Can we put more non-office jobs near cities and transit, or vice versa?

[llamaorama]

I've always felt a need to question why most urban format or transit oriented development follows a formula of upscale residential, outdoor mall style retail, and some high end office space almost exclusively. Yes, I realize these things are ultimately driven by economics and business. And yes, I've heard the argument about how today's luxury housing may become affordable in the future. But that's a long time to wait, and we build these things at a glacial pace. Put it all together and I guess that just says a lot of 1990s and 2000s progressive planning ideas were really just a ploy to sell commercial real estate to gen x yuppies. Now with two of the three legs (mall style retail and concentrated office) struggling due to current events and long term trends alike, how much of this even makes sense anymore?

I also have this suspicion that the reason why transit ridership starting declining in the early to mid 2010s from a historic peak was because a lot of cities got very very expensive. More affluent people are more likely to pay for parking, to use services like uber, etc. Working class people who used to use transit now live and work in the suburbs where it is impractical to not drive a car.

Anyways, what would it take to reverse this trend? Suppose cities were to encourage conventional suburban apartment complexes that the market wants to build to cluster in certain areas and run enhanced bus service through the area along with last-mile sidewalk enhancements?

Also why do areas geared for light industry and general services, which could be everything from a mechanic shop to a carpet warehouse to an assisted living facility and a county jail, need to be scooted out of sight on the urban periphery anyways? We just assume these things are "dirty" and therefore anti-urban, which makes no sense in the year 2022. Instead if we clustered these things we'd get more employment concentrations in city centers and it would also be a way to yield a goodly amount of property tax revenue but not need as much physical infrastructure. And skilled trade jobs pay well enough, almost like office jobs, that these people would in turn go out to eat for lunch, pick up things on the way home. But unlike the office denizens, they can't work from home.

This would be a truly radical new concept, I think. Do any cities currently have any neighborhoods that resemble what I am talking about? Are there any leaders or any figures in urbanism or architecture who have expressed similar thoughts?

[Crawford]

A lot of these lower wage, working class jobs are in low-density, auto oriented formats, usually in areas with access to highways and low(er) land values than the core. I mean, warehouses, at least outside of NYC and maybe a few other places, tend to overwhelmingly be one-floor, highway-oriented hangars.

I do agree it's likely that gentrification contributed to lower transit usage, as working class and nonwhite households moved further out and shifted to more auto-oriented lifestyles.

[pdxtex]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

I've always felt a need to question why most urban format or transit oriented development follows a formula of upscale residential, outdoor mall style retail, and some high end office space almost exclusively. Yes, I realize these things are ultimately driven by economics and business. And yes, I've heard the argument about how today's luxury housing may become affordable in the future. But that's a long time to wait, and we build these things at a glacial pace. Put it all together and I guess that just says a lot of 1990s and 2000s progressive planning ideas were really just a ploy to sell commercial real estate to gen x yuppies. Now with two of the three legs (mall style retail and concentrated office) struggling due to current events and long term trends alike, how much of this even makes sense anymore?

I also have this suspicion that the reason why transit ridership starting declining in the early to mid 2010s from a historic peak was because a lot of cities got very very expensive. More affluent people are more likely to pay for parking, to use services like uber, etc. Working class people who used to use transit now live and work in the suburbs where it is impractical to not drive a car.

Anyways, what would it take to reverse this trend? Suppose cities were to encourage conventional suburban apartment complexes that the market wants to build to cluster in certain areas and run enhanced bus service through the area along with last-mile sidewalk enhancements?

Also why do areas geared for light industry and general services, which could be everything from a mechanic shop to a carpet warehouse to an assisted living facility and a county jail, need to be scooted out of sight on the urban periphery anyways? We just assume these things are "dirty" and therefore anti-urban, which makes no sense in the year 2022. Instead if we clustered these things we'd get more employment concentrations in city centers and it would also be a way to yield a goodly amount of property tax revenue but not need as much physical infrastructure. And skilled trade jobs pay well enough, almost like office jobs, that these people would in turn go out to eat for lunch, pick up things on the way home. But unlike the office denizens, they can't work from home.

