The importance of the Urban Walkshed

A watershed is the geographical area where water collects into a single source, the term has been adapted by urban planners to refer to the geographical area around a location where it is easy to walk, in say about 20 minutes time.

Historically the area where I live was farmland just outside the urban boundary of the city of Rochester. It was bought up, plot by plot and new housing developments were built one-by-one. Between Rochester and Brighton there sits a string of hills formed when the glaciers receded, this geographical barrier kept the area from being developed until after WW1. As is visible in the map below, the street design incorporates some larger curved roads and a little bit of connectivity is lost between neighboring developments, but there’s still the idea of the grid as the basic building block.

Just a little further out, land that was developed in the 50s and 60s has the characteristic loop roads and culs-de-sac that are so familiar today.

The apartment complex where I live was built in the 1950 when the US was just starting to experiment with car-centric infrastructure. I wanted to see how the walkshed differed from some place developed earlier, and I’ll let the following images speak for themselves.

On this image I draw the 5, 10, 15, and 20 minute walksheds from my apartment. These lines are called “isochrons”, it should take the same amount of time to reach any point on the green line taking the most direct route available. The concentric circles are a theoretical walkshed, if you could go out in 1 direction unimpeded. These circles should roughly be increments of about a quarter mile, but in this example the the circles are a little small, I improved my technique between this picture and the next, so bear with me.

The point stands that connectivity is off though. Most of the 20 minute isochron is inside the 15-minute (yellow) theoretical walkshed, and some even dips into the 10-minue (orange) theoretical walkshed. This is in part because my apartment is near the rear of the complex and the only entrances are towards the south and east, nearly a worst-case scenario for walkablility.

There’s hardly a lack of amenities nearby, but the infrastructure around the area is clearly made with the car in mind. The biggest problem is that the roads were not designed for people to cross them comfortably, and the shops were not designed with the idea that people would be walking to them. They are spread out, and set far back from the road, a distance easily covered by car, but an uncomfortable distance for pedestrians to be mingling around cars. It would make a huge difference if there was a pedestrian connection to some of the side streets neighboring the apartment complex, and if the storefronts were along the pedestrian right-of-way with parking in the rear.

5 minutes:

I can just leave my apartment complex and reach the walgreens on the corner. It’s handy to have a convenience store so close, not many people do.

10 minutes

I can get to Pulaski Park, a plot of land originally bought up to run a highway through. I can get to this without crossing the street which is nice. The two streets that intersect near the apartment complex are 5-lanes wide and overbuilt for the amount of traffic they carry. The cycle time is pretty long too, so crossing may take up to a minute. But once you cross you can get to a bus stop, a 7/11, a gas station, some medical offices, other apartment complexes and McQuaid Jesuit high school.

15 minutes

I can reach a few more apartments and go up some residential streets. There’s also church and elderly care facility within this area. More importantly there’s a grocery store. Of course this store is set way back with a sea of parking in front.

20-minute walkshed

In this area you can walk to other shops in that grocery store plaza, including a liquor store, some small restaurants, the post office and a salon. Also more apartments, more residential houses, and some medical offices. A corner of Rochester’s Highland Park is just barely reachable.

Connectivity nearby

And now lets look at someplace close to my apartment, but within a more traditional street grid.

The connectivity of these streets is really something to behold. Each of the isochrons nearly match the theoretical maximum, suffering a little bit to the south as the string of hills along Highland Ave, create a barrier to walkability. Weirdly, Rochester’s irregular street pattern helps this connectivity too, the angled streets connect areas diagonal from each other better than an orthogonal grid.

Even with a 5 minute walk there are plenty of good restaurants, a barber, a pub, even a little park, one could almost get to downtown in 20 minutes. There’s some nearby schools and libraries in this range, and a large section of Highland ParK.

That’s not to say this region is “peak urbanism”. The highway cutting through the middle of the city is uncomfortable to cross. The overpass along Goodman street always has cars coming onto or off of the expressway, which makes it difficult to cross. Public transit can be a little inconsistent, and there’s a real lack of bike lanes, even though the area would be well served by more of them.

