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Monthly Archives: March 2007

The Limits of Moderate-Capacity Transit

By | | Transportation
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Gas prices in the first nine months of 2006 were at their highest levels (after adjusting for inflation) in twenty-five years. Most transit agencies made the most of this, with some gaining huge increases in ridership over the first nine months of previous year.

  • Flagstaff saw a 49-percent increase in bus ridership;
  • Tucsan saw a 26-percent increase;
  • Colorado Springs gained 22-percent more riders;
  • Tulsa 20 percent;
  • Santa Fe got 15-percent more riders.

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While these are exceptional, APTA reports that American transit systems carried 3 percent more transit riders than in 2005. So why did the transit system in Portland, the city that supposedly loves transit, actually carry less riders in 2006 than the year before?

Moderate-capacity transit in Portland.

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Strategic Planning: Another Waste of Your Tax Dollars

By | | News commentary, Public lands
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Our society lets markets handle the production of most things that are easily measured and asks government to produce things that are harder to quantify. This makes it easy for government agencies to suffer mission creep, meaning they start doing things other than the purposes for which they were created because the new things are easier to measure or have a more powerful political constituency.

Back in 1993, some bright bulb in Congress tried to solve this problem through strategic planning. Specifically, a law called the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) required every federal agency to write a plan that specified the outcomes the agency was trying to produce and showed how each part of the agency’s budget contributed to those outcomes.

Like so many other planning ideas, this one hasn’t worked. Instead, it has become just one more hoop for agency officials to jump through, adding to taxpayer costs without producing any results.

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Housing Markets Are Melting Down

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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The U.S. housing market, which helped keep the world economy afloat for the first half of this decade, is deflating. Here are some signals:

  • The Census Bureau reports that sales of new homes in January 2007 were about 20 percent less than in January 2006. All of this decline was in the West (where new home sales fell by 50 percent) and South (where they fell by 11 percent); sales in the rest of the country were about the same.
  • At least twenty-two mortgage companies who lend to subprime borrowers have gone bankrupt in the past two months, leading some to call this a “panic.”
  • Almost 25 percent of existing mortgage debt is under adjustable rate loans whose rates will be adjusted upwards this year — in many cases to rates well above the fixed rates now available.
  • Already, foreclosures are running 25 percent higher than last year.

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Which Transportation Policy Is Better: Houston’s or Portland’s?

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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I’ve added a new “loyal opponent” to my list (right), the Public Transit blog, which is run by Michael Setty. In truth, Michael’s loyalty as an opponent is somewhat questionable as he is more willing to listen to alternative views than some of his more radical smart-growth allies. (I hope I don’t reduce his credibility among his peers by saying so.)

In any case, he has a recent post comparing Houston and Portland traffic in 1993 and 2003. In a nutshell, data presented in the post show that Houston built more freeways, while Portland built light rail. Yet traffic congestion grew faster in Houston than in Portland. “These data suggest,” Michael mildly observes, “that some of the main beneficiaries of Portland’s transit investments may be the drivers who remain on the road.”

Did Portland’s light-rail lines significantly reduce congestion? At first glance, the data seem to say so. While this may be debated at length for years to come, I think there are some alternative explanations.

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Who Are These Planners, Anyway?

By | | Why Planning Fails
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Many of my posts in the last two months criticize planning and argue that, no matter who does it, planning is bound to fail. Yet some people are still planners. Who are these planners and why do they do it?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are about 31,650 urban & regional planners practicing in the United States. This probably does not include most forest planners working for the Forest Service, watershed planners working for the Corps of Engineers, or other agency planners. Yet national forest and other federal agency planning processes are remarkably similar to urban planning, so it is likely that these agencies hired at least a few urban planners to help them design their processes.

In 2005, planners earned an average of $57,620, meaning we spend close to $2 billion on planning salaries alone. This is not a large sum by government standards, but neither is it a trivial amount.

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Columbia Crossing Follow Up: 12 Years to Plan a Bridge

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In my post about the Sellwood Bridge I noted that Portland planners seem to take inordinate amounts of time to make decisions about new roads. In a post on the Columbia Crossing I noted that Portland transportation planners seem to be going out of their way to drive up the costs of new roads.

When I was writing about the Columbia Crossing, I didn’t notice that the region has already spent ten years “planning” this bridge, and expects to take at least two more. At the rate they are going, it will probably take a lot more than two years to reach a decision, much less to actually start any construction.

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Touring the World’s Cities by Rental Car

By | | Urban areas
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When Americans visit Europe, they usually rely on transit to get around the cities and trains to get between the cities. Since nearly all the Europeans they meet are riding transit or trains, this gives them the impression that most Europeans live that way as well. In fact, Europeans drive for nearly 80 percent of their travel.

My friend Wendell Cox has visited just about every major urban area in the world. He argues that the way to visit a city is to rent a car and see the whole city, not just the central part that is accessible by subways or other public transit. This gives him a very different view of foreign cities.

Living the Russian dream: a home in the suburbs and two cars.

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