This would be a truly radical new concept, I think. Do any cities currently have any neighborhoods that resemble what I am talking about? Are there any leaders or any figures in urbanism or architecture who have expressed similar thoughts?

Read about Japanese zoning, its interesting. Its basically a top down style where housing can go anywhere but the more noxious use cannot be built where housing already exists. So existing factory, yep Can I build a house next to it?? Okay, if you want. And just like everything else in America, if it doesn't generate a profit or is affordable to construct, it probably won't get built. You have to wonder if any of our high price cities will ever become too expensive and the population just flat lines.

[Doady]

The bus routes with the most boardings in Mississauga on October 28, 2019 were mostly the industrial routes. E.g. Hurontario, Derry, Dixie, McLaughlin, Malton Express, Britannia, Airport Road, Tomken.

19 Hurontario 10,256
102 Hurontario Express 9,858
109 Meadowvale Express 9,596
42 Derry 7,744
66 McLaughlin 7,265
5 Dixie 7,240
3 Bloor 7,130
35 Eglinton 5,958
26 Burnhamthorpe 5,623
101 Dundas Express 5,532
107 Malton Express 5,445
61 Mavis 5,415
1 Dundas 5,306
1C Dundas-Collegeway 5,130
39 Britannia 4,566
19A Hurontario-Britannia 4,230
23 Lakeshore 4,033
51 Tomken 3,934
7 Airport 3,834
10 Bristol-Britannia 3,808

The low-income people working in these suburban factories and warehouses are the low-hanging fruit when it comes building transit ridership for a new transit system. 42 Derry is almost a pure industrial route, 21km long, hardly serving any commercial or residential uses, no connection to the Toronto subway, doesn't even touch the Toronto border, but it has twice the ridership of the Cleveland RTA Blue/Green Lines.

I see it with my own eyes everyday along Britannia Road: people crowded together and risk being stranded at the bus stops because the buses are getting too full to accept more passengers, the 40 foot buses recently replaced with 60 foot articulated buses, the rush hour frequency gradually went from 34 minutes to 27 minutes to 23 minutes and now to 20 minutes, the MiWay system constantly having trouble keeping up with the demand.

So forget the idea that transit along these roads is "impractical", that these workers and workplaces are a hopeless target, that it's the downtown office workers are the easiest target. That is not what I have seen based on my personal experiences as someone who is no longer allowed to drive a car because of seizures, living in a big industrial and car-oriented suburb. I can also see it in the skyrocketing transit ridership in neighbouring suburb, Brampton, which is even newer and even more industrial and has even more car-oriented built form. Transit ridership declined in other places only because they had the same idea that it would be "impractical" to serve these kind of workplaces with transit no matter what, so they didn't even try.

Practical transit means is a complete network, without any gaps. Even the densest and most urban city cannot be an island, isolated from the rest of the metropolitan area. The decentralization of jobs, spread out in huge industrial areas did not hinder the ridership in the industrial car-oriented suburb like Mississauga. What was holding the system back were the gaps in the network, and those have recently finally been filled, even some 24-hour service added recently. THAT is the number one thing holding transit in USA back, just simple lack of routes, especially with full service, because of the idea that so many places are not worth trying to serve.

Systems that were successful at maintaining high ridership and growing from 2011 to 2019 like Seattle, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, it was not about an increasing concentration of jobs downtown, it was just about maintaining a complete transit system with fewer gaps and further filling in those gaps. Likewise, high ridership systems like Milwaukee that lost 41% of their ridership during that same time period, it wasn't because of the decentralization of jobs.

[mhays]

The vast majority of office growth in my region is specifically around decent transit. It can be done.

That's due to a bunch of factors, like a critical mass of workers riding transit, a healthy core (well, relatively), State policies about employers encouraging alternative transportation, residential growth policies that also put residents near transit, and limits on outward growth.

[SIGSEGV]

Some examples in Chicago of rail transit next to industrial uses:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8419.../data=!3m1!1e3

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8050.../data=!3m1!1e3

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ke...!4d-87.7043639

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ke...!4d-87.7043639

That's all legacy stuff though. In terms of new things, the closest I'm aware of is probably this:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ke...!4d-87.7043639

[SFBruin]

This is just a market thing, right?

