west north

A recent David Roeder column (with more background information at Windy Citizen) about Housing Bronzeville vaguely reminds me of the Houston experiment that invests TIF funds into affordable housing preservation — but, in this case, using an SSA-like funding mechanism.

Who knew that walkable neighborhoods were so All-American? The Brady Bunch house gets an astonishing Walk Score of 80, according to the site’s blog.

Yet America’s landscape has changed for the worse since then: adults’ daily walking trips have fallen by nearly half just within my lifetime. Restoring just one or two daily walking trips to everyone’s lives could cut CO2 emissions by the equivalent of 16 coal power plants — and help Americans lose three billion pounds of fat. [Dashka Slater in NYT].

Also of interest: how well are you living up to the Charter’s principles? (I got to trumpet a rare 100, which led to several accusations of cheating. However, I do go to my building’s outdoor movie nights, which, with nearly 40 units, should count as a block party — and about as good as we’ll get on a state highway.)

And I thought the Japanese had a curious philosophical approach to historic preservation. Zvika Krieger in the New Republic reports on the shockingly nihilist attitude of Saudi authorities toward maintaining countless historic sites, including many directly connected to Mohammed:

“It is not permitted to glorify buildings and historical sites,” proclaimed Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz, then the kingdom’s highest religious authority, in a much-publicized fatwa in 1994. “Such action would lead to polytheism.” [...] The clerics’ stance permits the Saudi government to play it both ways, in a perfect marriage of the secular and spiritual. It can destroy ancient sites and still maintain doctrinal credibility; the massive, capitalistic accumulation of wealth becomes a religious necessity, not an evil. “The government has finally woken up to the commercial value of religious tourism,” Sfakianakis says, “and they are really the ones driving this construction boom in Mecca.”

An NY Times article about urban hotels incorporating green construction technologies mentioned the first in what could be a chain of ALT Hotels, now under construction in Brossard, as part of a lifestyle center on Montréal’s South Shore. Several features — the building’s straightforwardly boxy look and uniform, $129-per-room pricing — raised my suspicions, confirmed by this:

In order to offer a quality hotel at the lowest possible prices, Groupe Germain and its Quebec partners have developed a totally new construction concept: the prefabricated room. Prefabricated rooms are currently being built at Rénova in Plessisville, one of the Group’s long-standing partners.

Finally! A modular hotel! A “Super Hotel” saved me late one night in Matsumoto: a tidy and super-efficient (bunk beds!) room for $67. All rooms were exactly identical, and the hotel appeared to have been built, Lego-like, from modular blocks; only the ground floor differed, and it housed a walk-through lobby, a continental-breakfast bar with lunchroom style seats, a business center, a little onsen and locker room, and the ubiquitous vending machines. The bathrooms, in particular, were definitely prefab, but still incorporated the latest in Japanese integrated bidet technology.

Not only the prefab construction cut costs, but the relative lack of unnecessary frills: the front desk staff doles out towels and toiletries upon check-in; a keycode printed on your receipt replaces actual keys; and everyone’s forced out of the hotel for cleaning during midday. (This being Japan, robots were undoubtedly involved.) I’ve always been an undemanding but cheap traveler, and this no-frills approach matches that pretty well.

Last week, Kirk Johnson reported in the Times about the I-70 corridor that rises up into the mountains west of Denver — a four-lane rural road which now faces many of the same congestion issues as any urban commute corridor: crushing traffic loads for a few hours a week, with sort of capacity enhancement proving to be frightfully expensive. Much of this results from settlement patterns that resemble nothing so much as the old “pearls on a string” commuter rail towns: dense, pedestrian-friendly nodes clustered along a single corridor, although unfortunately a freeway rather than a railroad in this case.

Appropriately, many of the solutions that have been implemented to date are similarly incongruous urban fixtures dropped into stunning mountain wilderness: HOV lanes along Hwy 82 into Aspen, all-day transit equipped with advanced ITS, and even several proposals for rail service. (The principal difficulty: I-70 follows an available rail alignment west of Vail, but the section through Summit County and east to Denver is too steep for conventional rail service — and would likely require an additional tunnel at the continental divide.) Now, the ultimate in urban congestion solutions is on the table:

[Colorado State Senator Chris] Romer’s suggestion — congestion pricing using financial incentives to encourage people to drive or not drive at peak times on I-70 — drew 500 e-mail messages in the first 24 hours after it was reported in The Rocky Mountain News. About 70 percent opposed the plan, he said, and many of those called him exuberantly bad names… “But we’re not going to solve this problem by being cautious, which is what government does best,” he said, explaining that reliance on gasoline taxes and highway construction will not work… “We have to get creative,” Mr. Romer said. “And if we fail, we adjust and we try again.”

The long shadow haunting the Sunbelt’s growth (and any future long-term infrastructure investments), is the potentially disastrous changes in precipitation that will accompany global warming. Some climate models predict that snowpack in much of the Rockies could become un-skiable during my lifetime. (I’ll be 70 years old in 2050.) The result would destabilize existing ecosystems in an area where human settlements closely abut wilderness; increasingly catastrophic floods, mudslides, and wildfires would further threaten . Economically, the resulting economic losses could be monumental, similar to a hurricane wiping away another beach city.

