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Environmentalists Destroy Boston Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation, Urban areas
26 Comments

The Metropolitan Boston Transportation Authority (MBTA, or “T” for short) is in deep financial trouble, with nearly $9 billion of debt and a $3 billion maintenance backlog that is growing more every year. According to a Boston Herald op ed by Harvard researcher Charles Chieppo, the blame for this can be placed on the Dukakis administration and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF).

When Massachusetts was planning the Big Dig, CLF sued demanding investments in transit to mitigate the air pollution generated by new auto traffic resulting from the Big Dig’s minor expansions in highway capacity. Dukakis settled by agreeing to build 14 new transit projects.

In fact, those transit investments did little or nothing to clean the air. For one thing, relieving congestion actually reduces air pollution. For another, cars today are so clean that persuading people to ride transit instead does little for air quality.

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California Itching to Lose a Decade

By | | News commentary, Transportation
14 Comments

Last week, the California legislature voted to destroy the state’s economy for another decade. The 21 senators who voted for the measure told the public they were approving a high-speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but everyone knows they barely have enough money to build from Fresno to Bakersfield.

In voting to borrow $4.5 billion as a down payment on a rail line that is certain to cost at least $68 billion, and more likely over $100 billion, the legislature is risking the state’s entire economic future. The state already has a $16 billion deficit in its budget (which it closed only with one-time tricks and the promise of increased taxes), and the rail line will immediately increase that by more than a quarter of a billion per year, and in the long run (if it continues building) by much more.

This is not about jobs. More jobs are going to be killed by running up tax rates (or further cutting services) to pay for the deficits. This is not about transportation. Though advocates promise fast downtown-to-downtown travel times, only 2.5 percent of Los Angeles-area jobs are located in downtown LA, so few residents will ever have reason to ride the train. This is nothing more than pork barrel.

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Planning Is Destroying Britain

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning
33 Comments

The Economist reviews housing prices in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and what do you know, it finds that high housing prices are due to urban planning. “The biggest constraint on development in London is the Green Belt,” says the magazine that calls itself a newspaper. “Tt runs (with perforations) all around London, to a depth of up to 50 miles, and bans almost all building on half a million hectares of land around the city.”

Ah, but Britain has 62 million people in an area slightly smaller than the state of Oregon (94,000 vs. 98,000 square miles), so those greenbelts are needed to preserve farms, forests, and open space, right? Not really.

As a BBC writer points out, urban areas cover just 6.8 percent of the United Kingdom (10.6 percent of England, 1.3 percent of Scotland, 3.6 percent of Northern Ireland, and 4.1 percent of Wales). Moreover, much of the land inside those urban areas is open space, so less than 2.3 percent of England, and even smaller proportions of the rest of the kingdom, have been “paved over.”

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Does Transit Promote Urban Development?

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
17 Comments

Back in 1995, the FTA asked transit advocates Robert Cervero (of the UC Berkeley planning school) and Samuel Seskins (of Parsons Brinckerhoff) whether transit let to changes in urban form. After reviewing the literature, they concluded that “Urban rail transit investments rarely “create” new growth, but more typically redistribute growth that would have taken place without the investment” (page 3). They added that this “redistribution” mainly favored central city downtowns at the expense of the suburbs.

I’ve been citing that study as definitive for many years, but recently someone asked me if there is anything more recent. As a matter of fact, there is.

In 2010, Brookings published Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects (volume 3), which included a paper by USC planning professor Genevieve Giuliano and one of her colleagues that addressed the same question. Based on “more than three decades of research,” they “found little evidence that transit investment has had significant impacts on urban structure.”

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Will Screwing Investors Save the Economy?

By | | Housing
23 Comments

Cornell law professor Robert Hockett has proposed a way out of the “mortgage debt impasse” that he thinks is slowing our economy: have the federal government take all of the underwater homes by eminent domain, paying fair market value for the homes, and then sell the homes, hopefully to the previous buyers. Since the federal government will be able to sell the homes for what it paid for them, it won’t lose money, and fewer residents will lose their homes, so it sounds like a win-win solution.

Although the plan has been endorsed by Yale housing economist Robert Shiller, the Antiplanner is not so enthused. Hockett and Shiller barely hint that it is not exactly a win-win plan, and the big losers will be those who invested in mortgage-backed securities. The forced-sale of the homes backing these securities for less than value of the mortgages means many of these investors will lose their money.

No doubt many will say tough luck. But this attitude has become characteristic of the Obama administration, and it probably threatens our economy more than the “mortgage impasse.”

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Cities Growing Faster Than Suburbs–Not!

