In September, Tyler Cowen picked Berlin as his “preferred exile”:

There would be plenty of art and music, lots of smart people to talk to, access to other good locales, and the near-certainty of public order, yet with bearable winters and good health care.

Today, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he’s not so enthusiastic:

I like spending time in Berlin. But I am never sure I like Berlin itself, West or East. Berlin is Germany being imperial. Berlin is Germany looking toward the east. Today Berlin is Germany pretending it is normal, while not yet having a new identity.

Maybe the change in tone is a function of all the news coverage about Berlin right now, all of it concentrating on the city’s historical importance. But the fact is that for all Berlin is now the capital of the most important country in Europe, it’s still, as its unofficial slogan puts it, arm, aber sexy. (Poor, but sexy.)

I spent four months in Berlin in 2008, and never once did I think of it as “being imperial”. Being grungy is more like it. The most imperial thing in Berlin is the Reichstag, which, after it was wrapped by Christo, was topped by Norman Foster with a transparent dome and opened to the public in as non-threatening and enjoyable a manner as he possibly could. Can Berliners be rude? Yes. But not in an imperial way, more in a sullen way.

Berlin has celebrated mainly itself since the wall went up, and even more so since the wall came down. It was always exceptional in many ways, being divided into quarters given to each of the Allied powers, and being a domicile of choice for young West Germans looking to avoid military service. With the exception of a flurry of construction activity in the early 90s, money has never had much interest in Berlin: it’s much more famous for the Love Parade.

Neither Berliners nor the rest of Germany consider the capital to be particularly German. Instead, it’s a historical anomaly, most of which was literally walled off from the rest of the world for 30 years, and all of which remains a very long way from any other major city. When you’re in Berlin, with its dearth of high-speed rail lines, you don’t feel particularly connected to the rest of Europe: instead, you feel the freedom associated with being distant from the concerns of others. I love the city, and I send it all my love on this special day. Long may it retain its singular character.

Copenhagen:

The morning and afternoon commute in Copenhagen is a spectacle involving tens of thousands of cyclists roaring down dedicated lanes in tight packs, past cars moving at half the speed, if at all…

Traffic lights that were once co-ordinated for car speeds were adjusted to cater to the pace of the average cyclist, allowing them to travel long distances without ever getting a red light. To increase safety, stop lines for cars are five metres behind those for bikes. Cyclists get a green light up to 12 seconds ahead of cars to help increase their visibility.

In the winter months, bike ridership drops off 20 per cent. Still, an armada of plows is ready to clear bike lanes when snow flies. They get priority over routes for cars.

How do other cities get there from here? Slowly. You don’t do everything at once, but instead just add things incrementally, until you reach the point at which cyclists outnumber car drivers. Lots of attitudes need to be changed, including those of today’s cyclists, who, in car-centered cities, tend to be highly aggressive. And attitudes change slowly. But it can — and should — be done.

(Via Florida)

Ryan Avent explains, contra Matt Yglesias, why hosting the Olympic games makes sense from a behavioral-economics perspective:

Infrastructure benefits begin appearing years down the road and last for decades beyond that, while many of the costs — the political headaches, the need to put together financing, the disruption of construction, and so on — are relatively immediate. Winning the Olympics ties an immediate benefit to the immediate costs.

More to the point, it sets a deadline. Infrastructure projects invariably end up plagued by endless delays: just ask anybody who currently commutes on the Second Avenue subway line in New York. And deadlines are often the only way that anything ever gets finished: just ask any journalist. If you win the Olympics, you know that for all the construction headaches you’ll have to endure before they open, at least you’ll have some decent infrastructure thereafter. If you don’t win the Olympics, then even if you’re enlightened enough to invest in infrastructure, you can have no faith in its arrival.

Rio de Janeiro has desperate need for a good subway system. If it wins the Olympics, it will probably have just such a system by 2016. If it doesn’t win the Olympics, there will still be a lot of infrastructure investment in the city. But without a deadline, I don’t think anybody has any faith in getting that subway system any time soon.

