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Monthly Archives: October 2007

New Starts Still Suffer Overruns, Ridership Shortfalls

By | | Transportation
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How close to rail transit projects come to meeting their promises of being completed on budget and attracting the projected number of passengers? If you listen to transit agencies, almost every project is completed on time and beats its ridership goals. But those numbers aren’t very reliable as the transit agencies base their claims on projections made shortly before the projects were completed, not when the decision was made to build them.

In the early years of the Bush administration, the Federal Transit Administration commissioned a study to find out how well they were doing. The study was completed in 2003 — and the FTA then sat on it for four years. Now, they have finally released it, and you can download it here (4.4 MB Word file).

Is this light-rail project really necessary?
Flickr photo by brewbooks.

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Fraser Says: Dump Vancouver’s Growth-Management Plan

By | | Regional planning
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A new report from the Fraser Institute — Canada’s free-market think tank — says that Vancouver, BC’s growth-management plan is making Vancouver less, not more, livable. And you know the report must be right, because it was written by your very own Antiplanner.

Nice views. But how many people would really prefer to live in these high-priced condos if affordable single-family homes were available in the suburbs?

Vancouver has been practicing growth-management planning at least since 1966, when the Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board published a plan that set aside large amounts of land from development. That board was soon replaced by the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD), a backdoor effort to create a consolidated metropolitan regional government.

In the early 1970s, one of the members of the GVRD board coined the term “livable region” to cover up the fact that they were writing a plan that made the region less livable. From then on, just about every planning document prepared by the GVRD made liberal use of the term livable, making good use of the Big Lie theory: repeat a lie often enough and people will believe it.

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“Choice” as a Rhetorical Device

By | | Follow up
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A couple of weeks ago, I asked what we should call Portland’s transit and real-estate development mafia if not the light-rail mafia. Loyal opponent Dan S suggested the “greater choice mafia.” This, of course, reflects the repeated claim of smart-growth planners that all they are doing is offering people more housing and transportation choices.

Bull. If someone wants to live in high-density housing, they can find it. Most Americans don’t, so there isn’t as much high-density housing as low density. But it is there. Planners want to turn it around — to get more people living in high densities than in low. That’s not offering people a choice — it is taking away America’s preferred type of housing from a large share of American families.

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Debunking Coercion Part 4
How Friendly Is Portland?

By | | Follow up
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Portland is supposed to be one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the nation. But after trying to negotiate the city’s skinny streets (made skinnier by traffic calming) and getting honked at by the drivers of some of its fat buses, I find it to be a pretty hostile place for cyclists. Others, too, find Portland an unfriendly place, particularly businesses trying to grow while negotiating numerous regulations and restrictions.

Is Portland a Business-Unfriendly Environment?

In 1970, Portland was the headquarters of several Fortune 500 corporations, including Georgia-Pacific and Louisiana-Pacific. One by one, they all left, claiming that Portland had a business-unfriendly environment. Only Nike, located in an unincorporated part of Portland’s suburbs, remains — and only barely, as Nike threatened to move out when land-use planners tried to force it to turn its office campus into a high-density residential development.

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Debunking Coercion Part 3
Does Forcing Density on People Improve Livability?

By | | Follow up
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Is Portland’s land-use planning process reducing sprawl and auto driving? The Congress for the New Urbanism wants to think so, but they ignore the high cost that planning is imposing on Portland-area residents.

Are Transit-Oriented Developments Changing People’s Travel Habits?

My critique of Portland’s transit-oriented developments (TODs) argues, “there is little evidence that they have significantly changed people’s travel habits.” Rather than respond to this, Michael Lewyn says that the percentage of people living in these developments who use transit is higher than the national average.

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Debunking Coercion Part 2
Who Put Light Rail in the New Urbanist Platform?

By | | Follow up
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Portland’s well-publicized planning process is having insignificant effects on travel habits of the region’s residents. Instead, it is simply leading to more and more costly congestion. Yet the Congress for the New Urbanism wants to believe that the system is working so badly that it is willing to selectively use numbers that seem to support its case without looking at the big picture.

Transit’s Anemic Growth

Michael Lewyn’s critique of my paper on Portland reviews Portland’s transit ridership starting in 1986, the year Portland opened its first light-rail line. From this point of view, light rail looks successful. This selective use of data neglects to observe the decline in ridership, and huge decline in transit’s share of travel, that took place during construction of the light-rail line. In a pattern that would be repeated in many other cities, rail cost overruns in the early 1980s forced TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, to reduce bus service and raise fares.

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Debunking Coercion Part 1
The Debunking That Doesn’t Work

By | | Follow up
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The Congress for the New Urbanism can’t decide whether it favors coercion or not. The group believes that New Urban designs — high-density, mixed-use developments with pedestrian-friendly layouts — will make cities more livable and that there is a large pent-up demand for such livability. But at least some of its members are not sure they trust people to choose New Urban living, so they are willing to force those choices upon people.

One of the first things CNU did when it was founded in the early 1990s was publish a list of “New Urban basics” saying, “All development should be in the form of compact, walkable neighborhoods and/or districts.” Another document, called the Charter of the New Urbanism, held that existing suburbs should be reconfigured along New Urbanist principles. This doesn’t offer much choice for people who don’t want to live in compact developments.

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