The Many Reasons for the Decline In Car Culture

Car culture seems to be declining worldwide, and urbanization and technology may play a big part in that. Millennials are more willing to live in cities and stay there rather than move to suburbs, unlike the previous generation. This means that they’re less likely to own cars and more likely to take public transit, walk, or use private taxis like Uber. Not only that, social media allows people to stay in touch without ever leaving their home, and e-commerce makes it possible for people to purchase things online, decreasing the overall number of trips that people need to make. The number of cars per driver in the US has fallen from 1.2 in 2007 to 1.15 this year.

This trend is global. For instance, in London, cycling levels have risen rapidly over the last couple years, to the point where cycling now makes up one-sixth of all traffic in central London. This is a record-breaking level of cycling in the city, and part of it is due to the increased availability of bike share docks and bicycles. In San Francisco, the majority of trips are made without private cars, and it’s been that way for several years. In addition, the prevalence of shared-use structures like pedestrian and bike bridges has grown all over, and we’re only going to see an increase in infrastructure dedicated to car-free transit in the coming years.

Another major reason for the decline in car culture is that automobiles are simply not sustainable. Global leaders, such as Al Gore and former Mexican president Felipe Calderon, have proposed a radical idea: why don’t we spend the $90 Trillion that will be invested in infrastructure over the next 15 years toward developing cities that aren’t car-centric?

Some will argue we'll never get there, but the times, they are changing.

Right now is a crucial time in shaping the future of urban transportation. 75% of the infrastructure that will exist in 2050 hasn’t been built yet, so the decisions that we make about the direction of our cities’ transportation systems over the next few years will be critical. Let's not take them for granted

When You Can Put a Face to Hardship

I always marvel at the generosity of people when it comes to strangers.  But especially to strangers who are shown to have a hardship on television or in the news.  So it came as no surprise this week that a Detroit man, James Robertson, who travels almost a marathon every day gets the attention of folks who really want to help.

I would however love to see the demographics and opinions of those generous people.  Perhaps the biggest thing I would ask is...

"Do you support paying more in taxes for a better transit network?"


The reason I would ask this questions is because while in urbanist circles we understand the connection between housing and transportation costs and supply and demand for affordable housing (apparently though in SF we still don't get it) I wonder how much people actually do understand. 

There's always so much push back to giving "those people" access but when there is a face put to the masses, they are more charitable with their money and time.

And people put up over $260K for a car for James, but that money would probably fund a few bus routes for more than just one person. 

I think Ben Adler at Grist puts it best when he says:

Only in America would we assume that Robertson’s 46-mile commute is the natural order of things and the problem is that some people don’t have cars. Robertson’s situation demonstrates that low-income residents of Detroit and other cities around the U.S. need two things: mass transit and affordable housing near jobs.

So what do we need to do to educate people about this? How do we explain the concept of economic competitiveness and access?

There was a great City Metric piece recently on this issue.  They explain how much transit means to EU economies.  It's pretty huge.

In fact, the sector accounts for €130-150bn of the EU’s GDP each year, as well as providing 1.2m jobs and indirectly creating the conditions for an estimated 2-2.5m more.

But not just that, it's about access, just like in James' case.

That’s why, in London, one of the major advocates for the soon-to-be completed Crossrail project was the business sector: it realised that investment in public transport is key to matching employers with appropriately skilled employees, and retailers with customers. 

Check out the piece, it makes a compelling case for other co-benefits as well. And if you want a US case, just check out New York.

The more jobs you can reasonably commute to within an hour, the more job opportunities you'll have, and the higher your wage will be.

...

In New York, mass transit is the path to economic mobility, not education, It’s far more important to have a MetroCard than a college degree.

And sure, we can connect people with cars.  But there's a tax on that.  There's roads to build, parking to provide and upkeep to the car for each individual.  And if you're sitting in traffic, your time is a tax.

James couldn't keep his car running because it cost too much.  But he and others wouldn't have to worry about that if they are paying into a larger system.  One where everyone benefits, not just those who happen to have a car.

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Talking Headways Podcast: Speeding By Design

This week my guest host Tim Halbur and I chat about how we set speed limits, the design of complete streets for trucks, and the airbnb-ification of parking spaces.  You might also hear some stories about selling parking spaces to fund parties.  Listen in below.

The Role of Mayors In Transportation Planning

Last week, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced the “Mayors Challenge for Safer People and Safer Streets.” Foxx, who was the mayor of Charlotte from 2009 to 2013, urges mayors to make pedestrian and bike safety a priority for the next year. While road deaths in other categories have dropped over the last few years, the rate of biking and pedestrian deaths in the US has trended upwards since 2009.

