I admit I haven't looked into this at all, but I'd guess that Los Angeles is something of an outlier among US cities in its economic activity, and if you think Exeter has a traffic problem, hoo boy.
I, born and bred on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and living in Chicago, have looked at the political landscape here in the U.S. and Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Sprawl
Just realized, as someone who lived in New Haven for 25 years, "planning" is not always the solution, either. If it was, it would have worked there. They tried it, during the "Great Society" era. Put up a lot of modern architecture, but left the social infrastructure intact. The cherry on top is that the people who took over the Yale school of architecture decided it was time to "learn from Las Vegas," and thus was born Post Modernist wallpaper, now seen on every "new" building that gets thrown up everywhere. Be careful what you plan (or "anti-plan") for. The would-be social reformers who tried to re-do New Haven must be disappointed. Have a visit, the downtown Yale neighborhood got a rebrand: "The Shops At Yale."
That's true but Los Angeles famously doesn't have a central business district, either. I.e. following Dan's argument, you would expect that a credible commitment from the government to build a bonafide transit nexus <<here>> would prompt a bunch of new economically-valuable construction, as happened in NYC's Hudson Yards neighborhood once the MTA issued bonds to pay for the 7 train extension to the site.
If you look at the 19th century or earlier, transport infrastructure was very important for development. Cities were co-located with seaports, or perhaps at the waterfall line. Cities like Atlanta grew because a few railroad lines just happened to intersect there. Chicago was the easiest portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi river system.
Nowadays, mostly yeah. Cities develop because people want to live there, or because jobs are plentiful. But transport is still developmentally important at the micro level. Rents are much higher near train stops than bus stops.
On the third hand, the city of Newark, NJ is beginning to boom because it happens to be a transport hub: an airport, a seaport, and a railhead--not to mention proximity to Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson. On the fourth hand, it had decayed despite these advantages.
I think this is too simplistic. The point is that in the past, when we needed natural hubs for transportation--rivers, harbors, etc; waterways are an obvious consistent feature that enabled much larger settlements because of how easy it was to get people/things there--we can make our own hubs, now.
We have a choice about which technology we use, and I think the discussion about economic geography should be about the costs/benefits of that choice. No one's using planes for a 5km trip; no one's really using a bike for a 500km "trip" (outside of, say, a special marathon). It's the short/medium distances where there is actual competition, and therefore those distances at which there's a real discussion to be had about the role of transportation in shaping economic geographies.
I tend to think that in really car-dependent societies like younger American ones, you see a monopath of technology taken which has a lot of externalities, blinkering people in that cost/benefit discussion. Once you get to certain population densities, nothing's beating bikes and trains (and pedestrianism, obviously, along with them), and I'd argue that even at lower densities, it's a matter of choice, and not a clear-cut one, how you build towns and cities, not a product of any natural superiority of trains or cars over each other.
Liked: "it had decayed despite having these advantages." True of people also.
A four-handed man throws a wrench into the old "what is the sound of one hand clapping" problem when two of the extra hands start applauding. Then...Buddha confused!
Robber: hands up!
You: how many?
BTW I thought it was "Sodom On The Hudson"? Sounds like a real estate development, anyway.
Not sure where this is leading...you were making sense, then the train served onto an unmarked siding. Too bad you can't do public policy in one liners...on the other hand, what if you could?
San Jose, CA, is a great example of the failure of "build it and they will come". The suburbs were where all the good activities and malls were situated. Downtown was dreary, with old office buildings and few places to eat or buy anything. So the city decided to spend a lot of money on a light rail system to make it easy to get to the city center, with the hope of revitalizing the center with restaurants, etc. AFAIK, it remained a bust. One could see the light rail travel with nary a passenger aboard. There was no revitalization of the city center despite incentives. The suburbs remained where all leisure activity took place, as well as the more desirable workplaces.