By | | City planning, News commentary, Useful Data
19 Comments

A return to the cities and rejection of the suburbs is an article of faith among smart-growth planners, and their wishful thinking is often supported by breathless media reports. The latest news comes from 2011 Census estimates, which the Wall Street Journal reports as revealing that the “cities outpace suburbs in growth.” MSNBC reports that “cities grow more than suburbs [for the] first time in 100 years.”

What do the numbers actually say? Of the 51 largest metropolitan areas, the percentage growth of 26 center cities was higher than the percentage growth of their suburbs. Why 51? Maybe because if they only looked at the 50 largest areas, exactly half of their cities would have grown faster than the suburbs and then they couldn’t say “most.” The percentage growth of central cities in all 51 of the largest areas combined was also higher than of their suburbs, but not by much: 1.03 percent vs. 0.93 percent.

That’s percentage growth, and if that continued as a long-term trend, it might be meaningful. But in fact it was only one year, from 2010 to 2011 (and the 2011 numbers are only estimates). And since, in most cases, the central cities make up only a small portion of the metropolitan area, faster percentage growth doesn’t translate into a large numeric growth. For example, Atlanta grew by 2.4 percent while its suburbs grew by only 1.3 percent. But Atlanta’s 2.4-percent gain means 10,040 new residents, while the suburbs 1.3 percent gain means 62,869 new residents. In other words, Atlanta suburbs actually gained more than six times as many people as Atlanta itself.

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Planners Inspired by Supreme Court Decision

By | | News commentary
11 Comments

Representatives of the Association of American Planners applauded the Supreme Court’s health-care decision that a Congressional requirement to buy health insurance was a tax, not a mandate. “This provides us the tools we need to fix everything that’s wrong with America,” said association CEO Paul “Precious” Farmlands.

The association’s government affairs staff immediately began crafting legislation to save American cities and rural areas through compact development. “We would like everyone to enjoy the benefits of living in high-density, mixed-use housing,” said Jason Georgetown. “But it’s not a mandate; we’ll simply tax anyone who chooses not to live in this kind of housing $50,000 a year. The taxes will go to make high-density housing more affordable for low-income people.”
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AAP also was writing a law requiring everyone to walk, bicycle, or take transit to work. Anyone who refused to obey the law would pay a “tax” of $25 for every day they drove to work. The money would be used to subsidize rail transit. “The possibilities opened up by the Supreme Court’s health-care decision are endless,” said Georgetown.

What Is “Middle Class”?

By | | News commentary
8 Comments

This week’s Rolling Stone has an article on the “sharp, sudden decline of America’s middle class.” The only problem is that few if any of the people discussed in the article are in the middle class; instead, they are working class.

As the Antiplanner has noted elsewhere, Americans often pretend to ignore the line between working class and middle class, yet it is very real and difficult to cross. The middle class includes people with college educations and jobs that involve thinking and creating, usually described as “white-collar” jobs. The working class includes people with less education and jobs that require physical labor or repetitive work, usually described as “blue-collar” jobs.

Many people in the middle class have very few working-class friends, so they can’t relate to working-class lives and lifestyles. We imagine that most people are middle class, and only a few unfortunates are in the working class. In fact, less than 30 percent of working-age Americans have college degrees, which is a pretty good proxy for the size of the middle class.

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More Evidence That Portland Is Nuts

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
20 Comments

TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, has made the largest cuts in its history, including reductions in bus service, fare increases, and elimination of free rail rides in downtown Portland (the free bus rides were eliminated last year). Meanwhile, it is using nearly $10 million of money supposedly dedicated to the Milwaukie light-rail line to remodel its offices.

Portland’s mayor and alleged pedophile Sam Adams considers TriMet’s subsidized passes for “youths” to be one of his “favorite program,” so he has proposed to fund it by charging TriMet $2 million for using city property for its bus shelters and benches. What an innovative financial tool!

Apparently, all that broke government entities need to do is requisition funds from other broke government entities. TriMet can build its next light-rail line by charging the state rent for taking cars off the road. The state can fund its k-12 educational programs by charging the universities for the future college students it is providing. The federal government can eliminate the national debt by charging water districts for the clean water that runs off of federal lands. Pretty soon everyone can own money to everyone else and we can all pretend that they cancel out (ignoring, of course, the original investors who will lose their shirts, but they’re probably part of the 1 percent so they deserve it).

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Clinically Dead

By | | News commentary, Transportation
24 Comments

California’s high-speed rail project seems to be dead. At least, that’s the conclusion of a Washington DC writer commenting on a report that Governor Brown has given up on the idea of exempting high-speed rail from environmental reviews.

Without that exemption, the writer thinks, the state will never be able to build the line. However, In the spirit of former Egyptian President Mubarak, who was clinically dead though maybe still alive, perhaps California high-speed rail is only clinically dead. The latest word is that Brown is only delaying, not ending, his proposal exempt the project from environmental reviews.

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