I’d like to hear some of your thoughts about urban development and transit policy, but I know so little about these topics I’m not quite sure what to ask. Maybe you could explain a few principles to an absolute beginner in this topic? (I know that’s not exactly a question, sorry.)

– from Annie

I’m going to try and describe a few ideas that influence how I think about urban development and transit policy. None of these are original, some of them likely have formal names and people associated with them. I’m not citing my sources, and I’ve never really studied these areas in an academic sense. Instead, consider these statements to be a crib sheet of things that have stuck with me because they either struck me as a true or came along with a boat load of evidence that convinced me they are true. Think of this is my crib sheet of “basic principles” I’ve come to largely believe.

The housing market is a lot like other markets– it responds to supply and demand.

The housing market is unalike many other markets, certainly the ones we study, because it’s expensive to move and expensive to buy and sell homes. Additionally, moving involves uprooting your connection to community resources, possibly requires you to change your job, etc. The housing market is full of high transaction costs.

The housing market is unalike many other markets because it takes a lot of time and capital to build new supply. Whereas interest rates and prices in the market can change overnight, building new housing cannot.

The high costs of building housing come from complicated rules around zoning and permitting alongside the fact that building housing is very labor intensive and hasn’t gotten much more efficient.

In the United States, our zoning and permitting rules are restrictive. We often do things in the name of “safety” with zero evidence they provide any safety benefits. We are grossly incurious of different safety standards set internationally and stick to what we wrote down in manuals in the early to mid 20th century as proven.

Gentrification is one of the most complicated and fraught topics to discuss. It’s kind of like defining pornography, except if the folks defining it came from vastly different cultures and time periods. Most of what people describe as gentrification is very much not gentrification. We use the language of gentrification and displacement to describe any change to place and rarely dig in. Often, what’s described as pro-gentrification actually reduces displacement by ensuring desirable areas maintain supply, stay desirable, and continue to offer quality housing at a price many residents can afford. Absent that growth, many of those people would move to neighboring areas and cause even greater displacement.

The sprawling suburbs and exurbs of America were a huge mistake, and we should be living in denser, more walkable neighborhoods with sufficient public transit to cover many aspects of daily life.

There is nothing more pro-environment than denser housing, and any idea of a return to rural pastoralism is a symbolic, aesthetic choice. The proper way to heal the environment is to reduce the need for human transit and reduce our land use footprint. Most people who react negatively to this can only imagine “Manhattan-ifcation” and lack the experience of traveling to many cities and neighborhoods which are significantly more dense than their experience while being obviously pleasant and desirable. These same people often imagine a sense of community that does not actually exist in American suburbs and small towns but very much does where there is denser housing.

Streets are safer when there are reasons for people to be there as often as possible. Unsafe streets are unlit and empty. Safe streets have folks picking up a coffee or dropping of kids in the morning, having lunch and entering/leaving offices and professional services all day long, then have folks picking up kids, leaving work, going out to dinner in the evening, followed by after dinner drinks or late night entertainment events in the evening. A street like that has people moving on it all the time. We don’t see crime where there are always lots of people around with good reason to be there– it’s the ultimate place-based cultural deterrent (the true deterrent is tackling poverty).

Organization before Electronics before Concrete– I think this originated in Germany, and it’s one of the most powerful ideas in transit/train policy. Basically, first you need to actually get the operating of trains right. Get a solid time table, run trains frequently and on time, provide good service. Once you’re at the limits of what can be done through organization, then you electrify your rail service. Trains operating with electrified lines over diesel run faster– they break down less often and they have lower penalties for adding more stops because they can accelerate and decelerate faster. They can also be operated with centralized control systems rather than drivers, reducing staff costs for operating trains more frequently and on tighter time schedules. Lastly, you use concrete– actual construction like grade-separated crossings over roads, level boarding at stops to decrease dwell time, or establishing new rights of way/expansions. We don’t do this anywhere in the US with any kind of success because we’re not serious about transit.

Frequency and predictability beats speed– I need to know when my train will depart and I need my train to be available as often as possible. That’s what drive usage. It’s no good to me to have two trains in the morning and two in the evening that arrive in 65 minutes but leave at different times every day. I’d rather take a train that always leaves at 5 after the hour, every hour and take 80 minutes.

Increasing transit service frequency and reliability is more important than decreasing fare box prices, at least in the US, but possibly everywhere.

There should be very little politics as we see them today at the municipal level. Most of the political questions around how we organize our society will not and cannot be solved at the municipal level and shouldn’t be the focus there. Instead, municipal government should be about public service provision– how do we operate as effectively as possible? You should get elected and hire people based on how well they can run city services. Unfortunately, we often elect folks based on issues they can’t really effectively tackle and settle for poorly run cities and gross underfunding, especially of schools and bread-and-butter infrastructure like sewage and water pipes, electrical lines, street maintenance, transit operations, and more.