I am actually there right now, and it's completely strange, like a standard North American downtown but...scaled, as if it was part of a model railway layout. I think the problem isn't anything to do with light rail but rather freeways, the city has been chopped up with huge motorways and devoured by its own suburbs. Pretty sui generis though; nowhere else is Silicon Valley, and there's the further issue that San Francisco is always going to win at "being a proper city" in the Bay Area.
Did you live in the Valley before the light rail was built? The city center was poorly laid out, and very much a place for professional offices as well as the city services. There were restaurants, but relatively few. At night, the city emptied out, rather like my memories of Wall Street. Not a nice place to wander around. The light rail was added to try to create a magnet to attract leisure businesses back to the city from the suburbs. But San Jose had good malls, and the Santana Row development is a better approach to creating a venue for restaurants, shops, and even music. AFAIK, the city revitalization completely failed, wasting resources. [There was a suggestion that it was pushed by developers who had clout with the city, fronted by an influential ex-mayor. IDK if that was true or not.] There was also the stupid development of the stadium for the San Jose Sharks, secured by the usual people and promises of increasing local businesses. {Also total BS). San Jose council had a reputation as being somewhat corrupt. Whether it cleaned up its act IDK, I left the city in the early 2000s. (I cannot say if it was similar or worse than other city councils.)
No, I first visited in late 2023. this said I have been to both the stadium and Santana Row; the latter is certainly nice but also weirdly artificial. a professional colleague this week said that the vibe was like The Truman Show, heartily agree
No, I first visited in late 2023. this said I have been to both the stadium and Santana Row; the latter is certainly nice but also weirdly artificial. a professional colleague this week said that the vibe was like The Truman Show, heartily agree
If you get some inside information on where a planned rail route is going, don’t you think it’d be profitable (though unethical) to quietly buy up real estate along the proposed route? If yes, isn’t that the same as saying that transport infrastructure should be expected to spur economic activity?
As I understand it, this was essentially the business model for Brightline in Florida, a privately-owned passenger rail line built by real estate developers, where the profit was intended to come from property development near the rail stations. I believe they’ve been quite successful so far. Why wouldn’t that scheme be repeatable in principle, at least in jurisdictions lacking unreasonable barriers to investment?
Yes, Japanese real estate developers are chuckling at this post.
It was recently announced that Ho Chi Minh City would build its second metro line, and of course real estate prices along the proposed route immediately jumped.
Probably not a great idea to extrapolate from one small, declining island’s experience with (talking about) building transport infrastructure to the rest of the world…
I think the argument would be: once a city is big enough and thriving enough to need transport(ation) infrastructure, the specific *location* of the infrastructure will generate activity *at that specific location*. But that fact doesn't generalize to places that are not big and thriving enough.
Build an "L" stop at the corner of Main and Prairie in Chicago, get more activity at that location.
Build an "L" stop at the corner of Main and Prairie in Nowheresville, Idaho (population 75), get nothing.
That’s too restrictive, look at what happened in the West in the US. You could build rail lines into trackless prairie, and the towns sprang up around the rail lines. In the modern era, suburban development follows highway expansions.
I mean, the power of transport infrastructure clearly isn’t infinite, or it’d be impossible for former nodes like Detroit to decline, but it also is clearly not zero either.
On a related note, Central PA got some big boosts economically the past 20 years or so as the existing highway networks allowed massive warehouses to spring up that serve NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC, etc. A very different proposition than light rail (moving things is very different than moving people) but still worth considering.
Bradford city centre was a complete blighted, disconnected shit hole. Improving the city realm and connecting it better to Leeds won't itself generate economic growth. But the city was so low it's hard to conceive how any investors could be enticed in without a plan to lift it up and connect it. Exeter is but one example.
Seems like new transport infrastructure can prevent clogged transport being a brake on growth that wants to happen due to other factors. Which has the same sign as “causes growth”.
