This note by Robin Hanson (in which he expresses his irritation with state highway departments that leave cones on the highways too long, thus unnecessarily restricting traffic lanes) reminded me of an idea I had when I moved to Berkeley, California, many years ago. I lived on a residential street that was only a few blocks long. But boy was it wide. Really wide. Here’s a recent picture from Google maps:
My thought was: why not narrow the street by about 50% and give the extra land to the owners of the property? The lots are pretty small there and property values are high–higher now than in 1990, I’m sure. So it’s basically free money. As a renter, I didn’t think too much about this, but I really don’t see why nobody’s done this. They don’t even have to do the whole city, they could do it one street at a time.
Because it's not free money. How much would the government have to spend in order to covert pavement back into usable land? And if they decide not to convert it into usable land, then that means private citizens would own small sections of the road, and therefore be allowed to charge for parking, even a toll just for passing through.
To start with, it could be essentially free–they could just paint lines on the pavement corresponding to the width of an ordinary street and say that everything outside the lines belongs to the owners of the property. The owners couldn't charge for parking on the newly-drawn street, but, sure, they could charge on the outside parts that they now would own. No problem–they'd essentially be charging people to park on their lawns! As you can see from the above picture, the street could be a lot narrower and still have plenty of room for parked cars.
The city government cold also handle the problem incrementally, by getting rid of the unnecessary width of the street when repaving.
There seems to be an assumption here that the only use for streets is to park two rows of current cars and let two others pass without scraping too often.
However, homes in that neighborhood are circa 100 years old, so it's reasonable to make decisions like that with at least a 100-year horizon, maybe longer. Given that undoing the decision would be effectively impossible, that also suggests we should be cautious about making it. Who knows what the future will bring?
And even current usage may justify the wide street. As a cyclist, when I look at that picture, I don't see waste; I see a road that's safe for me to ride on without worrying about getting run down or doored. Some parents would see a road with enough room for kids to play ball without worrying about banging up the neighbor's car. Maybe locals have found other non-interfering uses for the common space. Maybe people who live there value the sense of spaciousness.
And of course, it's not obviously free wealth. You're not increasing the amount of property. You're just changing ownership from the citizens jointly to the citizens individually. That might change how people use it, and therefore change the value. But it's not clear to me that the net value change would be positive, let alone large enough to justify the costs.
I agree that street is ridiculously wide, although it does make it nice for bike riding: you can ride two abreast and still not worry about blocking traffic. There are some practical and legal issues with doing what you suggest, though, Andrew: it's a giveaway of public property to a very small number of private property owners. This would be tough to get away with anywhere, but impossible in Berkeley.
However, I definitely agree that there are better uses for all that space than just pavement. One possibility is vegetated swales, like the ones Seattle is using to control stormwater runoff. Berkeley is looking for places to implement this, and Spaulding could be a good one.
Stormwater runoff is a big deal here, because West Berkeley (down towards the bay) has pretty bad flooding problems: all of the runoff from higher up in the city flows downhill, but there isn't enough culvert capacity under the freeway to carry it all the way to the bay. (There's a lot more impermeable surface in the city now, than there was when the culverts were installed). Increasing the culvert capacity would be hugely expensive — I think the most recent estimate, several years ago, was forty million dollars — so the city is looking into distributed systems like swales on the edges of streets, and encouraging people to use cisterns to capture some roof runoff. It all adds up.
So, I'm with you, let's convert acres of wasted asphalt into something useful! But let's not give city-owned land to 100 lucky homeowners.
You're looking at it as a boon to the property owner who happened to be lucky enough to purchase land on wide streets (luck since there was likely no foresight that predicted the divesting of city lands and rights-of-way on those streets).
It would more likely be seen (once publicly suggested) as a boon to city revenue: instead of splitting the streets equally on both sides, enlarging the existing owners' lands, take all the land on one side and sell it. A single alley could separate the new lots from the previous road frontage lots.
Of course, this would never happen. The existing homeowners would fight it. Just as I as a taxpayer would fight the giving away of city land.
Phil: Interesting idea on the vegetated swales. I've never heard of that before, but I like the sound of it. Vegetated swales. Vegetated swales. Nice.
To all: I sort of see what you're saying about the fairness issue that it's only helping the residents of this one street, which is only four blocks long, but . . . right now, nobody is getting benefit from this pavement. Spaulding Avenue is not any sort of through street. (William: You can ride your bike on California Street, which is one block over, is a through street, and is, I believe, striped for bike lanes.)
In this case, giving half the street to the landownwers (or making it into swales, or whatever) is a pure benefit, I think. It really is increasing the amount of property. I agree that details matter, but this one is a pretty easy call, I think: it's an incredibly wide street in a city with valuable property on small lots.
William: I think these houses are less than 100 years old, but you make a good point, which is that if something really is done with these streets, it would make sense to study the history behind them and also their current usage. My guess is that there was no good reason underlying the really wide streets (the land might have been very cheap at the time) and that they're not currently being used for much, but I could be wrong.
Where I live (Minneapolis), an overly-wide street typically indicates that there used to be trolley tracks on it before the streetcars were scrapped (see the bottom photo at http://204.169.52.42/history/tr3.asp and weep). In many cases the tracks are still present under the asphalt and come to the surface every few years when the asphalt wears away or morphs or whatever it does.
Overall, this sounds like a useful suggestion. It is not obvious how cheap it is to make the conversion, but yes it probably is cheap enough to make it worthwhile.
Bike lanes!
I work at home and during the day most roads where I live have very little traffic but get busy at peak time. Most of the time i.e. including night, the land is just sitting there unproductive.
It seems to me that cities with grid layouts could have the main roads two way but minor roads, the ones inbetween the main roads, one way. It becomes slightly more inefficient to get home/away from home but the unproductive land could be treed and that's got to be a bonus.
I think one of the Nordic countris was really into doing more productive things with roads so that they could be shared with cars and become more communal, people areas.
Why are streets so wide? Philip K. Howard in his book "The Death of Common Sense," writes that "… streets are 50 feet wide, about 50 percent. wider than streets were a few decades ago. Why? Because the traffic engineers who wrote the standard code after World War II believed that streets should be wide enough to allow two fire engines going in opposite directions to pass each other at 50 miles per hour." Howard's point is that society can be enslaved by regulations and excessively zealous bureaucrats.
They do this in Northern VA. Typically the land doesn't go to the homeowners but to expanded sidewalks. The narrower streets are more appealing, trees are more likely to canopy, and it slows down drivers.