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Tag Randal O’Toole

Midnight parking round-up

1. Donald Shoup makes up for last week with an interesting piece on how America’s tax structure biases employers towards providing parking for their employees, similar to how untaxed employer-provided healthcare shapes that industry. 2. Back in August Randal O’Toole asked for proof that minimum parking requirements force Walmart to build more parking than they otherwise would. I think this is a bit of a red herring, since obviously parking reform would have more of an impact in areas that are more urban than where Walmart typically locates, but lo and behold, here’s the proof, at least in the case of one store in Northeastern Connecticut. In this case it looks like the parking minimums are going to be reduced, but I question whether smaller companies without Wal-Mart’s clout and money could have demanded such changes. 3. A survey of urban planners, supposedly biased towards big cities, found that 60% feel that the free market would not provide an adequate amount of parking if developers were not given parking minimums, with only 1 in 10 believing that the market would provide too much parking. The author of the paper, called “Are suburban TODs over-parked?” (.pdf), and published in the Journal of Public Transportation, found that suburban TOD projects in the East Bay and Portland supplied too much parking for the amount of cars that were actually parked. The authors unfortunately don’t do a great job of linking the parking surplus directly to parking minimums, but they do provide some interesting empirical evidence for what Matt Yglesias called “parking feedback loops” and what the study’s authors term a “virtuous cycle” – the idea that parking itself is a barrier to walkability, and thus removing spaces will lessen the demand for parking, even if nobody was using the spots that were removed.

Toronto’s new zoning code

by Stephen Smith Matt Yglesias points to an article about Toronto’s new zoning code. The story is short on details, although the lowering of parking minimums near transit and overall simplification of the code seem like appealing features to Market Urbanists. I did, however, find a blog post from last year about the proposed changes, which has a lot more details. Keep in mind that this is from last year and so it might not still be relevant, but if anyone’s interested in digging a little deeper into the new code, there’s a good place to start. This part, though, is not very encouraging: The new zoning also takes a more coherent approach to minimum parking provisions, requiring a lot less parking for condos/apartments or office buildings that are in the downtown core or on heavy transit lines. Many new projects don’t need the amount of parking required by zoning, and developers would be glad not to pay the extra cost to provide it. But the overall reduction in minimum parking requirements is disappointingly limited — the planner in charge of the project, Joe D’Abramo, estimated it at about 10% less compared to previous requirements. There also seems to be a lot of New Urbanist-style regulation – for example, making it more difficult to build drive-thrus and driveways – that we don’t necessarily support. When you look at the revisions as a whole I doubt that there’s more urban-forcing than urban-allowing, but I do wish that they’d work harder on repealing things like parking minimums and density restrictions before trying mandate density. Even if the mandatory New Urbanist regulations are minor, they give ammo to people like Randal O’Toole and the Cato/Reason bunch to claim that urbanism is being forced down people’s throats rather than simply being allowed. New Urbanist […]

HSR Urbanists: “We Are All O’Tooles Now”

I probably won’t make any friends today, but now I’ve read one too many urbanist (many who’s ideas I usually respect) use unsound logic to support high speed rail. This argument often includes something like this: “…and furthermore, highways and airports don’t come close to paying for themselves, therefore high speed rail need not meet that hurdle either.” Here’s some examples of the typical contradiction many usually-reasonable urbanists are making when arguing for high speed rail- Ryan Avent in an article plagued with this pseudo-logic: Government is going to build more capacity. Given that, what is likely to be the best investment, all things considered? Available alternatives, as it turns out, are not all that attractive. Roads do not appear to pay for themselves any more than railways do. Receipts from the federal gas tax come close to covering federal highway expenditures, but gas is used on highways and non-highways alike, indicating that at the federal level, highways are subsidized. and: I respect Mr Cowen very much, but I think it’s long past time we stopped listening to libertarians on the issue of whether or not to build high-speed rail. Who will ask whether road construction remotely passes any of the tests they’re so prepared to push on rail? And if we begin charging an appropriate fee on drivers to maintain existing roads and reduce congestion, what do they all think will happen to land use patterns and transportation mode share? Some have emailed to ask me why I dislike Randal O’Toole so much.  The main reason is because people like Avent will always be able to point to the government highway-lover from CATO and rashly proclaim all libertarians have forever lost credibility when it comes to transportation and land use.  Of course, Avent’s narrow-mindedness on this topic deserves contempt […]

