The piece is very informative. It provides an opportunity for cities and urban areas to self-assess on how they approach urban governance,urban planning, infrastructure development and management. Working in a local authority in a developing country where functions have been devolved while revenue and resources remain centralized, there is definitely a lot to learn from 19th Century cities. Thank you for such a robust piece.
Thank you! I would love to explore the similarities and differences to developing-world cities today in future pieces, although it is an intimidatingly huge subject!
I wouldn't trust the modern construction sector to make anything as successful as Regent Street etc., and besides I would probably be too tender-hearted. But I do think that replanning urban areas is sometimes hugely positive-sum.
This is a fascinating lens for examining the dysfunctions of modern urban infrastructure institutions. I'm a San Franciscan, so I think of our "enterprise departments," which function very similarly to the German Stadtwerke you describe. There are four main ones: SFPUC (water/sewer), SFMTA (roads and transit), the Port of San Francisco, and the SFO airport. Their budgets are on the city books, but handled separately from the "general fund" budgeting process because they rely on large streams of dedicated user fee revenue.
The fiscal and institutional results of these four agencies' efforts could hardly be more different. SFMTA is a perennial mess, regularly requiring bailouts and incurring cost overruns. This partly reflects the inflationary dynamic you describe, where charging parking fees, congestion charges, transit fares etc that recouped its full operating expense would be extremely politically unpopular even though economically sound. It's also tied to the general reasons US cities are bad at building cost-effective transit infrastructure. But beyond that it reflects political divisions derived from American urban interest-group fights between transit proponents, bike and pedestrian advocates, and those neighborhood and business groups which see themselves as protecting the interests of car owners. Modern streetscapes are a "site of contestation" in a way that, if I understand your account correctly, they just weren't in the 19th century.
SFO is the complete opposite: a world-class airport facility, beautiful, commodious, technologically cutting-edge, quiet and relaxing in a way so few airports are, a place I am always regretful to depart and glad to return to. It is run efficiently, completes its infrastructure improvements on time and within budget, and generates a significant profit which goes to subsidize the city general fund. It enjoys unqualified support across the political spectrum. If all city departments were run like SFO, no one would ever cite SF as an example of a poorly governed city. But to be fair, SFO has an "easy" job: a defined land area within which everything is devoted to one task, and all the systems that coordinate to do that task are under unified control.
The Port and SFPUC are somewhere in between. SFPUC is an interesting case because it maintains a limited-distribution power utility that draws power from hydroelectric generation as part of the far-flung reservoir and pipeline system that provides SF and the surrounding area with water from the Sierra Nevada mountains. It has repeatedly proposed to expand this responsibility by buying the "regular" city power grid from the regional state-chartered private monopoly, Pacific Gas and Electric, which may well be the absolute worst infrastructure institution in California (and that's saying something). PG&E doesn't want to sell; there are open legal questions about what it would take for the city and/or the state to force them to do so; but perhaps more importantly, it's an open question whether SFPUC would actually do a better job if it succeeded in getting what it wanted.
I'd love to see followups on what modern cities could plausibly do to recapture the level of institutional-infrastructural effectiveness of 1914.
Fascinating – I didn't know about these examples at all. I considered tackling the question of why the C19 system declined, but I decided the piece was already massive enough and so I only touched on a few of the proximate causes without trying to develop a systematic account.
As you indicate, there are lots of cases where the C19-style system seems to have partly or wholly survived today. The French concessions and the German Stadtwerke still exist, although the transport components of them are heavily price controlled and subsidised. As I understand it the modern Japanese rail system is remarkably close to the C19 model in its entirety, with light price controls and limited subsidies. And so on through lots of cases around the world.
I need to think through what made this survival possible for certain services in certain places, even as the system collapsed elsewhere. But it may be a rather big project!
South Bay resident here, but your descriptions are accurate as far as I can tell.
Within the framework suggested in Mr. Hughes essay, I wonder whether SFO hasn't worked beter because their coordination boundaries are clean — one well-defined area, one well-defined task, one controlling authority.
SFMTA is a strongly coupled system. Every change to their system requires multilateral agreements among riders, cyclists, pedestrians, drivers, residents, etc. The same problem didn't exist in the Victorian era in London because the streets were so wide that there was literal room to maneuver (see photo above!)