Meanwhile, cities across the nation’s southern tier, like Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Raleigh are all already sinking deeper straws to suck up even the pond scum from their drought-ravaged reservoirs. Georgia has resorted to desperate new lows, some of which actually date from the 18th century — not just praying for rain (perhaps more of a strong-arm tactic to embarrass Florida to reduce its claim to downriver flow), but recently seeking to move its Tennessee border. Yet these areas continue to grow; as with electricity, the expectation is just that water will be provided regardless of cost or future prospects — and reporting on the crisis continues to focus on such short-term thinking. Sure, conservation pricing has resulted in higher water bills for many (Mayor Franklin in Atlanta pays about $100 a month for water) — but how high would water bills have to go in order to dissuade new arrivals, or to convince non-water-intensive industries (e.g., not manufacturers) to begin looking elsewhere? My guess is that prices would have to go very high indeed.

Lance Armstrong decides to do his part by opening a bike station in Austin, although it won’t be open in time for my forthcoming visits (twice in a month!). He apparently really gets it, too, from the land use connection to the need for safe facilities to the importance of having a rich cycling culture. Pamela LeBlanc reports in the Austin American-Statesman; video of the interview is also available. Emphases added.

“This city is exploding downtown. Are all these people in high rises going to drive everywhere? We have to promote (bike) commuting,” Armstrong said Wednesday, gazing up at the towering 360 condos rising next to the site of his new shop. “This can be a hub for that…”

Armstrong said he’d like to see Austin evolve into a place like Portland, Ore., where biking is part of the culture and people pedal to work, to restaurants and to run errands. “Walk outside, and the streets are lined with bikes — because they have a safe place to ride,” Armstrong said of the city long known for its bicycle-friendly amenities and policies.

So how does Austin get to that point?

“The (Lance Armstrong Bikeway) is a big start,” he said. Armstrong and his general partner in the project, Bart Knaggs, said they’d like to see Austin create bike lanes separated from vehicle traffic and a system like a new one in Paris where people can use a credit card to rent a bicycle from a bike rack station and return it at any of the dozens of other stations around the city.

“There are times I ride in Austin, and I’m afraid of cars,” Armstrong said. “Imagine what the beginner cyclist must feel like? I think (Mayor) Will Wynn’s dream was this whole revitalization of downtown, which we’re getting, but it’s going to make it a lot easier if people can get around on bikes.”

Mellow Johnny’s… focus won’t be on selling the newest, lightest racer. The shop will celebrate the culture of biking, from the historic memorabilia hanging on the walls to a counter where customers can sip coffee and ask questions as they watch bike mechanics at work…

Showers and a locker room will allow commuters who don’t have facilities at their offices to ride downtown, store their bikes at the shop, bathe and catch a ride on a pedicab or walk the rest of the way to work…

Armstrong predicted that Mellow Johnny’s will be “the coolest bike shop in the world,” but said he’s not trying to put any other Austin bike shop out of business. “It’s not us versus them,” he said. “We’re all about the cycling culture.”

The mellow group hugs between spandexed roof-rackers, testy commuters, curious townies/gownies, lost tourists, dirty messengers, filthy hippies, and maybe even pedantic Vehicular Cyclists (”Afraid of cars? Weenie!”) will commence in May, on Republic Square in the southwest corner of downtown Austin.

Several complaints about downtown Coral Gables being chock-full of bridal shops brought this little story to mind:

Las Tunas Avenue (silly name, no?) in Temple City, Calif. is lined with Asian bridal shops with cheesy names like Love City. The Anglo neighbors began to get suspicious of drug fronts, not unexpectedly wondering where exactly the demand for bridal gowns was coming from.

What was happening, of course, was just a natural aggregation of businesses: the inevitable intersection of a young and growing immigrant population (many of whom spend quite lavishly on weddings) with time-pressed young brides who like to spend a lot of time comparison shopping. As word of the bridal shops began spreading, more began opening to cash in on the trend. And since bridal boutiques run high margins on low volume (and often do “house calls”), they appear to be “suspiciously” low on customers.

Two video games that I spent much time with during high school suddenly make so much more sense — after wandering around Japanese cities for a few days. A-Train and SimTower, both of which were published in the USA by Maxis (creator of SimCity), have at their hearts urban and business models that respond to conditions quite unique to Japan — a society that, despite its considerable automotive might, practically defines “transit oriented development.” Both games were fascinating looks into the integrally interlinked role that transportation, both horizontal and vertical, plays in a densely populated society.

In A-Train, the game player is put in charge of a for-profit commuter and freight railway system serving local travel within a growing metropolitan region. As with Japanese rail systems, the lion’s share of potential profits stem not from railway operations but from the two “ancillary” businesses also in the simulation: property development and stock market speculation (based on the “keiretsu” cross-holdings model that was an integral part of the “Japan Inc.” business model).

Indeed, a 1997 study by Takahiko Saito comparing Japan’s “major private railways” found that 55% of operating profits (aka EBITDA, an earnings figure that excludes capital spending) stem from non-transportation operations. In most cases (and in the much larger case of Hong Kong’s MTR) property development, management, and operations were the largest contributor to profits — oh, and note that buses are usually run at a loss, presumably because they support profits elsewhere in the operation.

Ratings and Investment Information, a financial research firm, confirms that is still the case for the private railway sector: “transport’s contribution is… just under 50%” of EBITDA cash flow. The mainline railway business is just not that profitable, despite the railways being in a uniquely ideal profit-generating situation, with uniformly high densities across huge urban areas, and very aggressive management. Saito writes:

The fact that railway companies engaged in commuter transport in large cities could maintain sound management without government subsidy is remarkable to managers of railway companies in other countries. The traffic market in large Japanese cities is extremely favourable to railway management.

