A double-stack intermodal train prepares to depart the Arlington Rail Yard on the Staten Island Railroad | Photo by Joshua Nelson

Many heralded the opening of the High Line for its innovative reclaiming of a disused freight rail line as a public, open space. Its abandonment was due, in part, to the rise of interstate trucking since the 1950s, along with changes to the economic geography and industrial practices of New York and its food industries. But just because the city no longer conveys freight via rail through the West Side of Manhattan does not mean that our city no longer has the need for the kind of hard infrastructure that moves goods cheaply, efficiently and reliably from point A to point B.

While the deindustrialization of cities like New York has accelerated over the past fifty years, our awareness of the consumption of environmental resources has grown: we can now evaluate all commodities through terms like carbon footprint, locally sourced or eco-friendly. But without deeper engagement and familiarity with the supply chain, environmental consciousness — not to mention sophisticated economic development strategy — only goes so far. When we think about infrastructure, the benefits of commuter mass transit are well-known, but we often fall short of extending the same logic to the transportation of goods. Freight trains might not be the most efficient thing that comes to mind, until we start comparing them to the trucks that dominate our distribution networks.

Joshua Nelson oversees freight rail operations at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. We sat down with him to help shine a light on some aspects of the supply chain that might not be topics of everyday conversation. Since he’s one of the only people working on these issues at the municipal level, we wanted to know exactly what his job entails, in order to peer into the city’s complex networks of transportation logistics. Trains don’t just get people to work, they also get potatoes to the grocery store, scrap metal to the recycling plant and they just might help keep our city competitive in environmental, economic and infrastructural terms.

– C.S.

The freight rail network of the New York City metropolitan area

A CONVERSATION WITH JOSHUA NELSON

What do you do?
I do planning and policy for the city with respect to freight rail operations and development. This means I make sure that the city has options when it comes to rail freight transportation and that there’s competition in the city among different freight rail carriers. I also do asset management work with the city’s three separate facilities that we own. The City has rail assets in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, at the New York City Terminal Produce Market in Hunts Point in the Bronx, and then the Staten Island Railroad (PDF) on the western shore of Staten Island, which was rehabilitated in 2007 by the City and the Port Authority.

How did you first get interested in rail infrastructure?
I’ve always loved transportation. My father’s a locomotive engineer, who recently celebrated 40 years on the railroad. He worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad in northern Utah and now works for the Union Pacific Railroad. So I grew up loving transportation, but never fully realized I could make a career out of it. After getting into urban planning in college, I found work in traditional transit planning. I worked for two different transit authorities, one in Salt Lake and one in Seattle. And after studying transportation planning in graduate school, an opportunity came up here, at New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, to work with freight rail. It’s a unique position: most cities don’t have somebody devoted to issues of freight rail exclusively. Most often, the planning functions associated with freight happen at the state level, not necessarily the municipal level.

How does rail compare to other modes of freight transport?
In terms of transporting freight, rail is most often compared to truck. There are some other alternatives, like inland waterway movements, but by and large, it’s rail versus truck. There are significant benefits to using freight rail. First, there is the technological advantage: a locomotive pulling a train of 100 rail cars can be operated by two individuals, an engineer and a conductor. A truck carries 1/3 of what a single rail car can carry, and each truck requires one driver. So you need 300 trucks and 300 drivers to transport the equivalent amount of cargo as one 100-car train. Freight requires a fraction of the labor, which translates into significant cost savings for the customer.

1 locomotive engineer + 1 conductor carries 300 truck loads; 1 truck driver carries 1 truck load

Second is the environmental advantage. Rail is more fuel-efficient than trucking. Of course, locomotives pollute. But replacing 300 tractor-trailers with one or two locomotives is obviously going to provide a net benefit in environmental terms. Overall, the big advantage is rail’s ability to transport a lot of stuff very cheaply over a very long distance.

A common concern is that railroads, because they’re inherently monopolistic, often don’t provide the levels of customer service that people require. So, here in New York, we’re constantly working with all of our freight rail partners to make sure that the businesses that do receive services from the railroads are getting what they need.

How does freight rail interface with other modes of freight? Particularly the maritime infrastructure, like tugboats and barges?
When people think of freight transportation, they often think of container ships, which is what we call intermodal containerized service. The premise of intermodal transportation is that when you’re switching between modes (say from ship to truck or to rail) you don’t have to unload a whole bunch of product from a ship and individually load it into a boxcar for rail transport. Instead, you just put everything in one container that stays closed and is picked off that ship, put directly onto a railcar, and taken to wherever its final destination is in the middle of the country. While containerization in the maritime industry had its origins in the late ’50s, the intermodal revolution on the rails has really come about in the last twenty years, alongside the booming trade with China. Southern Pacific Railroad introduced the first double-stack container car in the late 1970s, which made handling intermodal containers extremely cost-effective for the railroads. By the late 1980s, the technology was fully embraced by the railroads and intermodal really took off. Today, intermodal traffic accounts for approximately 20% of revenue for U.S. railroads.