It's easy to blame the management of these institutions, but the compare and contrast in coordination costs between SFO and SFMTA is pointing to something important, I believe. The problem isn't bad management, it's constitutional. SFMTA is literally frustrated (in the physics sense) in any attempt to do anything new, which requires a balance among its stakeholders.
The PG&E situation is illuminating too, I believe. The issue isn't really whether SFPUC is more competent than PG&E, it's whether municipal ownership would reduce or increase the coordination costs of operating the grid. PG&E's track record might be understood as a reflection of its monopoly *combined with* the lack of meaningful competitive discipline *or* democratic accountability, putting it in the worst possible position, capturing monopoly rents without any meaningful market or government feedback. But would SFPUC taking over the grid allow political factions to turn the entire power grid into a political standoff between advocates for solar, rate-sensitive residents, etc.? You could end up in the SFMTA situation. Mr. Hughes history suggests that the concessionaire model worked partly because the concessionaires were insulated from this kind of free-for-all. Like SFO, they had one job, one revenue stream, one regulator.
What might work in SF?
"Widening the streets" through congestion pricing that creates surplus revenue? grade-separated transit that removes buses from the competition?
"Extension plans" pre-commit to a big vision, like transit corridors for bikes, over a 30 year horizon, index fees to inflation automatically?
"Unbundling/Desynchronization" SFO works because it runs on its own clock. SFMTA doesn't because it has to accommodate schedules across too many different time scales. Could street functions be disaggregated by time scale? Have a single authority responsible for dedicated transit lanes, another for cycling network authority — each with its own user-fee funding? Like Victorian cities granted separate monopolies for trams, gas, water, and electricity?
I feel like a deeper lesson here is also a humane one. Ineffectiveness is not necessarily a property of bad management, but of the problems we're asking that management to solve being overconstrained. As you say, SFO has the easy job. Rather than beating up managers how are failing, we should be looking for ways to make their jobs easier.
Might have been inspired by the living memory of the French & '48 revolutions and the rise of Marxist agitation. The Haussman plan for Paris certainly was calculated to remove the impassable & unparseable warrens the rabble lived in.
Wider streets are also harder to barricade and easier to patrol, even if back then not necessary for normal traffic.
In certain cases that played a role, but I think it was very limited. Anthony Sutcliffe says it was at most a small factor even in the case of the Parisian street cuttings, and in e.g. suburban England it surely cannot have been a factor. My understanding is that it was driven by a mixture of:
Genuine circulation considerations on arterial roads;
A desire to create natural firebreaks;
Aesthetic considerations;
Prevailing medical theories about bad air etc.
It must also have been made far easier by low land values, which meant the opportunity costs were much lower.
I actually suspect that C19 people would often have been better off with somewhat higher enclosure ratios, but that by cosmic good luck it turned out to be hugely useful for the higher volumes of traffic that arrived in teh C20.
All good points. Particularly hard to feel in our guts today what a fear urban firestorms were not that long ago, had not even thought of it.
OTOH debatable whether street cuttings that could support car-centric inner-cities were that much of a blessing. After a few decades of experiencing them quite a few high-capacity societies seem to be retreating from it.
Those that don’t, and can support it from a public safety perspective, seem to mostly converge on malls, which are just walkable city cores with a big parking lot out front.
The beach example is a classic but the end result is *not* good for the vendors either: each vendor has the same share of customers as before, but the average customer now must walk twice as far to get their ice cream, resulting in fewer sales because some won't bother. Also, the arrangement leaves ample opportunity for somebody to set up shop at the edges.
A couple notes: I find the network-effect-based argument for city planning persuasive, but it was my impression (based on ChatGPT) that (apart from eminent domain for arterial roads), American cities largely incentivized developers' adherence to city plans in newly-annexed subdivisions through city-tax-funded street maintenance. IMO, encouraging a circulatory grid through such a subsidy but allowing private deviations might strike a better balance by allowing for neighborhoods that appeal to affluent families that might otherwise decamp for the suburbs, and additionally the option of gating streets (a la Saint Louis' private places) may help cities resist middle-class flight during crime waves.
