Late November shorts
Indeed, it hit 70F today, so I did indeed wear shorts!
1. mqVibe looks interesting: it rates neighborhoods “in terms of edginess, residential, burbiness (i.e., how many chain businesses dominate the blocks), and other dimensions,” according to John Hendel in TBD. The rankings of local neighborhoods appear about right; will have to check out other cities’ rankings to see how it differs vs. Walk Score.
2. Old news, but since Fox News has instituted a rule stating that any discussion of global warming should be preceded by a “discussion of the debate,” I suggest another new rule: any report about radio waves (like those involving mobile phones) must also include a segment where a man in a tin foil hat presents the debate about whether such devices are actually government mind control waves. Hey, if you’re going to distort the science…
3. Street enclosure ratios make all the difference in the world — they could make even the worst excesses of mini-mall LA avenues look human scale. (Original: David Yoon)
4. “[J]ust about every one is complaining about bikes and stop signs. But the fact of the matter is, those stop signs are there to regulate speed, not right of way; two way stops actually do a better job of that. And bikes have a hard time beating the speed limit.” – Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger. Indeed, the 4-way stop is actually a very poor way of regulating right of way. In many cases, it’s difficult to tell who has the right of way, since “first to approach the intersection” and “first to get to the stop bar” are often different.
Mexico City: thoughts
First impressions that I scribbled down about Mexico City:
- Wow, it is indeed high up. Bring some nasal spray to combat the sniffles.
- A great number of buildings are indeed askew, which did not help my occasional difficulty in descending stairs.
- Speaking of stairs, their metro is the only place where I have ever seen metal escalator treads worn down by heavy pedestrian traffic. Stone, sure, but wow!
- Also the only other place, besides Tokyo, where subway passages are given lanes — and the arrows have been planned to point you in the most direct route, getting everyone out of one another’s way. (This confused me at first in Tokyo, since the directional markers often added to the general confusion over whether to walk on the left or right.)
- The only useful thing about Polanco is its street names — scientists and poets.
- After being thoroughly disgusted with Polanco, I had no appetite to venture even further out (half an hour past the subway!) to the manufactured Edge City of Santa Fe. I’m pretty sure that the Google Earth view is more interesting, anyhow. Of course, it’s classic sectoral urbanism — the favored quarter just follows Reforma out, and out, and out… and demands more infrastructure as it goes.
- Subsidized gasoline must explain, to some extent, the popularity of monster SUVs and ancient gas-guzzlers alike.
- Something about the scale of the blocks downtown, their early-20th-century stone architecture, the wall-to-wall commerce, and the nonstop crowds reminded me more of Shanghai than of other large Latin American cities I’ve been to.
- Note that it’s early 20th century architecture; even though the city was settled almost 800 years ago, it was tiny up until the 20th century (and the postwar years in particular). In 1900, it scarcely extended for a few blocks past the Alameda.
- The overhead cost of providing so many security guards everywhere must add considerably to the cost of doing business. It is pretty reassuring, though, to have a few cops standing around on every block downtown.
- Amusing photo: Martha on an Ecobici! It’s heartwarming that bike-sharing is what the mayor of Mexico City shows off to foreign celebrities.
Silly NIMBYs
1. Silly NIMBY A: “Bob Knoll, who lives in nearby Garrett Park Estates, said he worries that construction would close sidewalks and walking paths near the mall.” Hmm. Actually, de-malling (in this case, of White Flint Mall in Montgomery County) will vastly increase the number of places to walk.
2. Silly NIMBY B.
October shorts
It’s no longer shorts weather, but quick links endure!
1. Capital Bikeshare just turned one, and surprisingly has doubled its initial ridership projections and is currently running an operating surplus. [via GGW/WashCycle]
2. Economists like Ed Glaeser (and Ryan Avent, although I haven’t read his new treatise; reviewed by Rob Pitingolo in GGW and Lydia in CityPaper) often make the mistake of overly simplifying how housing markets work. Instead, numerous other important factors complicate matters, including:
- as Rob points out, housing is a bundle of goods whose utilities vary for different audiences
- housing construction can induce demand, particularly by adding amenities to a neighborhood
- housing construction can also remove amenities from a neighborhood, like a low-rise scale, thus changing other intangibles included in that bundle of goods
- construction costs don’t increase linearly; rather, costs jump at certain inflection points, like between low- and mid-rise
- housing and real estate in general are imperfect markets, since land is not a replicable commodity
- the substantial lag time for housing construction, even in less regulated markets, almost guarantees that supply will miss demand peaks
Pro-active planning remains the best and most time-honored way of pre-empting NIMBYs. Get the neighborhood to buy-in to neighborhood change early on, and then they won’t be surprised and upset when it happens.
