Felix Salmon

I’m not sure why it took me until yesterday to find Paul Krugman’s post from April 16 about population density, where he found a very odd fact buried in a new Census report. We know that the population of the US is rising, and we know that the population of the US is also becoming increasingly urban. As a result, urban density — the number of people per square mile — has to be going up.

And yet, if you calculate density the right way, weighting by population rather than by land area, you find something very odd: density is actually going down.

In the US as a whole, population-weighted population density fell by 16 people per square mile between 2000 and 2010, while in metropolitan areas it fell by an enormous 405 people per square mile. What could be going on? The best answer, I think, comes from David Schleicher, a George Mason professor who’s an expert on the political economy of urban areas.

If you look at property and land prices in America’s cities, they rose impressively between 2000 and 2010, the property bubble and crash nothwithstanding. Cities are increasingly attractive and expensive places to live; that’s a trend which isn’t going away any time soon. And historically, when urban property values rise, it doesn’t take long for property developers to pounce on the trend. New buildings rise; whole neighborhoods get rezoned. With billions of dollars at stake, politically-connected developers normally find a way to get what they want somehow.

That’s exactly what has happened in, say, Miami, where shiny new condos rise in lockstep with property values. But note something important about Miami: those condos are being bought largely by foreigners, who have little if any political clout in the city. In most US cities, by contrast, rising property values in recent years have meant something different: a rise in the number of politically-powerful groups and individuals moving back into the city from the suburbs.

These rich and powerful have two important effects on urban density. Firstly, they decrease density just by moving to the city: they do that by dint of the fact that they live in larger homes with smaller families. My apartment in New York’s East Village, for instance, is in a 1920s tenement building, which was converted into condos in 1984. During the condo conversion, the old layout, of four apartments per floor, was scrapped in favor of a new layout with only two apartments per floor. But the number of people per apartment didn’t go up. And if the conversion were to take place today, the building would almost certainly be converted into “full-floor luxury residences”, with a keyed elevator opening directly into monster spaces. Again, without any discernible increase in the number of people per apartment.

Rich people like to maximize the amount of space they live in, whether they’re buying suburban McMansions or downtown lofts. As a result, higher property prices in dense urban areas are prone to making those areas less dense — at least until the developers come along.

This is where the second important effect of the rich-and-powerful comes into play. These people tend to fall on the spectrum somewhere between NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) and BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). Just look at the vitriol hurled by carless Soho residents, for instance, at New York’s new bike-sharing stations. As urban areas become increasingly affluent, filled with wealthy politicians and their wealthier donors, it becomes harder and harder for developers to procure the zoning changes and construction permits they need in order to keep on producing new residential inventory.

The result is that the normal state of affairs — where powerful individuals get trumped by even more powerful construction-industry inevitabilities — is turned on its head, to the point at which new construction can no longer keep up with the de-densification endemic to gentrification. Bloggers may rail against this state of affairs — both Ryan Avent and Matt Yglesias have written at great length about how important it is to allow new buildings to rise within urban areas — but ultimately the natural conservatism of the rich is winning out, across the nation. If you want to move to a city where density is going up rather than down, you might just have to move to Miami. Or China.

The best conference panels, like the best blog posts, are the ones which change your mind. And while I haven’t done a U-turn on anything, after yesterday’s panel on smart cars I’m now thinking very differently about the relative merits of various ways of improving how we move around where we live and travel. While I’ve generally been a fan of just about any alternative to the automobile, now I’m not so sure: I think that smart car technology is improving impressively, to the point at which it could be the most promising solution, especially in developed parts of the world like California.

One reason is simply fiscal. Projects like the self-driving car, and the Sartre platooning project in Europe, move the costs of new technology onto companies (Google) and individuals (people buying smart cars). As such, while the total amount of money spent might well be enormous, the money doesn’t need to be spent up-front by any state or national government. That stands in stark contrast, of course, to rail projects, which cost billions of dollars up front; if they ever do pay for themselves, they do so only very slowly.

It makes perfect sense for dense urban areas to invest in subway systems, of course — as China is doing; India should follow suit. A pedestrian-friendly city with a great bike-path network and a fast subway system is basically any urbanist’s dream, both energy-efficient and reasonably low-tech. But between cities and suburbs, or between cities, you need other ways of getting around. And here there are real choices to be made, between rail and roads. Or rather, given that roads are necessary, do you build roads and railways, or can you solve all your problems with roads alone?

China of course is happily blasting new railways through the country as part of its massive national-infrastructure project. But the more developed a country becomes, the more expensive and time-consuming any new rail line will be. And if you’re looking out say 20 years, there’s a pretty strong case to be made that the kind of efficiency that we can get today only on rail lines will in future be available on roads as well — with significantly greater comfort and convenience for passengers.

Right now, technology is arguably making roads and cars more dangerous. Drivers are notoriously bad judges of their own driving ability, and they’re increasingly being distracted by devices — not just text messages, any more, but fully-fledged emails, social-media alerts, and even videos. What’s more, when car manufacturers roll out things like stay-in-lane technology, that just makes drivers feel even safer, so they feel as though they have some kind of permission to spend even more time on their phones, and less time paying attention to the highway. The results can be disastrous.

But once we make it all the way into a platoon, or in a self-driving car, then at that point we become significantly safer than even the safest human driver. While we’re very bad judges of our own driving ability, we’re actually incredibly good at intuiting how safe our driver is when we’re a passenger. And the experience of people in self-driving cars is that after no more than about 10 minutes, they relax, feel very safe, and are very happy letting the car take them where they want to go. They even relax so much, I’m told, that they lose the desire to speed — maybe because they know that they’re getting where they’re going, and in the meantime can lose themselves in their phones.

If and when self-driving cars really start taking off, it’s easy to see where the road leads. Firstly, they probably won’t be operated on the owner-occupier model that we use for cars today, where we have to leave our cars parked for 97% of their lives just so that we know they’re going to be available for us when we need them. Given driverless cars’ ability to come pick you up whenever you need one, it makes much more sense to just join a network of such things, giving you the same ability to drive your car when you’re at home, or in a far-flung city, or whenever you might normally take a taxi. And the consequence of that is much less need for parking (right now there are more than three parking spots for every car), and therefore the freeing up of lots of space currently given over to parking spots.

What’s more, the capacity of all that freed-up space will be much greater than the capacity of our current roads. Put enough platoons and self-driving cars onto the road, and it’s entirely conceivable that the number of vehicle-miles driven per hour, on any given stretch of road, could double from its current level, even without any increase in the speed limit. Then, take account of the fact that vehicle mileage will continue to improve. The result is that with existing dumb roads, we could wind up moving more people more miles for less total energy expenditure in cars — even when most of those cars continue to have just one person in them — than by forcing those people to cluster together and take huge, heavy trains instead.

This vision creates a dilemma, when we start facing choices about building rail lines or new suburbs. We’re not in a self-driving-car utopia yet, and the transportation problems we have are both real and solvable using rail. So do we use the tools we have, or do we wait and hope that future technology will solve our problems in a more efficient way?

And the question of building infrastructure applies to cars, too: do we just allow the auto industry to build ever more efficient gas-powered vehicles, which will eventually become self-driving, or do we spend billions of dollars building out an infrastructure capable of supporting and recharging electric cars wanting to travel substantial distances? Again, whatever solutions we put in now could end up being obsolete surprisingly quickly.

