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Category Archives: Regional planning

San Diego’s Insane $163.5 Billion Plan

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning
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If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then San Diego’s latest regional plan  is completely insane. The draft 2021 Regional Plan, which was released on May 28 by the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), includes all of the latest planning fads: active transportation, complete streets, density, rail transit, density, transit-oriented development, microtransit, density, and vision zero. Did I mention density and rail transit?

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

The plan backs up these ideas with dollars, proposing to spend more than $80 billion on transit, $9.8 billion on high-density housing districts, $4.3 billion on bike paths, and $0.0 billion on new roads. In all, the plan proposes to spend $163.5 billion over the next 30 years, more than half of which would go for transit and transit hubs. Some of this is for operating expenses, but transit capital improvements alone would cost $52 billion. Continue reading →

The Future of Work Is in a Small Oregon Town

By | | Regional planning
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Richard Florida, who got famous for telling cities they needed to increase their densities to attract what he called the “creative class” of workers, now admits (in an article in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal) that the future of work is in a small town in Oregon. I happen to live near that town and pass through it several times a year. It is so small that, from the highway, you wouldn’t know you were in a town if it were not for the sign.

The Job Capital of America. Photo by Peggy Rowe-Snyder (Pegro62).

Yet that town today is the location of so many advertised jobs that it has been called “the job capital of America.” The town’s name is Remote, and apparently it is the only town in the country with that name. So whenever anyone advertises for “remote workers,” some job web sites assume they mean Remote, Oregon. Continue reading →

Are Greater Densities Worthwhile?

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning
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An article in The Urbanist last month breathlessly reveals that the city of Seattle can be built up into a city of 2 million people without a lot of high-rise development. All that is necessary to achieve that growth, the article claims, is to rezone single-family neighborhoods to allow midrise apartment buildings.

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

As of 2019, Seattle had slightly more than 750,000 people living at about 9,000 people per square mile, making it the sixth-densest of the nation’s 50 largest cities. The Urbanist proposal represents a 165 percent increase in population resulting in densities close to 24,000 people per square mile, denser than any city in America other than New York City and a few of its suburbs. Continue reading →

Evidence on Post-Pandemic Telecommuting

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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More studies have been published indicating that telecommuting is likely to be far more important after the pandemic than it was before. A University of Chicago study published early this month concluded that “22 percent of all full work days will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5 percent before.”

The reasons are clear: “The pandemic drove a mass social experiment in which half of all paid hours were provided from home.” By most accounts, that experiment was successful.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that 44 percent of employers believed that their employees were more productive working at home than in an office or other workplace, while only 31 percent believed they were less productive. Even where employees were a little less productive, the potential savings in office costs might encourage employers to allow people to work at home. Continue reading →

Telling Clients What They Want to Hear

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The Washington State Transportation Commission hired the Boston Consulting Group to develop a “sustainable growth vision” for the Cascadia Corridor, which means Vancouver, BC to Portland, Oregon. The Boston Group did taxpayers a disservice by telling the commission what it wanted to hear, rather than what it needed to know.

The group observed that the cities in the corridor have the opportunity to become “a global innovation hub.” To find out how to do that, the Bostonians looked at other major innovation hubs and discovered they fall into two rather distinct groups that it called “affordable sprawl” and “expensive and congested.” The best representative of the former is the Texas Triangle, meaning Dallas-Houston-San Antonio. The best representative of the latter is the San Francisco Bay Area.

When measured on two axes of housing affordability and a rush-hour congestion, the Texas Triangle is high on affordability and low on congestion, while the Bay Area is low on affordability and high on congestion. The Bostonians noted that the Cascadia Corridor is currently right in the middle on both, but warned that if it wasn’t careful it would end up as bad or even worse off than the Bay Area. Continue reading →

Measuring Climate Intentions, Not Results

By | | Regional planning
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If your city wants to be lauded for doing the most to reduce climate change, it needs to impose as heavy-handed restrictions as possible on every aspect of your daily life. It doesn’t matter whether those restrictions actually do anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; all that matters is that they be as restrictive as possible.

Click image to download this 5.1-MB report.

That’s the conclusion reached from reviewing a Clean City Energy Scorecard report from a group called the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. The report “scores 100 U.S. cities on their efforts to achieve a clean energy future by improving energy efficiency and scaling up renewable energy.” New York is rated number one and Boston and Seattle are tied for number two. Continue reading →

Do Densities Matter?

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Do population densities influence the spread of coronavirus? A new study in the Journal of the American Planning Association says no: “after controlling for metropolitan population, county density is not significantly related to the infection rate.”

Co-authored by Reid Ewing, one of the nation’s loudest proponents of smart-growth (meaning density), the study made a crucial mistake: it measured the population density of entire counties. But most counties in urban areas are only partially urbanized.

San Bernardino County, for example, has 2 million people and covers 20,000 square miles, for an average density of about 100 people per square mile. But 1.8 million of those people live on just 2.6 percent of the land, meaning a density of 3,400 people per square mile. Obviously, using 100 instead of 3,400 would drastically change the results. Continue reading →

We Were Warned Not to Bunch Up

By | | Housing, Regional planning, Transportation
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We were warned. After September 11, 2001, historian Stephen Ambrose told us what to do.

“One of the first things you learn in the Army is that, when you and your fellow soldiers are within range of enemy artillery, rifle fire, or bombs, don’t bunch up,” wrote Ambrose in the Wall Street Journal. Now that the U.S. was under attack from terrorists, Ambrose urged the nation as a whole to learn the same lesson: “don’t bunch up.” “In this age of electronic revolution,” he noted, “it is no longer necessary to pack so many people and office into such small space as lower Manhattan.”

Ambrose’s advice was ignored. Manhattan’s population has grown by at least 100,000 people since 2001. Fitting 1.6 million people on a 23-square-mile island is only possible because of transit systems that force people to pack themselves into buses and railcars. Continue reading →

Confirmation

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The Antiplanner has focused on a few themes in recent years: density is expensive; buses can move more people than rails; transit systems are mismanaged; transit is losing rides to ride hailing. Recent research papers from a variety of sources have confirmed these ideas, at least in part.

First, Steve Polzin and Jodi Godfrey at the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transit Research have examined transit ridership trends, noting that ridership in Florida is declining twice as fast as the rest of the nation. These declines aren’t due to decreasing service, as some have said; in fact, service in many Florida urban areas has increased and, if it decreased, did so only after ridership declined. Instead, they blame the decline on “the fact that more travelers now have additional options,” notably ride hailing, working at home, and increased auto ownership.

Transit systems in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area have been hit particularly hard by ridership declines. Broward County Transit (Ft. Lauderdale) has lost more than a quarter of its riders since 2014. To make matters worse, the agency is under investigation for falsifying overtime records for favored employees and, for some reason, hiding buses from Federal Transit Administration inspectors. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library:
Cities Without Planners

By | | Book reviews, Regional planning
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Alain Bertaud (previously) is an urban planner who never met an urban economist until almost a decade after graduating from planning school. The economist opened his eyes: not only did urban economics often teach exactly the opposite of what planning schools taught, the economists based their conclusions on data, models, and real world experience, while the planners based their ideas on intuition and the general beliefs of previous generations of planners.

Bertaud’s new book, Order without Design, reflects a lifetime of growing skepticism about urban planning dogma. Planners, says Bertaud, based their ideas on rules of thumb that were developed by people who often know nothing about the people they are regulating or planning for. Continue reading →