The New York Container Terminal at Howland Hook, Staten Island | Photo by Joshua Nelson

Before intermodal, you had to unload the ship by hand, break bulk, and then get that cargo into a boxcar. If that boxcar was terminating in a place where there’d be a truck trip to a final destination, then all those goods would have to be unloaded manually and put into the truck. It was extremely costly and the multiple “touches” always led to the potential for damaged goods.

Here in New York, we have a unique operation where there’s a much more direct interface between the maritime world and the rail world, and that’s in the “car-float” operation that takes place between Greenville, NJ and Sunset Park in Brooklyn. It’s the last vestige of this huge network of barges and tugs that used to be owned by all the private freight rail carriers in the city. Because of the lack of bridges across New York Harbor, these railroads actually put rail cars onto the barges and used tugboats to deliver them to pier sheds all throughout the city, and also to interchange with other railroads.

A carfloat approaches the 51st St Float Bridge in Sunset Park, Brooklyn | Photo by Joshua Nelson

In New York City, how does most imported cargo get to market?
The vast majority, by tonnage, is trucked into the city. According to a 2004 report by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, which is our local Metropolitan Planning Organization, freight rail’s share of the cargo flow is right about 1%. It’s very small when you compare it to everything else.

So 99% of our cargo is trucked from our ports?
Pretty much. Most goods don’t travel from port to the end user immediately; it’s not like it goes from a boat straight to your local Target. Often, goods move from the port facilities to a distribution center, many of which are off exits 7 and 8a on the New Jersey Turnpike, and also in Eastern Pennsylvania. Everything gets consolidated in these big distribution centers, and then trucks take the goods from there to make deliveries throughout the city.

Trucks at the Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market | Photo by Andreas Burgess

It’s important to note that there is a difference between cargo that terminates in the Port of New York and New Jersey, 100% of which is trucked to these distribution centers, and cargo that passes through the port. Approximately 10-15% of the cargo that enters the Port of New York and New Jersey on its way to, say, Chicago, Cleveland or St. Louis, leaves the port by rail on its way to other destinations.

Something we’re exploring, which is part of the Sunset Park vision plan and part of the Community Board 7′s 197(a) plan and in the latest update to PlaNYC, is turning two railyards in Brooklyn into “transload” facilities, places where you can bring in a railcar of goods and transfer all those goods to truck. That way, someone who doesn’t have a rail spur right into their building or their backyard can nonetheless pick up their goods by driving a truck, say, a mile and a half into Brooklyn, rather than moving their goods hundreds of miles by truck entirely. The city really lacks those kinds of facilities, and we think it’s important to develop them.

Tell me a little bit more about the three freight rail assets that the City maintains.
The Staten Island Railroad opened in April of 2007 and, for all intents and purposes, has been a huge success. When they did the initial projections for how much traffic they thought they would generate, I think it was 1/3 of what it’s generating today. The trackage formerly belonged to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) and, later, CSX Transportation. In recent years, the only customer was the Proctor & Gamble facility at Port Ivory, on the northwest shore of Staten Island. After Proctor & Gamble ceased operations there, the City acquired the right-of-way with the intention of reactivating the rail line. The City also saw the route as a means of effectuating its 2006 solid waste management plan.

The Port Authority and the City partnered and put $72,000,000 into the rehabilitation of the railroad in order to create direct access to the Howland Hook container port facility and also to the newly constructed Staten Island waste transfer facility in the Fresh Kills area. The container port really relies upon on-dock rail service and, of course, the Department of Sanitation definitely benefits from being able to export the waste by rail as opposed to truck. Now the City can shift its solid waste disposal out of Staten Island while retaining a significant number of jobs connected to solid waste disposal industry on the Island. And, besides saving money, the railroad eliminates about 90,000 truck trips, on average, from our roads every year. So that’s a big deal.

Double-stack container cars in the Arlington Rail Yard near Howland Hook Marine Terminal, Staten Island | Photo by Andreas Burgess

Then in the Bronx, the City maintains a relatively short spur that leads to the Hunts Point Produce Market. This line is important to us, and to the cooperators of the produce market, because it provides an alternative to truck. Five days a week, about 3-4% of the produce in the market comes in by rail as opposed to truck. The City is very focused on expanding the Produce Market and giving the cooperators what they need to continue to provide the valuable services that they do to all the restaurants, bodegas and grocers across New York City.

The cooperators of the market like rail because it’s cheaper by a significant price differential, but not all products can handle the long transit time. It takes about ten to twelve days for a boxcar of produce to make its way across the country, so the kinds of fresh produce that are still good after that kind of journey are what we call “hardwear”: potatoes, onions, sometimes carrots, coming from the growing regions of Eastern Idaho, Western Washington and sometimes California.

A locomotive crew switches refrigerated boxcars at the Hunts Point Produce Market | Photo by Joshua Nelson

The third of the City-owned freight rail assets, in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, is what we call the Brooklyn Waterfront Rail system — and I think this is the most exciting piece of the freight rail puzzle right now.

It’s comprised of components of a number of different old railroads: the Bush Terminal Railroad and the New York Connecting Railroad, which was operated jointly by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad and the Long Island Railroad (when previously owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad). What’s left of these networks is some trackage between 29th and 65th Streets to the west of 1st Avenue in Sunset Park. It’s a system that was all under private ownership until the Port Authority bought it in 2008, and it is in need of significant capital upgrades. So we’re working with the Port Authority on updating the railroad’s old service contract with modern legal terms; bringing everything into a state of good repair on the Brooklyn waterfront; and making capital improvements to enhance our ability to market the rail line and to market parcels within the Sunset Park area to companies that would be interested in rail service.

