America, Seattle, and the Streetcar

The horse car, and then the street car, lifted Americans from the mud and horse manure that formed their roads, and sheltered them from the rain and snow. As a stable consumer of power, it subsidized the building of power plants and spread of electricity, and it usually maintained the streets, often paving them, that the streetcars ran on. It made it possible to build bigger factories with larger numbers of workers from further away.

And then, as suddenly as it had come, the streetcar era was over, and American bought automobiles instead. The streetcars of the day were hard-riding cramped single-truck cars for which nobody grieved. In America the day of the streetcar was done by the time the PCC car was unveiled- a car that became the favorite of the world, but was rejected by America.

Since that time, the streetcar, and our circumstances, have evolved. In the many lines of Europe we can see this flowering, but in America we're still wondering what the role of the streetcar should be in transit and urban planning.

We seem to know that, because of the low speed of streetcars, 3-5 miles seems to be a good length for a streetcar line. Development clusters readily on streetcar lines and property values increase. With this and other factors in mind, it becomes possible to imagine specific roles for the streetcar in the city of your choice.

Arguably, Seattleites should be doing a lot of such imagining. Seattle is essentially a small city, and the projected funding for high-capacity rail transit is claimed for many years into the future by Sound Transit and their Link lines and extensions. Creating viable in-city transit improvements should be high on the list for Seattleites.

I'm hoping to sketch some imaginary lines in the future, but for now, the point is that the factors that created our original lines will not be the factors that create the new lines we need, and the streetcars we build today are vastly different from the streetcars we rejected then.

Planning For The Worst

Seattle transit fans are surely among the most pathetic techno-dork wannabes in the history of ever. Like a sailor blown off his ship into the water, they see any semblance of transit as a timber to be grasped and clung to to buoy their hopes. And for the existing agencies, they feel the same affection a sailor feels for the ship at sea, which is to say, the best damn ship is the one with me on it.

Consider the Seattle Streetcar Plan. Never actually a plan, then-Mayor Nickels had requested SDOT to identify possible streetcar routes, and five were briefly sketched. This was at once more and less than any mayor of the past 50 years had done for rail transit in Seattle. The problems lay in how the Seattle transit fans began trying to see how the plan would work- and in the subsequent emergence of what seemed to be a better plan.

In part because there was no plan, it was hard to see how the plan would work. And then, along came candidate McGinn, who stripped planning to the barest essential of proclaiming that voters would have a chance to vote on a plan, and thus raised it to the highest plane, that of the ethereal. Unencumbered by any physical reality, imagination could soar, and the tide turned savagely against streetcars until the McGinniacs began to figure out that those streetcars might be all they got out of McGinn- if that.

Maybe the saddest part of this story is that if McGinn had any real interest in transit, he could have kept the ball rolling that Nickels started, but to McGinn transit is just a glittering bauble with which to beguile Seattle's transit children.- yet his supporters cling to him, like sailors clutching wreckage in a stormy sea. But without a strong leader, a person, perhaps, who would draw a line in the sand and declare the electric trolley buses must be renewed and expanded, the inexorable forces of car and truck will expand during McGinn's term, not recede.

Ironically, Seattle transit fans might be better grounded in reality if they built model railroads, and learned there some of the differences between reality and the happy ability to decide for yourself where the line will run and what kind of neighborhood it will serve. Seattle presents some interesting problems for coming changes in transit, and there's no shortage of real solutions to consider.

Eminent Domain Not The Same As Communism

Imagine my surprise, while reading an article about how cities try to shrink to match their shrinking populations, to learn that "eminent domain was all but unheard of in Germany". That notwithstanding, Leipzig, the city in question, had acted to solve the problem with a different form of legal contract.

But just think of it! In that brutal monolithic Communist state of East Germany, eminent domain hardly exists. In reality, of course, businesses and private property continued to exist under 'communism' and, in fact, flourish where conditions allowed- witness the Czech dominance in streetcar manufacture for several decades.

Seattle doesn't need to think about shrink, but Tacoma would be blessed if they could. Today Tacoma is a shell of a city, sitting on a great site for a city. It would be a great place to live- if it were a city.

Dave Thompson used to say that "where there's a will, there's a fucking way", and a will, the will not to experience another 'own goal' disaster, seems to drive the Europeans to plan and build for a prosperous society. Part of how they do this is by having institutions so deeply rooted that concepts like communism or eminent domain just bounce off, and part of it is in knowing when the institutions need to change to deal with changing times.

One thing, though, seems clear- describing eminent domain as 'communism' is just plain wrong.

NAFTA and the Mexican Gangs

Nafta was meant to be a win-win treaty, at least for those who owned the businesses and the land. Mexico would open her doors to the import of US grain, and we would open our doors to the import of cheap manufactured products from Mexico. Wages would be lowered for US manufacturing workers, and peasants driven off the land in Mexico by falling grain prices, and all would be well with the world, as seen by people with lots of money.

So we helped the Mexicans assemble, in towns on our border, millions of incredibly poor people, working in brutal slave-labor conditions, or, by the tens of thousands, unemployed. Control of this area is what Mexican gangs fight over. Where our government would levy taxes, this drug-gang government collects protection money. The term 'drug-gang' is actually a misnomer- these are really regular gangs with drugs as one of their largest businesses, but far from their only business.

