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New funding for roads in Georgia

The Georgia Department of Transportation recently approved $102 million in projects to improve the state’s infrastructure. The department gave the go ahead on these projects as the state is in the midst of a debate over a new proposed one percent sales tax to help fund infrastructure. Highway supporters often argue that fuel taxes fund road construction and maintenance, but this is simply not the case, leading to the need for other dedicated transportation funding, like the Georgia sales tax. Improvements slated to benefit from the new fund include highways, bridges, and public transit. Metropolitan Planning Organization Coordinator Corey Hull said, “We … want them to know this is our only option right now. The state does not have a plan B for funding transportation and infrastructure.” Clearly, the fuel tax is not meeting the funding requirements for the states’ drivers, so the funding is being drawn from the wider state population, including non-drivers. Currently, this may be a small distinction in Georgia, though, where only 2.7% of residents take public transportation to work. Like road improvements, public transportation projects in Georgia are funded by the broader tax base rather than the constituents that actually rely on the service. Perhaps the number of Georgians who take public transportation to work will grow with the proposed expansions to Atlanta’s light rail. However, it’s hard to imagine that such marginal improvements to public transit will create meaningful change to transportation in a city like Atlanta, which was was largely designed around the highway system. As a result of low demand for transit in Atlanta, the city hopes to cover only 20 percent of the operating costs of a new streetcar system with fares. Rail has many clear advantages over buses — these systems are typically faster and easier for riders to navigate. However, in a […]

Urbanist project selling well in Denver

The New York Times discusses a new building in Denver that embraces many of the ideals of transit-oriented development. The Spire is a mixed-use condo building that includes retail and recreation space along with residential units. Saqib Rahim explains: If they wish, the denizens of this mini-world can step outside into the arts district, or they can walk fractions of a mile to three of Denver’s light rail lines. Spire scores a 91 on WalkScore.com, earning the label “Walker’s Paradise.” To reach paradise, though, Spire residents won’t have to give up their cars. The 33 floors of residences sit atop a “parking podium” eight floors tall. It contains bikes and cars for rent, but most of the room is for 600 parking spaces. The building has 500 condos. Denver residents clearly enjoy the option to live in a walkable, transit-friendly neighborhood, as The Spire is one of the fastest-selling condo buildings in the country. It exemplifies that walkable development can be achieved in Western cities that have been primarily built around the automobile. The building’s prime location in the city’s downtown Arts District allows it to command high enough prices to pay for an underground parking podium, but Rahim questions whether transit-oriented development should include any parking at all. While Denver has adopted many Portland-style Smart Growth features including one of the nation’s largest light rail systems, many city residents still rely on and enjoy easy use of their vehicles. Scott McFadden, a Denver area developer who focuses on TOD said in the article: “You still need it to go to work and to shop and, quite frankly, to take it to the mountains, which is why you live in Denver in the first place.” The Spire is located in an area of the city that does not have parking […]

Death and life in a changing neighborhood

A controversy in DC’s Columbia Heights neighborhood exemplifies the common clash between NIMBYism and the achievement of Jane Jacob’s ideals. Some residents are opposed to a new proposed diner, Margot’s Chair, that would be open 24 hours a day. The owners already have three well-loved restaurants in DC, but passionate protestors wrote an inflammatory letter disparaging the change the diner will have on the neighborhood: While 11th Street has a host of small, unique, charming and creative business’s that give our neighborhood its own unique mystique – scaling up to a 24 hour business and a capacity of 1/4 of one thousand inside (not including outside – that permit will be applied for later) is pushing the envelope of the small Hip Strip we as residents have come to enjoy [sic]. As a former resident of this “Hip Strip,” I agree that the diner would continue the pattern of change that gentrification has brought to the neighborhood, a change which is of course subjective. However, a 24-hour restaurant would bring improvements to public safety that are about as objectively positive as changes to urban development can be, in line with the development that Jacobs advocates in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her work clearly refutes three of the protestors’ criticisms of the project. 1) While this area already has several restaurants and bars, a 24-hour diner would fill a different market niche and attract a different crowd, particularly in the mornings. Jacobs explains that one of the most important safety features a neighborhood can have is a mix of homes and businesses that lead people to be on the sidewalks at different times of the day. This diner would provide “eyes on the street” in exactly the hours when they are most needed in a neighborhood that struggles with crime […]

Irrational, or responsive to incentives?