3. Very interesting to see (via Dan Mihalopoulos/CNC) that Inspector General Joseph Ferguson has put a lot of sacred cows on the table for increasing revenue in Chicago — particularly several implicit subsidies to drivers. A downtown congestion charge, tolls on Lake Shore Drive, a commuter income tax, privatized parking enforcement, higher water/sewer fees, and higher garbage collection fees all would substantially impact suburbanites, single-family homeowners, and drivers.
4. How important are street enclosure ratios? As this gallery of reconstructed L.A. traffic sewers shows, they’re so important that almost nothing else matters if you get them right. (Photo-illustrations by David Yoon.) Back when I was reading comments on LEED-ND 1.0, a lot of complaints centered on the street enclosure requirement; I think that thinking about such urban design factors is just foreign to the architects & engineers who typically do LEED submittals. Yet it’s absolutely fundamental to defining urban rooms.
Fortress Illinois
A very long time ago (it looks like June 2000), I wrote a college paper about the history of Illinois Center and Lakeshore East. Since someone asked about it, I’m going to post it. There may be more in “City Building,” the recent monograph of SOM’s urban design projects.
Note: the footnotes and formatting are broken. That happens.
The real meaning of Park(ing) Day
Once again, the killjoys are looking too narrowly at a fun event. DC may have many acres of park space, but the vast majority of it is inaccessible to its residents on a daily basis — cut off from the city by highways, hillsides, rivers, and too often security fences. Unlike metered parking spaces, those park spaces aren’t located right at the heart of the neighborhoods where we work, shop, and live.
More broadly, Streetsblog DC calls Park(ing) Day a “global demonstration about all the ways we can use curbside space besides automobile storage.” It’s a chance to have a thoughtful dialogue about what else we could use curbside space for, and to get a chance to see just how huge cars are relative to the other elements of our urban environment. We don’t often get a chance to see just how much other stuff can fit into the space occupied by one car — a dozen bikes? a picnic table? a kindergarten class? a City Council?
San Francisco has made Park(ing) Day permanent in many locations throughout the city by allowing businesses (and residents!) to rent curbside spaces annually. Many of them have become elegant sidewalk cafes, some house bike parking, one has a curious dinosaur themed garden. All of them offer something rewarding and engaging to walk past, and many offer the city’s economy more of a boost than yet another parked car would.
It’s not as if street parking has always had the Divine Right of Kings, either. Way back in 1924, in a paper entitled Suggestions for Relief of Street Congestion, a Chicago engineer supported banning curbside parking entirely: “It seems unreasonable that a comparatively few people can utilize the most valuable street space in our cities, practically at will, for their own pleasure and convenience and to the serious inconvenience of thousands of their fellow citizens.” (Norton, Peter. 2008. Fighting Traffic. Cambridge: MIT. p. 141.)
[posted to GGW]
Landscape vs. New Urbanism
A few notes I took at Charles Waldheim’s speech (the “LU vs. NU throwdown“) at CNU 19 in Madison:
1. Charles Waldheim didn’t show the same fangs towards NU in his talk that he has in his articles.
2. More about the “hegemony” of NU? Perhaps in theory, but anyone who talks like that merely shows how divorced ivory tower academics are from the practice of building tract houses, strip malls, and office campuses. It’s a huge world out there.
3. Waldheim takes credit for certain projects which aren’t quite what they seem. The High Line is a gold-plated park which works in that particular high-density context — but as Jane Jacobs points out with her discussion of small blocks vis-a-vis Park Avenue and Rockefeller Plaza, any new north-south route within the oversized Manhattan grid will create exceptional value. That goes double for the High Line, since NYC pursued a density-transfer approach that stacked even more buildable value along the High Line. It’s a proto-NU approach.
His slides only showed the Lower Don Lands project in Toronto as anything on the site (excepting the UDA-designed project just upstream) that included new urban fabric — and the urban design was by Ken Greenberg, who is a bona fide New Urbanist. Their proposal is a prime example of placing Buildings In Space without regard to the pedestrian connections or urban space between them; the landscape doesn’t allow the nodes of fabric to be contiguous, and the buildings’ jaunty angles don’t appear to have any rhyme or reason. Taking credit for the TTC’s carbon efficiency, and by extension the hydroelectric plants upstream, is manifestly cheating.