So while I’m convinced that now is an excellent time for the US to embark on a substantial round of infrastructure investment, I’m less convinced that we should be investing in rail in particular. A smart electricity grid, definitely. Improvements on existing bridges and tunnels, absolutely, including that new tunnel to New Jersey. But I’m less convinced about things like a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and LA. Especially so long as there aren’t any self-driving cars to pick up passengers when they arrive.

Mobile devices are wonderful things, just as cars are. But both can cost lives, as Robert Kolker explains in a great NY Mag article:

Cars still speed, drivers still drink, and jaywalkers still pay no attention, especially with smartphones to distract them. “I wonder if we’ve reached a critical mass where so many people are looking down and so many people are listening to headphones and so many drivers are texting that the probability of an inattentive walker and an inattentive driver is much greater,” says Sam Schwartz, a.k.a. Gridlock Sam, the transportation consultant and traffic guru.

Schwartz is speaking purely anecdotally, of course: there are no reliable statistics on such matters, and I doubt there ever will be. But it’s undeniable that when people are staring at a mobile phone, they become much more oblivious — and much more dangerous.

As smartphones make our streets increasingly dangerous, it’s incumbent upon local government to try to mitigate things as much as possible. A world where everybody’s looking at a screen cannot be a world where cars can careen around the city at 40mph without any risk of getting a speeding ticket. Fast cars are lethal things, and have no place anyway in a dense city where the interplay of automobiles, bicycles, and pedestrians constitutes a highly-complex dance. So we should slow them down, using all manner of traffic-calming measures. (My favorite, which seems to be used far too sparingly, is to put louvers on traffic lights so that cars can’t see the color of the light at the end of the block. When they can, they often speed up to make it through.)

But the distraction of smartphones isn’t just physically dangerous: in reducing our awareness of our surroundings, it has broader corrosive effects. Alastair Bland has a good post on the way that GPS devices mean that we stop needing to pay attention or to learn the kind of things that maps can teach us:

A study conducted in Tokyo found that pedestrians exploring a city with the help of a GPS device took longer to get places, made more errors, stopped more frequently and walked farther than those relying on paper maps. And in England, map sales dropped by 25 percent for at least one major printer between 2005 and 2011. Correlation doesn’t prove causation—but it’s interesting to note that the number of wilderness rescues increased by more than 50 percent over the same time period. This could be partly because paper maps offer those who use them a grasp of geography and an understanding of their environment that most electronic devices don’t. In 2008, the president of the British Cartographic Society, Mary Spence, warned that travelers—especially drivers—reliant on electronic navigation gadgets were focusing mainly on reaching a destination without understanding quite how they got there.

I love maps, be they old or new, paper-based or digital. And if I’m on a hike, or even just giving directions in a car, I feel lost without one. (The main thing I hate the most about Apple’s iOS maps compared to Google’s is that if you use them for directions, they won’t let you zoom out, examine your route, look where you’re going next, etc. Apple’s maps infantilize: they basically say “we know where you are, we’ll tell you what to do, don’t worry your pretty little head about it.” While Google’s encourage you to explore your surroundings much more, look at alternative routes, and generally be aware of where you are.)

Sadly, I’m in a tiny minority here. Most people have no love for maps at all, and positively dislike map-reading, avoiding it as much as possible and finding it quite difficult. For decades they were a regrettable necessity — but now that we don’t need them any more, we’re jettisoning them as fast as we can, and relying instead on passively receiving turn-by-turn directions from some algorithm. Those algorithms are undoubtedly helpful, but insofar as they allow us to stop paying attention to our surroundings, they also hasten our evolution into people whose entire experience of the world is intermediated by some kind of digital device. Which cannot possibly be healthy.

I’m a huge fan of Google’s driverless car, and I can’t wait for its broad adoption: it promises to reduce accidents and fatalities enormously. But it also promises to reduce our real-world horizons even further. I’m reminded of this anecdote from Chrystia Freeland:

The wife of one of America’s most successful hedge-fund managers offered me the small but telling observation that her husband is better able to navigate the streets of Davos than those of his native Manhattan. When he’s at home, she explained, he is ferried around town by a car and driver; the snowy Swiss hamlet, which is too small and awkward for limos, is the only place where he actually walks.

Our phones are cutting us off from the world: they’re turning us into mini versions of Eric Packer, the cloistered billionaire in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (and played by Robert Pattinson in the movie). It’s unhealthy, and yet it’s also inevitable, and of course it carries much more upside than downside. I do wonder, however, what the logical conclusion is, and how the world will change as a result.

More than half the world now lives in cities, and nearly all the growth and value creation in the world comes from what Richard Florida calls “megaregions” centered on large conurbations. So it’s really useful to see which cities are doing well, and which are not.

Sadly, that’s not what we’re getting. Instead, we get things like “The 20 Richest Metros in America“, from The Atlantic, based on the metric of personal income per capita, or — and this is much worse — CNBC’s First Annual Recovery Road Trip, which spent much of this week counting down the top three cities in America, based on a highly convoluted and opaque methodology based loosely on stock-price appreciation.

The results of these exercises are always useless. Here’s a list of random cities! (This is the Atlantic’s list.)

1. Bridgeport, CT
2. Midland, TX
3. San Francisco, CA

Here’s another list of random cities! (This is CNBC’s list.)

1. Atlanta, GA
2. Charlotte, NC
3. Philadelphia, PA

Here, by contrast, is the actual league table for US cities:

1. New York
2. Los Angeles
3. Chicago
4. Washington
5. Houston
6. Dallas
7. Philadelphia
8. San Francisco
9. Boston
10. Atlanta
11. Miami
12. Seattle

As you’d expect, this league table changes only very slowly, but it does change: Philadelphia fell behind San Francisco, for instance, in 2008, but then regained its seventh-place position in 2009. And lower down the table there’s more movement: Pittsburgh has risen from 25th place to 22nd since 2007, for instance.

The problem is that because this league table doesn’t change very much, there’s not much news value in reporting it, and instead reporters are drawn to gimmicks. Similarly, if you wanted to use public-company stock-market capitalization as a metric, then the obvious thing to do would simply be to list the cities with the largest market caps. My guess is that it would look very similar to the metropolitan GDP league table, and therefore, again, not be all that newsworthy. So instead, CNBC decided to go with the amount that stock prices have fluctuated, a methodology akin to simply throwing darts at a list of cities.

If you want to do valuable reporting on the cities which are getting things right, then the thing to do is to look at the growth rates of America’s biggest metropolitan areas, see which areas are consistently outperforming, and ask why. It’s much less gimmicky. But it’s much more useful.

It’s amazing how much coverage a thinly-sourced press release can elicit:

If you look at the PDF with the numbers in it, there’s no indication at all of where the numbers being cited come from, or what exactly they’re measuring. The idea, here, is that we’re trying to measure “jobs in the wholesale financial service sector”, which will include some but not most lawyers and accountants, if that helps.

In any case, Ben Walsh helpfully turned the press release into a chart:

This of course says basically nothing about which city if any is the financial capital of the world. If there were more wholesale finance jobs in Tampa than there are in London, that wouldn’t make Tampa an international financial capital.

What’s more, we can basically ignore the forecasts and extrapolations — everything in light grey. You think Hong Kong is going to add 70,000 new wholesale finance jobs in the next five years? Well, it might, I suppose, depending on a multitude of factors including what happens to money and banking regulations in mainland China.

The one thing that’s clear from this chart is that the 2008 financial crisis hit the US hardest, in terms of financial job cuts, while the European crisis which began a couple of years later was the point at which European jobs started getting shed. To be honest I’m a little surprised at how few jobs were lost in London during the 2008-9 crisis, but that might be a function of the way in which the Europeans tended to support their banks rather than encouraging them to consolidate, merge, and generally shrink.

