Recently in land use Category

Now at streets.mn Five Rules for Vital Streets: "There are three seeds:

• A concentration of people (customers, though they need not be spending money, that helps)
• A concentration of stuff (suppliers, who need not be selling)
• An environment that encourages people to spend time doing stuff (marketplace)"

Updated from a Transportationist post: July 12, 2007.

Guangqing Chi has a new website devoted to Land Developability:

"Land developability is a measure of land availability for future conversion and development in a geographic entity, such as a state, a county, a city, a census tract, or other geographically aggregated units. The land developability index is generated using spatial overlay methods based on data layers of surface water, wetland, federal/state-owned land, Indian reservation, built-up land, and steep slope, which are all seen as undevelopable. The land developability index can be used for regression modeling when land use and development is a consideration of an analysis, for detecting potentials for land conversion and development, and for predicting the direction of future land use and development."

This looks like a very useful piece of research data infrastructure.

Michael Iacono, David Levinson, Ahmed El-Geneidy, and Rania Wasfi (2012) Markov Chain Model of Land Use Change in the Twin Cities. (Working Paper)

The set of models available to predict land use change in urban regions has become increasingly complex in recent years. Despite their complexity, the predictive power of these models remains relatively weak. This paper presents an example of an alternative modeling framework based on the concept of a Markov chain. The model assumes that land use at any given time, which is viewed as a discrete state, can be considered a function of only its previous state. The probability of transition between each pair of states is recorded as an element of a transition probability matrix. Assuming that this matrix is stationary over time, it can be used to predict future land use distributions from current data. To illustrate this process, a Markov chain model is estimated for the Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, USA (Twin Cities) metropolitan region. Using a unique set of historical land use data covering several years between 1958 and 2005, the model is tested using historical data to predict recent conditions, and is then used to forecast the future distribution of land use decades into the future. We also use the cell-level data set to estimate the fraction of regional land use devoted to transportation facilities, including major highways, airports, and railways. The paper concludes with some comments on the strengths and weaknesses of Markov chains as a land use modeling framework, and suggests some possible extensions of the model.

Below I posit some directions for research in transport and land use. Comments welcome.

1. We need more panels and time series and fewer cross-sectional analyses. If we want to establish causation, we need to look across time, otherwise, we are stuck simply with correlations. [And as we know, correlation is not causation]. We need data that examines the evolution and dynamics of transport and land use systems. I have not quite come to the conclusion that all analyses must be temporal (that is rejecting any atemporal analysis), but I am really tempted to do so as a reviewer.

2. We need to improve the scientific rigor of our research. The discipline is ripe for continuing meta-analysis to establish the magnitude of effects, and to reduce the range of estimates (and explain the range that exists through different underlying causal factors).

3. We need to more systematically consider network structure when looking at explanations of travel behavior. This includes measures of topology, morphology, and hierarchy. The measures that have historically been used have been relatively easy to estimate, but don't get at the gestalt of the network as an integrated system.

4. We need to systematically look at the difference between travelers perceptions of how systems operate and how long are travel times, and what we analysts measure. The differences can be systematically explained, at least in part, and people of course make decisions based on how they think the world works, not on how we think it does. We could then examine why perceptions differ from measurements, how much is simply differences in linguistic interpretation (when a trip begins and ends is somewhat ambiguous, e.g.), and how much is differences in time perception, and how much is "rounding" error, and how much is strategic to either impress with the length of the commute (which brings to mind the Four Yorkshiremen sketch) or to exaggerate in order to get sympathy or a policy response.

5. We need to increase the inter-disciplinarity in the study of transport and land use research, with planners, geographers, engineers, economists, and others working together looking at these problems.

6. We need more international and historical cases in the field to build towards a general truth. Reasoning is both inductive and deductive, but so much of what we are doing is complex, one often cannot simply derive from theory whether a change will lead to more or less travel, it depends on parameters, for instance. the fixed costs of engaging in a trip vs. the variable (and non-linear) costs of travel.