Matthew DeBord takes aim and fires:

Salmon also makes it sound as if the average American eats primarily at off-the-freeway fast-food joints in between trips to the supermarket to fill their car with huge amounts of groceries. They nourish themselves by “absent-mindedly shovelling down an unknown quantity of something random while watching the TV.”…

Oy! Talk about an east-of-the-Hudson River, blinkered mindset. There are plenty of cities in the U.S.—and the rest of the world—where the urban concentration isn’t that dense, people own cars…and remain thin while eating both restaurant cuisine and keeping the pantry stocked, preparing delicious, unfattening meals at home. That’s right, they have restaurants! And they don’t eat their ice cream by the gallon while watching Survivor! Some of them even use their cars to transport their bikes to the (beach, mountains) to ride them for…miles and miles! Or they drive someplace rugged and scenic to take a hike. Or they take frequent walks while also owning a car!

No argument at all, DeBord is right. An active lifestyle on the outskirts of somewhere like Boulder or Portland or San Diego trumps a relatively sedentary life of pork-and-butter-heavy NYC expense-account dinners any day.

On the other hand, if you’re an overweight suburbanite there’s a good chance that you don’t live an active lifestyle. And for the large number of people without the “personal discipline” that DeBord writes about, ceteris paribus they’re likely to be thinner if they live in an urban center. Although buying a bike and heading for the local foothills on a regular basis would be cheaper, more convenient, and more effective.

Dan Ariely wonders how the New York bus system could cope with the extra demand created by making crosstown buses free. (Actually, he does more than wonder: he simply asserts that it couldn’t.) But Charles Komanoff has already run the numbers, and as far as anybody knows, they do add up.

Laura Conaway asks why pedestrians walk in bike lanes, and reprints the photo above, which might well have been taken on Broadway, just south of 42nd Street. I know that stretch well — I bike down it on my way from work — and in general I stick to the road-for-cars, rather than risking life and limb on the bike-path-for-bikes.

This is a badly designed bike path, because of the location of the pedestrian zone you can see on the left hand side of the photo. There’s the sidewalk, and then the green bike path, and then the brown pedestrian zone, and then the black car lanes. When Broadway is bustling with foot traffic, it’s only natural for pedestrians to move back and forth between their two zones, especially during times when bike traffic is light.

But more generally I think it’s just that pedestrians were taught the rules of walking on streets by recourse to fear: look both ways, lest you get run over by a car. The natural corollary to such thinking is that if there’s no danger of getting run over by a car, there’s no need to look out for traffic. (If and when pedestrians do see me biking down the lane, they’re generally good enough to stay out of my way; the much bigger problem is the oblivious pedestrians, often listening to their iPods, who have no idea I’m there, and never stop to look.)

There’s also the natural impatience and pushiness of New Yorkers, who have a natural tendency to use bike lanes as a staging point in their rush to cross the street. No one in New York waits patiently on the sidewalk for the lights to change; instead, they inch forward on the road as far as they can without walking straight into the path of cars. They don’t worry about getting into the path of bikes, though, and if they see a bike coming, they generally stay put, since they couldn’t possibly step backwards. And if they’re crossing mid-block, which they often do, they generally take one step out from between parked cars before looking for traffic, since they know any car driving down the road won’t drive that close to the parked cars. (Bikes, again, they just don’t think about.)

Bicyclists, I have to say, are just as bad, if not worse: at intersections they never stop where they’re meant to, and instead stop either (a) right in the middle of the pedestrian crosswalk, or (b) right in the middle of the cross-street’s bike lane. (And don’t even get me started on the “bike salmon” who ride the wrong way down the block and seem to think that all bike lanes are two-way streets.) Although bikers get very mad at motorists, the fact is that car drivers are much more law-abiding than either bicyclists or pedestrians, and tend not to feel that the rules don’t apply to them. I’ve even noticed an increasing number of car drivers who seem to know the difference between a bike lane and a left-turn lane.

In northern Europe, everybody tends to be much better behaved. I think that’s learned: as the number of cyclists in a city rises, two things happen. Firstly drivers and pedestrians become more conscious of the fact that a cyclist is likely to be on the road. And secondly there’s an increasing number of what you might call non-brave cyclists, who don’t consider biking to be some kind of urban warfare and who are more likely, at the margin, to simply follow the rules of the road which they know so well from driving cars. Eventually their good behavior rubs off onto the more reckless.