Also, in today's context I'm interested in the question of tax policies to promote urbanism. Admittedly it's in tension with my (limited) Georgist and anti-gerontocracy positions, but allowing cities to grant tax breaks to homeowners could be a powerful way to stabilize their sociology/politics, since cities have more business/rental property to comparatively overtax.
Finally, in today's context (particularly in America) I'd emphasize that school choice would be very helpful for retaining (especially conservative-leaning, due to the classical/religious education element) middle-class families.
As a California resident, it seems consistent with the story you're telling. Modern housing crises sure feel like coordination failures rather than resource shortages, with each additional approval step compounding coordination costs multiplicatively as cities try to scale.
Questions I'm left pondering...
Were extension plans valuable less for their optimality than for the common knowledge they created? https://www.symmetrybroken.com/uncommon-knowledge/ And similarly, was inflation's real damage not rising prices but the destruction of stable nominal anchors that let strangers self-coordinate?
If Victorian planners governed at the boundary, not the bulk, does modern zoning have that exactly backwards? Having zoning ordinances frozen us in a suboptimal equilibrium that we could escape through agreement at a higher abstraction level, on principles of good zoning?
Very interesting indeed. About the conclusion, "We still have something to learn from them". But what exactly? That is to ask, what specific policy proposals does this history suggest could work today?
I thought of trying to go into this question in detail, but I decided it would be too much to take on within the confines of the piece. The answer will depend on what view we take on the underlying causes of the decline of the C19 system – without that it is hard to say what the political constraints are today. I don’t (yet) have a good answer here.
Some tentative ideas occur, though; e.g. I suspect that it will be politically very hard to loosen price controls on public transport where they exist today, but it might be possible to apply the C19 model to new infrastructure and especially new infrastructure types, as apparently happened with French and Austrian motorways.
Every urban planner (and every city dweller) should read this.
Thank you!
Incredible piece!
The piece is very informative. It provides an opportunity for cities and urban areas to self-assess on how they approach urban governance,urban planning, infrastructure development and management. Working in a local authority in a developing country where functions have been devolved while revenue and resources remain centralized, there is definitely a lot to learn from 19th Century cities. Thank you for such a robust piece.
Thank you! I would love to explore the similarities and differences to developing-world cities today in future pieces, although it is an intimidatingly huge subject!
Samuel, if you were appointed god-emperor of London, would you therefore carve out huge new arterial roads to improve congestion?
I wouldn't trust the modern construction sector to make anything as successful as Regent Street etc., and besides I would probably be too tender-hearted. But I do think that replanning urban areas is sometimes hugely positive-sum.
This is a fascinating lens for examining the dysfunctions of modern urban infrastructure institutions. I'm a San Franciscan, so I think of our "enterprise departments," which function very similarly to the German Stadtwerke you describe. There are four main ones: SFPUC (water/sewer), SFMTA (roads and transit), the Port of San Francisco, and the SFO airport. Their budgets are on the city books, but handled separately from the "general fund" budgeting process because they rely on large streams of dedicated user fee revenue.
The fiscal and institutional results of these four agencies' efforts could hardly be more different. SFMTA is a perennial mess, regularly requiring bailouts and incurring cost overruns. This partly reflects the inflationary dynamic you describe, where charging parking fees, congestion charges, transit fares etc that recouped its full operating expense would be extremely politically unpopular even though economically sound. It's also tied to the general reasons US cities are bad at building cost-effective transit infrastructure. But beyond that it reflects political divisions derived from American urban interest-group fights between transit proponents, bike and pedestrian advocates, and those neighborhood and business groups which see themselves as protecting the interests of car owners. Modern streetscapes are a "site of contestation" in a way that, if I understand your account correctly, they just weren't in the 19th century.
SFO is the complete opposite: a world-class airport facility, beautiful, commodious, technologically cutting-edge, quiet and relaxing in a way so few airports are, a place I am always regretful to depart and glad to return to. It is run efficiently, completes its infrastructure improvements on time and within budget, and generates a significant profit which goes to subsidize the city general fund. It enjoys unqualified support across the political spectrum. If all city departments were run like SFO, no one would ever cite SF as an example of a poorly governed city. But to be fair, SFO has an "easy" job: a defined land area within which everything is devoted to one task, and all the systems that coordinate to do that task are under unified control.