4. To complement point #1, he didn’t show the sorts of plans featured in the various LU books and journals — of fragmented separate-use, low density pods isolated by shards of landscape, resembling nothing so much as 1980s golf-course or marina subdivisions.
Hmm? links
1. Is WaPo Style really writing about “hipster glasses”? [Original article by Ned Martel.] I had a bear of a time with my most recent glasses purchase, ultimately reverting to special ordering a pair of frames that I’d seen a while back in Chicago. They’re a tad larger than my last pair, with which I was explicitly rejecting the aviator-sized frames that were then just coming into vogue. I’ve never liked that style: the outside corners hide the cheekbones and magnify any under-eye puffiness.
Glad to hear that “the nation’s public wonks['] glasses are getting smaller and smarter,” although as long as I’ve known MSNBC’s foxy Chris Hayes, he’s always worn little, squarish glasses. (Hopefully, this is the only article which compares him to Eric Cantor and Milhouse.)
2. “Flood insurance is the federal government’s second-largest fiscal liability after social security,” writes Jay Gulledge for Pew Climate. Unfortunately for the Know-Nothings, that particular ledger item will not magically decline anytime soon.
3. Speaking of the Know-Nothings, the Skeptical Teacher decries how their maddening contempt for science continues to spill into ever more policy matters. In particular, unverified anecdotes appear to be the basis of public health policy.
4. Hmm! A new idea for a DC bicycle tour, maybe incorporating interpretive performance art: famed local sex scandals. I’d add Marion Barry’s hotel room(s), the 14th St whore march, and infamous bygone strip clubs.
A caution for bike sharing in NYC
The Bixi bike share system chosen by NYCDOT is a proven platform that addresses a lot of concerns that New Yorkers might have about bike sharing. Thefts have been low in recent Bixi installations; 0.0002% of bikes checked out in London over the first year never returned. The footprint of the system is pretty well centralized, which will ensure that plenty of daily users are around to foot the bill.
My principal concern with launching bicycle sharing in NYC is that it will be very difficult to keep the bikes/spaces balanced, the biggest operational problem that’s emerged in urban bicycle sharing. Alta has acknowledged its challenge in DC and it’s been a leading complaint in London (watch the striking daily inflow/outflow here); so far, these are the two biggest CBDs that have bike sharing. The operational environment for rebalancing in all other bike-share cities is far simpler than in Manhattan.
Bike share works best in areas of medium-high density and very high mixed-use, since it requires that a large number of people circulate bikes around the system, around the clock. That way, the bikes naturally circulate themselves without much intervention. Many European and Asian cities are organized in a way that’s fairly conducive to bike sharing. Their density curves are not that steep, and many neighborhoods have 18- or 24-hour street life. Moving a lot of people to a single point — i.e., very high density, single-use concentrations, is a job most efficiently done with transit whether that’s shuttle buses for sports stadiums or rail feeding a CBD. The capacity numbers speak or themselves: at any given moment, ~1200 people can use Capital Bikeshare, while Washington Metrorail runs enough trains at peak to move 153,000 people at once.
Even in London, the City is overwhelmingly mid-rise, and high-rise, office-heavy Canary Wharf is outside the bike share footprint. North American bike sharing programs so far are either in comparatively small cities (Minneapolis, Denver, a fraction of Toronto) or in cities with an exceptionally “European-style” mid-rise and/or mixed-use core (Washington, Montreal, that fraction of Toronto).
A bike share system attempting to serve Manhattan’s highly centralized employment density will be quite difficult to manage. DC and London both struggle with office cores twice the size of Montreal’s; NYC has a CBD that is seven times as large. A vast number of docks will be demanded within the office cores, where street space is already at a steep premium. Rebalancing vehicles will not be able to easily cycle bikes amidst streets already clogged with delivery vehicles. Without an ability to rebalance bikes, it will be difficult to find bikes in Brooklyn, or open docks in Midtown, during the day. Paying customers who are thus kept out of the system will get very upset.
What might work? Unfortunately, we can’t know which sites will have a fairly balanced flow of coming and going throughout the day, but that could be inferred based on observation of adjacent land uses. A high-density or vertical racking solution like the (as yet theoretical — I’ve only seen a mock-up) Bike Dispenser might come in handy for swallowing, or ejecting, vast quantities of identical bike-share bikes at key locations like rail terminals.
A class that I’m in this semester will investigate bike share rebalancing worldwide; keep an eye on the class blog for updates and the final report.