I'm definitely on the transportist-urbanist-econgeography side of the argument, but I think that you can absolutely get some rather mechanical growth effects from general equilibrium reasons alone, without any direct invocation of spatial agglomeration stuff. Essentially, in a reasonable ridership scenario, transit becomes socially cheaper than cars (taking into account both public and private spending, and especially once you start adding externalities) and thus those aggregate savings have to turn into additional consumption or investment. It's true that only some fraction of that will be spent locally, but it's not zero. Obviously this might not be enough to justify some investment as a local development strategy, but it's still worth it from both the national growth PoV and the local quality of life, so why not do it anyway (as long as it's a network people would ride) even if you believe in ~0 spatial-connectivity-driven growth?
I'm less of a transport-sceptic/agglomeration-sceptic than you are, but I feel like I end up mostly on the same page as you because it feels like half of the transport discussion (and many other discussions, see planning, etc) exist so think-tankers and politicians and central bankers can duck out of the hard task of providing a good environment for growth in general and spending money on actual industrial policy. I appreciate that getting industrial policy wrong is a problem, but "just not" has not in fact gotten us where we want to be either.
Agreed. Transport First is a very Victorian mindset (why can’t be just build things like the Victorians used to do?) because it works when you’re opening up new areas (seaside resorts on the Irish Sea being one example, mining areas another) and the existing transport is either non existent or poor (canals were vital to the Potteries to ship goods without breakages). And, of course, transport runs two ways. Connecting Manchester to London via HS2 might boost Manchester but it could also turn it into a suburb of London. Adonis’s Golden Arrow wasn’t pointing towards London by accident. All a long way of saying that transport investment needs to be part of a strategic plan for an area and developing - and delivering - strategic plans requires considerably more attention to governance than has traditionally been the case. Transport for The North, anyone? And who was in charge of The Northern Powerhouse?
The issue with your Exeter example is that has a fairly good transport system for its size? What 10 stations in the city and about another 5 just outside ? Service every 30 mins from Crediton, Exmouth, Tiverton, Totnes?
Sheffield's richest area isn't on the tram network and several of the poorest are. It has probably done a bit for house prices in some of the places in the middle, and has maybe helped the student-led repopulation of the city centre. But otherwise I suspect you're right and it has little effect on economic growth. But it's still much-needed for improving the traffic, air pollution and other quality of life issues that come with car dependency.
@backofmind Dan Davies - It looks like there's a fake account that is a spam bot designed to look exactly like you it just has 1 at the end of their username and is spamming everyone with their name.
but, but, but... this idea is guaranteed to fail because it has to involve a conspiracy, right? Unless I've misunderstood it (chance: minimum 90%, maybe higher) what this involves is having an actual policy of "build transport infrastructure when it's desperately needed" but everyone believes that you have a policy which is "build transport infrastructure at just the right times" so that they're confident that you'll do it. So you go into the Transport Planning Office at the council or wherever and say "ok, lads, what we're actually going to do is build this new tram system five years after it started to be needed, when everyone's desperately clamouring for it, but it is critical that nobody outside this office has any idea that this is the plan; they need to all believe we'll jump to it on the first opportunity". Even if we assume that the marketing campaign for this new confidence-building approach is great and everyone does believe it on day one (giving the transport planners the benefit of the doubt, which I am pretty sceptical about already), they're not gonna believe it on day 1000 when you still haven't actually done it because it's not desperate enough yet. And day 1000 was probably in about 1995...
I admit I haven't looked into this at all, but I'd guess that Los Angeles is something of an outlier among US cities in its economic activity, and if you think Exeter has a traffic problem, hoo boy.
yeah, also Dallas; I guess to some extent "sprawl" can be considered a form of transport infrastructure
I, born and bred on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and living in Chicago, have looked at the political landscape here in the U.S. and Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Sprawl
Reminds me of my ADD relatives' method for solving the "where should things go" problem: piles.
Here a pile, there a pile, everywhere a pile, pile.
Pile = "I have no idea what to do with this stuff, so I just drop it."
The pile = where it is.
"Don't mess with my pile."
Sometimes, boxes: boxes of unpaid bills, for instance. Then, more boxes.