One strange “bug” that the game’s Wikipedia entry notes results from an anti-trust situation: the human player competes against the simulation to develop property, but only the player can place certain high-value developments (particularly recreational facilities like stadia, golf courses, and ski resorts). Since the player has a monopoly on these facilities, their market value is bid up tremendously, and their construction offers a ready source of cash and/or leverage opportunities. Indeed, winning the game seems well nigh impossible without exploiting this loophole; in particular, the capital cost of building new rail infrastructure simply cannot be recovered solely through railroad profits.

The game curiously omits the notion that freeways would compete with the rails for intra-urban traffic. The cost of driving in Japan — despite the lack of a Singapore-style conscious price-rationing system for road space, a combination of high tolls (a crosstown roundtrip can easily cost $40, as the expressways are also privately owned) and high prices for imported gas — discourages single occupant car trips.

(Of course, long distance rail companies in Japan still cheerily accept government subsidies for capital costs and to cover operating deficits in rural areas — a formula that could serve Amtrak well, except that almost all of America is “rural” by Japanese standards.)

SimTower gives the player a blank slate of land upon which to build a mixed-use skyscraper. Here, the transportation challenge is vertical, rather than horizontal: arranging a menu of wildly varying mixed uses (offices, condos, shops, hotel rooms, ballrooms, fast food, restaurants, cinemas, lobbies, a wedding chapel, a subway station, parking) around various circulation elements (local and express elevators, stairs, and escalators). Many of the simulated occupants were assumed to never leave the tower in the course of a day.

Mixed-use skyscrapers certainly aren’t unheard of in the USA, but the degree to which uses are mixed together and shoehorned in is far greater in land-short Japan: dozens of blocks in even small cities are lined with three-to-ten story buildings, perhaps on 3,000 square foot sites, stacked high with shops, fast-food joints, and bars. Underground retail concourses, second-floor shops, even food courts high inside skyscrapers and department stores don’t just exist, they thrive. One particular thing that surprised me about the game was the occupants’ seemingly insatiable demand for restaurants; true to form, Japanese shopping malls often have as many (or more!) eateries as shops — a nation of tiny kitchens and long working hours results in considerable demand for eating out. The main JR train station in Nagoya (one of the first large instances of a post-privatization JR company branching out into property) houses five floors with perhaps 50 eateries (from breakfast through cocktails) high above ground level, in addition to countless more food options at or below grade in several interconnected buildings.

The most ambitious mixed-use complexes surround or surmount railroad transfer stations, which offer the broadest market reach. Tokyo, with its longstanding decentralizing policy of terminating the private suburban railways at the circular Yamanote line (only subway and JR lines extend into the core), offers the most obvious illustration of this concept: each intersection between the Yamanote and a major suburban railway has spawned an urban node that surely rivals Midtown Manhattan in urban energy. And since the terminals are controlled by private railroads, they have a strong economic incentive to fill their station areas with a land-use mix promoting round-the-clock ridership — hence the preference for retail and entertainment over blank, faceless office towers.

To be sure, countless social and economic differences mean that these lessons can’t be transferred directly to America. However, the Japanese experience does demonstrate that private real estate interests — guided, of course, by public policy (e.g., the world’s highest farm subsidies) — can have tremendous success in profitably creating transit-oriented development, and illustrates the stupendous amount of urban value that transit infrastructure can generate.

From a Bloomberg article by Bob Ivry:

The skyline of Miami is visible from Key Biscayne, the barrier island where John Rosser lives. Some nights the real estate broker scans the new buildings and sees more dark windows than lighted.

That skyline — dozens of huge towers, some with lighted crowns, stairwells, and parking garages; others with silent cranes; most of them otherwise eerily dark shadows looming overhead — makes downtown Miami feel like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. Just saying.

[I'm leaving town in a few hours and NOT bringing a computer with me. Therefore, expect zero posts for at least two weeks!]

Alan Durning points out,
in another installment in his “Bicycle Neglect” series about cycling, an interesting cost-benefit analysis that examined just one of cycling’s many positive aspects and pitted it against one of the more obvious negative aspects — the purportedly unjustifiably high cost of bicycle facilities.

In Lincoln, Nebraska, the public cost to install and maintain a network of five bike and pedestrian trail was about $100 per year for each person who became more physically active as a consequence, according to an article in the journal Preventive Medicine. The cyclists and walkers who used the trail paid another $100 each per year, on average, for running shoes or bikes, bringing the total cost of the trail to about $200 per user. Meanwhile, the health benefits of using the trails – largely, savings on medical bills – were above $550 a year per trail user, according to a related journal article.

The trouble is that even if we know that the benefits of said facilities outweigh their costs, those benefits are far too widely dispersed across the economy to make sense to your average transportation policymaker — and to your average commuter with a choice. Indeed, the social benefits of cycling appear to exceed even the substantial personal benefits:

At rush hour, in town, a mile you bike rather than drive saves you a quarter dollar, plus the cost of parking, and adds about a quarter hour to your life. The same rush-hour mile biked provides even bigger benefits to your community: some 50 cents, just for quantifiable gains.

As with transit, this introduces a significant market failure: since the primary benefits are external and the primary costs (for most people, the fear of being hit by a car and the additional time involved) are internal, it doesn’t “seem” to make sense for any individual to take up cycling — unless society (those who benefit most from having people cycle) creates incentives to do so. In other words, governments has a responsibility to subsidize “good” behaviors (those that create significant social/external benefits, like cycling and transit use) to better balance individuals’ cost-benefit calculations — all while taxing “bad” behaviors (those with high individual benefits and high social costs), like driving.

Similarly, any discussion of the (de)merits of specific modes is incomplete if it solely examines that individual cost-benefit calculation.

