Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

Tag Bay Area

Links

1. China’s high-speed rail scandal. So much for Obama’s State of the Union shout-out. 2. Boston, Philadelphia, and DC are all moving towards parking reform – both of minimum off-street requirements (unfortunately to be replaced with maximums in most cases) and of underpriced curb parking – but NYC’s the laggard. Like I noted a few weeks ago, this could be sabotaging its recent upzonings. 3. One Democratic Assemblyman wants to hamstring the NYC subway with yet another ridiculously overbearing safety rule – literally forcing trains to come to a complete halt right before entering a station – adding significant time to existing commutes. 4. NYC’s FRESH initiative gives money to a politically-connected supermarket for a parking lot. Wait, isn’t car-owning food desert victim an oxymoron? 5. Downtown San Jose’s Diridon station – the most transit-accessible place in San Jose – is getting $10 billion worth of new rail. Zoning consultants were paid for a year, and came up with the following recommendation: “no proposed changes to current code.” Got that? $10 billion in rail investment in one of the most progressive places in America and there will be no new TOD allowed.

Links

1. Systemic Failure calls out the Bay Area for giving an award to a textbook example of greenwashing in urbanism: Ironically, this project was recently promoted on the SF-Streetsblog website by “New Urbanist” developer Peter Calthrope for its “highest level” of green technology. What does it say for the Bay Area environmental community, that such stupendously ugly, auto-oriented architecture can win “sustainable community of the year” awards? I love how vociferous and blunt Systemic Failure’s criticism is – it’s something that’s sorely missing in the overly self-congratulatory planning blogosphere. 2. LA rushes to get another giant hulking parking lot in before Jerry Brown turns off the “redevelopment” tap. 3. Interesting charts on the gas tax throughout history.

The “Systemic Failure” of US transportation policy

Today I stumbled upon a blog that’s gotta be the best one I’ve found in a while. It’s about US transportation policy by a blogger who seems to be based somewhere in the Bay Area, and it’s called, fittingly, Systemic Failure. The post that first got my attention was this one about London’s bike sharing system likely being profitable in the future, which made me realize that this would be a great first government transportation program to privatize, especially considering that the government is keeping the price extremely low (it’s free for trips under 30 minutes) and the system is struggling to keep up with demand. I assume the reason that private companies didn’t try this earlier was that city governments have no framework for renting out small parcels of public space for use as bike racks – this despite having a vast infrastructure in place for renting similar parcels to drivers on a short-term basis (i.e., on-street parking!). But beyond that, (s?)he does a great job covering a range of transit issues, from the misguided attempts at federalization of transit safety by Obama after the WMATA Red Line crash in 2009 (1, 2, 3, 4) to the inanity of helmet laws (1, 2). The “Drunk Engineer” also offers blistering critiques of American protectionism in transit procurement, including one in which he describes the horrible inefficiency of Buy America provisions, which wreaked havoc on a Houston streetcar project and caused a Bay Area transit authority to have two completed Japanese pilot cars disassembled and shipped to the US where they would then be reassembled to conform with the law (another example here). Another interesting post that I found was this one about Senator Barbara Boxer’s insistence that Metrolink trains have two conductors onboard for safety reasons, despite the lack of […]

Midweek link list

1. Mumbai is rethinking its density bonuses for developers who build parking lots and hand them over free of charge to the city. 2. Tort liability driving away possible MARC operators. 3. San Mateo County legislators threaten to charge San Franciscans a congestion charge similar to the one that the city is proposing to charge San Mateo (and East and North Bay) commuters. Bring it on, I say – it’s about time drivers were charged for using local roads. 4. The Supreme Court refuses to hear West Harlem business owners’ appeal against the city’s decision to use eminent domain to hand Manhattanville over to Columbia University. 5. The NYT has a story about a commercial kitchen-for-rent in Queens, calling it a “lifeline” for for “100 small businesses.” It’s a nonprofit, but even renting a space there for 6.5 hours in the middle of the night costs $154. I’m still waiting for the Times story about the many more people who cook illegally out of their own homes and whose businesses are therefore stunted and precarious, all because they can’t afford to comply with the city’s onerous health and zoning codes. 6. The US may have 1 billion parking spaces. This does not in and of itself prove that we have too much, but for those of us who already believe that zoning codes mandate more parking than the market would provide (for which there is good empirical evidence), it’s a horrifying thought. 7. Yonah Freemark discusses how Hong Kong’s transit agency uses property development to internalize positive transit externalities and maintain (relative) independence from the municipality. 8. The WSJ reports on the strong market for downtown office space, especially compared to declining suburban office parks.