Steven Johnson Why The Bay Area Needs The Bay Lights [Transportation as art]

Created with over 25,000 energy efficient, white LED lights, it is 1½ miles wide and 500 feet high... The Bay Lights is a monumental tour de force seven times the scale of the Eiffel Tower’s 100th Anniversary lighting.

Pioneer Press Planning for [Sprawl in the] South Concord Corridor is in the works:

"A key part of the plan is building a frontage road for I-494 that connects the Hardman Avenue and Concord Street interchanges.

"This convenient frontage road access will open the area up to the market forces generated by the traffic on I-494 and will provide an improved environment for fostering retail, including restaurants," the study reads."

Via SR, Pretty cool use of US census data. From Hairycow

Atlantic Cities: Saving Detroit's Public Transit By Privatizing It [A foot in the door to privatization.]

Authenticated electricity: Sony power outlets will charge you for charging:

"Sony is building a new kind of power outlet that raises a not entirely pleasant prospect—in the future, plugging a phone into a public wall socket might require authentication and take a chunk out of your bank account. But the technology will have many important uses, Sony says, from managing payments for recharging electrical vehicles to avoiding blackouts by intelligently regulating the use of power."

MasterCard is pitching: Leave the Hassle at Home: Commuting can be Easier with ONE Card for ALL Stops:

"The vast majority of commuters we surveyed think so.  In fact, 72% of respondents in U.S., 85% in Singapore and 86% in South Korea told us they wish there was one card for use across all local mass transit systems. They also estimated that with one payment card they could save close to one hour (55 minutes!) per work week. Well, the capability already exists in MasterCard PayPass and for many, it’s already in your wallet."

[Yes, I agree, though the time savings is probably exaggerated.].

Baruch Feigenbaum @ Reason says: I-85 Managed Lanes are A Success. [They may or may not be, these data do not prove one way or another yet, since total flows dropped and speeds rose. More people faster would be conclusive (from a transportation perspective, environmentalists would disagree). Fewer people faster is ambiguous, and depends on Value of Time. In percentage terms, speeds rose (3.2% in the GP lanes, 4.6% in the managed lane) more than flows dropped (1.7%)].

Arnold Kling reviews: Matt Yglesias on Urban Development

KurzweilAI finds this potential use for high-speed rail: Startram — maglev train to low earth orbit

