Examples of zoning screwing up TOD

I spoke about how TOD needs to be privileged over building new lines, and how real TOD ought to be, pointing out Chigasaki station. Well, now let me rant about how North American planning practices can seriously screw over attempts to build rational cities centered around transit.

May I present to you: Radisson Station?

Radisson Station is a station near the eastern end of the Green Line of the Montréal Metro. It is a direct 20-minute ride away from downtown Montréal,

Radisson in the Montréal Metro map

The station is close to a freeway, Autoroute 25, has a mall right next to it, but only a small section of the mall is near the station, the biggest part is farther away, and the station itself is mainly surrounded by plenty of parking, its location near a freeway means it is a big park-and-ride spot.

It actually has two entry points, one north and one south of a major arterial street. Here is what they look like:

Northern entry point

Southern entry point

Already, there is a massive TOD mistake, in fact two of them:

First, these buildings that are entry points of the subway system serve no other purpose. We're talking of the location that is the easiest to access from a subway, the location right on top of it, and the STM (the transit operator) is content to have two small buildings that serve absolutely no other purpose. To be fair, the southern entry point has an excuse, it is under high-tension power lines that limit what could be built, but the northern entry point has no such excuse. Neither do the dozens of similar entry buildings the STM has all over Montréal. The easiest idea ever would be for the STM to ask for bids from promoters to build high-density residential, commercial or office buildings to replace their mostly useless entry buildings. I think it could get plenty of cash that way.

Second, most of the land immediately adjacent to the two entry points is actually parking lots or a small bus terminal.

The two entry points in green, parking lots in red, the small bus terminal in orange

 The result is that, apart from a few houses to the north-west, the nearest residential areas are at least 300 meters (1000 feet) away from the station, separated by plenty of parking and an uncomfortable walking environment. They really ought to build something instead in the area, and if they want to maintain the park-and-ride, they should at the very least make it a multi-storied parking garage to free up the rest of the area for development, or to shove the parking underground, under buildings.

But what I mainly want to bring attention to is something symptomatic of North American zoning practices, which this area illustrates to a T. First, a map of the north side of the neighborhood (forgive us Montrealers, our north is more west than north, we simply have the St-Lawrence river that we consider "south" even if it's actually more to the east).

North-west of the station, the station is the green dot

 On the previous image, there are 3 red dots with numbers in them, they are viewpoints I have captured from Google Maps to show what houses there look like, to see how housing evolves the further we get from the station.

Point 1: single-family houses on large lots (15 units per hectare, 6 per acre)

Point 2: semi-detached houses and duplexes (35 units per hectare, 14 per acre)

Point 3: condo towers in park(ing lots) (about 200 units per hectare, 80 per acre)

Did you notice the problem here? No, I didn't mess up the order of the images. Believe it or not, the residential density INCREASES the farther one gets from the subway station! The condo towers here are no less than 2 kilometers (1,3 mile) away from the station, a 10-minute bus drive away (plus waiting time). That is the exact opposite you should do, you want to reduce transfers in transit trips, not increase them, so you want the densest concentration of housing and jobs as close to subway stations as possible, but it's the opposite that happens here.

How it came about

There is a logic to the madness here. The single-family houses at point 1 were built in the 1950s, at the time, there was no subway and plenty of space available for development in the region. It was actually considered a relatively far suburb, in fact it was farther from the downtown area than the official suburb of Longueuil. So in that context, single-family houses do make some sense.

The duplexes seen at point 2 were built at about the same time as the subway station in the 1970s. At the time, such buildings (semi-detached and duplexes with parking in the basement and the living area built above) were all the rage in Montréal as they were able to get some density yet still have enough parking according to the paradigm of automobile-focused development. As Montréal had little land to develop and the border of suburbanization had long gone even farther, some higher density was warranted.

The condos seen at point 3 were largely built in the 1990s and the 2000s. Places left to develop in Montréal had grown exceptionally rare (in fact, this whole area is part of an ancient suburb called Anjou that was merged to Montréal in the late 1990s). So the land was very expensive, and the suburban growth now extended to areas twice as far as this. The idea of building higher densities had now become more popular.

So if you look at the chronology, every "layer" of residential density actually made perfect sense when they were built.

The issue then becomes: why are we keeping these areas as-is when the context has changed so much? If 15-story condo towers are justified 2 kilometers away from the subway station, why wouldn't they be justified 100 meters away?

