The Stock Transfer Tax: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back?

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

By Alex Marshall

May 2003

It sounds too good to be true. At a time when New York City and state are billions of dollars in the red, they could raise that and possibly more by reinstating a tax that is mostly paid by people living outside the state and country.

It’s called the Stock Transfer Tax. Until 1981, the state had one, and the city got the revenue.

Until it was phased out, it was raising $300 million a year for the city. Technically, it is still in place, only the proceeds are instantly rebated to the buyer of a stock. Now some people, including an Albany legislator, are considering bringing it back in a new form.

A lot has happened since 1981. The number of purchases on the stock market has grown exponentially. If the same tax were in place now, it would raise an amazing $11 billion in 2004, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office, which recently studied the issue.

Just how does this lucrative tax work? It’s a bit hard to understand, in this age of supposedly landless and nationless capital. But, even though shares of IBM or Apple may be bought by someone in Peru or Peoria, transactions still go through the New York or American stock exchanges, which are located in New York City, if the stock is listed through those houses. The buyer pays the relatively tiny tax, not the brokerage house. The old tax was set on a sliding scale, rising up to 5 cents per share, to a maximum of $350 per transaction. No one has suggested re-instating it at the old level, in part because the various fees that are associated with stock trading have all declined.

New York State Assemblyman Ronald Tocci of Westchester County has suggested reinstating it on a sliding scale, up to a penny per share. The Fiscal Policy Institute ran a scenario study of a half penny per share, with a $35 cap. The IBO, in its studies, put it at half the old rate, or approximately 2.5 cents per share on a sliding scale.

“I see it as a possible, viable alternative to a lot of other unpopular taxes,” Tocci said in an interview from Albany.

New York State first implemented the tax in 1907. In 1965, according to Frank Mauro of the Fiscal Policy Institute, which has studied the issue, the State agreed to give all the revenues to the City in exchange for the City giving up the revenue from a penny of its sales tax. In 1975, during the City’s budget crisis, the securities industry agreed to a 25 percent surcharge. And in 1979, in part because of lobbying by the industry, Gov. Carey agreed to phase it out.

“A good tax is one where the base is very broad, and the rates are very low,” Mauro said.

“Economists agree that all taxes have economic consequences. So to have the least interference, you should have the base very broad and the rates very low.” “It’s intriguing,” said Ed Cupoli, chief economist of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee in Albany. “But the legislature would be reluctant to do anything negative to the securities industry.” In theory, the tax raises enormous sums of money at a miniscule rate of taxation, which, not incidentally, is paid by people mostly living elsewhere.

For example, if a trader in South Dakota bought 100 shares of IBM for $80 a share, the current cost would be $8,000. A penny per share stock transfer tax, depending on the sliding scale, would add at most $1 to this transaction, or 1/8000 of the total cost. For a lower-priced stock, the fee would be lower because the tax would be lower. If someone bought 1000 shares, or $80,000 worth, the fee would be capped, perhaps at $35.

Such a tax would not be burdensome on any one individual. But because millions of shares of stocks are sold daily, it would generate enormous sums of money very quickly.

If this tax can generate so much money so easily, why aren’t our competitors doing it?

They are. In fact, most other stock exchanges have a transfer tax in place, and often at considerably higher rates. Hong Kong, Singapore, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and others have such a tax, all at higher rates than what is being proposed here, according to J.W. Mason, a doctoral student in economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in an article in City Limits Magazine in October 2002 (“Big Idea: Tax the Street”, www.citylimits.org.).

London, often said to be one of New York’s principal competitors, taxes stock sales at 0.5 percent of the price of a stock. This rate is many times higher than the New York tax. In the case of the 100 shares of IBM above, this would be $40, instead of $1.

If Tocci’s plan of a penny per share were put in place, it would probably raise more than $2 billion a year. If split between the city and state, this would be a significant source of new revenue for both.

There is a downside though. The worry is that if such a tax were reinstated, then the New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange, the principal entities affected, would leave town to avoid it. If the traders traded in New Jersey, their customers would pay no tax.

Tocci and others argue that the stock exchanges would be unlikely to leave town to avoid a tiny tax that they themselves don’t even pay. Some of the other remedies being considered, such as a surcharge on the income tax of wealthy taxpayers, would hit their personal pocketbooks much more directly, Tocci said.

But others in the banking and budgeting business have been more critical.

“I think it’s dead on arrival in Albany,” said Rae Rosen, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank. “An industry-specific tax might on balance do more harm than good, particularly for an industry that has the ability to move operations out of the city.” The tone of the limited IBO analysis is pessimistic. The IBO examined the issue as part of a larger report, “Budget Options for New York City,” (www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/). The section on the Stock Transfer Tax says: “The proposed STT half-restoration could reduce overall private sector employment in the city by as much as 80,000 and lower receipts from other city taxes by close to $650 million.” David Belkin, Senior Economist at IBO, says that there has been a general trend against such taxes.

“The industry people say the exchange will collapse,” Belkin said. “But even just assuming some decline, that in and of itself has an impact.

London and Hong Kong have one. But there is more competitive pressure. There is a big fight going on in London over their tax. The tax is worth considering. For one thing, other more onerous taxes raise relatively small amounts of money. In the IBO’s study, “Budget Options for New York City,” (http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/), controversial measures, such as a Luxury Apartment Rental Tax, would raise only an estimated $27 million a year. Other taxes, such as restoring the commuter tax, would raise only about $500 million, or far less than most versions of the stock transfer tax.

One indication that the tax could work is that there already is one in place. It’s what funds the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although Congress recently scheduled the tax to decrease in rate over the next few years, it now raises more than $2 billion a year. About $350 million of that goes to fund the SEC. The rest goes into the US Treasury.

Tocci and Mauro suggest one way to make the tax palatable to The Street is to give them some direct benefit. Some of the money could pay for a new stock exchange building, or for industry promotion. It should be remembered that in the 1970s, the industry agreed to a surcharge to help solve the city’s budget problems.

“It has to be part of a community effort, it has to be part of saving New York,” Mauro said.

“Doing this at a very low rate and raising money from all over the world would be better than raising taxes that would come directly from the New York economy.”

–First published in Spotlight on the Region, the bi-weekly newsletter of Regional Plan Association in New York City.

Guns Don’t Kill People; Cars Do. Or At Least Not As Many

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

On Foot Or On Wheels, Facing The Threat

Whether you walk, drive or bicycle on your daily rounds, are you more in danger of getting killed from a bumper of a car or a bullet from a gun? It depends on where you live, although the stats suggest that overall, the mean metal of a car is more dangerous than that from a gun, simply because speeding cars are so much more prevalent than speeding bullets.

The New York Daily News started out this somewhat morbid train of thought of mine with its news series this month examining pedestrians killed by vehicles. The series noted that from 2000 to 2002, 580 pedestrians were killed. The news campaign, entitled Save a Life, Change the Law, is an excellent example of advocacy journalism. It informs the reader of a fact — a lot of people on foot are killed by cars — and then forcefully presents a possible remedy, in this case, making it easier to charge drivers with criminal penalties if they kill a pedestrian. If more drivers were charged with criminal penalties for reckless behavior, drivers might think twice before speeding through an intersection.

The good news is that both the murder rate and the killing of pedestrians by vehicles have been steadily dropping over the last decade. In 1990, 365 pedestrians were killed and an amazing 2,606 people were murdered. In 2002, only 195 pedestrians were killed and only 575 people were murdered. If the murder rate keeps up its swift descent, walking across a dangerous intersection will be riskier than walking through a bad neighborhood.

Eric Monkkonen, an urban historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, studies both crime and urban planning. He is the author of Murder in New York City (UCLA press 2001), and America Becomes Urban, (UCLA 1988). Both are excellent. He said New York City’s murder rate has always gone up and down over the centuries, but was unusually high in the last generation.