Warehouses take up a lot of space, so they can't be in desirable real estate, and end up far from transit.

[llamaorama]

Originally Posted by Doady

The bus routes with the most boardings in Mississauga on October 28, 2019 were mostly the industrial routes. E.g. Hurontario, Derry, Dixie, McLaughlin, Malton Express, Britannia, Airport Road, Tomken.

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

Some examples in Chicago of rail transit next to industrial uses:

Anecdotally, the company I used to work for had production facilities (with a couple hundred hourly workers on site) in Cicero, Il near the end of the Pink Line on 54th and also all over the North York area in Toronto which was where the company originally started.

That's part of what motivated this thread. I know it exists. These aren't pre-war red brick factories with smokestacks either. They were late 1970s business parks with tilt wall shop/warehouse space and 2 story offices in the front.

[iheartthed]

I don't think gentrification stalled transit ridership. The timing coincides with the rise of startups providing easily accessible shared transportation through smartphones. If anything is responsible for the decline, it's probably the excessive amount of venture capital dollars attempting to shake up transportation.

Ride hailing apps:

• Uber: founded March 2009
• Lyft: founded June 2012
• Via: founded June 2012

Car-sharing services:

• Car2Go (merged with ReachNow): founded 2008
• ReachNow (merged with Car2Go): founded 2016
• Getaraound: founded 2009

Electric moped-sharing:

• Revel: founded 2018
• Scoot: founded 2011
• Lime: founded 2017

Then there are all the bike-sharing services that have popped up in just about every major city over the past decade.

[Crawford]

There are some changes in working class lifestyles that may help explain U.S. transit ridership declines, however.

Up until the mid-1990's or so, most cities had some degree of working class core shopping district. Even Detroit had a pretty vibrant shopping area right downtown (though it was really getting hardscrabble by that point). So there would be heavy bus ridership to these budget shopping nodes. There were also still-active bus-oriented neighborhood nodes (such as Grand River-Greenfield), now mostly gone.

Also, poor people tended to live close to the core, in more urban settings. In basically every U.S. metro, the poor population has dispersed outward, into more auto-oriented settings. The skid rows, the housing projects, the traditional "ghetto" mostly gone.

Kids in urban centers have traditionally walked or taken transit to nearby school. There are far fewer kids in urban settings, and the advent of charters/school choice means that parents/caregivers are more likely to drive kids to distant schools.

The last pre-suburban generation was dying off. Boomers were really the first generation that grew up with autocentricity. As the Silent and Greatest generations passed on, ridership disappeared. One thing I notice with transit photos from the 1970's and 80's is all the old people, many who never learned to drive. All these old ladies wearing headscarfs, probably many with European or Delta accents.

Finally, there were some gains in living standards, and used vehicles became more reliable, meaning that the economic calculus for low income households somewhat shifted to cars over transit.

[memph]

Originally Posted by Doady

The bus routes with the most boardings in Mississauga on October 28, 2019 were mostly the industrial routes. E.g. Hurontario, Derry, Dixie, McLaughlin, Malton Express, Britannia, Airport Road, Tomken.

19 Hurontario 10,256
102 Hurontario Express 9,858
109 Meadowvale Express 9,596
42 Derry 7,744
66 McLaughlin 7,265
5 Dixie 7,240
3 Bloor 7,130
35 Eglinton 5,958
26 Burnhamthorpe 5,623
101 Dundas Express 5,532
107 Malton Express 5,445
61 Mavis 5,415
1 Dundas 5,306
1C Dundas-Collegeway 5,130
39 Britannia 4,566
19A Hurontario-Britannia 4,230
23 Lakeshore 4,033
51 Tomken 3,934
7 Airport 3,834
10 Bristol-Britannia 3,808

The low-income people working in these suburban factories and warehouses are the low-hanging fruit when it comes building transit ridership for a new transit system. 42 Derry is almost a pure industrial route, 21km long, hardly serving any commercial or residential uses, no connection to the Toronto subway, doesn't even touch the Toronto border, but it has twice the ridership of the Cleveland RTA Blue/Green Lines.