Cross-posted at streets.mn and transportationist.org. Wells Fargo Bank has shuttered the drive-thru bank part of its branch at University and Emerald in Minneapolis (on the St. Paul City Line). [Google Street View image shown.] This may be for several reasons, the branch is immediately across the street from a Central Corridor LRT station (under construction), its road access has consequently been constricted. It would make a nice redevelopment opportunity, so this may simply be a real estate transaction. But perhaps there are other reasons. We have achieved peak travel in the US, and internet and electronic banking has replaced much drive-thru business. I, like many pedestrians and bicyclists, am annoyed with the hostility the drive-thru gives to non-auto modes. I was reprimanded for walking up to a drive-thru ATM at a Maryland National Bank in Columbia (after many acquisitions, now part of Bank of America) ... of course there was no walk-up ATM there, or I would have used that. If I don't want to or can't deal with a person, I still have to walk-up to the drive-thru ATM at my Credit Union on University Avenue, which still does not have a walk-up (and their machine looks circa 1980). The annoying part is not just the wrong height of the ATM and the poor User Interface, it is the cross-subsidy non-driving customers give to the driving customers, who pay no extra for the larger building and infrastructure they require. Drive-thru businesses have a long history in the US, dating at least from 1930 in the banking sector. Obviously gas stations were drive-thru, and I suppose it expanded from there. I had a fascination with these types of businesses as a child, both because of their (at least banks) use of pneumatic tubes, and just because of the futuristic feeling one had doing business from a car. I was impressed when I visited my aunt who went to a drive-thru dairy store in the Philadelphia suburbs. In the planned community of Columbia, Maryland, we did not have these, though drive-thru banks were allowed in the Village Centers, at first drive-thru restaurants were not, and certainly not drive-thru groceries. We eventually got a Fotomat knock-off, and I was fascinated by the miniaturization of retail. Visiting some southern town (I'm guessing Tallahassee, but it was a couple of decades ago) when I was in college, there was the drive-thru liquor and gun store (like this one, but different), everything for good-ole-boys to have a really good time on a Friday night. There is also a drive-thru romance store in Alabama, which seems less awful and gives a different meaning to the term 'quickie'. Of course there are drive-thru 'quick-serve' restaurants, and even Starbucks, which was once aiming to be a third space, in addition to these other oddball collections. Tom Vanderbilt in a Slate article on the subject notes McDonald's gets 65 percent of US sales from drive-thru. An hour of Googling does not give me a solid number of drive-thrus in the US, but Rheitt Allain estimates about 100,000. There is better data on all restaurants, apparently the number of restaurants in the US is dropping about 2 percent according to Nation's Restaurant News to 574,050 in 2011. One assumes drive-thrus are dropping as well, though independents are experiencing most of the fall. Overall, spending for food away from home has been dropping the past few years as a function of the recession and high gas prices. The total number of bank branches seems to have peaked in 2009 (i.e. it was down in 2010, whether this is short term or permanent is of course unclear), while the number of institutions is way off the peak due to consolidation and merger. All of this portends that the US may have saturated the drive-thru market, and the direction is moving down. It is still speculative, and future data will be required to confirm this, but if so, we may be facing a more walk-up America.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Vol. 4, Issue 3 of the Journal of Transport and Land Use, available at https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu

Table of Contents

Journal of Transport and Land Use, Vol. 4, Issue 3 

Introducing the World Society for Transport and Land Use Research  
Kevin J. Krizek, University of Colorado 
Kelly J. Clifton, Portland State University

The impact of the residential built environment on work at home adoption
frequency: An example from Northern California 
Wei (Laura) Tang, Patricia L. Mokhtarian, and Susan L. Handy, University of
California, Davis

Mobile phones and telecommuting: Effects on trips and tours of Londoners 
Grace Uayan Padayhag, Tokyo Institute of Technology 
Jan-Dirk Schmöcker, Kyoto University 
Daisuke Fukuda, Tokyo Institute of Technology 

The attributes of residence/workplace areas and transit commuting 
Bumsoo Lee, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 
Peter Gordon, University of Southern California 
James E. Moore II, University of Southern California 
Harry W. Richardson, University of Southern California 

The impact of residential growth patterns on vehicle travel and pollutant
emissions 
Deb Niemeier, Song Bai, and Susan L. Handy, University of California, Davis

Divergence of potential state-level performance measures to assess
transportation and land use coordination 
John S Miller and Linda D Evans, Virginia Transportation Research Council 

Using multi-criteria decision making to highlight stakeholders’ values in
the corridor planning process 
Bethany Stich, Mississippi State University
Joseph H. Holland, University of Mississippi 
Rodrigo A. A. Nobrega, Mississippi State University
Charles G. O'Hara, Mississippi State University


The Journal of Transport and Land Use is an open-access, peer-reviewed
online journal publishing original interdisciplinary papers on the
interaction of transport and land use. Domains include: engineering,
planning, modeling, behavior, economics, geography, regional science,
sociology, architecture and design, network science, and complex systems. 

Thank you for the continuing interest in our work,

David M Levinson
University of Minnesota

 

I see lots of complaints about height limits (especially in DC) in the Blogosphere: e.g. Avent, Yglesias, Market Urbanism, Freemark.

I am in DC and have walked around again. The density feels right for a city, much like Tokyo, London and Paris (all notable for a lack of overly tall buildings). In DC, the buildings are not too tall and canyon like, and there are few vacant lots in the core.

