Transit Oriented Development: The Undiscussed Subject

If you attend a local planning board meeting, be it Town, County, State, or Regional, you will generally find a board of appointed politicians, the municipalities’ attorney(s) and an audience of builders, their attorneys, and a planner if the project one or more of the builders are involved with projects where local or state laws require it. Perhaps on the rare occasion you may find an interested member of the community or a homeowner in need of a planning variance. You very likely will not find a Transportation Planner, though one should be a legally required member of every planning board at every level of governance.

Understanding the Differences Between American and Other Railroads

In Europe and many other international locations you’ll find excellent public or private local, regional, and even international transportation services. In America the flacks who call themselves ‘writers’ or ‘journalists’ publish endless broadsides describing the pleasures of travel in those places. They never bother to inform their readers and viewers that they are comparing sweet succulent peaches to onions. The whole of western Europe would drop unseen into the bottomless pit that is the midwestern United States, but more on point, the Europeans were in on the development of transportation from the ground up, starting in the early 19th Century with systems that had royal and national sponsorship. One might remember an episode of the PBS Mini-Series “Victoria” that depicted the young queen and her consort, Prince Albert, a prominent sponsor of technology, riding in a glorious open car behind the Stourbridge Lion (An actual replica) a part of the romanticized tale.

“Saw the steam carriage pass with surprising quickness, striking sparks as it flew along the railroad, enveloped in clouds of smoke and making a loud noise. It was a curious thing indeed!” [Circa 1837][1]

It would actually wait five years before Victoria would ride a train in a specially designed car built by the Great Western Railway at Prince Albert’s request, that took the royal couple from Windsor Castle to Paddington Station in London, the queen wrote in a letter,

“We arrived here yesterday morning [Buckingham Palace], having come by the railroad, from Windsor, in half an hour, free from dust and crowd and heat, and I am quite charmed with it.” [Circa 1842][2]

These occurrences were bracketed by the nascent commercial development in the United States that lacked any national authority or license but held State Charters, the Baltimore & Ohio and the Camden and Amboy Railroads in 1830 and the Central Railroad of New Jersey in 1847. There would be no Federal Recognition or financial promotion by government until the Lincoln Administration made the Pacific Railway Act law in 1862. This aided railway and service expansions across the west in the wild and uncertain, often corrupt political times following the Civil War by granting to the Railroad building a line alternating sections of land parallel to the authorized rights of way that were approved. The fact that the Federal Government did not ever own or hold title to these ‘granted’ lands was never a significant issue. In the southwest these grants gave away legally titled lands whose titles predated the United States, and in the midwest often included lands that were solemnly concluded Treaty Lands given to Native Americans to secure peaceful coexistence.

Things worked well, in spite of labor disputes, often violent, and political interference by reformers seeking to root out corruption and socialists who sought to destroy capitalism, advocating unworkable ideas, the roots of socialism. Advocating ideas that were directly antithetical to the proposition of Adam Smith’s thesis expounded in “The Wealth of Nations,” proposing that the user of services could tell the purveyor of those services what they cost. Though few they were especially virulent in a troubled time.

A History of Transit Oriented Development: An Accidental Formula

Still, commercial railroading in the United States continued to expand until it reached a peak shortly after the end of the 1st World War following the reestablishment of commercial railroading in .

In the period just prior to that war some railroad service areas suffered from combative levels of competition. This endangered the whole transportation web because some of the endangered roads were essential bridge routes between major hubs. When the US. Entered the war in April of 1917 it was evident that many of the railroads would, because of the penny-pinching the unregulated competition had created, be unable to serve the needs of the nation. The Wilson Administration federalized the railroads for the duration, establishing the US Railroad Administration. This had two major effects, it reversed the penny-pinching, with billions of dollars of new equipment and facilities and it stabilized the post-war management picture. When the Transportation Act, 1920, commonly known as the Esch–Cummins Act, passed the larger, more profitable roads swallowed many of the marginal smaller roads to insure their ability to serve their customers efficiently.

We had, by trail, error, and accident created a system of interlocked, independent commercial companies that was as close to perfect as one could achieve given the intermodal connections and technologies of the times. In many urban and suburban areas it was possible to go less than a mile, then ride either a commercial or public local transportation system to an interlocked regional system. And to transfer to large nationally interlocked system and to travel to almost anywhere in the country.

Almost immediately politics and other national situations began cutting into this efficiency. By the time the Franklin Roosevelt Administration took office in 1933 there was a National Depression and while still relatively healthy the nation's railroads suffered as well. When FDR demanded political favors that represented a huge impact on their expenses when income was down and profits almost nonexistent, the railroads said no. Roosevelt retaliated by promoting their competition, the motor freight industry and aviation passenger industries, building airports and roads at no cost to them, to enhance their viability and profitability. This and further political actions by the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations made it almost impossible for the Railroads to maintain an operational budget, necessary for the normal operations of business. Eastern railroads that served major metropolitan area, New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington and etc. couldn’t effectively fund the most expensive drain on their operations their commuter and regional passenger networks. When business customers compare travel times the fact that an airplane took two hours to get to Chicago from New York City compared with the train, taking overnight wiped out the once dependable business passengers, so things just got worse. Then the Truman used the National Emergency of a Coal Strike just prior to the onset of winter to write a pro-labor executive order that mandated a 40 hour 5 day work week with overtime rates after 40 hours and the financial die was cast.

Most Americans caught up in the Depression and then the 2nd World War didn’t notice what this cost them, and many wouldn’t until the Penn-

Central Bankruptcy and the cascading railroad failures virtually paralyzed the eastern and particularly the northeastern states, nearly starting another Depression.

Pennsylvania Governor, Philadelphia and Wilmington’s Mayors all saw the “Words of the Prophet Painted on the Subway Walls.”[3] effected legislation that changed Philadelphia’s PTC public company to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority in 1965. This created the first Regional Transit System.

Other systems sprung up around the country after that as the Metra in Chicago and the NY MTA became regional by assuming the Long Island Railroad and forming Metro North. Unfortunately these Regional Urban/Suburban are seriously handicapped by the very nature of suburban sprawl, they lack sufficient automobile parking in close proximity to the rail and bus lines and most also lack a local public bus service to connect with the regional carriers systems.

Transit Oriented Development is the Answer

And it is a principle interest for communities and their planning boards, clusters of dwellings, be they condominiums, apartment or conjoined houses (2, 3, or 4 unit sets)with adequate local public or commercial transportation works best. But housing developments can be acceptable,

especially if they are readily accessible for the medium sized busses that are normally used for these purposes.

Transit Oriented Development Saves the Environment

In these days of increasing concern for our environment, communities, but particularly metropolitan areas and cities are facing extreme demands to regulate and reduce their Carbon Footprint. A very large portion of this statistic is vehicle emissions. Reducing the number of vehicles on the road is a key way of reducing the emission statistic.

[1] Recollections Blog; <https://recollections.biz/blog/2751-2/>; Retrieved, 9/28/2019 11:24:44 PM

[2] I.B.I.D. 9/28/2019 11:36:12 PM

[3] Paul Simon; “Sounds of Silence;” ASCAP 1965, paraphrased.