Posts about Miami

The purpose of infrastructure is to connect people, goods, information, and services. When people live close together, less infrastructure is needed to make these connections. Consider one type of infrastructure, perhaps the most representative from an urban planning perspective: roads.

Roads cost money to build and maintain. Movement along those roads creates pollution and costs the users time. All else equal, it is more efficient to build, use, and maintain fewer roads per person.

Which of the 12 statistical areas in the United States with more than 5 million inhabitants has the greatest number of people per mile of arterial roads? That honor goes to the Miami Metropolitan Area, perhaps not by choice but rather by geographic necessity, tightly bound by ocean to the east and the Everglades to the west.

Statistical area	2010 population	Miles of primary road	People per road mile
Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL Metro Area	5,564,635	1,462	3,807
New York-Newark-Bridgeport, NY-NJ-CT-PA CSA	22,085,649	8,060	2,740
San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA CSA	7,468,390	2,951	2,531
Chicago-Naperville-Michigan City, IL-IN-WI CSA	9,686,021	3,838	2,524
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside, CA CSA	17,877,006	7,663	2,333
Washington-Baltimore-Northern Virginia, DC-MD-VA-WV CSA	8,572,971	3,950	2,170
Philadelphia-Camden-Vineland, PA-NJ-DE-MD CSA	6,533,683	3,349	1,951
Houston-Baytown-Huntsville, TX CSA	6,051,363	3,127	1,935
Boston-Worcester-Manchester, MA-RI-NH CSA	7,559,060	4,229	1,788
Detroit-Warren-Flint, MI CSA	5,218,852	3,011	1,733
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX CSA	6,731,317	4,127	1,631
Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Gainesville, GA-AL CSA	5,618,431	4,048	1,388

In contrast, the Atlanta Combined Statistical Area (CSA), the most sprawling of the 12 regions, has roughly the same population as Miami, but its roads total a distance nearly 3 times as long. Wouldn't it be great if we could spend all the money that goes to maintaining those unnecessary miles of road on something more productive?

The DC-Baltimore-Northern Virginia CSA ranks right in the middle, at number six, just behind Los Angeles, a fact that local environmentalists probably won't find especially comforting. At least we have both Houston and Dallas beat.

Miami is the only one of the largest metro areas not to have multiple Metropolitan Statistical Areas making up one larger CSA. Does that account for the change? No; even if you look at the individual Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas that make up those 11 CSAs, Miami's still has the most people per road mile.

The gap between the Miami metro area and the second place, New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA, is closer, and without Ventura County and the Inland Empire, the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA metro area jumps to #3, but otherwise little changes in the calculation.

Cross-posted at R.U. Seriousing Me?

I analyzed the 11 heavy rail systems in the United States. Some of these cities also have light rail, commuter rail, or other transit systems, but I didn't count those. That means in Boston, I looked at stations on the Red, Blue, and Orange lines, but not Green. (Why?)

I also combined heavy rail stations from multiple operators in the same region. For example, the Philadelphia score counts both SEPTA and PATCO heavy rail stations. New York's includes PATH and the Staten Island Railway (SIRT).

And the winner is... Los Angeles?

I was surprised by the results. Los Angeles scored the highest! I certainly did not expect that. Though in hindsight, it makes a good deal of sense.

Los Angeles has only 2 heavy rail lines, the Red and Purple lines. Those lines are confined to a relatively small area in the LA Basin, with the exception of 2 stations on the Red Line in the San Fernando Valley. And while Southern California has a reputation for being sprawling, the LA Basin is actually fairly dense, especially where the Metro has been built. As a result, its score isn't dragged down by suburban park and ride stations.

In the same respect, I was surprised that BART scored better than WMATA. Large portions of the DC system serve areas that are urban or urbanizing. In contrast, BART's system is much more suburban-oriented and has very little in the way of urban circulation.

Also surprising is that New York is not an outlier. It does come in a close second to Los Angeles, but I really expected it to be off the charts compared to everyone else. The New York City Subway alone scores 90.47 without PATH and SIRT, still just below LA; SIRT averages 71.45 while PATH is higher, 92.23, but its relatively small size (13 stations) means it doesn't change the New York average even a tenth of a point.

What is not very surprising is that the sunbelt cities (except LA) score more poorly than the more urban older cities (except for Cleveland). Cleveland is at a disadvantage because of the structure of its transit system. The system only has one stop in the central business district, and that station's score isn't that impressive anyway, which harms the average.

Distribution matters

The chart above shows how Walk Scores for stations in each system are distributed. The green bars give the average score. The rectangle shows the 25th and 75th percentiles, and the lines with dots at each end show the highest and lowest Walk Scores for any station in that system.

At the high end, several cities had at least one station (sometimes several) with perfect 100-point scores. The lowest score for any station nationwide was 28 points. Two stations in the Washington region—Arlington Cemetery and Morgan Boulevard—and one station in San Francisco—North Concord/Martinez—had that score.

