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Why Housing Is Expensive

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning
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I previously posted about a growing antiplanning movement in Britain and a conference held on the impact of planning on housing prices. Someone sent me a PowerPoint show (7.2 MB) that was given at the conference that graphically demonstrates the problem with finding a place to build a home in England.

Click the image to see a larger picture.

The show is a bit large but worth the download. It was presented by Kate Moorcock Abley, who is affiliated with Audacity, one of the groups that put on the conference. Audacity’s director, James Heartfield, will be speaking at this November’s American Dream conference in San Jose.

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Just How Bad Is Sprawl?

By | | Regional planning
8 Comments

Back in 2001, National Geographic published an article on urban sprawl. The magazine included a map that purported to show the extent of sprawl in the U.S.

Click on the map to download a printable pdf.

At the time, I described this map as a deceptivegraphc because it greatly exaggerated the extent of urban development. For example, the map showed that one-third of Vermont was apparently covered with sprawl. In fact, U.S.D.A. data indicated that only 3 percent of the state had been developed.

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Why Are Government Files So Large?

By | | City planning
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Recently I downloaded an environmental report by a city planning agency and was appalled to find that the table of contents alone was 20 megabytes. The entire report totaled 170 megabytes. The city’s web site didn’t even have the decency to warn users how big each file would be.

Anyone who has made PDFs should know that they are quite easy to shrink by reducing the resolution of photos and other graphics. Commercial sites tend to keep files as small as possible or to provide multiple resolutions so that they are accessible to as many potential customers as possible. For example, the trailers pages for web sites advertising most movies offer “small,” “medium,” and “large” formats.

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Scaling Transit, Part 2: Buses to Rail

By | | Transportation
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Yesterday, I described how an effective private transit system could be designed for all but the smallest urban areas by simply scaling up the taxicab association model to buses. Rather than use this model, many of America’s subsidized transit agencies have tried a different sort of scaling upwards: from buses to rail. This has led to numerous planning disasters.

Too many public officials imagine that running a rail transit system is just the same as running a bus system, only with bigger vehicles. Jonathan Richmond’s paper (since expanded to a book), The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles quotes the Los Angeles Times: “One of the arguments made most often for the rail line is that it will be cheaper to operate because a single driver on a train can carry up to five times as many passengers as a bus.”

These are, as they say, famous last words. The reality is that a bus system does not scale up to a train system: they are quite different beasts, and running a train system not only requires a completely different set of skills, it entails a much higher risk — a risk that transit agency officials can ignore because they simply impose it on taxpayers and, in the worst cases, transit riders.

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Scaling Transit, Part 1: Taxis to Buses

By | | Transportation
29 Comments

People in the transit industry often tell us how fortunate we are that they are spending billions of dollars of our money each year, because otherwise there would be a lot more cars on the road and a lot more congestion. This is simply untrue.

In most cities, most transit riders are transit dependent — for one reason or another, they can’t drive. If government subsidized transit didn’t exist, private operators would take up the slack and serve these people. The fares might be a little higher (though not necessarily), and they might not serve some low-density suburbs (where you see buses that are empty most of the time), but the service would be there. Plus, anyone who was a “choice” rider — that is, they can drive but would prefer not to — could use these services too.

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Migration from the Cities

By | | News commentary
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Congratulations to faithful ally Wendell Cox for getting quoted in Forbes magazine about the “great American migration”. The article describes how many of America’s major urban areas are losing population as people move to the suburbs of a variety of smaller cities.

Wendell has been following this migration on his Demographia web site. (Find “domestic migration” on the home page.) He shows that census data put the lie to claims that Americans are moving out of the suburbs and back into downtown areas. Instead, they are moving out of expensive suburbs and into smaller, more remote, and definitely more affordable suburbs.
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Of course, as Forbes notes, a few people are moving to downtown areas. That’s fine for them (though we should always ask how much their million-dollar homes are subsidized). But, as Wendell shows, their numbers remain small compared with suburban growth.

You Can Build Your Way Out of Congestion (But Watch Your Back)

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
17 Comments

The 2007 Preserving the American Dream conference will be in San Jose this year, so I’ve been taking a close look at that region. San Jose definitely practices smart growth, so I presumed that, like Portland, congestion there would have greatly increased as planners tried to discourage driving.

When I examined the Texas Transportation institute’s data file for San Jose, however, I was surprised to find this was not the case. In fact, between 1989 and 1997, the amount of time the typical rush-hour commuter wasted sitting in traffic actually fell by a whopping 50 percent. During this same period, Santa Clara County (of which San Jose is the seat) gained well over 100,000 new jobs.

Who wouldn’t envy a place that could absorb that many new commuters and still cut congestion in half? How did they do it? Simple. They built new roads.

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Prove It! #2: Alleys Increase Crime

By | | Mission
12 Comments

Last week, in a comment on a comment on a post, I mentioned that alleys lead to increased crime. So naturally, someone who is Google-challenged asked me to prove it. It turns out there is a lot of evidence that alleys contribute to crime by providing quiet places where criminals can hide their activities and by offering easy access to secondary entrances to people’s homes.

The research goes back at least as far as the late Oscar Newman, an architect who wanted to know why some neighborhoods suffered higher crime rates than other neighborhoods inhabited by people in a similar socioeconomic class. Newman found that urban design plays a role in making neighborhoods more or less vulnerable to crime, and that the two most important factors were having defensible space, which usually means private property, and impermeability, which means limiting the number of access points to dwellings and businesses. By limiting permeability, cul de sacs make neighborhoods less vulnerable to crime; by increasing permeability, alleys make neighborhoods more vulnerable.

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Suburbs Emit Less Greenhouse Gases

By | | News commentary
26 Comments

It is amazing how many assumptions people make without checking the facts. They assume transit consumes less energy than cars (not true for most U.S. transit systems). They assume suburbs are more heavily subsidized than cities (the vast majority of subsidies go to the cities). They assume that highways are unfairly subsidized (actually, subsidies to transit are greater than to highways even though highways move a hundred times as many passenger miles).

The latest set of assumptions center around greenhouse gases. I’ve already addressed the assumptions that transit emits less greenhouse gases than cars and that high rises emit less than single-family homes.

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Peak Tyranny

By | | Regional planning
41 Comments

Someone once told me that loyal opponent Todd Litman, of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, thinks of himself as my nemesis. But I don’t want to be a nemesis to Todd. First of all, he is a nice guy. Second, he is pretty analytical; even if I disagree with his conclusions, I appreciate that he knows his way around a spreadsheet.

If I were to have a nemesis, I would want it to be someone who is really my opposite, someone who relies on exaggeration and over-the-top rhetoric to make his case. Someone like James Howard Kunstler.

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