The Brooklyn Waterfront Rail System

What kind of companies are those?
For example, one of the companies that will be relocating to the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal (SBMT) is the Axis Group, an auto import/export distributer. They’ll be bringing in import vehicles via deep-draft ship and using the Marine Terminal area as a distribution facility. A portion of those vehicles will leave SBMT by rail. Another tenant is Sims Metal Management, which is building a municipal recycling facility in partnership with the NYC Department of Sanitation and they want to be able to ship out repurposed recyclables by rail. So those are two totally different kinds of operations: one ships out recycled tin cans and baled waste for sale on the domestic commodity markets, and the other ships out shiny, brand new automobiles.

What do you wish people understood better about freight rail and why it’s important for New York?
What I would encourage people to do is to think about their supply chain in general. When you’re on line at Duane Reade or the grocery store, take a look at whatever you have in your hand and ask yourself: “Where did this avocado come from? And how the heck did it get here?” By and large, when people think of transportation, they think of it in terms of something they don’t want around them: they don’t want trucks or freight trains rumbling past their door. But at the same time, they want a huge variety of consumer products when they walk into the store, and they want cheap prices. I think freight rail, for New Yorkers, is a totally unseen part of life in the city that the average person doesn’t think about, but it’s definitely there. And although it doesn’t handle a large portion of the overall traffic that we have coming into the city, it’s still very important.

I think that the more that we can encourage rail freight activity, the more transportation options small businesses will have and the more competitive the city will be. It’s a much more positive approach to the city’s supply chains, not only in relation to consumer products, but to anything that is manufactured, either on greater Long Island or within the city.

Does encouraging usually mean expanding the infrastructure?
I think in some cases it means expanding infrastructure, but it also means maximizing and leveraging what you already have. In a lot of cases, when we talk about the proposals for the 65th Street Rail Yard and the 51st Street Rail Yard to develop these transload facilities, this is land that the City owns that could be utilized in a much more robust way. It’s less a question of building railroads or building new infrastructure than it is about bringing everything to a state of good repair and then marketing the facilities we have to utilize them to their full potential.

"Where did this avocado come from? And how the heck did it get here?"

Graphics by Marcelo López-Dinardi.

Joshua Nelson is an Assistant Vice President at the New York City Economic Development Corporation specializing in freight rail transportation. He is responsible for managing the City’s freight rail assets while also developing goods movement policies that support more modal balance in the regional transportation system. Previous transportation experience includes improving the on-time reliability of Mexico City’s Metrobús bus rapid transit system, promoting rideshare programs in Seattle and launching the TRAX light rail system in Salt Lake City. Joshua received a BA and BS from the University of Utah and holds both a Master of Science in Transportation and a Master in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Deputy Secretary of Transportation John D. Porcari with Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood | Photo courtesy of Andy Bossi

Deputy Secretary Porcari began his talk with a theme driving much of political discourse today: economic recovery. Explaining the role of the Recovery Act in promoting jobs growth, Deputy Secretary Porcari stressed that the Recovery Act and grants programs such as Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) had “reestablished connections we had lost” between the federal government and local agencies. He pointed out that programs such as TIGER, which was the source of $83 million in funds for the first phase of Moynihan Station in New York City, and the recently announced Federal Transit Authority Livability Grants, which encourage local agencies to incorporate transportation improvements early into the planning process, provide direct funds to mayors and to local and regional governments to deliver transportation services to their communities. The TIGER program, which was allocated $1.5 billion in the Recovery Act, was conceived as a national competition to spotlight multi-modal solutions to drive economic recovery on the local scale. Deputy Secretary Porcari argued that these connections with municipal and local-level agencies through direct funding have been quietly shifting public perception away from the idea that the US DOT’s primary relationship is with State-level DOTs. His analysis suggested that metropolitan areas, municipalities and local communities have become incubators of transportation innovation with a broader impact on state- and national-level transportation initiatives.

The Deputy Secretary identified two factors that define an effective funding strategy: consistency and predictability, both of which are lacking in current policy. Due to reauthorization uncertainty and myopic strategies built around short-term budget and political cycles, many argue that the government lacks a systematic, long-term solution to transportation financing. While President Obama devoted one-third of the last State of the Union speech to infrastructure innovation, no specific funding sources have been identified for much of these proposals. A federal infrastructure bank is still in its gestational stages and a surface transportation bill is stalled while Congress remains mired in the deficit debate. Deputy Secretary Porcari, sharing President Obama’s affinity for letter grade self-evaluations, assigned the current federal financing policy a D-/F grade.

Deputy Secretary Porcari concluded his remarks with the observation that “transportation is fundamentally a generational challenge” and that high speed rail will be one way in which the current generation secures a legacy for subsequent generations. He emphasized that the government is not seeking to replace current infrastructure with high speed rail or prioritize it over other modes, but rather is responding to the demographic reality of 2050, when the US population is slated to increase by 100 million in largely urban or rapidly urbanizing areas.

