* Not too surprisingly, a King County, Wash. study by Larry Frank’s team at UBC finds that people walk if there’s something to walk to (particularly retail and transit) and a way to walk there. “The study showed that transit use and walking are ‘highly synergistic.’ Transit use was highest in locations where walking was most prevalent, and the choice to walk was highest where buses and trains were most convenient and efficient.”

* In an article on how “the hot construction market has fueled NYC’s hybrid inclusionary-linkage program”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/realestate/23cov.html, the Times mentions that churches in Brooklyn are looking to the linkage fees to do “air rights housing deals”:http://www.cnu.org/about/index.cfm?formAction=project_view&templateInstanceID=789, a concept CNU awarded in the 2004 Charter Awards:

bq. [D]eals are being considered by churches in central Brooklyn that “flourished in one era and now have a lot of underutilized property” — rectories or schools. If they build affordable housing on their property and finance it by selling air rights, they will also help their members. “Their angst was that their congregants were being priced out of their neighborhoods…” [said Michael D. Lappin, president and chief executive of the Community Preservation Corporation].

* Two notable citations for TDM publicity go to (1) GetDowntown, the Ann Arbor downtown chamber of commerce’s TDM program, for its May “Curb Your Car Month”:http://www.getdowntown.org/cycm (i.e., commuter challenge month) slogan of “go on a low-car diet” and (2) Cleveland’s RTA for this ad message:

* The NY Times editorial page on Monday “called for higher gas taxes”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/opinion/24mon1.htm. Higher revenues would be used to expand low-income tax breaks, scrap gas guzzlers, fund new mass transit, and sponsor clean energy research, and markets would react to higher pump prices by pushing price pressure upstream to producers. (How’s that for alliteration?)

bq. The government must capitalize on the end of the era of perpetually cheap gas, and it must do so in a way that makes America less vulnerable to all manner of threats — terrorist, environmental and economic. The best solution is to increase the federal gasoline tax, in order to keep the price of gas near its post-Katrina highs of $3-plus a gallon. That would put a dent in gas-guzzling behavior, as has already been seen in the dramatic drop in the sale of sport-utility vehicles… “We know that the days of unlimited, inexpensive gasoline are over,” William Clay Ford Jr., chairman and chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, said last week. So be it. Cheap gas is no longer compatible with a secure nation, a healthy environment or a healthy economy – if ever it was. The real question is whether we should continue paying the extra dollar or two per gallon in the form of profits to the Saudis and other producers, or in the form of taxes to the United States Treasury, where the money could be used to build true energy independence.

This month’s _Washington Monthly_ comes with a stunningly bad feature by Margy Waller, suggesting a huge new federal entitlement to help America buy more of what it hardly needs: cars. Hence, a letter to the editor:

The illustrations accompanying October’s “Auto-Mobility” by Margy Waller say it all: long lines of cars stretching out to the horizon, all stuck in traffic. This points to the most obvious problem with Waller’s foolish thesis: her new fleet of cars, like those of Houstonians fleeing Hurricane Rita, will end up stranded in traffic jams. 3.5% more cars might not sound like much, but her proposal would put too many of those cars right where and when they’re least wanted: in major cities at rush hour. Our cities simply cannot fit any more cars, and the postwar solution — to abandon or bulldoze cities in favor of plentiful parking in the suburbs — has cost our nation dearly.

Even more perversely, the Great Car Giveaway would further increase the already staggering social costs that drivers impose on American society, both drivers and non-drivers alike: most obviously, air and water pollution, death and injury from crashes, and the military and monetary costs of securing oil from overseas. These costs are highest in and around cities, where, again, Waller’s proposal would have its greatest impact. These costs also disproportionately fall onto the poor, who tend to drive old clunkers with poor mileage, absent or failing safety systems, and high maintenance costs.

Perhaps most twistedly, her proposal further penalizes those who quaintly use truly economical (and sustainable) ways to get to work, like walking or cycling, or who telecommute. These millions of workers currently do not benefit from existing commuting tax subsidies, even though we place zero burden on our groaning road network or on our polluted skies.

Moreover, the duplicitous proposal has little merit on its face. America already has more cars than licensed drivers. Subsidizing transportation for only the 4% of Americans who are truly transit dependent (many living in cities) would cost much less. Meanwhile, Waller conveniently forgets that the federal government already subsidizes free workplace parking (by deducting employee parking as a pre-tax benefit) to the tune to $85 billion annually, writing off one of the largest costs of car ownership.