A big part of pedestrian and bike safety is street design, and a major part of the Mayors Challenge is committing to take a Complete Streets approach to making transportation decisions. The Mayors Challenge isn’t a funding solution, but it is an opportunity for mayors to take on the challenge of assessing the current state of their street design guidelines and actively pursue the best practices to transform their transportation networks

A study of over 70 US mayors finds that regardless of city size, mayors often had the same priorities: growing their cities while managing transportation and operations within their limited budget constraints. The three most common policy priorities cited by US mayors for the next year are eco­nomic development, quality of life and infrastruc­ture.

However, mayors can’t transform their cities completely on their own. The mayors of San Francisco and Seattle, in particular, have come out and said that they do need the help of the federal government on transportation issues, particularly infrastructure. As American cities continue to grow, a national urban agenda and support from the federal government is necessary to ensure that our cities succeed.

But it looks like we'll need the mayors of our cities to get it started.

Atlanta's Transportation Barriers

Atlanta has had an issue with freeways for a long time.  Just yesterday an article from Curbed Atlanta reported out how freeways tore apart the fabric of the city in the 1950s.  (Also see the Institute for Quality Communities for some fun time series maps)

But that was just the start, it's been a long slow devolution in a region of highways, sprawl, and ridiculous county boundaries for a long time.  I remember in college reading Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and thinking that the region was crazy, with lots of development leapfrogging and questionable deals.

The place sprawls like no other city and is hard to serve with transit due to freeway blockages and absent a grid or rationally organized street network.  Seems like MARTA CEO Keith Parker is working to fix it, but it's a long, very winding, road even if they end up reworking all the transit routes.

And the region could be the archetype for Chris Leinberger's favored quarter where much of the jobs march North as the Southern parts flounder. When I was at Reconnecting America, I did some work in Atlanta and for kicks made the chart below.  While not as stark as I thought it might be when I started pulling the numbers, it still shows the imbalance between jobs and where workers live.  Many low and moderate workers live in the southern part of the region while the vast majority of the jobs are above I-20.

And then look at where people who make low wages live...

And where they work...

VS. Where High Wage Workers Live

 

And where they work...

That to me is the biggest transportation issue.  Connecting low wage workers with low and moderate wage employment.  I wonder if the next SPLOST will address this more.

   

Keep Austin Employment Downtown

Julio G. makes the case that Austin's general transit ridership is stagnating and that population decline in the most transit productive areas is to blame.  Part of that comes from NIMBYs and a restrictive development code.  But I would also argue that transit ridership is on the decline because the most productive destination for transit is declining in share as well. 

Employment drives a large percentage of transit ridership and Austin is likely to be no different.  16% of all trips are by transit, but 34% of transit trips (p5) are work trips.  APTA on board surveys have put that number around 59%.

So we can't just think of residential, but rather employment in the region.  We know Austin has been sprawling for some time, but let's look at the numbers.

Julio says that for the last 15 years, population has increased 34% in the region.  Because data from LED is only available from 2002 on, that leaves us with a 13 year period.  But the growth in jobs in that 13 years has been 26% or ~675K to ~852K according to LED data.

But for downtown, which I looked at as West of I-35, North of Barton Springs Road, East of Lamar, and South of MLK employment growth is much smaller.  Only an 18% change, from ~112K in 2002 to ~132K in 2011.   The share of employment that resides in this downtown sector has gone down too.  In 2002 it was 16.5% of total jobs in the region, while in 2011 it was 15.5% of total jobs. 

1% isn't huge, but its enough to show that employment sprawl is a big issue.  And if you depend on employment to drive transit ridership, and your #1 market is losing share, it gets hard to serve. 

So in addition to getting more housing in Austin's core, I would argue that for VMT reduction, getting employment into the core is just as important.  Right now people are driving to Round Rock or 360 or many other places.  Create centers, serve them with good transit, and the ridership will grow. 

Obviously easier said than done.

15 Year Population Change
                               34%
12 Year Employment Change
                               26%
Austin 2002
Regional Jobs -      675K
Downtown Jobs -   112K
Downtown Share - 16.5%

Austin 2011
Regional Jobs -       852K
Downtown Jobs -    132K
Downtown Share -  15.5%

How Should The Government Fix Affordable Housing?