Now that we’ve established that communities should spend lavishly on bicycle facilities, what should they do? The FHWA’s BikeSafe has a new “Bicycle Countermeasure Selection Tool” that will tell you with a few clicks!

young and restless Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

The first set of charts, graphs, and illustrations has come back from the planners examining Wicker Park & Bucktown on behalf of we, the people of WP-B (or at least our special service area). The most astonishing finding, in my view, is here: our neighborhood’s people are defined by a stunning — indeed, almost statistically improbable — self-segregation of young people.

Nearly 52% of the population is between 20-39, compared to just 29% nationally. 45.4% even fall within that most marketer-coveted of all age groups, the 18-35s. Maybe we could make a lot of money selling sidewalk billboards.

Perhaps even more quizzically, young men significantly outnumber young women in most age brackets: 9.4% (nearly one in ten!) neighborhood residents are (like me) men in their late 20s, nearly three times the share in the American populace. It’s not even an appreciably gay neighborhood, either.

Almost all other age groups are underrepresented (relative to their national shares) in the neighborhood by about 30-50% — except for preschool aged children. Sure enough, the kids leave at school age — although not nearly to the “total” extent that is sometimes claimed by alarmists. Why, there are about as many grade-schoolers living here as 60-somethings.

(Produced by Interface Studio for Wicker Park Bucktown Special Service Area #33)

A wrap-up of items from my latest week away:

* Paul Merrion in Crain’s points out that “intense opposition to [refinery] expansion plans following BP America Inc.’s scuttled proposal to dump more waste in Lake Michigan… raise the prospect of even higher prices at the pump if pollution-control technology makes refinery expansion unfeasible.” Well, duh (and that’s a good thing, IMO), but I wonder if all those drivers signing petitions against BP’s expansion realized that they, too, are part of the problem. Probably not, of course.

* Greg Hinz pre-emptively rued this week of fiscal crisis:

the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) will unveil a proposed 2008 budget that, unlike prior versions, almost certainly will be the real Doomsday thing… Mayor Richard M. Daley on Wednesday will unveil his own heaping helping of woes: service cuts and tax hikes that insiders have warned may include a stunning $100-million hike in the property tax… the Cook County Board considers an increase of 2% in the county’s sales tax proposed by county President Todd Stroger… as Springfield squabbles over a proposed property-tax hike that threatens to hit city homeowners with what County Assessor Jim Houlihan says would be an average 40% increase on bills due later this year… “It’s an all-out race to see who can raise taxes higher, faster than others in the race,” says Gerald Roper, president and CEO of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce.

My favorite: city water and sewer rates will go up by $65 million. This, in a city that (this never fails to astonish people elsewhere) has no water meters. That’s right, I of the paused showers and ultra-efficient dishwasher (hey, Californian parents will do that to you) pay the same rate as someone who runs the sprinkler 24/7. Maybe the infamously corrupt water department might consider adding meters, and charging people per use — instead of regressively raising rates across the board?

* Sadly, two fascinating trial balloons that went up last week amidst the tax-hike frenzy got shot down really fast. A tax on parking spaces, apparently floated by the governor (and discussed here last year), appears to have disappeared into the muck. A city gas tax hike, and parking-meter increase, disappeared between last week’s rumors and this week’s proposal. Not that Fran Spielman didn’t get a chance to get a great quote about it:

Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th) said she’s all for doubling the gas tax, but only if the Chicago Transit Authority gets the money. “I don’t think we’re going to get the help we need from Springfield. (CTA funding is) a critical issue for me, and I don’t see anybody paying attention,” she said.

* Andrea Johnson in LiveScience reports on an aerial survey by Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University that found three surface parking spaces for each licensed driver around Purdue. Not quite the seven I’ve seen quoted elsewhere (where’d that come from?), but then again this didn’t count residential garages, on-street parking, or structures of any sort. However, the fact that such a survey was possible

* I scribbled this down about Interbike in Las Vegas, over on Flyertalk:

I’m (hardly) old enough to remember CABDA, the last of the regional bicycle trade shows (and right next to the UA hub at ORD!). Eurobike Portland sounded interesting while talk of that lasted, and with the industry’s recent growth perhaps a competitor could’ve survived.

My employer treats our convention as an honor bestowed upon cities that meet our standards, since our attendees expect to learn from the cities they visit. APBP, Thunderhead, and other bike groups do the same. Granted, I see everything through the lens of the built environment, but wouldn’t it be cool if bike dealers could walk out of the convention center and see… people bicycling, thanks to good facilities and a healthy local bike culture? Maybe then they’d start to get excited about the changes possible in the communities outside their own shops — a great way to build overall demand and sales.

* A photo of me by Hayley Graham accompanied this Chicago Journal article about the Pilsen Park(ing) Day action.

* Counterintuitive: facing losses in 2005, CalTrain (which has a unique combination of an hourly pay structure and nearly equally balanced loads) worked its way out of a deficit by expanding service, particularly faster express trains. Fewer stops = more runs with the same crews. A virtuous-cycle, revenue-growth approach to budgeting, rather than the vicious-cycle, cost-cutting approach — they’d be easier if only transit captured more of the value it created, of course.

* NYC’s public-service bike safety ads carry the simplest, stupidest, but most necessary message possible: Look.

* I typically dislike freeway-median transit — it inhibits the potential for pedestrian friendly, transit oriented development, since the stations are necessarily embedded amidst stinky cars — but I could get behind Mark Oberholzer’s idea:

integrating turbines into the barriers between highway lanes that would harness the wind generated by passing cars to create energy. “Opposing streams of traffic create really incredible potential in terms of a guaranteed wind source,” Oberholzer says… “The technical problems of tying into the grid and managing the flow made me think of putting the power to a different use,” he says. “I’m pretty excited about integrating a subway or light-rail train right where the barrier is. I love the idea of siphoning off electricity generated by private transportation to run public transportation.”