In any case, London will be the capital of international finance for many, many years to come, regardless of how many jobs are shown on this chart. This is not necessarily a good thing. The press release features dark language on the subject of “onerous regulation and taxation in the UK”, as though we still live in a world where jurisdictions are well advised to compete on how laissez-faire their economic and regulatory policies are. (We know, now, how that works out.) If London remains a financial center — and it will — then that just means it will be much riskier than is appropriate for the capital city of a decent-sized European nation, and that Londoners will continue to suffer from having to live in an obscenely expensive city.

In a way, I wish that the scaremongering in this report were true: it’s about time that London’s center of gravity moved away from the ultra-rich. In order to do that, however, the city (and the City) would have to be much less of a magnet for international capital. And I don’t see that happening. Such magnets are cultural, and based in longstanding institutions; once the plutocrats have decided to put their roots down in London, it’s going to take a lot before they leave.

And really it’s the plutocrats which matter, along with a handful of large money-center banks. London could be an international financial capital even if it had only 50,000 people working in wholesale finance, rather than 250,000. When you’re dealing with trillions of dollars of capital flows, it’s never headcount which matters. Follow the actual money, not the paychecks.

Traffic is flowing in New York again this morning, for four reasons. First is the ban on private cars entering the island if they’re carrying fewer than three people. Second is the subways, which have started working again, in a limited manner. Third is a noticeable increase in bicyclists, even between yesterday and today: I have real hope that Sandy might persuade a whole swath of new people that bike commuting is incredibly fast and easy. And then there’s a much more mundane fourth reason: people are running out of gas.

With much critical infrastructure still out, many gas stations don’t have electricity to pump gas, and most of the rest — at least in New York and New Jersey — have sold out, as people filled up not only their cars but any other vessels they could find. Gasoline is precious right now: it powers generators which pump out flooded buildings, as well as powering the one form of transportation which is capable of getting stuff from Brooklyn or New Jersey into Manhattan. As for when new supplies might arrive, that’s extremely vague, but the consensus seems to be Saturday.

There’s something self-fulfilling about gas shortages: they’re the crisis equivalent of a bank run. So long as everybody just goes about their day in a normal manner, refilling their tank only when they get low, everything goes smoothly. But when people start thinking that there might not be enough to go around, everybody panics and rushes to the stations: while shortages in New Jersey have real Sandy-related causes, shortages in places like Westchester are essentially the product of self-fulfilling fears.

The standard econowonk response to such things (see e.g. Yglesias, or for that matter Uber, which has reverted to “surge pricing”) is that if the market were just left to its own devices, none of this would happen. Prices fluctuate in response to changes in supply and demand, so when supply goes down and demand goes up, it’s only natural that they should rise to the point at which demand starts falling off and the two finally meet again. At that point, the gas stations will still sell most of their gas, but there won’t be massive lines at the pump, and there will always be gas — at a price — for those who really need it.

It doesn’t help matters that such arguments tend to come from the kind of people who can afford to pay extra for their essentials. Crises always hit the poor worse than the rich, even when prices don’t rise: in my own NYC neighborhood, for instance, there is tragic human suffering right now, even as I have a warm and comfy office to go to, a group of rich friends with spare rooms, and enough money to pay for a hotel or Airbnb room should I need it. If the Lower East Side’s handful of open bodegas started price-gouging just because they had a captive audience, that would only exacerbate the situation — quite aside from the fact that it would also open them up to the very real risk of grievous bodily harm.

At times like this, the charitable impulse, of helping out where and when you can, is very strong: hence the articles with headlines like “Donate to Hurricane Sandy Victims with a Simple Text Message”. Even as gas stations are running dry, individuals across the northeast are siphoning out gas from their cars’ tanks to provide fuel for people who need it more than they do. They’re not charging a market-clearing price for doing so: in fact, they’re not charging any money at all. Multiplied thousands of times, such small individual acts of charity make a huge difference.

Meanwhile, during a crisis, the opportunity costs involved in sitting in a long line for gas actually fall substantially. Yglesias is right that price-gouging would reduce those costs, but they are the least of the damage that a storm like this causes. Much more important is the feeling that your neighbors are rallying together at a very hard time. If we all run out of gas, we’ll all run out of gas. But we won’t try to profiteer from that, and we’ll try to use it in as effective a way as possible, rather than just letting it get acquired by whomever happens to be most price-insensitive.

That’s why there’s something a bit distasteful about Uber’s insistence that the only way they can provide a good service these days is by charging more money. The cost of gas has not gone up: either their drivers can find the gas to drive people around or they can’t. The drivers, for their part, already make good money from Uber, whose prices are high; doubling those prices seems excessive, especially when there’s a strong impulse at times like these to help people out without charging any money at all.

I’m not taking a position here on price-gouging laws: while I don’t like the practice, I’m also not convinced that it should be made illegal. But the fact is that the benefits of price-gouging tend to accrue to a handful of merchants and the price-insensitive rich, while the costs are borne by those who can least afford it. ‘Twas always thus, or course, but during a crisis, especially, it’s a good idea to try to minimize such mechanisms, rather than trying to encourage them.

What a difference a day makes: yesterday, the streets of hurricane-devastated New York were largely empty; today, the electrified parts of the city are in a massive state of gridlock. It’s just as well the threatened Obama visit isn’t happening: traffic in Manhattan and most of Brooklyn is bad enough without it.

New York began as a small town based at the Battery, and slowly expanded northwards towards Wall Street (where the city wall was originally built) and beyond up to City Hall. It then expanded from there to the megalopolis it is today — but the heart of the city has always been, and will always be, downtown, where the East River and the Hudson River meet New York Harbor.

And right now, that heart — downtown New York — is a black hole. No electricity, no cell service, no heat in most buildings, no subway service, not even after it is restarted on a limited basis tomorrow. The temporary subway map is stark: everything just comes to a sudden halt at 34th Street, and at Borough Hall/MetroTech in Brooklyn. No electricity means no subways, and also no traffic lights.

In many ways, one of the most heartening lessons of Sandy was the utter lack of chaos in downtown Manhattan after the power went out. When the sun rose on Tuesday morning, cars, bikes, pedestrians, and emergency vehicles navigated the grid of streets efficiently and without rancor, and the amount of time it took to drive across town was if anything lower, with all the businesses shut, than it would normally be with all the traffic lights working. Public-spirited acts were everywhere: volunteers taking it upon themselves to direct traffic at major intersections; people bringing down power strips to the few outlets with generator-powered electricity; restaurants serving up their food for free to the local population; coffee shops jerry-rigging propane-based systems to give the people what they really need.

It turns out, as students of the Dutch woonerf system could tell you, that when drivers are forced to self-govern, rather than simply following the orders of speed limits and traffic lights, the system generally works extremely well, at least until traffic reaches a certain density. Similarly, the speed-limits-and-traffic-lights system also tends to work pretty well, until it doesn’t.

The idea is to maximize the number of person-miles per hour, especially during the morning and evening peaks. And there’s a real science to this: up until a certain point, if you add an extra car to the system, that increases person-miles per hour, just because that car contains people who are traveling a certain number of miles. But past that point, adding extra cars doesn’t help; instead, it hurts. You know how on a freeway traffic can be flowing smoothly and then suddenly grind to a halt for no particular reason? At that point, clearly, the capacity of the freeway to generate person-miles per hour plunges. And city traffic works the same way. In extremis, once you reach gridlock, no one is moving anywhere. And a world where people take half an hour to travel five blocks is clearly a world where they all would have been much better off just walking.

