The Antiplanner

One of the Antiplanner’s co-speakers during a couple of events in Honolulu is David Callies, a law professor and author of two books on Hawaii land-use law: Regulating Paradise and Preserving Paradise. Hawaii passed the first statewide growth-management law in 1961, and still has about the strictest land-use laws in the nation. Not coincidentally, it also competes with California in having the nation’s least-affordable housing.

Regulating Paradise, a 1984 book that Callies is currently updating, shows that the 1961 law (sometimes called Act 187) is only one of several laws that have limited development of the state. Landowners in some parts of the state have to comply with as many as 30 different sets of regulations, from historic preservation to coastal zone management.

The original purpose of the 1961 law was to protect farmland. But Callies points out that this backfired. By limited urban development to about 5 percent of the Hawaiian Islands, the law made housing so expensive that farmers could not pay workers a living wage and compete with other tropical countries that grew similar crops. As a result, Hawaiian agriculture is in decline, and the only justification for the land-use law is to provide scenic views for upper-middle class urbanites.

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Unplanning sounds like a book for the Antiplanner. But the title is deceptive. Author Charles Siegel is critical of the urban planners who, according to the myth, planned and designed the low-density suburbs that most Americans live in today. He supports the high-density, anti-automobile goals of most of today’s urban planners. He just wants to achieve those goals with top-down political action, not top-down planning.

Instead of building new roads, says Siegel, we should build more rail transit. Instead of building low-density suburbs, we should cluster development around rail stations. Instead of speed limits of 45 to 65 mph on urban arterials, he says we should limit speeds to 30 mph.

Like most New Urbanists, Siegel lives in a fantasy world in which people will behave the way he thinks they ought to behave instead of the way they do behave. Siegel presents a circa 1910 postcard of a streetcar suburb, saying “streetcar suburbs were greener, less congested, quieter, and safer for children than today’s automobile-oriented suburbs.”

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Americans moved to the suburbs because of interstate highways. Or they moved to the suburbs because of federal housing policies. Or they moved to the suburbs because of federal subsidies to sewer and water lines.

Opponents of suburban lifestyles rely on the myth that outside forces caused Americans to move to the suburbs. This myth, in turn, relies on the further myth that only Americans live in suburbs. As every American tourist who has traveled the London subway and Chunnel trains knows, everyone in Europe lives in high-density cities.

Bollocks, says Paul Barker, a London researcher who wrote this 2009 book. In reality, despite decades of anti-suburban campaigns similar to those in the U.S.,
“84 percent of people in Britain live in a form of suburbia” (p. 15).

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Most DC visitors and residents consider the Washington Metrorail system to be a great success. Among them is Zachary Schrag, author of The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro. But, as Schrag clearly documents, by the standards of Metrorail’s original planners, it is a dismal failure.

Back in 1962, planners projected that a 103-mile rail system would cost less than $800 million — or about $4.6 billion in 2009 dollars. Moreover, they expected that fares would cover all of the operating costs and nearly 80 percent of the capital costs (pp. 53-54).

As it turned out, the actual 103-mile system that was completed in 2001 covers all of the basic routes of that original plan, yet cost $17.6 billion in 2009 dollars, close to four times the initial projection. Fares cover only about 60 percent of operating costs and, of course, none of the capital costs.

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The U.S. economy had grown rapidly for more than a decade, and even seemed to absorb a major natural disaster in stride. But then an unpredictable event triggered a panic, and suddenly banks closed, stock prices collapsed, and the entire world economy went into turmoil.

The many parallels between the panic of 1907 and the crash of 2008 suggest that this book — written just before the recent turmoil — deserves a close reading. The authors — two professors at the University of Virginia business school — provide an hour-by-hour account of the collapse and how New York bankers, led by J.P. Morgan, responded. But the book also provides a broad view of the conditions that led to the panic and how policy makers can respond to such panics.

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Smart-growth advocates say we must reduce the growth of driving to meet greenhouse-reduction targets, because otherwise driving growth will exceed the per-mile reductions in emissions that result from technological improvements. This argument is refuted by four MIT researchers in a new book on highway and air transportation.

The flaw in the reasoning of the smart-growth advocates is that they look no further than the fuel-economy (CAFE) standards set by the Energy Independence& Security Act of 2007, which required automakers to sell cars averaging 35 mpg by 2020. The MIT researchers go far beyond that, considering alternative engines, vehicle designs, materials, and fuels. They also look at the bigger picture, asking what is the cost-effective share of emission-reduction targets that should be met by passenger transportation. (They don’t say much about freight.)

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This is a bit premature, but booksellers such as Amazon and reviewers such as the Globe and Mail have already let the cat out of the bag. So I might as well announce the forthcoming publication of a new book: Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It. This book is to transportation planning what The Best-Laid Plans is to government planning in general.

Regular readers of the Antiplanner will be familiar with some of the arguments in the book: Mobility is valuable, and the personal mobility provided by the automobile is not only convenient and inexpensive, it is available to nearly every family in developed countries. Mass forms of transportation such as intercity trains and urban transit cannot substitute for the automobile, so efforts to restrict automobility can cause grave harm to society.

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I once wrote an article about Halle Neustadt a high-density, soviet-built city in East Germany that some urban planners once rated “the most sustainable city in the world.” As the article pointed out, it was only “sustainable” (that is, people didn’t drive much) before German reunification. Soon after the Berlin Wall fell and the country reunified, Halle Neustadt residents went out and bought cars, and soon after that about a third of them moved out to low-density suburbs. Today, many of Halle Neustadt’s high rises have been demolished.

My article pointed out that Halle Neustadt was based on urban planning ideals of the era as described in a book titled The Ideal Communist City. Much of the rhetoric in this book sounded very familiar: suburbs were evil, driving was evil, and government-imposed density was the solution. In a conclusion that drives smart-growth advocates nuts, I showed that the only significant differences between smart growth and the ideal communist city were that the former emphasizes mid-rise apartments of varying sizes while the latter emphasizes high-rise apartments that would be considered tiny by American standards.

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The Antiplanner finally picked up a copy of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), a popular book by journalist Tom Vanderbilt (whose web site, How We Drive, seems to be down at the moment). Vanderbilt interviewed numerous people (including several of the Antiplanner’s friends) to learn about the psychology and physics of driving.

Vanderbilt explains that the word “traffic” doesn’t mean “congestion” but simply “movement.” Appropriately, the book focuses at least as much on safety as on congestion. Vanderbilt is an entertaining writer who manages to present a balanced view of many controversial issues.

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The Department of Energy has just published the 28th edition of the Transportation Energy Data Book, including data for 2007. Since this was the source of some of the Antiplanner’s data used to compare energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of cars vs. rail transit, it is worth taking a look to see what has changed.

Two of the most important pages contain tables 2.13 and 2.14, physical pages 64 and 65. These list the energy consumption per passenger mile of various forms of transportation between 1970 and 2007.

The tables indicate that, between 2006 and 2007, energy consumption per passenger mile of cars increased by 0.1 percent. For light trucks, it decreased by 0.9 percent, but for transit buses it increased by 1.3 percent. Airlines reduced energy consumption per passenger mile by 3.0 percent; Amtrak by 5.1 percent; and light/heavy rail transit by 4.8 percent. However, commuter rail energy consumption per passenger mile increased by 4.4 percent.

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