Pretty much everyone agrees that this just isn’t a national issue. But it IS a local issue, and gets a lot of attention in local elections. In the San Jose area here in CA, there is a longstanding debate the development of the Coyote Valley area between SJ and Morgan Hill, to the south. Right now, that area is pretty much all farmland and rolling hills of open space. It’s a favorite area of mine to do long bikerides in a rural setting, so I’m pretty familiar with the issues.
Get on the SJ Mercury News web site and search for articles on Coyote Valley. Many of the topics you are proposing are being hotly debated. But if a presidential candidate started talking about stepping in, I think everyone around here would have the reaction "Mind your own f***ing business, you Washington politician. "
But suppose a presidential candidate made an issue, not of zoning and density policies, but of a proposal for a national high-speed rail network? Those high-speed rail lines now running in Japan and Europe exist because of government support at the national level, and it’s hard to see how we could get such a system here without such support. And HSR could not only provide an energy-efficient mode of long-distance passenger transport (taking pressure off both the interstates and the airports), it could also be used for freight shipping (getting some of the big trucks off the highways). Federal policy could also encourage and subsidize the construction of commuter-rail and light-rail networks in metropolitan areas.
I will have to say that while this debate sounds innocent enough on the surface, it quickly becomes the most hair-brained, totalitarian, and far-reaching argument that I have ever read on these boards once you think about all of the changes that would have to be made (forced) for any of his to work on a federal level.
BrainGlutton why don’t you lead us old wise one:
Where will these rail lines operate? They already operate here is Boston at a big loss and only work for a small fraction of the population. Please start by mapping out the transportation in California. We will leave the harder problems for later. Who is going to pay for it?
What happens to the existing homes that people have built in these “sprawl” areas? What about the people that just own land outside the cities? What can they do with it? Will the “federal government” just buy it all up and convert it into parks? It is mostly privately owned.
What will happen to huge businesses that spring up in a relatively unpopulated area? I visited my brother in Fayetteville, AR last summer and the area is now a model of sprawl because Wal-Mart headquaters has enough employees associated with their business to sustain an enire metro-community growing at an extremely fast rate. What about Las-Vegas? Surely you couldn’t have anticipated that a major city would just spring up out of the desert now would you? It has its own sprawl.
I grew up in a town of about 1,000 people. It is a suburb of nothing and is near nothing. It also thrived in the pre-WWII era that you talked about. What do you expect those people to do? Foresake the modern age so that can be the culmination of your fantasy?
Want to here what your real, concrete, and actionable ideas are?
Pay attention to that last line because any person that cannot respond to it is, by definition, a crackpot and a loon.
I have a hard time imagining what these basic uniform density laws would be–the equivalent of a basic minimum wage, I get that much, but how? You’d have a minimum density law for all new development?
Overall I support what you’re saying (and incidentally, for some of those arguing here, keep in mind that fixing sprawl problems doesn’t necessarily mean doing away with suburbs and forcing us all to live in cities. There are smart ways to plan suburbs and new development, and not-so-smart ways). But I don’t see this as appropriate for the federal government to meddle in, not in the regulatory ways seem to be suggesting.
What’s right for one area may not be right for another. One area may be better off allowing suburban development but requiring that lots be small and population be dense. Another area may be better off with a greenbelt. Another might be better off promoting urban repopulation. It has a lot to do with the local economy, geography, demographics, transportation, water and sewer configurations, public safety resources, and so on.
Just because we accept some basic national standards doesn’t mean we’re inclined to accept all of them. I’m inclined to leave New York zoning in the hands of New Yorkers. By what mechanism would the Federal Government dictate zoning standards in each state? I imagine they could withold federal dollars but I don’t know how many federal dollars go into building suburbs. Of course I think it’d be political suicide for anyone in the House or Senate to suggest such a course of action.
We’re working on that. Vehicles are being designed to be more fuel efficent and they’re working on vehicles that don’t use fossile fuels at all.
If it could get me from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time I’d consider using such a high speed rail network.
We just bought a larger place, because we needed more storage and some room for the kids to play. It is in the suburbs, to be sure.
I think it’s wonderful, myself. Almost paradise.
Our house sits on a quarter-acre lot, and there’s a big swingset and slide in the backyard that the kids love. The whole neighborhood is very wooded, and our two year old twins quickly learned the word “acorn”. There are thousands of them in our yard from our oak trees.
The subdivision has shopping, parks, schools, a rec senter and a private country club. It has a 108-acre lake with three swimming beaches as well. All of these things are easily reachable by bike.
Just across the road is a national forest, with camping, hiking, and other activities available.
I carpool to work, and use a separate HOV lane to get there. If I were inclined to pay for rail transit, it would be available a very short distance away.