Ultimately I think it all comes down to a combination of visibility and civility. As bikes and bikers become more visible, everybody else will be more conscious of them. And as they feel more noticed and less victimized, they will start to behave more responsibly to other road users, on foot and in cars. Who will then start to reciprocate even more. The problem is this takes years; it doesn’t happen overnight. And in the meantime there will be nasty bike-pedestrian collisions, some of them unspeakably tragic. My friend Josh Phillips died in 2006 after hitting a pedestrian on his bike. The pedestrian wasn’t malicious, just oblivious. But that’s no solace to Josh’s family and friends.

Update: Walking back from lunch, I noticed this scene on 41st and Broadway. You can shout as loud as you like, this obstacle won’t get out of the way. And as a result you can see two bicyclists having to detour into the pedestrian zone.

Anecdotally (which means that I don’t have any empirical data on this, but it feels this way), transportation spending is second only to defense spending when it comes to waste, inefficiency, and a general syndrome of money going to politically-influential districts rather than where it would make the most sense.

But then the Obama administration started banning earmarks in the stimulus bill and, I thought, leaving decisions on the allocation of funds to an independent central authority rather than to bickering legislators. I was rather surprised, then, to read this:

The stimulus law provided $26.6 billion for highways, bridges and other transportation projects, but left the decision on how to spend most of it to the states.

The results have been predictable: disproportionate amounts of money for roads in the middle of nowhere, while important urban transit projects go unfunded. Seattle, for instance, got none of the first tranche of federal stimulus funds; Charlotte got less than 2% of North Carolina’s.

This is why we need an Urbanist Party: so that city-dwellers can finally punch their weight in politics (Obama is the first president from a city in living memory) and so that local, state and federal government starts paying much more attention to the people who really make any modern economy run.

In the world of urban planning, there are few things hairier than transportation hypotheticals. When NYC pedestrianized Broadway in Times Square and Herald Square in May, the transportation commissioner said that traffic speeds would go up — but now it seems that we won’t know until December at the earliest whether that’s actually true.

At the same time, however, a smart model of what exactly would happen if you changed this or charged for that is a prerequisite for making any kind of informed improvements to a snarled-up central business district. And so, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Charles Komanoff’s absolutely astonishing Balanced Tranportation Analyzer — a 3.5 MB Excel spreadsheet which is the product of many years of research and analysis into the question of New York City traffic.

This thing is so big and so complicated that even with all of the detailed explanations in it, it’s hard to understand — you really need Komanoff himself to walk you through it. But he recently did just that for me, and so I can point you to the “Delays” sheet, for instance, where Komanoff attempts to quantify the externalities imposed by any given car in NYC traffic.

Being a cyclist, I’m acutely aware of the issue of externalities — it generally costs you nothing to blindly step off the sidewalk and into the bike lane, or to open your taxi door without looking behind you, but it can affect me greatly. Komanoff’s a cyclist too, but he’s concentrating in this spreadsheet mainly on vehicular traffic. After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. (At weekends, the equivalent number is just over 2 hours.) No one car is likely to suffer excess delays of more than a few seconds, of course, but if you add up all those seconds for the thousands of affected cars and trucks, it comes to a significant amount of time.

Many of those hours are very valuable things, especially when you consider big trucks, staffed with two or three professionals, just idling in traffic. Komanoff calculates (check out the “Value of Time” tab) that the average vehicle has 1.97 people in it, and that the average value of an hour of saved vehicle time south of 60th Street in Manhattan on a weekday is $48.89. Which means, basically, that driving a car into Manhattan on a weekday causes about $160 of negative externalities to everybody else.

Of course there are lots of variables here; for one thing, the externalities associated with driving your car into Manhattan go up with the total amount of traffic in the CBD. If you think there’s 5% less traffic in New York now than there was a year or two ago, for instance, the cost imposed goes down by 14%, from 3.26 hours to 2.79 hours. Or, to put it another way, if you could somehow implement a policy which resulted in 10% fewer vehicles driving into Manhattan, any given vehicle would impose “only” 2.38 hours of externalities — an improvement of about $43 over the base case.