What do height limits do? The restrict buildings over X stories. Thus more buildings less than or equal to X stories are built over a greater footprint if demand is fixed. In other words height limits reallocates development. The consequence is that a larger area is urbanized at a higher density (at or near X stories). In DC, there is a much larger urban sphere than, say, height-limit-less Minneapolis, where high-rises in downtown are surrounded by many low-rise and surface parking lots.

Instead of having 10 blocks of 50 story buildings, DC has 50 blocks of 10 story buildings. Is this a really worrisome outcome?

This additional urbanized space is a positive externality in a number of ways. Better urban form (more sidewalks are walkable), less congestion (traffic is spread out over more space), less pollution intake ("the solution to pollution is dilution", the bad stuff is spread over more area), less crime (more eyes near street level), more serendipitous random meetings on the street (which supposedly create greater productivity) and so on.

At one limit, we could have a height limit of 1 story, and spread everything out, at the other, we could have no limit, and buildings would be as concentrated as the market and structural engineering could support. Clearly the first is extreme, but so is the second, so long as we have unpriced externalities. We live in an imperfect (second-best) world with many unpriced externalities (congestion and pollution among them), which have no clear property rights. Regulating heights is one of many second-best solutions to this problem.

Do the height limits imply more suburban development? Sure, someone who really really wants a high rise for some reason will have to locate in the suburbs.

I can't think of a good reason except ego for needing a high rise, while I see many inefficiencies associated with tall buildings: greater distance to the ground floor and thus to people in other buildings (in the absence of skyways on the 50th floor), limited interactions on the upper stories, so much floor space devoted to elevators, higher building costs, etc.)

Otherwise suburban development is not for lack of space in DC, but rather due to a preference for the suburbs. Cities without height limits get their share of suburban development for all the usual reasons (lower land costs, easier access for workers, etc.) when day-to-day inter-firm accessibility is not particularly valuable in their sector, and intra-firm accessibility still matters.

The inaugural World Symposium on Transport and Land Use Research
(WSTLUR) was held in Whistler, BC on July 27-30, featuring over 40
peer reviewed papers (submitted to the Journal of Land Use and
Transport, jtlu.org) and keynote addresses from Ed Glaeser (Harvard),
Robert Cervero (UC Berkeley) and David Bannister (Oxford). Please see
www.wstlur.org for the program and links to presentations and even
audio recordings of the keynotes.

The steering committee is now forming the World Society for Transport
and Land Use Research (WSTLUR), who will be charged with organizing a
subsequent symposium in 2014 and other aims of the Society. The
mission statement—broadly, to cultivate an interdisciplinary research
community/agenda--- is below.

Members of the society will elect the board (11 seats are open); the
board will then select its officers. (Please see bylaws posted at
www.wstlur.org ; Kevin J. Krizek, University of Colorado, has been
appointed chair of the elections committee). If you are interested in
participating in this exciting international endeavor, we encourage
you to become a member of the society. Attendees of the World Symposium on Transport and Land Use Research
(WSTLUR) are already members. Fees are $75 for three years
and can be registered by going to www.wstlur.org .

Elections for the board will commence Sept 15, 2011; if you are
interested in becoming a member and voting in the election, please
become a member by September 9, 2011.

NOMINATIONS:
If you or someone you know is interested in serving on the board,
please send a nomination to Kevin J. Krizek (Krizek@colorado.edu) by
September 9. Anyone can nominate members for the board, however,
nominees must be (or become) a registered member of the society. A nomination
consists of:

-Name of the nominee
-Current position and affiliation
-A narrative (not to exceed 80 words and written in the third person),
describing the nominee’s activities, broadly speaking, in the area of
integrated transport-land use research.

Self nominations are allowed and all nominations need to be accepted
by the nominee. Please end only one email to Kevin J. Krizek
documenting the above process with the nominee’s full name in the
subject heading. (Self nominees would need to send only one email;
others would send one email with acceptance embedded).