This morning, and this evening too, New York — electrified New York, that is, above 39th Street — suffered some of the worst gridlock it has ever seen; in a press conference, mayor Michael Bloomberg said that “the streets just cannot handle the number of cars that are trying to come in”. This is the context in which cab company Uber is boasting that it is “doing our best to figure out ways to get more cars on the road.” They’re even losing money by doing so — and exacerbating congestion at the same time. Under the Uber model, a lone driver will drive an often-substantial distance to pick up what is usually a lone passenger, will then drop off that passenger, and repeat the procedure over the course of the day. The car rarely has more than two people in it, often only has one, but is driving around the city and contributing to congestion on a continuous basis. (In contrast to private cars, which at least have the decency to park themselves out of the way when their job is done.)

The city of New York has a much better idea when it comes to cabs. Yellow taxis are being encouraged to get passengers to share rides, while black cars are allowed to pick up street hails (and can also pick up additional passengers). On top of that, the mayor announced today, there is going to be a new rule in effect tomorrow: if you’re driving into Manhattan after 6am using any of the major bridges or tunnels, you’re going to need to have at least three people in your car. Otherwise, you won’t be allowed through.

There’s a problem with this policy, which is that people are going to find it relatively easy to “slug” their way into Manhattan, getting rides with drivers who otherwise wouldn’t be allowed in, only to be stuck when those same drivers happily leave the island without them. But the principle is a good one: there’s no way that private cars can possibly transport everybody who needs to come into Manhattan, and as a matter of public policy, everybody gains if the number of private cars in the city is reduced. This is not the first-best policy, but it is the easiest to implement immediately, and in a situation like we have right now, you can’t have the perfect be the enemy of the good.

If the East River subway tunnels remain closed for more than a few days, however, this stopgap approach is not going to work. Millions of people commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan every day, and the only way they can be accommodated is with those subway tunnels. Every day those subway tunnels are out of operation is a day that New York City is essentially not functioning. And by one estimate, it could take weeks or even months for those saltwater-flooded subway tunnels to reopen.

Which means that the bigger-picture lesson of Sandy is the importance of investment in infrastructure. Our electrical utility, unable to find $250 million to spend on things like submersible switches and moving transformers above ground, is making adjustments only gradually — with the results we saw on Monday night. And $250 million is small beer compared to the kind of money it would take to protect New York Harbor from hurricanes, and to protect those subway tunnels from Sandy-level storm surges. Still, $10 billion or even $50 billion spent up-front would not only be a large economic stimulus for New York, but would more than pay for itself if and when global warming means that more hurricanes hit this area.

Where would that sort of money come from? Cate Long has one suggestion:

The most obvious source of funding for these projects would be for the Federal Reserve to purchase public infrastructure bonds instead of the $40 billion a month of mortgage-backed securities it has been buying. The housing market is important, and keeping mortgage rates low is useful, but investing in public infrastructure is much more important for the nation now.

It’s not a bad idea: the Fed would do more long-term good for the country by buying infrastructure bonds than it would buying mortgage-backed securities. But there are problems with it, too: once the Fed stepped in, the chances are that no one else would lend, and private financing of public infrastructure would actually go down rather than up.* Maybe some kind of Treasury guarantee would be better, especially since these projects are fundamentally fiscal, rather than monetary, in nature.

In any case, there’s a clear public interest when it comes to investing in and coordinating our urban infrastructure. America’s cities, including New York, have been suffering from underinvestment for decades. Hurricanes happen sometimes; traffic jams happen every day. And some smart public expenditure could help minimize the damage that both of them cause.

*Update: Some confusion about what I was saying here. The point is that if the Fed started buying infrastructure bonds, that in no way would reduce the creditworthiness of those bonds. The price would rise and the yield would fall, as always happens when a large new buyer enters the market — but at that point the yield would be lower than the yield required by the market to make up for the credit risk in the bonds. So private-sector buy-and-hold investors would no longer buy them, the Fed would to a first approximation be the only real-money buyer. As a result, the flow of private money into the infrastructure sector would go down.

Back in July, I gave a cautious welcome to TomTom’s congestion indices. The amount of congestion in any given city at any given time does have a certain randomness to it, but more data, and more public data, is always a good thing.

Or so I thought. I never did end up having the conversation with TomTom that I expected back in July, but I did finally speak to TomTom’s Nick Cohn last week, after they released their data for the second quarter of 2012.

In the first quarter, Edmonton saw a surprisingly large drop in congestion; in the second quarter it was New York which saw a surprisingly large rise in congestion. During the evening peak, the New York congestion index was 41% in the first quarter; that rose to 54% in the second quarter, helping the overall New York index rise from 17% to 25%. (The percentages are meant to give an indication of how much longer a journey will take, compared to the same journey in free-flowing traffic.) As a result, New York is now in 8th place on the league table of the most congested North American cities; it was only in 15th place last quarter, out of 26 cities overall.

So what’s going on here? A congestion index like this one serves two purposes. The first is to compare a city to itself, over time: is congestion getting better, or is it getting worse? The second is to compare cities to each other: is congestion worse in Washington than it is in Boston?

And it turns out that this congestion index, at least, is pretty useless on both fronts. First of all there are measurement issues, of course. Cohn explained that when putting together the index, TomTom only looks at road segments where they have a large sample size of traffic speeds — big enough to give “statistically sound results”. And later on a spokeswoman explained that TomTom’s speed measurements turn out to validate quite nicely with other speed measures, from things like induction loop systems.

But measuring speed on individual road segments is only the first step in measuring congestion. The next step is weighting the different road segments, giving most weight to the most-travelled bits of road. And that’s where TomTom data is much less reliable. After all, on any given stretch of road, cars generally travel at pretty much the same speed. You can take a relatively small sample of all cars, and get a very accurate number for what speeds are in that place. But if you want to work out where a city’s drivers drive the most and drive the least, then you need a much larger and much more representative sample.

And this is where TomTom faces its first problem: its sample is far from representative. Most of it comes from people who have installed TomTom navigation devices in their cars, and there’s no reason to believe those people drive in the same way that a city’s drivers as a whole do. Worse, most of the time TomTom only gets data when the devices are turned on and being used. Which means that if you have a standard school run, say, and occasionally have to make a long journey to the other side of town, then there’s a good chance that TomTom will ignore all your school runs and think that most of your driving is those long journeys. (TomTom is trying to encourage people to have their devices on all the time they drive, but I don’t think it’s had much success on that front.)

In general, TomTom is always going to get data weighted heavily towards people who don’t know where they’re going — out-of-towners, or drivers headed to unfamiliar destinations. That’s in stark contrast to the majority of city traffic, which is people who know exactly where they’re going, and what the best ways of getting there are. There might in theory be better routes for those people, and TomTom might even be able to identify those routes. But for the time being, I don’t think we can really trust TomTom to know where a city as a whole is driving the most.

I asked Cohn about the kind of large intra-city moves that we’ve seen in cities like Edmonton and New York. Did they reflect genuine changes in congestion, I asked, or were they just the natural variation that one sees in many datasets? Specifically, when TomTom comes out with a specific-sounding number like 25% for New York’s congestion rate, how accurate is that number? What are the error bars on it?

Cohn promised me that he’d get back to me on that, and today I got an email, saying that “unfortunately, we cannot provide you with a specific number”:

The Congestion Index is calculated at the road segment level, using the TomTom GPS speed measurements available for each road segment within each given time frame. As the sample size varies by road segment, time period and geography, it would be impossible to calculate overarching confidence levels for the Congestion Index as a whole.

