Examples are all too ready. In Washington state, which has seen a whole agency melt down around a voter-mandated monorail service connecting neighborhoods and downtown Seattle, there’s now an initiative gaining momentum to undo the 9.5-cent fuels tax approved in the last legislative session. See this Seattle Times article: Gasoline tax fuels backlash. If voters agree, hundreds of transportation projects just vanish. Reports say it’s all about credibility.

Then dash across the country to the Atlantic states and witness the nasty imbroglio over the Connecticut Department of Transportation’s apparent massacre of one of those historic stone bridges on the Merritt Parkway, one of the few if not the only major freeway that has always made its journey through the countryside without overdone concrete flyovers and tacky commercial signs, frontage roads, and disposable development on the shoulders.


As Jim RePass of the National Corridors project laments, ConnDOT is building a huge structure for entrances and exits — 30 feet in the air with lighting towers stretching up even farther — ramps 3/4 of a mile long leading to a road that’s not likely to ever be built. RePass says “this should obliterate, once and for all, any thought that ConnDOT even notices that the Merritt Parkway is on the National Register of Historic Places, or has bridges so individualized that no two are alike. Indeed, they plan to blow up two of those originals. It’s as if you gave dynamite to a madman and set him loose in an art museum. Take that, you aesthetes!”

At the curb, a Hummer limo waited for someone. It’s L.A. of course, where many people are defined by their style of transportation. Inside the Pasadena Conference Center, the 2005 version of the Congress of the New Urbanism was under way. Dobbins, a former planning director for Atlanta, was paired with William Fulton of Solimar Research, Ventura, California, in an effort to compare Atlanta and L.A.

Both places are prisoners of gridlocked freeways. The contrast lies in L.A.’s history. It grew up as a collection of small cities with real centers. “Today,” Fulton said, “the region revolves around the freeway system, but underneath it remains the world’s largest arterial grid.” Today both regions rely on their freeways, but in Atlanta there’s no real driving alternative.

Those old cities in the L.A. region offer another advantage, Fulton said. Citing Torrance as an example, Fulton claimed there are huge areas, aging and awaiting infill development. With endangered species laws creating the equivalent of urban growth boundaries, L.A. is out of land. Urban infill is where much of the action is today. Atlanta, by contrast, appears destined to stretch out toward Charlotte, Chattanooga, and Birmingham, according to Dobbins.


Dobbins recalled the stand-off with the EPA in 1998, and the 18 months when the region went without any federal transportation funding. He said the region got religion for a brief period. The settlement agreement included more funding of transit and funding for Livable Centers Initiatives — hundreds of millions of dollars over five years. Today, “we are backsliding,” We’re still building these centers — he cited Columbia Park at the Avondale MARTA site as a good example — but “we are essentially at war between funding transit corridors and centers and reverting to massive highway building.” This despite the fact that most of the Atlanta region’s employment centers are actually close to the MARTA transit lines.

Fulton pointed out that Atlanta’s density of people per square mile is one-fourth of the Los Angeles region. Both places have sprawled, but in different ways. Fulton shows a slide of eastern sprawl — houses sprinkled in a sea of spacious grass. Then one of western sprawl — huge tracts of houses so close they nearly touch.

When this session ended, the Hummer was gone. Likely its large cabin left with a low-density load.

Which is why the new Seattle monorail project, set to begin construction this fall, is so interesting. It is a rare thing: a populist piece of infrastructure. Over the heads of the planners, the politicians and the business leaders, Seattle residents have come up with a plan, designed a system and then funded it — in three separate referendums. It’s an amazing act of civic chutzpah. The project’s eventual success or failure bears watching, because it raises the question of whether citizens can play the game of infrastructure development more directly, and not just give thumbs up or down to what the experts come up with.

The monorail has long been part of Seattle’s image of itself, which helps explain public support for the project. A tiny, toy monorail, less than a mile long, was part of the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962. It was left in place afterward because residents and tourists liked it so much. The image of the futuristic car atop white concrete pylons became part of the city’s image, as much as its towering Space Needle.

Flash forward 35 or so years. The region’s mobility is terrible, in large part because people must get around only on a few big highways that crisscross the water-bound region. In its geographic form, Seattle resembles Manhattan and its boroughs; it is almost an island surrounded by populous suburbs. Except unlike New York City, Seattle lacks a mass transit system to get people across or under the water in large numbers; all traffic must cross the water by car over bridges. In response to the congestion, experts had proposed and the City Council had approved, a regional light rail system. Like most light rail systems, it was expensive, slow to be designed and constructed, and soon became mired in a number of neighborhood controversies about route and design. Some people started to question it.

