Most Read: Are Self Driving Cars Just Us Ignoring the Real Issues?

I'm going to start a new series on the blog called "Most Read".  It will feature the most read article from the day before on The Direct Transfer Daily as well as some thoughts I have on it.  It's been hard to blog lately but I need to get into it again to put some half baked thoughts to screen.

Today's most read piece was one by Jim Bacon entitled "The Slow, Inevitable Demise of Traditional Mass Transit"   In it he talks about WMATA's declining transit patronage in the region and that part of the blame goes to the union while local government support will not be able to keep up with demands. 

He then mentions the blue state transit model failure which just seems like tossing red meat to me. 

By “blue state,” I refer to a set of attitudes that are most prevalent in blue states: a sympathy for transit unions, which means high compensation costs and low productivity; a reluctance to charge riders the full costs of providing their service, which depresses revenues; and a proclivity to seek federal aid, which comes with expensive regulatory strings attached.

I don't have sympathy for bad work rules but I do think people should be paid fair wages.  I'm not necessarily pro union when these things are blatantly wrong but since when did anyone pay the full cost of the transportation service they use?  Well, everyone pays full cost but it's just snuck out of your pocket instead of a direct charge.  As many have said before and many will say again, why do we always have to pull out the "pay for itself" trope.  We know that nothing does!  If we did our cities would look a LOT different as there's a lot of subsidies flying every which way.

When Kevin DeGood came on the podcast, he had the numbers to prove it.  Data liberalization is amazing! He found 5.5 percent of roads carry 55 percent of the traffic.  That's definitely not paying for itself  and it shows an over-reliance on highways in major cities that carry so many cars, they can't keep up.  The interstates between cities many times do actually cover costs in gas tax revenue.  Once we get into the details. interesting findings come out.

But let's step outside this often debated construct for a bit and talk about "shared-ridership revolution".  At first blush after watching the debate for a while, I'm going to come out and say I don't like it.  Sure there are first mile/last mile solutions that make sense and they can be useful in a pinch, I just don't like the inevitability of self driving cars and the demise of transit in cities because I think its short sighted.  I think Tom Vanderbilt's article on futurism pushed me more towards the skeptical side as well.  He shares points other have made...

As the psychologist George Lowenstein and colleagues have argued, in a phenomenon they termed “projection bias,” people “tend to exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes.” 

To me, bike share isn't usually the main focus of the topic while "Ride Hailing" otherwise known as Uber or Lyft is.  But these are just more convenient taxis and they are still two tons of metal running around on constrained streets in urban areas.  People also focus on self driving cars as if they are a panacea but I don't know if people noticed that 10 car BART trains and Muni buses and LRVs are always crush loaded at rush hour.  I'm sure many WMATA buses and trains are the same way.  

That is a GEOMETRY problem that these apps won't solve because they are projecting in their current paradigm. Suburban car problems.  Kind of like lots of tech and apps being 20 year old man problems.  If everyone in a city decided to hail a self driving car, we'd still have traffic but even more of it!  Think about those 60 bus riders each in those little google cars.  Still taking up way more space! 

The problem in my mind is that we continue to try and solve issues we created ourselves in a strange circular fashion. Technologists have always been saying we are going to keep moving out and will need mobility solutions for that change.  But going back to the "pay for itself" argument and the actual usage of roads, we find that the free roads are used to the point of congestion and are not actually supported at current "usage fee" rates.

So the question for me then is, are self driving cars the next freeway? Why are we trying to solve a problem (congestion and living too far from work) with more vehicles when all we have to do now is price roads accordingly and free up land uses?  When self driving car corridors get overused, are we going to have to price those corridors too?  Did we just build a whole system that went back to the old problem because we wanted a techno fix for something that only required economics?

Cities are still thriving.  People want to be near other people.  And while ride sharing is useful in cities now, it's only useful because transit many times is not.  Guess what the problem is usually with transit and even biking and walking.  CARS ARE IN THE WAY!  Give me self driving buses that come every two minutes in a grid with their own lanes.  Do you think we'll need as many self driving cars in cities then? I bet at some point we'll even have to create congestion cordons just for self driving cars.