Secretary LaHood reinforced the ideas set forth by Deputy Secretary Porcari and, as a mouthpiece for the administration on transportation issues, reiterated President Obama’s goal to provide 80% of all Americans access to high speed rail in the next 25 years. The idea that high speed rail is the future of transportation in the US has become highly politicized and hotly debated; three states — Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida — have already turned down federal funds for high speed rail. These funds have been redistributed to fifteen states and Amtrak, which has identified the NYC-DC corridor as an underutilized asset for which rail can serve commuters in the region.

Secretary LaHood drew a parallel between President Eisenhower’s implementation of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, considered to be one of the most massive public works projects in US history, and President Obama’s blueprint for high speed rail today. Secretary LaHood observed that there was no established funding mechanism for the interstate program when it was first authorized but the project still moved forward. Ultimately the federal government agreed to pay 90% of the required funds, reducing the amount required by individual states, because state governors were wary of increasing taxes. But with impending spending cuts by the federal government, especially in light of the current deficit, a largely federally-funded solution seems uncertain, if not unlikely.

Secretary LaHood envisions high speed rail as an infrastructure project that, despite current opposition, will eventually become an integral part of transportation in daily life. He stressed Deputy Secretary Porcari’s point that the future of transportation comes down to options and providing a growing population with more modes of transport from which to choose, whether this is through a streetcar system (manufactured in the United States, he noted) in a single metropolitan area or a high speed rail system connecting several areas. In discussing how high speed rail has become highly politicized, Secretary LaHood responded to an audience member’s question — “why are Republicans against high speed rail?” — by using himself as an example of a Republican who supports the initiative and citing that only three Republican governors have turned down high speed rail funds (thus far, it should be noted). He advised the audience not to be dissuaded by partisan politics and stated that transportation has always been a bipartisan issue, a viewpoint many are sure to challenge.

Secretary LaHood and Deputy Secretary Porcari were aligned in their message that Americans want high speed rail and that the DOT is seeking to “reconnect transportation to qualities that Americans hold dear,” such as economic growth and improved quality of life. The whirlwind hour-long synopsis of current transportation issues that was cohesive in message but scant on specifics concluded with the administration’s achievements in the past two years, including a $48 billion stimulus plan which has put 65,000 Americans to work on 15,000 projects. The elephant in the room during this analysis was the debt ceiling debate currently raging in Congress. The significant role that the federal government plays in funding local, state and regional projects cannot be discounted, but with the government’s long-term discretionary spending plan under scrutiny, transportation funds are specifically at stake. Moving forward, fare increases, taxes and the privatization of transportation projects may be some ways in which local and state agencies will have to make up for the shortfall in federal funds. While Congress continues to debate the debt ceiling, the future of transportation funding remains in limbo. However, both officials made it clear that infrastructure financing needs to be more than a short-term priority.

Young Professionals in Transportation Board | Photo courtesy of Andy Bossi

Manasvi Menon lives in NYC and works in transportation. She is on the board of Young Professionals in Transportation, New York, New York Chapter.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

HUMAN IMPACT ON THE EARTH
It’s Earth Day! First up, take a look at this series of maps and graphics from NationalJournal.com that shows the extent of our impact on our land and in our oceans as a result of population density, land transformation, accessibility, electric-power infrastructure, commercial fishing, cargo shipping and more.

NEW BUILDING BENCHMARKING GRADES
A new benchmarking law will take effect on May 1st. According to The Architect’s Newspaper, owners of buildings over 50,000 square feet will be required to report water and energy use through the EPA’s Portfolio Manager Tool; non-compliant owners will get hit with fines. The data submitted will lead to an efficiency grade that tenants — or potential buyers — will be able to check on the Department of Buildings website. The hope is that as owners and tenants begin to understand how their buildings are performing, the market will shift toward efficiency, helping reach broader, zero-emission goals.

2009 Vision for High-Speed Rail via whitehouse.gov

HIGH-SPEED RAIL FUNDING: DE-RAILED
Last weekend marked the official elimination of the original $2.5 Billion set aside for high speed rail. Transportation on the whole was damaged by the cuts — as President Obama said at a DNC event last week, budget cuts do not just fail to include high-speed rail, but is “a vision that says we can’t afford to rebuild our roads and our bridges.” See more on the cuts to transportation in Infrastructurist’s coverage of the news or read a detailed report on the budgetary amendments in this House Appropriations Committee summary PDF.

BLUE URBANISM
“More than half of the U.S. population lives in coastal counties adjacent to the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and Great Lakes.” Blue Urbanism begs the planning and design world to think about this fact, and see cities through the lens of the open water. As our planet gets bluer, cities are noticing. Traditional borders are moving and port cities are looking at the oceans a new ways. Beyond monitoring water quality or noticing the loss of marine biodiversity, coastal cities across the world are redeveloping plans to include sustainable waterfronts. The Cape Cod Planning Commission recently expanded an Ocean Management Planning District, including a half million acres of open ocean, to evaluate the scale, location and efficacy of offshore wind turbines. New York City just released the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan to increase use of waterways. Rotterdam is practically designing their city around the water. Read more on the growth of Blue Urbanism in Design Observer’s fascinating piece on this growing movement.

