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Category Archives: News commentary

It Was Bound to Happen

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Most city residents don’t want density. But they also don’t want urban sprawl. How do we deal with this conundrum? The obvious (but stupid) answer is to put all new residents in a few extremely high-density developments. That solution prevents sprawl without densifying most existing neighborhoods.

So I was not surprised when Jim Karlock pointed out to me that Portland City Commissioner Sam Adams proposed in a speech last week that Portland “should plan to accommodate our share of projected regional growth — Metro anticipates 300,000 more Portlanders by 2035 — within 1/4 mile of all existing and to-be-planned streetcar and lightrail transit stops.” This would, he said, “encourage responsible, transit-supportive development while protecting our existing single-family neighborhoods from undo growth.”

By which, I presume, he means “undue growth.” (I previously mentioned a news report of this speech but had not read the complete text.)

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The Spotted Owl and the Planner

By | | News commentary, Public lands
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Many people know that the northern spotted owl stopped the cutting of old-growth forests, but few people know why. In the late 1980s, the Fish & Wildlife Service listed the spotted owl as a threatened species because it relies on old-growth forests, which were rapidly being cut, as its habitat. This contributed to a huge decline in timber harvests from federal lands after 1990.

Fish & Wildlife Service photo.

The spotted owl is a predator whose main prey are northern flying squirrels, red-backed voles, and other species that mainly live in old-growth forests. But the spotted owl is not the stop of the food chain: it is preyed upon by the great grey owl, which especially goes after undefended juveniles and eggs. When given the opportunity, the great grey will swoop down on spotted owl nests, knocking the eggs or young out of the nests, and then feeds on them on the forest floor.

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Obsessed With Regional Centers

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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I’ve previously noted (twice, it turns out) research showing that 60 to 70 percent of all jobs in modern urban areas are outside of downtown or other “regional and town centers.” Just as planners in the 1950s through the 1980s were obsessed with “saving downtowns” some fifty years after downtowns became obsolete, planners today are obsessed with town centers several decades after they were really relevant.

Portland politician and Metro council president David Bragdon says that planners don’t dare leave the development of such town centers to “laissez-faire unpredictability.” So he supports “public investment” because “planning means nothing without investment.”

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Toronto Transit Going Bust

By | | News commentary
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Toronto’s transit system is facing “financial catastrophe,” and the transit agency has proposed to shut down one of the subway lines and up to 21 bus lines, plus raise fares by 10 to 25 percent. “This is one of the darkest days that we’ve seen,” said the chair of the Toronto Transit Commission.

Dark days for Toronto transit.
Flickr photo by Neuroticjose

Some people accuse Toronto’s mayor “of trying to whip up a public panic” so that the city can get more money from the province. But there are a couple of other issues involved here.

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Migration from the Cities

By | | News commentary
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Congratulations to faithful ally Wendell Cox for getting quoted in Forbes magazine about the “great American migration”. The article describes how many of America’s major urban areas are losing population as people move to the suburbs of a variety of smaller cities.

Wendell has been following this migration on his Demographia web site. (Find “domestic migration” on the home page.) He shows that census data put the lie to claims that Americans are moving out of the suburbs and back into downtown areas. Instead, they are moving out of expensive suburbs and into smaller, more remote, and definitely more affordable suburbs.
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Of course, as Forbes notes, a few people are moving to downtown areas. That’s fine for them (though we should always ask how much their million-dollar homes are subsidized). But, as Wendell shows, their numbers remain small compared with suburban growth.

Suburbs Emit Less Greenhouse Gases

By | | News commentary
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It is amazing how many assumptions people make without checking the facts. They assume transit consumes less energy than cars (not true for most U.S. transit systems). They assume suburbs are more heavily subsidized than cities (the vast majority of subsidies go to the cities). They assume that highways are unfairly subsidized (actually, subsidies to transit are greater than to highways even though highways move a hundred times as many passenger miles).

The latest set of assumptions center around greenhouse gases. I’ve already addressed the assumptions that transit emits less greenhouse gases than cars and that high rises emit less than single-family homes.

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RTD to Raise Transit Fares

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In 2004, Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) convinced voters to increase the sales tax dedicated to transit from 0.6 to 1.0 cents per dollar so that it could build six new rail lines. Now it says tax revenues are falling short of projections, while costs are higher than expected. So it is raising transit fares, which will only reduce ridership and harm transit-dependent people.

This is a completely predictable result of trying to build a rail megaproject. It is one thing to run a bus system where the capital costs are low and don’t require either long-term borrowing or long-term cost projections. It is quite another thing to plan a ten- or more year construction project that requires a thirty- or more year mortgage.

Blocking traffic.
Flickr photo by Jeffrey Beall.

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Right-Wing Think Tank Releases Report on Portland

By | | News commentary
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That well-known right-wing think tank, the Cato Institute, today released a report about Portland written by that not-so-well-known sprawl-loving, car-happy nut, Randal O’Toole. O’Toole spews out all kinds of so-called data that smart-growth planners probably refuted long ago, such as that transit has lost market share in Portland since they started building light rail and that Portlanders voted against building more light-rail lines.

O’Toole (did I mention that he is right wing?) even dredges up the story of Neil Goldschmidt, Portland’s former mayor who, after retiring from politics, formed a “light-rail mafia” that milked Portland’s planning process, directing hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies and no-bid contracts to his clients and friends. So what if Goldschmidt turned out to be be a statutory rapist? That doesn’t mean anything is wrong with Portland’s planning.

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TODs Don’t Work, Says L.A. Times

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Los Angeles Times takes a hard look at transit-oriented developments (TODs) and concludes that they don’t change people’s travel habits. Local officials say TODs will revitalize neighborhoods without adding to congestion, but the Times finds that “there is little research to back up the rosy predictions.”

The paper cites one study that “showed that transit-based development successfully weaned relatively few residents from their cars.” Two reporters from the paper itself spent two months interviewing TOD residents and reached the same conclusion: “only a small fraction of residents shunned their cars during morning rush hour.”

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Will Anyone Learn the Lessons from the Tahoe Fire?

By | | News commentary, Public lands, Wildfire
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At the risk of premature judgment, it appears the Angora fire that destroyed hundreds of Lake Tahoe homes will provide a classic example of what is wrong with federal wildland fire policy. As of Tuesday evening, the fire has burned more than 3,000 acres, and managed to destroy more than 200 homes and scores of other structures. (Get the latest official report here.)

The Angora Fire on Sunday.
Flickr photo by Steve Wilhelm.

As those who have read my most recent fire paper know, the standard story is that a century of fire suppression has led to a build-up of fuels in the forests. The standard solution is to allow the Forest Service and other agencies to spend close to half a billion dollars a year on fuel treatments.

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