“New York has always been safer than other American cities, so the crime rate could go even lower.” Monkkonen said from his office in California. “The question is how to get it there. I wouldn’t trust anyone who has a simple answer.” Moving back to pedestrian deaths, Transportation Alternatives, in several excellent recent reports available at its web site www.transalt.org, reported that the number of pedestrians has continued to drop in 2003, with only 102 pedestrians killed in the first nine months of the year. It appears we are heading for a record breaking year in safety. T.A. credits the transportation department with a series of traffic calming measures that have significantly made things safer for pedestrians.

But only if you are satisfied with not dying.

Transportation Alternatives also reports that in 2002, 15,000 pedestrians and 4000 cyclists were injured, about the same as in past years. Also in 2002, 16 cyclists were killed, a rate that has been pretty consistent for the past decade.

How do we fare if we move from the urban streets of New York City to the more suburban ones of New Jersey? Not so well, at least if we are walking or driving.

Drivers in the Garden State killed 184 pedestrians last year, an alarming 37 percent increase, it was reported recently. Pedestrian deaths in New Jersey had been dropping, and the increase is so large that it begs some specific explanation. New York has 8 million people; New Jersey has about 8.4 million.

Given the similar populations and the similar pedestrian death rates — 184 in New Jersey versus 198 in New York City — seems evidence that it’s more dangerous to walk in New Jersey, simply because so many more people walk regularly in New York City.

It’s not only more dangerous to walk, it’s more dangerous to drive. In 2001, New Jersey had 747 traffic fatalities, at least double the number of those in New York City.

This statistic matches with the work of William Lucy, a professor of urban planning at the University of Virginia, who made headlines consistently in the 1990s with his studies showing one was more at risk living in a traffic ridden suburb than a crime ridden inner city. Several of his studies showed that a prosperous Northern Virginian or Richmond suburb was less safe to live in than Washington DC or Richmond, which then vied for the highest murder rates in the land. The reason was surprising but obvious from the data.

Speeding cars killed a lot more people in the suburbs than they did in the inner city, where the cars tended to travel more slowly and accidents tended not to be fatal.

Here in the Tri State Region, it would be nice to have the best of all worlds. If we make it safe and most of all pleasant to walk and bicycle in the city or suburb, we will have safer and more pleasant communities all around.

–Alex Marshall, an Independent Journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA

DC Metro: A Record of Reinvigorating a City

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

(Taken from the February 2004 issue of Planning Magazine.)

Love (and Hate) That Metro

It’s a mess say some commuters — it’s too expensive and the stations are too far apart. But they ride it all the same.

By Alex Marshall

While he sips an imported beer at Aroma, the elegant bar on Connecticut Avenue near the National Zoo, Jamison Adcock is happy to offer his opinions on “Metro,” the popular name for the D.C. region’s 103-mile transit system, whose pinwheel map is as familiar to residents as the tall spire of the Washington Monument or other local landmarks.

“It’s a horrible mess,” says Adcock, a 33-year-old software engineer. “It’s the lamest metro system I’ve ever seen.” Exhibiting the enthusiasm of someone finally getting a load off his mind, Adcock details Metro’s shortcomings: With its long arms stretching into Maryland and Virginia, and fewer stops within the city proper, “it’s basically built for commuters,” he says.

There’s more: The point-to-point ticketing system, which charges riders according to distance traveled, makes it “incredibly expensive compared to, say, Boston or Philadelphia.” The deep stations mean “you have some of the longest escalators in the free world.” And the open-air escalators lack canopies, making rainy days bad news for riders.

For all his bad-mouthing, it turns out that Adcock actually uses Metro. In fact, that’s how he got to this bar to meet his friends at 7 p.m. on a Friday night. “I can come down here and not worry about parking,” he admits. “And I can drink three or four beers and not worry about driving home.” This prompts Adcock at last to mention a positive about Metro: The management has extended its hours to 3 a.m. on weekends. “They finally did something right,” he says.

Everyone’s a critic

Such criticism from a regular rider illustrates an undeniable fact about Metro. Twenty-seven years after the first line opened in 1976, the system has worked its way into the very fiber of the city and region, transforming both in the process. It’s almost impossible to overstate Metro’s impact. It has revitalized downtown and the closer suburbs, led to population growth within the city proper, priced out less affluent newcomers from once-sleepy suburbs and once-dying urban neighborhoods, and changed the skyline in both suburb and city.

Few people are indifferent to Metro because few people are unaffected by it. Whereas the chief complaint about many transit systems is that they’re inefficient or too costly to taxpayers, the rap against Metro is that it does not go far enough, run long enough hours, or match some other rider expectation of tiptop service. Polls on expanding the system routinely reach support levels in the 70 percent range.

Even critics begin their remarks with praise. “The overall image of the system locally and nationally and worldwide is that it’s a spectacular system,” says Robert J. Smith, a Metro board member who was appointed by Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich. Smith has attacked the system’s budget as lavish and wants to see more money put into highways rather than transit. But he is also a regular patron. “I ride it every day,” he says.

Still, coping with success has its own challenges. With the original system now almost complete, the region is faced with deciding whether to embark on a new era of Metro expansion, to put that money into more roads, or to do neither.

Even without expansion, just keeping up with the capital and maintenance costs associated with a steadily growing ridership is a daunting task. It’s a challenge few predicted Metro would have when the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), the subway’s builder and administrator, was created in 1967.

Corrugated cocoon

If you blindfold a group of Metro riders and lead them into one of the original stations, even after years away, it’s likely to take only seconds before they recognize where they are. The cocoon of corrugated barrel vaulting is absolutely distinctive.

Familiar to every user as well are the round lights at the platform edge, which flash as a train approaches, and the rechargeable paper tickets, which are inserted into the turnstiles. The cars themselves are distinctive. Wider than subway cars in older systems, many still feature the orange seat cushions and carpets that give the trains a vaguely disco feeling, reminiscent of the era in which the system opened. Construction began in 1969, and the first line began operation in 1976, coinciding with the nation’s bicentennial celebration.

Politically, Metro traces back to the Joint Transportation Commission, created by Congress in 1954 to study the problems of getting around in the Washington area. Conceptually, you could say the system harks back to the tiny subway created in 1906 between the U.S. Capitol and the Senate Office Building. A Washington Post headline at the time asked, “Why Not A Real Subway System for Washington?”

Although construction of the system beneath a roughly two-centuries-old city was a tough engineering job, the political hurdles were even higher. Constructing and operating the system required bringing together the District of Columbia and the states of Maryland and Virginia, entities that historically have been in conflict. Throw in the local governments, and the cooperation problems multiply.

The reason these hurdles were cleared is twofold: the leadership of many individuals and the promise of federal dollars. As with the interstate highway system that began in the 1950s, the lure of the federal money got competing states and localities to sit down and talk.

Ultimately, the federal government paid $6.4 billion and local governments $3 billion of the system’s $9.4 billion cost, according to Metro officials. In present-day dollars, $9.4 billion works out to about $22 billion. Although a big number, in context it can seem cheap. For example, New York City’s planned Second Avenue subway line, which will run just 10 miles up the East Side of Manhattan, currently bears a price tag of $16 billion.

Chutzpah at work

The chutzpah of early leaders like Reps. Carlton Sickles (D-Md.), Basil Whitener (D-N.C.), and Joel Broyhill (R-Va.), who managed to build political support for Metro and fund it, can be appreciated clearly in retrospect. The federal government and its partners were proposing a comprehensive heavy rail system at a time when transit use was dropping all over the country and highway construction was seen as the more obvious government investment.

“I tried to understand why Washington built a subway, when every other American city was building highways,” says Zachary Schrag, an historian at Columbia University, who wrote his dissertation on the city’s subway system. “The answer is to see Metro as the embodiment of Great Society liberalism. It was about using the power of the federal government to take American wealth and put it into grand public projects, not designed to serve the poor or the rich, but to serve everyone. Only if we understand it in those terms do we get a sense of what it’s worth.”

And if at times Metro’s station design, by Chicago architect Harry Weese, seems overly grand, it’s because it was meant to be. “Metro was not designed to be the cheapest solution to the problem; it was designed to be the best solution,” says Schrag.”It was designed to do public works right.”