One closing thought, where I grew up there was pretty much nothing 1 mile in any direction besides other suburban houses and farmland. There was a creek that I could walk down to, and an old railway bed converted into a running/biking trail. But there were no shops, businesses, restaurants. I had to either take the bus or be driven to school. Despite this, I had fun, and there’s merits to that kind of environment. But I feel like I’d much rather live where I am now than where I grew up, despite all the overbuilt infrastructure.

Whole lotta nothing around here

Upstate Zoning: Part 3 – Syracuse

Of the upstate cities, I tend to spend most of my time in Rochester, and on occasion Buffalo, where I go see sports, or visit family. It’s been a while since I’ve visited Syracuse properly, usually it’s as a stop on a Greyhound bus, or I’m passing through on the way north to the Adirondacks, or south to New York City. It isn’t that Syracuse doesn’t have attractions, they host the New York State Fair, and SYU sports are another attraction. I just personally have little cause to visit.

As far as zoning goes, Syracuse is in a similar situation as Rochester, where they are in the middle of implementing a new comprehensive plan “Syracuse 2040”, the plan was drafted in 2012, and they still haven’t implemented the new zoning plan, but nobody claimed local government worked efficiently. 2040 seems like a long way out, and it is, but Syracuse needs a lot of work. The previous plan “Comprehensive Plan 2025”, adopted 2005, was scrapped. This new plan seems to be adding bicycle infrastructure, historic preservation, land use updates, and plans for broader sustainability.

Downtown Syracuse

The Guiding Principles of Syracuses new land use plan are:

1. Preserve and enhance Syracuse’s existing land use patterns
2. Protect and enhance the character and “sense of place” of Syracuse’s neighborhoods
3. Ensure high-quality, attractive design throughout the city
4. Promote environmentally sustainable land use patterns, transportation options, and site plans
5. Ensure tha development regualtions and review processes are efficient, predictable and transparent

This is just so many words that say the new plan is more of a refresh than an overhaul. Nothing radical going on here. But let’s take a look at what’s actually changing. Unlike Buffalo’s or even Rochester’s new zoning plans, Syracuse doesn’t seem to be actively promoting what the changes to the zoning will be, and indeed I’m having a rather hard time finding an image of Syracuse’s existing zoning map. It seems like there’s been some variation from earlier forms of the map, though things seem to have been put on hold the past few years, the most up-to-date version of the zoning plan on the ReZone Syracuse Website are from December 2019.

The new plan has the following zones

• Residential
  • R1 – Single Family Residential
  • R2 – Two-Family Residential
  • R3 – Two-Family, Small Lot
    • 2000sqft lot per unit instead of 3000sqft per unit for duplexes in R2
  • R4 – Multifamily Residential, Medium Density
    • Up to 4 units
  • R5 – Multifamily Residential, High Density
• Mixed Use
  • MX1 – Urban Neighborhood
  • MX2 – Neighborhood Center
  • MX3 – Mixed-Use Transition
  • MX4 – Urban Core
  • MX5 – Central Business District
• CM – Commercial
• LI – Light Industry
• OS – Open Space
• Planned Development

The new zoning map can be found here but you can also get the picture of the area from the screenshots below

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To paint a general picture, the downtown section is zoned as “Central business district” which fades into MX3 and MX4 down the major arterioles. To the west of downtown and along the lakefront there’s some light industrial zoning, running along I-690 and the south of I-81 is a bunch of commercial land, zoned for suburban style strip-malls and big-box stores. Most of the residential land is R1 with R2 constituting some neighborhoods to the north and southwest of downtown. R4 and R5 zones are variably places, presumably where existing apartment complexes stand.

From an eyeball assessment the major zones in the city are R1 for what might be called the first ring suburbs within the boundary of the city, R2 has a substantial presence and MX4 is the most prevalent mixed use district outside of the downtown core. MX2 seems to line some major commercial areas outside of downtown.

For a list of uses look through the table below, taken from this document

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The rather rigid separation of uses for residential areas is a little disappointing, given how prevalent the zone is across the city. Almost no commercial activity whatsoever is allowed in any residential neighborhood. I guess that’s typical, most residential places seem a walking distance away from at least MX2 zoned areas.

Syracuse is also just another tier of city. It’s population is maybe about 50,000 people lower than Rochester, and area-wise is about 10-square miles smaller. Maybe if it annexed some neighboring suburbs the population would be comparable.

