you make the place denser but less attractive, more prone to traffic problems, and more expensive to support with infrastructure. And aside from paving green space, how else do you make the city denser?
I fully agree SOME cities have gone so nuts with green space that they make expansion impossible and living in the city limits a privilege for rich people, but New York just isn’t one of them. New York is the fifth densest city in the USA and the only four denser incorporated cities are four of its own suburbs. Why you’d want it more dense I cannot understand; it’s supporting as many people as the space can reasonably support in a decent standard of living.
Houston is growing faster than New York for the rather simple reason that it’s physically possible for it to do so. It has a quarter of the population in a larger area. Complaining about it is crazy. Have a look at how “sustainable” it is when it has ten million people and five times the infrastructure… which is the point at which it will be comparable to New York, not before.
Indeed, much of your assumption misses the point that you are making arguments based on where people have drawn city borders, which is, let’s be honest, wildly arbitrary as compared to where the city actually is. The comparison to the City of Houston would not be New York City; it would be New York City and almost all of northeastern New Jersey, the western third of Long Island and the mainland as far north as White Plains. How sustainable is that space? What’s the carbon impact? Because in terms of the city core and supporting suburbs, THAT space is roughly analagous to the borders of the City of Houston.
Here’s what I don’t get: Why is the culture on this board so hostile and unconstructive? It’s filled with smart people and has the stated objective of fighting ignorance, but it seems to be more about just fighting. Anyway…
There is no way I can present all facts of anything. I made a short summary to put a context to the discussion I wanted to have. I could have made it shorter or longer, included more facts or less. I could have over- or underemphasized points too, I guess.
The fact that you use the phrase “called you on it” tells me that we do not have a constructive dialogue. You put up some interesting facts, I responded to it, we had a discussion. This is what is SUPPOSED to happen. That’s not you “calling me on it”, it’s you adding facts and perspectives to the discussion.
“You think that we’re all a little too stupid” Seriously, what the hell… I even prefaced my OP stating that I consider myself to be among the most ignorant on this board. I try to present facts and thoughts in a way that is easy to understand because I want as many as possible to be able to be part of the discussion. You make it sound like patronising.
I agree 100% and this post is part of the bolded process. Having a democratic discussion on an interesting issue to see if we can learn something or develop new ideas.
You are a thousand times right. Wrong phrasing by me, mea culpa.
It’s a good example, thus my inexplicable focus. In fact I am not focused on NYC, I am 99% focused on my own area, but for the purpose of this thread that area is of little interest.
Here I disagree with you. I think even the densest part (Manhattan) could achieve and benefit from even higher density. My experience is that the potential for densification is massively underappreciated. Just a quick glance at Manhattan reveals a lot of potential.
I agree. In dense areas green structures become much more important and valuable. If I were to make a densification plan for Manhattan I wouldn’t touch Central Park or any qualitative green area.
As I said earlier, you don’t need and shouldn’t touch the green space. But even Manhattan has plenty of brown space that could be developed, and this is just from a quick glance.
The easiest is to develop all ground level parking. The parking space can be moved underground, and even expanded if there is need. Instead of one level of parking, you can have two levels of underground parking (or more), with several levels of housing or commercial areas from ground level and up.
Also, once again from a quick glance, you have several blocks of housing that have been planned according to functionalist ideals (IMHO the worst ideals to ever curse urban development). Due to the inherent idea of functionalism these are inflexible and thus hard, but not impossible, to densify. You could either use a small scale strategy of integrating new buildings within these blocks, or the more radical strategy of simply demolishing them and replacing them with “real” city blocks. The problem with the latter is that these blocks usually contribute to social diversity by supplying cheap housing. A quick guesstimate from looking at these blocks is that you could easily increase density by anything from 100-400%, even without increasing height. These areas all seem monofunctional as well, so you could increase social sustainability and attractiveness as well by restricting ground floor area to commercial activities.
There are not as many “leftovers” or “forgotten areas” in Manhattan as elsewhere, but there seem to be some. Those could be developed.
There’s also overdimensioned infrastructure that perhaps could be developed. Especially on the waterfront. With a more radical approach to this you could actually get a crap-load of real estate, but I don’t think that would be realistic.
Another option is of course to add levels to existing buildings. There seem to be several areas where streets are wide enough and houses low enough to allow add-ons without the microclimate deteriorating.