I’ll be away for a week or so (some of it in Toronto, where I’ll get to attend some workshops preceding Walk21), so…

* John McCarron writes in the Trib about a new book by UIC’s John McDonald about the fortunes of American cities:

The good news for Chicagoans is that, while we fell as hard as any of the big cities on McDonald’s list during the ’60s and ’70s, we turned it around during the late 1980s and mounted the most dramatic comeback of all.

But we had a long way to come back. Chicago lost 17 percent of its population between 1970 and 1990. During that time, the poverty rate jumped to 21.6 percent from 14.4 percent. The average annual family income, measured in 2005 dollars, dove to $48,500 from $54,300. The murder rate jumped by 30 percent and the percentage of single-parent households nearly doubled to 41 percent from 22 percent.

Then came the turnaround. “The reversal for Chicago and the region during the ’90s was truly remarkable,” McDonald said in an interview. “Far more so than was the case for New York and the other Northeastern cities.”

Of course, that turnaround cannot be taken for granted; underinvestment in infrastructure, in particular, is a problem. Hence…

* “Illinois Works,” according to the Southtown, will consist mostly of accelerating current IDOT highway plans. The Trib reports:

The legislation approved by the Senate would provide $425 million in capital funding to the Regional Transportation Authority. The CTA would receive 55 percent under the current formula. Brown said the $234 million the CTA would receive — roughly what the agency gets now — is far short of what’s needed. CTA officials said almost $6 billion in maintenance is required to put the bus and train systems in good repair.

Yes, that means just 8% of this massive capital package will fund transit in the Chicago region. The many Chicago senators who voted for this bill should be ashamed.

* The 26 September NYT included a feature on Portland’s food scene, citing its affordability and easy access to farms. Farmland at the urban fringe has value far beyond its aesthetic interest as green space, and the economic value has a multiplier inside the city as well. I’m sure that the Cato Institue doesn’t care, anyways.

* Leadership is about “follow me” not “after you.” — Tom Friedman on U.S. climate policy, responding to the insistent whine of “after you, China.” As I’ve said before, “Until you’ve taken constructive, positive action, you forfeit any right to waste my time with whines and complaints.”

* New photos here and on the way. Wicker Park Critical Mass and my recent trip out west, for instance.

* I’ve spent far too much time lately rebutting right-wing arguments against transit funding on various blogs. Most of those responses have been crossposted (for my own reference, which is the primary reason why I have this blog) as comments under various earlier posts tagged “transit.” (Another good rebuttal: MPC’s in Friday’s Trib. However, one bus really = about 34 cars; 43 passengers per hour on CTA buses divided by 1.25 per car. An even better one: the Sun-Times’ editorial, pointing out that the tax increase amounts to $33 a year for Cook residents.)

You want to talk “backdoor fare increase”? The Economy League study of SEPTA that I’ve mentioned, examining substantial [but smaller!] cuts proposed, found that riders would pay $2.20 in higher fares, longer waits, and more driving for every $1 that government “saves” by cutting SEPTA. To pay that much via the “backdoor fare hike,” you’d have to charge up $880 in bills every day.

One common theme has been “privatize the damn thing,” as the public has little confidence in CTA’s ability to manage its current system, much less invest to renew it. However, words of caution from the libertarian-leaning City Journal’s Nicole Gelinas:

While the private sector has a role to play in building, upgrading, and maintaining public infrastructure, it can never assume the public sector’s ultimate responsibility—financial and otherwise.

* I’ve also spent a lot of time on the phone with reporters lately. Published articles to date: Mark Lawton from the Booster on WPCM; Matthew Hendrickson from the Chicago Journal on WPCM; Nara Schoenberg from the Tribune on CCM. (Even though I didn’t get quoted in the last one, it was by far the best of the interviews: well over an hour on topics ranging from political theory to winter riding. She’d never heard so many people say “it changed my life.” One line: “the utopian eco-cyclists who pioneered the party/protest/prank in this city point to numerous achievements.”)

Forthcoming (with photos!): Chicago Tribune on car-free living, and Sierra Magazine on eco-jobs.

* Apparently, the whole Dutch-bike trend is really taking off among Manhattan models, a rather influential crowd I don’t pay much mind to. Gillian Reagan reporting in the NY Observer, quoting George Bliss of the Hub Station:

“[Lela Rose ha]s really inspired me, and now I’m focusing on the tricycle child carrier as a product for upscale women in SoHo. … That’s the niche, professionals and models because, you know, if you go to a cocktail party, you’ve got to have something to talk about. ‘Green? What’s green? Oh, bicycling!’

Ms. Rose’s paean to her bike: “it sounds ridiculous, but I don’t go anywhere anymore without bringing the bike, because to me it’s like my car. At a minimum, it’s the best way to get around. It’s for the environment. It’s great for health reasons. For me it’s just a great way to get a better peace of mind. I could go on and on about the benefits of bike riding.”

(Disclosure: I once rented a bike from George — a 50-lb. single-speed with a coaster brake — at his prior location at SoHo’s west edge.)

* MTC recently held a workshop on Smart Parking on “parking policies to support smart growth, focusing on providing strategies for interested local jurisdictions”; the presentations are online.

* A 2004 report on TDM strategies from FHWA has many interesting case studies focusing on special events and large employers.