I see it with my own eyes everyday along Britannia Road: people crowded together and risk being stranded at the bus stops because the buses are getting too full to accept more passengers, the 40 foot buses recently replaced with 60 foot articulated buses, the rush hour frequency gradually went from 34 minutes to 27 minutes to 23 minutes and now to 20 minutes, the MiWay system constantly having trouble keeping up with the demand.

So forget the idea that transit along these roads is "impractical", that these workers and workplaces are a hopeless target, that it's the downtown office workers are the easiest target. That is not what I have seen based on my personal experiences as someone who is no longer allowed to drive a car because of seizures, living in a big industrial and car-oriented suburb. I can also see it in the skyrocketing transit ridership in neighbouring suburb, Brampton, which is even newer and even more industrial and has even more car-oriented built form. Transit ridership declined in other places only because they had the same idea that it would be "impractical" to serve these kind of workplaces with transit no matter what, so they didn't even try.

Practical transit means is a complete network, without any gaps. Even the densest and most urban city cannot be an island, isolated from the rest of the metropolitan area. The decentralization of jobs, spread out in huge industrial areas did not hinder the ridership in the industrial car-oriented suburb like Mississauga. What was holding the system back were the gaps in the network, and those have recently finally been filled, even some 24-hour service added recently. THAT is the number one thing holding transit in USA back, just simple lack of routes, especially with full service, because of the idea that so many places are not worth trying to serve.

Systems that were successful at maintaining high ridership and growing from 2011 to 2019 like Seattle, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, it was not about an increasing concentration of jobs downtown, it was just about maintaining a complete transit system with fewer gaps and further filling in those gaps. Likewise, high ridership systems like Milwaukee that lost 41% of their ridership during that same time period, it wasn't because of the decentralization of jobs.

The other thing is that many of these industrial areas are full of office and retail, especially in the smaller units. Butcher shops, bakers, printing shops, interior design studios, furniture showrooms, music schools, dance studios, engineering offices, construction contractor offices, a lot of supply stores geared more towards businesses than households, smaller tech companies, daycares, insurance brokers and more.

Many of these could in theory co-exist with residential uses, the main thing is that they are looking for cheaper rents than what they'd get in downtown Toronto.

Most of the rest is light industry and warehouses, which are not really noxious, although they can generate a lot of truck traffic and prefer "landscraper" buildings, which don't mix very well with attractive pedestrian environments, but still don't need to be super segregated from residential areas.

One thing is that these industrial areas often have less than ideal road networks for transit service. Not so much cul-de-sacs, but you do have a lot of non-straight roads, crescents, mega-blocks, and roads interrupted by freeways.

[lrt's friend]

I don't want to make my city (Ottawa) a panacea. It's recent rapid transit developments have been problematic and I have been critical of implementation and how it may not grow ridership despite billions of investment.

Nevertheless, the city has examples of successful implementation of transit in suburban areas.

Innes Road is a perfect example. Historically, a rural county road and never a major highway, typical middle class suburban development encroached in the area starting in the 1970s. The road became a boulevard (stroad) in the 1990s and big box retail moved in shortly thereafter with typical massive surface parking lots.

Instead of abandoning the road as a lost cause for transit, the city made sure that sidewalks were included when the boulevard was built and a basic bus route was introduced. The city had a plan to expand service as ridership grew and nearby development increased. It became a priority (trunk route) for transit for the area, and as service increased, so did ridership. It is now a frequent all-day route, running seven days a week 5 am to midnight. This is a perfect example of what is possible in suburban areas. Provide good service and people will use it.

I don't understand the idea that ride share or cars are the only choice for suburban areas. Both are very expensive compared to public transit and I don't understand how this is affordable for many in the community. Public transit is often the only choice for teenagers, students, seniors and those of lower income. When the option only becomes private vehicles, we really limit possibilities for those on very limited incomes and put enormous pressure on family budgets. It is surprising that offering little or no transit service in similar situations in many cities is particularly the case in areas where minimum wages are the lowest.

