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Almost-Thanksgiving list

Unfortunately, none of these things are really things to be thankful for: 1. 81% of Americans disagree with Kelo v. City of New London in a 2009 survey, with the wording being quite generous to the pro-takings side. 2. Who possibly could have thought this was a good idea? It’s like they took every bad publicly-subsidized megaproject idea they could think of and rolled them into one. 3. NYU’s plan to build a forth tower in the middle of I. M. Pei’s three towers in Greenwich Village (discussed here by commenter Benjamin Hemric) has officially died, the death kneel coming from Pei himself. NYU’s plan B is to build the tower on a plot that they already own and can develop as-of-right. They’ll be tearing down a supermarket to build it, but who still eats food these days anyway? 4. “…there isn’t a single grocery chain store within [Detroit’s] city limits.” 5. Apparently the kiosk tear-downs in Moscow were a result of nothing more than Mayor Sobyanin’s verbal order, and the kiosks are being allowed to reopen until the city can formally close them. The unaccountable government-by-fiat of the USSR dies hard.

The mirage of revealed preferences

I often hear from libertarian-inclined defenders of the suburban status quo that the fact that American is so overwhelmingly suburban is proof that it’s what Americans want. Economists call this “revealed preference,” but it could also be understood as voting with your feet and wallet. People have made the decision to live in the suburbs, so there must be something they like about it. Randal O’Toole of Cato and Wendell Cox of Demographia have both made versions of this argument, as has Jesse Walker back when he was at CEI. Though some liberals take issue with the idea that markets reflect preferences better than democracy, for the most part people understand that there’s wisdom in consumer choices. There is, however, one catch to using revealed preferences: the market has to actually be a market. That is, it has to be free of regulation and subsidies that push consumers too much one way or the other. So, for example, you cannot use consumers’ “revealed” preference for high-fructose corn syrup to argue that Americans prefer it over sugar, because the government massively subsidizes corn and imposes tariffs and quotas on sugar. Now of course, America has a mixed economy, with an arcane structure of rules and regulations undergirding a capitalist system, so no sector is going to be entirely free of interference.  Although people like O’Toole are adamant in their stated opposition to parking minimums and mandatory low density zoning, they believe that density-forbidding regulations are mostly benign and unnecessary, since most Americans wouldn’t really want to live more densely than they do now.  By this logic, even if restrictions on density were loosened, developers wouldn’t change their ways and America’s deeply suburban land use and transportation patterns would endure. At the end of the day, whether not we can use “revealed […]

NYC to raise on-street parking rates, local news freaks out

New York City has some of the most underpriced parking in the nation, and while there have been a few pilot programs (in the UES, the West Village, and Park Slope) to raise rates during peak hours, it looks like Bloomberg is finally pushing to implement Park Smart citywide.  Residential metered hourly rates throughout the city will be bumped up to $1 (they were 50¢ just six months ago) and commercial rates will rise to $3 (they were $2 six months ago). Beyond this, peak on-street parking in the busiest commercial zones will cost even more. The Post loads its article with driver outrage (headline: “Feed it and weep!  Meter$ jacked up”; opening line: “Park your wallet right here, drivers.”), but at least towards the end they suggest a benefit of the program: “More than half of the business owners and drivers in the area said parking became easier once the more expensive pilot program went into effect.” The CBS affiliate starts off interviewing a guy who lives on the Upper West Side who thinks that Bloomberg “should pay for [parking] himself.  Dip into his pocket […] and put it to the city.”  The interviewer then asks, “And pay for your parking?” and he answers, completely unashamed, “Right!”  The next guy complains about how tough it is to survive in the city, while he commuters by car from Rockville Centre in Nassau County (median household income: $99,299). He’s joined in this opinion by a fellow Long Island resident from Melville (median household income: $92,527). After a city representative notes that it’s a steal compared to off-street garages and an UES physician agrees, the presenter finishes by announcing plans to charge “sky high rates” on busy commercial streets during peak hours – so they’ll be higher than the $3.75/hour that they are now. […]

