Use the Land to Pay the Tab?

The city of Charlotte is contemplating buying a dead mall. The same dead mall is at the end of the proposed streetcar route. It would be interesting if they would decide to view it as an opportunity to be innovative in their financing. If they go Portland style, they could put together a development agreement and sell to a developer who might be able to do something interesting and urbanist with the property, provided there is a market for such a thing. It's also quite possible that this development could pay for part of the streetcar, some affordable housing and other amenities.

Does anyone know why Charlotte would want to buy this property? It's not clear that there is a true goal in mind, which could hinder any thinking, innovative or otherwise.

Do Not Count Here

A lot of what I do at work depends on the census. I need data to make accurate maps and analyze trends in TOD and employment and other things. My current favorite dataset is the LEHD. Apparently though the folks at the census know that its hard to count. I don't doubt that it is. But I really wish that Michelle Bachman's district would have a big green dot on it. Perhaps one that says don't count at all. That way we would get rid of her and her census idiocy all together. I also hope the rolling averages work out from the ACS. It would be really annoying if they skip the long form in 2010 and then we were stuck with lackluster data until 2020. We already have to suffer 10 year old data. Think about where you were and what you were doing in 2000. Things changed a bit since then?

The Market Must be Right

There's an article from London Ontario with the ever awesome Troy Russ of Glatting Jackson discussing what light rail can and can't do. One of the things it can't do is change the market around its stations. While there is a lot of hope out there that just building a light rail line will solve most if not all the worlds problems, hope alone won't make it so.

"The biggest misconception about transit is it's the reason development happens," said Russ, a planner in an American company, Glatting Jackson, who has designed rail lines in Charlotte, Pittsburgh and Orlando and stations in Denver.

Much development we've seen with recent light rail lines has been from the ability to expand the sphere of a market like downtown, but not change it. The line also has the power to shape an existing market. This is what the Portland Streetcar did when it pushed most of the development in downtown for the last decade along its corridor. I also believe that the streetcar allowed the market in Portland to feed on itself creating a synergy that wasn't possible without it or regulations that shaped growth around it.

So I would urge caution when pumping up that local light rail project or streetcar as the answer to a lack of development pressure. Alone without other regulatory help that swings the pendulum away from today's road paradigm, the tracks will lay dormant. But if you can figure out where the market is going to be next and lay down the rules, it's likely that shaping the development will be as easy as aligning poles on a magnet.

Setting the Table for a Buffet

Perhaps a knowledgeable and keen businessman such as Warren Buffet is the key to restoring the railroads to prominence in this country. It would be interesting to see if such a large buy in BNSF is going to give others a small push to start thinking about passenger rail as a buy situation as well. One of the things that I think he will benefit from are the billions of dollars that will go into rail lines between cities for high speed rail. Because the government is pushing harder for HSR than anything else, and so far it's a popular program, he knows that if he plays correctly within the confines of the current government parameters, the sky is the limit. Who knows, perhaps he'll be on track to follow in Vanderbilt's footsteps.

Spinning the Dials

The state is stepping forward to do scenario plans for the State of California. It will be interesting to see what the wizards over at Calthorpe associates can put together. They've done similar work for Salt Lake City, Austin, and Portland. But I don't think anyone has seen it done at this level before.

But even if a formal state plan doesn't emerge, Vision California could affect state policy. The impetus to reduce carbon emissions is one example: State agencies eventually could draw on the studies to require local governments to allow additional high-density development near bus and train stops. "Once we build the base cases, we have a tool where we can spin the dials," Calthorpe said. "Let's just get the information together. That's a giant step forward in itself."

Ultimately the scenarios will show how much the path we are going down now will cost. My guess is that it will be shocking but educational to know how much we just toss away.

Sunday Night Notes

I wish there were more time in the day. I have some land value and transportation reading to catch up on.
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Senators driving buses? Electric ones?
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If the Corridor Cities high ridership route is so circuitous, then why does the model say it will get more riders? When do we get to blow up the new starts process? And when do we get to stop wasting money on sprawling development that creates these situations?
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It's quite an intense process to secure rights of way especially in Dallas on the way to the airport.
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Richard Layman posted this about innovators. I thought it was worth the read.

Setting Up Fiscal Sustainability

I was interested to see former Texas State Rep Mike Krusee talking about the subsidization of roads and others at the CNU Transportation Networks conference talking about his conversion from evil, especially after we know he screwed Austin back in 2000 and 2004 essentially getting them into the mess they are in now in a somewhat roundabout way.

What was especially interesting was to hear him mention that he was the one that wanted to look at how much roads cost and thus authorized the study to index how much roads cost in Texas. What did they find? No road pays for itself. None. Curiously, that study or any mention of it exists no where on the TxDOT site. The only memory of it existing is on the blogs that picked it up after it showed up again in a newsletter. We covered this back in 2007 and notice that the pages that once kept this information front and center at TxDOT are gone.