So why are people saying transit will be changing under the disruption of the "shared ridership revolution"?  Instead of this circular problem I feel like we're creating, why not just address the main problems?  Housing affordability and road pricing.  Tech can't seem to wrap its collective heads around those problems though because right now, those are political problems.  So let's just build a car that will drive itself. 

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Podcast: Your Brain on Two Legs with Antonia Malchik

This week we talking with Antonia Malchik who recent wrote a piece at Aeon Magazine called "The End of Walking" We talk about experiences walking around the world and in foreign countries. We also talk about the importance of your brain in motor function.

Podcast: The Urban Displacement Project

Miriam Zuk of UC Berkeley joins me this week to talk about the Urban Displacement Project.  They take a look at gentrification and displacement in the Bay Area.  Definitely have a listen.

Podcast: Remaking California's Transportation System

This week I'm publishing a audio series that I did for the NRDC Urban Solutions program that discusses California's greenhouse gas policies and their effects on transportation policy.  It's gotten some good reviews but also a bit wonky, so I know you all will enjoy it.

Podcast: Indexing Livability for All Ages

This week we have Rodney Harrell of the AARP Public Policy Institute to talk about the Institute's new Livability Index.

Map Wire: A Change in the Pearl

At Reconnecting America we looked into a lot of streetcar projects.  For some the streetcar has become an example of the worst of transit planning.  Spending money for transit that's got a land use focus really gets people worked up.  But the maps we're looking at today are just going to look at one area of the streetcar, change in property values proximate to the alignment.  The other mobility issue is a whole other can of worms we can open at a later date.

One of the projects we worked on was looking at the value capture potential of the H Street Streetcar in DC.  In order to compare other lines, we looked at property value changes over time.  And as with other studies we had done on value capture, we found that values increase a lot when you start with a blank slate.

The key to creating value substantial enough to pay for infrastructure or affordable housing or anything else requires a lot of land, and a lot of land that is starting from zero or near zero.  This can mean vacant parcels or underutilized parcels which I discussed in the last map post. 

The maps below show two 6 year periods of the Pearl District, and you can see distinctly a lot of value being created where the vacant property of the rail yards were located West of the Post Office property.  It was interesting to see the changes after buildings were constructed.  I'd be interested to hear what others think of the maps.  You can find similar ones for Seattle and Tampa in the Map Room.  It would be interesting to look at the property value change now in 2015 vs 1997 when the streetcar plan was announced. 18 years is a good period of time to see what happened.

  [PDF 97-03] + [PDF 03-08]

A New Congestion Paradigm in LA

I don't get why we continue to focus on congestion in cities as something we need to "fix".  Repeatedly we focus on congestion as if when it were solved our problems would be over.  But congestion is the sign of a successful city, and curing it as Detroit has doesn't seem to be the right answer either. 

But that doesn't really matter if we have created a better system of mobility and access.  Back in 2011 CNU was in Madison and Joe Cortright was having a discussion with Tim Lomax of TTI about their mobility report which measures hours of delay.  Confused by how they measured delay and thinking about my own situation, I noted out loud that I didn't count.  I never saw any of the congestion on the roads because as a BART rider, I wasn't a part of it...yet we had one of the WORST ratings.  It's because we as a society are often only talking about congestion on roads, and I wasn't on the road, but I had more reliable access to my job than anyone on the road.

This is partially why "congestion" in its current use is bad metric for deciding transportation investment.  We don't account for moving people around more efficiently, just cars.  And there are a lot of people that don't seem to count.

But this new plan being discussed in Los Angeles is going to show the benefits to thinking about mobility in a different way.  The old way of "congestion" would increase according to the environmental report.  The Level of Service Standard that has been used for environmental reporting would increase intersections receiving an E or F congestion score from 18% to 36% under this plan that includes increasing dedicated lanes for buses and bikes.  