[eschaton]

I've noticed this myself...I've termed it "employment gentrification."

The best way to think about the modern economy is there are three types of jobs:

Professional-class jobs are people who work in offices, have college degrees, and provide service to other individuals or firms. Think architecture, engineering, accounting, IT, law, etc. For various reasons, from corporate consolidation to changing living preferences, these jobs have been concentrating in major metropolitan areas, and to a lesser degree within downtowns of those metro areas.

Personal service jobs are people who interface with individual customers as a part of their job, generally face-to-face. Some of these jobs are professional-class as well (like doctors) but most of them comprise the urban working class (hairdressers, bartenders, waitresses, day care aides, bank clerks, etc..) These jobs can be in the city or the suburbs, but this is for the most part where you find the "working poor" of cities, since they have to live close to wherever there is a concentration of customers. Aside from a handful of cases, like hospitals and universities, it's hard to have very large concentrations of this sort of employment within city limits - or indeed everywhere - since customers are diffuse and many of the underlying industries are still heavily fractured.

Remote blue-collar jobs are the type of occupations that high-cost urban cores have been shedding. This basically means any job which does not require a college degree where work can be performed at a distance from the final customer. Obviously manufacturing jobs have been shed from urban cores for generations now, moving to remote industrial parks where they still exist at all. But this also includes logistics/warehousing, along with some "office" type jobs (you'll almost never find an urban call center for example).

It's mostly simple market pressures which are shunting the latter out. Honestly, when considering highest/best use, a city block occupied by a warehouse employing 35 people just isn't as ideal as an office employing 300 people, or an apartment housing 300. It also doesn't help that constructing light industry on a multi-level basis is almost never worthwhile.

[Crawford]

I've noticed much more efficient, transit-accessible layouts in Canadian sprawl. I'm familiar with those huge warehouse corridors in Etobicoke-Mississauga-Oakville, and they're definitely better planned. Still ugly and soulless, but better for transit-dependent workers.

Also, they seem to be more mixed-use than in the U.S. You see dance studios, gyms, retail bakeries, daycares. These would be atypical uses in U.S. warehouse districts, I think. Not sure if the zoning is looser or high costs drive these uses to warehouse zones.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by eschaton

(you'll almost never find an urban call center for example).

i guess we need a working definition of "urban" first, but Discover recently announced that they are converting an old shuttered target store at 87th/cottage grove in the Chatham neighborhood on chicago's south side into a 1,000 person call center.

the good: putting a lot of jobs where the people who need them already are in the heart of the southside at a site that is reasonably transit accessible (both 87th and cottage grove are CTA bus routes and it's about 1/2 mile from a metra station, and about 1 mile from an el station).

the bad: it's a suburban format target store with a big giant surface lot in front of it, so a lot of the new workers will just end up driving there anyway. the first rule of transportation planning: if you provide free easy parking, people will park.

[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by Doady

The low-income people working in these suburban factories and warehouses are the low-hanging fruit when it comes building transit ridership for a new transit system. 42 Derry is almost a pure industrial route, 21km long, hardly serving any commercial or residential uses, no connection to the Toronto subway, doesn't even touch the Toronto border, but it has twice the ridership of the Cleveland RTA Blue/Green Lines.

the toronto bus was arranged specifically to take riders from already hectic business park and airport adjacent settings and connections to those jobs. in contrast, the old cleveland suburban rta blue/green lines are legacy suburban streetcar suburb trolleys that take residents in mostly upscale and sleepy sfh's neighborhoods along their pokey routes downtown. so not a good comparison.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

Anecdotally, the company I used to work for had production facilities (with a couple hundred hourly workers on site) in Cicero, Il near the end of the Pink Line on 54th and also all over the North York area in Toronto which was where the company originally started.

That's part of what motivated this thread. I know it exists. These aren't pre-war red brick factories with smokestacks either. They were late 1970s business parks with tilt wall shop/warehouse space and 2 story offices in the front.

