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Wired Gets It Wrong Again

By | | Transportation
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“Building bigger roads actually makes traffic worse,” asserts Wired magazine. “The reason you’re stuck in traffic isn’t all these jerks around you who don’t know how to drive,” says writer Adam Mann; “it’s just the road that you’re all driving on.” If only we had fewer roads, he implies, we would have less congestion. This “roads-induce-demand” claim is as wrong as Wired‘s previous claim that Tennessee fiscal conservatives were increasing Nashville congestion by banning bus-rapid transit, when actually they were preventing congestion by banning dedicated bus lanes.

In support of the induced-demand claim, Mann cites research by economists Matthew Turner of the University of Toronto and Gilles Duranton of the University of Pennsylvania. “We found that there’s this perfect one-to-one relationship,” Mann quotes Turner as saying. Mann describes this relationship as, “If a city had increased its road capacity by 10 percent between 1980 and 1990, then the amount of driving in that city went up by 10 percent. If the amount of roads in the same city then went up by 11 percent between 1990 and 2000, the total number of miles driven also went up by 11 percent. It’s like the two figures were moving in perfect lockstep, changing at the same exact rate.” If this were true, then building more roads doesn’t make traffic worse, as the Wired headline claims; it just won’t make it any better.

However, this is simply not true. Nor is it what Duranton & Turner’s paper actually said. The paper compared daily kilometers of interstate highway driving with lane kilometers of interstates in the urbanized portions of 228 metropolitan areas. In the average metropolitan area, it found that between 1983 and 1993 lane miles grew by 32 percent while driving grew by 77 percent. Between 1993 and 2003, lane miles grew by 18 percent, and driving grew by 46 percent.

That’s hardly a “perfect one-to-one relationship.”

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Millennials, Children, and Urban Life

By | | Housing
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The Washington Post reports that millennials living in walkable DC neighborhoods are growing up, getting married, having children, and (as the Antiplanner would expect) moving to the suburbs.

What wimps! They should be like these Toronto millennials who have had kids but are “learning to survive in 700 square feet.” Of course, unlike the Post, which actually quantifies (sort of) the number of millennials moving out of DC, Toronto Life relies strictly on anecdotes.
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Of course, somewhere there is a planner saying, “the problem is affordability. If we just subsidized inner-city housing, more people would move/stay there.” To the Antiplanner, the definition of a socialist is someone who doesn’t understand that subsidizing something is not the same thing as making it affordable.

Polarization and Freedom

By | | News commentary
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A new Pew poll finds that three out of four “consistent liberals” would rather live in a community “where the houses are smaller and closer to each other” but within walking distance of schools, stores, and restaurants. Conversely, three out of four “consistent conservatives” would rather live in a larger home on a large lot even if it means driving to schools, stores, and restaurants.


Source: Pew Research Center. Click chart to download Pew’s 121-page (3.5-MB) report on polarization in America.

Pew says this shows that “differences between right and left go beyond politics,” which Pew claims is one of the seven most important things to know about polarization in America. Yet the left has turned the choice between a traditional suburb and a so-called walkable community into a political issue, so it is no wonder that people’s views on this choice are polarized.

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Voting Themselves Bigger Budgets

By | | Transportation
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An implicit principle in a democracy is that the officials who decide how your taxes are spent represent you, the taxpayers, and not the bureaucracies that receive your taxes. But Congress violated this principle when it wrote MAP-21, the 2012 transportation law. As detailed in a proposed rule earlier this month, the law gives transit agencies in major urban areas a vote on how much of each region’s transportation dollars are spent on transit.

State legislatures are made up of people elected by various voting districts, not representatives selected by the state departments of transportation, justice, welfare, fish & wildlife, parks, and other bureaucracies. Similarly, city councils are made up of people elected by the voters in that city, not by representatives selected by the various water, transportation, fire, and other bureaus.

In 1962, Congress mandated that urban areas of 50,000 people or more create metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) that would decide how to spend federal transportation and housing funds. At that time, it recognized this principle, specifying that the governing board of each MPO consist of elected officials from the various cities and counties in that urban area. While this was one step removed from the voters, it at least insured that the voters had an indirect say over how their money is spent.

However, MAP-21, the 2012 law reauthorizing federal transportation funding (including funding for MPOs), departed from this principle by requiring that transit agencies in all urban areas with 200,000 or more people be given representation on the MPO boards. In other words, the bureaucrats themselves will get to vote on their own budgets.

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Castro Nomination Threatens Streetcar

By | | Transportation
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A few weeks ago, President Obama nominated San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro to be the next Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. While some suggest that this may be bad for Castro’s future political career, he wouldn’t be the first mayor to be tapped for a cabinet position and then return home to be elected to higher office.

