Two weeks ago, the Center of the American Experiment published a report by the Antiplanner showing that traffic congestion in Minneapolis-St. Paul was the deliberate result of the region’s Metropolitan Council’s plans to increase congestion in order to get more people to ride transit, walk, or bicycle. The Antiplanner quoted Met Council documents saying that it was not going to try to relieve congestion, cited budgetary numbers showing that more than 80 percent of capital spending was going for transit systems that carried less than 1.5 percent of travel while less than 10 percent went for roads that carried 90 percent.
Since the report was released, Met Council supporters have issued a couple of responses, including one yesterday. What do they say?
- Let’s spell Cato Institute with a K as in Kato. Get it? KKK? Right wing? Ha ha!
- Don’t believe anything the Antiplanner says; he doesn’t even have a degree in urban planning. (Thank Edwin Mills for that.*)
- Congestion is actually a good thing; be glad you have it.
You’d think that, with such hard-hitting critiques, I’d fold up my tent and quietly slink away. But a careful reader will notice that none of them actually address any of the points made in my report. Yes, congestion indicates that people are getting economic benefits from moving around, but they’d get even more benefits if there were less congestion.
About the only quantitative analysis is a statement in yesterday’s response that “congestion levels over the past 15 years have stayed about the same” despite an increase in the number of commuters. There’s a good reason for that: when Tim Pawlenty was governor, the state significantly increased spending on highway improvements, thus relieving congestion. As soon as Pawlenty left, the policy was reversed and now congestion is increasing again, just as it was before Pawlenty.
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Meanwhile, the writer who believes that congestion is a good thing argues that “Policies that can nudge behavior toward less driving are a good and necessary step.” She doesn’t say so, but congestion is one of those policies. But, having already pointed out that travel has an economic benefit, she fails to say just why less driving is good.
In short, these responses simply prove what the original report said: planners have decided, for no good reason, that cars are bad, and so are imposing congestion on many cities in order to reduce driving. In doing so, they ignore the huge costs they impose on the regions or, at best, pretend that those costs are benefits. How did we let so many cities be ruled by such elitist thinking?
* Long-time Antiplanner readers may remember that I once entered a graduate program in urban planning. At the same time, I took an urban economics course that used a textbook by Edwin Mills that proved that many of the claims made by urban planners were wrong, such as that higher densities relieved congestion. I quickly dropped out of the urban planning program.
Well, as a bicycle-riding youth and car-less college student I definitely enjoyed the “pedestrian freedom” of traveling everywhere I needed to (class, dorm, cafeteria, entertainment, book store) on foot. That certainly promoted the “cars are bad” feeling (feeling as opposed to thesis). Then having to compete with cars on streets with my bicycle encouraged that, and the ease of parking my bicycle, so on and so forth. Lots of feelings, but not a lot of data. I had a planning class where the professor would put a photo of the tail pipe of a car on the screen and rant about the evil of the automobile. I had a professor that tried to inculcate the belief that there were few greater evils than impervious land cover (roads and parking lots). A failing education system simplifies the teaching of history eliminating or reducing all the conflict and contradiction and simplifying the complexity resulting in people that believe all the worlds problems are simple and can be simply resolved. That’s not too far from where we are on this. The WMATA union wants to expand service. I think the system needs to prepare for decommissioning. Close 1/2 of the stations, reduce the track mileage by 25%, make it mainly a commuter system during rush hour etc etc etc.
1. If you have the facts, you argue the facts.
If you have the theory, you argue the theory.
If you have neither, you make personal attacks.
2. Struggling to breathe is a GOOD thing, because it means you are still breathing and alive. That doesn’t mean doctors should seek to make breathing more difficult.
At least the urban planners sometimes are so wrapped up in themselves that they tell the truth — it is about the urban planners “aspiring” to be one of the big boys and not a regional city. So they admit they want to build it more than needed and they will come:
The Twin Cities should (and probably do) aspire to be more like the economies of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles than like Indianapolis and Kansas City, the center’s comparisons. A strong economy, larger in scale than our region, may mean that our traffic patterns feel out of scale for the population. But this also means new technologies, innovations and other good future-looking business developments will outpace a comparable region. And this is a good thing.