Should you have any questions, please contact
Kevin J. Krizek (University of Colorado) at Krizek@colorado.edu.

MISSION STATEMENT
The purpose of WSTLUR is to promote the understanding and analysis of
the interdisciplinary interactions of transport and land use and to
provide a forum for debate and a mechanism for the dissemination of
information. More specifically the aims include:
1. The exchange and dissemination of information at an international
level on all aspects of the theory, analysis, modeling, and evaluation
of transport-land use interactions and related policy.
2. The encouragement of high-quality research and application in the
above areas, through debates, publication, and promotion.
3. The provision of a clearinghouse for information on recent
developments in the field and to foster contacts among professionals
within and between various countries and different disciplines.
4. The promotion of international conferences, seminars, and workshops
on all aspects of transport-land use interaction.
5. The representation of the viewpoints of members to appropriate
national and international bodies, as required by the membership.
6. The preparation of regular communications to facilitate the above aims.

The analyst Horace Dediu writes in Harvard Business Review: Google's Strategic Mistakes Drove Motorola Buy:

It's an innovative, if not convoluted, business model: Building and giving away the plumbing so that homes are granted unhindered access to free Google utility services (whose meter readings are sold to the highest bidder). But it comes with more complications. … Instead, with Motorola, Google got a hold of the vehicle through which it can create and sell integrated products. The company is thus no longer just a plumber but also a house builder and real estate developer. It can now build showcases that demonstrate the value of its services. The challenge then is how it will sell plumbing to contractors while it also competes with them by building houses. Android's big bet has yet to pay off and Google just doubled down.

This is a really interesting metaphor. Replace plumbing with roads, Google with transportation agencies, and Motorola with land development, and you have the model of Land Value Capture we have been talking about. Like Google giving away the OS plumbing and make it back in advertising, states give away roads and transit lines to users, hoping to make it back (somehow) in tax revenue (maybe?). Google, following Apple's lead, has decided it needs to internalize the value chain to avoid the convolutedness of the market model they had created, which gave them large share, but few profits in mobile. We need to come to the same realization in transportation, in favor of more direct vertical integration of transportation and land use.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Vol. 4, Issue 1 of the Journal of Transport and Land Use, available at http://www.jtlu.org

Table of Contents

 

Introduction: The Journal of Transport and Land Use enters year four

David M. Levinson

 

Articles

Agglomeration economies, accessibility and the spatial choice behavior of relocating firms

Michiel de Bok, Significance b.v., and Frank van Oort

 

 

‘New urbanism’ or metropolitan-level centralization? A comparison of the influences of metropolitan-level and neighborhood-level urban form characteristics on travel behavior.

Petter Naess

 

An application of the node-place model to explore the spatial development dynamics of station areas in Tokyo

Paul Chorus and Luca Bertolini

 

Defining land use intensity based on roadway level of service targets

Hamid Iravani, Arash Mirhoseini, and Maziar Rasoolzadeh

 

Impacts of ethanol plants on highway networks

Subhro Mitra, Alan Dybing and Denver Tolliver

 

Book Reviews

Review of "Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It" by Randal O'Toole

Reviewed by David M. Levinson

 

 

The Journal of Transport and Land Use is an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal publishing original interdisciplinary papers on the interaction of transport and land use. Domains include: engineering, planning, modeling, behavior, economics, geography, regional science, sociology, architecture and design, network science, and complex systems.

Brad DeLong writes:

Ron Paul: Get the Government Out of My Government!

Matthew Yglesias on Ron Paul:

Ron Paul And The Civil Rights Act: I watched Ron Paul on Hardball yesterday afternoon talking about his opposition to the Civil Rights Act.... The real issue here is Paul’s perfectly sincere [complaint that the]... Civil Rights Act is... a genuinely large infringement of people’s private property rights. It says that just because you own a hotel doesn’t mean you can decide to bar black people from staying at it. It says that just because you own a bus, you can’t decide to make black passengers ride in the back. It says you can’t buy—at any price—a seat at a whites-only lunch counter. It’s a massive instance of big government medaling in people’s private business.