Hard Truths About Why Conservatives and Libertarians Hate Urbanism

It’s no secret that conservatives and libertarians don’t have very warm feelings towards urbanism. But with their emphasis on upzoning and reducing parking minimums, shouldn’t new urbanism and smart growth have at least some libertarian constituency? And given that local roads are paid for almost entirely out of general funds – that is to say, local roads are a blatant example of socialist redistribution – you’d think that there would be people on the free market right advocating raising the gas tax and tolling highways. But alas, no such luck. Michele Bachmann thinks roads shouldn’t count as earmarks, Carl Paladino’s never met a road he didn’t want to detoll, and Mother Jones managed to cobble together a whole article’s full of “We don’t need none of that smart growth communism”-style rhetoric coming from the Tea Party. Now, it could just be that there are just too many suburban Republican voters whose homes, lives, and culture are invested in sprawl for any politician to oppose it. But that doesn’t explain the lack of support from libertarian think-tanks and magazines, who, by virtue of their complete lack of political viability, don’t have to worry about politics and getting re-elected in the suburbs. Cato and the Reason Foundation still toe the “war on drivers” line, with Randal O’Toole denying that any developers even want to build less parking than current minimums require. So why don’t conservatives and libertarians have more compunction about sprawl? I believe the problem is more the messengers than the message. Despite the free market aspects of modern-day urbanism, smart growth and new urbanism are not libertarian movements. Urban planning is dominated by liberals, and it shows – few even seem aware of the capitalist roots of their plans. The private corporations that built America’s great cities and mass transit […]

Quote of the day

From Matt Yglesias: I never like to visit a place without checking out its local parking regulations. Whoa, and I thought I was bad! (He is, of course, talking about minimum parking requirements for developers, not day-to-day rules for people looking to park their cars.) If you’re feeling particularly optimistic today and feel like you need to correct that, take a look at his comments section. I posted this there as well, but I think it bears repeating: “It’s always amusing to me how [Yglesias’ commenters] seem to value ideological purity (i.e., opposing anything that moves anything towards the free market) over what are otherwise traditional progressive goals (helping the environment, reversing sprawl, revitalizing cities).” My favorite part is when someone calls him a “glibertarian.”

Happy 250th post!

…okay, so it’s not really the 250th post – that passed a few weeks ago, uneventfully. But we did recently pass 100,000 total page views (at least, so says Sitemeter…WordPress seems to think it’s more), so I thought it would be a good time to introduce myself and maybe ask you guys for a favor. First of all, my name is Stephen Smith (as you can now see above), and while this is Adam’s blog that he’s had for a few years now, I’ve been putting up most of the posts for the last few months. (I did post occasionally before August, but that’s when I really started ramping up the postings.) I graduated last spring from Georgetown undergrad, with an entirely unrelated and highly regrettable major that might have made a little more sense if I actually wanted to become an international trade lawyer, but which alas seems good for little else.  I’m currently biding my time with this (entirely unremunerative) blog until I can find a job in journalism or thinktankdom somewhere on the East Coast (or in any field, any place, really…).  So, if you have any leads on that, send me an e-mail at smithsj[at]gmail…you figure out the rest. Paid or unpaid, East Coast or East Africa (I can speak Romanian, French, German, and Spanish, in descending order of fluency…so maybe West Africa would be better) – I can’t promise you that I’ll take it, but I’ll at least consider it! Anyway, I also thought I’d take the time to ask you guys if you had any feedback on the blog. Anything you like in particular that you want more of, or that you didn’t like and want less of? Anything that I haven’t written about that you think I should? What field do you work […]

NJ, the far West Side, and LIC should pay for the No. 7 subway expansion

The transit blogosphere has been falling over itself with excitement since yesterday about Bloomberg’s proposal to extend the No. 7 train into New Jersey, and I have to agree that it sounds like a very good plan. It would be much cheaper than the recently-axed ARC project and wouldn’t involve a mile-deep, dead-end station. But best of all, it would reward areas like the far West Side, Queens, and North Jersey cities which have opened themselves up to development and allow the density necessary for mass transit to at least pretend to be self-sustainable – something that the commuter rail-centric New Jersey suburbs have been loathe to do. Despite the project’s reduced cost ($5.3 billion), it will apparently not be eligible for the $3 billion in federal funds that Chris Christie forfeited when he canceled the ARC project, so funding is the main stumbling block at this point.  The Times also cites “the lengthy environmental review required of such projects” as an obstacle. My suggestion is that West Side developers or tenants, along with those in the benefiting parts of Queens and New Jersey, should pay for at least some of the cost. Mass transit, especially in metro New York, has huge positive externalities for real estate, and West Side developers are already salivating at the prospect. Back around the turn of the last century, when transit lines in America were still built and operated by private companies, developers themselves would internalize these externalities by directly controlling the real estate around their stations. While this model still works in East Asia, it would be hard to imagine such flexibility in New York any time soon, but a well-designed tax increment financing system could come close.  Under such a plan, a tax would only be levied on the areas that will […]