PROCRO NO MORE
Sick of hearing neighborhood names like SoBro, ProCro or SoHa — or trying to figure out where they are? The New York Times City Room blog recently reported that Brooklyn Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries is reeling about the realty practice of renaming NYC neighborhoods to feign desirability. Jeffries wants to introduce a new bill that would require a series of approvals for neighborhood renaming from the City Council, the mayor and community boards. “It’s the Wild West in New York City right now,” he said. “Brokers are allowed to essentially pull names out of thin air in order to rebrand a neighborhood and have the effect of raising rents or home prices.”

PRATT CENTER AND BROOKINGS REPORT ON URBAN MANUFACTURING
A report by the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program and the Pratt Center for Community Development, “The Federal Role in Supporting Urban Manufacturing,” points to the changing geography of our nation’s production sector and how federal and municipal government should work to support its growth and development. The report highlights the need for smaller urban manufacturer support. To take a closer look at the recommendations see Pratt Center’s coverage, download the full report or download the case studies. In 2009, Adam Friedman, Director of the Pratt Center, gave Omnibus readers a primer on the importance of manufacturing to New York. Check it out here.

EVENTS + TODOs
The Skyscraper as Citizen: A Lecture by Henry N. Cobb. Center for Architecture is hosting an event to discuss “Reflections on the Public Life of Private Buildings,” with special attention to Boston’s John Hancock Tower. Monday, April 25, 6-8 PM, Monday, April 25th.

MAS Walking Tour: Rethinking the Sheridan: From Bronx River to Hunts Point Explore the impact of the Sheridan Expressway on the neighborhoods that border it from a pedestrian vantage point, Saturday, April 23, 11:00 a.m. Register here.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Obscura Day Poster | Image by Oliver Munday

Happy April Fool’s Day! For a little urban planning humor, be sure to check out Planetizen’s April 1st Edition — who knew those guys were so funny?
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INTERNATIONAL OBSCURA DAY
For its second annual International Obscura Day, Atlas Obscura offers excursions into unexpected corners of world cities — New York, of course, included. On April 9th, you have the chance to explore the inside of the Catacombs at the Greenwood Cemetery, tour the Ghost ships of Coney Island Creek (with promised tales of rum-runners, whalers and a home-made submarine), or grab a beer and hop on a bike for a bike tour through the historic breweries of Brooklyn and Queens, among other urban adventures.
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BRINGING MANUFACTURING BACK TO THE CITY
The Times reports on the place-based future of manufacturing in an opinion piece that heralds a field often assumed outsourced for good as an opportunity to create jobs and strengthen urban communities. The piece profiles the organizations SF Made and Made in NYC, which serve as networks for local manufacturing businesses, provide resources for small start-ups and connect consumers to locally-sourced products. This reinvigoration of the manufacturing sector and the press it’s getting suggest that people are increasingly turning to independently-owned, small-scale enterprises to boost the economy, perhaps hoping that acting local can accomplish the financial resuscitation larger corporations have been slow to spur. It also demonstrates a demand to integrate production with community in what Mike Dwight, founder of SFMade, calls “geographic ingredient branding,” which he defines as “a way to ‘brand’ the history, culture, personality and natural beauty of [a] city as a means to uniquely differentiate local manufacturers.” .

A BIG NIGHT FOR APPS
Redefining the “networked city,” urban apps are becoming an increasingly ubiquitous way to connect with a city and its citizens. Last night a committee of technology innovators and municipal leaders announced the winners of the 2011 NYC BigApps2.0 competition, selecting applications that alert users about important urban information ranging from nearby public art to restaurants in violation of health code. Architizer reports on the event, with a run down of some of the winning apps. Roadify, the Grand Prize winner last night, was profiled recently on Transportation Nation. This handy app fuses the urban trends of crowd-sourcing, smart phone navigating and MTA updates, allowing subway riders to update one another on the conditions of their commute and thus provide more immediate transit news than the MTA’s site. While the subway may not be wired, the creators of Roadify hope info from users entering and exiting the station will piece together an accurate picture of whats going on underground.
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STATES AND THE METRO ECONOMY
Over on The Avenue (a collaborative blog from Brookings and The New Republic), Jennifer Bradley asks when states will finally recognize their dependence on metropolitan economies. Her piece summarizes a longer article, co-written with metro-area evangelist Bruce Katz, in Democracy Journal and posits that the reflection prompted by the Great Recession should lead to a restructuring of state government, one that prioritizes the needs of metro areas. The argument is not new, but the historical overview, which reaches back to the pivotal ceding of states’ rights during the 1789 ratification of the US Constitution, is helpful and refreshingly well informed.
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TURNING TRAFFIC INTO ELECTRICITY
Feeling good vibrations in California, State Assemblyman Mike Gatto proposed a bill that will test the use of vibrational energy emitted by automobile traffic to harness electricity. Employing piezoelectricity – a technology that converts the work of physical motion into electricity (which Omnibus readers may recall from Carmen Trudell and Jenny Broutin’s fluxxlab project) — and following the design of similar systems in Italy and Israel, California’s plan will place sensors under roadways and then convert the strain placed on them by cars into an electric charge, which is then channeled into the grid. According to Gatto, a one-lane highway is able to produce 44 megawatts over the course of a year. As a post on the Freshkills Blog points out, piezoelectricity has been used to capture energy in wind, walking and even dancing, so lets hope more permutations of its technology travel to this city.
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Eduardo Souto de Moura's Braga Stadium | photo by Luis Ferreira Alves via Architectural Record