It seems like information like this would be extremely powerful in pointing out everywhere around the country that essentially our way of funding expansion of roads now is broken. And even though he's not one of my favorite people for many reasons, Krusee made a basic point that I think is important even if we probably don't agree on the outcomes. We have enough money in the system. We just need to start allocating it correctly.

Over the past 50 years, Krusee argued, the federal government was using tax money that came by and large from cities to subsidize roads to areas without access otherwise. "City dwellers have subsidized the land purchases and the development costs out in the suburbs," said Krusee. What's more, the gas tax, which city dwellers pay when driving on city roads, but which goes to freeways largely outside of urban cores, is "a huge transfer of wealth from the cities to the suburbs to build these rings."

This admission is important, and it points the way towards sustainability for the whole urban economic system. Once we realize that we can't keep expanding roads(or sewer, electrical systems which have similar costs to the roads in terms of return according to Scott Bernstein) further and further out, and that the goals of the interstate system have been co-opted by suburban development forces for fiscally and environmentally unsustainable practices, the more of an effect we'll have on changing every citizens fortunes, not just those who build sprawl.

This also brings me to a point that Scott Bernstein made at the conference, that in these hard economic times, we need to really focus on how these investments will create value and wealth for people and cities in hard economic times over the long run. As my college professor Shane Davies always said, if you want to make change, you "hit people in the pocketbook".

Stories Like This

When I see headlines like this, It makes me a bit upset.

"Woman Raped Along Uptown Light Rail Line"

Not just because someone was violated against their will, but also because the insertion of along Uptown Light Rail Line vilifies the line itself for something it really had nothing to do with. If you read closer into the story, the woman was not riding the light rail line and was assaulted downtown walking on a sidewalk. Could have been any sidewalk and she could have been leaving any bar. But the headline screams "transit is dangerous". These kind of associations happen all the time and will continue to happen. I just wish they didn't.

Monday Night Notes

Chris Leinberger tells us that "value capture" is the term of the next year. Though I wish he would dig a bit deeper.
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Izmir imports trams from China.
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Is McCrory for transit or against it? He likes the train when he's in Tampa, but doesn't want to spend money for the streetcars or an extension of light rail. Kay Hagen understands.

Hagan rode to her new Charlotte office – a symbolic short hop – on the Lynx light rail line, a reminder that earlier this year, she secured $24 million for the Charlotte Area Transit System

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Edmonton will levy a fee on suburban developers to pay for new transit.

Job Centers Should Be Center

As Becks notes, I think its important to start thinking 20 years ago about transbay capacity. Unfortunately we haven't had a real conversation in the region about it. A second tube (I believe with four tracks for commuter rail and BART) is certainly needed to reinforce San Francisco and Oakland as the central job centers of the region. But why waste $10B on a new tube as Rafael from CAHSR blog says in the comments when you could be creating more jobs in the regions other centers.

Instead of demanding the construction of a second BART tube for $10 billion, perhaps we should be asking why everybody and their grandmother absolutely, positively has to work in downtown San Francisco to begin with.

I'm pretty sure San Francisco's CBD only has a certain small share of the region's overall jobs, perhaps 10-15% at most. I'm guessing here but for the most part this is the case in most of the country. But the reality is that since the jobs are clustered so tightly, they demand usage of alternative transport. They also are places of agglomeration and its not an issue of the execs getting a corner office but where face to face meetings and deals happen at lunch. (This is a whole other topic but I don't believe E-working is every going to replace working in an office with other people) There is a reason why the first BART system was built, because leaders of the area wanted to be the Banking Center of the West Coast and needed that critical mass of density and prestige to achieve it.

Another issue here is that of sprawl. There is this belief that the highways and housing policies were what caused the sprawl with the thought that more people could just drive into the central city. But in reality its even more nuanced than that. We've been building these roads out but when we do that we create these job centers and edge cities on the periphery that increase the outward migration pattern. People keep moving out and towards the exact point at which they can have a thirty minute commute or less from their job center. For jobs such as finance or research or science that are transit oriented, this means less people taking transit and more people deciding to drive their cars. I'm fairly confident that less Chevron employees take transit to work these days. It also means less urban office parks with parking lots that increase reliance on SOVs even more. We see this with Pleasanton and the continued movement of people out to Stockton.

If we're truely going to be transit oriented and sustainable in this region, we can't put a cap on the jobs in the center cities and continue to push jobs out to the periphery. If you don't spend that $10B on a second tube and push for more development (residential and employment) in BART's current reach in the inner East and West bay and even more money on an actual urban rapid transit network to connect to the existing bus network, I would argue that you're going to be spending much much more money to try and get people to and from their exurban and suburban job centers let alone the difference in city services (water sewer police fire) that must be supplied to all of these new suburbs and growth.