I just don’t think that it is supporting as many people as the space can reasonably support in a decent standard of living. I think it could support more and with a higher standard of living.
The growth in Houston isn’t urban though, it is suburban, and completelty unsustainable (immensly energy inefficient and segregated). I agree that physical space is one of the reasons, but it is not “the” reason.
I am mainly looking at different types of developed land (urban, suburban, rural, dense, sprawled, diversified, monofunctional etc) but I am forced to use names so that we’re talking about the same places. This may cause some unneccesary misunderstandings, but I’m not sure how else to do it. Anyway, great post, cheers.
I’m going to suggest that you’re missing three things here:
What you are saying is self-evidently not an economical solution by virtue of the fact that nobody is doing it. New York City appears to max out at between eight and nine million people.
If further densification was desirable, someone would already be doing it, as in fact is happening in less dense cities; in Toronto, which has approximately half the population density, the downtown core is densifying entirely due to market forces. There is demand for more condos right downtown, and so more condos are being built. If there is no demand for it, then the only way to make it happen would be government interference in the market, which would cost huge bucks and probably cause more problems that it solved.
Simple-sounding physical solutions like “eliminate above ground parking” ignores the fact that it’s a hell of a lot easier said than done. (And there isn’t much ground level parking to start with.) Manhattan is already an absolute jungle underground. Burying things in an urban area is gigantically expensive. If underground parking was a great idea then, again, I ask why someone isn’t doing it. I know how hard it is to park in Manhattan, and it seems to me people would pay good coin for reliable parking underground. So why aren’t there investors lined up to build them? Simply put, because it’s hideously difficult and expensive. Most of the underground space is taken.
Further densification of New York City would put further pressure on the city’s transportation and resource infrastructure no matter where you put those people. The city has never had more than 8.5 million people in it; if you want to go substantially higher you will be making the roads busier, the trains busier, the bridges and tunnels more crowded, the airports busier. You will need more water, more delivery systems for electricity, more gas, more trucks. You’ll need more cops, firefighters, hospitals and schools. You can’t simply thrown up higher apartment buildings and say “well, there we go.” How are those people getting to work? Where are their kids going to school?
And the added density will, again, push people out of the city. People in New York now accept the present level on density; that’s no guarantee they would accept more.
It absolutely is the reason. Houston is effectively unlimited in terms of space. There is no natural barrier the city will run into anytime soon. People who want space move there. New York is not, and so is populated by people who value things other than space. Eventually, when Houston gets really immense, the downtown (if it’s maintained as a pleasant place to live, like Toronto, but unlike Detroit) will densify.
I get the sense that your belief here is that extreme urban density equals “sustainability” and that the government should make choices that encourage that. There’s three problems with this thinking.
The first is that the places people live are a reflection of what they WANT. People do not live in Manhattan or in Harrisburg because someone planned it out for them; they live in those places and a rational response to what they want and what they can afford. For some people, Manhattan is a logical choice on their indifference curve regarding urban services and cost; for others, it is not. New York City and Houston do not represent the right and wrong way to plan cities. They represent different choices in what people want to live in. If you want to live in a place where you have very little room and it’s really expensive and it doesn’t always smell very good, BUT you have access to world-class levels of commerce, entertainment, culture and leisure, you live in Manhattan. If what you want is space and clean air, you live in a little town in Montana. If you want something in between you live in something in between. Or maybe weather is an important issue; New York City, like most northeastern cities, has unpleasant weather, whereas Monterey, California has lovely weather, so someone who’s outdoorsy will prefer Monterey, and so on and so forth. Your ability to draw more people into New York City is going to be limited by the fact that not everyone wants to live in New York City for any price, and that some of the people who do live in NYC will want to leave if you change it in some substantial way. You don’t have an unlimited number of people to pull in, and most of the ones amenable to living in New York already live there.
If you want to change densification patterns talking about what you’re going to build misses the point, I think, because you an change this brown space or elevate that building and it doesn’t change the fact that you need someone who wants to live there. The proposals you’ve made - and I appreciate the limits of a message board - don’t sound super appealing. And if they are super appealing you aren’t going to solve the cost of living issue at all, are you? Either you’re not going to attract enough new New Yorkers to make the densification worth it, or else you will, which means the supply/demand function would reach the same equilibrium and the cost of living would still be high, or both.