Well, because of zoning of course. The area is zoned as sector 14-06:

map of zoning sectors for the Mercier borough

And this sector is identified among a lists of sectors where the zoning is built to "preserve the area's 'character'". It is even written explicitly in the borough's official urbanism plan.

Here is the original in French

This is the English translation I made

Now, this is a plan, not the gritty details. What does average building-to-lot ratio mean? The plan doesn't say, but I bet there is a document somewhere that does.

Still, as the zoning stands, it ought to be possible to slightly densify the area, but you would need to buy and destroy the existing building which has value as a house, around 400 000 to 500 000$ in the area. So that means that if you allow density to double at most, the houses that will be built will have to absorb an additional 200 000$ to 250 000$ in construction cost, likely making them too expensive, unless they are luxury housing.

This is where an approach that allows for much higher density and piecemeal replacement would work much, much  better.

Other examples: recent condos in Québec

In Montréal, all cities of the metropolitan area accepted a plan to supposedly create a sustainable metropolitan area, to increase density and concentrate development in TOD areas. This sounds good, but in practice, in many, many cases, what this resulted in is municipalities deciding to allow low-rise condo buildings on the outskirts

We always used to have a few condos and apartment blocs near commercial areas in our suburbs, but with this plan now in place, we have seen something happen which was rare before. In order to satisfy density goals, cities started requiring higher density developments from developers who develop on the outskirts of existing cities. The result was pretty poor: condos with 40 to 60 units per hectare (16 to 24 units per acre) built on the edge of field, or near highways, where there was nothing in close proximity. In order to save on costs and since land is cheap, these residential-only developments are generally surrounded by big parking lots.

You can see this in real estate listings on centris.ca, which shows the WalkScore of each listing. The WalkScore is a way to account for "walkability" depending on proximity to services and businesses. The score goes from 0 to 100. From 0 to 49, locations are car-dependent, from 50-69 they are considered somewhat walkable, from 70 to 89, they are very walkable, and  from 90 to 100, they are considered walkers' paradise. All the following listings are thus considered to be in car-dependent locations.

Most suburbs do have locations that have 70-80 WalkScore, so it's not like all the suburbs are car-dependent deserts.

There are still some legit TOD going on, condos being built in areas with 70+ WalkScore, but the amount of car-dependent condos is very high. The one advantage I can see is that these mostly 1000+-square-foot condos are pretty affordable, ranging from 180 000 to 250 000$, allowing the new generation to have affordable housing without going too far into the exurbs. Indeed, most people I know of my own age who have bought a home have bought, at least initially, a condo like these ones. Some have gone on to houses, others are still in condos. It's also an interesting tale of what happens when developers have to try to build density with at least 2 parking spots per unit because of suburban parking requirements and because that's what their clients will need (they are in car-dependent areas after all). And all that while trying to avoid underground parking since it's too expensive to build while land is cheap. Note that alleyways in back are very rare in Québec.

Parking lots behind condo buildings, a classic solution sacrificing the back yard

...and the denser and taller the buildings, the bigger the parking lots

A long driveway to a garage, probably to satisfy two requirements: 1- places for 2 parking spot, 2- the driveway can't occupy more than 40% of the front of the lot. Note how one owner created a fork in his driveway to be able to park 2 cars without one blocking the other and still respect the rules

A rare case of parking lot in front, sacrificing the front yard but preserving the back yard. Results in houses facing the parking lot instead of the street

This is almost Japanese in design... driveways in front for condos, with the driveways being long enough for two small cars. It looks bad from the front, but it is an extremely space-efficient way to cram parking spots for a multi-family home

Massive parking lots AND parking garages under building.... that's what you get when you try to build 6-story condo buildings in a car-dependent area where you need 2 parking spots per unit

Again, this is due to the zoning which makes it near impossible to densify places that are currently walkable in most instances, as they're often currently occupied by low-density housing which are about the only thing that can be built in the area. Many old houses exist that are quite cheap but on big lots in the walkable areas of suburbs, which would be ripe for replacement. Here are some images that I got from searches on centris.ca for single-family houses for less than 300 000$ in areas where the WalkScore is between 60 and 85:

There are plenty of old single-family houses ripe for teardown, which could be replaced piecemeal by townhouses, triplexes or even 6-condo building with some imagination (and a reduction of parking requirements to one per unit). For instance, most single-family homes in Longueuil tend to have a lot that is 20-meter wide (66 feet) and 30-meter deep (100 feet). Well, these buildings also are built on lots of those exact same dimensions:

...they just have 6 times as many units, and each of these units is at least 100 square meters big, or around 1 100 square feet.