PRITZKER PRIZE WINNER ANNOUNCED
On Monday, the Pritzker Prize Committee announced Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Mora as its 2011 winner. De Mora’s designs, mostly built in Portugal, are softly modernist, employing smooth geometries and a design lexicon that reflects local heritage and a sense of place. As an article in Architectural Record points out, his attention of scale and subtlety affirms a trend among the Pritzker jury in recent years to favor “craft, local scale, and sensibility over architectural extravagance” – welcome values that preserve longevity and strong aesthetics in a time when we need to re-evaluate the impact of hasty, ostentatious building.
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
High-speed rail has been a hot topic for discussion of late, after the Obama administration committed $53 billion to the construction of a high-speed rail network and set a goal to connect 80% of Americans to its service by 2050. This project will undoubtedly transform the American landscape, and the Van Alen Institute is asking architects, planners and artists to envision what our high-speed future may look like. The Life at the Speed of Rail competition seeks design projects and imagined narratives that will address the impacts of new infrastructure, aiming to better inform the design decisions for the construction of the network. The deadline is May 21st, 2011.
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EVENTS
Over the next month, the downtown landscape will be transformed by a host of artists and cultural institutions – Urban Omnibus among them – leading up to the Festival of Ideas for the New City. Held from May 4-8, the festival is a collaboration between the New Museum, the Architectural League and a long list other cultural institutions, that will host an array of discussions, events and urban interventions to explore the themes of the Heterogeneous City, the Networked City, the Reconfigured City and the Sustainable City. Stay tuned for many more updates from us, including more details about Urban Omnibus’ own contribution to the event.

Next Wednesday, Omnibus Editor Cassim Shepard will be discussing some of the ideas behind and projects presented on Urban Omnibus in the context of other work he’s done at the intersection of urbanism and creative media-making. The lecture, at noon at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (20 Cooper Square at 5th Street), is free and open to the public.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

INTELLIGENT INFRASTRUCTURE
Also next week, an impressive collection of minds from technology, government, architecture and academia will convene for a conference hosted by the Economist entitled “Intelligent Infrastructure: the Architecture of Progress.” We’re not only excited about this event because the title manages to cluster some of UO’s favorite words, but also because we will be on hand to report on the proceedings. Of particular interest to Omnibus readers will be talks by Frank Gehry, Saskia Sassen, Carlo Ratti, Thom Mayne, Petra Todorovich, Jaime Lerner, Liz Diller and Cas Holloway. Check out a full list here. Stay tuned!
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EMERGING PLAN FOR NATIONAL RAILWAY
The Infrastructurist offers some historical perspective on the $53 billion high speed rail plan announced yesterday by Joe Biden. The piece compares the administration’s proposal to FDR’s study for a national expressway system that eventually became the interstate highway system. The new plan would be implemented over the next six years and aims to cross the country with a network of connecting rail corridors operating at different speeds: core express, regional and emerging (we question a passenger’s eagerness to hop aboard the “emerging” train from New York to Boston). Of course, such a large investment has been met with scrutiny in Congress, so we will keep our eye on how the debate between budget concerns and infrastructure priorities plays out.
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TRIUMPH OF CITIES
“Cities thrive because they host quality conversations, not because they have new buildings and convention centers,” writes David Brooks in a column praising Edward Glaeser’s new book The Triumph of Cities. Brooks cites Chicago as an example of a vital city fueled by updated housing stock, incentives to small business, strong leadership and — crucially — face-to-face political communication. In an age of global information flows, Glaeser argues for the increased need for dense city centers where creative citizens can clash and collaborate in person, generating ideas and productivity. But the social implications of density and diversity go beyond its financial yield. As an insightful UO commenter notes, many of the complex dynamics Suketu Mehta discusses in this week’s feature reflect the kinds of complex processes Glaeser analyzes.
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SENSORED CITY
Complain excessively to no one in particular and apparently the powers that be will do something about it. Parking, seemingly everyone’s go-to rant, is now being sensored on Roosevelt Island. The Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation is creating a smart phone application that alerts drivers to parking spaces near their destination. As an article in Capital magazine points out, cities are already laced with sensors, detecting everything from noise pollution to temperature to red light violations. Sure, it sounds a little Orwellian, but municipal governments are looking for new ways to translate crowdsourced urban data into programs that will increase the efficiency and comfort of navigating the city. First step, finding a parking spot.
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A BROWNFIELD FAILURE
New York’s Brownfield Clean Up program is largely ignoring the lower income and minority neighborhoods it was intended to aid, according to the watchdog group Environmental Advocates of New York (EANY). Instead of allocating tax credit to developers for resuscitating sites in areas with incomes below the poverty line and in neighborhoods with large African American and Latino populations, funds are largely going more economically stable communities, as detailed in EANY’s analysis.
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HESTER STREET OBSERVED
Hester Street Collaborative (HSC) and parent firm Leroy Street Studio get some much deserved attention in a Change Observer piece that explores their partnership as a paradigm of architecture for public good. Hester Street has had its hands in many public space projects around New York, like the Allen street “mall-terations” and People Make Parks. HSC interfaces between community groups and public agencies to realize design/build initiatives in neighborhoods traditionally underserved by architects, making them a perennial Omnibus favorite.
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FIVE BOROUGH FARM UPDATE
If last month’s Omnibus interview with Nevin Cohen of the Five Borough Farm project piqued your interest, read the Design Trust for Public Space’s project update. A post on their blog recaps the conversations from a December workshop on the current state of urban farming and gardening and future plans for urban agriculture. The workshop touched on everything from the goals of the farmers to how they evaluate their success, and generated one-on-one discussions to expand the resources of the Five Borough Farm.
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CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS
Friends of the Pleistocene (authors of “Geologic City”) are looking for brief writings and visual essays “plumbing the geologic depth of ‘now’” for their upcoming book, Making a Geologic Turn. As explained on their blog, this “geologic turn” is evident in the artists, philosophers, and cultural commentators who prove that geology is “not only an area of scientific study – it’s also a condition of daily life.” Intrigued? Visit Friends of the Pleistocene for more information.

