Market Urbanism – Page 91 – Liberalizing Cities From The Ground Up

News and thoughts on the gas tax

An influential highway group has called for replacing the flat tax on gas with a percentage tax, according to the Wall Street Journal. They want to replace the current 18.4 and 24.4 cent taxes on gasoline and diesel, respectively, with more flexible 8.4% and 10.6% tax rates. At current gas prices that would be about a 2-cent increase (at least on the gasoline side of things), and it would at least allow for automatic increases with inflation. It is a bit awkward for road funding to rise and fall with the cost of fuel, but it may be the only politically feasible way to raise the gas tax – to pass it off as an unintended consequence. Of course, there’s the possibility of the price of gas falling, although I don’t know how likely that is over the long-run. As you can imagine, the political reaction was quite hostile, with Rep. John Mica, who’s on the soon-to-be Republican-controlled House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, saying that anything that would raise gas prices is a “non-starter.” It’s unfortunate that the gas tax is seen as just another tax and not the explicit cost of the road infrastructure, but it looks like it’s going to be a casualty of the Tea Party’s anti-tax mantra. In any case, the issue will be dealt with after the midterms when hopefully politicians will be a bit more clear-headed. The WSJ suggests that politicians are reluctant to keep borrowing from the general fund for road projects, but I’m afraid that their fear of budget deficits will be overpower by their fear of raising the cost of driving. And as much as I resent Obama and this Congress for refusing to raise the gas tax, it could have been worse – both McCain and Hillary Clinton were in […]

The inanity of airport connectors

Despite my issues with how new transit projects are implemented in America today, I’m generally happy to see them built. Even though they’re flawed, heavily-subsidized government creations, they make upzoning more palatable and can later be sold off and privately managed. There’s a lot I’d do differently, but on net I think most new transit projects are a step, however imperfect, in the direction of market urbanism. But there’s at least one form of transit that I can almost never get behind: the airport connector. The airport connector is a special beast of a rail-based transit system that’s a relatively recent phenomenon outside of transit-dense regions like Western Europe and Japan. So manifestly wasteful that it generates more animosity towards mass transit than it does riders, it’s a project that only politicians and unions could love. Unlike more integrated networks where the airport is just one station on an otherwise viable route (like Philadelphia’s Airport Line or DC’s proposed Silver Line), airport connectors generally serve only the airport and one local hub. With no purpose other than to get people in and out of the airport, they provide neither ancillary transit benefits nor TOD opportunities. Oftentimes they don’t even reach downtown, acting instead like glorified park-and-rides. The most egregious example in the US would have to be BART’s proposed Oakland Airport Connector. The rail line will extend for a little more than three miles, replacing what is now a bus routes. The $3 fare will double, along with the half billion dollars that it will cost the government. Like the current bus route, it will only connect Oakland’s airport to the nearest BART station with no intermediate stops. It’s opposed by transit activists, who would rather convert the bus into a dedicated BRT lane and spend the rest of the half billion […]

Hell freezes over, or: the one in which I agree with Randal O’Toole’s argument over Shoup’s

I never thought the day would come, but I actually find myself taking issue with Donald Shoup’s recent criticism of the Cato Institute (which Randal O’Toole works for) and its own DC headquarters’ employee parking program. While I agree with Shoup’s more general critique of Cato’s stance on transportation and land use issues, and consider him to be the greatest urbanist since Jane Jacobs, his attack on Cato for giving its employees free parking appears to me to be misdirected. The gist of his argument is that since Cato offers free parking to its employees and neighboring NPR (both on Massachusetts Ave. in DC) charges its workers for parking, NPR is taking the “free market” approach and Cato is taking the “free parking” approach. But I don’t see how this comports with Shoup’s broader research, which focuses on parking policies of governments and not private (well, sort of) entities like NPR and Cato. Corporations are allowed to take a command-and-control approach to their operations and still be considered “free market institutions” as long as they are competing in a free market, and in fact some of the most successful ones are (Facebook, for example, is still run as Mark Zuckerberg’s own personal fiefdom). Now of course, Cato is not operating in a free market when it comes to parking. It likely was forced to build some amount of parking by law, and even if it wasn’t, the influence of neighboring areas’ land use policies looms large on a single building like Cato’s. There’s also the issue of employer-provided parking as a fringe benefit not being taxed, which Shoup mentions. He then suggests that Cato offer a parking cash-out program, whereby they pay employees who choose not to park the cash equivalent of the spot, which Cato doesn’t appear to currently […]