I recently got to ride with Tom Bertulis on Boston’s “Hubway”; he pointed to Seattle’s helmet law (among the few for adult cyclists in North America) as a serious impediment to introducing bike sharing there. I have to admit that although I wear a helmet 99% of the time with my own bike — since I keep helmets near my bikes and typically plan such trips — I often neglect to when riding bike share. Tom Fucoloro from Seattle Bike Blog notes bike share’s exemplary safety record, and (as Tom B. also did) Mexico City’s repeal of its helmet law in favor of bike sharing, to argue for at least modifying Seattle’s law.
What if: gas taxes were always a percentage
Currently, the price of gas in the District of Columbia includes 18.4¢ in federal tax and 23.5¢ in local taxes. As many have noted, the rising per-gallon price of gas has reduced the purchasing power of excise taxes on gas, particularly as the rising price finally is inducing some price elasticity (i.e., more efficient cars and a switch to untaxed fuels like ethanol or electricity). Some have advocated that instead, the tax should be levied as a sales tax, or a percentage of the price.
Indexing gas taxes to the historic price of gas (as converting the tax to a percentage tax would do) makes the inflation-adjusted decline in gas taxes even more stark. It appears that retail prices were around 19¢/gallon in the 1930s, when 4-5¢ state gas taxes were in effect around here, plus the 1¢ federal tax; that implies that there was the equivalent of a 41% sales tax on gas during the nation’s deepest-ever economic depression. An equivalent tax on today’s typical DC gas price of $3.60 (of which $0.419 is tax) would result in a tax of $1.30/gallon and a “new” gas price of $4.48. To get back to such rates would require an 88¢ increase in the gas tax — not far off from Tom Friedman’s 2003 proposal for a $1/gallon, $110B-in-revenue “Patriot Tax.”
Of course, had gas taxes always been levied at these rates, prices would have been higher earlier, demand would thus be lower today, and the resulting prices would probably also be lower. Strange how that works.
[comment added to Matt Johnson's post at GGW; the original post has the real and nominal gas tax rates in DC, Md., and Va. He also points out that cutting all of the "extraneous" pedestrian and bicycle programs from the USDOT budget would recover a tiny fraction of the money that could be raised by indexing the gas tax appropriately.]
On debt
I have little more to contribute to the discourse over the debt-ceiling debacle — part of the never-ending 2011 budget cutting season (partly a result of this Congress’ record low productivity and thus inability to pass even the most routine of budgetary measures) — so here’s a few quotes I’ve relished from this most recent debate between prudence and insanity:
Perhaps best of all, David Brooks:
If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases… This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.
But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.
The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.
The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.
The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.
The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.
But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures…
But while Reagan nostalgia endures, a number of Republicans have begun to admit the obvious: The Gipper would no longer be welcome on the GOP team. Most recently, Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr. (Calif.) called Reagan a “moderate former liberal . . . who would never be elected today in my opinion.” This spring, Mike Huckabee judged that “Ronald Reagan would have a very difficult, if not impossible time being nominated in this atmosphere,” pointing out that Reagan “raises taxes as governor, he made deals with Democrats, he compromised on things in order to move the ball down the field.”
The Economist‘s editorial:
Now, however, the Republicans are pushing things too far… The sticking-point is not on the spending side. It is because the vast majority of Republicans, driven on by the wilder-eyed members of their party and the cacophony of conservative media, are clinging to the position that not a single cent of deficit reduction must come from a higher tax take. This is economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical…
America’s tax take is at its lowest level for decades: even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when he needed to do so. And the closer you look, the more unprincipled the Republicans look…
Adam Levitin, a bankruptcy attorney in California, foresees a disaster in the newly rewritten Balanced Budget Amendment (and correctly wonders just how enforceable the amendment could be):
Here’s the true lunacy of the bill, it would require a 2/3s majority (by rollcall vote) in both houses for any bill to increase revenue. Let me repeat that again: any tax increase would have to be approved by a 2/3 majority in both houses. That’s a federal version of Proposition 13, the state Constitutional amendment that destroyed California by requiring supermajorities for tax increases. It effectively gives a selfish minority the ability to stymie actions that benefit the whole.
Robert Bixby, executive director of the original deficit hawks at the Concord Coalition, echoes the sentiment:
The whole point of a balanced budget amendment is to ensure that future generations are free to make their own fiscal decisions. It is inconsistent with that freedom to forever mandate a particular level of spending or to permanently favor spending cuts over revenue increases as the manner of managing these decisions.
