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Clouding the Debate

By | | News commentary
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Amid the conservatives blaming the oil spill on Obama and liberals blaming it on America’s auto addiction, journalist Robert Samuelson gets it right, noting that one of the most worrisome consequences of the Gulf oil spill is a “more muddled energy debate.” All the proposals to end oil consumption, such as one to convert the U.S. to 95 percent renewables by 2050, are mere “pipe dreams,” says Samuelson in a possibly unintentional pun.

Of course, some people think we should build huge wind farms. But winds are so unreliable that Britain is paying wind farms to stop generating electricity when the wind is blowing because the electrical grid can’t handle it. (Winds in many places blow harder at night when demand for electricity is lowest.)

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Are Suburbs Authentic?

By | | News commentary
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Andrew Potter, who recently wrote a delightful book on what is “authentic,” has now come out in defense of the suburbs. Potter challenges James Kunstler’s view of the suburbs as having no “sense of place.”

“This is the sort of thing that could only be argued by someone who has either never visited a suburb, or is so enthralled by his own prejudices that black looks white, up looks down, and a thriving community appears to be nothing more than a barren wasteland,” says Potter. In fact, suburbs have “vibrant sociability on every street,” while the cities have devolved “into social and psychological wastelands, full of apartment buildings where people barely acknowledge one another in the elevator.” New Urbanists see cities as “a version of the ‘Sesame Street’ fantasy spun by Jane Jacobs,” but in fact Jacobs’ Greenwich Village “already disappearing by the time she turned it into an urban planner’s fetish dream.”

“The entire case against the suburbs,” says Potter, “is little more than lifestyle snobbery . . . revealing itself as a thinly veiled form of contempt for middle-class tastes and preferences.” While cities like Portland are “increasingly populated by the hip, the young, and the childless,” the reality is that these people are bringing “frankly suburban practices,” such as critical mass bike rides, into the city cores. This “importation of the habits and values of the suburban lifestyle” has actually helped revitalize the cities and is turning even New York City “into one giant homogeneous suburb.” While some may quarrel with that conclusion, Potter’s point is that too much of the debate about the suburbs has been based on phony esthetic ideals.

Planning Student Proves Consultants Are a Waste of Money

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Spending around $1,000, 20-year-old Daniel Jacobson, a Stanford University undergraduate student, has written a 140-page streetcar feasibility study for Oakland, California. The city of Oakland itself had already spent $300,000 on a streetcar study back in 2005, and planned to spend another $330,000 for further study this year.

Of course, the Jacobson’s study is filled with fabricated data, false assumptions, and phony calculations. But most readers will be too dazzled by the beautiful graphics to notice. Besides, any $300,000 professional feasibility study would contain the same fabricated data and calculations.

The biggest fabrication, of course, is the inevitable claim that building a streetcar will lead to economic redevelopment. There is not a chance in hell that spending $100 million or more on a 2-1/2-mile streetcar line would lead to any economic development, and even if it did, it would only be development that would have taken place somewhere in the Oakland area anyway. But any streetcar study is going to make this claim because that is the only way to justify spending tens of millions of dollars on a nineteenth-century technology that is slower, less flexible, and more dangerous to have on the streets than buses that cost far less.

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Urban Planners’ Employment Act

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd has introduced a “Livable Communities Act” that promises more than $4 billion in federal grants to communities that promote smart-growth principles. The Senate held hearings on the bill last week, and a somewhat similar bill has been introduced in the House by Representative Albio Sires of New Jersey.

The Senate bill starts out with “findings” that repeat all the usual smart-growth crap that is mostly false and all highly debatable. Some of the findings imply that there is a growing demand for high-density, mixed-use housing. But if that is true, why does the federal government need to subsidize it?

The bill laments that “as much as 30 percent of current demand for housing is for housing in dense, walkable, mixed-use communities,” while “less than 2 percent of new housing is in this category.” Of course, that may be because many cities have a surplus of existing housing that fits this description, so they don’t need any new construction. (It may also be that “as much as 30 percent” is really more like “less than 20 percent.)

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More High-Speed Spending

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Here’s a brilliant idea from a disappointing governator who ran as a fiscal conservative but then helped his state run up tens of billions of dollars of deficits: build a “demonstration” high-speed rail project from Los Angeles to San Diego. The trains would use existing tracks and so would be moderate-speed rail, not true high-speed rail. Schwarzenegger hopes to see it completed before he leaves office so that people can see the benefits of California’s true high-speed rail project that won’t be completed before 2020.

The top speed of Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner from L.A. to San Diego is 90 mph. Schwarzenegger could spend a billion dollars on this route, but BNSF would still restrict the top speed to 90 mph.
Flickr photo by Snap Man.

Other than the fact that nobody has any money to do what Schwarzenegger proposes to do, one major problem is that the BNSF Railway, whose tracks the trains would use, has a policy that passenger trains may not go more than 90 mph on its tracks. CSX has a similar policy; Norfolk Southern’s limit is 79 mph. Of the nation’s four largest railroads, only the Union Pacific has agreed to allow trains as fast as 110 mph on its tracks, and then only if the government spends billions adding new tracks for both passenger and freight trains to run on.

