Category Archives: Urbanism

David Gunn, Amtrak Prez, Speaks His Mind

Posted on by
Reply

David Gunn, the current president of Amtrak and the former head of New York City Transit, has had and will have great impact on transportation within the Tri-state region. In the 1980s, he dramatically improved the city’s then failing subway system. In 2002, he took on the similarly Augean task of improving the nation inter-city rail service, whose largest user is the New York region. In this excerpt from a 90-minute interview with RPA Senior Fellow Alex Marshall, Gunn draws parallels between what he considered Amtrak’s shambled state when he arrived, and what Gunn considers the currently misplaced priorities of the political leaders who set the mission — and the budget — for this region’s transit service. In general, he urges the Tri-state region to not shirk its job of maintaining excellent transit service, even while it pursues new services and projects. His sometimes sharp words are a bracing challenge to those who value high-quality transit, and must decide how to achieve it.

BEGIN
Alex Marshall: Here in New York City, you were known as the guy who, as president of New York City Transit, turned around the subway system by focusing on the nuts and bolts of the system. What are the nuts and bolts of Amtrak?

David Gunn: Well, you know actually Amtrak’s situation is very similar to the situation of the New York City Transit Authority, it’s just that the geographical spread is much greater. But in terms of the nuts and bolts, they are almost identical. Amtrak has suffered from years of deferred maintenance. The car fleet was allowed to deteriorate; heavy overhaul ceased years ago. Wrecked cars were just parked; they weren’t repaired. The locomotive fleet was in a little better shape, but a portion of our electric locomotives were ignored. The track structure, the parts we owned, was terribly neglected. The whole system was gradually becoming unreliable, and we were faced with the situation New York had in the 1970s and 80s, with slow corridors and the like. So we put together — we even used the same terminology — A-State-of-Good-Repair Capital Program, so you have overhauls and heavy maintenance being done on the car fleets and locomotives on a regular basis, and you start getting the track and the infrastructure back to a state of good repair.

A.M.: It’s surprising to me that there’s that much deferred maintenance in the Amtrak system, given the relatively heavy political attention put on Amtrak over the last decade.

Gunn: But the attention was all bullshit! It was political attention on this self-sufficiency notion and other wild ideas, which weren’t going to happen. Nobody was paying attention to basic maintenance. When I got here, they couldn’t even tell me how many ties they put in last year. I kept asking that question. “Well, what did we do last year? How many ties did we put in, how much rail?” And all they could give me were dollars figures.

This is what happens to institutions — and it happened in New York — when they get consumed with reorganizing, reforming and oversight. Instead of going in and fixing the basic problems, and actually taking the resources you do have, which may be inadequate, but putting them to work

The problem is that people don’t like to pay attention to the nuts and bolts, ’cause it’s not sexy. But you have to balance the two. And unfortunately — and I don’t know if it’s human nature or just the American Way — but everybody gets focused on the big sexy projects and ignore the basics. It’s like the Transit Authority right now, people think it’s fixed, right? So people start to think, now we can play games, now we can do Second Avenue, now we can do Eastside Access, now we can do the new Penn station at the Farley building. And they forget the nuts and bolts.

A few weeks ago, I rode a subway train in New York to get to an event. It took me one bloody hour to go from Penn Station to Borough Hall or Jay Street on the A train. The train I rode was an R-32, and the last time that train was heavy overhauled and painted inside was when I was there. Now it still ran pretty good which is a credit to the guys in the shops. But the fact of the matter is the subway is getting dirty. Even the new trains don’t look so hot. That system was spit-shined back in the nineties. And this is all because the attention is being focused on sexy stuff and not on the basics. I’m not criticizing the management of the Transit Authority. They have done a superb job of surviving in this environment. It’s the politics and the oversight that’s getting it fouled up.

A.M.: What about the Second Avenue subway or the new Moynihan Station. Do you think we should just ignore those?

Mr. Gunn: I’m not saying the 2nd Avenue subway is not important, Alex, it is. But what’s happening in New York is that the basic maintenance of the existing system is not being pursued. It’s under funded and they’re living off the capital that was put in years ago. . . If they keep going with what they’re doing, they’re going to have another crisis. It’s unbelievable actually. You’d think people would learn from history.