It was also in the 1960s and 1970s an absolutely vital tool in resolving a social and political crisis of gargantuan proportion.... Ron Paul, like Rand Paul before him, opposes this measure not—or not only—out of some bias against black people but out of a deeply-held belief that the state should never solve any social problem no matter how severe the problem or how effective the solution.

It seems to me that that is wrong. When you own a hotel and bar Black people what happens is that if Black people comes in and sleep in the beds you call the police--functionaries of the state--and they then take the Black people away and charge them with trespass. When you own a bus and require Black people to sit in the back and Black people sits in the front you call the police--functionaries of the state--and they then take the Black people away and charge them with trespass. When you own a lunch counter and make it whites-only if Black people sit down at the lunch counter you call the police--functionaries of the state--and they then take the Black people away and charge them with trespass.

Ron Paul's belief is that the state should assist in amplifying social and political crises and injustices whenever the propertied wish to provoke them.

Private fee-simple property is, after all, an institution established and enforced by the government. You can hardly get the government out of what is, fundamentally, the government's core business.

Or if you do--if you no longer rely on government to enforce your property rights, you had better be willing to hold seisin in the manner of Richard "Strongbow" de Clare--and had best start practicing with horse and lance...

This is a major problem for libertarians, though not for anarchists. Property rights are a social institution that improve efficiency, they are not however strictly moral. My own property is something worth preserving, as that is property I largely earned from work I did (with of course aid along the way from previous generations). Taking my property from me would discourage work. That the Queen of England owns property comes from inheritance because her ancestors (and the spouses of those ancestors) used force somewhere along the way. Buckminster Fuller labels them the Great Pirates, which I think is a very poetic phrasing of this phenomenon.

But property is not an absolute, and the expectations that the government can help random racist property owner enforce racial exclusion on his property, paid for by the general public, is noxious. This is less of a problem for anarchists like David Friedman who authored The Machinery of Freedom, who don't rely on the government, but may hire their own private security firms. As those aware of the world may note, Anarchy has problems of its own.

As Hans Rosling says "People who don't like government, go into this corner and discuss Somalia, People who don't like markets, go into that corner and discuss North Korea."

This is a transportation problem because the issue is basically one of the common carrier, who must the bus carry, and how must they be carried? And this was an issue with Rosa Parks, who decided to start the Civil Rights movement those who were defeated in the War of Northern Aggression still grumble about. (Though in that case the Montgomery Bus Company was apparently publicly owned, and the Jim Crow laws required it, it could just as easily have been private at the time, and been a private sector requirement, as it had been in the privately-owned streetcar era).

The Strib, being ever vigilant in reading the Pioneer Press, reports on When the Sprawl Stopped:

Times are tough in the Twin Cities exurbs. Five years ago, they were among the fastest-growing cities in the nation, offering cheap land and acres of new homes at affordable prices. But the stunning collapse in the housing market and the devastating recession that accompanied it have turned the boom into a memory. The exurban communities, scarred by foreclosures, are still reeling from plummeting home values and the loss of business.

From Isanti County south to Scott County, new roads lead to phantom neighborhoods. Many homes sit empty, their owners long gone, foreclosed. Now, with $4-a-gallon gas a possibility by summer, the prospect for recovery is bleak in these neighborhoods full of long-distance commuters.

"I don't believe we've bottomed out yet," said Greg Owens, president of Community Pride Bank in Isanti. "The question is: When will it stop going down?"

The downward momentum is a sharp contrast to that of a decade ago, when communities from Cambridge to Belle Plaine exploded with growth as young families looked beyond the suburbs to buy a piece of the American dream. Land and gasoline were cheap, and the tradeoff for a 45-minute or longer commute was a bigger, more affordable home compared to those closer in.