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Transit Agencies vs. Transit Unions

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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A recent article in the Washington Post highlights new tensions within the transit industry. Most federal transit grants are legally dedicated to capital improvements, but the recession has left most transit agencies short of operating funds, so they have been lobbying Congress to allow them to use more federal funds for operating subsidies.

The main opposition to such legislation, it turns out, comes from what the Post describes as “the biggest transit agencies, such as New York’s MTA and Washington’s Metro.” The Post explains that “The big transit systems argue that letting them use federal funds for their basic operations would reduce their leverage — unions would invoke the funds to seek bigger raises, transit advocates would argue against service cuts, and local and state lawmakers might limit their share of transit funding.”

In reality, this isn’t a tension between big and small agencies; it is a tension between agencies with older rail systems — meaning Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington — and agencies with newer or no rail systems. The agencies with older rail systems desperately need money to bring their systems up to a state of good repair. Since such maintenance is included in the FTA’s definition of capital improvements, they are happy to have federal monies dedicated to capital.

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The Broken Ladder

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Southern California writer Joel Kotkin has a new report about urban growth that in many ways is a sequel to his previous report on Opportunity Urbanism. While Opportunity Urbanism focused on Houston, The Broken Ladder look at London, Mexico City, and Mumbai. The common theme is that density is no longer vital to wealth creation, and land-use regulation aimed at achieving such density
has become an obstacle to the upward mobility of low- and middle-income people.

Kotkin also has a great web site, NewGeography, which has numerous contributors and in many ways is an antidote to the anti-suburbs, anti-auto sites that have proliferated across the web. For example, two writers from the center-left New Democrat Network have an article pointing out that a majority of blacks, Latinos, and other minorities all now live in the suburbs, so the old arguments that suburbs were the result of “white flight” is no longer valid.
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Throwing Good Money After Bad

By | | City planning, News commentary, Planning Disasters, Transportation
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TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, is planning to spend $7 million upgrading the 24-year-old Rockwood station in the city of Gresham, Portland’s largest suburb. TriMet officials hope the improvements will “leverage investment in transit into nearby development opportunities” in that neighborhood. Fat chance, especially since it was the light rail that killed the neighborhood in the first place.

The Rockwood Fred Meyer in 2000. Note the light-rail train in the background.

For 45 years, the center of the Rockwood neighborhood was a Fred Meyer store, a “supercenter” selling groceries, clothing, variety, and hardware. Fred Meyer also leased storefronts to other businesses such as coffee shops and locksmiths. When Fred Meyer spent $400,000 remodeling the store after TriMet opened the light-rail line in 1986, TriMet triumphantly counted it as an investment inspired by the light rail. Never mind the fact that Fred Meyer bragged on its web site that it had remodeled all of its 130 stores at about the same time.

The truth was, things were not going well at the Rockwood store. In January 2003, Fred Meyer shocked the neighborhood by closing it even though it was obligated to pay a lease on the site for another 10 years. The store “was in decline for a number of years,” a Fred Meyer official told the Oregonian (article available to those with access to Infoweb). “It was in a decline before the last remodel.” This was the only time in the chain’s history that it closed a store without immediately reopening a replacement nearby.

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Florida vs. Klein

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
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Is it ironic, or just self-serving, that Richard Florida, the man who urged cities to attract the so-called creative class with policies that made housing unaffordable, now writes a Wall Street Journal article (link to full article for non-subscribers) arguing that “homeownership is overrated”? Pay no attention to the facts behind the curtain, which are that growth-management policies encouraged by Florida’s ideas created an affordability crisis, which led policymakers in Washington to pressure lenders to loosen mortgage criteria so people could buy overpriced homes, and that growth-management also made prices more volatile so that eventually a large share of American homeowners would be underwater.

Florida can get away with his brazen approach because most of his followers don’t understand economics well enough to follow the above train of logic. As George Mason University economist Dan Klein points out in the very next day’s WSJ, when asked if “restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable,” 60 to 70 percent of liberals and progressives incorrectly answer “no.” By comparison, only 16 percent of libertarians and less than 23 percent of conservatives said “no.”
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This raises some interesting questions. Does economic ignorance lead people to lean left? Or do progressives cultivate economic ignorance? Klein doesn’t speculate about the answer. However, I suspect that some people find economics to be more intuitive than others, and those who don’t easily understand it are more likely to be attracted by flim-flam artists such as Richard Florida.

FTA Wants Your Comments

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Transportation
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Last January, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that he was replacing rules that required that federal transit grants had to be “cost effective” with rules promoting “livability.” Yesterday, the Federal Transit Administration asked for your comments on this proposal.

The FTA doesn’t have new rules yet; it just wants to know what you think of the idea. Considering that the head of the FTA has revealed that he is skeptical of expensive rail projects, especially when cities can’t afford to maintain and operate the systems they have, they might genuinely be interested in some new ideas. After all, how livable can a city be where lots of people have given up their cars for transit only to find that the transit agency has stopped running for lack of funds?

Speaking of costly transit, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has just published a new paper on the cost of transit in that state. The paper also shows how Tennessee transit systems use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, than cars or even SUVs. The only really efficient transit system, the paper shows, is vanpooling, which is the closest thing most transit agencies have to actual automobiles.

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