NextGen 8 in Madison
A full schedule and maps have been posted for next week’s (free) events in Madison — both at Monona Terrace and at the Urban Project Lodge, where you can work hands-on with other urbanists on advancing the cause. See you there!
Transit to jobs
A few notes from yesterday’s Brookings event unveiling “Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America.”
- Over the course of the recession, household incomes have fallen by $2000 and now gas costs have increased by $1000. That’s quite a squeeze!
- By 2050, America will add 130 million people — equivalent to the 2010 population of every state west of the Mississippi.
- Interesting distinction (which they explore in the report) within the Sunbelt between Western and Southern cities. I knew (having grown up in a southern suburb) that Southern cities lagged in transit coverage, but it’s really quite striking just how awful the buses are down there.
- 70% of metro Americans have transit access at home, so when people say “I don’t live near transit, it doesn’t benefit me” they’re probably lying. Put more nicely, that’s a teachable moment, and agencies could market their services better.
- The online mapping tool‘s “travel time” feature kind of reminds me of Mapnificent, but with less elegant geography and with some other data layers available.
- Sec. LaHood, answering a question about how to sell his fellow Republicans on the mere idea of investment, underscored that “debt is one priority among many.”
- These are the “biggest cities” for those of us who have specialized occupations, despise long commutes, and refuse to drive to work; i.e., metros ranked by the number of jobs reachable by the typical transit served household within a 45-minute trip (and their metro population rank in 2010):
New York: 946,058 (1)
Boston: 346,424 (10)
Chicago: 317,096 (3)
Washington: 277,092 (7)
San Francisco-Oakland: 240,819 (11)
Los Angeles: 225,838 (2)
Philadelphia-Camden: 202,724 (5)
Milwaukee: 135,829 (39)
Minneapolis-Saint Paul: 130,967 (16)
Houston: 126,364 (6)
Seattle: 117,441 (15)
Baltimore: 106,384 (20)
Pittsburgh: 102,333 (22)
Three bigger themes worth exploring:
- Households appear to be increasingly sold on the value of transit access, but it seems that corporate decision makers need to learn about the value of transit accessibility. Regional chambers of commerce would be a good platform for this education — one example that comes to mind is the Metropolis Pledge — and perhaps also commercial real estate brokerages could play a role. Once upon a time, I worked for a company that was in the process of relocating a large number of workers away from transit; their internal surveys showed that many workers were displeased with the move, but employees were only consulted after the decision had been made.
- Last mile circulation does not appear cost-effective with standard metrics like farebox recovery ratio or passenger loads, according to Keith Parker from VIA in San Antonio. Yet this segment of the transit market is the prime PPP opportunity, whether in shuttle buses or TOD or whatever, since the last mile is where the real value capture opportunities lie.
- From an urban design standpoint, there’s been some discussion at past CNUs about workplace New Urbanism, and to broaden the typical definition of “mixed use” from the usual (residential with some retail and maybe a bit of office, all of which is fairly high-rent). It’s a little disingenuous to say that all workplaces can be brought near transit — many of the low-skilled industries that Brookings identifies as lacking in transit access are probably hopelessly dispersed or just rural (agriculture, forestry, mining, repair, construction). Seems like there’s plenty of scope to bring many mid-skilled industries (manufacturing, TCU) into the TOD fold.
GOP turns its back on its past and future
The other day, I mentioned the Republican Party’s role in pioneering huge federal subsidies for national infrastructure investments, spurring centuries of enduring economic growth — and how it’s turned its back on that heritage, now attacking the mere notion of federal investment as “socialistic.”
Take a moment to closely consider the Pacific Railway Act ad the contrast to today’s small-bore politics gets even sharper. 1862′s Republican-dominated Congress wasn’t just preoccupied with a handful of terrorists on the other side of the world; it faced an enemy that had just stolen half the country and was just a few months into battling (and, at that point, winning!) an unfathomably costly and bloody war. That Congress allocated precious federal resources to literally lay the groundwork for a greater future for America — even at a time when it was unclear whether America even had a future.
Moreover, those first Republicans chose to create a giant federal entitlement scheme for snooty higher education — the Morril Land Grant Act — at a time when few Americans could possibly have comprehended widespread college enrollment. That investment, reinforced over the years by state appropriations, now spins off almost incalculable economic gains for the nation. They financed all this federal largesse with, naturally, new income taxes on the rich.