O’Toole Under More Fire

At Streetsblog, Ryan Avent presented a scorching attack on the most notorious free-market impostor – Randal O’Toole: Taking Liberties With the Facts for his consistent hypocrisy: The Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole gets under the skin of many of those interested in building a more rational and green metropolitan geography, but in many ways he’s an ideal opponent. It would be difficult to concoct more transparently foolish arguments than his. The man is an engine of self-parody. The requisite identification of “libertarian” contradictions: This is one thing I’ve never understood about the libertarian love affair with highways; they seem utterly blind to the fact that it has required and continues to require massive government action to build and maintain the road network. The interstate highway system is perhaps the single largest government intervention in the economy in the 20th century. Reading O’Toole you’d think it was a wonder of the free market. And with ease, Ryan points out the data needed to take O’Toole to task on his persistent assertion the “roads pay for themselves”: The source of his blindness on the issue seems to be due to his belief that roads pay for themselves, and that congestion exists only because governments shift gas tax revenue to pay for transit and other smart growth projects. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In the first place, gas tax revenue comes nowhere near paying for roads. Federal gasoline tax revenues cover barely half of the annual budget of the Federal Highway Administration. Add in diesel tax revenues and you’re still short. And that’s just the federal budget picture. In response, Randal replies to critics in the comments of his latest post of his “Antiplanner” blog: The Antiplanner sees the American dream as freedom of lifestyle choices and opportunities to realize those choices […]

Yglesias Has My Head Spinning…

In his last two urbanism-related posts, Matthew Yglesias makes great points only to dissolve them in a vat of unrelated statements posed as conclusions.  His logical inconsistency seems to invalidate his otherwise pretty good blogging on urbanism. A couple days ago, Matthew blogged about regulation of neighborhood retail, quoting a DC blog: “In DC, zoning laws make that idea [mixed-use retail] prohibitive, and what the zoning laws don’t cover ANC and neighborhood groups do in their zealousness to protect residents from interspersing residences with commercial activity.” …. I really and truly wish libertarians would spend more time working on this kind of issue. And I also wish that ordinary people would think harder about these kind of regulations. Yes!  More, please?   But then, the next sentence leaves me saying, “huh?”: I’m a big government liberal. I believe business regulations are often needed. But still, there ought to be a presumption that people can do what they want. So, I really don’t understand what this post has to do with libertarians anymore – why even mention them. It seems logically inconsistent to presume people can do what they want, while presuming a big government can regulate their economic choices. Now, on to today’s post: Randall O’Toole is a relentless advocate for highways and automobile dependency in the United States. Consequently, I don’t agree with him about very much.  But the thing I consistently find most bizarre about him, is that the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation have both agreed to agree with O’Toole that his support for highways and automobile dependency is a species of libertarianism. then… Central planning, of course, is the reverse of libertarianism. So if promoting alternative transportation is central planning, then building highways everywhere must be freedom! But of course in the real world building highways […]

Are You a Wright or Friedman Urbanist?