Whatever the expense, the founders’ vision of the system’s overall design was quite sound. The path of the lines and the placement of the stations generally follows the original plan. The system’s five lines — red, orange, blue, yellow, and green — have arms stretching into the surrounding regions and states. The original 100-mile system was completed in 2001. A few heavy construction projects remain. WMATA is at work at the first infill station, New York Avenue, on the Red Line, and is extending the blue line by two stations; the line will terminate at the multi-million-dollar Largo Town Center.

The rail component works with a surface system of buses. Although Metro is what people call the subway, WMATA is also in charge of bus service for the city and much of the region. MetroBus runs almost 1,500 buses, which make about 500,000 trips daily, less than MetroRail’s 650,000 trips. Metro is seamlessly integrated with the city’s main airport, Reagan National Airport, one of the few systems in the country to be so. Tourists use Metro regularly and return home asking why their communities don’t have a transit system like it.

Quirks

The system has its quirks. No eating is allowed on the trains or platforms, a rule the transit police enforce with regular $10 tickets. It is also relatively expensive. A journey of more than a few stations quickly adds up to $3 or more, particularly at rush hour. Metro’s fare box pays about 70 percent of MetroRail’s operating costs, one of the highest percentages in the country.

Adcock, the critic at the bar, is essentially correct in his gripes about the system’s limitations. MetroRail is a hybrid of a traditional subway, which serves people within the city, and a commuter line, which brings people into the city from outlying areas. Even within the city, stations are relatively far apart, as is the custom with commuter rail lines. Some stations within the District are more than a mile apart.

Having fewer stations made Metro less expensive to construct and ensures that trips downtown are faster for commuters. But it makes the train harder to use for everyday travel because you have to walk further to and from the station. By comparison in Manhattan, most stations are five to seven blocks apart. Metro is remedying this some. The New York Avenue station, now under construction, adds a stop between Union Station and the Rhode Island Avenue station, which are 1.7 miles apart on the Red Line.

Another limitation is that the Metro lines have only two tracks. That means a breakdown in one place can back up other trains many stations distant. Unexpected delays are frequent. During a Friday afternoon rush hour recently, passengers waited fruitlessly for a Red Line train to arrive at Metro Center. At one point, the crowd grew so large that it overflowed into the wide hallway that led to the platform. A breakdown had delayed the trains.

“I’m still at Metro Center at 5:30; I’m not going to make the train at Union Station,” said one chagrined rider into her cell phone. “You’re going to have to reschedule my meeting.”

Metro planners look wistfully at New York’s subway, whose lines generally have four tracks, with both express and local service. Despite the advantages of more tracks, it is actually quite rare globally, probably because it increases construction costs enormously. With Metro, there is some talk of adding an express track to the Orange line to limit backups and improve service.

Whatever its shortcomings, many residents regard Metro fondly, probably more than is common with something as utilitarian as a subway. “I think it’s terrific,” said regular rider Joan Wise as she briskly made her way to her morning train at the Cleveland Park station. “It’s half an hour from inside my house to inside my office, and someone else is in charge. I’ve just been to Barcelona and Madrid, and Metro is better.”

It’s not Paris

When people do criticize Metro, they often compare it unfavorably to subways of older, larger cities like New York and Paris, whose systems were founded a century ago and which carry about 10 times the traffic of Washington’s. After all, the Paris subway carries 4.5 million riders daily and its new line, the Meteor, serves more people than Washington’s entire system. What’s amazing is that people are comparing these systems at all. In a sense, it shows how successful Metro is, and its users ambition for it.

About the only other recently built subway that is as vital to a region as Metro is to Washington is Mexico City’s. Its first line opened in 1969, the same year that construction began on Washington’s Metro. Mexico City’s system has 175 stations and 125 miles of track, versus Washington’s 83 stations and just over 100 miles of track, and carries 4.2 million riders a day versus Washington’s 675,000.

Although obviously eclipsed by Paris and Mexico, the D.C. MetroRail system is, by some criteria, the second largest in the U.S., after New York’s. Such inter-city comparisons are difficult, because separating out what is a commuter railroad and what is a subway is difficult.

Yet, whatever Metro’s rank, few foresaw that the Washington rail line would be in the upper tier nationally. Many critics predicted that it would be at best “an expensive toy,” used mostly by tourists, says James Hughes, director of planning and operations for Metro.

Transformation

Unlike the hypothetical blindfolded visitor who would recognize a Metro station or train at a glance once the blindfold was removed, a Washington-area resident who had been away since the 1970s would probably not recognize downtown Arlington, Virginia; Chevy Chase, Maryland; or even downtown D.C. In these places and others, Metro has transformed quiet suburban streets into hybrid urban centers, and once-decaying urban streets into thriving ones.

Friendship Heights along Wisconsin Avenue, which straddles the border between D.C. and Montgomery County, Maryland, is one of these new centers. A generation ago, a long-time resident remembers, a convenience store provided just about the only local shopping. Now, office buildings, department stores, and towering apartment buildings huddle around the subway station. The Mazza Galerie, an enclosed shopping mall linked to the station, includes a Neiman Marcus, Saks, and other exclusive stores.

In many ways, this area is a cross between urban and suburban. The department stores are accessible both from Wisconsin Avenue and from the surface parking lot behind the mall. Thus, the mall sucks customers from two main sources, the rail users and other pedestrians who tend to walk in from the avenue and the suburban drivers who enter from the rear. Office buildings have similar arrangements.

Tom, a blue-jeaned 38-year-old, has come on a Sunday afternoon to visit the Borders bookstore across the street from the mall on Wisconsin Avenue. “I’m going to get some coffee, do some reading,” he says as he emerges from one of the Metro’s typically long escalators. “I own a car, but it doesn’t make sense to use it much, not with the traffic and when you have the Metro,” he says.

At the Ballston Metro stop in Arlington, Virginia, 25-story residential towers and new stores and restaurants face the streets, but the streets are wide, suburban-style boulevards with sweeping curves and gigantic intersections. Crossing one of these intersections, with their multiple turn lanes, is a dangerous activity, despite the brick crosswalks and flashing walk signs.

Overall, though, there is little question that the five Metro stops in Arlington are a model of integration. In part, that’s because Arlington County planners had a hand in siting the Metro line and stations, and then encouraged and designed for development around the stops. The result is a series of dense, tax-paying business districts. Most Metro stations in Arlington have no parking at all. Passengers crowd trains throughout the day and evening, rather than simply at rush hours.

In contrast, elected officials, developers, and civic leaders in neighboring Fairfax County, Virginia, were unable to agree on plans for development around the Orange line. As a result, the stations are surrounded by parking lots and except during rush hours trains run half-empty. This pattern is difficult to reverse now because commuters would protest if their parking were removed and development encouraged.

At the station

In the District, station-area renovation and revitalization has been picking up since the mid-1990s, when the economy revived and the city left behind a series of political scandals and began lowering its crime rate. As much construction as anywhere is taking place near the WMATA headquarters at Fifth and F streets near the Judiciary Square Metro station.

“When I came here seven years ago, there were a whole lot of parking lots around here,” says planning director James Hughes from his office on Metro’s seventh floor. Now he can point to new construction all around, including the MCI sports center.

At 14th and U streets, a largely African-American neighborhood that 20 years ago was written off 20 years ago as hopelessly blighted, hip design stores and trendy Somali restaurants attract upscale shoppers. New apartment buildings are going up, such as the one almost directly across from the Lincoln Theater, which was meticulously restored a decade ago.

Without the subway

It’s quite probable that none of this would have happened without the subway. Certainly in part because of Metro, the District’s population increased in the last census for the first time in decades. The federal government has expanded within the city, rather than outside of it. Without a subway, the gargantuan new Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center on Pennsylvania Avenue could never have been constructed downtown, say Metro officials. The 3.1-million-square-foot complex houses government agencies and private businesses related to trade.

“If we didn’t have Metro, it would have been built in Gaithersburg or somewhere even further out,” says deputy Metro director Wayne Thompson.