* Socialized car insurance in B.C. (PDF from VTPI) offers the province a unique way to fine-tune the costs of driving — which might be why B.C. was among the first places to experiment with eco feebates. Another VTPI paper (page 10) demonstrates how increasing fuel economy standards could actually increase the social costs of driving by encouraging more of it.

* Dallas has a streetcar. How did I not know that?

* Here’s an interesting approach: Louisville, Colo. tested a proposed zoning designation by running six examples of ground-related multifamily housing around Denver past the code. Interestingly, all of them exhibit the kind of quasi-Dutch modernism that I saw a lot of around there: blocky massing, bright colors.

Apparently, abandoning schools and churches and office buildings and entire neighborhoods is just not enough for Detroit: there’s an abandoned velodrome in the north of the city — and, yes, a brand new one in the suburbs. Photos by Dan Kopanke.

- Leon Wieseltier at TNR offers today’s neologism: pluto-porn. No, not a Disney ripoff, but obsequious coverage of the fantastically wealthy.

- Here’s a new approach to TDM: free beer, a free bicycle, and public adulation, just for handing over your car keys. Too bad this touring festival’s only out West this year. [New Belgium Brewing - Follow Your Folly]

- Oh, a man can dream. Paul Nussbaum’s report on Pennsylvania’s transit bailout, from the 19 July Inky:

Promising an end to the annual brinkmanship over SEPTA funding, Gov. Rendell yesterday signed a landmark transportation law to provide an average of almost $1 billion more a year for transit and highways over the next 10 years.

Surrounded by smiling legislators who a week earlier were at each others’ throats, Rendell signed the transportation bill in the warm confines of 69th Street Terminal in Upper Darby as evening commuters rushed past…

The law will provide $300 million in new funding for mass transit and $450 million in new money for highways and bridges this fiscal year, with the total rising to $1.07 billion by 2016.

The money will come from future toll increases on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, anticipated new tolls on Interstate 80, and 4.4 percent of the revenue from the state sales tax…

State Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.), the House Appropriations Committee chairman who vowed to block the state budget until mass transit was provided for, said yesterday: “I don’t know why this had to be so hard.”

“I’ve been fighting for this for decades,” said Evans, who said the measure would provide many new jobs, both directly and indirectly.

Not sure if SEPTA’s elimination of transfers (now in litigation) is an attempt to sell more passes or what.

- Carbon trading in Illinois could raise $2B a year for state government. [Redefining Progress: Climate Action Plan for Illinois]

- Flooded subways and tornadoes shut down NYC: a taste of headlines to come? [Environmental Defense] Not quite as dire as the forecast for the West, though: less snow, less water, more flooding, more drought and fires: boats stranded at dry marinas, ski towns engulfed by flame, cracked and dusty lettuce fields, cities browned out during heat waves. [Clear the Air] Fake headlines from the future describing localized effects of global warming could be a useful way to teach people about the issue — even here in the country’s sea-proof yet water-rich inland metropolis. [Prairie Home Companion]

- Last week’s Crain’s included an interesting package on four retail-starved new neighborhoods downtown: West Loop, South Loop, Streeterville, and (interestingly) University Village. [ChicagoBusiness]

- Gregg Easterbrook in an LA Times op-ed about his horsepower argument:

Please don’t counter that “no one can tell me what I can drive.” The Constitution says you’ve got a right to own a gun and to read a newspaper. Firearms and [speech] are the only categories of possessions given protected status by the Constitution; courts consistently rule that vehicles on public roads can be regulated for public purposes such as safety.

Dennis Byrne recently published an opinion piece in the Trib asking why taxpayers pay half of transit’s costs (but not half of drivers’ costs), and thus saying that fare increases are in order. Here’s a really long reply.

In the course of writing this, I found that Sweden’s carbon tax amounts to $1.61 per gallon of gas — far higher than the ~$0.49 in tax per gallon levied in Chicago (ostensibly to pay for roads). And now that I look at it, I should’ve used the “free rider” term to describe positive externalities — and used the example of how non-drivers subsidize parking at supermarkets, since the store just wouldn’t exist without those other customers. Oh well. A few more edits are in [brackets].

Simply looking at the line item figures for transit and driving does not provide an adequate accounting of the costs that we, as a society, will end up paying.

All economic actions have “externalities,” which are costs or benefits that are outside the direct transaction. For instance, let’s say that I run a paper mill next door to your house, and dump the sludge into a stream that runs downhill into your yard. The noise, smell, and sludge don’t bother me [or my customers], since I profit, but they will cost you dearly.

It turns out that driving is an activity which has low internal costs (once you own a car, gas is practically the only marginal cost) and very high external costs — whereas transit has high internal costs [principally labor] but even higher external benefits. Even worse for transit, its external benefits are very widely diffused, while driving directly and obviously benefits the driver.

For example, direct proximity to transit typically improves property values much more so than access to a road; this is especially the case in downtown Chicago, and you could even say that access to railroads is what built Chicago in the first place. Yet all that property value created by the railroads largely did not accrue to the railroads — it benefited third parties. Similarly, properties in the Loop (which generate untold billions in property, sales, income, payroll, and other taxes) wouldn’t be generating nearly as much economic activity in the absence of transit; after all, that’s how half the people get there. In fact, that’s why most of America’s streetcars were built by property speculators, and why the world’s only profitable subway system (in Hong Kong) is a subsidiary of a huge property corporation.