Many American cities are experiencing a shortage of affordable housing. It’s a big problem that needs to be addressed, but there’s little consensus about how to address it. Add to that the NIMBY attitude that many people seem to hold toward affordable housing projects, and we’re looking at a problem that is both complex and politically charged.

Housing costs in San Francisco have skyrocketed in the past few years and it doesn’t look like they’ll stop increasing any time soon. One of the reasons for the price increase is because discretionary permitting prevents the housing supply from increasing rapidly as the population grows. Some such as the blog Market Urbanism believe that reforming regulations so that development is less restricted would go a long way in addressing the issue. On top of that, creating a land tax would encourage denser development, and funding housing vouchers with that tax money would ensure that the amount of funding increases when housing demand goes up and drives up the cost of land.

Los Angeles is suffering from a lack of affordable housing as well, and some feel that the local government should be doing far more to address the issue. Some suggested solutions to LA’s affordable housing issue include overhauling the zoning code so that it’s easier to develop, offering incentives to developers for building affordable housing, and preserving the current stock of affordable housing.

All of these proposed solutions include some form of government intervention. However, we have seen that some government responses, like rent control and subsidized housing, have not exactly solved the affordable housing problem in the past. If that’s the case, how should the government intervene in affordable housing issues? Whichever way we choose to address the problem, it’ll be important to understand the housing market, as well as acknowledge the shortcomings of our previous solutions.

Talking Headways Podcast: Free Ranging Kids and Uber Data

Hopefully we'll start to see more posts after quite a long hiatus around here. In addition to Kelly's posts from The Direct Transfer, we're going to be also posting my weekly podcast that Streetsblog hosts. Unfortunately my co-host Tanya is not going to be podding with me every week (She'll be back as a guest), but we'll have some sweet guest hosts talking about all things transportation and cities.

This one below is the last full pod from Tanya and me. In it we talk about free range kids and whether the Uber data dump is just a PR move or will actually help transportation planners. If you haven't been listening to us, hopefully you will enjoy it. You can find us on iTunes and Stitcher as well if you wish to subscribe.

The Debate Over Whether Gentrification Exists

Editors Note: Kelly Wong has been collecting articles from The Direct Transfer that tell the story of different urban issues.  Her posts from the Direct Transfer Blog will also appear on the Overhead Wire.  If you wish to subscribe to The Direct Transfer Daily Email, a project of the Overhead Wire please visit here.  To see Kelly's previous posts, you can find them here.

Gentrification is most commonly debated about in the sense that people disagree on how to counter its negative effects. However, there are also some who debate whether gentrification is actually harmful at all. Some people think it’s is one of the biggest urban issues in the developed world, some acknowledge that it’s not good but feel that there are bigger problems to worry about, and others deny that the negative effects of gentrification are nearly as abundant as the media make them out to be.

 A recent Slate article argues that for the most part, the negative effects of gentrification are hugely exaggerated, to the point where gentrification is more of a myth than an established urban phenomenon. After all, gentrification in which a previously poor neighborhood becomes overtaken by upper and middle class residents is extremely rare, and the article argues there is little proof that displacement happens in gentrifying neighborhoods any more than it happens in non-gentrifying neighborhoods. Socioeconomic status of most neighborhoods is quite stable over time, and neighborhoods that have had rises in average income actually reap some benefits from it.

 Others vehemently disagree. Looking at New York, which is one of the most illustrative cases of gentrification, we can see a definite and dramatic change in racial and income demographics over the last couple decades. The black population in many neighborhoods decreased while the white population increased, along with an increase in income. Subsidized affordable rentals are far more likely to convert to market rate in gentrified neighborhoods, driving out lower income residents who will no longer be able to afford the cost of housing.

 This City Limits survey shows that while some people think that gentrification is a good thing, the majority of readers feel that gentrification is problematic, though they vastly disagree about how to counter it or whether it can even be remedied. If there’s one thing the debate over gentrification shows, it’s that the issue is complex and nuanced, and that no easy answers will be appearing anytime soon.

Do We Have a Choice?

This really irks me... 

"I absolutely believe in choice," said Wendy Danks, director of marketing for the Builders Association of the Twin Cities. And she thinks consumers will choose to buy what they have bought in the past. The advantages of single-family homes -- good prices, good schools, family-friendly yards -- will continue to attract buyers, she said. 

Do we really have a choice?  I don't think so because the price of urban housing is nowhere near the cheap price of sprawl.  This needs to change, and it needs to start with these Builders Associations realizing that they are part of the problem, actually believing there is a choice.