It seems to me that if you don’t know what your confidence levels are, your index is pretty much useless. All of the cities on the list are in a pretty narrow range: the worst congestion is in Los Angeles, on 34%, while the least is in Phoenix, on 12%. If the error bars on those numbers were, say, plus-or-minus 10 percentage points, then the whole list becomes largely meaningless.

And trying to compare congestion between cities is even more pointless than trying to measure changes in congestion within a single city, over time. As JCortright noted in my comments in July, measuring congestion on a percentage basis tends to make smaller, denser cities seem worse than they actually are. If you have a 45-minute commute in Atlanta, for instance, as measured on a congestion-free basis, and you’re stuck in traffic for an extra half an hour, then that’s 67% congestion. Whereas if you’re stuck in traffic for 15 minutes on a drive that would take you 15 minutes without traffic, that’s 100% congestion.

Cohn told me that TomTom has no measure of average trip length, so he can’t adjust for that effect. And even he admitted that “comparing Istanbul to Stuttgart is a little strange”, even though that’s exactly what TomTom does, in its European league table. (Istanbul, apparently, has congestion of 57%, with an evening peak of 125%, while Stuttgart has congestion of 33%, with an evening peak of 70%.)

All of which says to me that the whole idea of congestion charging has a very big problem at its core. There’s no point in implementing a congestion charge unless you think it’s going to do some good — unless, that is, you think that it’s going to decrease congestion. But measuring congestion turns out to be incredibly difficult — and it’s far from clear that anybody can actually do it in a way that random natural fluctuations and errors won’t dwarf the real-world effects of a charge.

When London increases its congestion charge, then, or when New York pedestrianizes Broadway in Times Square, or when any city does anything with the stated aim of helping traffic flow, don’t be disappointed if the city can’t come out and say with specificity whether the plan worked or not. Congestion is a tough animal to pin down and measure, and while it’s possible to be reasonably accurate if you’re just looking at a single intersection or stretch of road, it’s basically impossible to be accurate — or even particularly useful — if you’re looking at a city as a whole.

Today, September 11, is a day that all New Yorkers become hyper-aware of tail risk — of some monstrous and tragic disaster appearing out of nowhere to devastate our city. And so it’s interesting that the NYT has decided to splash across its front page today Mireya Navarro’s article about the risk of natural disaster — flooding — in New York.

Beyond the article’s publication date, Navarro doesn’t belabor the point. But in terms of the amount of death and destruction caused, a nasty storm hitting New York City could actually be significantly worse than 9/11. Ask anybody in the insurance industry: a hurricane hitting New York straight-on is the kind of thing which reinsurance nightmares are made of. And as sea levels rise in coming decades, the risks will become much worse: remember, it’s flooding from storm surges which causes the real devastation, rather than simply things blowing over in high winds.

So, what can or should be done? One option is to basically attempt to wall New York City off from the Atlantic Ocean:

A 2004 study by Mr. Hill and the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook recommended installing movable barriers at the upper end of the East River, near the Throgs Neck Bridge; under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; and at the mouth of the Arthur Kill, between Staten Island and New Jersey. During hurricanes and northeasters, closing the barriers would block a huge tide from flooding Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and New Jersey, they said.

Needless to say, this solution is insanely expensive: the stated price tag right now is $10 billion — well over $1,000 per New Yorker — and I’m sure that if such a project ever happened, the final cost would be much higher. And such barriers don’t last particularly long, either. London built the Thames Barrier in 1984, and there’s already talk about when and how it should be replaced. And building a single barrier across the Thames is conceptually and practically a great deal simpler than trying to hold back the many different ways in which the island of Manhattan is exposed to the water.

What’s more, there’s an environmental cost associated with barriers, as well as a financial cost. Which cuts against the kind of things which New York has been doing. They’re smaller, and much less robust. But they improve the environment, rather than making it worse. And they’re relatively cheap. For instance: installing more green roofs to absorb rainwater. Expanding wetlands, which can dampen a surging tide, even in highly-urban places like Brooklyn Bridge Park. Even “sidewalk bioswales”. (I’m a little bit unclear myself on exactly what those are, but they sound very green.)

Adam Freed, the outgoing deputy director of New York’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, talks about making “a million small changes”, while always bearing in mind that “you can’t make a climate-proof city”. That’s a timely idea: we can’t make New York risk-free, and it’s not clear that it would make sense to do so even if we could. After all, as we all learned 11 years ago today, it’s impossible to protect against each and every source of possible devastation.

Other cities have similar ideas:

In Chicago, new bike lanes and parking spaces are made of permeable pavement that allows rainwater to filter through it. Charlotte, N.C., and Cedar Falls, Iowa, are restricting development in flood plains. Maryland is pressing shoreline property owners to plant marshland instead of building retaining walls.

Still, all of this green development does feel decidedly insufficient in comparison to the enormous risks that New York is facing. I like the idea of a “resilience strategy”, but there are still a lot of binary outcomes here, especially when it comes to tunnels. Either tunnels flood or they don’t — and if they do, the consequences can be really, really nasty. Imagine a big flood which took out all of the subway and road tunnels into Manhattan, or even just the subway tunnels across New York Bay as well as the Holland Tunnel. As such a flood becomes more likely, the cost of protecting against it with some big engineering work — insofar as such a thing is possible — becomes increasingly justifiable.

And this is just depressing:

Consolidated Edison, the utility that supplies electricity to most of the city, estimates that adaptations like installing submersible switches and moving high-voltage transformers above ground level would cost at least $250 million. Lacking the means, it is making gradual adjustments, with about $24 million spent in flood zones since 2007.

Lacking the means? What is that supposed to mean? New York City has a credit rating of Aa1 from Moody’s; ConEd has a crediting rating of A3. Interest rates are at all-time lows. There has never been a better time to invest a modest $250 million in helping to ensure that New York can continue to have power in the event of a storm. Doing lots of small things is all well and good, and I’m not convinced that the huge things are necessarily worthwhile — or even, in the case of moving people to higher ground, even possible. But the medium-sized things? Those should be a no-brainer right now.

This chart comes from Uber data geek (that is, a data geek who works for Uber) Bradley Voytek. You might recognize it from a blog post of Voytek’s from back in June, headlined “Building the Perfect Uber Party City”.

What Voytek managed to do, back then, was create two “stereotyped patterns” of Uber car usage, based on something called principal component analysis. The first pattern he called “Weekend Component”, and it’s the chart you see above. The second pattern he calls “Weekday component”, and it looks very different indeed. (You can see the two overlaid on top of each other at right.)

Just by looking at these two curves — the red and the blue — Voytek can account for 93% of the way in which demand for Uber cars fluctuates over time. Some cities and neighborhoods are more Weekday; other cities and neighborhoods are more Weekend. (Most, it turns out, are more Weekend than Weekday, at least when it comes to demand for Ubers.) But just about everywhere comes very close to being a mix of the two, rather than something altogether different.

And there are some neighborhoods which correlate very strongly with the weekend curve in particular: Voytek calls these the “party neighborhoods”. In his post, he picked out the most “weekendish” neighborhoods in each of Uber’s cities: North Beach in San Francisco, Soho in New York, and so on. But I was interested in the league table. So, via Voytek, here’s the top 50:

The Weekend Index, here, is the degree to which Uber usage in the neighborhood in question resembles the red line in Voytek’s chart. Obviously, it’s not all nights and weekends, but it’s skewed that way. Sunday nights are very slow, and then each successive night picks up a bit, and goes on a little bit later, until you get big peaks on Friday and Saturday nights. And across the board, nighttime usage is much heavier than daytime usage.