The second problem is that I think this “New York is sustainable” bit is an absolute crock. Sorry, but I gotta be honest; it’s just a weird thing to claim. New York City is not a closed system, just as Houston is not a closed system. Its continued existence relies on the resources provided in other cities, towns, farms, and even countries; the Starbucks on every damn corner in NYC isn’t getting its coffee from Staten Island. It is of course true that New Yorkers drive less than Houstonians (Houstonites?) and whatnot, but the density in that little area relies on tremendous resource extraction from elsewhere. Someone has to farm, mine, harvest, fish, build, refine, mold, weld, machine, and construct the stuff that keeps New York going, and most of it can’t be done in New York City because the city’s too dense. More people in NYC means more of that will be done in other places. You can’t handwave that away. I’m not taking the aggressive starving artist approach os saying “you an’t live with us!” because of course the reserve is also true; the sainted farmers who put FARMS FEED CITIES stickers on their pickup trucks ignore the reverse argument that CITIES PAY FARMERS. And suburbs do a mix of the two.
The third is, again, that if it made sense for New York to be denser than it was, it would be. You’re operating on the assumption that it’s desirable for New York to be denser. That’s fine - assuming you live in Manhattan, your opinion is as valuable as any other New Yorker’s. But your opinion is not the aggregate opinion. The aggregate opinion is that it’s about as dense as people want it to be, and the evidence is plain; the city tops out between eight and nine million, and Manhattan does not seem to want to rise over 1.7 million; it was once a bit higher, but at a time when many Manhattanites lived in conditions that we would not consider acceptable in a modern country today.
Like it or not, the people of New York City and the USA have spoken with their actions, and the number that want to live in NYC is about eight and a half million, give or take. Without budget-crushing subsidies, why would one expect that to change?
If you just want to increase “sustainability” I’d suggest to you that “shoving more people into Manhattan” is a solution in search of a lot of questions. What you should be suggesting is that sustainable behaviour be encouraged… and that if this leads to the further densification of large cities, that’s fine. But maybe it won’t - maybe another solution will emerge that you hadn’t even thought of. If the USA were to, say, switch a large portion of its tax burden away from income and consumption taxes and into carbon taxes, you would see behaviour changing to accomodate that and, hopefully, it would move towards greater sustainability. Would that mean more people in NYC? Maybe, and if so, let the market decide where to put them. But I have a feeling it wouldn’t. (Might densify other, less-already-dense cities, though.)
I realize NYC isn’t all manhattan, but it’s still a very expensive place wherever you life. It’s just too expensive to have a big place that uses a lot of electricity. You live in shoebox apartments if you aren’t very wealthy. It’s too expensive to have a car if you live in manhattan, so that reduces cars.
Is this really a good thing? I mean sure it might help the enviroment, but is the solution just to make energy so expensive that people have no choice but to live in shoeboxes?
Also many places have virtually no public transportation, or it’s crappy. I live in DC, and we have the second busiest subway system in the nation, but it’s woefully unreliable, dangerous, and run by incompetent people. It’s virtually worthless on weekends because of all the repairs they are doing because they put it off for so long. Being carless here isn’t really an option, and if they tried to make it so expensive that people had no choice but to go carless, it would be a catastrophe because not every place has the public transport that NYC has.
That’s kind of a cart-and-horse thing, though. New York City has a very extensive public transportation system because it’s an extremely large and densely populated city, and it’s not really possible to have it any other way. There is no equivalent city in the USA. The Washington metro area - DC and all its suburbs - has *twelve times the area *but far fewer people than just the City of New York. The city itself is three times larger than Manhattan with one third the people. It couldn’t support a New York-level public transit system and is a century or more from needing one.
Nobody could afford to build an elaborate subway system without the population to pay for it.
This strikes me as a flawed argument, basically saying that because it isn’t being done it can’t be done. Of course it can be done, you can’t change the laws of physics, but everything else is negotiable. The reasons it isn’t being done can be changed. The reason you don’t have sky rises going up in Central Park (once again, I don’t advocate this) isn’t that it is physically impossible (it’s easy), or unprofitable (it would be incredibly profitable) but because of (good, imho) policy decisions.
Everything is easier said than done, developing within existing structures is always more complicated than the alternative, but far from impossible. The same project would be incredibly unprofitable in Detroit, but I would gladly invest in any densification project on Manhattan because even though development costs will be relatively high, the return on investment will still be great. Parking spaces in themself are usually not profitable, but as part of a bigger project they can easily be financed. In this case the city would probably have to regulate it to make sure enough parking space is provided.