The same thing happened at Amtrak. Everybody got all wrapped around the axle with ideas that we’re going to leap into the 21st Century with TGVs [a reference to France’s high-speed trains, known by their initials “TGV” for “Train of Great Velocity”] and high-speed corridors all over the United States. Meanwhile, we weren’t putting in any new rails on existing lines. We weren’t overhauling cars. There was a total disconnect in terms of where this place was headed, between the nuts and bolts, and what the rail proponents focused on. To some extent, I’m being critical of the rail proponents, because they have this idea that the nuts and bolts will take care of themselves. And that is wrong.

A.M.: Are you saying we shouldn’t invest in the latest technology? What’s wrong with truly high-speed trains?

Gunn: It is not helpful, in my opinion, to engage in these flights of fancy where you’re going to build TGVs all over the United States. We do not have the technical capabilities for doing it, we don’t have the manufacturing to support it anymore, and you don’t have the people to run it.

A.M: What about France? They have a large and growing network of true high-speed trains, which go 200 mph.

Gunn: But they’ve been working on their train system since the war. For sixty years, they’ve been incrementally creeping up on speeds on electrification, on cantenary design, on locomotive design. In the United States, which was the leader at the end of World War II, you can’t even buy a coupler that is made in the United States. You can’t just take this super sophisticated technology from over there, and bring it here and make it work. Because, I mean, you have to have people who actually have a toolbox and can stand there and make it work. This is what the big thinkers — planners and other people — often don’t get. This is not a detail. It is a critical component of having a good operation.

A.M.: Where does Amtrak fit into the overall transportation policies of this country?

Gunn: There are areas where the cheapest solution to congestion is high-speed rail, or at least higher speed rail. I’m not talking about flights of fancy and the TGVs. I’m talking about you get a P-42, which is one of our diesel locomotives and can run 110 mph. You get the track fixed, you get the signal system fixed, and clear enough control points and passing sidings, so you can run reliably frequent service, like in the Northeast corridor. And this actually will save the government money. I mean, can you imagine building highways to carry the mobs of people that go over those rails in the Northeast Corridor?

I mean look at places like California — it’s becoming a nightmare. Try to go from L.A. to San Diego by highways certain times of the day it’s a bloody parking lot. We got the little old San Diego line, which is single track in a lot of places, and it’s handling over two million people a year. People on trains are zipping by people on the freeways. And yet some people in Congress act as if these are unimportant assets.

Obviously out in the boonies you’re not going to have passenger rail because there’s no volume. But when you get into congested areas like Chicago, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Portland, Seattle, LA, San Diego, Sacramento, Oakland, San Jose, the highway physically can’t do it. It’s not even a case of money. There’s no place to put all the lanes you would need. Not to mention that to add lanes to most interstate highways in urban areas, you’re talking billions and billions of dollars, for just a few miles.

A.M.: Why is the Amtrak Acela Express so slow going to New Haven on the first half of the New York to Boston run?

Mr. Gunn: What’s happened on that line is that it used to be a four-track railroad from New Haven to New York City. Then a while back, the MTA made a terrible mistake. It ripped up one track North of Stamford, so it’s down to three tracks. I was there when they did it, and I said to them, “You will regret doing it.” But they did it anyway, and then what happened is they suddenly realized they had to replace the 1910 cantenary line. It is 1910, original stuff — the first mainline electrification in the World, and it’s still there. We got cantenary poles that are almost 100 years old on the Hellgate Bridge route. And so, what they did, then they had to take another track out of service. And then, the whole corridor is fragmented. It’s run by MetroNorth, owned by MetroNorth, but North of Stamford, it’s dominated by ConnDOT [the Connecticut Department of Transportation], so ConnDOT is dictating the speed and the pace with which they’re doing the wiring. You only got double track from Stamford to New Haven. It’s physically impossible some days to run the trains through there on time. Then you hit New Haven, and you go 130, 140, 150 miles an hour.

The tracks North of Providence are owned by the MBTA [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority]. The whole thing is a symptom of the fact that you would never have had the fragmented ownership of the corridor if the Department of Transportation in Washington had known what it was doing.

A.M.: Any chance of the service on the Boston/New York line improving any time soon?

