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Category Transportation

The Rent is Too High and the Commute is Too Long: We Need Market Urbanism

Why is the rent so damn high? And why does it take hours to commute from cheap, plentiful housing to modern economy jobs? If you are living in a big city in America, you likely face this problem. And it isn’t just an American problem: From Ireland to New Zealand to The Philippines, the rent/commuting crisis is hitting the 21st century hard, right in the big cities where most of the economic growth is coming from, and where most of the jobs are. Meanwhile, in the economically blighted regions of America, everything seems to be falling apart, with lead in the tap water, crumbling roads, and municipal bankruptcy for thousands of towns and cities a very real possibility. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are a few cities that seem to have figured out how to match a futuristic tech economy with futuristic transit and housing for the masses. And there are many small towns around the world that don’t face insurmountable backlogs of infrastructure repairs. What are they doing different? Why is the price per square foot for living space in Tokyo a third of what it is in Boston or San Francisco?  Both cities have similar incomes and geographic constraints. Why is it an enormous scandal in Japan when trains leave a few seconds off schedule, while in America it is normal for your bus or train to be an hour late or never show up at all? Chalking this up to cultural differences is an easy explanation, and may have some weight, but I submit that the underlying laws of human economics do not vary based on culture, and there is much that we can learn from looking abroad. For Americans, the story begins in the nineteenth century when most of the country’s infrastructure […]

“Curb Rights” at 20: A Summary and Review

People sitting on a bus

At 4:30 am, alarms on my cellphone and tablet start beeping, just enough out of sync to prompt me to get up and turn them off. By 5:00 am, I riding as a passenger along an unusually sedate New Jersey Turnpike, making friendly conversation with my driver and survey partner to make sure he stays awake. At 5:30am, as most of the city sleeps, we find a drab concrete picnic table outside the bus depot and chow down on our cold, prepared breakfasts. Around us, buses are revving up and their drivers are chatting and smoking cigarettes. At 5:50 am, we find our bus and introduce ourselves to our driver for the day. All of the Alliance drivers seem to be Hispanic. Our run begins. You wouldn’t expect it, but the first run is always the sweetest. The riders trickle on, making it easy to approach them, and unlike the typical 8:00 am rush hour rider they are usually friendly and receptive to my request. I approach them and mechanically incant “Good morning Sir/Ma’am. Would you like to take a survey on your commute today for NJ Transit? It will only take a few minutes of your time.” My partner sits in the front, tallying the boardings, exits, and survey refusals. We will spend the next eight hours zigzagging across the New York City metropolitan area, asking harried riders about their commute. For the past month or so, this has been my part-time job: surveying bus riders about their origins, destinations, and travel preferences for NJ Transit. The job is just engaging enough that I rarely have time for sleeping or class readings, but has enough slow periods that my mind can wander on the question of bus planning. Although I am not authorized to read any of the surveys […]

Cities Should Not Design for Autonomous Vehicles

Coauthored with Emily Hamilton Last week, the autonomous vehicle company Waymo began testing cars in Chandler, AZ with no employees sitting in the front seat. While Waymo is busy creating systems of vehicle-mounted sensors that allow cars to safely navigate existing urban infrastructure and obstacles, some cities are pursuing plans to build “smart streets” that broadcast information about roads and potential hazards to autonomous vehicles. The American history of auto-centric infrastructure demonstrates that building specific infrastructure for autonomous vehicles may have long-lasting negative consequences. Waymo’s cars rely on both detailed maps and car-mounted lidar sensors that “see” the world around them in order to follow their route and to to avoid collisions. While the current technology is very safe, car-mounted sensors remain imperfect. As Tim Lee points out, there are reasons that Waymo launched in Chandler: its sunny weather, wide streets and minimal pedestrian traffic. Fully autonomous vehicles will need even better sensors than those that are currently available to drive safely in snowy conditions and in places with less regular streets that may confuse a vehicle’s sensors. Some analysts have advocated for publicly-provided smart streets and smart intersections that could limit the need for vehicle-mounted sensors and, perhaps, speed the adoption of autonomous vehicles. My colleague Brent Skorup has this view: Car-mounted sensors often confused by road materials (a shift from dirt to gravel or asphalt), reflective buildings, bridges, or even the weather. Roadside sensors not only mitigate these problems, but also reduce the computing load on car-mounted systems, because the vehicles have to make fewer snap decisions. There’s a way to get this information to vehicles quickly and accurately. Just as lawmakers and city planners started laying asphalt, installing streetlights, posting speed limits, and zoning property to accommodate Henry Ford’s cars, we need to design roads and infrastructure […]