Komanoff, of course, isn’t just analyzing the present, he also has a plan for the future. First of which, necessarily, involves congestion pricing. To drive into Manhattan south of 60th Street, you pay a toll: on weekdays, the toll is $3 at night, then rises to $6 for most of the day, and for peak periods (6am to 10am, and 2pm to 8pm) goes up to $9. At weekends, there’s a similar but smaller toll, at $1/$3/$5 prices.

Then there’s the subway fare: that too changes according to the time of day. At night subways are free; sometimes they’re 50 cents, and most of the time they’re $1. At ultra-peak hours (between 8am and 9am, and between 5pm and 6pm) a subway fare rises to $2, dropping to $1.50 the following hour.

One of the most interesting parts of Komanoff’s plan is the bus fare: always $0, all the time. That speeds up buses considerably, since it basically eliminates long lines at the fare box as people hunt for their MetroCard. In turn that makes buses more attractive, and a lot of people, attracted by the free fare and faster speeds, will start taking the bus rather than driving or taking a taxi or a subway. In-city commuter rail, on Metro-North and the LIRR, also goes free.

Medallion taxis do not pay the congestion charge, but there is a 33% taxi-fare surcharge. One tenth of that (around 3%) goes to the taxi drivers and owners; the rest (30%) goes to the MTA; the taxi surcharge alone raises enough money to make in-city commuter rail free.

Add it all up, and it’s pretty much revenue-neutral, says Komanoff: the biggest line items are that you lose $1.46 billion in transit fares, while gaining $1.31 billion in congestion charges. But total time savings are the biggie: implement this plan and New Yorkers get over $2.5 billion of time back which would otherwise be spent wasted in traffic. Vehicle speeds in general rise about 20%, and as much as 25% between 9am and 10am.

All in all (see the “Cost-Benefit” tab), Komanoff sees $5.3 billion in gains and just $2 billion in losses. Sounds good to me. What’s more, it’s politically more acceptable than the last attempt to introduce congestion pricing into NYC, where the brunt was disproportionately borne by Brooklyn. This plan puts much more of the cost of the plan onto Manhattanites, largely thanks to that taxi surcharge. Here are Komanoff’s charts (from the “Incidence” tab):

Komanoff’s still working on this spreadsheet, but the main message is pretty clear — that smart congestion charging would be great news for New York, and probably for most other dense cities as well. If you’re feeling really ambitious, you can even try playing around with the numbers yourself. Enjoy!

My fingers weren’t crossed hard enough. I did end up buying a folding bike this weekend — a Montague DX — and proudly carried it, folded in half, into 3 Times Square this morning, after having been told by a security guard that folding bikes were OK to bring in to the office. Except, it turns out, they’re not. The only way you’re allowed to bring a folding bike into the building, it turns out, is if it’s packed up into a bag. Otherwise, no dice.

I suppose my next hope is that NYC’s bike-friendly new transportation commissioner will install some permanent bike parking in the acreage of Times Square she recently pedestrianized. But I’m not holding my breath. In any case, I hope my bike shop accepts returns. They did say they would, but I’ve just learned how much I can trust verbal promises.

Update: I just popped down to check on it — I realized I’d left the quick-release seatpost open to easy theft when I chained the bike up outside. The back tire’s completely deflated. As am I.

These houses are going to be demolished to make room for a parking lot. Says Ryan:

In my view, it takes a particularly unimaginative, short-sighted, and careless sort of person to see a piece of property in this location and determine that the best and most profitable use for it is a surface parking lot (particularly since street parking near H Street isn’t exactly difficult to find).

Not at all. A parking lot is pure optionality. It generates income, it lowers your property taxes, and it makes it really easy to build something highly commercial if and when developers can actually borrow money again. Old houses like these are never going to be particularly lucrative. Best to take any opportunity to demolish them, so that down the road they can be easily replaced with something shiny and new.

As Ryan’s commenters point out, the problem here isn’t that the owners of the houses want to demolish them, or even that the Historic Preservation Review Board neglected to save them. Rather, it’s that the zoning laws allow parking lots (and the associated curb cuts etc) at all. The problem with the parking lot isn’t that old housing will be demolished, the problem with the parking lot is that it’s a parking lot. Historic preservation boards shouldn’t be used as stealth zoning authorities. There are real zoning authorities for that kind of thing.