Later, in the Reconstruction years, the transcontinental railroad was lauded for creating publicly funded, make-work jobs for veterans — a noble cause which today’s Republicans denigrate as “buying jobs with borrowed money.” Yet that was never the point of the railroad: those employed veterans were building useful, lasting infrastructure, not ditches. Today, that same infrastructure continues to spin off billions of dollars in value, and continues to create private-sector jobs in ways that its builders could not have foreseen: the fiber-optic backbone paralleling the tracks makes possible companies like Amazon and Qwest, its sheer intermodal shipping capacity underlies UPS’s world-renowned logistics, the diesel-engine business was the basis for GE’s leading position in gas-fired electric turbines. Infrastructure investments don’t pay off next week, and they might not even pay off next year, but they ideally leave lasting benefits for the next generation. However, today’s GOP has made it clear that their vision for government is one that pays off their base now, while damning future generations (of taxpayers, of Medicare beneficiaries) to a nasty, brutish, and short life.
Turn one traffic lane into four, instantly!
Since driving is in decline, perhaps removing car lanes for bike lanes could free up room on space-constrained urban streets. How much more traffic could these streets serve? In spite of grumblings to the contrary, bike lanes are much more efficient at moving vehicles than traffic sewers are. (Remember that bikes are vehicles, too.) Consider first that a single road lane can typically move at most 1,000-2,000 cars per hour — the upper end for expressways and the lower end for arterials. (Local streets move fewer than 1,000.)
Removing one car lane can create enough space for two buffered bike lanes, or for one bidirectional cycletrack. Each of those lanes, in turn, could easily move almost twice as many vehicles as each car lane:
[T]he saturation flow for a single 1-m (3.3 ft) to 1.2-m (4-ft) bicycle lane appears to be between 1,500 and 5,000 bicycles/hr with a majority of the observations falling between 2,000 and 3,500 bicycles/hr. (D. P. Allen, N. Rouphail, J. Hummer, J. Milazzo, TRR 1636)
In other words, converting one lane to a cycletrack can quadruple the capacity of that lane of traffic. It’s like adding three lanes of traffic, just with some paint. The inverse of that statement: even if the lane “looks” 75% less busy than the old lane of traffic, it’s still moving about as many vehicles and just about as many people (since average car occupancy is ~1.25).
Americans loving their cars a bit less
Earlier, I’ve pointed out that young Americans aren’t quite in love with driving. Now, via WashCycle, a link to a 2006 Pew study (predating the current recession and $4 gas) with longitudinal evidence of general cooling in America’s love affair with the car. In 1991, people who “like to drive a great deal” outnumbered those who “consider [driving] a chore” by 50%; by 2006, those numbers had flipped. That cooling wasn’t limited to the young, either: “This decline over the past 15 years in enjoyment of driving has occurred among men and women, young and old, as well as in all regions of the country.”
(Page 4 of that report sets out reasons why people enjoy or dislike driving. It might be a worthwhile exercise for marketers of other modes to identify targeted responses to those rationales.)
The affluent society starving investment
As the Economist points out this week, capital spending on transportation & water infrastructure in the USA has declined by two-thirds since its Kennedy (and Pat Brown) era heyday. As that era crested, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote “The Affluent Society,” a vision of an America characterized by private affluence amidst public poverty. That vision has come to pass: the World Economic Forum ranks 23rd for overall infrastructure quality, between Spain and Chile. At a metropolitan level, I would hazard that Spanish and Chilean metropolitan commuters appear to enjoy more extensive and efficient mass transit and toll highways than their American counterparts.
As if this precipitous decline in investment just were not enough, Jonathan Cohn points out that the Ryan/House GOP budget would reduce federal spending on infrastructure by roughly half.* That the Republicans are leading this charge would surely disappoint that party’s founding fathers, who (as highlighted at GOP.com) “Established the Transcontinental Railroad” with lavish sums of federal “funny money” (land grants).
The GOP is broadly fighting a war against the future — attacking any investment in the future, choosing instead to distribute those false savings as tax cuts to foster present-day private consumption. The Ryan budget also cuts federal investment in human infrastructure — education — by over half. At the state level in North Carolina, N&O political columnist Rob Christensen frames the “two competing narratives” of low taxes and private consumption today vs. broader public gains tomorrow within the context of Richard Burr, a Republican of the old (pre-paleo-nihilist), truly pro-business variety:
[Gov. Perdue and the Democrats] have argued that North Carolina has been a leader in the South for the past several generations precisely because it has invested more than its sister states in creating a nationally respected university system, a noted community college system, and has historically been a leader in roads and the arts. That North Carolina — unlike other parts of the South — has not engaged in a race to have the lowest taxes in the South, the Democrats argue, has allowed the state to develop a more sophisticated industrial policy that has resulted in such success stories as the Research Triangle Park…
[Republican U.S. Senator Richard Burr:] “We are the highest-tax state in the Southeast. And we still win. We win more than our neighboring states.” The main reason, Burr said, is because of North Carolina’s education system, particularly its university and community college system. “When an employer looks at an investment in North Carolina, they are not looking at the return next year,” Burr said. “They are looking at the return 30 years from now. They need a future workforce that has the skills and knowledge.”