Since 2000, the population in exurban Twin Cities counties has grown by 25 percent. Some -- Chisago, Sherburne, Scott and Wright -- saw gains of 30 percent or more.

In the city of Isanti, the population nearly tripled, from 2,300 residents to more than 6,000 late in the decade.

Anticipating continued growth and demand, developers and contractors built neighborhoods and homes faster than they could fill them.

"Everybody was going nutso," said Rojas, the bookstore owner.

Then came the crash. Thousands went into foreclosure. Others were stuck in houses worth far less than what they paid. Acres cleared for construction stayed empty.

And it's not yet over.

Statewide, foreclosures rose 11 percent -- nearly 26,000 total -- in 2010, with the greatest number in Hennepin and Ramsey counties. But the rate of foreclosure was greatest in the northern exurban counties of Sherburne, Isanti, Mille Lacs and Kanabec.

The Pioneer Press asks Is sprawl over?

In what is believed to be a turning point in American history, new figures from the U.S. Census indicate that suburban sprawl might be coming to an end.

For the first time in more than 60 years, the growth rate of Minnesota's suburbs has plummeted, with some actually losing population.

"This movement outward is a trend that has been in place for the entire post-World War II era," state demographer Tom Gillaspy said. "Now it has come to a screeching halt."

And when experts look at the reasons for the decline, they say that sprawl might be gone for good. That's because long-term trends indicate less population growth, the demise of the single-family house and higher gas prices.

Urban areas can easily adjust to such changes, with a variety of housing for a variety of people — rich or poor, young or old, families or singles, all serviced with mass transit.

But not suburbs. They specialize in one kind of housing: big houses with big lawns for big families. The census figures are a warning for suburbs betting on more growth, including Forest Lake, Woodbury, Lakeville and Lake Elmo.

Cities are scrambling to adjust, laying off employees and delaying public projects. Most home-builders are shrinking the size of their new homes or switching to cheaper townhouses or apartments.

But changes are hard to make, despite the ominous census numbers.

"I can only take that as banter," snapped Jay Berger of Berger Built Construction, who just ended what he said was his most successful year ever, building single-family homes in places like Forest Lake.

"They don't know Forest Lake. They don't know my houses."

LOSING POPULATION

The farther the suburb, the greater the slowdown in growth.

Growth in third-ring suburbs, including Afton, May Township and Scandia, was just 6 percent from 2000 to 2010 — a fourth of the percentage increase in the 1990s.

"What is really dramatic is the exurbs," Gillaspy said. "You see developments with houses halfway built up, with nails halfway beaten in."

Second-ring suburbs — such as Eagan, Inver Grove Heights, Woodbury and Blaine — surged 42 percent in the 1990s and just 23 percent in the past decade.

In first-ring suburbs, growth stopped in the past decade after a 5 percent increase in the 1990s. These include Maplewood, Roseville and West St. Paul. The populations of Minneapolis and St. Paul have been roughly flat for two decades.

The suburban growth slowdown reflects a metrowide slowdown, said Metropolitan Council research manager Libby Starling. Metro-area population growth was 15 percent in the 1990s and about 8 percent in the past decade, she said.

Immigration from other countries has increased steadily, from about 5,000 annually in the early 1990s to about 11,000 today.

But Minnesota's population is like a leaky bucket — gaining immigrants but losing people to other states. In the 1990s, about 10,000 people a year moved to Minnesota from other states. But in the past decade, the state lost about 7,000 people a year.

Said Starling: "The key question is how the Twin Cities competes economically in the next decade and how Minnesota plays into immigration," both domestic and foreign.

EMPTY NESTS, EXPENSIVE GAS

The suburbs' growth also is declining because demand for their specialty — the single-family house — is falling.

That style of housing defines two-thirds of American homes — yet only one-third of households has children, said Charles Marohn, president of Strong Towns, a nonprofit that advises Minnesota cities on development patterns.

Props to my former student Chuck Marohn who is extensively quoted.