Without question, Metro and the federal government depend on one another, which is one reason regional leaders feel justified in asking for heavy federal support for Metro. Forty-seven percent of federal workers and contractors use the trains and buses to get to work, say Metro officials. When Hurricane Isabel swept through Washington in 2003, the federal government had to shut down when Metro announced it was canceling all service.

What’s ahead

Drive out from the city, past Friendship Heights and the other close-in suburbs until you reach the eight-lane I-495 beltway and the sprawling land of edge city office parks and some of the worst traffic on earth. The Texas Transportation Institute regularly rates the Washington region as one of the top three traffic nightmares in the U.S. Despite Metro’s high ridership, this is the daily reality for most of the region’s residents.

All this awful traffic, centered around the D.C. beltway, paradoxically helps and hurts future prospects for the hub-and-spoke Metro system. The traffic is one reason Metro use is so high. It also creates a market for the small, expensive apartments around Metro stops.

The traffic even creates some political support for Metro. Many drivers believe that it keeps congestion in check, even though transit experts will quickly disabuse them of such a notion. Mass transit does not necessarily improve traffic flow, they say, because the density that transit promotes ultimately means less room for cars.

But the suburban-style growth so common in Maryland and Virginia also impedes Metro’s prospects for future growth. It is very difficult to integrate existing suburban areas such as Tysons Corner into a mass transit system.

Way out there

This uneasy balance between freeways and Metro, suburban and urban-style growth, sets the context for the next generation of growth in the D.C. region. The lines of the debate and political divisions are already becoming clear, and at least in recent years have not been favoring transit.

In Virginia, the tiny Herndon town council made headlines in December when it refused to create a special tax district to fund a portion of the proposed $3.5 billion Metro extension to Dulles Airport.

In Maryland, Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr., an advocate of increased highway spending, has replaced Democrat Parris Glendening, an outspoken mass transit proponent. Ehrlich and his transportation secretary, Robert Flanagan, are backing a $1.7 billion “intercounty connector.” The new road would be a link in an outer, outer beltway, running across the top of the region and connecting I-270 in Rockville in Montgomery County with I-95 near Laurel in Prince George’s County.

The rub is that the connector would run along roughly the same path as a proposed new Metro line — the Bi-County Transitway. The debate over the two nicely frames the region’s priorities and choices about growth: Invest in the transitway, and the region will probably get denser,transit-oriented development closer to the city. Invest in the intercounty connector, and the region will have more suburban, highway-oriented growth farther out.

The transitway, which would be about 20 miles closer in than the connector, would connect four lines in Maryland with an outer loop. It would run from Bethesda to New Carrollton, with stops along the way in Prince George’s County. The firmest proposal is for a light rail line rather than heavy rail. However, Gov. Ehrlich has also asked for a study of bus rapid transit.

If the new line is built, Washington will become one of the very few U.S. cities with true peripheral transit lines. Although convenient, these suburb-to-suburb lines tend to be more costly because they lack the heavy traffic that goes in and out of a core city. New York City has only one such line, the G line between Brooklyn and Queens. Despite its utility, it is constantly in danger of cutbacks in service by cost-cutting administrators.

Whatever the decision about the new line, Metro administrators and planners will have their hands full just keeping pace with growth on the existing system. Many trains are already overcrowded and if capacity is not expanded, officials say, customers will eventually have to be turned away.

The easiest solution is to simply add cars. The Metro stations were built to accommodate eight-car trains, but trains now are either six or four cars. This ability to increase capacity by 25 percent or more is fortuitous and shows the foresight of Metro planners. But adding cars is not cheap. At $2 million each, adding 120 cars would take about $250 million. In addition, money would be needed to upgrade electrical equipment to move the longer, heavier trains.

In coming years, Metro also needs to overhaul the system’s more than 550 escalators, some of them over 200 feet long. MetroBus needs to upgrade its fleet more regularly. The total price tag for long-term capital maintenance is more than $12 billion between now and 2025.

The three jurisdictions involved — Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. — are attempting to come up with the money. Although they have pledged billions on their own, they are looking to the federal government to supply about a third of the $12 billion total.

Obviously, given the region’s and the nation’s budget woes, Metro faces uncertainties. But it’s impossible to imagine a future for the Washington region without it. Hordes of commuters, tourists, and shoppers will continue to board its multicolored trains daily. The only question is at what rate Metro will continue to transform life in the nation’s capital.

Alex Marshall is a journalist in New York and the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken (2001; University of Texas Press). He is a member of citistates.com, an association of speakers on urban affairs.

Images: Top — The system’s deep stations mean long escalator rides. Bottom — In the heart of the city: the Gallery Place-Chinatown station. its three levels provide access to the red, Green and Yellow lines. Photos by WMATA.

Making Elections Matter

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

During the six presidential races in my adult lifetime, I’ve lived in three states – Virginia, Massachusetts and New York – that collectively have 31 million people and 58 electoral votes.

But despite all this political muscle, I can’t recall ever seeing a campaign ad by Reagan, a local appearance by Carter or a policy spin by Dukakis. No, each presidential race has been like a distant battle, watched with interest but not something I was a part of.

Why is this the case, given the populous, wealthy states I have lived in? Because our nation has something called the Electoral College, an antiquated system designed in the 18th century for reasons immaterial to our goals now. During the last election, we heard the machinery of this system grind and spark for more than a month, before it crankily spat out a “winner.”

Just days ago, we saw this “winner” — George W. Bush — put his hand on a bible and take the oath of office even though he lost the national election by more than a half million votes. That’s a good reason to scrap the Electoral College and replace it with a direct election.

But it’s not the only reason. The other reason is that, even if the system produces a clear winner, it usually causes candidates of both parties to ignore most of the states in the country, and the concerns of their voters.

The Electoral College, in most states, awards the all-important electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. Consequently, if a state is solidly in one column or another, neither candidate pays it any mind.

Virginia has always been one of those states – voting solidly Republican for most presidential elections since World War II. Consequently, candidates largely ignore it, because they have little chance of changing the outcome, and thus winning additional votes.

During the presidential campaign last summer and fall, I lived in Massachusetts and New York. These states were solidly for Al Gore – so both Gore and Bush ignored them too. Which meant they ignored me!

I’m tired of this. I’m tired, I realized, of presidential candidates not caring whether or not I vote for them. My situation, and I expect my sentiments, are shared by millions if not most voters in the country.

In this last campaign, Bush and Gore directed their money, time and ads at voters in a half dozen or so “swing” states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. Most importantly, they altered their positions on the issues to affect the vote in these key states

Because Pennsylvania has a lot of hunters, Gore softened his position on gun control, even though most Americans favor it. Gore won Pennsylvania, so he probably made the right choice – for himself. But the country lost.

It seems unlikely that we will get rid of the Electoral College completely. Like our system of allocating senators, the Electoral College gives disproportionate power to less populated rural states. Wyoming, which has about the same population as Virginia Beach, has two senators and a congressman, and three electoral votes. These rural states are unlikely to support switching to a system that decreases their power.

But we can change the system for the better, even if we keep the Electoral College itself. We can change it in such a way that would decrease the chance of producing a president that has lost the popular vote, while prompting candidates to pay attention to more areas of the country.

This change would be for every state to copy Maine and Nebraska, which right now allocate their electoral votes by congressional district, rather than on a winner-take all basis. In Maine and Nebraska, a presidential candidate gets one vote for each congressional district he wins, and two electoral votes for winning the state as a whole.

If every state did this, it would turn presidential races into a race of congressional districts, rather than state against state. This would produce a more finely grained campaign. Bush and Gore would not have ignored California, New York and Virginia, as they did in the last campaign, because there are too many congressional districts where the race is relatively close. Under such a system, you would have seen a big state like California break up into a patch-quilt of votes for either Bush or Gore.

Indeed, given the diversity of different regions around the country, you might start seeing true national campaigns, rather than the pseudo ones we have now.