In the past, Dennis, you’ve doubted whether downtown Chicago is an anachronism. I’ll tell you that it’s not. Even as old face-to-face standbys like the trading pits disappear, industries remain concentrated downtown due to what are called “agglomeration economies.” More than half of the region’s office space is downtown, and that proportion is actually increasing — as it is in Washington and New York City, the nation’s two other “fortress downtowns.” More importantly, offices rent for 30% more downtown, and apparently firms think it’s worth the premium. In fact, transit is the big reason behind that: three-fourths of downtown executives surveyed in 2002 cited access to transit (and, more importantly, the huge labor pool it moves) as the biggest factor in their location.

Like participation in the arts, use of parks, or attendance at public schools, transit is a public service that all of us benefit from even if we do not consume the service. In particular, transit makes the compact urban form of downtown and of many neighborhoods possible — you could not re-create a great walking neighborhood like Lakeview or Wicker Park with adequate parking for every visitor, since the parking lots would push everything out of walking distance. Without transit, and without the compact urban form that transit generates (both downtown and in the neighborhoods), Chicago really has little to recommend it over Atlanta or Indianapolis or Phoenix. I don’t even usually commute by transit, but I appreciate that the endlessly fascinating city that’s right at my doorstep is made possible by transit. In LA, where my family lives, there are also two baseball teams, an opera house, and great restaurants — but they might as well not exist, since it takes hours of hand-to-hand combat on the freeways to get to any of them. That’s not so in Chicago, thanks to transit.

On the other hand, driving is an activity that benefits pretty much only the driver while imposing considerable costs on the rest of society. Every additional car on the road costs every car behind it time, and that adds up. Surely, as a transportation reporter, you’ve heard of the Texas Transportation Institute’s annual Urban Mobility Report. Well, those guys calculate that transit in the Chicago region saves every single rush-hour driver 22 hours of traffic jams a year — that’s time worth nearly $1.6 billion a year, just in productivity savings to rush-hour drivers! (As you might know, that figure is nearly twice the RTA’s annual taxpayer subsidy.)

Others have attempted to calculate the full external costs of driving to Americans, and to the Chicago region in particular. (Cars impose higher external costs in cities than in the countryside.) A 1995 study looking just at the rather direct fiscal costs of roads to local governments found that Chicago-area governments spent one-third more on roads than they received in taxes and fees from road users. A number of studies have attempted to quantify a number of fuzzier costs to the public purse, like health care (to treat crash victims or asthma sufferers like me), securing oil supplies from the Middle East and elsewhere, and environmental degradation (half of all tailpipe emissions worldwide come from American cars). Six different studies from the 1990s — before, I might note, we had a set price for carbon dioxide [and before our recent Iraq escapade!] — estimate that each car costs society anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 a year, over and above what the owner pays to operate it. On a per-gallon basis, those estimates range from $3 to $7 per gallon in social costs. So yes, in fact, we taxpayers do“pay half a motorist’s costs when he drives to work or goes shopping.”

So, there you go: one economic argument for why we “subsidize transit.”

Oh yeah, and NYC Transit and Metrorail cover more of their costs from the farebox because their boundaries are more tightly drawn — neither of them operate money-losing suburban buses.

Wonkette’s Anonymous Lobbyist, though not an ISTEA junkie like yours truly, kind of nails it on the head:

The current transportation funding mechanism is called SAFETEA-LU, which stands for “Safe Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users,” but the “Lu” is actually former Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young’s wife’s name, so he made his staff come up with a fucking acronym that used that because that’s how stupid and parochial transportation policy is… everyone gets to more or less keep ignoring our crumbling current infrastructure in favor of new roads (which are way more popular with constituents, since they don’t tie up traffic as much as that nasty roadwork). So, everyone won, sorta, and everyone lost, like usual.

In fact, a smart guy* presented a paper at TRB this year called “SAFETEA-LU Earmarks in Minnesota, a Rural Advantage: Minnesota’s Other Growing Pork Industry.” Among his conclusions: “the earmarking process is optimized for political stability, and not for public utility… earmarks are inefficient allocators of resources, in that they… do not explicitly consider long-range national transportation, social, economic, and environmental objectives.”

The paper goes into detail over Oberstar’s earmarks; one which I like is the Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program, a $25M fund for bicycling and walking projects around the Twin Cities. (It mostly funded new bike lanes around Mpls in its first year.)

Not that the I-35W’s bridge “50 score… structurally deficient” means anything, really. A bridge scoring in the single digits on the same scale — Hillsborough Street over the CSX tracks, about a mile west of the Capitol — was part of my routine in Raleigh years ago. The last time someone was carried away from CCM in an ambulance was apparently from a fall on the 31st bridge over the IC tracks, which rates a 22; the famously awfully paved Chicago Ave bridge over the river gets an 11; and, perhaps most shockingly, Congress’s bridge over the river (as it emerges from under the Old PO) rates 2. Yes, two, on a 1-100 scale (apparently, Illinois uses 100, other states 120.)

* Michael Smart from UCLA, ha ha

posted at Knowledge Problem: Wanted: Economic Analysis of Urban Rail Transportation (five months’ belated thanks to Derek for the heads-up; a follow-on to Funding Redux’s diss on privatization)

Privatization [of CTA] would hardly be a panacea; one of two companies hired in a privatization of the London Underground recently entered receivership, and taxpayers could be held responsible for its tremendous cost overruns. Our local “traction kings” hardly fared better: Insull made his fortune from energy, not the “L”; Yerkes profited off subterfuge and subdivisions, not the streetcars. In fact, both used securities fraud to cover the steep losses they faced on transit operations, which is why both were run out of town on the rails.

Those men faced no real competition, as their empires predated today’s heavily subsidized and regulated freeways, parking, sprawl, etc. By the end of Insull’s reign, the railroad industry had become the most regulated public utility in American history, wearing far heavier regulatory yokes than those which the cable, phone, and electric companies “toil” under these days.