How Suburban Parking Requirements Hold Back Downtown

A large, empty parking lot

You wake up thirty minutes before your alarm, jerking up after having a nightmare about a car crash. Reluctantly, you clean up, eat breakfast, and hop into your car. Work is only three mile away—easy biking distance—and there are 15 or so people in your neighborhood who work where you work—enough for a commuter bus make sense. But alas, the city required the developer to provide two parking spaces for your townhouse and the cost is hidden somewhere in your mortgage, so why not use it? After spending thirty minutes traveling three miles on the freeway—at least we live in the Golden Age of Podcasting, right?—you arrive at your suburban office park and pull into the garage. The parking is “free,” meaning that your pay has already been docked to cover the cost of the space, so why not use it? Your girlfriend calls shortly after lunch, asking if you want to go on a double dinner date with her friends to a new BBQ place downtown. You agree to join. You’re starving—you left lunch at home and it’s just too time consuming to drive to a decent place—so you hustle downtown. You arrive first, only to find out that there is only on-street parking. Downtown is, after all, exempt from parking requirements, and since street parking is “free,” it’s impossible to find a space during dinner time. You call your dinner partners—each of them is driving separately from work—and suggest another BBQ place downtown that offers subsidized garage parking. This place is a little more expensive, since the restaurateur has to cover some of the cost of offering parking, but you’re all hungry and don’t want to deal with the headache of cruising for street parking. Eventually you all meet and enjoy a nice meal, speculating about how traffic […]

A Guide to Urban Development [Guia de Gestão Urbana]

Caos Planejado, in conjunction with Editora BEI/ArqFuturo, recently published A Guide to Urban Development (Guia de Gestão Urbana) by Anthony Ling. The book offers best practices for urban design and although it was written for a Brazilian audience, many of its recommendations have universal applicability. For the time being, the book is only available in Portuguese, but after giving it a read through, I decided it deserved an english language review all the same. The following are some of the key ideas and recommendations. I hope you enjoy. GGU sets the stage with a broad overview of the challenges facing Brazilian cities. Rapid urbanization has put pressure on housing prices in the highest productivity areas of the fastest growing cities and car centric transportation systems are unable to scale along with the pace of urban growth. After setting the stage, GGU splits into two sections. The first makes recommendations for the regulation of private spaces, the second for the development and administration of public areas. Reforming Regulation Section one will be familiar territory for any regular MU reader. GGU advocates for letting uses intermingle wherever individuals think is best. Criticism of minimum parking requirements gets its own chapter. And there’s a section a piece dedicated to streamlining permitting processes and abolishing height limits. One interesting idea is a proposal to let developers pay municipalities for the right to reduce FAR restrictions. This would allow a wider range of uses to be priced into property values and create the institutional incentives to gradually allow more intensive use of land over time. Meeting People Where They Are Particular to the Brazilian experience is a section dedicated to formalizing informal settlements, or favelas. These communities are found in every major urban center in the country and often face persistent, intergenerational poverty along with […]

Interview with Parking Guru Donald Shoup

Marcos Paulo Schlickmann, a transportation specialist and collaborator at Caos Planejado, our Brazilian partner website, recently interviewed Professor Donald Shoup, who answered questions about private and public parking issues. Private parking Marcos Paulo Schlickmann: What is your opinion on legal parking minimums?  Donald Shoup: In The High Cost of Free Parking, which the American Planning Association published in 2005, I argued that minimum parking requirements subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion, pollute the air, encourage sprawl, increase housing costs, degrade urban design, prevent walkability, damage the economy, and penalize poor people. Since then, to my knowledge, no member of the planning profession has argued that parking requirements do not cause these harmful effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown they do cause these harmful effects. Parking requirements in zoning ordinances are poisoning our cities with too much parking. Minimum parking requirements are a fertility drug for cars. MPS: What would happen if we were to abandon parking minimums? DS: Reform is difficult because parking requirements don’t exist without a reason. If on-street parking is free, removing off-street parking requirements will overcrowd the on-street parking and everyone will complain. Therefore, to distill 800 pages of The High Cost of Free Parking into three bullet points, I recommend three parking reforms that can improve cities, the economy, and the environment: Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers. Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each block, so there will be no parking shortages. Prices will balance the demand and supply for on-street parking spaces. Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets. If everybody sees their meter money at work, the new public services can […]

Government-Created Parking Externalities

In new research on parking policy in the Journal of Economic Geography, Jan Brueckner and Sofia Franco argue that residential developers should be required to provide more off-street parking in places where street parking contributes to traffic congestion. They argue that because traffic congestion is a negative externality, off-street parking requirements improve urban living. But street parking only contributes to traffic congestion when policymakers underprice it. Rather than addressing the externality of a government-created problem with new regulations, cities should price their street parking appropriately. Brueckner and Franco’s argument relies on the assumption that off-street parking will be under-provided without government intervention. They argue that because drivers circle their destination looking for free or cheap street parking, minimum parking requirements make people better off. The authors are correct in arguing that street parking contributes to the problem of traffic congestions. Parking guru Donald Shoup estimates that drivers who are circling around looking for parking spots make up 30 percent of downtown traffic. Cruising for parking imposes an external cost on others by causing everyone to waste time in slow traffic. While, Brueckner and Franco actually cite Shoup’s work on street parking and traffic congestion, they ignore his insight that when parking is priced appropriately, cities can eliminate this externality. The incentive to cruise for parking originates with public policy when city officials provide street parking at below-market prices. When parking prices are high enough, drivers will leave some parking availability on each block, eliminating the cruising problem without the need for minimum parking requirements. San Francisco’s SFPark program provides an example of successful implementation of variable pricing based on demand. SFPark has the goal of maintaining one to two available spots on each block so that drivers don’t contribute to traffic congestion while they’re looking for parking. When street parking is priced high […]