Voytek also sent me a list of the least “weekendish” neighborhoods that Uber covers. They’re pretty dull, as you might expect. What you might not expect is that the top six are all on the west coast. At the top of the list is Outer Richmond, in San Francisco, followed by Roosevelt and Madrona in Seattle, Visitacion Valley in San Francisco, Greenwood in Seattle, and Leschi in Seattle. Nowhere in New York or Boston or DC even makes the top ten.

The big league table, however, of the most weekendish neighborhoods, is fascinating — just because those tend to be particularly (to use a word that Thomas Frank hates) vibrant. These are the neighborhoods that other cities aspire to; they’re the areas that cause people to want to move to a city, and make them willing to pay high rents to live there.

And if you ever wondered what were the best and worst nights to go out, this Uber chart should answer your question very simply: the later you get in the week, the more crowded any given place is likely to become. That’s pretty intuitive, but it’s always good to see intuitions backed up with empirical data — and it’s easy to see why restaurants that close one or two days a week always choose Sundays or Mondays.

TomTom has released its first congestion indices today, comparing 31 cities in Europe and 26 cities in the US and Canada. (They call that North America, which is a bit disappointing, because I’d dearly love to see how Mexico City compares to other North American cities, and it’s not on the list.) The rankings are interesting, but even more interesting, to me, are the way that the rankings have changed over the past year.

Consider Edmonton, for instance: a town in the midst of a massive oil boom, where road construction can’t even begin to keep up with population growth. That was obvious back in September 2009, in the city’s transportation master plan:

As Edmonton evolves from a mid-size prairie city to a large metropolitan area, it is inevitable that congestion levels will increase, particularly during peak periods. Physical, financial and community constraints in many areas make it unfeasible or even undesirable to build or expand roads to alleviate congestion.

TomTom doesn’t give data as far back as 2009, but at least we can see what direction the city is moving in. Last year, Edmonton had a congestion index of 24%, which means that on average, travel times were 24% longer than they would take if traffic were flowing freely. That meant Edmonton was the 8th most congested city on TomTom’s list. This year, the Edmonton congestion index has plunged to just 13%, placing Edmonton 23rd out of the 26 cities, with an enormous decrease particularly during the evening rush hour:

I have no idea why traffic in Edmonton has improved so much over the past year; certainly I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if it had gotten worse rather than better. But the point here is that there’s an important stochastic element to congestion. Consider New York: in 2008, Mike Bloomberg proposed a congestion charge, which passed muster with city legislators but which was ultimately killed in Albany. Again, we don’t have data for what congestion was like in 2008. But between 2011 and 2012, congestion rates in New York overall fell from 23% to just 17%: a very impressive improvement. And today, New York is only the 15th most congested city on the list — behind metropolitan areas like Tampa, Ottawa, and San Diego.

What’s happened in New York to cause the drop in congestion? You can’t say higher gas prices, since those are a nationwide phenomenon, and don’t explain the drop in relative congestion. Plus, congestion in North America overall has stayed stable at 20% even as gas prices have risen. So if it’s not gas prices, what is it? Could it be all those bike lanes? Could it be that John Cassidy needs to eat some crow, and admit that bike lanes reduce congestion, rather than increasing it?

Perhaps: the jury’s still out. And maybe what we’re seeing here is more a function of random variation, and less a function of anything under the control of New York’s Department of Transportation.

What this report does tell me is that it’s going to be very difficult indeed to judge how effective any congestion-charging system is, just by looking at what happens to congestion after such a charge is introduced. I’m sure that if Edmonton had introduced a congestion charge at the beginning of 2011, the city would have claimed a huge amount of credit for the drop in congestion that resulted. But in fact, as we’ve seen, that drop in congestion would have happened anyway.

I’m planning to talk to the people at TomTom next week, and I’ll ask them whether they have any bright ideas when it comes to separating out causative factors for changes in congestion. In the meantime, we now at least have reasonably reliable league tables for the least pleasant cities to drive in. In North America, you want to avoid Los Angeles and Vancouver; in Europe, you want to avoid pretty much every major city. (Stockholm and London, with congestion charges, both have 27% congestion rates, putting them on a par with the very worst US cities.) But especially avoid driving in Warsaw, Rome, and Brussels. They’re even worse than LA.

Update: JCortright, in the comments, makes the excellent point that these numbers are much better at showing congestion changes within a city than they are at comparing congestion between cities. If you have a 45-minute commute in Atlanta, for instance, as measured on a congestion-free basis, and you’re stuck in traffic for an extra half an hour, then that’s 67% congestion. Whereas if you’re stuck in traffic for 15 minutes on a drive that would take you 15 minutes without traffic, that’s 100% congestion. So this methodology makes denser, smaller cities (like Europe’s) look worse.

On Thursday, I looked at the way in which cultural institutions tend to spend a huge amount of money on architecture, even if they would be better off spending that money more directly on their missions. In response, I got a fascinating email from a professor at NYU, asking me about its plan to spend some $6 billion on a hugely ambitious construction project — one which is fiercely opposed by local residents and NYU faculty.

The opposition is predictable, of course: Greenwich Village is as Nimbyish as communities get, and the professors who are railing against the plan are precisely the people who are going to suffer the most from endless construction work and ultimately the disappearance of the views and light many of them currently enjoy. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong to oppose the plan. As we saw at Cooper Union, ambitious construction projects can be hugely damaging to colleges — especially ones which don’t have a large endowment to fall back on.

At Harvard, the empire-building of Larry Summers resulted in a disaster — but at least the endowment is huge enough that if Harvard loses $1.8 billion, it’s not the end of the world. At NYU, by contrast, the size of the endowment is significantly smaller than the budget for the university’s expansion. And as a result, the whole project is significantly riskier. If NYU ends up having to dip into its endowment to fund losses on this project, then that could be hugely damaging for an institution which is already under-endowed by the standards of most top-tier US colleges.

The situation at NYU Is, I think, the flipside of the saga we just saw at the University of Virginia. There, a popular president found herself at odds with trustees who had been successful in the private sector; at NYU, the faculty is similarly opposed to the plans of the trustees, but in this case the president is very much aligned with what the trustees want.

In both cases, it seems, the faculty seems pretty happy with the state and status of the university as it stands, and are looking for low-risk stewardship. The trustees, by contrast, are much more aggressive, and are looking for growth and full-bore engagement in the higher-education arms race known as Bowen’s Rule. Here’s how Howard Bowen put his five-point rule in 1980:

1. The dominant goals of institutions are educational excellence, prestige, and influence.
2. In quest of excellence, prestige, and influence, there is virtually no limit to the amount of money an institution could spend for seemingly fruitful educational needs.
3. Each institution raises all the money it can.
4. Each institution spends all it raises.
5. The cumulative effect of the preceding four laws is toward ever increasing expenditure.

On top of that, there are many New York-specific idiosyncrasies involved in the NYU plan. NYU is nestled in the heart of downtown New York, on some of the most valuable land in the world. That makes expansion insanely expensive, of course — but it also raises opportunities for a higher-education form of regulatory arbitrage.

New York has strict and recondite zoning laws, which are largely responsible for the value of any given plot of land. Take a site in Greenwich Village: if all you’re allowed to build there is a few townhouses, it’s going to be worth a fraction of its value if you’re allowed to erect a 40-story hotel. Every so often, zoning is changed, normally in the direction of allowing more development. When that happens, the people lucky enough to own the land in question make windfall profits.

