Taller Buildings Would Improve The Efficacy Of Regional Mass Transit Systems

Dana Hedgpeth writes up new research comparing metropolitan areas by the efficacy of their transit systems in getting people to work:

Transit in the Washington area ranked 17th among 100 major cities' bus and rail systems in a report from the Brookings Institution released Thursday. The cities were judged mainly on how accessible transit systems are to the areas where jobs are and on how much of the geographic area the systems cover.

The top-ranked cities were Honolulu and San Jose, respectively. New York's transit system ranked 13th.

Robert Puentes is quoted as saying that the general problem nationwide is jobs migrating to non-transit locales, "The low-income neighborhoods have access to transit, but more and more jobs are in the suburbs."

Obviously part of the solution to that is that you need to build transit infrastructure. No American city would have suburbs if not for the fact that someone said "lets build some roads out thisaways." If you build roads and don't build trains, then people don't take the train. In Copenhagen, suburban transportation infrastructure is organized around S-Bahn lines and so people ride the S-Bahn.

But another thing here is that a central city is going to be inherently better-served by transit, since that's where the lines come together. So a city that wants transit-accessible jobs needs to have tall buildings in its transit-served urban core. Washington, DC could rocket up that list at almost no fiscal cost if we allowed for the construction of skyscrapers in the downtown area served by the L'Enfant Plaza, Federal Center SW, Union Station, Archives, Gallery Place, Smithsonian, Federal Triangle, Metro Center, McPherson Square, Farragut West, Farragut North, and Foggy Bottom metro stations. That's a lot of Metro stations in a small area. And this is also the part of the city that has the greatest concentration of bus lines—both WMATA and the commuter buses from the further-out suburbs. And it's also the part of the city served by MARC and VRA commuter rail. Right now it's the most expensive office rent market in the country, so clearly if it were legal to locate more employment here then employers would leap at the opportunity.