Rather than buying cars (or clothes, or toothpaste) for the working poor, our nation might consider giving them the cash to do it themselves. A $100 billion Earned Income Tax Credit expansion, or a FICA payroll tax rebate, would work wonders for low-income Americans. Funding that through higher taxes on pollution, or by rescinding the parking credit — in other words, a green tax shift — would also work wonders for our planet.

Edit: Alan Berube, William G. Gale, and Tracy Kornblatt of Brookings say that the “most advantageous tax policies”:http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/200506_taxpolicies.htm to help the urban working poor would fall along my lines: tax credits for child care, saving, health insurance, and homeownership. The last is particularly crucial: shifting from a deduction, which favors the upper class and benefits those with million-dollar second homes, to a capped credit which non-itemizers like me can take advantage of.

Edit 2: Spotted something somewhere online that had Waller clarifying that the credit would go to anyone who reported commuting expenses, even if they were less than the credit. Still, doesn’t that exclude telecommuters or those running home based businesses? The EITC does a pretty damn good job of helping the working poor already; no need to add yet more lines to the tax code.

The Onion offers up these solutions to high gas prices:

While the Mandatory Car Ownership Act might be fiction, its local counterpart, the pesky minimum parking requirements set forth by zoning, effectively ensures the same result. Renowned anti-parking guru Donald Shoup will speak about how to properly price parking — or even recognize that it’s a good that _can_ be priced — “here in Chicago on 2 November”:http://metroplanning.org/press/press.asp?objectID=2948.

Excerpts from his show-stopping presentation at APA in San Francisco:

bq. [P]arking policies are important and that our current policies are exactly the opposite of what they should be. Parking is important because the average car is parked 95 percent of the time and parking is mispriced because it’s free to the driver 99 percent of the time… Every year the U.S. spends about as much to subsidize parking as we spend for Medicare or national defense. The financial costs are enormous, but so are the many other hidden costs imposed on cities and the environment.

bq. Off-street parking requirements encourage us to drive wherever we go because we know we can usually park free when we get there. Eighty-seven percent of all trips in the U.S. are now made by car, and only 1.5 percent by public transit. American motor vehicles by themselves consume one-eighth of the world’s total oil production. Off-street parking requirements help explain why the U.S. has 1.2 motor vehicles per licensed driver and slightly more than one vehicle per person of driving age…

bq. The second policy I recommend is that cities should charge fair market prices for curb parking, by which I mean the lowest price that will achieve about a 15 percent vacancy rate for curb spaces so that anyone can always find an available space wherever they go. Charging fair market prices for curb parking will bring parking into the economy, like housing, food, gasoline and just about everything else we buy. Most markets depend on prices to allocate resources, so much so that it’s hard to imagine they could operate in any other way. Nevertheless, cities have tried to manage parking almost entirely without prices.

bq. The third policy I recommend, to make charging market prices for curb parking politically feasible, is that cities should spend the resulting curb parking revenue to pay for neighborhood public investment, such as sidewalk repair, public security and putting the overhead buyers underground. When nonresidents to park at the curb, and residents receive all the benefits, residents will begin to see the curb parking through the eyes of a parking lot owner. Political support for a policy of charging market prices for curb parking does not depend on a belief that market prices for curb parking will benefit the whole city, such as by reducing air pollution and traffic congestion — which it will do. Rather, support will come from the selective benefits the curb parking revenue can finance in the neighborhoods that let nonresidents park on the streets. And so the improvement in traffic congestion, the reduction of traffic congestion, the better air will be like regional icing on the neighborhood cake.

bq. I think most people do think that free parking at home is built into the social contract. In the proposed residential parking benefit districts, the residents would park free just as they do in the current permit parking districts. But in many permit districts, there is a lot of vacant curb space during the daytime when the residents are away at work. Some cities allow non-residents to buy daytime permits in these districts — no more than four permits per block and only in blocks that have vacant curb space. And if the non-residents’ payments for these daytime permits go to fix up that block where the nonresidents park — to repair their sidewalks and trim their street trees and put their wires underground — the residents would see, well, yes, it’s like Monty Python’s idea to solve Britain’s economic problems by taxing foreigners living abroad.

bq. I think that people are paying to park in a place that they want to be, rather than in a place where they can merely park free. I think that cities should aim to be great places where people are willing to pay to park at the curb rather than mediocre places where the only reason you’ll come is if the parking is free. And that really describes much of the United States. It’s a very degraded public environment where nobody will come unless they can park free a few feet from the front door.