Conclusion

These are just demonstrations of how the mentality of urban development that dominates in North America that "once an area is built, it should remain that way" is deleterious to actually having rational, efficient cities. Building dense areas on the outskirts of metropolitan regions is not an answer, these areas are generally transit-poor and unwalkable, which results in denser areas which need as much parking space as regular car-dependent suburbs, but the density means that parking lots dominate and make for a very poor looking area that is unlikely to draw people in or keep them there (except through low prices). Essentially, you have streets, parking lots and buildings, and not much else.

This is also why zoning has to be reformed. Zoning needs to allow higher densities and piecemeal densification in order to allow cities to evolve and to respond to higher demand for desirable areas.

Transit and congestion part 2: how congestion can cripple transit

In the previous article, I said that transit isn't really a solution to congestion, but a way to increase the capacity of congested roads and avoid congestion from choking the life out of urban areas. Basically, I spoke of the effect of transit on congestion, but it is very important not to underestimate the effect of congestion on transit viability.

Indeed, speed is vital for transit. Not only relative speed to other modes of travel as speed is probably the greatest factor to determine what mode of travel people will opt for, but also absolute speed, and for a simple reason: the cost of transit is directly impacted by the speed at which they travel. That is because a major part of the cost of transit is the driver, and he is paid by the hour. Furthermore, the slower each vehicle goes, the more vehicles you need to buy to be able offer the same capacity.

I know it is evident for most people who read this, but let me explain in detail through an example.

Let's take a given bus route:

• It is 10-kilometer long (a bit over 6 miles)
• It is a round-trip
• To satisfy demand, you need to have a frequency of 4 buses per hour (capacity for a transit line = frequency of the vehicles times the capacity of each vehicle)
• You can expect an average speed of 15 km/h (around 10 mph)
• You have 400 riders who will take the bus
• We will neglect the issue of layover for clarity, buses that end the route can start again just as fast as they arrive

Let's simulate this for 3 hours of the peak period.

Each line represents a bus going from the start of the route (0) to the end (10)

 In this case, at the most, you have three buses running on the route, so you need to buy 3 buses, each costing 400 000$, for an initial capital cost of 1 200 000$. During the three hours, buses are running in total for 7,25 hours. If each bus costs you 150$ per hour of running time to run, then that is about 1 100$.

So, to sum up, to provide this level of service and this capacity you need:

• 3 buses, so initial capital cost of 1 200 000$
• 7,25 vehicle-hours of running time, so 1 100$ operating cost
• To pay back operating costs, each ticket must cost 2,75$

Now imagine that instead of an average speed of 15 km/h, you have an average speed of 12 km/h (7,5 mph), just 20% slower. What happens? Well, instead of taking 40 minutes to make the entire route, buses now need 50 minutes to do so.

The result? You need 4 buses instead of 3, as at the worst time, you will have 4 buses running the route at the same time, you will also require 8,85 vehicle-hours of running time for buses. In short:

• The capital cost is now 33% higher, to 1 600 000$
• The operating cost is 22% higher at 1 350$
• To pay back operating costs, each ticket must cost 3,38$ if all 400 riders stick to the bus...
• ...but if the slow speed convinces say 50 of them to stop taking the bus, the cost per remaining rider is 3,86$, 40% higher than previously

So just being 20% slower has just increased costs by around 25% and may increase ticket prices by even more than that if the slow speed gets people back into cars (and buses have to self-fund). The problem is evident: transit needs to be fast to be cost-effective, if transit is slow, then it is going to be unattractive and very expensive.

Overall, in this case, the cost of the transit service in relation to speed can be represented the following way:

Cost per passenger of transit service depending on whether we suppose ridership to be static (always 400 during peak hours) or dynamic (4% gain or loss per 1 km/h difference in average speed)

In practice, the effects of faster service are probably not as pronounced because of layover time between routes for bus drivers and the like, but the dynamic is still there.

Case study: streetcars

This is likely what happened to old streetcars. When they were introduced at first, roads were largely empty of vehicular traffic, with only pedestrians and a few horse-drawn vehicles around, generally keeping to the sides of the street or to the sidewalk. As traffic speed was about 5 km/h (3 mph), ie walking speed, there was no need for signalization at the vast majority of intersections. No traffic lights and no stop sign, some cops directing traffic at a few major intersections. So streetcars in that context almost only had to stop to allow passengers to get on or get off. Even if they couldn't quite go fast, their average speed was still pretty decent. Since labor was cheap, they even had another employee besides the driver, the conductor, whose job was to collect the fare from riders, so that passengers could pay the fare after boarding and thus avoid losing time dwelling at stops.