Mr. Gunn: I think if you talk to ConnDOT, they say it’s a 10 year project. The thing is, it’s a highway department.

A.M.: What do you think about some of the big projects proposed for the New York region, like the proposed second tunnel under the Hudson River.

Mr. Gunn: As long as it’s part of a logical whole, I’m in favor of it. I mean, you need that stuff. Rail access from the South is at capacity. Right now, any increase in rail access is out of the question to New York City, because the tunnels are at capacity during rush hour. So you have to start thinking about this stuff. But you got to take care of the nuts and bolts as well.

And the problem is that every time you start talking about the bigger stuff, everybody assumes that you’ve taken care of nuts and bolts. It can’t be an either/or, which is generally what’s happening.

A.M.: You seem to be criticizing having a vision.

Gunn: I think that having a long-term vision on this stuff is actually vital. But if it isn’t rooted in solid incremental improvements in terms of the nuts and bolts of the management, and the skills you need to pull it off, you’ll never get there. Instead you’ll get a lesser vision, or a nightmare. The point that I’m trying to make here is that you need to know where you’re trying to get to, but you have to have the baby steps identified to start you on the road to get there. And so often, all you get when you’re dealing with planners, is the vision thing.

The Demolition Man

Posted on by
Reply

by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
MAY 1995

Metropolis writer Alex Marshall spoke to Andres Duany about his role in the controversial plan to bulldoze East Ocean View in Norfolk. At the time of the interview, the city had bought few houses and only a small amount of demolition had taken place. Planning officials gave Duany wide latitude in recommencling whether some homes or areas should be saved from demolition. For now, the bulldozers have been idled by a commission that ruled that the housing authority offered a property owner just half of what his property was worth. The authority is appealing, but if the ruling stands, it will drive up the cost of the project to the point that the development would have to proceed in stages, if at all.

METROPOLIS: You seem to be in the position of Baron Haussmann, who built his grand boulevards through the neighborhoods of nineteenth-century Paris. People are saying, “We love your ideas, but we don’t want our houses torn down.” What responsibility do you have to the people who now live in East Ocean View?

DUANY: I think it’s the ancient [question of the needs of the] individual versus the community. You have to find where to draw that line. And it’s very, very difficult to draw it. In this case, that work has been done. The Norfolk city council has made the decision and everybody is out.

METROPOLIS: The residents aren’t actually out yet.

DUANY: Well, the vote has taken place. Now we can see what the best community plan is and see who can stay and who cannot stay.

METROPOLIS: If your design gets built, are you concerned that your kind of urbanism will be less authentic than what exists there now?

DUANY: The neighborhood will still be mixed in income, but exactly the other way. Now it’s 95 percent rental and five percent owner. Under the new plan, it’s going to flip to be 80 percent owner and 20 percent rental. The scale will be healthier. Remember the statement that poverty does not cause crime. Poverty in concentration causes crime.

METROPOLIS: New Urbanism was founded in part as a reaction against urban renewal. Now you are participating in an urban renewal project.

DUANY: There’s a big difference between the neighborhoods that were wiped out in the 1950s, which were little Georgetowns, with darling houses and first-rate urbanism, and this stuff [the homes in East Ocean View], which is extremely exploitative. Even if I were most benevolent and broad-minded, I could save only 10 percent of the buildings. It’s not like [how it used to be done], where there were great places that were just misunderstood and demolished.

METROPOLIS: Do you ever wake up in a cold sweat at night and say, wait a minute, I’m involved in an urban renewal project?

DUANY: Well, I’ve never been involved in the side that causes demolition. I’ve always been on the repair side. I’ve actually resigned from projects because of not wanting to be involved in demolitions. I’ve been to charrettes in which contracts were signed and I just walked out the first day.

METROPOLIS: Where did this happen?

DUANY: In Houston, in an old black neighborhood. Actually, I quit because there was a very nice apartment building and some very nice 1940s housing. It was a total slum. But it was so beautifully designed that I thought it was of architectural value. Basically, at the end of the first day, I said, “Either you trust me to decide what stays and what goes, or you don’t.” And I walked. I was on the airplane the same night. But I’m in a very privileged position, because I have more work than I can handle. Most planners can’t do that. They have to eat.

