President’s Letter — June 2001
from the Western Rail Passenger Review
Commentary by William Lindley
An argument we hear occasionally is that Arizona, or Tucson, or Phoenix, “does not have the density for transit to work.” Why is this wrong? John Bredin explains it this way:
“Back at the last turn of the century, the New York subways were extended into farmland and sleepy villages in the boroughs of Bronx and Queens. No, that’s not a misprint. The area that is now the home of millions, block after block of apartments and small houses, was essentially ‘exurban’ until the subway ran through them. There are pictures, in various books on the history of the New York subway, of the four-track Queens Boulevard line being built literally through fields of grain! Once the line was built, they fields grew a ‘crop’ of apartment buildings, houses, stores, theaters, etc..
“This extension of transit into empty land was done on purpose: 1) as always, developers wanted to buy relatively inaccessible land cheaply and then sell or rent it when accessibility made it valuable. 2) Lower Manhattan was unbelievably crowded. Densities much higher than modern Manhattan, but without skyscraper apartment buildings to fit lots of people comfortably on a small piece of land. The city and private welfare groups wanted people to have decent housing but still work in the city, and encouraged the building of the subway. Cheap land in Queens and the Bronx made inexpensive but livable apartments possible. The subway made it possible for their residents to get to Manhattan jobs quickly.
“For a more modern example: when suburban highways are extended into undeveloped rural areas just outside the present ring of suburban development, nobody complains that the roads will be empty because everyone knows that office parks and subdivisions will be popping up along the highway even before it’s completed.”
Here in Arizona, it’s not a question of whether our cities will continue to grow, for they will. We must rather decide whether to reward suburban sprawl, or to reward a channeling of denser development along existing travel corridors like the new light rail line and the existing BNSF and UP rail lines where commuter and regional trains will run. The emphasis on existing corridors is far more sensible, for it not only encourages pedestrian-friendly development, reduces the stress on other infrastructure (power and telephone lines, water and sewer pipes), and diminishes the amount of native desert we have to flatten to maintain our economic growth.
Rail, then, is among other things, a method of social engineering. Rail allows us to channel development where want it — not by laws and “punishing bad behavior” but by rewarding the type of development we want