Here’s where things got interesting. A taxi driver said, “Why not a monorail?” It travels above traffic, he reasoned, and so would neither rob drivers of traffic lanes, nor pose the threat of collisions. Moreover, it would be “a Seattle solution” to urban congestion, rather than one bought off the shelf of national planning models.

He and a hastily organized civic group, ignoring the dismissals of various experts, then collected the thousands of signatures necessary to put the project, in concept, on a popular referendum. Voters approved it in 1997. Then voters approved a specific route and a special car tax to pay for it, in two more referendums in 1999 and 2002.

Amazing. Now construction is set to begin this fall, even though anti-monorail groups, some supported by downtown business groups, are trying to stop it through counter-referendums.

Here’s the basic plan. The first 14-mile “green” line would run from the northern suburbs through the downtown core and into West Seattle. It would run 20 to 40 feet above the street and complement the city’s light rail system, which is still being built but has been modified. A half dozen other monorail lines are planned for the future, all with varying colors.

Will it work? I don’t know, but on a recent visit to the monorail offices in downtown Seattle, I was impressed with the energy and creativity the people there seemed to exude. Kristina Hill, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington who is involved with the project, talked about how they were designing small-footprint stations with banks of elevators to quickly carry people up and down. Jonathan Buchter, the director of finance, talked of how the absence of federal funding had freed the agency to be nimble and pursue imaginative ways of raising operating income. One idea being pursued is offering tourists a more expensive ride on separate trains that would offer guided tours of the city. In general, staffers said transportation experts have an irrational bias against monorails, which are more flexible and practical than in decades past.

Bombardier of Canada and Hitachi from Japan, apparently the only two monorail makers in the world, are competing to construct the system. The $1.6 billion contract will be of the increasingly popular “DBOM” type, which means one firm designs, builds, operates and maintains the structure. The politicians and public like this because it seems to ensure accountability. I worry about firms designing proprietary systems that could turn out to be lucrative monopolies for themselves.

Unless the lawsuits and referendums derail the project, the world will have a chance to judge just how practical monorails are. I wish them luck, although a certain perspective must be maintained. For all the fireworks it is still just one line, whose capacity, like light rail lines, will be surprisingly low by New York standards. The monorail at first will have a top capacity of 3,000 passengers per hour, compared to 30,000 for an average subway line. The capacity can be expanded to 6,000. To truly give Seattlites more options, the city and region need to keep building transit at a steady, prodigious rate for decades to come. It will be interesting to see whether Seattle residents maintain their romance with the monorail, as time goes by.

– Alex Marshall, www.alexmarshall.org

The same thing holds true for the manmade environment, except that the water that makes stuff grow is usually investments in transportation infrastructure. Build a big highway, and you get more shopping centers and subdivisions. Build a new subway, and you get more office towers. Build a new airport, and you get more warehouses and convention centers.

This cause and effect relationship between transportation and development is pretty easy to see and accepted when it comes to highways and airports, but with mass transit there is more skepticism, perhaps rightly. In our highway-and-car oriented environment, a city can no longer be sure that constructing a streetcar line will produce a streetcar suburb, even though that was historically true.

Which is why a recent master’s thesis by Juliette Michaelson, a Masters Candidate at Columbia University, is so interesting. Michaelson examined the possible effects of a relatively small $69 million investment in 1996 by New Jersey transit in a small piece of track that connected two separate rail lines and allowed commuters in Northern New Jersey to have that beloved thing, a “one-seat ride” into midtown Manhattan.

What Michaelson did was examine property values in the areas around the transit lines that were affected by the new link, called Midtown Direct. She found that property values close to the train line had more than doubled in the last decade — which was about twice the rate as land a bit further out. While cause and effect are never for sure in dealing with human actions, it seems probable that the disproportionate increase near the transit lines was due to the new Midtown Direct service. If so, it was a pretty amazing return on public investment. The state invests a mere $69 million, and property values, and thus taxes, are boosted many times that. Eventually, you will probably see the built environment around these lines change physically, and well as financially, to include more apartments and offices as the “water” of the transportation investments take seed.

What are the implications of Michaelson’s research for other regions? Here’s my guess. In some metropolitan regions, like New York or now Washington DC, constructing transit changes the pattern of growth on the ground pretty easily. For example in Arlington, Va., with some appropriate zoning around the Metro stops, you got denser, less car dependent development. But in a low-density and under-used city like Des Moines, which I recently visited, watering the plant may take more time, and more water.

You can read more about Michaelson’s research in the bi-weekly newsletter of Regional Plan Association, which I edit as a Senior Fellow there. Tom Wright, the executive vice president of Regional Plan Association, gives his take on Michaelson’s research as well as on the continued and troubling gap between the planning and transportation professions.