I feel pretty much the same about this zoning code as Rochester’s new one. They’re saying some of the right things in their documents, but overall I’m less satisfied due to the lack of ambition. Both in the case of Rochester and Syracuse there’s a lot of land where only single family housing can be built. Rochester, to it’s credit expanded the medium density residential to allow up to 4-unit residential, and Rochester’s low density residential code allows for attached single-family housing.

Well, we’ve finally reached the point in the blog post to score the new zoning code. We’re keeping our 4-metric. Though I will remark, Syracuse’s zoning code documents and changes are more opaque, I’ve tried to keep a good faith effort of grading along the same rubric as before.

Category	Score	Comments
Encouraging Density	1	The preponderance of residential zoning is single or two-family units Mixed Use areas look ok, allowing multi-family
Pedestrian/Bike Accomodation	1	There is a plan for expanding the bike network, but it’s not readily accesibly. Minimum parking requirements kept, consideration for keeping parking at the rear of the building
Incremental Development	0	Low density residential is very inflexibly for categories R1-R3
Mixed Use	3	Credit where it’s due, mix of uses allowed in mix use is admirable most plots seem a reasonable walk to mixed use area
Overall	5/16	Some points may have been taken off for materials not being readily available. In general I’m not impressed by what I see

Upstate Zoning: Part 2 – Rochester

Previously I looked at zoning in Buffalo. Today I’m tackling the next major upstate city and my hometown, Rochester NY. Rochester adopted its last zoning code in 2003, with the aim to make Rochester more suburban.

This table was taken from a presentation for the Zoning Alignment Project that Rochester is undertaking to align its zoning with its 2034 Comprehensive Vision plan. We can see that in 2003 the city decided that almost all of the residential land in the city would be zoned R-1, that is single-family houses, mostly detached. In 1975 things were still quite restrictive at half R-1, so the proposed zoning changes are really just staking a middle ground between quite restrictive and extremely restrictive. I don’t have the numbers for Buffalo, but judging from the zoning map their single-family zoning is the least used of the different residential zones.

Before I continue more down this road, let’s look at the actual plan. The Zoning Alignment Project website has some fun tools to visualize the zoning changes. Including a side-by-side map of the changes, and an interactive map that describes the different zones in some detail.

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Like Buffalo, Rochester is changing the zone names away from the traditional R-1, C-2, M-1, etc. type codes to something that nobody else uses. Unlike Buffalo these names actually make sense.

Zone Name/Code	Old Equivalent	Description
Downtown Mixed Use – DMU	Center City District – CCD	Special zone for Rochester’s downtown, allows towers and larger buildings disallowed elsewhere
High Density Residential – HDR	R-3	Residential buildings of all sorts, from single family to multifamily apartment buildings
Medium Density Residential – MDR	R-2	Residential buildings, up to 4-units
Low Density Residential – LDR	R-1	Single Family Residential buildings, attached or detached. And existing as-built 2-family residential buildings
Flexible Mixed Use – FMU	M-1, C-2	New District, allows commercial, residential or light industry
Community Mixed Use – CMU	C-2	Mid-sized commercial buildings, multi-family residential, craft manufacturing
Boutique Mixed Use – BMU	C-1	Small shops, multifamily uses
Regional Commercial – RC	C-3	Suburban strip mall – style development, mostly kept to edges of city around existing structures
Industrial – IND	M-1	The industrial sections of Rochester
Open Space – OS	O-S	Parks
Village District – VD	C-V, H-V, PMV	Special districts for College Town, Harbor district, public market

Notable Changes

The changes are mostly pretty modest, but here’s a run-down of significant changes.

• Following Buffalo’s lead, parking minima will be removed city-wide
• MDR allows up to 4-family residential buildings without a special permit, up from 2
• Minimum lot size for detached homes reduced from 5000sqft to 4000sqft, matching historic pattern of Rochester buildings
  • As a comparison Buffalo minimum lot size for detached houses are 4000sqft only in N-4-50, most minimum lot sizes are 1500-1800sqft.
• Drive-thru restaurants and car washes are generally not permitted
• Up-zoning and more mixed use along RTS bus routes
• A lot of existing Industrial land is being opened up for commercial and residential uses with the FMU zone

There is also a nice map which highlights where R-1 land is being upzoned to MDR, (sorry Charlotte, wanted to keep the picture compact)

Most of the upzoning is happening to the north and west of the city, which is a little uncomfortable because they are also the poorest parts of the city and it doesn’t seem likely to me that they would see as much development as the “hotter” more affluent sections of the city in the south and east.