This dynamic helps explain the way in which property developers are deeply enmeshed in city politics — and it also, I think, helps explain a lot of NYU’s behavior. NYU, quite aside from being an educational non-profit, is also the largest property developer in downtown New York. And with this plan, it’s trying to change the zoning for a lot of the Washington Square area in a way that will, if all goes according to plan, essentially drop a huge pile of money in the university’s lap. Hence the proposals for things like hotels and retail: they’re not allowed right now, and if they do become allowed, NYU fully intends to build such things and make substantial profits from them.

This isn’t a stupid plan. It makes sense, if you don’t have a $30 billion endowment throwing off huge amounts of cash every year, then you look for income in other places.

On the other hand, when a university turns property developer that’s decided mission creep — and it’s mission creep accompanied by billions of dollars in debt. Property magnates generally do really well for themselves — until they don’t. And here’s where you can see the cleavage between NYU’s trustees and its faculty. The trustees tend to be successful businesspeople — people who have had the requisite combination of risk appetite and luck that’s necessary to make lots of money. And rich people have another characteristic, too: they nearly always overestimate the amount of skill and underestimate the amount of luck which went into their success. Plus, they think that success is somehow infectious: if they’ve made their millions through levering up, then that’s probably a good strategy for the non-profits whose board they’re on, too.

On top of that, the president-and-trustee class of people has a natural tendency to want to build monuments to themselves, as well as a certain emotional detachment when it comes to empathy with other people. They’ve seen the plans: the architects have shown them glossy pictures of what Greenwich Village is going to look like in 2031, but they don’t really feel the amount of noise and pain involved in getting there from here. They don’t live in Washington Square Village.

And most importantly, they don’t need to rack up enormous student loans just to attend NYU in the first place. Here’s the chart, from the NYT’s excellent infographic on university tuition and student debt:

You can see from this chart that while there are lots of colleges which charge NYU-level tuition fees, NYU is among the very worst of them in terms of the amount of debt its students are burdened with upon graduation. That’s partly because it has a relatively small endowment, and therefore can’t offer the level of financial aid that, say, Princeton can; it’s also, of course, a function of the fact that New York is an incredibly expensive place for a student to live. But either way, if NYU cared about its students as much as it cares about its reputation, it would be searching hard for ways to decrease the debt they’re graduating with.

Instead, NYU is embarking on a building plan which will almost certainly, in one way or another, feed through into higher tuition fees and higher levels of student debt at graduation. After all, tuition fees are a hugely important source of income for NYU, and NYU is going to need all the income it can lay its hands on if it’s going to be able to pay off the loans it takes out to construct all these new buildings.

I’m no preservationist stick-in-the-mud: I think that cities need to evolve over time, and that if Greenwich Village had a bit more density, New York would cope just fine. I also carry no torch for things like “the acclaimed Sasaki Garden”, which turns out to be a bunch of concrete planters which are all but inaccessible to real New Yorkers. If NYU wants to replace that garden with something better, I’m all ears.

But I do think it’s worth asking some pointed questions about who exactly all this construction is supposed to benefit. It’s certainly not the current students, who will be long gone by the time it even gets started. It’s not the current faculty, whose lives will be disrupted and who are almost unanimously opposed. And there’s a strong case that it’s not future students, either, who will see even higher tuition fees and I’m sure won’t welcome the extra student loans they’re going to have to take out.

Universities will always have plans to expand — and indeed NYU already has campuses in no fewer than four different countries. Before embracing this particular plan, then, it might be worth looking at the history of previous university expansion projects, and asking whether they actually delivered on the promises they made at this point in the process. Because the costs of this particular project seem a lot more obvious than the benefits do.

Aditya Chakrabortty doesn’t like the Shard, the huge new skyscraper nearing completion next to London Bridge station, across the river from the City of London. It’s certainly a monument to the 0.01%: owned by the government of Qatar, and featuring Michelin-starred restaurants catering to guests at the five-star hotel; the hedge-fund managers who will rent out the office space; and of course the plutocrats in the 10 monster apartments (for sale at prices starting at $47 million or so).

Aditya’s not happy about this at all: the Shard, he says, “both encapsulates and extends the ways in which London is becoming more unequal and dangerously dependent on hot money”. The inequality point is inarguable, but it’s also inevitable, in any global financial center. And as for the dangerous dependence on hot money, that I’m less sure about.

Aditya cites “Who owns the City?“, a report from the University of Cambridge which shows that 52% of the City of London is now owned by foreigners, up from 10% in 1980. That’s a trend, not a hot-money capital flow: after all, the trend survived the financial crisis unscathed, even as property values plunged. He writes:

As the Cambridge team point out, the giddy combination of overseas cash and heavy borrowing leaves London in a very precarious position. Another credit crunch, or a meltdown elsewhere in the world, would now almost certainly have big knock-on effects in the capital.

I’ve read the Cambridge report, and I don’t really see them saying that at all. The closest they come is this:

For global financial office markets such as the City of London, functional specialisation not just in financial services but in internationally‐oriented financial services lock the fortunes of the occupier market to the state of the global capital markets; while growing international ownership and specialist global financial and real estate investment vehicles help to lock the investment and occupier markets together in a way that increases both upside and downside risk…

The locking together of occupier, investment, development and financing markets both within the City and across financial centres contributes to an inherent, systemic risk.

The point being made here, in less than crystal-clear language, is that the owners of the City are the same as the occupiers of the buildings in the City. Which means that if there’s a big bust in the world of international finance, the owners won’t just want to sell, they might well move out, as well — causing a double whammy to London office prices.*

But a reduction in London office prices is what Aditya wants! It would reduce inequality, and more generally it would provide a dividend of glossy and expensive real estate to a population which could never have afforded it on its own. That was Dan Gross’s point in Pop — while bubbles are bad for the people who invest in them, they’re generally good for the economy as a whole, which sees a lot of investment which would otherwise not have been made.

London’s a financial center, and like all other financial centers, it gets a lot of tax revenue from the financial industry. Come another credit crunch, that tax revenue will fall. But for the time being it makes sense to welcome the revenue, and the infrastructure improvements which international financiers are happy to pay top dollar for.

The fact is that new skyscrapers always cause an outbreak of nimbyish bellyaching. Here in New York, Christine Quinn, our probable next mayor, is refusing to come out and endorse a relatively modest addition to Chelsea Market, because although it makes sense from a city-wide perspective, the locals don’t like it. They never do.

But cities need density, and if they’re not going to degenerate into anachronism, they need big, expensive, modern skyscrapers. Especially if they aspire to being a financial center. Some of the criticisms of the Shard are just silly: the idea, for instance, that it somehow ruins the view of the Tower of London. What view of the Tower of London? You certainly couldn’t ever see it from London Bridge station, and in general the Tower is famous for being the least recognizable major landmark in London. I used to work as one of those tour guides on top of open-topped double-decker buses, for a summer, and I can assure you that long before the Shard was built, there was really nowhere you could get a good view of the Tower. Your best bet was to drive north across Tower Bridge, but even then the Tower itself just kind of shrinks into the riverbank, and a lot of tourists had no idea what they were meant to be looking at.