What you don't want to face now, you put off. When it gets worse, you deal with it.
Urban planning, in miniature!
Just realized, as someone who lived in New Haven for 25 years, "planning" is not always the solution, either. If it was, it would have worked there. They tried it, during the "Great Society" era. Put up a lot of modern architecture, but left the social infrastructure intact. The cherry on top is that the people who took over the Yale school of architecture decided it was time to "learn from Las Vegas," and thus was born Post Modernist wallpaper, now seen on every "new" building that gets thrown up everywhere. Be careful what you plan (or "anti-plan") for. The would-be social reformers who tried to re-do New Haven must be disappointed. Have a visit, the downtown Yale neighborhood got a rebrand: "The Shops At Yale."
Lots of US cities have great transport connectivity its just based on a massive highways that are not acceptable.
That's true but Los Angeles famously doesn't have a central business district, either. I.e. following Dan's argument, you would expect that a credible commitment from the government to build a bonafide transit nexus <<here>> would prompt a bunch of new economically-valuable construction, as happened in NYC's Hudson Yards neighborhood once the MTA issued bonds to pay for the 7 train extension to the site.
If you look at the 19th century or earlier, transport infrastructure was very important for development. Cities were co-located with seaports, or perhaps at the waterfall line. Cities like Atlanta grew because a few railroad lines just happened to intersect there. Chicago was the easiest portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi river system.
Nowadays, mostly yeah. Cities develop because people want to live there, or because jobs are plentiful. But transport is still developmentally important at the micro level. Rents are much higher near train stops than bus stops.
On the third hand, the city of Newark, NJ is beginning to boom because it happens to be a transport hub: an airport, a seaport, and a railhead--not to mention proximity to Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson. On the fourth hand, it had decayed despite these advantages.
I think this is too simplistic. The point is that in the past, when we needed natural hubs for transportation--rivers, harbors, etc; waterways are an obvious consistent feature that enabled much larger settlements because of how easy it was to get people/things there--we can make our own hubs, now.
We have a choice about which technology we use, and I think the discussion about economic geography should be about the costs/benefits of that choice. No one's using planes for a 5km trip; no one's really using a bike for a 500km "trip" (outside of, say, a special marathon). It's the short/medium distances where there is actual competition, and therefore those distances at which there's a real discussion to be had about the role of transportation in shaping economic geographies.
I tend to think that in really car-dependent societies like younger American ones, you see a monopath of technology taken which has a lot of externalities, blinkering people in that cost/benefit discussion. Once you get to certain population densities, nothing's beating bikes and trains (and pedestrianism, obviously, along with them), and I'd argue that even at lower densities, it's a matter of choice, and not a clear-cut one, how you build towns and cities, not a product of any natural superiority of trains or cars over each other.
Liked: "it had decayed despite having these advantages." True of people also.
A four-handed man throws a wrench into the old "what is the sound of one hand clapping" problem when two of the extra hands start applauding. Then...Buddha confused!
Robber: hands up!
You: how many?
BTW I thought it was "Sodom On The Hudson"? Sounds like a real estate development, anyway.
Not sure where this is leading...you were making sense, then the train served onto an unmarked siding. Too bad you can't do public policy in one liners...on the other hand, what if you could?
San Jose, CA, is a great example of the failure of "build it and they will come". The suburbs were where all the good activities and malls were situated. Downtown was dreary, with old office buildings and few places to eat or buy anything. So the city decided to spend a lot of money on a light rail system to make it easy to get to the city center, with the hope of revitalizing the center with restaurants, etc. AFAIK, it remained a bust. One could see the light rail travel with nary a passenger aboard. There was no revitalization of the city center despite incentives. The suburbs remained where all leisure activity took place, as well as the more desirable workplaces.
I am actually there right now, and it's completely strange, like a standard North American downtown but...scaled, as if it was part of a model railway layout. I think the problem isn't anything to do with light rail but rather freeways, the city has been chopped up with huge motorways and devoured by its own suburbs. Pretty sui generis though; nowhere else is Silicon Valley, and there's the further issue that San Francisco is always going to win at "being a proper city" in the Bay Area.
