The End of Place

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

[Excerpt From Chapter Two]

The Nature of Place

Before the car, or more particularly before the highway, the essential challenge of cities was to keep everything from being in the same place. The city was centripetal. Like a black hole, the nature of a city or town was to suck everything to one point. People needed to be near the railroad, the port, the factory to get to their jobs, and factories needed to be near the people and transportation links. This was why reformers championed public parks. Called the lungs of the cities, they were spots of greenery in the tightly packed clumps of buildings and streets. And it took real community effort to put them there. Valuable and scarce land, which could have been converted into homes and businesses, had to be set aside by the public. The tendency of the pre-automobile city to suck people to specific points only intensified with the transportation advances of the nineteenth century, which drew people, machinery, businesses, and money toward the subway stop, the streetcar stop, the railroad terminal.

Just the opposite conditions prevail today. The city is centrifugal. The city is more akin to a giant salad spinner, spraying growth out over the countryside indiscriminately. Growth still clusters around transportation sources, except that it is now the freeway off-ramp rather than the subway stop or train station. But the growth circle of a streetcar is measured in blocks because people have to walk there. The growth circle of a freeway off-ramp in measured in miles, because people drive there, and need places to put their cars at each end.

Consequently, there is no particular advantage to being right near one’s workplace. In fact, there is considerable advantage to being as far away from work or other necessities as possible. The person who locates himself on the fringes gets the advantage of bigger lots and more peace and quiet, while still being able to “raid” the jobs and commerce of the metropolis as a whole. Thus the city expands ever outward, with each person and developer reaching the short-term gain of being the farthest out.

The drive to establish parks is anachronistic now, because we no longer live packed in a block with no green space nearby. Now, most of us live surrounded by green space, from our backyards to the berms and shrubbery that surround the shopping mall and local gas station. We are enveloped in greenery, because the low-density environment has plenty of spaces for trees, shrubs, and spare land that is left as forest or fields. Now, a park is just about providing recreation, not relief from crowding and congestion.

The essential dynamic of cities and places has changed. The fundamental challenge of cities today is to keep everything from being everywhere at once. The modern push to establish growth boundaries can be compared to the drive in the past to establish parks. Each movement is attempting to check a fundamental tendency of the form in favor of the public good. The public good now concerns containment, whereas before it was the reverse. Kenneth Jackson, a historian of the suburbs, said, “The effect of the auto on the city is analogous to what astronomers call the big bang theory of the universe.”2 In the past, cities sucked inward. With the car, they exploded outward.

This big bang has increased exponentially the rate cities consume land. Urban historian Robert Fishman noted, “The basic unit of the new city is not the street measured in blocks but the ‘growth corridor’ stretching 50 to 100 miles. Where the leading metropolis of the early 20th century–New York, London, or Berlin–covered perhaps 100 square miles, the new city routinely encompasses two to three thousand [square] miles.”3

A news article about contemporary Atlanta, a particularly acute case, gives a glimpse of the dynamic. “Over the past six years, Atlanta has gobbled up more land than any metro area, anywhere. Each year, the region’s suburban boundaries grow by 38 square miles.-.-.-. As a result, commuters-.-.-. pile up more car miles each day, per capita, than residents of any U.S. metropolis, including Los Angeles. They also breathe the worst air of any city in the Southeast.” The fastest-growing county, Gwinnett, has tripled in population in sixteen years to 460,000. “Seen from the air, Gwinnett looks like a vast sea of cul-de-sacs–an estimated 9,000 of which are spread across the county.” The growth of Atlanta, the writer correctly observes, was fueled by three Interstates built in the postwar era that converge on the region.4

Victor Gruen, father of the first enclosed shopping mall, in Minneapolis, precisely describes the centrifugal nature of suburban development in a long piece, which he apparently writes with some regret, about the children he has sired. In a chart entitled “The Vicious Circle,” he shows an arrow from “Sprawl” leading to “Increased Use of Automobiles” leading to “Decreased Use of Public Transportation” leading to “Separation of Urban Functions” leading to “Increased Road Surfaces” leading back to “Sprawl.”5

The End of Place saddens us, I believe. We have had thousands of years living with “walls” around us in the form of streets and buildings. It’s only in the last fifty that most of us have been able to leave them. Now, like a prisoner yearning for his old jail cell, we miss the places that once involuntarily confined us. Although we chafed at our old constraints, we find now that we might need them. The car and the highway have allowed us to leave our old confines, but they also have meant we could not go back.