In a post blogger Eric Orozco called, ‘forerunner candidate for “most incisive blog post” of the year,’ Daniel Nairn of Discovering Urbanism discussed the seemingly conflicted camps of libertarianism when it comes to Urbanism.  His observations are based upon the comments in the Volokh article on planning and walkability linked in the previous post. Daniel (a non-libertarian) presents the opposing libertarian factions as The Wright Group, after Frank Lloyd Wright and his romanticism about individualistic prairie living and The Friedman Group, which “believes that the spatial distribution of development ought to be determined by a free market.” The Wright group seems to favor optimizing individual autonomy through spatial living arrangements even if doing so requires centralizing economic and political authority to some extent. The Friedman group seems to favor optimizing individual autonomy through market decisions even if doing so results in more people living in situations where full control over private property is compromised in some way. Daniel’s insightful choice of figureheads fascinates me from a philosophical point of view.  Frank Lloyd Wright was hardly a libertarian, but had strong individualist tendencies, and is said to be the model for Howard Roark’s character in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.  Milton Friedman, a Nobel Laurette Economist, is probably one of the most famous figures of modern libertarian thought.  Despite Friedman’s steadfast defense of liberty, he had favored government roads on occasion. I think most would agree that The Friedman Group, as Daniel describes it, is more closely aligned with the thesis of Market Urbanism and the ideas of emergent order of the land marketplace.  Hayek or even Rothbard may also be considered appropriate, although less famous substitutes as figurehead. (note: I’m not sure what Daniel means by,  “even if doing so results in more people living in situations where full control over […]

Matt Yglesias fails to make the right case against highways

Matt Yglesias is one of the best mainstream bloggers on land use/transportation that I know of. As one blogger (who I don’t recall right now) once said, his urban planning and transportation posts could be blogs in their own right. However, it’s puzzling that in an article for Cato Unbound, he comes up with such a pathetic rejoinder to the O’Toole/Cox/Poole “vulgar libertarian” transportation cabal, who don’t seem to have ever met a road they didn’t like: Or consider the fact that Randall [sic] O’Toole is indignant about the prospect of public expenditures on mass transit systems, but appears to have little to say about public funding of highways. This, too, looks more like a case of narrow business interests than sterling free market principles. While Yglesias’ instincts are right – current transportation markets in America are highly distorted – the reason they’re distorted has little to do with the ways highways are financed. Based on some basic figures, Randal O’Toole concludes that the vast majority of road funding – over 80% – comes out of user fees. Now, of course there are still some subsidies there, but it’s really nothing compared to the subsidies that mass transit systems receive, which in America never even come close to covering operating costs, never mind capital expenditures. Now, there are some problems with the 80% number, such as the government’s favorable access to bond markets and the legacy of infrastructure that wasn’t paid for with user fees, but all in all, it’s hard to argue that roads have a subsidy advantage over mass transit. However, that’s not to say that Yglesias doesn’t have a point when he says that libertarians and conservatives have blind spots when it comes to how they see transportation. But the real government benefit that the road/car system […]

Free Market Impostors

I subscribe to the CATO Institute’s Daily Dispatch email. I enjoy ready the daily briefings of current events from a free-market perspective. But, once in a while, my capitalist stomach turns when they mention transit, usually accompanied by a quote from Randal O’Toole. Usually he bashes some transit plan, and gives some statistics about the inferiority of transit. Here’s a quote form the most recent Dispatch: Cato senior fellow Randal O’Toole writes: “A mile of rail transit line typically costs more to build than a four- to eight-lane freeway and typically carries fewer than half as many people as a single freeway lane mile. Federal funding for rail transit comes out of gasoline taxes and other highway user fees, and in most cases those funds would be more cost effective if spent on other transportation facilities.” Does this sound particularly “free market” to you? He’s just saying one socialist system is better than the other. On top of that he consistently presents only half the facts. You don’t even have to dig into his sources of data to know he is pulling a trick on the reader. Can you detect the deceptions? Yep, he discusses construction costs and completely neglects land costs, then focuses on cost/mile (as opposed to the more relevant cost/trip), while falsely inferring that the costs of automobile use is fully paid by fees and gas tax. Out in the country, land may be cheap and costs can be neglected. But, in urban areas where transit becomes more competitive, land is significantly more expensive. If one neglects land costs, one could justify tearing down several 60 story, $1000/sf office buildings Midtown Manhattan to build a 10 lane highway instead of an underground subway. I have a hard time respecting anyone who willingly neglects real costs (not just […]

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