Did you live in the Valley before the light rail was built? The city center was poorly laid out, and very much a place for professional offices as well as the city services. There were restaurants, but relatively few. At night, the city emptied out, rather like my memories of Wall Street. Not a nice place to wander around. The light rail was added to try to create a magnet to attract leisure businesses back to the city from the suburbs. But San Jose had good malls, and the Santana Row development is a better approach to creating a venue for restaurants, shops, and even music. AFAIK, the city revitalization completely failed, wasting resources. [There was a suggestion that it was pushed by developers who had clout with the city, fronted by an influential ex-mayor. IDK if that was true or not.] There was also the stupid development of the stadium for the San Jose Sharks, secured by the usual people and promises of increasing local businesses. {Also total BS). San Jose council had a reputation as being somewhat corrupt. Whether it cleaned up its act IDK, I left the city in the early 2000s. (I cannot say if it was similar or worse than other city councils.)
No, I first visited in late 2023. this said I have been to both the stadium and Santana Row; the latter is certainly nice but also weirdly artificial. a professional colleague this week said that the vibe was like The Truman Show, heartily agree
No, I first visited in late 2023. this said I have been to both the stadium and Santana Row; the latter is certainly nice but also weirdly artificial. a professional colleague this week said that the vibe was like The Truman Show, heartily agree
If you get some inside information on where a planned rail route is going, don’t you think it’d be profitable (though unethical) to quietly buy up real estate along the proposed route? If yes, isn’t that the same as saying that transport infrastructure should be expected to spur economic activity?
As I understand it, this was essentially the business model for Brightline in Florida, a privately-owned passenger rail line built by real estate developers, where the profit was intended to come from property development near the rail stations. I believe they’ve been quite successful so far. Why wouldn’t that scheme be repeatable in principle, at least in jurisdictions lacking unreasonable barriers to investment?
Yes, Japanese real estate developers are chuckling at this post.
It was recently announced that Ho Chi Minh City would build its second metro line, and of course real estate prices along the proposed route immediately jumped.
Probably not a great idea to extrapolate from one small, declining island’s experience with (talking about) building transport infrastructure to the rest of the world…
I think the argument would be: once a city is big enough and thriving enough to need transport(ation) infrastructure, the specific *location* of the infrastructure will generate activity *at that specific location*. But that fact doesn't generalize to places that are not big and thriving enough.
Build an "L" stop at the corner of Main and Prairie in Chicago, get more activity at that location.
Build an "L" stop at the corner of Main and Prairie in Nowheresville, Idaho (population 75), get nothing.
That’s too restrictive, look at what happened in the West in the US. You could build rail lines into trackless prairie, and the towns sprang up around the rail lines. In the modern era, suburban development follows highway expansions.
I mean, the power of transport infrastructure clearly isn’t infinite, or it’d be impossible for former nodes like Detroit to decline, but it also is clearly not zero either.
On a related note, Central PA got some big boosts economically the past 20 years or so as the existing highway networks allowed massive warehouses to spring up that serve NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC, etc. A very different proposition than light rail (moving things is very different than moving people) but still worth considering.
Come visit Manila, Philippines.
It's the most densely populated set of cities on the planet.
It's taken me 3hrs to travel 5kms. The ETA just before we left was 30mins, but then it was just before everyone left work and it started raining.
I could have travelled faster by walking backwards.
But most cases it's not quite that bad.
Usually we get about 12km in 3hrs during peak hour.
The same trip takes more like 45mins when there's barely any traffic on the road, but few people want to travel at 2am :-p
They also have two separate train systems. LRT1 and LRT2.
Both are basic light rail networks that travel above the roads.
I don't recommend people visit Manila if they want to enjoy the Philippines.
Liked: "I could have travelled faster by walking backwards."