What seems more certain is that Castro’s departure from San Antonio weakens political support for the city’s misbegotten streetcar plan. A couple of years ago, when the Antiplanner wrote a critique of a proposed San Antonio steetcar, proponents believed they had everything wired to build the line.

Opponents, however, hammered away at the proposal, arguing, among other things, that when voters rejected any funding for light rail in 2000, they were also rejecting streetcars. At that time, and until just a couple of years ago, the Federal Transit Administration classified streetcars and light rail as the same thing.

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House Defunds Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing

By | | Housing, News commentary
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The House of Representatives has approved an amendment offered by Arizona Representative Paul Gosar to the Transportation and Housing & Urban Development appropriations bill that would prevent HUD from spending any resources on its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program. As previously noted, this program is basically an attempt to use fair housing laws to force suburbs to rezone land for higher-density housing.

As described by Stanley Kurtz, under regulations drafted by HUD, suburban communities of single-family homes that do not have a perfectly balanced racial composition would be de facto guilty of housing discrimination. To remedy this, such communities would be required to rezone for multifamily housing.

Ironically, the rules implicitly make a racist assumption that racial minorities prefer multifamily housing. On a per-square-foot basis, single-family homes are less expensive to build than multifamily, so the rules could have required construction of smaller homes. But, of course, the real goal isn’t racial integration; it’s increasing densities.

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A First-Class Trip between Dallas & Austin

By | | Transportation
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If you are traveling between Dallas and Austin anytime soon, you might want to give Vonlane a try. This is a new first-class bus that has just 16 cushy seats, each wider than a first-class seat on a plane, plus a private conference room for six. Naturally, the bus has free WiFi, but also has on-board snacks, newspapers, television, radio, and noise-cancelling headphones to listen to them.

Vonlane spent $700,000 on each of two luxury motorcoaches and provides four three-hour trips a day from Dallas’ Love Field to Austin’s Hyatt Regency, a short walk from downtown Austin. The fare for a late-night trip is $40, while the daytime trips are $100. Vonlane claims this is half the airline fare; while it is true that Southwest’s fare for a trip tomorrow is $201, if you book far enough in advance you can get a $77 nonrefundable fare.

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End Poverty with Automobiles

By | | Transportation
29 Comments

“Automobiles tend to be ignored in [sustainability] planning efforts,” says a new study. Yet “automobiles are important to achieving many elements of the sustainability agenda because they are associated with improved access to high-opportunity and more livable neighborhoods,” especially for low-income families.

This isn’t really news. Back in 1997, researchers at UCLA wrote, “Car ownership is a significant factor in improving the employment status of welfare recipients.” In 1998, Yale economist Katherine O’Regan and UC Berkeley economist John Quigley wrote that helping the poor means “promoting the mass transit system that works so well for the nonpoor–the private auto” (see pp. 20-25). In 2003, a Harvard researcher found that, for low-income people, owning a car was more important to gaining a steady income than having a high school diploma.

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Cut Saturday Mail to Fund Highways?

By | | Transportation
4 Comments

The Highway Trust Fund will be out of money in a few months, mainly because Congress insists on spending more than it takes in. To avert this supposed crisis, Republican leaders are proposing to cut Saturday deliveries of mail and use the savings to replenish the trust fund.

There’s actually a tiny grain of Constitutional sense behind this proposal. The original legal justification for federal involvement in highways, back when members of Congress actually cared about such things, was that the Constitution authorizes Congress “to establish Post Offices and post Roads.” If the “post roads” aren’t paying for themselves, then who better to pay for them than the post offices?

In this sense, the Republican proposal is slightly more rational than President Obama’s proposal to use the increased revenues from a corporate income tax reform that will eliminate loopholes but reduce corporate tax rates. The administration predicts reducing rates will reduce corporate tax obligations in the long run but closing loopholes will increase revenues in the short run (interesting how Obama is promising corporations lower taxes after he is out of office in exchange for higher taxes when he is still in office). Obama wants to use some of those increased revenues to supplement the Highway Trust Fund.

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Immobilize DC

By | | City planning, Transportation
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Washington DC has proposed an anti-auto transportation plan that is ironically called “MoveDC” when its real goal is to reduce the mobility of DC residents. The plan calls for reducing auto commuting from 54 percent to no more than 25 percent of all workers in the district, while favoring transit, cycling, and walking.


Click image to download the plan’s executive summary. Click here to download other parts of the plan.

The plan would discourage auto driving by tolling roads entering the district and cordon-pricing. Tolls aren’t necessarily a bad idea: as the Antiplanner explained in this paper, properly designed tolls can relieve congestion and actually increase roadway capacities. But you can count on DC to design them wrong, using them more as a punitive and fundraising tool than as a way to relieve congestion. Cordon pricing is invariably a bad idea, much more of a way for cities to capture dollars from suburban commuters than to influence travel habits.

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