One possible objection is that such a revised system might make it even more likely to have tie votes, because you could have as many close elections as there are congressional districts and states: 485. But we can still improve the machinery of voting. And if counting the votes takes a bit longer, well, we saw no real harm come to the nation, even though the last election was not over for a month.

A merit of this type of electoral reform is that you do not have to amend the U.S. Constitution Each state has the power to alter its own system. The federal government could provide some sort of incentive, as it does with so many programs from highways to health care.

Virginia should act now. I bet residents would enjoy being a part of presidential campaigns, rather than distant spectators

In Praise of TV by Someone without One

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

The Powhatan Review, Norfolk, Va.
1998 issue
By Alex Marshall

Missing ‘Ally McBeal,’ ‘The Simpsons’ and HBO’s ‘RealSex,’ and how much one is missing, is the issue. Ten months ago my wife and I threw out our television, in a fit of highbrowism, and now we are without.

The question is time. It’s becoming clear to me, disturbingly so, that my time here on earth is limited. In what remains of that time, what do I want to do with it?

The problem with television is that it is always there. When we had a television, it would beckon to me from its perch on the third-floor of our townhouse, ‘Come watch awhile, why not, see what’s on?’ You’ve heard its voice, I’m sure. When I had a TV, the most dangerous time period was between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. Wandering the house, a bit wired, unsure of bed, my wife Andrea already asleep, I would find myself before the box, clicking from channel to channel, always saying, ‘I’m just going to be here for a few minutes to unwind.’ Two hours later, at say 2.30 a.m., I would stagger downstairs, my eyes burning and my brain with it, having digested God knows what. When I awoke the next morning, I would have a hangover as if I had stayed up drinking. Without a television, I am a changed man. Trim. Fit. Sounder of mind and body. I have cast the demon rum out of my house and am better for it. I think.

The problem is, I happen to like a lot of what’s on television. I approve of television in the specific. I’m not talking PBS. I’m talking ‘South Park,’ ‘The Larry Sanders Show’ and ‘Chris Rock.’ They are all cutting-edge stuff — funny, experimental and enlivening. Dramas like ‘NYPD Blue’ and ‘Homocide’ arguably have better writing, and are closer to the shifting shoreline and dangerous waves of emerging culture and society, than most movies, even independent, art house movies. ‘The Simpsons’ is better political satire than anything I have seen at the movies since ‘Bob Roberts.’ The ‘X-Files’ is a better work of science fiction than ‘Armageddon.’

But absent TV, I have time for other things. For one, I read more. In the last six months, I have read both The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1,500 pages), and The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (800 pages.) I may not have made it through either if I had something else to do after dinner. My life is richer for having read both books. I am starting to understand ‘Empire’ better, whether it be an attempted Nazi empire or the actual British ones; how our lives are determined by the political context in which we are born, and how in the past and still in the present, those political contexts are determined by the usually quite amoral struggles of groups of men and equipment to gain predominance over land and other people.

That’s a more important ‘get’ than the latest clever plot from the X-files.

But still, I ambivilate. To tell you the truth, I really don’t feel that much like reading at night, when I would otherwise be watching TV. I write for a living, and so I’ve usually spent much of the day staring at words, either my own or someone else’s. At night, I kind of feel like sitting back and being visually and aurally stimulated. I also dislike being cut off from the zeitgeist, to use a once trendy word, of popular culture and politics. I even miss the ads on television, being a big fan of the design and thought that goes into them.

The only time I really feel like reading at night is in bed, before I go to asleep. But I usually only last a few minutes, before sleep calls. When I read earlier in the evening, I feel vaguely anxious. But without a TV now, I soldier on more, at my perch on the couch, non-fiction book in hand.

Of course, it’s not as though my life is without visual stimulation. Absent a TV, I now walk the four blocks to the Naro movie theater at least once a week, and sometimes two or three. The Naro in July had the Warner Brothers Festival of Classic Movies. I managed to see 10 of the 33 shown. But movie watching is different than TV watching. With movies, you commit to it. You decide to leave the house, go to the theater, and see said film. Then you go home. One does not drift into watching a film in a theater. Then there is the technology. A friend convinced me that TV is harder on the head because it is beamed directly into your eyes. With a film, you watch reflected light. The movie projector isn’t aimed at you, like a TV. It’s aimed at a blank sheet on a wall, which one then views. It’s a less aggressive form of technology.

What bothers me is that it seems as I grow older, I have to increasingly plan my life. I read once that actors, as they grow older, have to do consciously what was once intuitive: a gesture, a portrayal of emotion, a reaction. I feel the same way about life. It seems that as I age, I have to plan things that once just happened. If I want to ‘hang around with friends,’ then I have to schedule ‘hanging around with friends time.’ It doesn’t just happen. I used to just pick up my guitar and play at odd moments, including learning new songs. Now, I contemplate scheduling a set period for the act. Reading was once something I just did. Now, I have a loose schedule: newspaper reading at breakfast; magazine reading at lunch; non-fiction before dinner and at night; fiction before bed.

I guess what I resent is having to be an adult. To have to be fully conscious and responsible for my own actions. I still want to be age 10, where life was a room I played in, without thought of where it came from.

Television fits into this, or doesn’t, because, despite my affection for the medium, I can’t quite work it into my schedule. If I start watching TV again at night, when will I read that new non-fiction book I wanted to get through? On the other hand, I dislike missing all those neat new shows on the tube. It seems unjust that I can’t do everything.

I leave where I came in. Undecided. I may go out next week, if Andrea will let me, and buy a big-screen TV and place it prominently again on the third floor. I would like to think that I could work out a plan to watch it more selectively, to limit the late-night forays. But I know that would take a plan and some discipline, both of which I often lack.

We’ll see. In the meantime, do you mind if I drop over your house tonight, say about 8:00 p.m.? ‘King of the Hill’ is coming on, and I just wanted to catch it this once. I promise not to stay long. Really.

When the big guns fail, here’s a secret weapon in the battle against warts

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

Published: Monday, August 9, 1993
Section: DAILY BREAK , page B1
Source: By Alex Marshall, Staff writer

THE STORY OF HOW I conquered and vanquished the strange, alien-like creatures that marched and multiplied across the soles of my feet for a decade may not be nice, it may not be pretty, but it needs telling, for those who face similar struggles need hope, examples that glory and victory comes to those who persist.

They – the warts that is – first appeared in the late 1970s. There were just two at first, right under the ball of each foot, so I felt them when I put my weight down.

I went to a dermatologist, the one who treated my teenage zits. He carefully froze them with liquid nitrogen and sent me on my way.

But the warts came back. Nitrogen worked on one or two warts on my thumb and hand, but foot warts were like Japanese guerrilla fighters, refusing to give up their positions even under the most withering fire.

So I did what I often do with long-term problems. I ignored them.

But they did not ignore me. While I finished college, lived in Europe for two years, taught high school, traipsed through Central America, became a writer, went to graduate school, got hired as a reporter and got married, my warts continued their slow march across my feet.

They were more persistent than Kempsville suburbs.

As the 1990s began, I found myself with, it’s hard to admit, more than 30 warts on the bottoms of my feet. Pea- to nickle-sized. I know, it’s disgusting. I fill with self-loathing just talking about it.

Still, I might have kept on ignoring them, but my wife was beginning to look at me funny. And they hurt when I walked.

So I declared total war. It was the only way I would get rid of them, I told myself. No pity. No quarter given. Lasers were the thing, I told myself. Move in the big artillery.

But the laser doctor, a dermatologist in a brick medical bunker on First Colonial Road, had bad news. I had so many warts that a laser would take off about half my foot along with the warts. I would be in bed several weeks afterward, maybe more. And it would be very painful.

So he recommended a different strategy. Weaken the bastards with liquid nitrogen and acid for a few months, then club them over the head with a laser.

Trouble was, my super-hardy warts didn’t weaken. They seemed to thrive under the acid and nitrogen as if I had been sending them to a health club. Eventually we moved up to acid so strong that the dermatologist handed it to me with shaking hands and elaborate instructions on how to avoid burning holes in my head or car.

But the warts didn’t flinch.