Connections: The Gowanus Lowline is design ideas competition for Brooklyn’s Superfunded Gowanus Canal. Sponsored by the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation and juried by a commanding panel of architects and urbanists, Connections invites “speculation on the value of urban development of post-industrial lands, and the possibility of dynamic, pedestrian-oriented architecture that either passively or actively engages with the Canal and the surrounding watershed.”
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CHINESE NEW YEAR PICTURES
If you missed last weekend’s Chinese New Year festivities, or just want to relive the joy of bringing in the Year of the Rabbit, check out Flavorwire’s New York City’s Chinese New Year Parade in Photos.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

James A. Farley Post Office, photo by Flickr user wallyg.

This week brought some activity back to the Moynihan Station project. The Empire State Development Corporation has officially selected Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for the first phase of the project, which exclusively involves interior and underground infrastructure. SOM says their design will alleviate foot traffic, improve rail signals and train capacity for the many thousands of passengers who travel through the station each year. Though renovation of the old Farley Post Office remains unfunded, this progress encourages us to imagine all that the new station might be.

Bird to the North reports on a successful experiment with traffic calming measures in Brooklyn Heights.  A widening of the sidewalk at the end of the block creates a narrow passage through which cars can pass, preventing them from speeding through the intersection to catch a green light. Not only do they slow traffic, they also make the city streets that much easier for pedestrians to get across.

In ribbon-cutting news, this week the city received its first ever officially-green-LEED certified New York Public Library. Gothamist reports on the new Battery Park City branch, located at 175 North End Avenue for anyone who wants to stop by. Then, next week brings the opening ceremony for Pier One, the first completed section of Brooklyn Bridge Park.  Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Paterson and various council and assemblymen will gather at 9:30 a.m. Monday, March 22nd, just one week after the state handed over control of the project to the city.

Non-profit organization Pathways to Housing has launched an interactive projection campaign, currently traveling the streets of Manhattan. Designed by Sarkissian Mason, the video installation incorporates eye-catching projections (an image of a person sleeping on the street transitions into the door of a home that the person enters when passers-by text a given number) and the increasingly common “impulse donation” option to contribute to a cause via text message (people who interact with the installation through texting are given an option to donate a small amount to the non-profit through an additional text message). Though we haven’t experienced the campaign in person, the video (above) looks compelling.

In opposition to the usual pro-urbanism enthusiasm for high speed rail, Wired featured a piece pondering the possibility that high speed rail might lead to new sprawl by creating faster and easier commutes to urban city centers from suburbs and exurbs.

Limiting new sprawl is quite a different proposition than actively seeking to shrink a city. Check out this podcast from the New York Times that discusses how to deal with diminishing populations. In the case of Detroit, whose government can no longer afford to service certain depopulated and far-flung neighborhoods, certain philanthropic foundations have stepped in to help pay the salaries of urban planners and other city workers brought in to help manage the incredibly complex task of urban downsizing.

Italian engineer and inventor Enrico Dini, a “mad genius” according to Fast Company, is getting some attention lately for D-Shape, a machine he developed that can print stone buildings. The CAD-driven machine deposits layers of sand that are bound together with an “inorganic binding ink” that in effect creates solid stone. Potential applications of the technology are infinite, and the implications could be huge for reducing the distance between the idea and the physical. Blueprint Magazine has an extended profile of the project, including Dini’s own expectations for what D-Shape might do – a few modest goals such as completing the Sagrada Familia and building structures on the moon.

D-Shape, via Blueprint Magazine

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about. Top image: Farley Post Office, by Flickr user wallyg. Bottom image: D-Shape, via Blueprint Magazine.