I’m not saying all this to brag, mind. Just to illustrate why people move to the suburbs. Lots of us have it pretty good there.
California I don’t know that much about. Here’s a link – http://www.davidpinero.com/rail/hartrailtimeline.cfm – to site about a proposed light-rail system for my home town, Tampa, Florida. (An aboveground system, of course – the water table’s too high here for a subway.) The cost would be paid by a bond issue at the county level. Up to now, local antitax pols have prevented the issue from being put before the voters, but pro-rail organizing continues. There’s also a plan to build a high-speed rail line in Florida at state expense – Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring that in 2000. Gov. Jeb Bush is dead against the project and has led a movement to repeal the amendment; a repeal proposal will appear on our November ballot but is expected to fail. See http://www.floridahighspeedrail.org/.
Those homes would remain where they are but, because of their location and the drastically rising cost of gasoline (which will rise drastically in the next couple of decades, regardless of what our government does or does not do), they might gradually drop in value. In fact, I’ve read a theory that in the future, the poor and the prosperous in American metro areas might switch places – the well-off moving into the re-gentrified cities and the poor spreading out to the 'burbs. That’s not a nice prospect – it would leave the poor stranded in areas where auto transportation is necessary and prohibitively expensive – but they’re still areas nicer than the projects they live in now. I’m holding out hope that the low-density 'burbs might be salvaged by “retroffitting” – infilling projects that raise their population density to the point where mass transit linkages become practical and economical.
Those places you describe are now their own nodes of settlement, and could benefit by infilling development to increase their local population density, and by being linked to regional rail networks. Furthermore, they will remain just as accessible by automobile as they are now; I’m not talking about digging up any of the roads or highways that have been built.
That town might be provided with a rail stop – otherwise, it would be left exactly as it is. It is not part of the problem.
Well…yes. A lot of them are. It’s very easy to propose new ideas like high speed rails across the country. It’s a little closer to Crazytown to propose a rail line to every burb, township and hamlet. Now create a viable plan to make them sustainable and profitable. And I mean at a level that goes a little lower than the pie in the sky 40,000 ft view. For two months, I would fly back and forth from New York to Seattle (about 2400 miles) every week. Given the choice between taking a 5 hour flight or an 8 hour train at 300mph (assuming it makes no other stops in which case it could be 2-3 times as long) the plane wins every time.
What would you do in the Northeast? Make a few dozen rail lines to every city in CT, PA and NJ?
It is stupid to expect people to switch mode of transportation or lower quality of life housing without economic or other real incentives.
What do you think 90% of rail is used for?
You still haven’t answered my question. What do you consider an appropriate density? How many square miles should a town of 20,000 occupy? People won’t want to walk more than 15-20 minutes (about a mile) to a train station only to sit for another hour as it travels through miles of BrainGluttonvilles.
The way I see it, your plan will simply destroy the real estate markets vy driving down the price of suburban housing and driving up the price of urban developments beyond the reach of anyone to afford them.
The problem is that cars work too well. It’s almost always going to be faster to drive yourself from place to place than to rely on public transit, and I suspect that’s even true in greater New York, possibly except when you need to go to or from Manhattan*, or within it. Even if you’re in an area blessed with high speed heavy rail systems, you lose time waiting for trains, especially if transfers are involved, and in travelling from and to stations.
That still doesn’t mean I wouldn’t prefer to have a good mass transit system and to be able to use it to get to work. One of the problems in L.A. has been that neighborhood groups object to any visible transit lines going through their burbs. Work on a San Fernando Valley busway has been stopped by NIMBYs, and the light rail line which was going to run from my neighborhood to downtown L.A. was stopped dead for similar reasons. The local transit authority owns the right-of-way, last I heard, but has leased it to various small business that have paved over or removed the rails in many places.
God how many novels I’d get through if I could take the train to work. That’s me you see at intersections, snatching a paragraph or two from my book while waiting for the light to change. I hate commuting by car; it’s like being a slave to the steering wheel, as I must attend to the traffic.
I suppose his opponent would respond with one word: “Amtrak.” Possibly to be followed with “as an illustration of how good the government is at running a railroad.”
Is there any evidence at all that a national high-speed rail line would attract ridership outside of the Boston-NYC-DC Northeast Corridor?
I just don’t think people will use rail in any extensive way outside of the handful of major cities that came of age prior to the rise of the auto. I just moved from New York (where I took the Metro North commuter train into the city from Westchester) to Dallas, and I’m already thrilled that I don’t have to waste any more of my life on train platforms and that keeping to my schedule isn’t dependent on the absence of maintenance screwups. I’d be quite happy to never have to ride another commuter rail line.