I was getting worried. What if these things crawled up my ankles to my throat? I was really having problems walking at this point. The treatments had made them larger and more painful.

My dermatologist, who was an open-minded kind of guy, had an idea. Let’s attack the beasts from the other end of your body, your head, he said. Biofeedback and hypnosis had been used with some success to train people’s bodies to reject warts and other skin problems.

But a guy at Eastern Virginia Medical School told me, after testing me with various gizmos, that biofeedback would probably take six months of daily sessions and cost thousands of dollars, most of which my insurance would not cover.

I didn’t like it but decided to try it. And curing warts through biofeedback and hypnosis would be a pretty good story. But that’s not what happened.

My wife visited a local chiropractor, Dr. Carl Nelson, bless his name and soul forever. She mentioned my wart problem, and he recalled a treatment he had heard about developed at the Mayo Clinic.

Here it is.

Soak your feet in hot water, he said, for 15 minutes a night for two weeks. Take 100,000 units of Vitamin A a day, only start this a few days before the hot water treatment and continue for just one week. During the treatment itself, take at least 1,000 units of Vitamin C a day. After each treatment, rub liquid vitamin E on the warts.

The theory was that warts were viruses. And as viruses, heat should kill them. The vitamins somehow boosted the process along. This was a ridiculous notion, and I had no faith in it. But I tried it.

Every night I soaked my feet in a plastic tub. I couldn’t stand the 118-120 degrees Nelson recommended, only about 112 degrees. I used the vitamins he recommended.

My crusty foot crustaceans didn’t change during the treatments, but a week or so afterward, I noticed all the warts had turned black. And then they slowly shrank, leaving my feet wart-free in a few weeks.

As they are right now, more than a year later.

All this leaves only one question.

Who put together the massive conspiracy of laser doctors and dermatologists to keep this simple, cheap treatment a secret?

My laser guy, who I called with the news, was actually pretty interested in my treatments and not that surprised. He said the Vitamin A might have as much to do with it as the hot water. This vitamin had had some success in spurring the body to gather its defenses together and beat skin problems. Because my body essentially rejected the warts, I was now probably immune to them, something that doesn’t happen with lasers. So why hadn’t he mention it?

Well, he said, most people, believe it or not, get angry if they come for a simple laser cure and you tell them to take a hot bath. And Vitamin A, taken in large doses for too long, could be harmful.

The lesson of all this, besides the inefficacy of Western medicine, is that if you work at something long enough, you may win in the end. Even against warts.

David Gunn, Amtrak Prez, Speaks His Mind

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

David Gunn, the current president of Amtrak and the former head of New York City Transit, has had and will have great impact on transportation within the Tri-state region. In the 1980s, he dramatically improved the city’s then failing subway system. In 2002, he took on the similarly Augean task of improving the nation inter-city rail service, whose largest user is the New York region. In this excerpt from a 90-minute interview with RPA Senior Fellow Alex Marshall, Gunn draws parallels between what he considered Amtrak’s shambled state when he arrived, and what Gunn considers the currently misplaced priorities of the political leaders who set the mission — and the budget — for this region’s transit service. In general, he urges the Tri-state region to not shirk its job of maintaining excellent transit service, even while it pursues new services and projects. His sometimes sharp words are a bracing challenge to those who value high-quality transit, and must decide how to achieve it.

BEGIN
Alex Marshall: Here in New York City, you were known as the guy who, as president of New York City Transit, turned around the subway system by focusing on the nuts and bolts of the system. What are the nuts and bolts of Amtrak?

David Gunn: Well, you know actually Amtrak’s situation is very similar to the situation of the New York City Transit Authority, it’s just that the geographical spread is much greater. But in terms of the nuts and bolts, they are almost identical. Amtrak has suffered from years of deferred maintenance. The car fleet was allowed to deteriorate; heavy overhaul ceased years ago. Wrecked cars were just parked; they weren’t repaired. The locomotive fleet was in a little better shape, but a portion of our electric locomotives were ignored. The track structure, the parts we owned, was terribly neglected. The whole system was gradually becoming unreliable, and we were faced with the situation New York had in the 1970s and 80s, with slow corridors and the like. So we put together — we even used the same terminology — A-State-of-Good-Repair Capital Program, so you have overhauls and heavy maintenance being done on the car fleets and locomotives on a regular basis, and you start getting the track and the infrastructure back to a state of good repair.

A.M.: It’s surprising to me that there’s that much deferred maintenance in the Amtrak system, given the relatively heavy political attention put on Amtrak over the last decade.

Gunn: But the attention was all bullshit! It was political attention on this self-sufficiency notion and other wild ideas, which weren’t going to happen. Nobody was paying attention to basic maintenance. When I got here, they couldn’t even tell me how many ties they put in last year. I kept asking that question. “Well, what did we do last year? How many ties did we put in, how much rail?” And all they could give me were dollars figures.

This is what happens to institutions — and it happened in New York — when they get consumed with reorganizing, reforming and oversight. Instead of going in and fixing the basic problems, and actually taking the resources you do have, which may be inadequate, but putting them to work

The problem is that people don’t like to pay attention to the nuts and bolts, ’cause it’s not sexy. But you have to balance the two. And unfortunately — and I don’t know if it’s human nature or just the American Way — but everybody gets focused on the big sexy projects and ignore the basics. It’s like the Transit Authority right now, people think it’s fixed, right? So people start to think, now we can play games, now we can do Second Avenue, now we can do Eastside Access, now we can do the new Penn station at the Farley building. And they forget the nuts and bolts.

A few weeks ago, I rode a subway train in New York to get to an event. It took me one bloody hour to go from Penn Station to Borough Hall or Jay Street on the A train. The train I rode was an R-32, and the last time that train was heavy overhauled and painted inside was when I was there. Now it still ran pretty good which is a credit to the guys in the shops. But the fact of the matter is the subway is getting dirty. Even the new trains don’t look so hot. That system was spit-shined back in the nineties. And this is all because the attention is being focused on sexy stuff and not on the basics. I’m not criticizing the management of the Transit Authority. They have done a superb job of surviving in this environment. It’s the politics and the oversight that’s getting it fouled up.

A.M.: What about the Second Avenue subway or the new Moynihan Station. Do you think we should just ignore those?

Mr. Gunn: I’m not saying the 2nd Avenue subway is not important, Alex, it is. But what’s happening in New York is that the basic maintenance of the existing system is not being pursued. It’s under funded and they’re living off the capital that was put in years ago. . . If they keep going with what they’re doing, they’re going to have another crisis. It’s unbelievable actually. You’d think people would learn from history.

The same thing happened at Amtrak. Everybody got all wrapped around the axle with ideas that we’re going to leap into the 21st Century with TGVs [a reference to France’s high-speed trains, known by their initials “TGV” for “Train of Great Velocity”] and high-speed corridors all over the United States. Meanwhile, we weren’t putting in any new rails on existing lines. We weren’t overhauling cars. There was a total disconnect in terms of where this place was headed, between the nuts and bolts, and what the rail proponents focused on. To some extent, I’m being critical of the rail proponents, because they have this idea that the nuts and bolts will take care of themselves. And that is wrong.

A.M.: Are you saying we shouldn’t invest in the latest technology? What’s wrong with truly high-speed trains?

Gunn: It is not helpful, in my opinion, to engage in these flights of fancy where you’re going to build TGVs all over the United States. We do not have the technical capabilities for doing it, we don’t have the manufacturing to support it anymore, and you don’t have the people to run it.

A.M: What about France? They have a large and growing network of true high-speed trains, which go 200 mph.

Gunn: But they’ve been working on their train system since the war. For sixty years, they’ve been incrementally creeping up on speeds on electrification, on cantenary design, on locomotive design. In the United States, which was the leader at the end of World War II, you can’t even buy a coupler that is made in the United States. You can’t just take this super sophisticated technology from over there, and bring it here and make it work. Because, I mean, you have to have people who actually have a toolbox and can stand there and make it work. This is what the big thinkers — planners and other people — often don’t get. This is not a detail. It is a critical component of having a good operation.

