California’s S.B. 375 mandates that cities increase the population densities of targeted neighborhoods because everyone knows that people drive less and higher densities and transit-oriented developments relieve congestion. One problem, however, is that transportation models reveal that increased densities actually increase congestion, as measured by “level of service,” which measures traffic as a percent of a roadway’s capacity and which in turn can be used to estimate the hours of delay people suffer.
The California legislature has come up with a solution: S.B. 743 exempts cities from having to calculate and disclose levels of service in their environmental impact reports for densification projects. Instead, the law requires planners to come up with alternative measures of the impacts of densification.
On Monday, December 30, the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research released a “preliminary evaluation of alternative methods of transportation analysis. The document notes that one problem with trying to measure levels of service is that it is “difficult and expensive to calculate.” Well, boo hoo. Life is complicated, and if you want to centrally plan society, if you don’t deal with difficult and expensive measurement problems, you are going to botch things up even worse than if you do deal with those problems.
The paper also argues that measuring congestion leads people to want to do things that might actually relieve congestion, such as increasing roadway capacities. This would be bad, says the paper, because increased capacities might simply “induce” more travel. The fact that such increased travel might actually produce some economic benefits for the state is ignored. Instead, suppressing travel (and therefore suppressing economic productivity) should be the goal.
According to various medical research conducted over the years, it has cropped up as great help for individuals tired of seeing sky high prices viagra online of the treatments that are contained with nitrates must not be combined with the treatment with men suffering from severe erectile dysfunction. If the pains are acute enough, a person may need to go to the hospital and take painkillers. viagra from uk cialis 5mg sale Lifestyle modifications can reduce severity of ED along with medication to treat the same. These canadian viagra medicines ensure improved sexual stamina to satisfy the sexual urges and needs of their partners because they lack the ability to get an erection. The document suggests five alternative measures of the impacts of densfication on transportation:
- Vehicle miles traveled;
- Auto trips generated;
- Multi-model level of service;
- Auto fuel use; and
- Motor vehicle hours traveled.
There are many problems with these alternatives. First, they really aren’t any simpler to reliably calculate than levels of service. Second, they ignore the impact on people’s time and lives: if per capita vehicle miles traveled declines by a percent, planners will regard it as a victory even if the other 99 percent of travel is slowed by millions of hours per year. Third, despite the “multi-modal” measure, these measures ignore the environmental impacts of transit. For example, they propose to estimate automotive energy consumption, but ignore transit energy consumption.
Worst of all, the final “measure” proposed by state planners is to simply presume, without making any estimates, that there is no significant transportation impact from densification. After all, if you add one vehicle to a congested highway and traffic bogs down, can you blame that one vehicle, or is everyone else equally to blame? If the latter, then it seems ridiculous, at least to the planners, to blame densification for increased congestion when the existing residents contribute to the congestion as well. By the same token, if an airplane is full, and one more person wants to take that flight, then the airline should punish everyone who is already on board.
The real problem is that planners and planning enthusiasts in the legislature don’t like the results of their own plans, so they simply want to ignore them. What good is an environmental impact report process if the legislature mandates that any impacts it doesn’t like should simply not be evaluated in that process?
All of this is a predictable outcome of attempts to improve peoples’ lives through planning. Planners can’t deal with complexity, so they oversimplify. Planners can’t deal with letting people make their own decisions, so they try to constrict those decisions. Planners can’t imagine that anyone wants to live any way but the way planners think they should live, so they ignore the 80 to 90 percent who drive and want to live in single-family homes as they impose their lifestyle ideologies on as many people as possible. The result is the disaster known as California.
Why is “congestion” such an important metric when there are many other factors involved in transportation, including a myriad of other goals? “Reducing congestion” has become something of a religious dogma in this country, with the tamu.edu TTI indices becoming part of the holy writ. As my associate Jarrett Walker pointed out in his rebuttal to a Canadian commentator regarding the TTI (http://www.humantransit.org/2013/12/a-glimpse-into-the-road-lobbys-echo-chamber-and-how-to-respond.html):
Everyone should know how to respond to articles like this, because we’ll keep seeing them. The comments on the article (“Wendell Cox is an idiot”) are not encouraging. Wendell Cox is not an idiot. He is part of a reactionary process that accompanies every revolution, one that we’ll hear more from. He’s a smart man who knows exactly what he’s doing.