METROPOLIS: Is it bad for your practice to be involved in a project that forces people out of their homes, even if you are doing so for the sake of better architectural quality?

DUANY: I suppose it is, yes. But it’s easy for me to say, “I didn’t do it.” The whole thing has been made so easy for me. I’ve been protected from this beautifully. Because [the city council made the decision] before I got here.

METROPOLIS: But you do have some misgivings about it?

DUANY: Well, I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say. But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because it doesn’t pay taxes. It bankrupts cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick here is to bring the middle class back to the city. The whole challenge is getting middle-class people to come in and live with lower-income people.

METROPOLIS: Is it possible to do some selective demolition and gradually bring the neighborhood up?

DUANY: I think the political reality was “Where do you draw the line?” Because all the people have terrific rights. Basically, [the planners] decided that if we’re unfair, we’re unfair to everybody. And that’s a form of fairness.

When The New Urbanism Meets An Old Neighborhood

Posted on by
Reply

by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
May, 1995

East Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia, is a neighborhood on death row, awaiting execution by bulldozer. Residents are being forced from their homes to make way for a brand-new village designed by Andres Duany. If this sounds like old-fashioned urban renewal, well, that’s what it is. It employs the same logic: cities can be fixed by plowing down neighborhoods and replacing them with better buildings and wealthier folks.

The presence of Duany adds a twist. As a partner of Miami-based Duany/PlaterZyberk Town Planners, he is an acknowledged leader of the New Urbanists, the self styled white hats of contemporary architecture who seek to reform America’s wayward landscape. Their remedy is as much moral as it is aesthetic. They believe that traditional town planning – by which they mean a grid of streets lined with trees and front porches, studded with shops and parks – can heal the nation’s fractured sense of community. In East Ocean View, however, the New Urbanists’ championing of the ideal of community is being put to the test. In essence, Duany is now facing the same charges that smeared the Modernists he so disdains: Is it people he cares about – or buildings?

The drama is being played out in a city of a quarter million, the center of a metropolitan sprawl inhabited by 1.4 million. Over the last few decades, Norfolk has lost a third of its population, while the suburbs have boomed, tripling in size. Although the city has a huge commercial harbor, it’s still basically a Navy town, relying on the massive Norfolk Naval Base and related installations to pump dollars and jobs into the economy. For almost half a century, Norfolk has been looking for ways to stem the tide of white flight and bring the middle class back to the city. Since the early 1950s, huge chunks of the city have been bulldozed; many lots remain empty, awaiting private-sector investment that has never materialized. At the moment, the city is leveraged to the hilt in a variety of downtown renewal schemes, including a suburban-style mall supported with $100 million in loans and free infrastructure.

In East Ocean View, bungalows, duplexes, and brick apartment buildings sit on a grid of streets on a peninsula sandwiched by the Chesapeake Bay and one of its estuaries. For decades, people have speculated that it could be a prime piece of real estate. In late 1993, not without controversy, the Norfolk city council approved a plan concocted by the housing authority to purchase 100 acres. The bulldozers have already bit into a few of the roughly 350 buildings that make up more than 1,500 homes. The city hopes that a new neighborhood, aimed at the middle and upper classes, will both rid the city of social problems and help its tax base. It’s undeniable that the present neighborhood has its troubles. Prostitutes loiter at certain intersections; young men in bulky jackets handle a brisk drug trade with passing motorists. But as residents will tell you, it’s one of the few places in the Norfolk metropolitan area where a working-class family can afford an apartment within a block or two of the beach. It’s also one of the more integrated neighborhoods, about two-thirds white, a third black, mixed pretty evenly. The homes range from neatly tended to boarded-Lip and abandoned.

The locals include people like Barbara Caffee, who with her husband has owned a house there for 30 years and raised a family. Her small home includes a basement they added themselves, plus an addition where her mother lives. Caffee, who is president of the neighborhood’s civic league, says flatly that they won’t leave. “I would understand eminent domain if they were going to put in schools or roads,” she says. “But to take down our house to build a home for someone else? I don’t understand that.”