A.M.: Where does Amtrak fit into the overall transportation policies of this country?

Gunn: There are areas where the cheapest solution to congestion is high-speed rail, or at least higher speed rail. I’m not talking about flights of fancy and the TGVs. I’m talking about you get a P-42, which is one of our diesel locomotives and can run 110 mph. You get the track fixed, you get the signal system fixed, and clear enough control points and passing sidings, so you can run reliably frequent service, like in the Northeast corridor. And this actually will save the government money. I mean, can you imagine building highways to carry the mobs of people that go over those rails in the Northeast Corridor?

I mean look at places like California — it’s becoming a nightmare. Try to go from L.A. to San Diego by highways certain times of the day it’s a bloody parking lot. We got the little old San Diego line, which is single track in a lot of places, and it’s handling over two million people a year. People on trains are zipping by people on the freeways. And yet some people in Congress act as if these are unimportant assets.

Obviously out in the boonies you’re not going to have passenger rail because there’s no volume. But when you get into congested areas like Chicago, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Portland, Seattle, LA, San Diego, Sacramento, Oakland, San Jose, the highway physically can’t do it. It’s not even a case of money. There’s no place to put all the lanes you would need. Not to mention that to add lanes to most interstate highways in urban areas, you’re talking billions and billions of dollars, for just a few miles.

A.M.: Why is the Amtrak Acela Express so slow going to New Haven on the first half of the New York to Boston run?

Mr. Gunn: What’s happened on that line is that it used to be a four-track railroad from New Haven to New York City. Then a while back, the MTA made a terrible mistake. It ripped up one track North of Stamford, so it’s down to three tracks. I was there when they did it, and I said to them, “You will regret doing it.” But they did it anyway, and then what happened is they suddenly realized they had to replace the 1910 cantenary line. It is 1910, original stuff — the first mainline electrification in the World, and it’s still there. We got cantenary poles that are almost 100 years old on the Hellgate Bridge route. And so, what they did, then they had to take another track out of service. And then, the whole corridor is fragmented. It’s run by MetroNorth, owned by MetroNorth, but North of Stamford, it’s dominated by ConnDOT [the Connecticut Department of Transportation], so ConnDOT is dictating the speed and the pace with which they’re doing the wiring. You only got double track from Stamford to New Haven. It’s physically impossible some days to run the trains through there on time. Then you hit New Haven, and you go 130, 140, 150 miles an hour.

The tracks North of Providence are owned by the MBTA [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority]. The whole thing is a symptom of the fact that you would never have had the fragmented ownership of the corridor if the Department of Transportation in Washington had known what it was doing.

A.M.: Any chance of the service on the Boston/New York line improving any time soon?

Mr. Gunn: I think if you talk to ConnDOT, they say it’s a 10 year project. The thing is, it’s a highway department.

A.M.: What do you think about some of the big projects proposed for the New York region, like the proposed second tunnel under the Hudson River.

Mr. Gunn: As long as it’s part of a logical whole, I’m in favor of it. I mean, you need that stuff. Rail access from the South is at capacity. Right now, any increase in rail access is out of the question to New York City, because the tunnels are at capacity during rush hour. So you have to start thinking about this stuff. But you got to take care of the nuts and bolts as well.

And the problem is that every time you start talking about the bigger stuff, everybody assumes that you’ve taken care of nuts and bolts. It can’t be an either/or, which is generally what’s happening.

A.M.: You seem to be criticizing having a vision.

Gunn: I think that having a long-term vision on this stuff is actually vital. But if it isn’t rooted in solid incremental improvements in terms of the nuts and bolts of the management, and the skills you need to pull it off, you’ll never get there. Instead you’ll get a lesser vision, or a nightmare. The point that I’m trying to make here is that you need to know where you’re trying to get to, but you have to have the baby steps identified to start you on the road to get there. And so often, all you get when you’re dealing with planners, is the vision thing.

Romance Novel – To A Man – Reads Like Female Porn

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

Published: Thursday, March 3, 1994
Section: DAILY BREAK – page B1 Source
BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER

My JOURNEY into romance novels began with an article in one of my favorite magazines, Whole Earth Review, the San Francisco quarterly that regularly runs against the mainstream current.In that issue, budding romance novel writer Augusta Wynde defended the chunky paperbacks featuring pectorially well-endowed young men like Fabio on their raised inset covers. These books sell in phenomenal numbers, she pointed out, yet are virtually ignored by the mainstream press and literary world, more so than other types of genre fiction such as mysteries, detective or science fiction.

“Reading bad detective novels is considered mildly eccentric; reading romance novels is evidence of irreversible vapidity,” Wynde said. “The New York Times Book Review regularly reviews mysteries, and occasionally reviews science fiction, but never reviews romance; the very idea seems almost embarrassing in its silliness.”

It is sexism, Wynde said, adding that women read romance novels, and the male literary world dismisses the books because of that. Playing around with guns, Wynde said, is more respectable than playing around with good-looking young men who might rip your bodice. Romance novels, Wynde said, get their power by using “heightened emotional intensity, not action.” So putting down romance is putting down emotions.

This seemed like a good argument to me. Maybe the romance novel really was misunderstood. Plus, I’ve always been interested in the contours of the female psyche. So I plucked off the grocery store rack “Sweet Liar” by Jude Deveraux, an author whom Wynde recommended.

“Her characters are entertaining and sympathetic,” Wynde said of Deveraux.. “She has a knack for wonderful fantasies. She’s immensely popular, and she deserves it. Her prose is uncluttered.

The royal-blue cover showed a jeweled broche and said, “The Dazzling New York Times Bestseller.” A note about Deveraux inside the back cover said more than 20 million copies of her books were in print.

The plot was this: A woman in her late 20s, Samantha, reluctantly travels to New York to search for her lost grandmother. In New York, circumstances force her to live in the same townhouse as a friend of her dead father’s, 30-year-old Michael. (In “Sweet Liar,” circumstances always force Samantha to do something.)

Samantha and Michael end up playing detectives and searching for the lost grandmother. The heart of the novel though, was Michael’s tortuously slow conquest of Samantha. For no apparent reason, Samantha was intensely hostile toward Michael, and he had to slowly break down her will, chapter by chapter.

Not a bad plot. But there was a strange hot-house air about the novel, especially in the descriptions of Samantha and Michael. It was as if I’d entered a room I wasn’t meant to be in. It reminded me of something.

Then it came to me. The novel reminded me of reading explicit sexual writing aimed at men, like the Forum section of Penthouse magazine, where readers detailed their supposed sexual exploits.

Romance novels, it hit me, were female pornography. As with male pornography, it was for women a generally private world, where unbelievable things were free to happen purely as a backdrop for something else. In Sweet Liar, Michael kissed Samantha in the street before they were introduced to each other. It was like in Penthouse when the airline stewardess offers herself to a passenger after a minute’s conversation. They also both objectified the opposite sex to an extreme.

Wynde’s thoughts that romance novels were really emotional dramas didn’t hold up to me, at least not with this book. Samantha and Michael seldom developed or interacted on a true emotional level. The romantic interplay was mechan-istic.

The feverish portrayal of courtship also revealed something about women, or at least about some women. In Sweet Liar, Samantha was a spoiled, brattish child. She treated Michael atrociously, often kicking, slapping and elbowing him. Michael not only put up with her, he showered her with gifts like designer clothes. (Samantha, though, didn’t figure out that Michael was spending thousands of dollars on her. She lived in this protective fog of ignorance, although she wasn’t meant to be a stupid woman.) Michael had his own faults. He would often manhandle her, preventing her from leaving rooms or shoving her along.

Lovers of romance novels, it seems, have, in their fantasies, a taste for passivity and a hint of violence.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with reading romance novels. A fantasy is a fantasy. But it’s interesting that descriptions of courtship may occupy the same place in the female psyche as descriptions of love-making do to men.

I don’t know how Sweet Liar turned out. The story pulled me about halfway through but then I stopped. I couldn’t stomach any more.