The Port and SFPUC are somewhere in between. SFPUC is an interesting case because it maintains a limited-distribution power utility that draws power from hydroelectric generation as part of the far-flung reservoir and pipeline system that provides SF and the surrounding area with water from the Sierra Nevada mountains. It has repeatedly proposed to expand this responsibility by buying the "regular" city power grid from the regional state-chartered private monopoly, Pacific Gas and Electric, which may well be the absolute worst infrastructure institution in California (and that's saying something). PG&E doesn't want to sell; there are open legal questions about what it would take for the city and/or the state to force them to do so; but perhaps more importantly, it's an open question whether SFPUC would actually do a better job if it succeeded in getting what it wanted.
I'd love to see followups on what modern cities could plausibly do to recapture the level of institutional-infrastructural effectiveness of 1914.
Fascinating – I didn't know about these examples at all. I considered tackling the question of why the C19 system declined, but I decided the piece was already massive enough and so I only touched on a few of the proximate causes without trying to develop a systematic account.
As you indicate, there are lots of cases where the C19-style system seems to have partly or wholly survived today. The French concessions and the German Stadtwerke still exist, although the transport components of them are heavily price controlled and subsidised. As I understand it the modern Japanese rail system is remarkably close to the C19 model in its entirety, with light price controls and limited subsidies. And so on through lots of cases around the world.
I need to think through what made this survival possible for certain services in certain places, even as the system collapsed elsewhere. But it may be a rather big project!
South Bay resident here, but your descriptions are accurate as far as I can tell.
Within the framework suggested in Mr. Hughes essay, I wonder whether SFO hasn't worked beter because their coordination boundaries are clean — one well-defined area, one well-defined task, one controlling authority.
SFMTA is a strongly coupled system. Every change to their system requires multilateral agreements among riders, cyclists, pedestrians, drivers, residents, etc. The same problem didn't exist in the Victorian era in London because the streets were so wide that there was literal room to maneuver (see photo above!)
It's easy to blame the management of these institutions, but the compare and contrast in coordination costs between SFO and SFMTA is pointing to something important, I believe. The problem isn't bad management, it's constitutional. SFMTA is literally frustrated (in the physics sense) in any attempt to do anything new, which requires a balance among its stakeholders.
The PG&E situation is illuminating too, I believe. The issue isn't really whether SFPUC is more competent than PG&E, it's whether municipal ownership would reduce or increase the coordination costs of operating the grid. PG&E's track record might be understood as a reflection of its monopoly *combined with* the lack of meaningful competitive discipline *or* democratic accountability, putting it in the worst possible position, capturing monopoly rents without any meaningful market or government feedback. But would SFPUC taking over the grid allow political factions to turn the entire power grid into a political standoff between advocates for solar, rate-sensitive residents, etc.? You could end up in the SFMTA situation. Mr. Hughes history suggests that the concessionaire model worked partly because the concessionaires were insulated from this kind of free-for-all. Like SFO, they had one job, one revenue stream, one regulator.
What might work in SF?
"Widening the streets" through congestion pricing that creates surplus revenue? grade-separated transit that removes buses from the competition?
"Extension plans" pre-commit to a big vision, like transit corridors for bikes, over a 30 year horizon, index fees to inflation automatically?
"Unbundling/Desynchronization" SFO works because it runs on its own clock. SFMTA doesn't because it has to accommodate schedules across too many different time scales. Could street functions be disaggregated by time scale? Have a single authority responsible for dedicated transit lanes, another for cycling network authority — each with its own user-fee funding? Like Victorian cities granted separate monopolies for trams, gas, water, and electricity?
I feel like a deeper lesson here is also a humane one. Ineffectiveness is not necessarily a property of bad management, but of the problems we're asking that management to solve being overconstrained. As you say, SFO has the easy job. Rather than beating up managers how are failing, we should be looking for ways to make their jobs easier.
Quality post
> This generosity is somewhat astonishing
Might have been inspired by the living memory of the French & '48 revolutions and the rise of Marxist agitation. The Haussman plan for Paris certainly was calculated to remove the impassable & unparseable warrens the rabble lived in.