Indeed, I missed that area: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8546.../data=!3m1!1e3

What is probably the largest concentration of industrial jobs (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pe...2!4d-87.650658, former Union Stockyards) within the city of Chicago has ok transit service (tons of frequent bus routes between Ashland, Halsted, 35th and 47th, as well as less frequent routes on Pershing and Root). Though there used to be an L branch leading here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_Yards_branch

[Doady]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

the toronto bus was arranged specifically to take riders from already hectic business park and airport adjacent settings and connections to those jobs. in contrast, the old cleveland suburban rta blue/green lines are legacy suburban streetcar suburb trolleys that take residents in mostly upscale and sleepy sfh's neighborhoods along their pokey routes downtown. so not a good comparison.

Yeah, that's my point, how important it is to bring transit to the workplaces, not just workplaces to transit. A lot of blaming urban design for poor transit, but little thought to better designing transit to serve the city, to serve the workplaces, especially those of the low income workers.

And the difference is not just one line vs. another line either. MiWay system got 201,287 boardings on October 28, 2019 serving a population of 750,000 while the Cleveland RTA serving a population of 1.2 million (Cuyahoga County) averaged 102,200 weekday boardings in the fourth quarter of 2019, almost four times difference in per capita ridership. You can see the same ridership with other suburban systems like Brampton and Laval. Llamaorama and Crawford also mentioned North York and Etobicoke, but those places are served by Toronto's TTC so the numbers are not separate.

Here are people waiting at a bus stop along Derry Road, before the pandemic:
https://goo.gl/maps/ucvWhTcrqGXumamq7

In 2019, Derry Road also had a 104 Derry Express which got 2,468 boardings on October 28, so 10,212 boardings combined for 42 Derry and 104 Derry Express (same boardings per km as Cleveland's Red Line). Express version seems to have been cancelled and replaced with a 42A branch now, and the combined 42/42A Derry currently operates at 6-7 minute frequency during rush hours. Look at the Derry Road corridor, anything special? Think about whether it would really be so difficult to achieve similar ridership and service levels for any suburban industrial route in Canada or US.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by eschaton

I've noticed this myself...I've termed it "employment gentrification."

The best way to think about the modern economy is there are three types of jobs:

Professional-class jobs are people who work in offices, have college degrees, and provide service to other individuals or firms. Think architecture, engineering, accounting, IT, law, etc. For various reasons, from corporate consolidation to changing living preferences, these jobs have been concentrating in major metropolitan areas, and to a lesser degree within downtowns of those metro areas.

Personal service jobs are people who interface with individual customers as a part of their job, generally face-to-face. Some of these jobs are professional-class as well (like doctors) but most of them comprise the urban working class (hairdressers, bartenders, waitresses, day care aides, bank clerks, etc..) These jobs can be in the city or the suburbs, but this is for the most part where you find the "working poor" of cities, since they have to live close to wherever there is a concentration of customers. Aside from a handful of cases, like hospitals and universities, it's hard to have very large concentrations of this sort of employment within city limits - or indeed everywhere - since customers are diffuse and many of the underlying industries are still heavily fractured.

Remote blue-collar jobs are the type of occupations that high-cost urban cores have been shedding. This basically means any job which does not require a college degree where work can be performed at a distance from the final customer. Obviously manufacturing jobs have been shed from urban cores for generations now, moving to remote industrial parks where they still exist at all. But this also includes logistics/warehousing, along with some "office" type jobs (you'll almost never find an urban call center for example).

It's mostly simple market pressures which are shunting the latter out. Honestly, when considering highest/best use, a city block occupied by a warehouse employing 35 people just isn't as ideal as an office employing 300 people, or an apartment housing 300. It also doesn't help that constructing light industry on a multi-level basis is almost never worthwhile.

These seem like good distinctions.

But warehouses, light industry, and maker spaces are stacking in a lot of cities. It's still not very common (after originally being normal a century ago) but a growing trend. Last-mile delivery is a big driver.

[memph]

BTW yearly reminder that 10 storeys is "kind of short" for a warehouse in Hong Kong.

Sha Tin Cold Storage Co LTD (green building)
https://www.google.ca/maps/@22.39726...7i16384!8i8192

Bunch of vertical warehouses
https://www.google.ca/maps/@22.38987...7i16384!8i8192