And: "I don't recommend people visit Manila if they want to enjoy the Philippines."
Was gonna say u were good at 1-liners, but's that's 2 lines.
Bradford city centre was a complete blighted, disconnected shit hole. Improving the city realm and connecting it better to Leeds won't itself generate economic growth. But the city was so low it's hard to conceive how any investors could be enticed in without a plan to lift it up and connect it. Exeter is but one example.
Seems like new transport infrastructure can prevent clogged transport being a brake on growth that wants to happen due to other factors. Which has the same sign as “causes growth”.
I'm definitely on the transportist-urbanist-econgeography side of the argument, but I think that you can absolutely get some rather mechanical growth effects from general equilibrium reasons alone, without any direct invocation of spatial agglomeration stuff. Essentially, in a reasonable ridership scenario, transit becomes socially cheaper than cars (taking into account both public and private spending, and especially once you start adding externalities) and thus those aggregate savings have to turn into additional consumption or investment. It's true that only some fraction of that will be spent locally, but it's not zero. Obviously this might not be enough to justify some investment as a local development strategy, but it's still worth it from both the national growth PoV and the local quality of life, so why not do it anyway (as long as it's a network people would ride) even if you believe in ~0 spatial-connectivity-driven growth?
I'm less of a transport-sceptic/agglomeration-sceptic than you are, but I feel like I end up mostly on the same page as you because it feels like half of the transport discussion (and many other discussions, see planning, etc) exist so think-tankers and politicians and central bankers can duck out of the hard task of providing a good environment for growth in general and spending money on actual industrial policy. I appreciate that getting industrial policy wrong is a problem, but "just not" has not in fact gotten us where we want to be either.
Agreed. Transport First is a very Victorian mindset (why can’t be just build things like the Victorians used to do?) because it works when you’re opening up new areas (seaside resorts on the Irish Sea being one example, mining areas another) and the existing transport is either non existent or poor (canals were vital to the Potteries to ship goods without breakages). And, of course, transport runs two ways. Connecting Manchester to London via HS2 might boost Manchester but it could also turn it into a suburb of London. Adonis’s Golden Arrow wasn’t pointing towards London by accident. All a long way of saying that transport investment needs to be part of a strategic plan for an area and developing - and delivering - strategic plans requires considerably more attention to governance than has traditionally been the case. Transport for The North, anyone? And who was in charge of The Northern Powerhouse?
The issue with your Exeter example is that has a fairly good transport system for its size? What 10 stations in the city and about another 5 just outside ? Service every 30 mins from Crediton, Exmouth, Tiverton, Totnes?
Sheffield's richest area isn't on the tram network and several of the poorest are. It has probably done a bit for house prices in some of the places in the middle, and has maybe helped the student-led repopulation of the city centre. But otherwise I suspect you're right and it has little effect on economic growth. But it's still much-needed for improving the traffic, air pollution and other quality of life issues that come with car dependency.
@backofmind Dan Davies - It looks like there's a fake account that is a spam bot designed to look exactly like you it just has 1 at the end of their username and is spamming everyone with their name.
but, but, but... this idea is guaranteed to fail because it has to involve a conspiracy, right? Unless I've misunderstood it (chance: minimum 90%, maybe higher) what this involves is having an actual policy of "build transport infrastructure when it's desperately needed" but everyone believes that you have a policy which is "build transport infrastructure at just the right times" so that they're confident that you'll do it. So you go into the Transport Planning Office at the council or wherever and say "ok, lads, what we're actually going to do is build this new tram system five years after it started to be needed, when everyone's desperately clamouring for it, but it is critical that nobody outside this office has any idea that this is the plan; they need to all believe we'll jump to it on the first opportunity". Even if we assume that the marketing campaign for this new confidence-building approach is great and everyone does believe it on day one (giving the transport planners the benefit of the doubt, which I am pretty sceptical about already), they're not gonna believe it on day 1000 when you still haven't actually done it because it's not desperate enough yet. And day 1000 was probably in about 1995...