In the Washington Post Brad Plumer editorializes on the choice of many Americans to accept longer commutes by car in exchange for larger homes far from their workplaces. He says that consumers are unable to accurately calculate the cost of their commutes, including time spent driving, leading them to make “irrational” choices about where to live. However, Plumer downplays the policies that encourage consumers to buy homes rather than rent and that allow them to partially externalize the costs associated with driving. Plumer asserts that when buying a house, consumers think they will value additional space more than they do, but he gives no convincing reason that their subjective valuation of home size is incorrect. If in fact if consumers did undervalue the time they spend commuting in relation to home size when they purchased a home, he gives no reason why they would not eventually realize this error and improve their situation by moving to a smaller home closer to a city center. His piece is written in response to Congressman Earl Blumenauer’s recent report on the topic of shielding Americans from volatility in the oil market. Blumenauer does credit the policy environment dating back to the 1944 Federal Highway Act for shaping the car-centric culture that many Americans live in today, and he supports policies that provide incentives for decreased reliance on cars. Blumenauer asserts, “For too long, the Federal government has disproportionately subsidized highways at the expense of other modes, reducing consumer choices.” Rather than moving away from determining transportation and urban development through legislation, he provides policy prescriptions at the federal, state, and local level to decrease consumers’ dependence on oil. For example, Blumenauer suggests that mortgage lenders should be encouraged to take transportation costs into account, making it easier for those living close to their […]

What good is form-based zoning when you just keep everything the same?

“Form-based zoning” is something that I’ve never entirely understood. It’s always explained to me as regulating form not use, and generally the example given is that form-based zoning will require certain design aesthetics but not dictate whether something is used as a residence or a place of business or whatever. And instead of setbacks, FAR requirements, etc., it will dictate overall size (I guess with a height limit?). But while it seems marginally more pleasant to mandate parking lots go behind buildings, it doesn’t seem to me like zoning by “form” is inherently better than the status quo American planning tools. A planner can use a Euclidean designation to accomodate high-density development just as easily as he can use a form-based code to force suburbia on an area. In other words, the devil’s in the details, and just moving to a form-based code doesn’t really change anything if you don’t also allow for more growth overall After reading this paper (abridged ungated version as a .pdf here) on parking in Miami’s new form-based code – “Miami 21,” implemented in 2009 – I fear that I was right, and that form-based codes will probably end up looking just like the old ones: In general, there are minimal parking requirement changes in the Miami 21 form-based code. Lower minimum requirements or the establishment of appropriate parking maximums in existing, compact urban neighborhoods would protect the existing character of these areas and encourage the development of context-sensitive development that promotes walkability. Yet the proposed parking requirements in the Miami 21 form-based code still include relatively high minimums, even in the more urban transects This is partially a critique of DPZ’s SmartCode, which does not reduce parking requirements signi?cantly even in the more urban transects. Considering the level of public transportation service in its […]

A fresh rejection of commerce from Metro

Stephen has previously written on DC Metro’s potential to make money by leasing its valuable real estate to vendors, but Metro officials have now further entrenched the organization against making efficient use of its property. WMATA denied a weekend farmers market use of the parking lot at the Naylor Road station. The Washington Post reports, “Angela Gates, a Metro spokeswoman, said it is against WMATA rules to allow the sale of food and drink on its property.” In this instance, it sounds as if the Temple Hill, MD residents who proposed the market were not intending for vendors to pay Metro to use the parking lot; however, suggesting a user fee for the parking lot space could have made much more sense than outright prohibiting potentially profitable endeavors on Metro property. The Post continues: Officials say the market falls in line with the transit-oriented development envisioned for the area. Renee Sprow, director of the Maryland Small Business Development Center Network, said the group has not given up. Informal discussions continue. And Funn said a formal request for reconsideration will be submitted. Assuming that Metro remains opposed to vending in stations, WMATA could at least revisit the issue in its parking lots given its dire fiscal condition. Riders often shop for food adjacent to stations and carry food purchases onto trains in other locations around the city. At the Clarendon Metro, a farmers market already operates directly outside Metro escalators. While Metro remains completely opposed to using its valuable real estate to benefit its finances and its customers, the Chicago Transit Authority is taking the opposite approach. Recently, CTA hired Jones Lang LaSalle as a property manager to undertake improvements at its vacant properrties available for lease. In the last two years, CTA made about $32 million from leasing its retail and office space. Given WMATA’s staggering operating deficits, the […]