The allowed uses for each zone are described in the Tables below, I don’t have much to comment on them, only that a lot of the supposedly permitted uses are only permitted in existing buildings. The mixed-use areas are actually pretty good. Multi-family dwellings, attached homes and townhomes (don’t ask me the difference) are allowed almost everywhere, and there’s a blanket allowance for “all commercial uses unless otherwise specified” in mixed use districts and the first floor of 20+ unit buildings.

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Comparison with Buffalo’s Code

Buffalo’s code is fairly unique, in that it leads with what buildings can look like in each zone, i.e. attached houses, commercial blocks, towers, etc. Rochester’s code doesn’t mention what “types” of buildings are allowed where. Though both codes do touch on both form and uses. Rochester’s new code is still incomplete, I can’t dig into it with such grainy detail as I can with Buffalo’s code. But comparing the current Rochester code with Buffalo we can say the following

• The bulk of Buffalo’s land zoned exclusively residential allows higher density than single-family hosing.
• Buffalo’s height limit for the bulk of its residential land is 3 stories (40 ft), in Rochester it’s 2.5 stories (35 ft)
• Rochester C-2 commercial buildings currently have no maximum building height limit, though this may change in the upcoming plan. Buffalo’s equivalent is a restrictive 3 stories.
• Rochester zoning codes seem better separated and well defined, CMU and BMU are fairly similar, but different enough. Buffalo doesn’t have much distinction between Urban Center and Urban Neighborhood zones.
• Rochester’s new Flex Mixed Use is pretty unique, there’s no clear analogue with Buffalo, it’s most like Secondary Employment Center (N-1S), but used more extensively, or a mix of Flex Commercial (D-C) and Light Industry (D-LI)

Grading Rochester’s Code

Category	Score	Comments
Encouraging Density	2	Heavy reliance on Single Family Zoning, and MDR is still relatively low density. New height restrictions. Points for allowing multi-family units in FMU, CMU and removing minimum parking
Pedestrian/Bike Accommodation	3	I didn’t touch on this much, but Rochester has a decent Bicycle Master Plan, and new zoning avoids car dependent structures like car washes and drive-thrus in much of the city. Eliminating parking minimums is huge.
Incremental Development	1	LDR is still pretty much as locked in as it was before, and that’s the big issue, given the extent of land area it takes up. Bumping up density for MDR helps, as does increasing area of MDR. FMU changes might create step changes instead of gradual infill.
Mixed Use	3	FMU seems like it could be a game changer for Rochester, I don’t know what will come of it, might be a lot, might be a little. CMU looks good for mixed use, and HDR sneaks in some commercial for good measure. Comparable to Buffalo overall, maybe a little better.
Overall	9/16	This seems bad, until you realize that the old zoning code would have gotten a (0/1/0/2) = 3/16 overall.

Upstate Zoning: Part 1 – Buffalo

Buffalo updated its zoning code in 2016 to national acclaim. The Green Code, completely overhauled Buffalo’s previous suburban style, car-dependent zoning code to an unabashedly urban form-based code. Buffalo enacted the third form-based zoning code in the nation, after Denver and Miami. Buffalo was also the first major city in the US to eliminate parking minimums, with many other cities like South Bend, Berkeley, and Minneapolis following suit.

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Full images of the above previous map and the current map can be found here and here respectively. The map changes were pretty substantial, east and west Buffalo were broadly split between “Urban Center” in the more affluent west and “Urban Neighborhood” in the east, perhaps reflecting the growth potentials of the areas. I’ll go into the differences later. The general pattern of development remains the same however: largely residential, with commercial/mixed use along the avenues radiating from downtown, with a lot of industrial uses in the south.