In most places this is a red alert to widen the roads and speed up the cars. But under the newer more mobility focused measure of average vehicle miles traveled the plan would increase VMT to 35 million miles per day instead of 38 million which would come if the plan were not implemented.   

3 million miles per day means a lot when we're talking about emissions and mobility, showing that just because a few more interesections are more congested, providing mobility for more people has great benefits.

Of course the opposition still lives in the old paradigm and is upset. Richard Katz, a former member of the MTA board still worries about "congestion". 

"Taking away lanes, which creates congestion, to try and force people to choose a different method of transportation other than the car, is a horrible way to solve a congestion problem," he said. "Why? It creates more congestion … and people don't respond well to being forced to do things."

I would argue that we're forced to drive cars.  Our system should give us opportunities that don't involve driving.  But we know how that works in most places.  LA doesn't have more room to expand the roads, so there has to be another way.

Others are also upset at not being able to focus on congestion anymore.

"Cars are just going to sit there," said Don Parker, a board member with Fix the City, an advocacy group fighting the plan. "So labeling it a mobility plan is just not reflective of what the plan actually does."

Of course what he doesn't mention is that if cars just sit there, it's less likely they can hurt people in collisions at high speed.  Or that they aren't creating greenhouse gasses.  Or that people are finding more sustainable means of mobility.

While we don't know where the plan will eventually end up, this is an exciting move that we'll hopefully start to see in other cities over time.  Thinking less about "congestion" which we've been trying hard to fix since we started building freeways over 60 years ago will benefit everyone more.  Instead, let's think of how we can get the most people to the places they want to go.  Car optional.

Podcast: Discussing San Antonio Transportation

This week on the podcast we're joined by Trish Wallace and Jillian Harris of the San Antonio Transportation Department to talk about the cities current past and current plans for mobility.

Map Wire: Calculating Underutilized Land on Transit Lines

For Realizing the Potential: Expanding Housing Opportunities Near Transit, a report done for FTA and HUD, we looked at five transit lines that were existing or under construction at the time. The lines included different transit modes including streetcar, light rail, and commuter rail. 

This map shows the method we created to look at underutilized land, or land where the building values were worth less than the land on which they were located.  Parcel data is always tricky given different estimating methodologies and tax systems as well as values attached to different land use types, but using this ratio gives an idea of how much land along a line might be available for redevelopment.

In the maps you can see that an established line such as Boston's Fairmount has less underutilized parcels than say Charlotte.  The parcels are also much smaller.  But Charlotte, based on the maps posted last week, has a lot of industrial land.  There's also something to be said for industrial preservation, and transit lines can create a lot of pressure for redevelopment, even in places with productive industrial uses.  It's a less mentioned form of displacement that has been happening in cities with industrial cores that have been on the receiving end of a lot of redevelopment and adaptive reuse. 

In any event, this map might be of interest. 

 

[Large Size PDF]

Map Wire: Land Uses in 5 Transit Corridors

Back in 2008 we finished a report called Realizing the Potential: Expanding Housing Opportunities Near Transit.  It was one of the first times that HUD and FTA had worked together and was a starting point for those agencies eventually working together as the Partnership for Sustainable Communities along with the EPA.  You can see many of the recommendations for FTA and HUD to work together in this action plan from 2008 presented to congress.

But in the Realizing the Potential report, we looked at the affordable housing situations of five different rail corridors. I did 5 maps for each line looking at land use and housing data. The map below represents the different land uses on those corridors in Boston along the Fairmount Line, the Denver West Corridor which was recently completed, the Portland Streetcar, the Charlotte South Corridor, and Minneapolis' Hiawatha Line.  Each map individually can be found in the report or in the map room.  I believe this was put together for a powerpoint.

 

[Full Size PDF]

The interesting part is the huge difference in developable land on each line.  While Boston is a built out corridor, Charlotte has a lot of industrial properties and large parcels that could be changed to housing.  This was a fun map to make, but I must say the Boston parcel data was not fun to work with.