Stephen Smith
October 13, 2010
parking
8

Darien, CT gets sued by the DOJ over inclusionary zoning

The New York Times has an interesting article about a Justice Department probe into Darien, CT’s local inclusionary zoning rules. Inclusionary zoning means essentially that multi-unit developments have to offer a portion of the project as “affordable housing,” which invariably means charging below-market rents. We here at Market Urbanism oppose it because it essentially acts as a tax on dense development that’s not levied on the sort of one-off developments that are usually large lot, detached houses, which discriminates against the very people that it purports to be helping. While the people who live in the units certainly benefit from the too-good-to-be-true rents, every other poor person loses out as their housing costs rise. But unfortunately, the DOJ doesn’t appear worried about inclusionary zoning generally, but rather is interested in the “priority populations” provision, which determines who gets the low-rent housing, which is in high demand because of the artificially low price. Currently the town favors current residents, which the Justice Department is right to find discriminatory, since the well-healed New York City suburb is overwhelmingly white. While I’m always glad to see inclusionary zoning challenged, the focus on the priority populations provision strikes me as a bit narrow-sighted – they should be concerned about inclusionary zoning itself reducing affordable development. And in fact, the New York Times seems to recognize this, as they quote a developer at length as she describes the difficult of developing anything affordable in Darien. Sorry for such a long quote, but it’s very interesting: Inclusionary zoning was one strategy for accomplishing that goal. The policy hasn’t been used yet, as no qualifying developments have been approved since it went into effect in May 2009. The federal inquiry came to light last month, when Christopher and Margaret Stefanoni, a local couple who have sought approvals […]

Stephen Smith
October 13, 2010
housing Zoning
12

No ARC without TOD

A lot of fuss has been made by urbanists about how important the ARC transit tunnel under the Hudson is to curbing sprawl in North Jersey, but frankly I’m not convinced that more commuter rail into Manhattan is the cure for what ails New Jersey. The state’s fundamental problem is its reliance on two cities outside its borders for providing jobs to its people, and it’s used the existence of New York and Philadelphia as excuses to remain a sprawled, suburban oasis in the middle of a dense Northeast Corridor, which can’t continue once it runs out of land and money. Commuter rail in post-WWII America has never quite lived up to transit activists’ hopes, and the NJ Transit service and the ARC tunnel will be no different. Instead of viewing suburban train stations as smaller versions of city stations, locals like to think of them as their own personal portals into downtown business districts. Suburbanites don’t want transit-oriented development – they want lots of parking so they have access to the station, since most of them don’t live within walking distance. Increased density and less parking might benefit future residents who would move in to new developments, but they don’t show up to zoning board meetings and don’t get a vote. As an example of how many towns waste their transit, I grew up in Bryn Mawr, a suburb of Philadelphia, and a town which has better transit access than the Upper East Side. It’s part of a string of towns collectively known as the “Main Line,” after the train tracks that run through the area, there’s a light rail line that runs south of the main commuter line, and there are a few bus lines (both SEPTA buses and private college shuttles) that connect the towns. Despite its […]

Sunday links

1. Planners in the Twin Cities have decided to “back away from the age-old compact in which the state tries to keep pace with suburban expansion” (i.e., they’re canceling new outer road projects) and add toll/bus lanes to highways in the inner metro area. Republican governor and business on one side, Republican voters on the other – we’ll see who wins. 2. Philadelphia and Washington, DC try (and mostly fail) to account for and sell off their vacant plots. 3. While DC’s “impervious area charge” that finances for the sewer system makes sense in theory, it does seem a bit inefficient to mandate that people and businesses build parking, and then charge them a fee on something they might not even have wanted to build in the first place. I guess it’s better than California’s solution. 4. NYT architecture critic Nicholas Ouroussoff rails against the NYC Planning Department’s decision to cap Jean Nouvel’s planned Midtown skyscraper at 1,050 feet (he wanted to build it 200 feet higher) and what he views as a mentality that “risks transforming a living city into an urban mausoleum.” According to the planning commissioner, the design was rejected since it failed to live up to the Empire State Building’s grandeur, which it would have rivaled in size.

Stephen Smith
October 10, 2010
Uncategorized
2

Cap’n Transit comes out of the closet as a market urbanist

…sort of. He never quite cops to it, but he says he “appreciates” libertarianism’s arguments (unlike some people), and gives this great summary of what we here call the market urbanist narrative: In the past, private companies ran the trains, interurbans, trolleys and buses. They were usually able to make a profit providing freedom and personal mobility to people of all ages and income levels. Then the government interfered in the market, forcing operators to charge fares that were too low, and subsidizing roads, garages and oil so that private cars had an unfair advantage. The private operators went out of business, and since then a skeleton transit system has been operated by the government at great public expense. Government subsidy of driving has also destroyed our traditional small towns and cities, leaving hard-working families with a difficult choice between long drives and a gentrified urban lifestyle surrounded by intellectuals and criminals. A conservative solution would gradually phase out driving subsidies and allow entrepreneurs to start new bus and train services. As publicly-owned transit routes become more profitable, they could be sold off to the highest bidder. He put our beliefs more succinctly that I could – when you’re as passionate about the history of transit and land use in America as we are, it’s hard to distill it to a few short sentences. I should also note before continuing that I don’t really agree with lumping libertarian and conservative ideas on transit/land use together – “conservative” these days is nothing more than shorthand for Republican-leaning, and Republican constituents are almost all suburban/exurban/rural and are highly dependent on cars and will always vote for cars and against transit and density. But anyway, something I also found interesting was his typology of conservative/libertarian tendencies other than market urbanism. He finds three […]