Take time to understand the point of view. Many people’s brains are so fused with their cars that to them, congestion really is the same thing as urban mobility or urban liberty. To them, the TTI is right.
So first you have to object by shining light on that premise. TTI, and by extension Canada’s leading newspaper, believes that certain people do not exist or do not matter — namely everyone who already travels by transit, bike, or foot, and everyone who can imagine choosing not to drive in the face of real and attractive choices.
Congestion is fine, if you can afford to be marooned in a part of town where the per-capita income is enough to be able to support business, such as grocery stores. We have high density parts of town in Portland that have poor transit service, inadequate road capacity and lacks public transit because the residents are middle-lower income and can’t support any retail businesses – like grocery stores. In fact you msetty eluded to the fact that most in that income group should be marginalized by the planning process because they were no better than criminals, didn’t you? Do you mention that in your opinion about congestion?
As a financially comfortable resident of Portland for 40 years, I can say with conviction that based on my observations, urban planning seems to be mostly about screwing the lower income brackets out of a place to live in favor of some other more politically popular demographic, and most weird of all it’s become practically a religion here. I personally believe history may look back on it at best as misguided and worst as another incarnation of institutionalized persecution.
California’s S.B. 375 mandates that cities increase the population densities of targeted neighborhoods because everyone knows that people drive less and higher densities and transit-oriented developments relieve congestion.
That ‘because’ is a good laff for the new year. Thanks for the LOLz Randal.
DS
msetty wrote:
Why is “congestion” such an important metric when there are many other factors involved in transportation, including a myriad of other goals?
Because it wastes resources and time?
Because it is bad for the environment?
“Reducing congestion” has become something of a religious dogma in this country, with the tamu.edu TTI indices becoming part of the holy writ.</cite?
I know Tim Lomax of TTI. He is one of the least dogmatic people I have ever met.
Tombdragon, your comment is based on the premise that everyone must drive, which is the premise that both Jarrett Walker and I reject.
CPZ, when you claim something, please be more specific. Neither Jarrett Walker nor I said anyone at TTI is dogmatic.
What I said was that the USE of the TTI indices has become dogmatic among people like Wendell Cox and The Antiplanner. What Jarrett said is that using the one-dimensional TTI measure focusing only on auto travel ignores those who can’t drive, or don’t want to drive, or would not want to drive if decent alternatives were available and safe. In the larger regions that tend to have larger TTI indices, those usually have an increasing share of travelers to whom the TTI indice is irrelevant. I add the Todd Litman point that travel delay should be measured on a per capita basis, not per driver.
Also, Tombdragon, one can argue that your point is actually making an argument for substantial increases in the minimum wage to help insert money into low income neighborhoods. If those in poverty weren’t so close to the edge, perhaps many new small businesses would arise since there would be more money in those neighborhoods to support new economic activity. Only social service bureaucrats whose grip on their clients is eluded by insertions of money into the hands of poor people through work rather than welfare would complain. And libertarian “free market” economists, but I digress.
Tombdragon:
In fact you msetty eluded to the fact that most in that income group should be marginalized by the planning process because they were no better than criminals, didn’t you? Do you mention that in your opinion about congestion?
What in the world are you talking about?
Congestion is a complicated measure that is so often misused. If a bridge has a capacity of X, and the unrestricted demand is 3X, then you can double the capacity of the bridge and not change the congestion at all. Many will say that means there is no improvement. But an uneducated country bumpkin might say that the bridge is just as crowded, BUT NOW TWICE AS MANY PEOPLE ARE GETTING TO WHERE THEY NEED TO GO.
Why is “congestion” such an important metric when there are many other factors involved in transportation, including a myriad of other goals?
Here are some of those goals:
1. Increasing congestion
2. Making sure driving your car is as difficult as possible
3. Making life dangerous for pedestrians by persistently trying to combine auto and foot traffic in dense, mixed use new urbanism paradises.
4. Making life dangerous for bicyclists by persistently trying to combine auto and bike traffic in dense, mixed use new urbanism paradises.
5. Increasing congestion
6. Spending billions on rail boondoggles to attract three riders to light rail, with two of those riders being existing transit patrons coming off the bus route that was faster, which therefore got cancelled cause it would make the rail look bad.