Making-driving-more-expensive link minilist

These seemed not quite fleshed-out enough for their own post, but too important to be buried along with other links. 1. San Francisco is considering a congestion charge plan that would either cover the whole city during rush hour, or just the northeastern quadrant (or possibly a mix of the two), for what looks like a maximum of $6/day. Considering that local roads are rarely paid out of user fees, at this point any move towards making local roads more expensive would be a move towards a market equilibrium. The fact that much of “this money” would be spent on transit and non-road improvements is an irrelevant accounting trick, since money is fungible and so much road spending is already coming out of general revenues. And yet, I wouldn’t hold your breath for libertarian or small-government conservative support of this plan. 2. Sens. Tom Carper and George Voinovich have called for a 25¢ increase of the federal gas tax, which is 10¢ higher than the maximum increase recommended in any of the Bowles-Simpson plans. Voinovich, the token Republican signing the letter, is retiring from the Senate in 2011. The Hill notes that the proposal “seems likely to face staunch opposition from Republicans, many of whom ran on a firm anti-tax increase pledge.” Nevermind that the gas “tax” is technically a user fee and not a tax, and that keeping it artificially low without reducing road spending amounts to a subsidy for automobile drivers – Tea Partiers obviously don’t think with that level of nuance.

Sobyanin’s horrific plan for Moscow

It’s been a few months since longtime Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov was fired, so I figured it would be a good time to check in on the city. In spite of Moscow’s infamous traffic and “perversely-sloped” population density gradient, the former mayor’s plan to build 100 km of new metro tracks and over 350 km of new railroad tracks was rejected just a few weeks before his ouster as too expensive. So now that the new mayor, Segrey Sobyanin, has announced his plan to untangle Moscow’s Gordian knot of traffic, how does it measure up? Well, put quite simply, it’s probably the worst urban plan I’ve seen since Paul Rudolph’s plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Increasing the amount of parking by building large lots on the outskirts of town seems to be the most prominent proposal. Like the author of this Bloomberg article which claims that parking spaces in the city “meet 30 percent of needed capacity,” Muscovites don’t seem to recognize that all cars obviously already have places to park, and that increasing the amount of parking is only going to increase the ease of owning a car, and hence the amount of people who choose to do so. Russian urban planners seem to be stuck in the 1950s, too – here is the president of the national planners’ guild claiming that Moscow needs to more than double the surface area it dedicates to roads. The plan also seems to operate under the assumption that public transportation is the problem – their promises to expand mass transit ring hollow when they’re also contemplating banning trolleybuses from the city center and banning the private fleets of jitneys, known as marshrutki, which provide higher quality and more expensive service than the city’s decrepit buses. Some of the elements of the […]

Environmentalism vs. density, federal style

Coatesville is a town about 45 miles east of Philadelphia, and they want to refurbish their train station and build some transit-oriented development around it. The town really took off around the turn of the last century with the Lukens Steel Company, and because the train line was the town’s primary link to the outside world, development was concentrated around the station. But I guess being the epicenter of a century-old town doesn’t excuse you from the wrath of the mighty environmental review: If PennDOT and other stakeholders can settle on a plan and deal with some environmental issues at the site, Fauver hopes the state will begin the federally mandated environmental assessment process in March or April, which will take about a year. In contrast to locally-imposed environmental reviews, this time it’s the feds who are asking for it, probably since the station is served by Amtrak. In other words, it’s not something that greenfield McMansion developers on the outskirts of town have to endure. A federal twist on the familiar environmentalism vs. density theme.

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