The new zones are categorized into neighborhood zones and district zones. District zones form special areas for high-rises, and medical or university facilities. They also include places like parks, suburban-style strip malls, and industrial areas. The neighborhood zones on the other hand constitute the “urban fabric” of Buffalo and are categorized mainly by distance from Downtown Buffalo into Urban Core, Urban Center, Urban Neighborhood, and Urban Edge. The specific neighborhood zones are as follow

• Urban Core
  • N-1D – Downtown Hub
  • N-1C – Mixed-Use Core
  • N-1S – Secondary Employment center (effectively light industrial + mixed use)
• Urban Center
  • N-2C – Mixed-Use Center
  • N-2E – Mixed-Use edge
  • N-2R – Residential
• Urban Neighborhood
  • N-3C – Mixed-Use Center
  • N-3E – Mixed-Use edge
  • N-3R – Residential
• Urban Edge
  • N-4-30 – Single Family Residential (30′ width minimum lot size)
  • N-4-50 – Single Family Residential (50′ width minimum lot size)

Long straight avenues radiating from Downtown tend to be lined with Mixed-Use Center or the transitional Mixed-Use Edge, while adjacent areas are filled in with residential. Urban Edge is a bit of a misnomer. Some areas next to downtown are much poorer than Urban Center or Urban Neighborhood areas, and are zoned in a way to resist needing to be pushed out by new development. Other “Urban Edge” are wealthy neighborhoods near Delaware Park where dealing with the fears of residential property values becomes hard to manage politically.

The code is formed based, and each zone has a list of allowable building types, which are as follow: Some buildings are only allowed in one district, the tower for example is only allowable in the Downtown Core, while others are permitted almost everywhere

Table of allowable building types from the Green Code

Comparing N-2R and N-3R

While there are a lot of things one could discuss with the new code, I’d like to delve into the N-2R and N-3R districts which cover most of the city. The Green Code describes the purpose of N-2R as “The N-2R zone addresses residential areas adjoining more intensive mixed-use centers, generally defined by compact residential blocks, which occasionally include small mixed use buildings.” While N-3R has the defined purpose “The N-3R zone addresses residential areas adjoining the centers of Buffalo’s streetcar neighborhoods, generally defined by moderately compact residential blocks, which occasionally include small mixed use buildings.” According to the above table both N-2R and N-3R allow the same building types, but there may be some nuance in this distinction.

• N-3R requires a larger rear yard for attached and detached houses (20% of lot depth as opposed to 15% for N-2R)
• N-2R has a smaller minimum lot size (1500sqft vs 1800sqft) and minimum lot width (25ft vs 30ft) for detached houses and stacked units

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The above images showcase an example N-2R street and an N-3R.

These differences allow N-2R to have slightly higher density than N-3R. On a 300 ft block N-2R would allow 12 single family homes, where N-3R would only allow 10. There are far more similarities than differences between these zones though, both have a maximum height of 3 stories or 40 feet, 70% lot coverage and 80% impermeable coverage for attached, detached, and stacked unit houses.

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The above table shows allowable uses for each Green Code zone. Urban Center uses map perfectly onto the corresponding Urban Neighborhood uses, the only differences in the categories deal with building form. In terms of uses, both residential zones have the same primary permitted uses of dwelling in multiple, single or double units, group homes, gardens and open spaces without any special permit. A number of civic uses are also allowed, such as schooling, with special permit. Bed and breakfast facilities are also allowed under a special permit, but all other commercial uses are disallowed.

Other features of the Green Code

Before I close out this post I’d just like to cover other notable features of the code. I mentioned before that Buffalo eliminated minimum parking requirements throughout the city. The new code only does that for cars, certain use categories will require a minimum amount of parking for bicycles. In terms of land use, bicycles take up much less space than cars. One could easily fit 10 bikes in the space where 1 car would go. Residential units require a bicycle parking space for every 5 units, and most retail requires 1 bicycle parking spot for every 3000 sqft of store area. The plan also requires some landscaping in the form of street trees, at least 1 tree for every 30 feet of frontage. I guess that is what makes the code “green”.

What have the impacts of the Green Code been on the city? It’s hard to tease out effects of the code from broader trends in the market, but there has been a marked increase in new construction and apartment permitting. According to a 2020 housing market study before 2015 fewer than 1000 new units were permitted every year. Between 2015 and 2019, the period including zoning changes an average of nearly 1500 units were permitted each year, and in 2020, the year of the study 1600 units were approved. The impact of parking changes has been substantial too. According to a study described in this article new construction has opted to build less than 50% of the parking spaces that were previously required. Some new developments added no parking at all, finding it was sufficient to share parking with nearby lots. Other developments made parking a paid amenity rather than bundling a parking space with a room. City planners may dream of a day when car use is rare in city areas, but car use has a lot of inertia and won’t be changed overnight. It’s like a ship that takes a long time to turn around.