Is the End of Place an unavoidable consequence of the car? To answer this, we need to understand why one method of transportation is chosen or can be chosen.

A Tale of Two Towns

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

Kissimmee versus Celebration and the New Urbanism
[Excerpt From Chapter One]

“When you’re building your own creation,
Nothing’s better than real than a real imitation.”
-Lyrics from the song “Frankenstein,” by Aimee Mann

On the edge of two lakes about twenty miles south of Orlando are two small southern Florida towns. Both have old-fashioned main streets, with stores, restaurants, and a movie theater that open onto their sidewalks. Both have old-fashioned homes with front porches set on streets which lead into their downtowns. Both have parks that wrap around their lakes, where you can stroll and take in a sunrise or the night air. They both lie off a road called U.S. 192, and are just a few miles from each other.

But one of these towns is struggling. Its homes are not selling for much, and its storefronts have trouble staying full. The other town is a wealthy place, with homes that cost up to $1 million. Its downtown has rich boutiques and pricey restaurants.

The struggling town is called Kissimmee. It was founded in the mid-nineteenth century and grew as a shipping port and then a railroad and cattle town. But people stopped using the big lakes for shipping, and railroads became less important as well, and the town suffered.

The successful town is called Celebration. It is a new place, founded in 1994. It is, in reality, not a town, but a subdivision, built by the Disney corporation in conscious imitation of towns like Kissimmee. It sits next to a freeway and an exit ramp. Its homes are being bought by the Orlando upper classes, and its stores are being filled with tourists. It is an example of a much-heralded design philosophy called New Urbanism.

In learning why one town is struggling, and the other prospering, we can learn what people value, compared to what they say they value. We can also learn about what makes towns, and subdivisions, tick. We also learn about the concept and practice of community, which Celebration’s owners say they are reviving. By looking at Kissimmee, we can learn about Celebration, because Kissimmee is the thing Celebration is pretending to be–a small, Florida main-street-style town. What does it say when the imitation of something is worth more than the thing itself?

Comparing Kissimmee to Celebration shows where Disney has chosen to imitate the design of a small town, and where it has not. In some aspects, like front porches, Disney has chosen to exactly copy Kissimmee. In other aspects, like the way the towns govern themselves, it has chosen not to. What we find is that Celebration is a contemporary automobile suburb pretending to be a nineteenth-century town. And that pretense, like most pretenses, has a price.

By looking at Kissimmee and Celebration, we can learn about the general thrust of the design philosophy the latter represents, New Urbanism. It is probably the most heralded design movement of the last half-century. It has been embraced as a way out of the problems of sprawl. Celebration closely resembles other New Urban developments, both in the structure of its streets and the structure of its management, although it does differ in some respects. By looking at Celebration, and the thing it is imitating, Kissimmee, we start to see just where this New Urban path, as it has generally been configured, leads.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mrs. Mac’s versus Max’s

We can glimpse the distinctive characters of the respective “main streets” of Kissimmee and Celebration by looking at two eatery proprietors offering simple fare there. Kissimmee has a small restaurant on Main Street, called “Mrs. Mac’s,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. Celebration has a restaurant on Market Street, called “Max’s Cafe,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. One is a magical realist version of the other.