Some sources mention an average speed of 10 to 12 miles per hour (16 to 20 km/h) for streetcars in the US in the early 20th century (Source and source). Though it doesn't look that fast, take into account that the average speed of buses in New York City nowadays is 7,5 mph (12 km/h). In Montréal too, the average speed of buses in Montréal during the peak hours (when most people take transit) is about 12-13 km/h, around 7-8 mph. Despite nearly 100 years of technological advancement, transit is slower than back then.

Though data is scarce on the early 20th century (at least as far as I can find on the internet), most sources mention growing congestion as more and more cars came on the road. Traffic lights and stop signs started appearing in the 1910s and 1920s to deal with the higher vehicular traffic. These signalizations, though they ordered traffic, also had the effect (and still do) of causing delays on arterial roads. Even a well-programmed traffic light at a relatively little used intersection will frequently incur around 10-20 seconds of delay on average to cars passing through. So if you have one traffic light every 500 meters (around a third of a mile) on a 10-kilometer trip (6-mile), you will likely lose 3 to 6 minutes at traffic lights. So if you used to be able to do that length at an average speed of 20 km/h (12 mph), now you could have seen your speed actually fall down to 16-18 km/h (10-11 mph).

I imagine visually this is how traffic should have evolved:

Streetcars with mainly horse-drawn carriages and plenty of pedestrians (not shown), traffic is generally fluid due to few vehicles and low speeds of vehicles, allowing them to easily negotiate intersections

Cars become much more common, now there is friction at intersections and police directing traffic

Finally, we start adding signals to intersections

In old sources, often streetcars were blamed for congestion, due to the windshield perspective of those who used to have access to the media and the attention of the powerful. This is for a simple reason: most streetcars actually had tracks in the center of the street, in the left lane, the fast lane. How did passengers board? Well, at first, passengers waited in the street, forcing cars to slow down not to hit them. As traffic became more ordered, here is how it worked, and still works in Toronto:

Is it any wonder then that car drivers seethed at the sight of streetcars that blocked two lanes of cars when allowing passengers to board or alight? And why car drivers were so receptive to arguments for replacing streetcars by buses?

So, anyway, some posts back, I made a graph about the average speed of transit lines depending on how many stops they had to make and their maximum speed. I will re-use this to illustrate the effect of congestion on streetcar lines.

First, the original situation where streetcars largely had to stop only for passengers and faced little to no congestion to slow them down.

Initial situation, where streetcars only had to stop for passengers and faced no congestion

Now, after cars started congesting city streets and imposed traffic lights and stop signs, streetcars stop more often and go slower

Now combine this fact with the earlier fact about how slower transit is more expensive to run for the same capacity. This means that an operator in this situation has a choice of either reducing the capacity of transit lines by 30 to 40% or increasing the number of vehicles by 50% to maintain the same capacity. No matter what, it results in an increase of costs per passenger of at least 50%.

More importantly, this thought experiment reveals that streetcars, far from causing congestion, were actually a VICTIM of the congestion caused by cars. Car congestion increased transit operating costs and lowered their average speed, making them more expensive and less attractive at the same time.

Streetcar companies, that used to be profitable, started requiring influx of public funds to stay afloat, many were bought by cities. Even when the streetcars were replaced by buses, it didn't help matters, and transit companies, now public, often require up to 70% of funds to come from public money and not fares. A result of three factors:

• Less ridership
• More expensive operations as the lines are now slower
• Transit as welfare policy in cities now built around motorized transport

Lesson for future surface transit

The lesson we can take from these facts and what happened to streetcars should be clear: in highly motorized cities, transit requires reserved right-of-way to protect itself from congestion. In some small cities, maybe they don't need it yet, but if they plan on growing, they should do it as quickly as they can, because when congestion becomes common, taking any space away from cars will be more and more politically contentious.

This is a lesson I think developing cities especially need to take to heart. As people start being able to afford motorbikes or cars, they risk overwhelming streets and causing monstrous congestion. When this happens, bus services running in mixed traffic will suffer most, because the speed reduction will result in transit companies either requiring massive subsidies to keep running, or going bankrupt, thus pushing people into private motorized transport. Even worse, those who will not be able to afford motorized transport will have to walk in congested roads where they are likely to be hit, wounded or killed. Congestion may also choke cities and lead to good jobs and wealthy residents fleeing to sprawl, copying the North American mode of development that left desperate poor people in urban areas.