The distribution is important in understanding how well distributed the well-scoring stations are in the system.

In Washington, the distribution is weighted more toward good-scoring stations, but there are still a lot of poor-scoring stations, too.

Compare that to San Francisco's BART, where there are fewer poor-scoring stations. Instead, there are a large quantity of stations in the middle of the distribution.

New York and Cleveland offer contrast to each other. While most New York stations score very well, Cleveland's don't rank above medium.

Limitations

The Walk Score algorithm is not perfect. It works by calculating the quantities and distances of various amenties. There are other factors which it does not measure that help to define the walkability of an area.

For example, a street grid makes an area much more walkable than a sprawling network of superblocks and culs-de-sac. The quality and proliferation of sidewalks also influences walkability. But these factors aren't currently part of Walk Score; there's no good data file for Walk Score to use that shows where there are and aren't good sidewalks, for example.

Regardless, Walk Score gives us a standard and fairly good measure to compare transit stations (and systems) to each other.

Teams tied to place: Florida's argument, however, doesn't do much to dispute the common criticisms of LeBron's decision (including one from the Cavaliers owner) that it was selfish and about ego more than anything else. While professional athletes may be individuals free to chose between teams, the teams themselves are rooted in place. Teams profit from their connection and emotional bonds with local fans. It's no surprise that fans see this as a direct insult to their sense of place. In Richard Florida's context, they are the ones attempting to optimize their interests within given constraints.

The narrative that ties teams and cities together is extraordinarily strong. The recent passing of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner offered a chance to reflect on that complex connection between city, fans, team, and players:

The life of George Steinbrenner is a ramp across modern New York, a bridge that spans the whirlpool of one man's spinning psyche and the transformation of America's biggest, baddest city... He championed ordinary New Yorkers, then took them for every last penny...

He remembered the elation of the city when the Yankees won the World Series in 1978, a troubled time. "We put the trophy in the rotunda at City Hall," [former Mayor Ed] Koch said. "I knew, as the Romans knew, that the people require circuses and theatrics."

Economic impacts: Perhaps George Steinbrenner's crowning achievement as owner of the Yankees has been the creation of New Yankee Stadium, on the backs of substantial public subsidy. Plenty of economists consistently argue that stadium subsidies are not wise investments, but the emotional connection between team and city is difficult to quantify.

Likewise, there is a question of geography. Sports teams might not have an impact at the metropolitan scale, but many in Cleveland have seen a direct impact from LeBron James in the area immediately adjacent to the arena. A similar narrative exists for DC's Verizon Center and the subsequent revitalization of Chinatown.

However, accurately calculating all the costs and benefits of the intangible, emotional connection between a city and their team might be next to impossible.

There is no 'Next Big Thing': Aaron Renn uses LeBron's departure from the Midwest to take a long, hard look at the strategic decisions behind the move and the reaction:

In a sense though, Cleveland's disappointment was inevitable. LeBron James was never going to turn around the city. No one person or one thing can. Unfortunately, Cleveland has continually pinned its hopes on a never-ending cycle of "next big things" to reverse decline. This will never work. As local economic development guru Ed Morrison put it, "Overwhelmingly, the strategy is now driven by individual projects....This leads to the 'Big Thing Theory' of economic development: Prosperity results from building one more big thing."

The 'Big Thing' theory has usually been applied to things like sports stadiums and arenas, not the individual players that use them. Nevertheless, the comparison is illustrative. The push to keep a team or even a player by giving them a new stadium might not make economic sense, but losing that player can be painful. And even though a new stadium might not make economic sense for a metropolitan region, that doesn't mean the team itself—despite being deeply rooted in a single place—can't also migrate to greener pastures and better opportunities. Unfortunately for Cleveland, that's something they also know far too well.

There are a few other items of note, only semi sports-related:

LeBron likes bikes: One thing LeBron does like is bikes. He's a partial owner of Cannondale and hosts a bike-a-thon for kids in his hometown of Akron, OH. Given the negative reaction in Cleveland to his professional decision to play basketball in Miami, it's unclear what will happen to events like this.

New York and Barcelona are boring: Mayor Bloomberg and others were on hand to see the final push of the tunnel boring machine for New York's 7 line extension. Second Avenue Sagas notes the challenges of urban tunneling, even with the advanced technology available today. A few weeks ago, The Transport Politic took an in-depth look at Barcelona's massive subway expansion, also making extensive use of tunnel boring machines operating in dense urban environments.

Paris, automated: Jarret Walker, of the Human Transit blog, offers some observations from Line 1 of the Paris Metro. The line is in the midst of an upgrade to fully automatic, driverless operation. That's no small feat for a line initially built in 1900.

Cross-posted at City Block.