Mrs. Mac’s on Main Street in Kissimmee has Formica-topped tables that you might find in your kitchen, a nondescript floor, and a wooden checkout counter with a noncomputerized cash register. The menu is simple. Two grilled pork chops with three vegetables for $5.95. Steak for $6.95. Homemade chili for $1.50. At lunch, I watched a nonpicturesque group of people eat there: a fat woman struggling to control her three children, a businessman here and there. The food was austere but good.

Max’s Cafe in Celebration is to cafes what Celebration is to small towns: a fantasy version of a small Southern cafe. Max’s has venetian blinds with thick louvers in the windows, booths inside with metallic piping, and a long soda fountain. It’s really quite beautiful, although it comes at a price.

A bowl of chili at Max’s costs $5.95, compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A piece of pie costs $4.95 compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A cheeseburger is $7.50 compared to $2.70 at Mrs. Mac’s. And we don’t even want to get into the entrees. But the differences between the two places go deeper than the prices and decor.

The proprietor of Mrs. Mac’s in Kissimmee opens or closes when she pleases. Like the other property owners or lessors in Kissimmee, she is not under the thumb of a common management. The property under Max’s, however, is owned by Disney. Every store in Celebration serves at Disney’s pleasure and was handpicked by it. Celebration’s management is that of a shopping mall, not a town. Disney can adjust “the mix” of the stores to optimize profits, or character, or anything it chooses.

So why do the respective characters, not to mention prices, of these two main streets differ so remarkably?

Kissimmee’s Main Street was once its center, because the town itself was once a business and transportation center. It was natural for people to shop as they went to work, or got off the train, or took a boat down the lake. When the region’s center shifted away from the town, its Main Street dried up.

Celebration’s Market Street is no more of a center than Kissimmee’s Main Street is now. But it does do a better job of fostering that illusion, for reasons I will come to.

The business district of Celebration is a curious animal. To some extent, Celebration has succeeded in overcoming what has been the Achilles heel of New Urbanism, which is establishing a commercial center within a residential subdivision. Retail is an area where fictions are exposed. Successful retail establishments have basic needs, like traffic or pedestrian counts, that cannot be dressed up or swept aside.

New Urbanists blame zoning for the segregated uses embodied in the mall, the subdivision, and the isolated schools no one can walk to. But this puts the cart before the horse. Zoning, like most regulation, usually only tidies up decisions the marketplace and the physical infrastructure dictated. Neighborhood business districts were created by the necessity to have services within walking distance of one’s home. Before the nineteenth century, this was because feet were basically the only transportation for most people. To buy something, you had to walk there.

The advent of the streetcar and other forms of mass transportation changed that dynamic only somewhat. In their effects, streetcars and subways were to cities what guns are to violence: they were force multipliers. They made it possible for even more people to live in one place, and congregated businesses around streetcar lines and subway stops. Once they got home from work, people still walked to shop, visit a friend, or have a drink. They had to.

The car and the highway changed that. While mass transit systems were magnets, gathering people and businesses around central points, cars and highways were antimagnets, spreading things out as much as possible. Businesses that relied on customers with cars needed parking lots, which ate away at the street-based retail around them. Eventually, stores moved to the suburbs, where their parking lots could be as big as their owners liked. Stores got bigger and bigger because people could drive to them. So far, the country has not seen an end to this centrifugal dynamic, where businesses get larger and larger, and more and more isolated and spread out.

New Urban communities attempt to change this by resurrecting the old form of retail which existed prior to the automobile, or which was left over in its first few decades. They try to do this, however, without actually resurrecting the old transportation systems that made the old business districts possible and necessary.