Environmental review vs. congestion pricing

One of the sickest paradoxes in American law has got to be the arduous environmental review that’s applied to transit and dense building projects, but I didn’t think it was this bad. From an article about San Mateo County residents bitching about being asked to pitch in for the roads they use: The earliest the city could set up congestion pricing would be 2015, after a lengthy environmental review process. Note that except for maybe a few toll booths or, more likely, cameras, a congestion charge doesn’t require any new construction. I’m really curious as to what statute makes such an absurd environmental review necessary – any readers care to take a guess?

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.

Premium link list

Recently I’ve been delaying posting a few things because I wanted to wait till I had more time to cover them, but I’m realizing that I’ll probably have new things to write about on the 15th (which is when regular posting will hopefully resume), so have at it – your first ever premium link list: 1. The Bowles-Simpson Plan is out (but apparently it’s not the final plan that will be presented to Obama), and it looks like a great deal for market urbanism.  Their “Zero Plan” is a broad base, low rate approach that eliminates all tax deductions and credits, including not only the mortgage-interest rate deduction that we’ve discussed earlier, but also the tax break that businesses get for providing employees with parking that Shoup criticized a few weeks ago.  (By the way, that first linked TPM article is by far the most comprehensive and concise outline of the plan that I’ve seen in the media so far.) 2. Cap’n Transit gives an overview of his local community group’s proposal for eliminating parking minimums in a politically-palatable way. Spoiler: it involves everybody’s favorite transit maps – frequency maps! People involved in DC’s recent moves towards parking reform should especially take note, since the success of their plan depends on the definition of “good transit service.” 3. Reinventing Parking has a post on illegal parking extortion in developing countries.  In India and Bangladesh, which Paul Barter discusses, the problem is parking contractors illegally raising prices.  In Bucharest, though, where I used to live, the “extortionists” were much less organized, usually gypsy street kids, who didn’t do much to stop you from parking, don’t actually provide protection for the car, and probably aren’t going to do anything to your car but guilt trip you if you don’t pay them.  In either […]

Another week, another consolation link list

Another week without posts (from me, at least), another giant consolation link list! I’ve got a lot of them piling up and probably won’t be back to regular posting for a few more days, so I’ll try to spread them out over a few posts. 1. Wendell Cox’s Demographia came out with its 2010 Demographic Residential Land & Regulation Cost Index and finds, surprise surprise!, that sprawling Sunbelt and Southern cities have both the least regulated housing markets the most affordable housing. Bill Fulton finds a few faults with the study, including its tendency to lump all land use regulation (whether pro-sprawl or pro-density) together. What surprises me more, though, is that the report seems to only take into account “new detached housing,” and yet its conclusions are being reported as being applicable to “housing” writ large. I didn’t read it in detail, but I don’t see any evidence that multifamily residences or the right to build densely and without parking were even considered. 2. Slum (re)development will probably be one of the biggest urbanism stories of the century, and Mumbai seems to be making some fateful decisions. I’m having trouble finding comparisons of how different countries are doing it, but I suspect the most successful, attractive, livable developments will be the ones where local squatters are given property rights and are allowed to control the pace of redevelopment. Anything else is likely to breed popular resentment and will probably result in a lot of glitzy megaprojects built by political insiders that aren’t well-integrated into the surrounding city. 3. The NYT has a story on a “split” among environmentalists over density, although it seems like the pro-density camp is clearly winning, at least institutionally within the environmentalist movement.  I think a more interesting story is how people who are first […]

Trending now

gentrification
Only 2 Ways to Fight Gentrification (you’re not going to like one of them)
The problem with “public” transportation
The Great American Streetcar Myth
O’Toole Under More Fire