Search Results for: plan bay area

Debate Over Plan Bay Area

By | | Follow up, Planning Disasters
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The Antiplanner’s presentation at last night’s debate over Plan Bay Area is now available in PowerPoint or PDF format. You can also download Tom Rubin’s presentation in PDF format.

The debate was one-sided in the sense that close to 90 percent of the audience opposed the plan. One little incident sticks in my mind. During the debate, one of the plan’s supporters admitted that it was hard to predict the future, but added, “As Abraham Lincoln said, ‘The best way to predict the future is to create it.'”

I am a stickler for sourcing such attributed quotes, and that didn’t sound like something Lincoln would say. So I pulled out my iPhone and looked it up. Sure enough, it has been attributed to Lincoln–and to Peter Drucker, and to some other people. But it seems the person who actually first said it was computer programmer Alan Kay in 1971. I hope readers will understand what I mean when I say that knowing that Kay said it gives it a completely different meaning than if Lincoln had said it.

The Irrational Planning Process

By | | Regional planning
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Land-use and transportation planning is supposed to follow a rational planning process. That process includes defining the problem that needs to be solved, identifying alternative solutions, evaluating the alternatives, developing a final plan based on the best alternative or combination of alternatives, implementing the plan, monitoring the effects to see how well reality matches planning assumptions, and using the results of that monitoring as feedback into future plans.

This 1969 book describes the rational planning process on page 95.

The rational planning model has been around since at least 1969. Yet today, more than 50 years later, hardly any government agency follows this model. Instead, most government plans I’ve reviewed follow what can only be called an irrational planning process. Continue reading →

Regional Transportation Planning After COVID

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning
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The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1962 required urban areas of 50,000 or more people to have “a continuing, comprehensive transportation planning process carried out cooperatively by states and local communities.” The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1973 specified that this planning should be done by metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) overseen by elected officials (such as city councilors or county commissioners) representing a majority of people in the urban area. These MPOs are often called “councils of governments” or “associations of governments.”

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

The 1962 law required states to spend between 1.5 percent and 2.0 percent of federal highway funds on planning. Today, MPOs spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year writing and rewriting long-range transportation plans and annual transportation improvement plans. The infrastructure bill passed by the Senate and now before the House includes $2.28 billion to fund five years’ worth of metropolitan transportation planning. Since there are 408 MPOs in the United States, that works out to more than $1.1 million per MPO per year. Of course, most MPOs add local funding so their total planning budgets may be much larger. Continue reading →

Bay Area Arrogance

By | | Transportation
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The Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) has seen ridership fall in every year since 2015. The district was originally created to bring office workers from the suburbs into downtown San Francisco, yet downtown is now a ghost town with some of the highest vacancy rates in its history and actual occupancy rates — that is, offices that are actually being used — are probably below 20 percent. BART’s latest ridership numbers themselves are less than 15 percent of 2019 levels. Many of San Francisco’s high-tech employers have already announced that they will allow many of their employees to continue to work from home after the pandemic.

What better time is there for BART to announce its proposal to significantly expand its service? Called Link 21, the heart of the proposal is to build a second tube under the bay connecting San Francisco with Oakland costing a mere $30 billion. Continue reading →

The MCU School of Transportation Planning

By | | Policy brief
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Why do so many science fiction & fantasy visions of future cities have monorails?
Click image to download a three-page PDF of this brief.

Continue reading →

31. The Oak Grove Plan

By | | Iconoclast
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In 1989, when Vickie and I decided to move from Eugene to Portland so I could work on the SP&S 700, home prices in Portland were starting to rise following the recession of the 1980s. We soon realized that we couldn’t afford a home in Portland, but we did find a nice house in a Portland suburb called Oak Grove. Having grown up in Portland, I was aware that Oak Grove was located a few miles south of the city on the east side of the Willamette River, but I didn’t know much about it.

I soon learned that Oak Grove is an unincorporated area that had exclusively been farmland until 1892, when the world’s first electric interurban railroad connected the 20-mile distance between Portland and Oregon City, Oregon’s oldest incorporated city. Wealthy Portlanders soon realized that they could “get away from it all” by building homes along the rail line and commuting.

By 1930, parts of Oak Grove nearest the trolley line had been subdivided into standard 50×100 lots centered around a small retail area. But much of the community was a “railroad suburb,” with large houses on parcels of an acre or more, interspersed with farms and dairies. Over succeeding generations, the large parcels and farms were broken up and sold off. Today, the community has a wide variety of lot sizes and home styles. Continue reading →

Home Prices Rise Higher in Restricted Areas

By | | Policy brief
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For the first time since the financial crash, the median U.S. home price crept up above three times median family incomes in 2018, according to the 2018 American Community Survey (ACS). Places with price-to-income ratios under 3 are affordable (meaning people can easily pay off a mortgage on a house that is three times their income); price-to-income ratios between 3 and 4 are marginally affordable; price-to-income ratios between 4 and 5 are unaffordable; and price-to-income ratios above 5 are extremely unaffordable.


Click image to download a PDF of this four-page policy brief.

The U.S. price-to-income ratio is barely in the “marginal” class, as it is under 3.007. But it has reached this level because several states continue to allow their anti-sprawl policies to push housing prices up in the unaffordable or extremely unaffordable categories. Rather than fix the problem, planners are attempting to blame expensive housing on single-family homeowners who don’t want to see multifamily housing built in their neighborhoods. Continue reading →

BART: The Bay Area Transit Disaster

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Ridership on the $1.2 billion Bay Area Rapid Transit line to San Francisco Airport — which was never very high in the first place — has declined by 10 percent since 2013, which translates to a $4 million annual loss in fare revenues. Ridership on the $500 million BART-funded cable car to the Oakland Airport, which was also well below expectations, declined by 6 percent in the past two years, equal to about $620,000 in lost revenues.

BART blames ride hailing services for the loss in business, claiming that no one could have predicted the rise in such services when the agency planned these lines. Ride hailing is very predictable now (hindsight being 20:20), yet BART is still planning new lines, including an extension to Livermore, a second transbay crossing, and of course the line to downtown San Jose.

To pay for these new lines, as well as reconstruction of existing lines, BART asked voters to approve $3.5 billion in new funding in 2016 — and spent two years and an unknown amount of tax dollars promoting the ballot measure (without actually mentioning the measure) with the slogan “it’s time to rebuild.” It also failed to report these expenditures in a campaign filing statement, for which it was fined a whopping $7,500 by the state Fair Political Practices Commission. As one voter noted, “that’s not a fine; that’s a fantastic investment.” Continue reading →

BART Can’t Solve Bay Area Housing Crisis

By | | Housing
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Last weekend, California Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 2923, which gives BART the authority to ignore local zoning rules and build high-density housing on its own land in the Bay Area. This bill faced fierce opposition from mayors and city councils in Contra Costa County, but was supported by affordable housing advocates.

Ignoring the debate over density at the moment, what makes anyone think that BART, which can’t even effectively run a transit system, can suddenly become an expert housing developer? BART estimates that, with passage of this bill, it will be able to build 20,000 units of housing, about a third of which will be “affordable” (which in the Bay Area can mean affordable to people who earn $115,000 a year or less). While the region could use 20,000 housing units, there is no reason to think that BART can build them affordably or that high-density housing can even be affordable.

BART is well known for the cost overruns, maintenance problems, and crime problems on its transit system. It will be interesting to see how it applies these skills to housing. It’s hard to imagine the results will be very desirable. Continue reading →