Tuesday Night Notes

I don't know if I want my buses to be described as “Quiet as a tomb”
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If Oklahoma City builds a streetcar before much of the country...
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The opposition in Madison wants to pull an Austin by having an election before all the facts are in. This happened in 2000 and things worked out pretty well....right?
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Streetcars and traffic are tricky. Yonah is right that these issues should be dealt with but every place is different and will have different solutions.
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Salt Lake City residents can have more bars! Put them near transit they say.

"Clustering bars near public transit, they agree, could reel in visitors, reduce drunken driving and send a signal that Utah's capital doesn't shut down after dark. "

Sunday Night Notes

Design of train stations is important. My favorite airport in the US is Austin, because when you get off the plane, the high ceilings make you feel free from the cramped space. I think good train stations can give that same feeling.
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Salt Lake City is looking at Streetcar network plans. Just another arrow in the quiver.
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The Houston Chronicle interviewed the outgoing chairman of Metro. From afar, it seems like he's done a good job at moving the network forward. I hope he gets replaced with someone as good. Another interesting thing to note is the opposition from the congressional delegation. Sometimes I have to wonder why cities get represented by the suburbs, which seems to happen a lot, especially in Texas.

What is "Economic Development"?

What comes to mind when someone says that light rail, streetcars, or BRT will bring economic development? My first guess is that people imagine that more buildings will be constructed along the route and the economic impact of that construction is what comes to mind. But what about other measures of economic development like worker productivity and connectivity to the regional employment pool?

I think too often economic development comes in one form when we're talking about transit, which I think might be going down the wrong path. We know that transportation decisions which provide or increase access to a place are likely to increase its value and ability to develop. But what about all the other benefits such as fostering denser employment clusters or connecting workers of all economic levels to regional jobs? Increases in the quality of workers that an employer has access to is another measure of economic development. Allowing workers to save money on transportation in order to spend it elsewhere is local economic development as well.

The related issue is who gains from this economic development. With the building construction based economic development, its easy to assume that developers and the people that buy the new condos are the only ones who benefit. This type of thinking creates a flash-point on which opposition to your project can zero in on to say you're not helping the people that need it the most. It's a valid concern but it's also missing out on the creation of tax base that goes back into the budget for the whole city to use. Denser areas for their part are huge economic engines. Not discussing this larger view of economic development is doing a disservice to the project, especially when you think through how the specific project will or will not help the situation.

If the main reason for a project is economic development, it would be helpful to describe the economic outcomes that you expect to achieve with the project. A streetcar or light rail line is going to provide a mobility benefit, but it is how we talk about those benefits that ultimately allow people to understand what the project is really about. Many projects don't do a good job at this and are maligned by the opposition. Many bad projects get oversold, hoping that "economic development" will save the day. I believe the key is to figure out whether the project is doing what its supposed to be doing, and move forward from there.

Thursday Night Notes

Should companies buy naming rights to stations in order to help pay for them?
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America's greenest Mayor moving on.
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Should Mayor's act more like CEO's and push their city's "brand"?
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Wednesday Night Notes

Steve Patterson discusses the passing of an influential figure in city planning's past who often advocated for widening streets and euclidean zoning.
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There's been an interesting discussion going on about industry clusters. I wish I had more time to write about them. The interesting thing is that these clusters don't necessarily have to be urban. Rural clusters such as wind farms in Texas and wine making in Sonoma show lots of promise in raising wages while other clusters such as Tech are looking to intensify to provide amenities on par with what urban workers are looking for. I hope others tackle this subject because I'd like to see some opinions on the cluster's effect on urbanism and urbanization in these rural areas.
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A pretty cool spread on the future of Denver. via Denver Infill Blog
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Happy Birthday Streetsblog.net. Here's to next year!
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I've also started tweeting more article links. Follow @theoverheadwire or visit the bottom right of the blog for more links.

Light Rail Kills Babies 2

That's what the opponents told the folks in Salt Lake City. They've come a long way since then and are probably doing the best job of just getting things built of anyone in the country.

But now the opponents are going with the next common denominator attack. If they build light rail, say they should have built BRT. If they built BRT they would be saying only use buses such as is happening in Oakland. This is at the time when UTA is actually building out a real transit network with all different transit modes including streetcars, light rail, BRT and bus networks.

"I don't think it's done any great favors to transit down here," said Salt Lake City resident Stephen Pace, who led the anti-rail group Utahns for Responsible Public Spending. He said UTA should have focused instead on buses that have the same right-of-way preference over cars as trains, but are more flexible and require a less massive investment.

This is the ugly side of the mode wars where people who fight it don't think ANY money should be spent on transit, even if they say in public we should. It's not a nod to smart planning ideas but rather what is cheaper. It shows because these attacks come amongst vigorous transit expansion in all modes. It's also interesting that opponents are starting to attack the conservative credibility of UTA's leaders. A lot of the anti-tax folks are coming out to argue against any spending via taxes.

Pace rails against the "so-called" elected officials who champion fiscally conservative values but are "just as deep in the federal trough as anybody else" to fund TRAX extensions into their communities.

It makes me wonder, what is fiscally conservative anyway in terms of development and infrastructure expansion? Is it doing nothing?

This is also happening in Tampa where anti-tax conservatives are starting to feel as if they were left behind by their elected officials who understand that infrastructure is better funded collectively. The polarizing effects of the national debates are starting to trickle down to pure ideologies.