Stephen Smith
October 10, 2010
Uncategorized
6

Friday links

1. Miller-McCune (what a bad name for a magazine) has an article about a possible VMT tax, and points out that more fuel-efficient vehicles will lead to less gas tax revenue. 2. Streetsblog has an extremely unflattering profile of Republican nominee for NY Governor Carl Paladino. He made a name for himself politically by detolling a major highway near where he was a real estate developer, and has continued to oppose new tolling projects throughout the state. He’s promising to cut the gas tax rate, and apparently once said, “It’s time we started looking at parking as a public service.” I should note that his Democratic opponent Andrew Cuomo ain’t no slouch when it comes to encouraging sprawl – Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice fingered his tenure as HUD Secretary as one of the “starting points for the mortgage meltdown.” 3. Paul Barter at Reinventing Parking has a guest post about parking reform in Bogotá that was concurrent with their much-vaunted TransMilenio BRT system, and he promises us more about it in the future. 4. Quoteth the Los Angeles Times: “At least 120 municipalities [in California] — nearly one in three with active redevelopment agencies — spent a combined $700 million in housing funds from 2000 to 2008 without constructing a single new unit, the newspaper’s analysis of state data shows. Nor did most of them add to the housing stock by rehabilitating existing units.” 5. Vancouver learns the hard way that luxury public housing is a bad idea. You could call it inclusionary zoning at its finest.

Stephen Smith
October 8, 2010
Uncategorized
2

When will New Jersey reverse its sprawling ways?

by Stephen Smith New Jersey has always been an odd state – it’s the most densely populated of the fifty, and yet it lies just outside of the core of both of its metro areas (Philadelphia and New York). North Jersey does have a formidable number of mid-sized cities, but the biggest – Newark – is a posterchild for urban neglect, and New Jersey’s urban areas play a tepid second fiddle to their much larger counterparts across the Delaware and the Hudson. New Jersey’s appeal lies undeniably in its suburbs, which are connected by a network of government-built roads and enabled by anti-density development rules. Despite New Jersey’s predilection for sprawl, the New York Times reports that the state may literally be running out of horizontal space. A Rutgers study claims that around the middle of the 21st century New Jersey will become the first state to develop all its unprotected land development trends remain unchanged. The NYT article then claims that denser redevelopment is on the rise and cites a few of anecdotes as evidence, but frankly I’m not convinced that the state is very reform-minded when it comes to its density-limiting regulations. Even among the examples given by the Times we see the limits of reform: a 217-unit luxury rental apartment building near the Morristown NJ Transit station – an area that was supposedly rezoned as a “Transit Village Core” a decade ago – was only allowed to go forward after the developer agreed to build 722 new parking spaces. On a more general level, New Jersey’s experiment with zoning reform in the ’70s and ’80s has been severely disappointing in terms of liberalization. Researcher James Mitchell used decisions handed down around the same time by both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Supreme Courts to compare the effects on […]

A comment on NYU’s proposed superblocks

Benjamin Hemric left an interesting comment about my remark about NYU’s expansion plans in Greenwich Village. First of all, I should admit that I was lazy and got NYU’s plans totally wrong – they are going to add towers to the three that I. M. Pei already built, not tear them down, and they’re going to be in a similar style. But more importantly, Hemric sees NYU’s towers-in-the-park plan as anti-density fallout (emphasis mine): […] I’d like to say that I support more intense development of the NYU sites, but disagree with NYU’s current plans, which put the planned added density in an anti-city, tower-in-the-park form. It appears to me that NYU has developed this tower-in-the park approach, in large part so it seems to me, because it believes it will eventually help win over community opponents and government officials. So, in other words, this bad plan seems to me to be a result, to a large extent, of NYU trying to cater to anti-development community activists (although these activists are still up in arms about it) and government officials. I think a more market-oriented approach (one where a municipality takes care of its basic duties and needs and where private developers take care of their own needs), similar to what existed in cities prior to the urban “renewal” era, would likely produce a much better, more urbane plan. So I think that, to a large extent, it is the visible hand of “planning” that is mis-guiding this project and that more reliance on an invisible hand of the marketplace approach, where developers try to maximize their benefits and where municipalities focus only on limited “legitimate” (in my opinion) duties, like providing streets and parks, protecting landmarks, etc., would produce a much better result (here and elsewhere). […] Under its […]

Stephen Smith
October 7, 2010
planning

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