In fact, there's every reason to suspect that intimidating labor leaders might have been an early, and ongoing, role for the gangsters in Mexico. If the workers aren't cheap, the goods aren't cheap, and keeping the workforces cheap usually means intimidation, and not providing the elements of good government- education, social services, utilities and sanitation, and the maintenance of public order.

Bill Clinton and Tony Blair think this is the best way to raise the living standards of the world. I'm not so sure.

The Years the Locusts Ate

It's strange to think that just two years ago Seattle seemed to have a bright future well in hand. It seemed then that the viaduct would come down, a new park would be built on the waterfront, a streetcar would be built from Seattle Center and down 1st Avenue to the International District, and the Museum of History and Industry would move to a new park at the south end of Lake Union. And, while a recession or depression would affect container traffic to the port, Seattle did not seem particularly vulnerable to economic failure. Boeing, we are so over you.

Since then, a new mayor has been elected- a mayor who has no apparent interest in a 1st Avenue streetcar line, a park on the Central Waterfront, or the long-cherished community goals for a park at the south end of Lake Union. Rather than appealing to the highest aspirations of urban citizenry, McGinn appeals to the lowest. Given a microphone, he trumpets his opposition to the tunnel on any occasion, no matter how inappropriate, like some bewildered pachyderm lost in our Packwood Forest.

Currently, a central element of McGinn-o-mania is the Pedestrian-Bike-Traffic Master Plan, expanded to encompass transit- a huge study due "soon" to guide us in planning bicycle and pedestrian paths and future transit needs. Clearly, McGinn hopes this document (or process) will provide a plan to build paths and possibly propose a light-rail line to the voters.

The insanity here is that you can't really build a new street grid for bikes and walkers in addition to the street grid we already own. Not to mention the fact that the existing streets already occupy all the best places. Duh. The "advanced thinking" of Seattle is still riding on the sidewalk with training wheels. As for slyly piggy-backing a light-rail proposal onto an effort initially directed towards paths, well, good luck with that one.

Any long-term resident of Seattle is, of course, inured to the urban gadfly and the nattering nabobs of negativity. It is, to some extent, what passes for wit. Garnish with heaping scoops of holier-than-thou and you have a concoction that will kill or cure any proposal- and, quite possibly, the body politic in which the proposal has hatched.

HafenCity

In 2000 the Germans began construction of a new business and residential development in an old warehouse wharf neighborhood by Hamburg. They expect to have it mainly finished by the year 2030.

Ever the prudent engineers, the Germans consulted the best science available at the time, and have planned the new development to handle rises in sea level and flooding that may result from global warming. Not entirely coincidentally, the efficiencies of the new development also fight global warming at the source, by reducing carbon emissions.

This is your real explanation of the German banking genius- judicious and continuous pump-priming by governmental bodies investing in the future, over long periods of time. Take special note of the amounts of time required.

You can read more about HafenCity here.

Fundamental Contradictions of Railroads

Americans and Europeans began in the railroad business with two different backgrounds. In the US the concept of a corporation was almost a new thing. The antecedent was the corporate body, but in America those bodies were small and weak, and American industrial corporations grew with few restraints. In Europe, corporate bodies were of long standing, and any new proposal had to pass a long vetting process by cities, kings, parliaments, churches, and capital markets.

In both systems, railroads survived the first and one of the greatest shocks to their philosophy, the discovery that they couldn't function at all as they had been planned. The plan had been for the corporation to build a way, install rails, and then, when you wanted to use the way, you put your vehicle on the rails and went where you wanted to go. The railroad, in short, would function as a sort of improved toll road.

In just a few years, this was seen to be wrong and fallacious. To function properly, railroads needed to own and control all the vehicles using the rails. So managed, their fantastic improvement of transportation would obviously impact any society they came in contact with.

In America in the 1830s, this was hardly a problem. Virtually the entire continent could be developed by new railroads without impacting an existing business or king. The demand for transportation was so strong that it became the central fact of political and financial life for the states of the 'Old Northwest' in the 1830s.

In Europe, every constriction applied, from the competition of ports and waterways, to the belief that the monarch possessed as a right the granting of the corporate existence. The long practice of these constraints, however, also provided a framework for the gathering of funds and the building of the hugely capital-intensive railroads.

The later follow-on of these differences emerged in the 1880s and 1890s in America, when every strong railroad believed that with sufficient effort they could 'capture' a territory. Americans started thinking that if one railroad went broke, another would soon buy the line or build a new one, and, in fact, the railroads became so over-built that in 1918 the USRRA was able to slice tens of thousands of miles from the map and radically improve service.

In Europe, more of what we might call 'central planning' had built lines which had reasons, and would not be allowed to go broke and abruptly cease service. Nor, after a few disastrous experiences, were the European companies allowed to build without supervision. European railways entered the 20th century encumbered by the requirements of society, but by the end of the century the European roads were, with the sole exception of long-haul freight, vastly superior to our own.

How could this happen?