How ironic that Republicans, one of whom I first supported over 20 years ago, and one who pledged never to impose new taxes when he came seeking my assistance in running his first campaign several years ago, would be the leading proponents of a new tax that could siphon as much as $300 million per year from the residents of Hillsborough County.

What's even better is that the author of the Tampa article also believes that people have a choice whether to spend money on gasoline or not, even when they construction of the communities they live in are based on the automobile alone.

Sharpe writes that the proposed tax increase of $85 per person is "... less than the three-week price rise in the cost of gasoline." Perhaps. But the option of paying for gas is ours and not an imposed burden by our government.

Funny that imposed burden.

Infrastructure Spending

There's an article in the New York Times that discusses the lack of major infrastructure projects around the country funded by the Federal Government. For the most part it seems as if major infrastructure projects are having to go at it alone locally.

Another approach is to finance new projects several notches smaller in cost and boldness — and in contribution to economic growth. Denver and Salt Lake City, for example, are extending light rail and bus lines into the outlying suburbs, at a cost of less than $5 billion apiece.

The Federal Government is a limited partner in these investments. For example while the Feds pay 90% of freeway expansion, more recent experience for these transit projects shows there is only a 50% match, and in more recent new starts reports that has been sliding down. Denver for example is asking for less than 40%.

With federal funds dwindling it also begs the question, if the Federal Government is not going to give regions funding for projects, why are regions sending the federal government any gas tax money? Sometimes it seems like a fairly inefficient funnel. Ultimately the MPO is the acting federal government at a regional level where there usually is no real governance. Since regions are the economic engines for the country, it makes a little sense but the federal government has too much power to tell regions what they can and can't spend money on.

But the benefits of having the federal funding mechanism dialed into the region is during a severe downturn. Ultimately that funnel can become a spigot pushing projects faster than they would normally go by providing jobs. In thinking about it this way, perhaps something they can do to help places like Denver or Salt Lake City is take over the capital funding for already under construction projects and allow those cities to use their existing capital money for operations or other projects. There are plenty of places that already have transit networks that could get pushed up if there were a guaranteed capital outlay.

I don't quite understand why the large goal oriented projects have stopped or are at least slowed. My only guess is that things have become so politicized and the no taxes groups have taken over the political landscape, making everyone else afraid to make a decision without getting hammered politically. Ultimately there needs to be a way to pay for needed infrastructure improvements, even outside of a crisis.

The Usual Statements

Will there ever be a day when we don't see this sentence in a newspaper article?

Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain said the N.C. Department of Transportation, "from the top down, recognizes that north Mecklenburg's roads are overwhelmed, and Barry Moose's comment shows we need to move the traffic through our area faster."

More sprawl subsidy on the way!

Austin's Trends

There is a lot to like but a lot to reframe in a recent article in the Austin Chronicle. CAMPO, the local MPO is looking to go a different direction with the regional transportation planning they've been doing and has stumbled upon visioning as an acceptable way to move forward. Unfortunately survey respondents are split between what is basically the Envision Central Texas model and the sprawl as usual. But why are they split? Is it because they weren't told the true costs or that they don't mind wasting their money? A telling part of why folks might not have chosen the more sustainable method is the following:

The trends concept is basically a recipe for continued sprawl: It leaves regional development patterns up to current policies and market trends. It assumes that all $2.4 billion worth of projects in the current investment pipeline get built.

Market trends? Since when was sprawl market based? I always assumed it was fueled by a big fat subsidy to home owners through unequal housing subsidies and road subsidies. I must be wrong since the frame is that it's actually the market pushing that direction. The biggest challenge for advocates as shown by this paragraph is reframing the debate. We need to jump on it and own it. We should be the fiscally responsible ones, the ones who care about whether locals get to keep their hard earned money. It's also because shifting demographic and market trends are swinging away from what they used to be.

I do like the idea of allocating 50% of monies to the centers in the region which would go along way towards improving transit ridership numbers and hopefully focusing growth on employment as well as housing. Hopefully they actually build transit into the centers instead of around them. I'd probably focus on that first along with better pedestrian and bike amenities.

But there are many other considerations to deal with. First is affordability. How much does that housing and transportation cost eat up a family budget. How much money is going to be left in the typical Austinite's pocket by this plan? What are the citizens going to get out of it? That determines how the local economy grows. This should be part of the decision making matrix. Too often these decisions are made in silos. Integrate them with housing plans, water plans, employment plans, state plans, school district bonds and every other plan under the sun. How are you going to house your workers affordably? Is it more affordable housing plans or is it allowing greater supply creation? How are you going to provide energy on a smart grid to all these people? How does that work together with transportation? Trolley bus wires? We could go on...

Another is how much money can be saved in terms of infrastructure if you go with the centers plan. If you spend less on sprawl, how much are you going to have in your pocket for other worthy investments? Transform did this in the Bay Area with stunning results. Hopefully we can focus on what people care about, saving money. In the end as Professor Davies always said, if you want to get people to pay attention, "hit them in the pocketbook".

Monday Night Notes

Hartford has been brutalized by parking. The loss of tax base to the virus of surface parking is staggering.
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Can you reduce GHGs and still grow?
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Is Paris more accessible than London? Some physicists say yes because the ants told them. Via Price Tags
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Can space be found for affordable housing in New York City?
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An interesting thought, the city as a living machine. How can we bring cities back to a pre-city natural state while still growing? This is an idea that is being explored in many places. A variant on this was discussed last year when discussing plans for the Lloyd district in Portland. It opened up some interesting discussion in the comments.