To survive, retail needs an astonishingly large potential customer base, much larger than might be intuitively thought. The huge, 200,000-square-foot warehouse-style stores, like a Wal-Mart Supercenter, can require a customer base of a half million households within a twenty-minute drive.3 But even a small restaurant or pharmacy requires high traffic volumes, whether it be by foot or car. Traffic volumes depend on transportation systems. Wal-Marts are located around key freeway interchanges because it allows them access to a regional population base. A small store can succeed in an urban neighborhood, but it requires a lot of people going by its front door, the same as such a store in a strip shopping center out on the highway. To produce those traffic volumes, an urban storefront seems to need at least 10,000 families within walking distance, which means a gross density of at least ten homes an acre. Ghent, the century-old neighborhood in Norfolk where I live, has a gross density of close to twenty homes to an acre. Some individual blocks in Ghent, with larger apartment buildings, have double and triple this density. And Ghent still has difficulty supporting a retail street. In general, the denser the distribution of stores, the denser the distribution of people. Manhattan can support retail in almost every block because it can pack 10,000 people into one block.

This point has always confused architects. Retail is not their strong point. Le Corbusier, the modernist giant of the twentieth century, imagined that shops could be put into his tall towers and persisted even after it was shown that their population was not nearly enough to support the shops.4 Duany conceives of small shops within his low-density, neotraditional subdivisions even though they also lack the necessary population and density.

Celebration, even at buildout, has a density of less than two per acre. The densest part of Celebration is the Garden District, which has about five homes to an acre. These are the special, lower-priced homes, starting at $150,000, and so are off to themselves so they won’t contaminate the more-common $400,000 and $1 million homes in the rest of the community. The Garden District homes, which are 1,350 to 2,200 square feet, are often only six feet apart.5 At five homes to an acre, the Garden District has a crammed-together feel to it. I wouldn’t want to live there. I bet turning into your driveway at night could be a real operation. Yet the density here is still nowhere near high enough to support a business district.

So how is Celebration able to support a downtown?

In a book about the making of the Macintosh computer, Insanely Great,6 Steven Levy described the “reality distortion field” that workers said Apple founder Steve Jobs was able to create around him by the sheer force of his personality. Disney is able to create a similar reality distortion field around Celebration. Through the force of its marketing muscle, it is able to reverse the normal laws of retailing that demand that retail be placed around principal transportation arteries, be they suburban highways or subway lines. In the suburbs, this means placing retail on a heavily traveled main artery and putting big parking lots there to scoop the traffic off of it.

With Celebration’s downtown, you have to drive a mile on a winding access road off U.S. 192. This should kill any attempt at retail. But Disney is able to surmount this with the sheer force of its name and presence. Tourists and sightseers are being pulled off U.S. 192 by the publicity generated by the press and advertising. Disney has heavily advertised Celebration on local television as a place to go shop. Celebration also has its own exit sign on Interstate 4. It’s already listed on the one-page, low-detail maps that you get from the rental car companies.

All this is enough to bring a steady stream of traffic into Celebration to both look at the homes and walk around this novel creature, a “downtown” inside a subdivision. The tourist traffic is a twofer, for the tourists both support the stores and look at the model homes. (This has obviously caused some tension in the neighborhood. Many homes have small signs on them that say they are occupied, not a model home.)

Celebration’s downtown will only succeed if it is able to be not a neighborhood business district, but a regional shopping center. That is working so far. Most of their customers, store owners tell me, are tourists and home lookers. But because of this, the stores in the downtown are nothing like one would choose for a neighborhood shopping street. There are a fancy dress store, and upscale souvenir shops. There are restaurants, a grocery store, and a movie theater, but all extremely upscale. The Goodings market, a luxury chain in Florida, is a gourmet store. The manager says it originally tried to have a full produce and meat section. But the stuff wouldn’t sell. So it scaled back the produce and eliminated the fresh meat. What you have left is a fancy store that is convenient if you forget the bottle of wine, but is not for everyday grocery shopping.

The point is that the residents of Celebration are still utterly dependent on U.S. 192, and always will be. They drive there to shop for groceries. They drive to the Wal-Mart to buy some lawn furniture. They drive to the mall to buy a computer, a lamp, or almost anything essential.