If there’s one restriction to chafe at under the new Green Code it’s the height restriction, limiting buildings to 3 stories, or 40 feet in much of Buffalo. This still leaves a lot of room to grow for many residential areas of Buffalo, where most homes are 1 or 2 stories. But in other places this restriction may be too tight. I would think a relative height restriction, maybe 150% the average of nearby construction would be appropriate, so places near other areas where the building height is dominated by 3 story buildings could add an extra floor. This allows incremental development, where a 3-story height cap restricts it.

As a final matter, this plan does little to address the issue of land holders profiting off this new plan at the public’s expense through higher property values and rising rents. Buffalo is still one of the most affordable places to live in the US. Like other cities, rent and property value have been rising a lot, though this seems unrelated to zoning changes.

Grading Buffalo’s Green Code

Since this is going to be the first in a series I think it would be fun to create a scoring system from 0-4 for the different zoning codes.

Category	Score	Comments
Encouraging Density	4	Removing parking minimums, limited single family only housing, multi-unit residential allowed in nearly the whole city
Pedestrian/Bike Accommodation	4	Bicycle parking minimums, specific plans for pedestrian access, development to sidewalk, parking in rear
Incremental Development	2	Height limits restrictive in commercial corridors, but more area open to development in general
Mixed Use	3	Sufficient mixed use near residential areas, along major transit lines, small shops in residential only allowed by special use permit in legacy structures
Overall	13/16	This zoning code actively encourages mixed-use, high-density urban infill, especially along the major transit lines of the city. It takes in stride the advice of many urbanists, though loses points with an overly-restrictive height limit. Might be looking at 15/16 if the height limit was raised to 5 or 6 stories.

Highways are coming down across New York

Last year the Council for New Urbanism (CNU) identified 15 urban freeways in American cities that should be removed, so called Freeways Without Futures. Of the highways identified, 4 are in upstate New York: I-81 in Syracuse, the northern section of the Inner Loop in Rochester, and the Kensington Expressway and the Scajaquada Expessway, both in Buffalo. New York City also has a place in the list with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but given how this is a blog about upstate, I choose to ignore that project for now.

In terms of highway removal in Upstate New York, Rochester has led the way, already filling in the eastern section of it’s former inner loop, which has been replaced by an at-grade street, a separated bike lane, and several new mid-rise apartment buildings. Construction continues adjacent to the fill-in project with the “Neighborhood of Play” next to Strong Museum and National Toy Hall of Fame.

Among the highway removal projects mentioned in Freeways Without Futures, the Inner Loop North project is already the farthest along. There are draft plans available on the the project’s website which have received community input. The citizens of Rochester have chosen the most radical of highway removal plans, which also opens up the most space to new development and park space, all close to Rochester’s High Falls, bus, and train station. Gov. Hochul has pledged $100 million of state funds to support this project in the new state budget (about 1/10 of what may go to the new Bills stadium). With this amount in hand the project is fully funded and only needs to be fully planned and constructed.

The proposed new street plan after the Inner Loop North is removed

Syracuse has several interstate highways that run through the area including the NY Thruway (I-90), I-81, I-690, and I-481, with a large interchange right next to downtown where I-81 and I-690 meet. There are a few plans in the works, one is to upgrade the current viaduct to modern design standards, which would elevate it an additional 15-20 feet, though largely keep the traffic pattern the same. The other option, and I think the better of the two is the Community Grid plan

A video released by NYSDOT shows a vision for the “Community Grid” plan, which removes the elevated portion of the highway and replaces much of it with an at-grade tree-lined boulevard with connections to many adjacent streets. The whole of current I-81 would be downgraded from an interstate, and I-481, the ring road around Syracuse would be designated as the new I-81. This project is significantly more ambitious than either Inner Loop project in Rochester in terms of the amount of urban highway it removes, and the cost of the project. NYSDOT estimated the cost of the Community Grid project at $1.9 billion.