The further pressure on the citys infrastructure is exactly what makes it sustainable and profitable on a macro level. Another way of putting it would be that it will use the infrastructure more effectively. You could argue that the structures are maxed out, but even if that was the case that could be remedied either by “soft” measures (such as fees or taxes) or “hard” measures such as physical changes in the infrastrucure itself. Singapore for example has higher density, but a less congested road system in big parts because of soft measures. Of course these may not be popular or politically possible, but that’s another discussion.
There is zero evidence tha “higher density will push people out of the city”, in fact it is a logical fallacy. Higher density is the result of people being attracted, not repelled. You’re basically saying that if more people lived there, less people would live there. Higher density will of course be unattractive to some, but considering the plethora of low density areas that’s not really a problem on the bigger scale.
I’m saying it is one of the reasons, not the only one. Physical space is only one factor.
This argument seems to be the result of some misunderstanding, since I agree with most of it. I’d only point out that the incredibly high cost of space (be it residential or commercial) shows that indeed a lot more people want to be there. Of course not “everyone” wants to live in NYC, just a lot more people than are currently doing so. You don’t have to “draw” people there, you just have to make room for them and people will obviously draw themself there. Once again, this is evidenced by the prices.
Here again your argument is not consistent. You’re arguing that an increase in supply is meaningless because it will be back to an “equilibrium”, and at the same time youäre arguing that nobody would want this supply anyway. Both are wrong. There is no “equilibrium”, and the pressure on space in the area shows that it will be easily filled.
If your definition of sustainability is a closed system, then we have very different definitions. What makes NYC sustainable is it’s effectiveness, which comes from a combination of density and diversity. Unless you live on a plantation, your coffee will be transported to you. In NYC coffee can be transported in bulk (more effective) via sea (most enviromentally friendly method of transport) and distributed to a huge population within a small area. 8 million people drinking coffee in suburbs causes a bigger enviromental impact than 8 million people drinking coffee in a dense urban area. My definition of sustainability is (among other things) about effective use of resources. The Brundtland commission defined sustainability as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Of course I am not claiming that urbanisation or densification achieves total sustainability, only that it is the best method we know of to date.
This is not a poll and I am not arguing that densification is popular, I know better than most that it is not. Densification is the most complicated and least popular form of urban development. I am arguing that it is the most sustainable form of development from a social, macroeconomic and ecological perspective.
If enough people wanted it to change we wouldn’t be having this discussion. As I’ve said, I am not claiming it is popular (allthough the result actually is, since the densest enviroments tend to be the most attractive). I could argue that it is an impopular process with popular results.
Just to be clear, I have not argued “shoving” or in any way forcing people to move to Manhattan or anywhere else. You are not the first to use that rethoric against my argument in this thread, but I don’t see any way you could come to that conclusion from what I have said. I want to increase supply/accessibility, because there is an obvious supply shortage and because this happens to be an area where market forces align well with overall goals of sustainability (for a chanege).
One of the reasons people in Manhattan uses cars less than all (I think) other americans is that they don’t need to. Yes it is expensive and problematic to use a car, but Manhattan (and other parts of NYC) is also one of the few enviroments in the US where walking is a viable alternative. Living in a suburb is practically impossible without a car, in a dense and diversified urban enviroment, it isn’t. You get “further” walking 10 minutes in Manhattan than driving for an hour in a rural area. As in you can access more functions.
Cheap energy and individual modes of transportation is what enables sprawl, and it externalises costs. Suburbia as possible because of low gas prices and collective investments in massive infrastructures to accomodate car travel. If the cost of investments, enviromental impact and congestion wasn’t externalised, this development wouldn’t be economically feasible on such a scale.
Poor public transportation is a problem, but it isn’t caused by natural laws, it’s caused by bad policy. Many cities have extremely effective public transportation systems, but to make them economically viable you need a high population density. One person riding a bus, tram or subway is just not resources well spent. Detroits “people mover” is a good example of bad public transportation.
Tram systems only work as well as the existing road system does, really. Ask any Torontonian how quick the streetcar system is. When they’re done laughing at you, they might have an answer.
I know a bit about trams, having lived all my life in a city with trams, having been responsible for the planning of future tram lines, having spent some time on the board of the national tram organisation, and having travelled abroad to see how trams function in other nations. I don’t know as much about tram systems as some do, but probably more than the average Torontonian.