Mergers Or No Mergers, It’s Time To Re-Regulate The Airlines

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

I write this from the terminal of the Boston International Airport. I am about to board a small prop plane to Harrisburg, Pa, the state capitol. Given the plane’s small size, and my largish one, the ride will be uncomfortable. Not only will my 6’7′ frame be crammed into a tiny seat, but the propellers will sound like an electric shaver next to my ear for an hour and a half. Winds will bat the plane around as heavy seas do a rowboat.

For the privilege of this unpleasant ride, I am paying US Airways $851. Luckily for me, the taxpayers of Pennsylvania are reimbursing me, because their state legislature is flying me to Harrisburg to give my views on highways and suburban sprawl.

It has been more than 20 years since President Jimmy Carter and Alfred Kahn, chairman of the now defunct Civil Aeronautics Board, began deregulating the airlines. It is time to face facts about this experiment: It has failed. Every single aspect predicted by the advocates of deregulation has gone the opposite way. Competition, the theory went, would increase the number of airlines, increase the number of direct flights, make ticketing easier, and bring simpler, and lower fares.

At first, the theory seemed true. In the early 1980s, low-cost carriers like People Express offered short- to long-distance flights for pocket change. But in the ruthless consolidation that followed, these carriers were driven out of business. Now, a handful of oligarchic airlines reign over the skies like despots. Many smaller markets, like Harrisburg, have seen their air service, something vital to their economic health, ruthlessly extorted by one or two airlines. Flying has become unpleasant, uncomfortable, unpredictable and expensive. Passengers have no guarantee what they will pay, or under what conditions they will have to pay it.

The recent proposed merger between US Airways and United Airlines would do nothing to address these problems. It would probably make them worse. As it happens, these two airlines are already the only ones flying to Harrisburg from Boston. Their already vicious level of competition — I could have flown United and paid $856 — has not exactly produced affordable service. The problem with the airline industry is not mergers or no mergers, but the relative freedom airlines have now to engage in predatory capitalism with their customers.

A few weeks ago, I watched that classic movie from the early 1970s, The French Connection with Gene Hackman. At one point, the local New York villain suddenly decides to fly from New York to Washington to meet the mysterious Frenchman. The film shows the bad guy walk up to the Eastern counter at the airport, and say, ‘One ticket to Washington, please.’ The clerk says, ‘That will be $40, please.’

And that’s it.

Can you imagine something so simple nowadays? Forty dollars to fly from New York to Washington, at the last minute. Even with inflation, that’s pretty good. And consider what the villain did not do. He did not call seven, 14 or 21 days in advance to get this price. He didn’t have to stay over on a Saturday night. He wasn’t required to pay $75 if he changed his return date, or buy a whole new ticket at full-fare if he changed his departure date. He bought the ticket from ‘Eastern,’ one of many defunct airlines. That flight now to Washington from New York would cost $311. And that’s a bargain, considered what is being charged to smaller cities like Harrisburg.

Airlines executives frequently state that average ticket prices have declined in the last 20 years. But, as Robert Kuttner showed in his book Everything For Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets, prices declined even faster during the era of regulation. And average prices don’t take into consideration the economic costs of unnecessarily extending stays through a weekend to get a lower fare, or not being able to easily change one’s schedule. Nor do average prices consider that fares have increased enormously in some markets.

There is a way out of this mess: Reregulate the airlines. Reestablish the Civil Aeronautics Board, or some newer equivalent, which would set routes and fares. We would once again have a reasonable, stable system of air travel. Although Sen. John McCain and others have introduced passenger ‘Bill of Rights,’ few have contemplated complete re-regulation. They should.

People often forget that private airlines depend on a system of publicly financed, publicly-maintained airports. In giving these over to airlines to use as they will, it’s as if we had given over our public highways to a handful of taxicab fleets, who were allowed to charge whatever they wanted, and on whom we were completely dependent.

Americans have fallen in love with the idea that competition makes everything cheaper and better. This is not always true. With air travel, it’s time we returned to the days, like in those old movies, when the nation’s air travel system served its passengers, rather than only the profits of a dwindling number of airlines.

Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken. He writes frequently on transportation.

The Demolition Man

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
MAY 1995

Metropolis writer Alex Marshall spoke to Andres Duany about his role in the controversial plan to bulldoze East Ocean View in Norfolk. At the time of the interview, the city had bought few houses and only a small amount of demolition had taken place. Planning officials gave Duany wide latitude in recommencling whether some homes or areas should be saved from demolition. For now, the bulldozers have been idled by a commission that ruled that the housing authority offered a property owner just half of what his property was worth. The authority is appealing, but if the ruling stands, it will drive up the cost of the project to the point that the development would have to proceed in stages, if at all.

METROPOLIS: You seem to be in the position of Baron Haussmann, who built his grand boulevards through the neighborhoods of nineteenth-century Paris. People are saying, “We love your ideas, but we don’t want our houses torn down.” What responsibility do you have to the people who now live in East Ocean View?

DUANY: I think it’s the ancient [question of the needs of the] individual versus the community. You have to find where to draw that line. And it’s very, very difficult to draw it. In this case, that work has been done. The Norfolk city council has made the decision and everybody is out.

METROPOLIS: The residents aren’t actually out yet.

DUANY: Well, the vote has taken place. Now we can see what the best community plan is and see who can stay and who cannot stay.

METROPOLIS: If your design gets built, are you concerned that your kind of urbanism will be less authentic than what exists there now?

DUANY: The neighborhood will still be mixed in income, but exactly the other way. Now it’s 95 percent rental and five percent owner. Under the new plan, it’s going to flip to be 80 percent owner and 20 percent rental. The scale will be healthier. Remember the statement that poverty does not cause crime. Poverty in concentration causes crime.

METROPOLIS: New Urbanism was founded in part as a reaction against urban renewal. Now you are participating in an urban renewal project.

DUANY: There’s a big difference between the neighborhoods that were wiped out in the 1950s, which were little Georgetowns, with darling houses and first-rate urbanism, and this stuff [the homes in East Ocean View], which is extremely exploitative. Even if I were most benevolent and broad-minded, I could save only 10 percent of the buildings. It’s not like [how it used to be done], where there were great places that were just misunderstood and demolished.

METROPOLIS: Do you ever wake up in a cold sweat at night and say, wait a minute, I’m involved in an urban renewal project?

DUANY: Well, I’ve never been involved in the side that causes demolition. I’ve always been on the repair side. I’ve actually resigned from projects because of not wanting to be involved in demolitions. I’ve been to charrettes in which contracts were signed and I just walked out the first day.

METROPOLIS: Where did this happen?

DUANY: In Houston, in an old black neighborhood. Actually, I quit because there was a very nice apartment building and some very nice 1940s housing. It was a total slum. But it was so beautifully designed that I thought it was of architectural value. Basically, at the end of the first day, I said, “Either you trust me to decide what stays and what goes, or you don’t.” And I walked. I was on the airplane the same night. But I’m in a very privileged position, because I have more work than I can handle. Most planners can’t do that. They have to eat.

METROPOLIS: Is it bad for your practice to be involved in a project that forces people out of their homes, even if you are doing so for the sake of better architectural quality?

DUANY: I suppose it is, yes. But it’s easy for me to say, “I didn’t do it.” The whole thing has been made so easy for me. I’ve been protected from this beautifully. Because [the city council made the decision] before I got here.

METROPOLIS: But you do have some misgivings about it?

DUANY: Well, I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say. But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because it doesn’t pay taxes. It bankrupts cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick here is to bring the middle class back to the city. The whole challenge is getting middle-class people to come in and live with lower-income people.

METROPOLIS: Is it possible to do some selective demolition and gradually bring the neighborhood up?

DUANY: I think the political reality was “Where do you draw the line?” Because all the people have terrific rights. Basically, [the planners] decided that if we’re unfair, we’re unfair to everybody. And that’s a form of fairness.

Alex Marshall

writer, journalist, speaker

I'm an independent journalist in New York City. My articles, books and talks are on this site.

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The Demolition Man