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The Limits of Moderate-Capacity Transit

By | | Transportation
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Gas prices in the first nine months of 2006 were at their highest levels (after adjusting for inflation) in twenty-five years. Most transit agencies made the most of this, with some gaining huge increases in ridership over the first nine months of previous year.

  • Flagstaff saw a 49-percent increase in bus ridership;
  • Tucsan saw a 26-percent increase;
  • Colorado Springs gained 22-percent more riders;
  • Tulsa 20 percent;
  • Santa Fe got 15-percent more riders.

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While these are exceptional, APTA reports that American transit systems carried 3 percent more transit riders than in 2005. So why did the transit system in Portland, the city that supposedly loves transit, actually carry less riders in 2006 than the year before?

Moderate-capacity transit in Portland.

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Strategic Planning: Another Waste of Your Tax Dollars

By | | News commentary, Public lands
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Our society lets markets handle the production of most things that are easily measured and asks government to produce things that are harder to quantify. This makes it easy for government agencies to suffer mission creep, meaning they start doing things other than the purposes for which they were created because the new things are easier to measure or have a more powerful political constituency.

Back in 1993, some bright bulb in Congress tried to solve this problem through strategic planning. Specifically, a law called the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) required every federal agency to write a plan that specified the outcomes the agency was trying to produce and showed how each part of the agency’s budget contributed to those outcomes.

Like so many other planning ideas, this one hasn’t worked. Instead, it has become just one more hoop for agency officials to jump through, adding to taxpayer costs without producing any results.

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Housing Markets Are Melting Down

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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The U.S. housing market, which helped keep the world economy afloat for the first half of this decade, is deflating. Here are some signals:

  • The Census Bureau reports that sales of new homes in January 2007 were about 20 percent less than in January 2006. All of this decline was in the West (where new home sales fell by 50 percent) and South (where they fell by 11 percent); sales in the rest of the country were about the same.
  • At least twenty-two mortgage companies who lend to subprime borrowers have gone bankrupt in the past two months, leading some to call this a “panic.”
  • Almost 25 percent of existing mortgage debt is under adjustable rate loans whose rates will be adjusted upwards this year — in many cases to rates well above the fixed rates now available.
  • Already, foreclosures are running 25 percent higher than last year.

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Which Transportation Policy Is Better: Houston’s or Portland’s?

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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I’ve added a new “loyal opponent” to my list (right), the Public Transit blog, which is run by Michael Setty. In truth, Michael’s loyalty as an opponent is somewhat questionable as he is more willing to listen to alternative views than some of his more radical smart-growth allies. (I hope I don’t reduce his credibility among his peers by saying so.)

In any case, he has a recent post comparing Houston and Portland traffic in 1993 and 2003. In a nutshell, data presented in the post show that Houston built more freeways, while Portland built light rail. Yet traffic congestion grew faster in Houston than in Portland. “These data suggest,” Michael mildly observes, “that some of the main beneficiaries of Portland’s transit investments may be the drivers who remain on the road.”

Did Portland’s light-rail lines significantly reduce congestion? At first glance, the data seem to say so. While this may be debated at length for years to come, I think there are some alternative explanations.

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Who Are These Planners, Anyway?

By | | Why Planning Fails
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Many of my posts in the last two months criticize planning and argue that, no matter who does it, planning is bound to fail. Yet some people are still planners. Who are these planners and why do they do it?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are about 31,650 urban & regional planners practicing in the United States. This probably does not include most forest planners working for the Forest Service, watershed planners working for the Corps of Engineers, or other agency planners. Yet national forest and other federal agency planning processes are remarkably similar to urban planning, so it is likely that these agencies hired at least a few urban planners to help them design their processes.

In 2005, planners earned an average of $57,620, meaning we spend close to $2 billion on planning salaries alone. This is not a large sum by government standards, but neither is it a trivial amount.

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Columbia Crossing Follow Up: 12 Years to Plan a Bridge

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In my post about the Sellwood Bridge I noted that Portland planners seem to take inordinate amounts of time to make decisions about new roads. In a post on the Columbia Crossing I noted that Portland transportation planners seem to be going out of their way to drive up the costs of new roads.

When I was writing about the Columbia Crossing, I didn’t notice that the region has already spent ten years “planning” this bridge, and expects to take at least two more. At the rate they are going, it will probably take a lot more than two years to reach a decision, much less to actually start any construction.

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Touring the World’s Cities by Rental Car

By | | Urban areas
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When Americans visit Europe, they usually rely on transit to get around the cities and trains to get between the cities. Since nearly all the Europeans they meet are riding transit or trains, this gives them the impression that most Europeans live that way as well. In fact, Europeans drive for nearly 80 percent of their travel.

My friend Wendell Cox has visited just about every major urban area in the world. He argues that the way to visit a city is to rent a car and see the whole city, not just the central part that is accessible by subways or other public transit. This gives him a very different view of foreign cities.

Living the Russian dream: a home in the suburbs and two cars.

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Ottawa City Council Kills Light-Rail Line

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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In what I regard as a victory for common sense, the Ottawa city council has killed a planned light-rail line. Unfortunately, this may be a costly decision as a previous city council had signed a contract to construct the line, and the contractors say they want compensation for the cancellation.

The 18-mile line, which had been approved by the city council last July, was expected to cost CN$778 million, or about CN$43 million per mile. The Province of Ontario had promised to cover about CN$400 million of this cost, leaving the city to find CN$378 million.

Light rail passing high-density housing in Moscow. Photo by Lowell Grattan.

But after having spent CN$65 million on the project, a new city council elected in November decided light rail was a waste of money. In December, they voted 13-11 to cancel just before a contract deadline.

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Tax Subsidies to New and Old Urbanists

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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The subsidies mentioned in yesterday’s post about Denver were in the form of tax-increment financing (TIF). For those unfamiliar with the term, tax-increment financing is the principal method of funding urban renewal. An urban-renewal agency draws a line around an area to be renewed, and for the next twenty or so years all property taxes collected on any new improvements in that district — the “incremental” taxes — are used to subsidize the renewal program.

Usually, the agency estimates future tax revenues and then sells bonds to be repaid by those revenues. The bond revenues might be used for infrastructure such as streets, improvements such as parking garages and parks, or they might simply be given to the developer as seed money for the project.

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Portland Not the Only Place Subsidizing New Urbanists

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
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New Urbanism, as everyone knows, is morally superior to old suburbanism. So New Urbanists are clearly entitled to huge subsidies to support their environmentally friendly lifestyles. Such as subsidies for parking garages near their subsidized high-density housing.

The Antiplanner has covered such subsidies to Portland developments. But other cities subsidize them as well. An op ed by Jennifer Lang in Saturday’s Rocky Mountain News describes some of these subsidies in the Denver metro area.

This parking garage in downtown Denver was built with a $2.1 million subsidy that planners said was needed so the New Urbanists living in subsidized downtown lofts would have a place to park their SUVs. Photo by the Antiplanner.

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