Ah, how nice to see normal-weight fonts again. Now then.
pullin:IMO, the “suburban sprawl” problem can only be solved by remedying the problems that force people to the 'burbs in the first place.
Definitely true—up to a point. It seems that people nowadays are not so much fleeing the cities (which as plnnr notes are actually picking up a bit of population influx at present) as fleeing older suburbs. When the older suburbs can’t support the services they need and start to decay, it starts a “ripple effect” pushing the more affluent ever further outward:
This is becoming a sort of “neo-nomadic” perpetual migration to newer, more peripheral, less burdened communities by those who can afford to move, abandoning the older communities to those less able to cope with them. I don’t see how we can ever expect to “remedy the problems that force people to the 'burbs” as long as those who can best afford to deal with the problems continue to find it so much easier and cheaper just to move away from them.
I think there are smart things that could be done.
In the days before cars became very widespread, the mill towns of the Pittsburgh region were joined by a crazyquilt of rail lines, trolleys, and buses. Most of these were privately owned, and spread to wherever riders could be found.
I think private options like commuter buses and vanlines could play an important role today, if they were allowed to.
Another interesting option is one I use every day. Most people enjoy using cars, and resist carpooling, because they don’t like being beholden to someone else’s schedule. In the DC-Northern Virginia area, this problem is solved by “slugging”.
Every morning, I drive to a commuter lot and pick up riders. They get a free ride to work, and I get to use the HOV lane. The process is reversed in the afternoon when I pick up people standing in a “slug line” in town. I don’t know these people. It’s basically a glorified form of hitchhiking.
Even so, in more than twenty years of existence, there has never been a criminal act committed on a rider or driver.
I’ve been seeing a lot of complaints about bold, but I’ve been keeping up with this thread by peeking in freuently, and I haven’t seen any problems myself. What’s up with that?
Someone forgot to close a bold tag and it made all the posts after it bold. I fixed it with my Sekrit Mod Powers and so the posts are not bold anymore.
Within Manhattan it does not make sense to travel by car. It will either be too expensive to park in a garage or to time consuming to look for street parking, relative to the cost of a cab, subway or walking.
Traveling in and out of Manhattan is better by train if you live outside and can get to a train station.
Now here’s the thing. If you live in NYC and don’t have a car but want to travel somewhere outside the city, it’s a major pain in the ass. You either have to rent a car or take a train or bus somewhere and hope someone can pick you up.
That is one of the major reasons I think this non-automotive urban area is so ridiculous. You need almost Manhattan density to make it cost effective to get rid of your car. Anything less and stations would be too far apart to walk. People in CT generally still need to drive 20 minutes or so to get to a MetroNorth rail line. Are we going to encourage bulldozing all the suburbs in Fairfield, Bridgeport, Hartford, Milford, etc and put up high-rises around the train stations? Should we build a dozen more lines into Manhattan?
Kimstu - Your link gives an interesting theory but I would argue that poor neighborhoods will always “suck” for lack of a better term because people with no money live there. It doesn’t matter if they live in the core or 20 miles out in the burbs. If you make the core or inner suburbs nice, people will complain that “gentrification” is pushing out the older residents. If you neglect the inner city, it will decay and anyone with money will move to the suburbs. I would argue that demographic change does occur in “ripples”. Neighborhoods turn, prices drop and eventually are gentrified as potential “fixer-uppers” as other neighborhoods become more expensive. You can see this in Boston. Boston and the inner suburbs like Wellesley, Brookline, Brighton and Newton are too expensive for young professionals right out of school unless they live frat house style. Many of them instead live in traditionally working class towns like Malden, Waltham or Southie where there is public transportation and proximity to the city. Eventually they will either settle down there or move to more exclusive properties.
Shipping, of course – but, owing to the general inadequacy of our rail networks, 90% of overland shipping in America goes by truck. And both the trains and the trucks are deisel-powered – and that’s not sustainable. The new high-speed rail technologies can run on electric power which can be provided by nuclear power plants – which present their own problems, but at least they won’t run out of fuel any time soon.
I don’t have any figures on that – I’ll try to find some. But it’s a detail. The point of this thread is that low-density development presents a very real problem, and it’s a problem not enough people will publicly acknowledge.
You are missing the point entirely. Without any government action, the price of gasoline is going to rise drastically in the next few decades, to the point where suburban living will become impractical, and suburban property values will be depressed. Gas-electric hybrid cars will help (my Dad’s Prius gets 50 mpg), but only for a while. I am not confident that hydrogen fuel cells will ever provide a workable substitute for gasoline. What I’m proposing here is simply prudent planning that might help us adapt, with minimal social disruption, to the inevitable global changes that will come when the oil wells begin to run dry. Just because we want to go on living the suburban drive-thru way doesn’t mean we can. Nature does not always cooperate with our wishes.