Finally onto the two Buffalo projects. Unfortunately there is little to say on them other than there is an effort to remove them. The Kensington and Scajaquada expressways consititute a sort of ring road around Buffalo, Route 33 and 198 respectively. Kensington is below-grade, I could see this road either being filled in and replaced with a boulevard, or it may be capped, and have a linear park placed above it. Scajaquada Expressway cuts through the Olmstead-designed Delaware Park, and follows Scajaquada creek until it reaches Buffalo’s I-190. Residents of Buffalo have strongly pushed back against state DOT plans for renovating the expressway, and the project has fallen into the hands of the Greater Buffalo-Niagara Regional Transport Council. Proposals for Scajaquada involve replacing it with a low-impact parkway, or removing it completely. There are no definite plans for either project though the Scajaquada Corridor Coalition has some nice renderings that envision what removing the highway would look like.

Bonus: Albany also has a highway running through its downtown. I-787 runs along the Hudson river and cuts off residents of Albany (Albanians?) from the river. Perhaps more notably, there are some very large ramps connecting the highway with adjoining streets. But now there is a campaign, perhaps inspired by other highway removal projects across Upstate, that envisions what the Capital city would look like without this highway.

Buffalo Bills’ Billion Dollar Stadium

New York State taxpayers are fronting over one billion dollars of the cost of the new Buffalo Bills Orchard Park stadium. Is the cost to the tax payers worth it? (No)

Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park was originally opened in 1973, making the facility almost 50 years old. It’s the 3rd oldest operating football stadium in the NFL after Lambeau Field and Arrowhead. It seats over 70,000 fans. I’ve been there, and enjoyed the game, although I made the mistake of not bringing a seat cover, and got uncomfortable when the ice on the seat melted through my pants (oops). The Orchard Park location is about 11 miles out from downtown Buffalo, there is no good transit to the location, and traffic leaving the stadium is nightmarish.

In terms of sports arenas, football stadia are notoriously underused structures. They tend to only be used 8-12 times a year, depending on whether they are used for concerts, or non-pro football events. Baseball stadiums see more regular use with far more games in a season (typically 81). Hockey typically has 41 home games, plus several exhibition matches. Hockey arenas are indoors, and well shielded from the elements, the venues also typically can be used for basketball and concerts. Madison Square Garden in NYC sees around 320 events every year including Knicks games and Rangers games. Football has an associated tailgating culture, which requires an expanse of parking lot and people typically arriving by car, in large pickup trucks full of party equipment. This makes football stadiums generally a bad investment for a city, being use-light and land-intensive.

There are stadiums that are able to beat the record of 10-15 uses in any given year. SoFi Stadium in LA is home to two NFL teams, as is MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. This automatically doubles the number of events held in these stadia. Both of these stadia are also able to host regulation soccer games, and are near enough to population centers to draw major concerts.

Still, unless the surrounding area has need of new even venues, or the space can be doubled up between other teams, a football stadium is a bad public investment. But people, including me, like football, and if the teams think they can make a profitable investment in a stadium then they should be free to build one. But I start to bristle when taxpayer money goes to fund these stadiums. According to some reports the new Buffalo stadium, slated to cost $1.4 billion, will receive up to $1 billion in public funding from NY State and Erie County, making it the largest public funding of a sports stadium in history. The proposed new stadium would have fewer seats than the current stadium, will be situated in Orchard Park close to the current facility, and wouldn’t have a roof to protect the fans and players from Buffalo’s notorious winter weather.

Report after report has come out that any economic benefit to new stadium construction is wildly overblown. In this case the stadium funding seems more like a bribe to keep the team in Buffalo rather than having any economic stimulating effect. I feel like people should be reminded that $1 billion dollars is a lot of money. Most New York State agencies get far less than $1 billion in funding, and this value is close to what NY spent on it’s State-level police department. This money could be allocated to more worthy programs, it could be spent on highway removal projects, or for improving transit. Plans for high speed rail linking the major cities of New York vary in scale from $15-40 billion dollars, how does 1 football stadium used 10-ish times a year that seats 60,000, attract 1/20th the cost of a high-speed rail network, which would be used every day, and millions would use every year?