The Sex of Cities

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

[Excerpt From The Introduction]

Children are supposed to turn to their parents at some point and ask innocently, “Daddy [or Mommy], where do babies come from?” Faced with such a basic question, parents then decide how directly to answer it.

I doubt any child has turned to anyone and asked plaintively, “Daddy, where do places come from?” Or, “Daddy, where do cities come from?” But it is these questions that I hope people are asking, even if not consciously, and which I seek to answer in this book.

There’s been a lot of talk over the last half-century about our cities, towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods. Through most of it has run a thick current of dissatisfaction with the galloping forces of suburbanization that have characterized the postwar era. People may love their three-bedroom home on the cul-de-sac, but they hate traffic jams, destroyed countryside, pollution, and automobile dependence. But before we start labeling places as good or bad, or attempting to design new ones, we should understand them better. This means asking basic questions. Which are: What forces produce our streets, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions, and the shape they take? And can we control them? To proceed without understanding is to almost guarantee ill-conceived and unwanted results.

Babies come from sex. Where do places come from? What is the sex of place? What union of people and nature produces our cities, our suburbs, and the environment out of which we make our homes? If some concede the need for more widespread sex education, might I raise the call for more universal place education?

I believe we are mixed up about our cities, our neighborhoods, and the places where we live. We don’t understand how they work. We don’t understand what produces them. We don’t understand what starts them or stops them. We don’t know how to change them, even if we wanted to. That is what I hope to do in this book. To explain to myself and to the reader why human settlement occurs, what shapes it, and how it can be shaped. In this book, I discuss the nature of place and how the nature of places has changed. And how we can shape the nature of our places. I do not argue to redesign our cities in a specific way. I have preferences and make them known. But my purpose is to make clear the choices available and the price tag of each. How do we change our world? What levers do we grasp if we want to change how it is constructed?

Much of the book explicitly or implicitly addresses the dualism that has developed between the so-called urban and suburban environments, between the land of the parking lot and the land of the street. These two types of places are seen as representing different ideals, and being governed by different systems. I attempt to find the Rosetta stone that will make understandable the workings of both city and suburb. Although they indeed have stark differences in their everyday life, I contend if we widen the lens, we find both urban and suburban places are governed and created by the same laws of place. If we understand those laws, we come a long way in understanding how places and cities are created and how they function.

The Master Hand

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

The Role of Government in Building Cities

[Excerpt From Chapter Six]

In 1817, the governor of New York convinced the state legislature to spend $7 million to finance a canal from Albany to Buffalo. Eight years later, after thousands of workers had carved a channel through rock and earth, the Erie Canal was complete. The 350-mile canal opened the entire upper Midwest to shipping, and cemented New York City’s role as transportation hub for the nation, and as the country’s greatest city.

In 1919, the U.S. Navy, concerned that the country was losing the race in radio technology to Europe, created the Radio Corporation of America–or RCA. It was funded as a joint project between government and private business, and the Secretary of the Navy sat on its board. Later spun off as a completely private enterprise, it grew into one of the largest and most important companies in home and commercial electronics and communications.

In 1995, Denver opened its enormous new international airport, its cream-colored canvas peaks glinting in the sun. It was a big risk by taxpayers. But like New York state’s gamble with the Erie Canal two centuries previously, it was meant to move the Rocky Mountain metropolis into the position of a central transportation hub for the nation.

What all these actions or events have in common is government, government, government. In this chapter, I seek to make clear the role of government in creating both the architecture of place, and the related architecture of economics or wealth. In this antigovernment country, virtually founded on hostility to the enterprise, we tend to obscure government’s central role in creating the places where we live, the jobs we perform, and the money we spend. Government, whether it be a republic, monarchy, theocracy, or dictatorship, is more central to our lives than many of us acknowledge or understand.

From an urban planning perspective, it’s important to understand the role of government so we can more easily grasp the levers of power when we desire to make real changes.