This week brought news that Tishman Speyer and BlackRock Realty are handing over Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village to creditors to avoid bankruptcy. The Wall Street Journal lists the estimated value of the properties at $1.8 billion, just three and a half years after the $5.4 billion deal to purchase the site in 2006, and lists a few of the investors facing losses, ranging from the California Public Employee’s Retirement System to the Church of England. The New York Times explains why this is “a big black eye…but it’s not the end for Tishman” and investigates what this all means for the tenants. And the Post takes a look at who is thinking about buying the property now.

In waterfront news, $8.9 million in grants is being awarded by New York’s Department of State to waterfront revitalization projects in New York City. The Waterfront Alliance summarizes what projects will receiving funding — including the installation of MWA Eco-Docks, the implementation of the Bronx’s Shoelace Park Master Plan, Brooklyn Navy Yard improvements, climate change education programs, $1.5 million for the Randall’s Island Living Shoreline, two Jamaica Bay projects, and a seed farm and tree nursery at Freshkills — and points out that the announcement is also noteworthy for demonstrating “a major commitment to urban waterfront access” by the State. Check out the complete list with more details on MWA’s Waterwire.

The Make a Difference in Two Days lovers out there will appreciate this DIY intervention in Astoria that helps pedestrians cross a filthy pool of water that has submerged a heavily-trafficked sidewalk. An artist who goes by “Posterchild” constructed the “Astoria Scum River Bridge” out of an old work bench found on a curb as a gift to the neighborhood and was recently awarded a commendation from the office of Councilman Peter F. Vallone, Jr. (which came with a promise to help get the leaking pipe fixed).

Downtown Brooklyn residents: plan ahead. In 2019 your stretch of the BQE will be closing for a complete reconstruction. While it’s a bit early to start planning alternate routes, this announcement gives us occasion to think about the challenges of tackling significant infrastructure reconstruction projects in the middle of densely populated and highly-traveled neighborhoods. Streetsblog attended the stakeholder advisory council meeting for the project where the discussion often focused on how to balance neighborhood quality of life with the need to address the existing hazardous roadway conditions.

Outside of New York, high-speed rail is the hot transportation topic of the week now that details have been released about where the $8 billion of stimulus money allotted for HSR is headed. Much of the money is going to California, Florida and Illinois, with the Northeast receiving just $485 million to upgrade 7 major corridors in the region. The Infrastructurist points us to a post by Robert Puentes at the Brookings Institute that explains why prioritizing the Tampa-Orlando route makes sense and how this program is “nothing short of a sea change for how Washington thinks about infrastructure investments.” Meanwhile Wired digests it all in their feature about the history and future of “superfast bullet trains” in the U.S.

Finally we send you off into the weekend with a little toe-tapping video we’re calling “Me and Julio Down by the PS1 Pavilion” (aka SO-IL’s winning entry for the 2010 MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program):

SO-IL PS1 Pole Dance from SO-IL on Vimeo.

(Side note: Also on SO-IL’s Vimeo page you can see two quick clips of their installations for the League’s 2007 Beaux Arts Ball, Smoke and Mirrors.)

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about. Image: Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village by Flickr user Carly Hoskins.

It’s been a busy week packing, moving and unpacking. And as much as we’ll miss our special Brooklyn canal and the weird infrastructural happenings of Midtown East, we’re settling into Soho and are certain to find some local obsessions at the intersection of design and the built environment to cover in this neck of the woods.

If JFK airport had a writer-in-residence, what would she write about? Poetic treatises on the ebb and flow within the top international gateway to the USA? The ghosts of art exhibit debacles past? The difficulty and expense of getting to Manhattan, despite the Airtrain? The new FAA rules for Hudson flyovers? Well, in case the Port Authority (which controls JFK, LGA and Newark airports, along with Stewart and Teterboro) decides to try a writer on for size, they’ll soon have a precedent from across the pond. Heathrow Airport has contracted Alain de Botton, author of the Architecture of Happiness, to render his observations of the world’s busiest airport in prose.

Another of our principal obsessions is, of course, urban exploration. So if thinking about airports depresses you and you’d rather buy into the whole “staycation” trend this Labor day weekend, join the folks of Hey! I’m Walking Here! for a 20-mile trek through the landscape of that other island. Hopefully, this will whet your appetite for a meet-up we got planned along the Staten Island Railway later this month. Stay tuned.

Speaking of rail systems in both the city’s past and future, the proposal for light rail between Red Hook and Downtown Brooklyn is gaining ground, and if the project ever happens, it may just find a way to resurrect Red Hook’s trolley tracks.

That sounds stimulus-worthy but far from shovel-ready. But even if longer-term projects were being funded by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, cities are still getting the short end of the stick. Streetsblog has a nice write-up of Vice President Biden’s admission that stimulus aid to cities is imperfect:

Congress’ decision to route stimulus money through governors has sparked open confrontations between urban mayors and governors over how to distribute funds to the most needy areas. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was particularly direct in urging that the stimulus provide direct aid to cities, bypassing the politicization that often dominates decision-making in state capitals.

Politicization, is that what we’re calling it these days? We’re about ready for some interesting primaries in local races in a couple weeks, from city council to the heated contest to be elected what may be the last public advocate.

While pondering that, check out some raw footage, posted today by the Daily News, of the tearing down of the old Yankee stadium’s facade.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.