7. Enriching corrupt developers who make billions off smart growth and rail boondoggles
8. Increasing congestion
Come on msetty. if you love congestion and new urbanism so much, why don’t you live in it? 40 acre ranches in California are pretty expensive, which means you are invested in that lifestyle; it wasn’t just some shack in Arkansas cause you couldn’t afford better. Stop being a hypocrite and move to downtown San Francisco already!
A group of wealthy investors wanted to be able to predict the outcome of a horse race. So they hired a group of biologists, a group of statisticians, and a group of physicists. Each group was given a year to research the issue. After one year, the groups all reported to the investors. The biologists said that they could genetically engineer an unbeatable racehorse, but it would take 200 years and $100bn. The statisticians reported next. They said that they could predict the outcome of any race, at a cost of $100m per race, and they would only be right 10% of the time. Finally, the physicists reported that they could also predict the outcome of any race, and that their process was cheap and simple. The investors listened eagerly to this proposal. The head physicist reported, “We have made several simplifying assumptions: first, let each horse be a perfect rolling sphere… ”
Apparently planners think like physicists, because for damn sure they make many “simplifying assumptions”.
The idea is to price most people off the roads and away from private property ownership.
The elites, politicians, and the planner class don’t have any intention of giving up their property, homes, or cars. They expect everyone else to.
The elites, politicians, and the planner class don’t have any intention of giving up their property, homes, or cars. They expect everyone else to.
Which is why msetty and Dan both live in detached housing, one on a 40 acre parcel in expensive California, the other in a nice suburban home in Denver. Which is why our betters at METRO (and likely most other planning organizations around the country) live, for the most part, in large homes that reflect their wealth and desire to not be stacked like sardine cans at the latest new urbanism development.
msetty – you said “density per se DOES NOT equal crime. Anyone who insists that is does is either delusional or a liar with a political ax to grind, and deserves to be challenged. ”
Well in Rockwood – a suburb of Portland – on the MAX Light Rail – a walkable neighborhood in the interest of Smart Growth Metro Planners moved low income earners into the High Density Housing they built for them. The Crime increased so much and income went down so far that the Fred Meyer Shopping Center had to close because the neighborhood could no longer support the store, and crime skyrocketed, more stores closed and since no private enterprise would purchase the former store the County built another Courthouse on the property to deal with the increase in crime litigation. Jobs left the area.
Most in our area choose to drive because Light Rail is so slow, and it doesn’t go to where the jobs are, or where people want to shop. Most all of the Transit Oriented Development along the MAX Light Rail Line remains empty – after 20 years. Locals refer to it as the “Crime Train”, because it exports crime all along the route. Most in the region choose to drive, because they value their time, its faster to do drive, walk, or ride your bike anywhere than take TriMet – safer too.
Sandy wrote: “Congestion is a complicated measure that is so often misused. If a bridge has a capacity of X, and the unrestricted demand is 3X, then you can double the capacity of the bridge and not change the congestion at all. Many will say that means there is no improvement. But an uneducated country bumpkin might say that the bridge is just as crowded, BUT NOW TWICE AS MANY PEOPLE ARE GETTING TO WHERE THEY NEED TO GO.”
Not really. Twice as many people are getting across the bridge, not where they need to go. If all you are doing is increasing the capacity of the bridge, but not the roads leading up to the bridge, or the roads leading up to that road, it doesn’t make much difference. Twice as many people are getting to the next bottleneck. We see this in Austin all the time. We increase highway capacity to kingdom come and see no reductions in travel time. Why? Because we didn’t really increase capacity, we just offset the bottleneck a little bit.
My take? Other than some massive paradigm shift away from the 8 to 5, congestion aint going anywhere.
@^ Obviously I’m arguing with the bumpkin. Something I’ve gotten good at since my relocation to TX.
Okay, so I read Sandy’s comment a bit too quickly and missed the whole x2 v x3 point. My point is the if the demand is x2 and the bridge capacity is increased x2, the benefit will likely be marginal for reasons mentioned above. Sorry for my lack of reading comprehension skills. .
Obamacare in a nutshell.
“deal with difficult and expensive measurement problems”
To me this is the definition of bureaucracy. So as I see it, what is being suggested is that in order to fix onerous bureaucracy, we should create more bureaucracy. Fast forward… this is inefficient, government has overstepped it’s bounds.