Americans tend to think of government as something outside themselves, a kind of regulatory body that interferes with the working of both an economy and the development of places. According to this view, the shapers of cities and the creators of wealth are the individual actors: the developer, the house builder, the company owner.

But government–that is, us–almost always lays down the concrete slab that economies and places are built upon. Government not only creates the laws, and operates the courts and the police, it then lays down the roads and builds the schools. In a modern economy, it then proceeds to set up a Federal Reserve System, a Securities and Exchange Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and other more elaborate financial infrastructure.

I sense that most people do not understand this, and the reason can be laid at the feet of an insidious idea called “the free market.” We tend to think that places and economies just happen, built by the invisible hand of Adam Smith if by anyone. In our mind’s eye, we tend to see supermarkets and subdivisions proliferating across the countryside, driven by consumer choice and the decisions of banks to finance them. We tend not to see the government’s prior decision to build an Interstate through the area that made the whole thing possible.

The intersection of place and economics is often in transportation. The decision of what transportation system to build, something almost always done by government, tends to create both an economy for an area or metropolis, and a particular physical framework organized around that infrastructure. So when Denver builds a big airport, it also creates the loose physical structure of warehouses, offices, and shopping centers that proliferates around airports. When New York City built its subway system (which was nominally private but steered and aided by government), it also created the possibility of the dense networks of skyscrapers that would follow. The Interstate Highway System created both a new economics of transportation and a new lifestyle organized around suburban living.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We would understand government’s role in both places and economies if we understood better what government is.

Government, to put it unsentimentally, is “a system of authority,” from which all other forms of authority, including ownership of property, derive.12 In a democracy, that authority derives from the consent and will of the people. Managing this authority for the highest and best use is the central task of the people.

In this country, this understanding of political community has been replaced by rigid beliefs in the free market, without an understanding that the “free” market itself only exists through its creation and maintenance by a political state. The “free market” is a political act first. Politics comes before economics. By this, I mean the economic system we live under, in both the nation and the globe, rests on a foundation of political decisions that establish said system’s existence and form. Politics determines economics.

The capitalist system is a political act that creates a publicly defined set of rules enforced by the “system of authority” of government. Markets can be said to exist without governments only if we define markets as blind desire. “Free” markets exist only as created and underpinned by government. The polity creates the system of laws and courts and police that lets the “free” enterprise system operate.

The equations of economists, even at their most convoluted, seldom have a line saying something like “Right here there is a 10 percent chance that forces from a rival company will break through the factory’s defenses and shoot the CEO in the head.” That would be an actual free market, which we can see in operation in the drug markets nationally and globally. The illegal-drug cartels act little differently than France, England, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they warred to control markets, robbed each other’s ships, and fought to control supply lines.

The current global economy, so often held up as an example of the benefits of the free market, was not only created by technological advances like the computer or the telephone, but from the political arrangements that allowed their introduction and peaceful operation. It was politics that allowed for the laying of a transatlantic cable, and for the creation of a system of laws and courts that governs trade. Even mailing a letter to Europe relies on a slew of postal treaties worked out in the nineteenth century.

People may forget that we had a fully functioning global economy in the sixteenth century. England no longer seizes ships from France laden with goods from India because it and most countries have a series of political agreements that allow for “free” trade. These agreements not only prohibit the use of force, but they also provide a mechanism for adjudicating disagreements and for setting standards. The peaceful creation of wealth through a market economy is always based on the establishment of a prior political system. Peaceful global trade has emerged over the last two centuries because a system of political authority has emerged that creates the structure within which a global economy has to operate.

In effect, we have a world government. We can see it in action when the World Court at The Hague in Holland orders the United States to accept tuna caught in nets that harm porpoises, even though America’s own laws prohibit its sale. Sorry, says the World Court, but the system of global trade you agreed to prohibits your discriminating against other countries’ products on this basis. Pull at this thread and you find a vast structure, including things like the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the latter supervised by the World Court, which in turn reports to the United Nations. These institutions, though, should serve the interests of their polity and not just the short-term interests of individual businesses or even countries.