* Note differing metrics (% of GDP spent by all levels of government vs. just federal spending per capita). I’d estimate the Ryan trendline on that graph slightly downward, based on stable or declining state/local spending, which seems likely given budget pressures, and GDP growth modestly outpacing population growth.
Speaking of smoothly functioning societies, Fukuyama confirms Kierkegaard’s theory that history ends in modern Copenhagen. We’re all “getting to Denmark,” it would seem.
City limits blur up close
Chris Leinberger refers to how the 2010 Census tract-level data dump has inevitably led to self-congratulatory crowing by the pavement-lobby-funded sprawl-triumphalist brigade:
“Unfortunately, the census shines the light on the terms ‘city’ and ‘suburb’ –neither of which are the keys to understanding today’s built environment.”
Friendship Heights, Maryland shows a particularly striking illustration of how it’s dangerous to strictly rely on Census geography to define terms like “city” and “suburb.” (As if categorizing Fresno as a city and Newark as a suburb weren’t quite enough.) On the right, the Mazza Gallerie enclosed mall walls itself off from the “central city” streets, whereas on the left, the mixed-use, high-rise, street-facing Wisconsin Place is in the “suburbs.” To further muddle the vagaries of local Census geography, the four-block, 34-acre Census Designated Place (and incorporated tax district) of Friendship Heights Village is right behind Wisconsin Place. Since it’s just a cluster of mostly residential high rises, it’s the single most densely populated “place” in the entire country, with 79,556 residents per square mile. Even Manhattan only clocks in at 69,468 per square mile.
On the broader point: the triumphalists still refuse to recognize that population growth is just one, and not even a particularly good, metric of success. Global and national population growth is slowing, household sizes are declining, and housing space consumption per capita has grown considerably (although this trend is declining in suburbs, it probably still has a way to go in cities). All of these trends, plus the by-definition relative lack of cheap developable land in cities, means that cities will lag in population growth — but that most have turned the corner and are no longer places that people are fleeing when given the choice. I described Chicago’s turnaround as not one where the population is growing, but as one where it is ceasing to shrink as quickly (a turnaround in the second derivative of population growth). To the extent that hasn’t been borne out, it’s also a definitional problem — the city’s core is still growing, but outlying, low-density neighborhoods are emptying out as they undergo a different, more painful part of a demographic cycle. That doesn’t change the fact that something remarkably novel and different is happening to the core, though.
Demographics shorts
1. Bill Frey from Brookings on how America is already transitioning to a multiracial society:
Over the last decade, the U.S. population under age 18 grew by less than 3 percent. But the 2010 Census also reveals an absolute decline of white young people over this period, as well a somewhat smaller decline of black youths. Hispanics, Asians, and to a lesser degree multiracial children, accounted for all of the net growth the nation’s under-18 population.
This, however, has troubling consequences with regard to the ever greater divide (see #6) between older, whiter, conservative voters and younger, browner, liberal constituents — in short, between America’s past and America’s future, except that the former is generally going to be in charge.
2. Speaking of America growing apart, an interesting way to look at Brookings Metro’s newest online datasets — showing that metro areas dominate many states in population, employment, and particularly in economic output — is to compare cities that lead vs. lag in GDP per capita within their respective states. For instance, right next door:
Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C.: 47% higher GRP/capita than state average
Burlington, N.C.: 25% lower GRP/capita than state average
Within the nation as a whole, the wide gap between the most and least productive regions is sharply growing: DC earns 5X as much as Mississippi, and that gap has grown 18% since 1990. By 2015, at PPP, Shanghai province will have a higher per capita income than Mississippi.
3. Wikipedia has some interesting bits on linguistics. For instance, the extra R in “char siu bao” (it’s pronounced “cha seew bow”) comes, of course, from the non-rhotic Englishmen who settled in Hong Kong. Also, something that I’ve noticed in England and New England alike — particularly in terms like street names — is a tendency towards plainer terminology, disposing of many of the euphemisms that American English has imported from French. This tendency has a term, since of course it was tied to the tension between upper and middle class Britons — “U and non-U.”