The Caffees are among the few home owners there. Most residents rent, including Claudette Durclen, a 27-year-old nurse’s assistant who shares an apartment with her eight-year-old daughter. Durden says her biggest concern about leaving is her daughter. “She has friends across the street, friends out back, and friends across the road,” the young mother says, pointing from her balcony. “It would be hard having to start all over.”

Duany’s design for East Ocean View sharply reduces the total population of the neighborhood, a paradoxical path for neotraditionalists, who usually extol the advantages and efficiency of high density. Instead of 1,500 homes, Duany’s village has between 400 and 600, ranging in price from $70,000 to $500,000 or more – beyond the reach of 95 percent of the current residents. The new streets and buildings are meticulously laid out and designed. In classic neotraditional styles, the proposed town houses and fancy homes sit close to the street, side by side. About the only things the plan retains from the existing neighborhood are the trees; they’re needed to lend the new development some character and to provide a windbreak against ocean breezes.

Since the city is not using federal money, it is not required to assist residents in relocation. The housing authority has promised three months of free rent, and will bump any resident who requests it to the top of the public housing waiting list. But the city has been quite explicit in its hopes that some of these people will just go away. When the housing authority first unveiled the project, it included an economic report estimating that roughly a third of the neighborhood’s citizens would leave town, thus saving the city money on social services and police.

The city council approved the project a year before Duany came to town. But partly because of the controversy, city officials looked to Duany for approval of their plans to tear down the neighborhood. One official described Duany as “the doctor” with ultimate authority to decide whether to save or amputate the “diseased leg.” During a week-long charrette held in a senior citizens center, Duany discussed saving a few homes, but decided against any guarantees. A completely clean canvas, Duany opined, was more valuable than saving homes for a few lucky people.

In the course of the charrette, Duany did not duck complaints from those being forced to move. Elderly couples sought him out, and he listened patiently to what they had to say. Then he explained why their homes had to be torn down to build a better, more beautiful neighborhood.

Duany’s argument rests on two main points, one financial, the other architectural. The most important consideration, he says, is that the new neighborhood would raise the city’s tax base. The sacrifice of low-income residents is for the common good of the city.

“I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say,” Duany says. “But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because they don’t pay taxes. They bankrupt cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick is to bring the middle class back to the city.”

Of course, cities need stronger tax bases and new ways to stem the tide of middle-class flight. Many of the original urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s were designed for that purpose. But there’s no evidence that such programs work any better now than they did then. Clear-cutting a neighborhood often exacerbates social problems by splitting up supportive relationships and scattering poor residents into new and unfamiliar surroundings. Sometimes, that means the streets. Some of East Ocean View residents are refugees from past urban renewal schemes. Now they face the same thing all over again.

Duany’s support for the project seems to clash with certain core values of the New Urbanists, many of whom are inspired by the philosophy of Jane Jacobs and her methodical critique of urban renewal, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Further, Duany’s New Urban vision for East Ocean View comes at the expense of what is already an urban neighborhood. It’s got a street grid, with a variety of building types and a mix of incomes. One of the city’s best restaurants, and virtually the only building likely to be spared, is in East Ocean View. The buildings are not all situated according to strict neotraditionalist tenets, but the basic parts are there. The neighborhood is urban not only in its buildings, but also in the way the community interacts. This is not some cul-de-sac haven of isolated citizens. It’s the kind of neighborhood where you see a group of friends in T shirts, their young children in tow, heading to the beach with a six-pack of beer to enjoy a summer afternoon.

Outsiders often express surprise that the city is pursuing such an old-fashioned strategy. But Norfolk is something of an anomaly, as David Rice, executive director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, freely admits. “Cities lost enthusiasm for redevelopment in the Sixties and Seventies,” says Rice, almost boasting. “Except for Norfolk. We pressed on.”

It’s hard to see what advantage Norfolk has gained by this persistence. Likewise, it’s hard to tell how Duany reconciles his professed faith in urbanism with his actions in East Ocean View. His flip architectural assessment of the homes people are being turned out of seems narrow and ill considered. Cities are not defined by buildings alone; they are made up of an intricate web of relationships- physical, social, economic, cultural- that are rooted to places. The trouble with cities is that there are so many forces tearing these relationships apart. You would think architects would have learned by now to be healers, not wreckers.