The gradual ability for governments to replace the rule of force with the rule of law changed the form of cities, as well as the form of trade. Historian Eric H. Monkkonen says that the emergence of the nation-state allowed new forms of cities and towns to develop. Before the viable nation-state, only settlements that could defend themselves were possible. This took the classic form of the city-state. When “the state and the city separated,” it allowed more specialized forms of cities and towns to emerge, which in turn allowed a greater percentage of the population to urbanize.13

The classic model of a free market, where businesses operate unhindered by government interference, is comparable to a perfect vacuum created in the laboratory. I use this analogy, though, in a way contrary to the usage of many economists. With markets, it is government that restrains the “natural” forces of power and violence from rushing in and contaminating the perfect vacuum of the free market. Another analogy is that of a soccer game. Government not only referees the game, judging when players are offside and so forth, but also creates the field, its parameters, and how you play.

Government is often thought of as a parasite on free enterprise, or at least as dependent on it. But the reverse is more true. To paraphrase architect and organizational theorist Ted Goranson, behind Adam Smith’s invisible hand is an invisible arm–government.14 Again, this should be obvious, but I suspect it isn’t. The standard mental model of capitalism is that this magic system of supply and demand operates by itself, without human aid or deliberate organization of any kind. These are basic tenets of Economics 101, handed down by the priests of the system, the economics professors.

If you want to look at how markets operate without government, just look at the buying and selling of crack cocaine, or of bootleg whiskey during Prohibition in the 1920s. Without government, the act of exchanging value becomes quickly mixed with the use of force to control a market or command a sale. Indeed, since government itself is a system of authority, a system of regulated force, it can be said that in its absence, another “government” quickly emerges that establishes through force a system of rules and regulations by which trade can occur. The Mafia can be compared to a private government that is competing with the established government’s authorized monopoly on the use of force and subsequent ability to establish rules and structures.

Russia and some of the newly emerging capitalist countries are having problems establishing a functioning capitalist system because they don’t have enough government, not the converse. Capitalism only operates where there is the rule of law, including a court system to keep a record of contracts and enforce them. It operates even better if government creates a transportation system, a clean water supply, and other basic public goods. The limited liability corporation is a foundation of modern capitalism that is completely a political creation.

“All liberal rights presuppose or imply the dependency of the individual on the collectivity and on the principal instrument of the collectivity, that is, on the coercive-extractive state. This is a truism and a banality,” but one that has been forgotten in the modern era, says Stephen Holmes, writing in The American Prospect in an article titled “What Russia Teaches Us: How Weak States Threaten Freedom.”15

As Holmes writes, it is ironic that in this era of calls for lower taxes what Russia suffers from is the absence of sufficient taxation. Total tax revenues in Russia are at about 10 percent of the economy, which is insufficient to create a public sector to establish the rule of law and a healthy infrastructure.16

Part of our misconception of government is due to our emphasis on the Bill of Rights, which, as Holmes writes, is really a spelling out of a set of “negative liberties.”17 They focus on being free from government. But essential liberties also come from government’s presence. What makes democracy so revolutionary is that it established the concept of being free to participate in government, that this system of authority, which is what government is, could be controlled by the people, the polity, the public.

The failure to recognize that a market economy is a political choice and creation first and foremost leads to a belief that an economy operates by itself. The “laws” of supply and demand magically lift all boats to their highest and best use, without the aid of human intervention, goes the standard fairy tale. Part of this confused belief system comes from economics being classified as a science, and the conviction that, because equations and numbers are used, it can be compared to physics or chemistry. But humans are different than falling apples or sodium combining with chloride. They are their own actors, and can combine and perform in a variety of ways, many of which no one can guess.

Lewis Mumford posits that with the industrial revolution, nations adopted a new religious belief in classical economics to replace the belief that an all-seeing, all-knowing father God had laid out an orderly and just path for the world.

