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The Bankruptcy of the Modern Transit Model

By | | Transportation
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Over the past 25 years, the population of the Pittsburgh urban area has remained fixed at about 1.8 million people. Driving, however, has increased by almost 50 percent.

During this period, Pittsburgh has spent hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading light-rail lines, building exclusive busways, and — in the latest project — building a $435 million transit tunnel under the Allegheny River. Despite (or because of) this investment, transit ridership has dropped by more than 25 percent.

Although the numbers vary slightly from place to place, Pittsburgh’s story is pretty typical of transit everywhere. Sure, some cities have seen ridership gains, but subsidies to transit are huge and transit does not make a notable (meaning 5 percent or more) contribution to personal mobility in any urban area except New York (where it is 10 percent).

Bill Steigerwald, an editor of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, surveys the failure of the transit industry through an interview with the Antiplanner’s friend, Wendell Cox. Cox’s comments are scathing.

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You Have an Agenda

By | | Transportation
77 Comments

The Antiplanner was in Austin, Texas on Wednesday speaking to people about a revived proposal to build light rail. I showed that light rail requires far more land to produce the same amount of transportation as highways, that it emits more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than typical automobiles, and that most cities that have built it have ended up cutting transit service to low-income neighborhoods.

After my presentation, someone who was obviously not persuaded came up and said if we didn’t build light rail we would end up paving over Texas. I repeated that less than 3 percent of Texas is urbanized and 95 percent is rural open space.

“Anyone can lie with statistics,” he said. “I think you have an agenda.” I pointed out that my numbers came from the Census Bureau, but he just repeated, “You have an agenda.”

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Eight Reasons Journalists Should Learn Economics

By | | News commentary
34 Comments

A writer for MarketWatch.com, which is part of the Dow Jones-Wall Street Journal group — has penned one of the most smugly ignorant articles about our economy I could imagine. The article is titled Eight Reasons You’ll Rejoice When We Hit $8 a Gallon Gasoline.

His reasons include:

1. RIP for the internal combustion engine

2. Economic stimulus

3. Whither the Middle East’s clout

4. Deflating oil potentates

5. Mass transit development

6. An antidote to sprawl

7. Restoration of financial discipline

8. Easing global tensions

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Why “Progressive” Should Be Politically Incorrect

By | | Follow up
32 Comments

Certain political terms, such as communist, Nazi, and even socialist, have become politically incorrect in the sense that they have been so successfully demonized that calling someone one of these terms is about equal to using the “n-word” or other derogatory ethnic terms. On the Internet, for example, if someone compares you with Nazis, you can declare yourself the winner of whatever debate you are in.

It is time for the progressive philosophy to join this list of politically unacceptable beliefs. At the moment, many people view “progressive” in a positive way that is not in keeping with its history or the beliefs of many of its current practitioners.

As the Antiplanner noted yesterday, it is ironic that the cities that have promoted policies that make housing unaffordable and push low-income people out like to call themselves progressive. This is only ironic because progressives love to pretend they care about minorities and low-income people. History, however, shows otherwise.

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Let’s Talk about Gentrification

By | | City planning, News commentary
38 Comments

The New York Times has a love affair with Portland, but a recent article points to a dark side of Portland that the Antiplanner has commented on before: it is (as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser once put it) a “boutique city catering only to a small, highly educated elite.”

That means there isn’t much room in Portland for chronically low-income blacks. The black “ghetto,” as we called parts of Northeast Portland when I was growing up there, has been gentrified by yuppies who can’t afford homes elsewhere in the region’s urban-growth boundary. This has pushed blacks from rental housing in those neighborhoods, leaving just a scattering of blacks who owned their homes.

What is left “is not drug infested, but then you say, ‘Well, what happened to all the black people that were in this area?’ ” Margaret Solomon, a long-time black resident told the Times. “You don’t see any.” As California writer Joseph Perkins put it, “smart growth is the new Jim Crow.”

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Cost-Effective Reductions in Greenhouse Gases

By | | News commentary
88 Comments

A new brief from the Brookings Institution says American cities should “expand transit and compact development options” in order to reduce their “carbon footprints.” The brief is based on a study, but frankly, I don’t think the study supports the conclusions.

The study compared per-capita carbon emissions from transit systems with a crude estimate of carbon emissions from driving. But it failed to note that per passenger mile carbon emissions from transit tend to be more than from driving. The study also looked at residential carbon emissions, but not emissions from other sources. The study used so many shortcuts — for example, estimating carbon emissions based on miles driven rather than using actual fuel consumption data — that it is likely rife with errors.

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Houston: The Opportunity City

By | | City planning
39 Comments

No doubt a lot of people think I am some kind of nut for promoting Houston’s land-use and transportation policies. But I am not the only nut to do so.

Another writer who finds Houston attractive is Joel Kotkin, who has written several books about cities and urban areas. Kotkin is no free-marketeer, but based on his assessment of Houston, he is proposing a new paradigm that he calls “opportunity urbanism.” His recent report of that name contrasts this idea with Richard Florida’s “creative class” policies.

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Houston in Perspective

By | | City planning
48 Comments

On the day I flew to Houston a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from an old friend, an Oregon elected official who supports the state’s land-use planning program. Responding to my invitation to attend the Preserving the American Dream conference, he said he had been to Houston once before and it was “a living hell.” Then he added (ungraciously, I thought), if I liked it so well, why didn’t I move there?

I suspect that our attitude when we visit a place for the first time has a great deal to do with how we view that place afterwards. I admit that I, raised to believe that no landscape east of the Rockies could be worth visiting, took a long time to warm up to places such as New York and New Jersey (which, as it turns out, both have much beautiful scenery). Plus, I’ve noticed that the first objection many planning advocates have against Houston is its climate: “it’s hot and humid.” Yet I doubt any of them really believe that planners can do anything about local climates.

Kunstler might call this nowheresville, but the photographer called it “suburban bliss.”
Flickr photo by The Other Dan.

In any case, I came to Houston prepared to like it, and I did. This doesn’t prove anything; I may have looked at the city and region through rose-colored glasses. (Actually, I wore my amber ones.) I’ll be the first to admit that Houston isn’t perfect, and due to my ingrained prejudice against flat, I will probably never live there.

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Long-Range Planning Is Irrational

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
15 Comments

Today, the Cato Institute released a new report, Roadmap to Gridlock: The Failure of Long-Range Metropolitan Transportation Planning. Based on a review of more than 75 long-range transportation plans, the review has two major findings.

First, only two of the plans reviewed bothered to follow the “Rational Planning Model” that is taught in every planning school. This model calls for the identification of goals, the development of alternative ways of meeting those goals, evaluation of those alternatives, and selection or development of a preferred alternative that best meets the goals.

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Houston Through a Bus Window Part 2: Sienna

By | | City planning
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Click here for part 1.

After lunch at a typical Texas restaurant, our buses trundled out to Sienna Plantation, one of more than two dozen master-planned communities in Fort Bend County alone. Fort Bend is one of ten counties in the Houston meto area. Covering 10,500 acres, Sienna Plantation includes churches, schools, shops, parks, and single- and multi-family homes. The developer, Johnson Development Company, purchased the land, built levies to protect the area from floods, subdivided it, installed utilities, and sells parcels to builders, the local school district, and other companies. Johnson does not build any homes itself.

A map of Sienna Plantation. Click for a larger view.

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