As with too many rules and regulations passed by “progressives”, this follows the progressive tenet; “Rules for thee, but not for me”.
If you even dare to ask why you have to follow rules, but the elites who make the rules do not, you are labeled a bircher, birther, etc.
If the rules/regulations are good for society, then we should all be required to follow them. Never seems to happen, does it?
This is a watershed moment in the field of planning. Central planning is hard work, and planners used to argue that it was possible to direct the outcomes of large, complex entities like metropolitan regions (or entire economies) through the application of equally large and complex models. Apparently, even this pretense is being abandoned now. If traditional evaluation methods show your favored projects/policies to be flawed or socially undesirable, keep moving the goalposts (and eliminating metrics which make them look bad) until they sound reasonable.
This proposed law is an abomination and an embarrassment to the entire planning profession. It undermines what little credibility they had left. They have abandoned the proud tradition of massaging forecasts in favor of pure hand-waving and outright dishonesty (suppressing contrary or damaging results).
This proposed law is an abomination and an embarrassment to the entire planning profession. It undermines what little credibility they had left. They have abandoned the proud tradition of massaging forecasts in favor of pure hand-waving and outright dishonesty (suppressing contrary or damaging results).
You’re spreading that far and wide in your writing samples, amirite? Loudn proud? Who’s hiring? some third-rate firm dreaming of K St?
But srsly. If you were to believe the whining on this thread, one should plow forward regardless of input. Never change. Buggy whips, ever’buddeh.
DS
MJ, the law in question was passed last year and went into effect yesterday. It is not a “proposed law.”
Citing a disreputable, questionable and dead economist and one of his 1990 papers is a neat trick.
How about the Highway, er, “Transportation” Departments that can’t accurately project future motor vehicle traffic levels a year or two in advance, let along decades? (http://dc.streetsblog.org/2013/12/17/study-transpo-agencies-are-terrible-at-predicting-traffic-levels/. Or the highly fudged toll road forecasts in the U.S. and elsewhere that have de facto defrauded investors in many toll roads? (http://www.baconsrebellion.com/PDFs/2012/01/Wilbur_Smith.pdf, http://www.robbain.com/Bain_Transportation_2009.pdf, http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/optimism-bias-on-toll-road-plan-20121205-2avpq.html.)
In contrast, transit ridership projections have improved dramatically from the “bad old days” of the 1980’s and early 1990’s that were documented in the well-known Don Pickrell study from the early 1990’a (couldn’t find a direct link to this out of date study; Randal, do you have a copy?) but is still cited by rail opponents to this day.
The gradually improvements in new transit project ridership forecasing from the early 1990’a, through the early 2000’s is documented by a 2007 FTA report: http://www.fta.dot.gov/documents/NSPA2007_Final(1).pdf, and a recent analysis documenting the improvements in the last decade, http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/conferences/2012/LRT/LHenry.pdf. In any case, the state of transit forecasting is now much better than motor vehicle traffic forecasting, probably because the highway forecasters haven’t gotten it through there head about the sea change in U.S. driving patterns since 2005.
Funny msetty – Incomes have gone down in Portland due to traffic congestion and gridlock, and now the proposed business centers, and walkable neighborhoods don’t pencil out – outside the central core, where the upper income can afford to live. Public Transit service outside the central core is forecast to continue to decline because government can’t afford to provide the service as business leaves, and incomes decline. Later this year MAX Light Rail is scheduled to open another segment, and the cost of operating that line will require reducing bus service even more.
Incomes have gone down in Portland due to traffic congestion and gridlock
Evidence please.
DS
Well I don’t have direct evidence , but how about this:
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/12/instead_of_adding_6000_jobs_ou.html
and this:
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/12/east_portlands_housing_explosi.html
Evidence please.
DS
It’s obvious congestion has a direct effect on lowering income, and shit 4 brains knows this but can’t admit it because he supports congestion-increasing policies like smart growth. When people waste time and gas idling in traffic jams created by planners, that lowers their income & quality of life.
http://brr.berkeley.edu/2012/12/can-cutting-traffic-congestion-help-prevent-premature-births/
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9385/index1.html
Shit 4 brains always asks for evidence and links from everyone, but never backs up his own smart growth bullshit propaganda.