“The most fundamental of these postulates was a notion that the utilitarians had taken over, in apparent innocence, from the theologians: the belief that a divine providence ruled over economic activity and ensured, so long as man did not presumptuously interfere, the maximum public good through the dispersed and unregulated efforts of every private, self-seeking individual. The non-theological name for this pre-ordained harmony was laissez-faire.”

The idea of Adam Smith’s invisible hand shaping prices and production for the common good is a marvelous model that is true in some situations. The problem is, most students of economics accept it as being solid as an axe. They then proceed to pick it up and wield it indiscriminately. But the market only operates efficiently and for the benefit of everyone when the products of a market can be converted into something that can be bought and sold for money. Saving a historic building, for example, might greatly enhance the wealth and overall appeal of a town, not to mention the daily lives of its citizens. But it is very difficult to “marketize” the view of a church by charging people for the privilege of walking by it.

Not only do markets not always maximize public or individual good, they actually often degrade it through the same mechanisms meant to produce value.

There are many, many situations where people, all pursuing their maximum self-interest, make things worse for everyone, themselves included. Our treatment of the environment is the most obvious example, and the one most likely to topple the laissez-faire theology. It is simply too apparent that, left to themselves, people and companies will pollute the air, water, and land to the detriment of all without some larger system of legal control. Traffic is another. Everyone trying to get to work quickly and easily by car creates a traffic jam where no one gets to work quickly. Yet another example is the widespread distribution of guns. Individual actors, trying to maximize their personal safety, increase their physical danger, because a more dangerous world is created by the sum total of the actions of everyone arming themselves.

What’s troubling is how a proper understanding of the role of government in our lives is being undermined by a steady barrage of libertarian and antigovernment rhetoric. This language obscures the real relationship people have with government. It’s like criticizing the boat that keeps you afloat.

The version of the Republican Party dominant at the end of the twentieth century has been tremendously destructive in this, and should be rightly held responsible for the misconceptions many Americans hold. Republican leaders like Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi frequently wield the motto that “You know how to spend your money better than the government.” According to this analysis, government is akin to a thief, robbing taxpayers of their hard-earned pay. If government should exist at all, then, goes this line of thought, it is at best a necessary evil, best kept small and minimal.

This theory obscures the fact that government creates the wealth the people hold in their hands and are now reluctant to give up. A dollar bill is signed by the Secretary of the Treasury for a reason. Money is a communication device produced by a political agreement, both literally and in a wider sense. Not only does government print the money, but it also creates the conditions under which money can be “made.” It also creates the infrastructure of wealth creation, like public education and transportation systems.

America’s tortured, confused relationship to government can be seen in our tortured, chaotic, and confused transportation systems. Whether it’s trains, planes, or automobiles, the confusion between public and private has produced the worst of both worlds. Government puts too much money into highways and then prices the use of them too low, and so they are massively congested. Government shortchanges passenger train travel, leaving citizens with a skeletal, impoverished system. Government has ceded control of the skies to commercial airline companies, even though these for-profit companies depend on a public system of airports and air traffic controllers. This has left air passengers often running a gauntlet of high ticket prices and lousy, take-it-or-leave-it service. In general, we are a rich country with a surprisingly impoverished and incoherent transportation system.

Much of this would change if we recognized government’s central role in the architecture of our lives. Once this is accepted, arguments about the size of government become less ideological ones and more practical ones. Whether government or private enterprise performs a task becomes a question of efficiency. It is often beneficial to limit the scope and role of government, but this does not change government’s essential relationship to our lives.

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.

Alex Marshall

writer, journalist, speaker

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

Author Archives: Alex Marshall

The End of Place

A Tale of Two Towns

The Sex of Cities

The Master Hand

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

By Alex Marshall

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

On Foot Or On Wheels, Facing The Threat

DC Metro: A Record of Reinvigorating a City

Making Elections Matter

In Praise of TV by Someone without One

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