Terry Pegula

This stadium deal is corrupt New York politics at its worst. It’s simply public funding of billionaires like Terry Pegula, who made a fortune from extracting fossil fuels and now will receive a billion dollar hand-out at the expense of New York tax payers. It’s disgusting.

A downtown stadium was in the cards. This stadium would have required clearing a few existing blocks, but would be a major draw downtown, near transit lines, including an Amtrak station, so far less parking would be needed. As things currently stand it’s a 10-11 mile ride from downtown Buffalo by car.

Though it’s debatable whether a downtown football stadium is worth the cost. Land downtown arguably should be dedicated to places that would see activity more than a handful of times per year. Even if a downtown stadium uses less space, it still uses a lot of space, would be massively disruptive to communities living there, and would make downtown traffic on game day horrific. To make the venue worth the cost it would have to be able to attract concerts that wouldn’t otherwise go to the Key Bank Center, it would need a roof so the venue could be used year-round for concerts and other activities, and it would need to be able to host other sports events.

There have been studies of the cost of renovating the current stadium, as old as it is, and being subject to the intense freeze-thaw cycles of Buffalo is not faring well structurally. Repairs on the existing structure would almost be almost $1 billion, nearly as expensive as building a brand new stadium. So I can’t say I specifically object to the a new stadium being built. Of course at that point the state could probably just pay for the whole renovation at smaller expense, rather than 70% of the new project.

What high gas prices mean

A lot of people around here drive cars, and more specifically, a lot of people around here drive gas-powered cars. Gas prices have recently spiked from $3.25 at the start of the year to about $4.35 today, a 34% increase over the past 10 weeks, with most of that increase since the end of February, coinciding with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What does this mean for commuters? I’d like to paint a picture of some prototypical examples. Our first commuter is me. I have a fuel-efficient car, it gets about 30 miles to the gallon, and my commute is roughly 25 mile round-trip. If this were the only trip I made I’d only have to refill my car once every 12 work days. I’d probably be able to get away with 2 full tanks of gas a month. Of course I do things other than work in a week that requires driving like get groceries or visit family, so I’d estimate filling up the car about 3 times every month. Generally, I go thought 30 gallons of fuel a month. So I was spending about $100 per month on gas at the start of the year, and now I’m spending about $130.

But I also have the option to work from home, and with the higher gas prices I find it worthwhile to work from home one additional day per week, that means 100 miles less driving every month and a savings of $14 or so of gas every month, so that turns the monthly total to $116 per month, which is more, but not 30% more. I add this because it’s important to recognize that changing prices changes behavior. With higher gas prices more people will choose to do things like carpool, take public transit, or work from home in order to decrease what they spend on a daily commute.

Our second commuter is in the unenviable position of driving an inefficient vehicle, say a Ford F-150 or a muscle car, that gets about 20 miles to gallon, he does not have the luxury of working from home, and his commute is 30 miles into the city and 30 miles back, burning 3 gallons of fuel every day he works. That means going through a 24 gallon tank every 8 work days, we could estimate this person goes through 90 gallons of fuel every month. That means tripling my numbers from the last example. $300 a month in January turned into $390 a month in March. $90 is a good amount of money money. That’s money which may have been going into savings before, and now the budget is tighter. It may mean eating out less, or waiting longer to do a home improvement project.

Finally, the commuter who rides public transit is doing just fine. Fares haven’t increased with gas prices, his ride costs as much as ever, and with higher gas prices there should be fewer people on the road taking extraneous trips, which means fewer delays.

I think this goes to show that there is a defined benefit to living closer to where you work. This benefit is a decrease in the cost variability in commuting. There’s no indication we are near the top of this spike right now, there’s a very real possibility that gas prices could get as high as $6/gallon in some places. And gas prices don’t just impact the cost of a daily commute, they impact the cost of everything. Plane tickets will cost more, groceries will cost more, delivery services like Amazon and Uber eats will cost more. A lot of people have built their lives around the ability to discount the cost of their commute

I don’t know if we will see gas below $4/gallon again in my life time. And if energy, especially gas remains as expensive as it is, we may see our building patterns change with it. Expect more more people to want to live near job centers, or in denser areas, where public transit is an option, ride shares aren’t too expensive, more trips can be taken by foot or by bike. That isn’t to say our lives will get better due to more expensive energy. Only that they may necessarily become more efficient.