Summer Book Reviews #4: The Road More Traveled

We are back to transportation with this book, which came out just after the 2006 Preserving the American Dream conference, so I think of it as a new book. The Road More Traveled is written by two “fellows” with the Reason Foundation and is the star (so far) of that group’s mobility project.

In contrast to Street Smart, which idealistically promotes widescale privatization, this book takes a more incrementalist look at highways and transportation. Bob Poole, who leads the Reason Foundation’s mobility project, ultimately supports privatization and tolling, but is willing to accept (and has even invented) many “halfway” measures, including high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes (which some true-blue libertarians might question because it leave most lanes untolled).

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Happy Independence Day

Today Americans celebrate independence from a foreign nation and, more generally, freedom from tyranny. Regular readers of the Antiplanner won’t have to guess what I think about that.

Fireworks over the Willamette River, July 3, 2007.
Flickr photo copyright 2007 by Sean Dreilinger.

All my life, I’ve wondered about the relationship between the individual and society. When do the needs of the community trump individual freedom? Henry David Thoreau gave his answer in his famous essay, Civil Disobedience:

“I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men.”

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Summer Book Reviews #3: Don’t Call It Sprawl

Rather than the polemics of an activist like Wendell Cox, today’s book is an academic look at the sprawl debate: author William T. (for Thomas) Bogart is dean of academic affairs at York College in Pennsylvania. His book, Don’t Call It Sprawl: Metropolitan Structure in the Twenty-First Century, attempts to analyze cities using data and the latest research.

Though similar in some ways, Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History was an architect’s view of the sprawl debate. This book is an economist’s view — and (unlike the Antiplanner) not an economist with a particularly libertarian bent.

Bogart shows that urban areas — which he likes to call “trading places” because he sees trade as the main reason people choose to live closely together — are far more complicated that planners understand. Until recently, many planners had a monocentric view of cities; that is, they implicitly assumed that everything revolved around downtown. But that kind of city disappeared in the early twentieth century.

In the last couple of decades or so, planners have discovered the polycentric city, that is that modern urban areas have many job, commercial, and retail centers. For some reason, planners think they have to designate various regional and town centers and then stimulate their growth, as if they weren’t going to grow anyway. Planners then want to connect all those centers with a rail transit system.
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But Bogart shows that even the polycentric view of a city is obsolete. Together, the old downtowns and the edge cities/regional and town centers only have about 30 to 40 percent of the jobs in modern U.S. urban areas. That means that planners are ignoring well over half the workers in the region.

For example, advocates of Denver’s FasTracks rail boondoggle bragged that it would put 29 percent of the jobs in the Denver metropolitan area within a half mile of a rail station. But 29 percent is a pathetic number. Since well under half the commuters to downtown ride transit, and even a rail system would not serve other centers as well as downtown, FasTracks will almost certainly never serve even 10 percent of the region’s employees.

I don’t agree with everything Bogart says. For example, he doesn’t see anything wrong with subsidizing 30 to 40 percent of the cost of downtown housing “if that is desired by the city.” Such subsidies may be strongly desired by downtown property owners and developers, but few others in the city are going to benefit.

Nevertheless, I recommend the book to anyone who wants a better understanding of how modern cities really work. We’ve also invited Bogart to speak at the Preserving the American Dream conference in San Jose this November.

Subways Full, Take a Bus

The New York Times says that many of New York subways are running at full capacity. A chart indicates that, on the 2, 3, 4, 5, and E lines, the trains are full and they can’t run any more trains per hour.

The Antiplanner has written about transit capacities before and pointed out that an exclusive bus lane running at freeway speeds can actually move more passenger miles per hour than a subway. However, no one expects New York City to build bus lanes running at freeway speeds on Manhattan.

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Summer Book Reviews #2: War on the Dream

If anyone deserves the title of antiplanner, it is Wendell Cox. Wendell has challenged rail transit plans in Atlanta, Denver, Charlotte, and many other cities. For this reason, he has been called an anti-transit zealot, which is a typical tactic of the rail nuts to assert that anyone who doesn’t favor their particular flavor of transit must oppose all transit.

In fact, Wendell helped plan the Los Angeles rail network, and became a rail skeptic only after those rail lines went way over budget and, when finally built, ended up carrying far fewer riders than predicted. Now he insists that transportation funds be spent cost effectively, which greatly annoys people who think nothing of spending a $200 million a mile on a rail line that will carry fewer people than a $5 million lane-mile of freeway.

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Summer Book Reviews #1: Street Smart

Summer is finally here, and so naturally you want to know, “What antiplanning books should I read on my summer vacation?” This week, the Antiplanner will make a few suggestions.

Today, we look at Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads. Now that highway tolls are becoming acceptable, the book takes the next step and argues for road privatization.

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