I spent my career essentially working as an application chemist assisting in peer reviewed mostly environmental or agricultural research at UC Berkeley. This is a rigorous discipline that requires data and statistics in order to get it published.
Planning is hobby that I am good enough at to have been encouraged to get a Phd in, but I had not time to pursue. Unfortunately my experience with many of the planners research at UC Berkeley was that their discipline was not scientifically rigorous and many of the researchers should not have been working at a university. I was able to go to talks on research and keep asking technical questions that completely showed many speakers talk to be, frankly, ridiculous. Whether it was my efforts or not that made a difference, researchers now seem to have shifted their focus more towards developing countries where their ideas make more sense.
Interestingly most of the planning professionals live in single family homes and drive to work. Eventually I started to ask what size of house and lot they lived on, how many miles they drove their car every year, and if they had subsidized parking. Almost all planning professionals live in large houses on large lots, drive most places and many have subsidized parking! Then ask them how they expect their ideas to work when they don’t follow them. Interesting results. Some planners are completely silenced others just try to say they are trying to present “options” for people. Apparently just not “options” they themselves want to live.
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“Traffic congestion is just a symptom. Urban form [a.k.a. land use] is the true culprit, and you cannot apply transportation answers to problems about how land is used and where and how people live.”
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~ Dr. Yingling Fan
Congestion is the_OUTCOME_ of density. Not only does New York City, hands down the desist city and densest metro in the nation, have the worst traffic congestion but it also has the worst congestion both on roads, on foot and via transit.
The sad reality is that progressives don’t want to acknowledge that we face a basic trade off. We can trade lower housing prices and longer drive times ( low density; ATL, DFW, PHX,et al ) in exchange for unaffordably high housing costs and longer commute times ( NYC, SFO, BOS, et al ). They wrongly claim to have a solution. The reality is that they have a different approach. They’re trading a few things for a couple other things. They lack the mindfulness and humility to admit that they don’t have a solution, just a different approach plagued with a different set of problems.
BTW, if you want a clue as to whether Dr. Fan is more concerned about science and the scientific method or ideology, a clue is in how she chooses to describe herself. Despite not having a formal background in public health, biology, economics, et al. she’s very willing to tie them in with her love of density and trains.
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Yingling Fan is an associate professor in the regional planning and policy area who works interdisciplinarily in the fields of land use, transportation, social equity, and public health.
” https://www.linkedin.com/in/yingling-fan-7b450a10/
http://m.startribune.com/counterpoint-six-reasons-why-traffic-congestion-is-not-such-a-bad-thing/428988393/
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The Twin Cities should (and probably do) aspire to be more like the economies of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles than like Indianapolis and Kansas City, the center’s comparisons. A strong economy, larger in scale than our region, may mean that our traffic patterns feel out of scale for the population. But this also means new technologies, innovations and other good future-looking business developments will outpace a comparable region. And this is a good thing.
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Thank you, Sandy. I hadn’t yet read Ms. Brozen’s editorial. It’s outlandish to claim and imply that TRAFFIC CONGESTION _causes_ innovation. There’s not even a correlation. According to the Brookings Institution, just as many innovative metros are relatively small and are not plagued by traffic congestion. In that study Chicago, NYC and LA didn’t even make their top 20. Rochester, MN, Rochester, NY, Raliegh, Austin, Ithaca, Boulder, Ann Arbor, Burlington, VT and others did. If the medium used for making a trip correlated with innovation ( it does not ), then if anything the Twin Cities would need to become more like it’s tiny cousin to the south — Rochester, MN — than NYC.
Let’s spell Cato Institute with a K as in Kato. Get it? KKK? Right wing? Ha ha!
Plus Koch. And Kapitalism. And, as of last night, Karen Handel.
But not Kollectivesim. Or Kommunism.
Urban planning degree…..too poorly educated to become an architect
too over educated to get a real job.