More on Tierney

Laurence Aurbach writes that part of the process of Fisking John Tierney has more than just begun and suggests:

See Mike Lewyn's:
The NY Times lies down for the sprawl lobby
and
Fisking Jane Galt

•••

Joel Hirschhorn also weighs in and offers the very point with which I would have (should I ever do it) started my detailed eviscertation i.e. the observation that . Tierney connects

the national smart growth and New Urbanism movement only with city living. Anyone who is well read knows that innovative land developers are building new places in suburban areas which are mixed-use, higher residential density, and rich in neighborhood greenspace.

That's probably the most damning thing about Tierney's piece: it's not about "smart growth" (and how I do dislike that term) or new urbanism but about false assumptions.

Comments

[JRoth]

Posted this over at Lewyn's:

This is a tiny quibble (with Galt) but this bizarre statement [about secretaries commuting 2 hours from Yonkers, a small city a few miles from the Bronx] struck home: Yonkers is an 18 minute train ride from Grand Central Station. The only way it's 2 hours from anywhere in NYC is if you drive at rush hour, and I just don't imagine a lot of secretaries paying $1000/month to park their cars when they could simply take the train.

I might add that Yonkers is, in fact, old school smart growth. I grew up in a "suburb" outside Yonkers, where I could walk to school and bike to the store, where my father biked to the train station to get to his job in the City. This is exactly the model that smart growth advocates.

The fundamental disconnect is that Galt somehow equates New York City with New Urbanism and smart growth. Almost every one of her comments is coming from a Manhattan viewpoint, even though Manhattan is THE unique city in America. Not even SF is such a caricature of urbanism as Manhattan, yet Galt somehow acts as if Seaside is more like Manhattan than it is like Middle America.

When she does things like this, it's tough to know whom she's trying to fool - herself, or her readers. She seems very sincere, but can anyone outside the Bush Administration really base their arguments so deeply in fantasy?

[Jane Galt]

As it happens, I too have commuted that line, and you're simply incorrect: it's a minimum half-hour trip from Yonkers to Grand Central unless you leave at 6am: http://as0.mta.info/mnr/schedules/sched_results.cfm.

Of course, since most of us don't live and/or work in train stations, we have to factor in the walk/ride to the train, and the wait on the platform, and in the case of NYC, generally a subway ride to your actual office. An hour each way is a conservative estimate of the door-to-door commute. By contrast, my commute from the upper west side to Midtown is 20 minutes, door to door.

As for the reason I'm so Manhattan-centric, I would think it would be obvious: "THE unique city in America" is the ONLY one where mass transit provides a majority of the commutes. I've lived/worked in four of the six cities in the US that have substantial mass-transit systems: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. Of those, only in New York is mass transit the dominant form of commute over driving. So if we are trying to create non-car-dependant communities, the place to look is the Greater New York Area, of which Yonkers is a part, because it's the only place that's done it. This would seem to strongly suggest that the only kind of densities at which public transit is a feasible alternative to auto usage at current fuel prices are the kinds prevalent in New York City.

[JRoth]

First off, I apologize for my faulty memory - clearly 30 minutes is much closer to 2 hours than it is to 18. Anyway, it's very easy to add in time to make door-to-door trips appear longer. For 5 years, my family lived in an apartment in Tuckahoe, and it was a 3 minute walk to the train station - is this meaningfully different from traversing a suburban office park lot? Thousands of people live within 10 non-automotive minutes of the Metro North line - in a nation where commutes average 45 minutes, and a city where people drive 2 hours to commute, this is meaningless.

Anyway, Jane's defense of her NYCentrism is nonsense, because the question is not "What will it take to eliminate the private automobile in America?" It is "Is it possible to create communities designed around human, not automotive needs?" I doubt many advocates of New Urbanist communities would, in fact, point to NYC - or rather, Manhattan - as a model.

It's not that hard, Jane: in Sprawl America, every adult requires an automobile, and is rarely able to complete any ADL without one, unless it can be done on his or her property. In a thoughtfully-planned America, cars are a convenience, not a necessity. With my wife and daughter, I own a detached home in a leafy neighborhood, and our one car often goes days at a time without being started. We pay no premium for groceries, spend very little time fuming in traffic, and are, according to recent studies, 4 years younger, in health terms, than our exurban counterparts. My question for you, Jane, is why don't you think anyone should build neighborhoods like this anymore.

PS - The majority of workers in downtown Pittsburgh - a shrinking city afflicted by sprawl - commute by mass transit. Sorry.

[Laurence Aurbach]

Commutes are such a small percentage of all trips that they're almost a red herring. In the New York metro area, commutes are 10 percent of all trips, or (taking into account trip length) 15 percent of all person-miles.

The problem here is the lack of a definition for "car-dependent community." Jane defines it as anything outside of Manhattan. Most new urbanists and Smart Growth advocates have a different concept.

In pedestrian-friendly community, you can make a convenient, pleasant and safe journey to many of your daily destinations on foot, bicycle or transit. Kids can bike to friends' houses, to the park to play soccer, or the store to buy a popsicle (the "popsicle test"). There may be offices, shops and restaurants, a transit stop, community center, church or library within 1/4 or 1/3 of a mile.

In communities like these, people walk more and put fewer miles on their cars. They make as many car trips as residents of conventional suburbs, but the trips are shorter. There can be single family homes with small yards near apartments, and at the same time the density can be high enough to support transit. Eight to 12 dwellings per acre is about the minimum for decent transit ridership, according to the engineers.

There are thousands of traditional towns and neighborhoods that fit this description, and hundreds of new ones. Many are in high demand, with outrageous housing prices, because the supply is so limited in certain markets.