London is a city of large buildings on narrow streets (try finding the entrance to investment bank NM Rothschild one day), and the Shard is just the latest extension of that idea. I, for one, welcome it to the London skyline, even if I never set foot inside the place. It’s certainly a lot more interesting — and adds a lot more value to the city — than the bland mid-rise office buildings which Washington is doomed to, given its strict height zoning. Aditya’s right that the Shard hasn’t — yet — improved the lot of its immediate neighbors, but building nothing on that spot would hardly have been better for them.

I suspect that over time, the Shard will attract more money and gentrification to London Bridge in general, which is great news if your worry, like Aditya’s, is the area’s “deprivation and unemployment”. Cities are living things, and the construction of the Shard is proof that London’s still very much alive. And that, as Woody Allen would say, is definitely better than the alternative.

*Update: Colin Lizieri of Cambridge University writes to add that he was making another point, too: that diversification into office space in different financial centers is not really diversification at all, since the owners and occupiers of all that property are increasingly the exact same businesses, or at least very highly correlated ones.

It’s becoming something of a trend these days: good report, bad press release. The latest example comes from John Liu, the New York City comptroller, who is warning about New York’s bikeshare program. “LIU: BIKE SHARE PROGRAM PEDALS PAST SAFETY MEASURES” says the release (geddit?) — and certainly that’s the message received by the New York Times, which wrote up the news under the headline “Bike-Share Program May Mean More Accident Suits Against the City, Liu Warns”.

The report itself, by contrast, is much less alarmist, and mostly extremely sensible. Biking in New York is dangerous, for cyclists and pedestrians both, and it’s important to make it safer. Especially as thousands of new bikeshare riders are going to start wobbling their way around largely-unfamiliar streets. Here’s the scary chart:

The blue curve is the well-known safety-in-numbers effect: as biking becomes more popular, it also becomes safer. New York is an outlier here, and not in a good way.

Charles Komanoff has some on-point criticisms of Liu’s report, and if you read his report closely you’ll notice one big flaw in the chart. The x-axis shows bikers as a percentage of total commuters, while most bike trips in New York are not home-to-work commutes at all. If you included all New York cyclists, New York would have a higher ratio of cyclists, and fatalities per cyclist would go down. Put it this way: the chart is taking the total number of bike fatalities, and dividing it by the total number of bike commuters, rather than the total number of bicyclists as a whole. That results in low numbers for cities like Portland, where cyclists are much more likely to commute to work, and high numbers for cities like New York, where they’re much more likely to just be running errands, or shopping, or meeting friends.

That said, New York needs to become safer for cyclists and pedestrians both, and Liu has some very sensible proposals for helping it do that. The city should put a lot of effort into maintaing signage, bike lanes, and intersections, especially the most dangerous ones: the effect of that could be huge. It should expand the Safe Streets for Seniors program, which helps older New Yorkers navigate safely around vehicles of all types. It should educate bikers and drivers both on bike safety and the rules of the road; drivers in particular should look out to make sure they don’t cut in front of cyclists when making a turn, and also leave extra space when passing a cyclist just in case the biker has to swerve around a pothole.

The recommendations continue: kids should get taught bike safety at an early age. The “5 to ride” pledge should be promoted to all businesses with bike messengers or delivery people. There should be more police on bikes, and they should start handing out tickets to cyclists speeding through red lights or dangerously salmoning. On top of that, they should start ticketing cars and vans in bike lanes. And just generally be tougher on traffic. As the report says:

New York’s roads are an interactive, multi-modal system; increased enforcement from any surface modes will increase safety across all other modes. Through greater enforcement of speed limits and greater traffic signal compliance, the roads will be safer for all users.

Liu also wants to beef up New York’s overworked and largely ineffective Accident Investigation Squads; that’s a great idea. And he wants to collect lots of data on biking in New York and make it public. Which is a no-brainer.

Liu is also pushing to make helmets mandatory; I’m not such a fan of that idea. For one thing, I have yet to see any empirical data showing that mandatory helmets increase safety. And in general, insofar as a mandatory helmet law would reduce the number of cyclists, it would also reduce the safety-in-numbers effect. And as the chief fiscal officer of New York, he’s worried that increased biking might mean increased liability in terms of settlements paid out by New York City to injured cyclists. That worry seems small to me: as Komanoff says, the number of new cyclists will only increase the total by about 6%, and the $10 million of insurance that the bikeshare program has is much bigger than the $2 million to $3 million that New York has paid out annually in the past three years.

Overall, however, I’d say that the report is a very positive thing. And in that it stands in contrast to the press release, which quotes John Pucher of Rutgers University as saying that he “would expect at least a doubling and possibly even a tripling in injuries and fatalities among cyclists and pedestrians during the first year of the Bike Share program in New York”. I’ll happily take that bet: it’s ridiculously alarmist, such a rise hasn’t happened in other cities with bikeshare programs, and no such projection is made in Liu’s report. Liu also wheeled out the media-relations guy from AAA New York, of all people, to say that the best way to prevent cyclists incurring serious injuries is to force those cyclists to wear helmets. That’s just depressing: one would hope that a car-drivers’ organization might at least pay lip service to safer driving, rather than putting the onus entirely on the bikers.

I’m very excited about New York’s bikeshare program, and look forward to using it regularly. I hope that the increase in the number of cyclists will help bring a bit more civility to New York’s biking community, especially in terms of stopping at lights and riding in the right direction. Meanwhile, my biggest fear is that we’ll see the opposite: a bunch of people who have no idea what they’re doing, riding on sidewalks, salmoning, and generally causing chaos. I don’t think that’s probable, but it’s possible, and I look forward to Citibike and NYC doing everything they can to prevent it from happening. As they do so, Liu’s report — if not his press release — is likely to be quite helpful.

Last year, I expressed some skepticism that Washington’s Capital Bikeshare program would have much if any success in getting the unbanked on bikes. And according to Capital Bikeshare’s latest member survey, it seems that I was right:

Out of 5,157 bikeshare members surveyed, all of them had been to college; 95% had graduated; and more than half had graduate degrees. Assuming that most of the 5% with “some college” are current undergrads, I think it’s fair to say that this is a very well educated demographic, and very much not the poor or unbanked.

The people at Reason think this chart is grounds to stop subsidizing the bikeshare program altogether, which is silly: the government subsidy for bikeshare is basically a rounding error in the grand transportation budget, and I’m sure that the amount of government funds spent on maintaining roads in affluent suburban communities is orders of magnitude greater than the amount spent on bikes.

But it definitely seems to be true that the Capital Bikeshare scheme has done very badly at reaching the poor, the unbanked, and people of color. (Bikeshare’s membership is 79% white, in a city that’s 34% white.) Bikeshare’s most successful membership drive came from a deal at Living Social, which reportedly almost doubled Bikeshare’s membership; it’s fair to say that Living Social’s Washington email list probably skews white as well. But the deal does demonstrate, I think, that price matters: drop the membership fee, and membership rises. Which is something New York should pay attention to.

Or, to put it another way: there are surely hundreds of reasons why well-educated whites flock to bikeshares while blacks who haven’t been to college avoid them. But cost is surely very high up on the list. And so if you want your bikeshare program to be broadly adopted across social classes, it’s a really good idea to make it cheap.

Update: Thanks to WashCycle for paying more attention to the survey methodology section than I did. This member survey, it turns out, is not representative: members were solicited for their responses only via email, and the only way that you could take the survey was online. Which might well explain a lot. Also, the survey took place in November, before the scheme to enlist the unbanked went live. Apologies for missing both of those things, and well done to WashCycle for picking up on them. Let’s just say there’s no disclaimer anywhere in the survey that its results are not representative of Capital Bikeshare’s membership as a whole.