Shit 4 brains always asks for evidence and links from everyone, but never backs up his own smart growth bullshit propaganda.
Randal, what do you think of such low-wattage mouth-breathing on your site?
DS
Yep Dan, Metrosucks is a prick ( I mean that as a complement Metrosucks) – but no more so than to whom he refers – and everybody know it. That person is acting just like all planners do – not listening to anybody but his small social circle and ignoring the evidence that it breeds poverty in the lower income and those just embarking on life. He suggests an increase in the minimum wage – where at least in Oregon, those earning minimum wage is the fastest growing segment of the workforce. I think as a percentage of population Oregon has the the most college degreed barista’s anywhere – and it has everything to do with land use planning, Smart Growth, and High Density Development. The fact is you can’t fix stupid – East Portland is evidence that his planning mantra is irreparable – I know I have to live in it, witnesses the lies, experienced the increase in crime, and watched the Planned Development grow up around us. The ONLY solution to the “planning” is to tear down “planned” development to make room business space and add roads so consumers have access to them – as well as the workers needed to man them. In the end we ALL know who Metrosucks is referring to now don’t we.
Tombdragon,
if by prick you mean someone who doesn’t happily accept the crap our government overlords dish out, then yes, I am definitely a prick. I am tired of trying to cordially debate a$$holes like Dan because it’s obvious how contemptuously he views those of us that have to actually live in the conditions planners create for the non-planners.
Yep Metrosucks that is exactly what I meant – I said it was a complement! It is frustrating to live with the “planned” traffic congestion and be the target of those who seek to limit your opportunity and earning power – which is what the planners do. Dan hasn’t had to attend the community meetings and have the Planners lie to your face and marginalize your point of view, and be heckled by the planning groupies that don’t live in the neighborhood that they bring to support their political point of view.
Tombdragon,
he has attended, just as one of the lying planners behind the desks.
Well, no wonder Dan can’t can’t stand us – I’m sure he is ignoring everything we say, because we’re outside his social circle, and he doesn’t have to live, and work, in the “sim cities” he “plans”. Ha – that’s funny – since relatively few “work” and have economic opportunity in the “sim cities” people like him and msetty plan.
Tombdragon,
msetty lives on a 40 acre ranch in the Sacramento area. Presumably, nothing is within walking, streetcar, or bus range where he lives.
Dan lives in a nice large suburban house in the Denver area. He tools around in the Rocky Mountains in a 4WD jeep. He does not take the bus, walk, or take the Denver light rail. He lives exactly the opposite life he promotes constantly, the same lifestyle he criticizes when it is other people doing it.
They are both flaming hypocrites. Dan is the professional liar/planner who creates the lies & theories to implement smarth growth, and msetty is the professional apologist for smart growth bullshit. Neither are about to live the lifestyle they promote.
Dan lives in a nice large suburban house in the Denver area. He tools around in the Rocky Mountains in a 4WD jeep. He does not take the bus, walk, or take the Denver light rail.
These are all hilarious lies or weak hopes. But the weak flailing makes us LOLz!
That’s the best they can do!
DS
So Dan, do you live in a “planned” area, with inadequate road access, a Crime Train called Light Rail, and a declining median income, because business is leaving? If you did, wouldn’t you be upset with the institutionalized planners, and their bureaucracy ?
These are all hilarious lies or weak hopes. But the weak flailing makes us LOLz!
That’s the best they can do!
I really ought to post a Google Maps view of where Dan lives. That way people can see the walkability score of 26 with a “car dependent” rating. And depending on which map product they choose, they might even see Dan’s Jeep parked out front.
they might even see Dan’s Jeep parked out front.
Continue to make it up, Frank/sockpuppet. Please proceed!
DS
http://i41.tinypic.com/w7fs6o.jpg
Of course planner boy will recognize his own house, but if he continues to deny it, I’ll just post the link to Google Maps!
Thank you for letting us know you’re definitely making it up to have something to whine about. Clearly I don’t own a Jeep, despite your little wish.
Continue to make it up, Frank/sockpuppet. Please proceed!
DS
Wow Dan – in East Portland we can ONLY afford to live in an 865 sq ft home, because the push for high density housing and lack of infrastructure makes our cost-of-living so high compared to what we are able to earn we can’t afford more.