Shorts
1. No, we cyclists don’t approve of how stupid riding, either:
The above video adheres to the bicycle messenger video style manual, which mandates that any video must include messengers talking about how dangerous their job is while simultaneously including footage of them doing their job in the most idiotically dangerous way possible…. I’d like to see a video from the IBEW in which electricians talk about how dangerous their job is, intercut with footage of them randomly stabbing at wall outlets with forks. – BSNYC
2. On the eve of the government shutdown:
Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) drew cheers by saying, “If liberals in the Senate would rather play political games and shut down the government instead of making a small down payment on fiscal discipline and reform, I say, ‘Shut it down.’” – reported by John Avlon, Daily Beast
I’d like to see these Ayn Rand-worshipping teabagger extremists survive a true government shutdown. End Social Security and Medicare payments, garrison the forts, abandon the airports and ports and border crossings, freeze defense contractors’ payments, stand down the poultry inspectors, turn off MedLine, rope off the Interstates. See how your constituents feel after a few days of living in the Stone Age. Those taxes we pay are (h/t Oliver Wendell Holmes) the price of civilization, and without them we’ll descend into anarchy — which ain’t pretty.
3. David Roberts says of a nifty LLNL flowchart of America’s energy consumption: “Holy sh*t we waste a lot of energy! Well over half of the raw energy that enters our economy goes to waste.” Less than 1/3 of the fuel going into electric plants actually ends up as used energy; generator losses and line loss accounts for much of the rest. (Smart grids and better transmission lines should go a ways to solving that.) Yet the huge waste is in transportation: just as much energy is wasted in transportation as is provided by coal. Only 1/4 of the energy going into the transportation sector actually gets used. Increasing fuel economy will surely help matters a great deal, but surely a great deal of that inefficiency stems from America’s overreliance on the 20%-efficiency internal combustion engine for almost all of its transportation needs.
4. DCentric’s Elahe Izadi reveals how (in DC as in Chicago, although less dramatically since gentrification led to net gains in DC vs. net losses in Chicago) suburbanization rather than gentrification actually explains much of the decline in both cities’ Black populations.
Yesterday we spoke with demographer Roderick J. Harrison, a senior fellow at the Joint Center and a Howard University associate professor, to get a better understanding of the city’s shifting demographics. He framed D.C.’s loss of 39,000 black residents in this light: gentrification wasn’t the major driving force in Wards 7 and 8, where population losses were the greatest. Rather, it was by-and-large classic suburbanization in which people left the city’s poorest wards “that are often considered the worst neighborhoods,” Harrison said.
“The force behind it probably is seen as a positive force. These are people who are some way or another, they are upwardly mobile, they are improving their housing and neighborhood conditions, they are making personal decisions that they see, on the whole, as an improvement,” he said.
5. I’ve previously despaired over whether Continental Airlines’ marketing strategy might win out over United Airlines’ — and yes, it seems that CO’s Kaplan Thaler is behind the new company’s branding. As Lewis Lazare wrote in the Sun-Times:
A golden age in the annals of airline advertising officially ended Tuesday when the merged United Airlines unveiled its first ad campaign from Kaplan Thaler/New York ad agency… does away with the elegant, illustration-centric print ads and television commercials that for the past four years were a hallmark of the United advertising created by the Minneapolis boutique shop Barrie, D’Rozario Murphy. Those print ads and story-driven commercials were always smart and sophisticated — the finest examples of airline advertising since the landmark ‘World’s Favorite Airline’ campaigns for British Airways from Saatchi & Saatchi/London in the late 1980′s… United’s ads from BDM helped elevate the carrier’s image even as the airline was struggling to right itself after a difficult bankruptcy filing… The new United advertising just now breaking incorporates much of the imagery associated with previous Continental campaigns, which have been handled for many years by Kaplan Thaler. It is certainly a functional campaign, if not hugely creative.
However, what worked for Continental might not work for the new United: the two competed in very different market spaces. Continental faced very little competition for its “hub captive” travelers, and has been able to profit immensely from that. That’s highlighted in Nate Silver’s recent analysis of airports with “unfair fares.” Legacy Continental’s hubs are #1, #2, and #6 on his list of most overpriced large airports, with megahubs IAH and EWR taking the top slots. Of United’s hubs, IAD and ORD are #7 and #8, but United’s other three hubs are apparently at least fairly priced — and United has at times been #2 to American at ORD.