This little history lesson hardly disproves that contracting out operations might reduce costs — particularly when public bureaucracies have ossified and become unresponsive to change — but do use caution before bandying about “PPP” without understanding its ramifications. One could even look back at the same Yerkes/Insull history and draw the conclusion that urban transit is a natural monopoly (thus enabling free transfers, for instance) and inherently requires local government involvement, or one might draw the conclusion that Illinois politics vis-a-vis transit have forever been poisoned by collusion and power-broking at the public’s expense.

In any case, I have it on good authority that a great many MBA-diseased minds (not least Rob Huberman, Chicago GSB ‘00 and Carole Brown, Northwestern KSM ‘89) are being put to work on the CTA’s problems now. This may not have quite the results that we bargained for.

City planners will have to directly address climate change whether they’re prepared to or not. New case law emerging in California, under AG Jerry Brown, will require municipalities (and developers) to bring their plans into accordance with state climate action goals (AB 32), say Steve Jones and Dustin Till from the Marten Law Group:

California’s adoption of statewide emission-reduction targets in 2006 supplied the basis for the State of California’s claims in State of California v. San Bernardino County. After San Bernardino County issued its CEQA analysis for a comprehensive planning update that would guide future development in the County, both the State and environmental groups sued, claiming that the County violated CEQA by failing to assess how the substantial development anticipated by the plan would contribute to climate change and by failing to adopt measures to mitigate the climate change impacts of future development in the County…

The City of Austin, Texas adopted a “Climate Action Plan” which contains strategic elements such as the use of a “Compact City” and “New Urbanism” development approaches…

These developments make it prudent for developers to begin to assess and be prepared to mitigate the climate change impacts of new projects. For their part, municipalities will need to take account of the impacts of climate change in their land use planning and development regulations – requiring mitigation of GHG emissions for new development, as well as adopting plans that are consistent with the states’ emission-reduction targets.

Interestingly, the San Bernandino case (reported by John Ritter in USA Today) is not the first CEQA challenge to a local planning decision on the basis of carbon dioxide pollution, according to law firm Bingham McCutchen:

It was only a matter of time before the issue reached CEQA actions. An early greenhouse gas challenge to a CEQA document came in November 2006. The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the City of Banning, seeking to overturn the approval of a 1500 home development. The suit alleges that the project will result in large emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, because the project will increase vehicle trips, and the EIR prepared for the project fails to analyze those emissions or associated global warming impacts. That case remains pending. The Center filed a similar lawsuit on April 11, 2007, challenging San Bernardino County’s new General Plan. Two days later, the Attorney General also sued… In the short term, agencies and developers can expect lawsuits similar to those filed by the Center and the Attorney General. With no published case directly on point, the parties will seek to establish precedent that will shape California’s environmental future. (emphasis added)

It would be very interesting to see how court challenges under CEQA — particularly by third parties — will shape smart growth and/or transportation investments in California. One can see anyone planning a highway or coal power plant might be very worried indeed. Another question for the future might be whether California cases could be cited as precedent for similar challenges under NEPA, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s recent directive on EPA regulation of carbon dioxide. An EIS (or EIR) can say anything it wants to, of course, but municipalities will be in a much better position to respond to these cases if they have a binding climate action plan in place.

Of course, any analysis of American cities’ contribution to climate change must begin with automobiles. Julian Borger reports in the Guardian on a recent Environmetal Defense report on the magnitude of American cars’ pollution: nearly half of all tailpipe emissions worldwide come from American cars. “The amount of CO2 emitted from oil used for transportation in the United States is similar to the amount from coal used to generate electricity.”

Mayor Sam Sullivan of Vancouver’s EcoDensity initiative includes a call for provinces to tie capital spending decisions to big-picture ecological outcomes. From an editorial in the 13 Feb National Post:

As mayor of one of Canada’s biggest cities, Vancouver, I am frustrated with the nature of the debate on global climate change in this country.

Over the past several months, I have watched as environmental organizations, government agencies and the media provide advice on how Canadians can make small changes to our lifestyles, yet continue living in a fundamentally unsustainable fashion.

Instead of telling Canadians to simply check the air pressure in their tires to ensure better mileage, or put energy efficient light bulbs in their suburban homes, we should be talking about how better urban planning and densification of our cities can significantly reduce our impact on the environment.

Not once have I seen any prominent national news coverage on the link between increased urban density and the impact on our global ecology. It is time that we have this debate…

Prior to becoming mayor, in my 13 years as a Vancouver city councillor, the “D” word was not popular. In fact, the mere mention of increased density often meant the kiss of death for a civic politician’s career. But, with an ageing population, rising home prices and an increased public interest in protecting our local and global environment, the time has come for us to embrace density as a tool to make cities more sustainable and livable…

At a local level, cities should be seeking every opportunity to immediately use density as a tool to ensure we provide new and innovative forms of housing so that people can live closer to where they work. Through the creative use of our zoning powers, cities have a responsibility to become a major partner in the battle against climate change. But that will mean showing leadership beyond our three-year mandates and making the tough but necessary choices which may not always prove popular.

I also believe that provincial and federal governments should be demanding that cities commit to carbon-reducing strategies such as Eco Density before they provide infrastructure funding.

For too long, cities have built out to the far edges of our downtown cores, and then run cap in hand to senior levels of government demanding billions of new infrastructure dollars to fund these unsustainable planning and zoning decisions. Although it would be a departure from the status quo, future investments in infrastructure should be directly linked to the environment.

Update: Of course, some want to amend CEQA to pre-empt such challenges.