On debt

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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…

Dana Milbank, WaPo:

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.

Transit to jobs

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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

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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!

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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

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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

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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

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Three decades of retail Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

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

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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

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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.

Shorts

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Densest towns in NC Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

1. Carrboro, the ex-milltown turned grad-student ghetto that was Chapel Hill’s proletarian neighbor for many years, has been dethroned as North Carolina’s densest town. Instead, the new TND of Lake Park in Union County has the state’s highest population density. (Chart from USA Today’s online Census 2010 tool.)

2. “The telephone has a very rude propensity to interrupt people.” – Miss Manners, quoted by Pamela Paul in the NYT Magazine

3. Wicker Park may be one of the few places ever where an organic vegan quick-service restaurant replaced a drive-through Burger King. Perhaps it’s not really destined to be just a western extension of bro-tastic Lincoln Park. (Via Spyguy at SSC.)