Alon Levy has a blog! Or: How Florida’s HSR money is being wasted in New York

Longtime commenter Alon Levy…has a blog! So far there’s only one post up – a critique of one $295 million “HSR” grant for New York, money that was originally intended for Florida – but it’s a good one, and I recommend everyone add the blog to their feed readers. He gets into the nitty-gritty details of New York City’s rail network, and comes to the following conclusion: So the $300 million the state applied to has no relevance to either Amtrak or LIRR traffic. The only use is to let Amtrak use the southern tunnel pair to Penn Station without conflicts. Since Amtrak can already use the northern tunnels without any conflict apart from the one mentioned above, it is a pure nice-to-have. It would be good for operational flexibility if the tunnels were at capacity, but they aren’t: total LIRR plus Amtrak traffic into Penn Station peaks at 37 trains between 8 and 9 am, where the capacity of the tunnels is about 50 – and as with Hunterspoint traffic, Penn Station LIRR traffic will go down once East Side Access opens. I always thought that Obama’s high-speed rail strategy was absurd and any money spent on HSR-only infrastructure would be wasted, so I was at least marginally pleased when Rick Scott gave up Florida’s money and it was sent to the Northeast Corridor. But after reading this, and especially Alon’s suggestion earlier in the post that the money would be better spent on a similar project in Brooklyn that would benefit the MTA’s 3 and 5 trains (see comments), I’m beginning to wonder if spending the money on inter- and not intracity rail is the bigger problem. While regular intercity service might be more practical than HSR service (which, somehow, the Obama administration still claims is the goal), […]

Laneway housing in Vancouver and beyond

Vancouver holds a special place in most urbanists’ heart – a sort of supercharged version of Portland, with its stunning skyline and bold embrace of density and transit. In addition to the glassy forest of skyscrapers, it also passed a law enabling laneway housing under former mayor Sam Sullivan’s EcoDensity initiative. Sullivan was pretty controversial, but he never even came up for a second vote after Peter Ladner launched a party coup and then went on to lose the election anyway. As a result, it doesn’t look like the laneway housing rules have been revised, which is a shame, since as Vancouver architect Graham Barron (who has an excellent blog on development in Vancouver) writes, there are some problems: The objective of the infill design guideline is to encourage the retention of existing buildings, but the guideline’s own side yard setback makes this nearly impossible. In practice, this means that the vast majority of developers of these lots demolish the existing building and construct a new duplex. (Many of these new duplexes look like character buildings, but in fact are built slab-on-grade, i.e. without basements, and without attics, much like the cheap Vancouver Specials that preceded them). This is the first irony. The second irony is that many of the two-family zones in the City are meant to be heritage-friendly zones, which promote the preservation of character and heritage houses. Since it is largely impossible to build infill, and very costly to renovate or expand an older building, most developers will demolish the existing house, and then design the new duplex in a faux heritage style in order to get a density bonus that allows for greater floorspace. Result: character is being replaced with faux character. The final irony is that these new duplexes are then required to have a […]

Randal O’Toole’s responds on “per passenger miles”

I’ve had my disagreements with Randal O’Toole, a libertarian defender of suburban sprawl, but to his credit, he’s done the most convincing accounting of subsidies (well, accounting costs, at least) that I’ve seen yet. And though he normally concentrates on federal costs, his write-up of an American Bus Association report includes this paragraph about mass transit: What about state and local subsidies? A first approximation of such subsidies can be found by subtracting expenses from revenues in National Transportation Statistics. The results suggest that total subsidies to air travel are tiny, subsidies to highways are large (but tiny per passenger mile), and subsidies to transit are in between (but much larger per passenger mile). National Transportation Statistics doesn’t have state and local subsidies to Amtrak or intercity buses, but I suspect the former are much larger than the latter. All of this is probably true, but I’ve criticized the use of “per passenger miles” in the past (as had Michael Lewyn, unbeknownst to me at the time) on the basis that trips in areas served by mass transit can be shorter than trips made with in the suburbs and the exurbs with a car. I emailed Randal O’Toole and asked him what he thought of this argument, and as always, he was kind enough to send me his response: You make a valid point. But it is most valid in regions where transit is concentrated in dense areas and jobs are concentrated in those dense areas. In post-automobile regions, such as San Jose, Phoenix, and Houston, neither of those conditions apply. The same is true in pre-auto regions that have undergone massive decentralization, such as Cleveland and St. Louis. Even in Chicago and San Francisco, jobs have decentralized to the point where dense downtowns hold only a small share of the […]

Links: “At least they’re being honest” edition

1. NY Governor Cuomo promises the “most aggressive” strengthening of the state’s (read: NYC’s) rent laws. 2. Bronx <3 parking: “This community wants a moratorium on any more building until we get a parking lot.” “We don’t want any bigger buildings and we want parking space for everyone.” 3. Do people realize that “I don’t mind modernist architecture” and “All new buildings must have decorative cornices and intricate brickwork” are fundamentally incompatible statements? 4. Witold Rybczynski on density. Nothing you haven’t already heard a million times before, but, Witold Rybczynski! 5. DC’s zoning code finally allows building owners to enclose the once-encouraged outdoor arcades.

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