Considering this, I think developing cities need to implement transit-only lanes and BRT quickly, because it will only get harder to implement as more and more people get motorized. BRT exists here to essentially protect buses from the congestion that cars and motorbikes create and safeguard transit riders' access to an acceptably fast and safe form of transport. If buses are left in mixed traffic, transit use will simply evaporate over time.

For developed cities, modern tramways on their own ROW or even better, grade-separated LRTs and subways, should be preferable, because their lower labor requirement means they will cost less in the long-term and be more attractive to people who already have cars. But even bus lanes to go around congestion will do a lot of good in order to provide for more affordable transit that is more attractive to people.

Eventually, developing countries should also invest in rail, I think, for as they become richer, labor will become more expensive and the buses that used to be cheap will become more and more expensive. Rail can avoid that issue, and also provide for much higher capacity for less space.

Transit and congestion, part 1: is transit a solution to congestion?

The issue of transit and congestion comes up quite often. Oftentimes, transit proponents will sell transit to car drivers as a solution to congestion in order to get them to support spending money on transit solutions.

In reality, transit rarely allows for congestion to be reduced. The simple reason is that if transit does manage to get traffic down, the reduced congestion is likely to lead to induced demand as more people will make choices that result in them driving across the congested chokepoints of the road network... or maybe even transit users who have cars will see that congestion is light and so will switch back to cars!

Indeed, transit in most cases is actually much slower than cars, in North American cities, it isn't rare for transit to take 2 to 3 times as much time as cars to get anywhere, at least without congestion. Subways in dense cities where cars are forced to drive slowly are one rare exception. The only way for transit to be really attractive is thus for cars to see their average speed fall because of congestion. The moment when car drivers switch for transit is when they see they have an advantage to do so, and the most obvious advantage is time.

Average speed of cars and transit (with or without right-of-way) on an highway as it congests

What the previous graph shows is that the moment when people are going to flock to transit is when the speed curve of cars go down to the level of the speed curve of transit, which only happens in the case of congestion. Transit with a right-of-way, which may be simply buses with a bus lane allowing them to bypass lines of stop-and-go traffic until they reach the chokepoint of the network, will also be much better at it. Transit that go in mixed traffic will also see speed fall because of congestion, and people will go to them much less readily.

So, is transit useless then? No, it is very useful to avoid having central urban areas be suffocated by traffic. 

Let's take a simple representation of a CBD and a suburb, connected with a single highway with a capacity of 20 000 people in cars over an AM peak period (6 to 9 AM). Currently, the road is at capacity in the morning peak, when most people commute to work.

The suburb is predicted to grow 10% over the next 10 years. This growth in population is likely to result in more jobs too, so normally you might see the CBD grow likewise to provide jobs to these people, because there is an advantage in industries to stay close to similar companies.

However, this would result in more people wanting to go through the road than it can bear. Congestion will rear its ugly head, then people will try to find ways around it. One of the ways would be to live in the CBD, but for many reasons, it tends not to be easy to do. Or roads can be widened, but that is often supremely expensive in urban areas. One of the most likely alternatives that may occur is that instead of being in the CBD, the job growth will occur elsewhere, in an industrial park near the suburb.

So, in this case, the CBD stagnates while suburbs and job centers in suburbs grow. This may not seem so bad, but this tends to lead to downtown areas losing vitality and importance, in the end, the CBD may even start losing jobs to industrial parks in suburbs. The new developments also tend to be car-dependent, forcing people to own cars to get anywhere, which increases costs for everyone.

Transit can offer an alternative. Indeed, transit can increase the capacity of roads, a single bus can carry 50 or 60 people and take the place of just 2 cars on the road. Betting on transit is a cheap way to increase road capacity and so to keep the CBD growing and staying a vital part of the region rather than becoming just another industrial park amongst others.

This kind of transit is a mixed blessing... yes, it allows the central city to keep growing and keep its relevance, but it also enables residential-only suburbs to keep growing and sprawling. So it prevents job sprawl, but not residential sprawl. It can even be seen as an enabler of sprawl, as a mere aspect of a road-only policy.

So transit doesn't reduce congestion... but allows more people through nonetheless because of its greater spatial efficiency. But there is another aspect of the relation between transit and congestion that needs to be talked about, and that is the disastrous effect congestion has on transit. For transit has actually historically been a victim of congestion.

It's late and it's a distinct enough subject to warrant another post, so I'll stop here tonight.