Building A Better BART

In 2016, voters in San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa county approved a $3.5 Billion dollar bond to keep BART moving. Funds from the bond will be used to replace aging infrastructure throughout the system, but even three and half billion dollars will scarcely keep us running in place. Maintaining what we have long term—and eventually improving on what’s already in place—means finding a sustainable revenue stream for the system and reimagining how we fund transit in the Bay Area. Hong Kong vs the Bay Putting BART on permanently firm financial footing doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. Commuter rail systems in East Asia figured out how to run profitably decades ago. And there’s no better example of what BART could be than the Metro Transit Railway Corporation (MTRC) in Hong Kong. The MTRC operates 130 miles of track (roughly equivalent to BART). It transports over 5 million passengers a day (about 10x BART’s daily ridership). And it posts a 99.9% on time rate (let’s just say…way the hell better than BART). MTRC System Map   The MTRC is able to maintain its first-in-class service levels because it doesn’t skimp on the upkeep. It employs approximately 5,000 technicians who physically inspect every inch of track once every three days. The rolling stock is given a similar level of attention. And the entire system is overseen from a state-of-the-art control center where management can identify problems in real-time. The result of all this preventative care is a transit system that reliably performs at scale and sets the global standard for commuter rail. All told, the MTRC spends an impressive US $700 million a year on maintenance and improvements. But perhaps the most amazing thing is that this $700 million comes out to less than 40% of the MTRC’s yearly revenue. Value Capture Finance […]

Addressing Local Knowledge

Four years ago my wife and I decided to take our son to a special and slightly unusual restaurant to celebrate his birthday.  We were in Tokyo at the time and gave the taxi driver what we thought was the address for the restaurant – it had names and numbers on it.  Cabbies in Tokyo, and in Japan in general, are renowned for their courtesy, the cleanliness of their cabs, and their driving skill.  We were very surprised, therefore, when our driver suddenly pulled over and told us that “the restaurant is somewhere around here,” let us off, and drove away. After several minutes of search, we did manage to find the restaurant around the corner about a block or so away.  We had a great meal, but the memory of that experience has always been something of a puzzle – until now. This summer we returned to Tokyo for a family vacation, and while relaxing in our hotel room I found myself thumbing through a guide book we had brought along, Japan Made Easy, in which I found this startling statement: “Tokyo … has thousands upon thousands of streets, but fewer than one hundred of them have names.”  A quick check of Google Maps seems to confirm this assertion.   (Hat tip to Jeremy Sapienza). More than One Way to Address a Letter This raises some obvious questions, such as how one addresses a letter. The guide says: …[T]he addressing system in Japan has nothing whatsoever to do with any street the house or building might be on or near.  Addresses are based on areas rather than streets.  In metropolitan areas the “address areas” start out with the city.  Next comes the ku, or ward, then a smaller district called cho, and finally a still smaller section called banchi. This […]

Governing The Traffic Commons

As an economics professor, I often witness the surprise of my students when I explain how something as important as the market for food or clothing is self-regulating.  True, there are quality and safety regulations that attempt to control potential hazards “around the edges” of these vital markets, but by far the heavy lifting is done by competition among rival firms in the same industry.  Trying to sell tainted food or shoddy clothing in a competitive market without special privileges will either put you out of business or make you very quick on your feet. And I get great satisfaction when I see students realize that advertising, free entry, and entrepreneurship, in the context of economic freedom, are what keep goods and services safe, cheap, and of good quality.  Witness what happens when drugs and prostitution are prohibited: overly concentrated, dangerously mixed narcotics and significantly higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases, both accompanied by violence and corruption.  Here government intervention thwarts self-regulation. The Nonmarket Foundations of the Market Process In the past dozen years or so, as a result of my research interest in the economy of cities, which was sparked by my discovery of the writings of Jane Jacobs, I’ve come to appreciate more and more the nonmarket foundations of the market process.  Some of this has been reflected in previous Wabi-sabi columns that were concerned with social networks (most recently last week but also here).  Without norms that say, for example, treating strangers fairly and trading with them is good, or that lying to and stealing from strangers is bad, human well-being couldn’t have soared to the heights of the past 200 years, especially the last 60.  Now obviously none of this would have happened either without the widespread acceptance of private property, freedom of association, and the […]

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