Wider streets are also harder to barricade and easier to patrol, even if back then not necessary for normal traffic.
In certain cases that played a role, but I think it was very limited. Anthony Sutcliffe says it was at most a small factor even in the case of the Parisian street cuttings, and in e.g. suburban England it surely cannot have been a factor. My understanding is that it was driven by a mixture of:
Genuine circulation considerations on arterial roads;
A desire to create natural firebreaks;
Aesthetic considerations;
Prevailing medical theories about bad air etc.
It must also have been made far easier by low land values, which meant the opportunity costs were much lower.
I actually suspect that C19 people would often have been better off with somewhat higher enclosure ratios, but that by cosmic good luck it turned out to be hugely useful for the higher volumes of traffic that arrived in teh C20.
All good points. Particularly hard to feel in our guts today what a fear urban firestorms were not that long ago, had not even thought of it.
OTOH debatable whether street cuttings that could support car-centric inner-cities were that much of a blessing. After a few decades of experiencing them quite a few high-capacity societies seem to be retreating from it.
Those that don’t, and can support it from a public safety perspective, seem to mostly converge on malls, which are just walkable city cores with a big parking lot out front.
Equally interesting as it is revealing.
The beach example is a classic but the end result is *not* good for the vendors either: each vendor has the same share of customers as before, but the average customer now must walk twice as far to get their ice cream, resulting in fewer sales because some won't bother. Also, the arrangement leaves ample opportunity for somebody to set up shop at the edges.
Absolutely right! Everyone is either worse off or equally well off.
absolutely fascinating. so much work and research goes into a piece like this and it really shows.
Thank you! The research was, thankfully, a lot of fun.
Fantastic piece!
Thank you!
Awesome article!
A couple notes: I find the network-effect-based argument for city planning persuasive, but it was my impression (based on ChatGPT) that (apart from eminent domain for arterial roads), American cities largely incentivized developers' adherence to city plans in newly-annexed subdivisions through city-tax-funded street maintenance. IMO, encouraging a circulatory grid through such a subsidy but allowing private deviations might strike a better balance by allowing for neighborhoods that appeal to affluent families that might otherwise decamp for the suburbs, and additionally the option of gating streets (a la Saint Louis' private places) may help cities resist middle-class flight during crime waves.
Also, in today's context I'm interested in the question of tax policies to promote urbanism. Admittedly it's in tension with my (limited) Georgist and anti-gerontocracy positions, but allowing cities to grant tax breaks to homeowners could be a powerful way to stabilize their sociology/politics, since cities have more business/rental property to comparatively overtax.
Finally, in today's context (particularly in America) I'd emphasize that school choice would be very helpful for retaining (especially conservative-leaning, due to the classical/religious education element) middle-class families.
More on these issues in my own article on the subject: https://hmorgan.substack.com/p/a-new-conservative-urbanism?utm_medium=web
Wow. A tour de force.
As a California resident, it seems consistent with the story you're telling. Modern housing crises sure feel like coordination failures rather than resource shortages, with each additional approval step compounding coordination costs multiplicatively as cities try to scale.
Questions I'm left pondering...
Were extension plans valuable less for their optimality than for the common knowledge they created? https://www.symmetrybroken.com/uncommon-knowledge/ And similarly, was inflation's real damage not rising prices but the destruction of stable nominal anchors that let strangers self-coordinate?
If Victorian planners governed at the boundary, not the bulk, does modern zoning have that exactly backwards? Having zoning ordinances frozen us in a suboptimal equilibrium that we could escape through agreement at a higher abstraction level, on principles of good zoning?
Very interesting indeed. About the conclusion, "We still have something to learn from them". But what exactly? That is to ask, what specific policy proposals does this history suggest could work today?
I thought of trying to go into this question in detail, but I decided it would be too much to take on within the confines of the piece. The answer will depend on what view we take on the underlying causes of the decline of the C19 system – without that it is hard to say what the political constraints are today. I don’t (yet) have a good answer here.
Some tentative ideas occur, though; e.g. I suspect that it will be politically very hard to loosen price controls on public transport where they exist today, but it might be possible to apply the C19 model to new infrastructure and especially new infrastructure types, as apparently happened with French and Austrian motorways.