 

An illustration of the clustering of similar retail activities:

Hank Scorpio: Uh, hi, Homer. What can I do for you?
Homer: Sir, I need to know where I can get some business hammocks.
Hank Scorpio: Hammocks? My goodness, what an idea. Why didn't I think of that? Hammocks! Homer, there's four places. There's the Hammock Hut, that's on third.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Hank Scorpio: There's Hammocks-R-Us, that's on third too. You got Put-Your-Butt-There.
Homer: Mm-Hmm.
Hank Scorpio: That's on third. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot... Matter of fact, they're all in the same complex; it's the hammock complex on third.
Homer: Oh, the hammock district!
Hank Scorpio: That's right.

"The Simpsons" You Only Move Twice (1996) - Memorable quotes (speaking of James Bond films, Hank Scorpio looks a lot like Jimbo Wales)

updated March 5 with Case 0

Ryan Avent (among others) comments on Ed Glaeser's piece on Skyscrapers: Density and Skyscrapers and seems to support allowing more high density development in cities, which are restricted by local government regulation.

The issue that does not really come out (though is mentioned in the comments) is the problem of zoning vs. externalities. The reasons for the lower zoning densities are many, but the rationale is externalities (and the desire to move nuisance law from courts to regulation to avoid the large transaction costs and uncertainties of the judicial system). If you increase density, as the neighbors know, you increase local externalities which they bear (through longer travel times, etc.).

Since no one owns the right to uncongested roads, developers (and planners who support them in their quest for the highest and best use) think they can just offload these costs to local neighborhood streets and it is okay. But what they do is take time from other people by increasing congestion. The neighbors think (presumably by custom, status quo, or some other logic) that they have the right to prevent these externalities, and they do so with restrictive zoning. Zoning regulates negative externalities that are not currently governed by Pigou or Coase.

Neither side is right, the problem at its core is undefined property rights and untolled roads. It is just two sides of selfishness: greedy developers vs. greedy NIMBYs.

I had a similar conversation with Jonathan Levine at the November Regional Science Conference. He asked if a developer could come and build a high-rise in an existing single-family residential area. I replied "good luck", suggesting the NIMBY's hold the cards. I also suggested this was a relatively rare case, which I think is because the zoning largely reflects the market in most places. I.e. there is not much market for high rise housing in largely single-family neighborhoods. There are of course edge cases. Systematically, there are three four cases when a developer is considering building somewhere:

(0) The zoning is not binding. In this case the zoning exceeds market demand, but there are negative externalities to development which the neighbors want to avoid.

(1) The zoning is not binding. In this case the zoning exceeds market demand, but the negative externalities are small.

(2) The zoning is binding, but the developer through either request or lobbying (perhaps at some monetary expense) gets an area rezoned. The lobbying allows political decision-makers to collect rents from restrictive zoning, or neighbors to achieve side-payments. These side-payments compensate the community for the negative externalities that will be received upon a change in the status quo. The political rents are a problem for the political system and how we finance campaigns or administer bribery laws.

(3) The zoning remains binding, but the land is not rezoned because the developer's payments were, or would be, insufficient to persuade the opponents or decision-makers.

Case 0 is a problem for the community, which must now pay the developer not to develop. We see this when communities purchase development rights (e.g. agricultural reserve areas). Here the Coasian right to develop resides with the developer One can see difficulties with Case 0 scenarios. Developers can threaten to develop, and get paid not to develop, even though they were not serious. Bluffing is very easy. Hence the desire for communities to control the development rights through restrictive zoning. Residents must act through government because of the asymmetry and coordination costs, 1000 neighbors all harmed slightly do not have the ability or incentive individually to give a side payment to a developer not to develop at all (or as much), because some residents will want to free-ride on the side payments of others. Only through the government or government-like organization can this be achieved.

Case 1 is not a problem for developers or the community, and the development proceeds without hitch.

Case 2 costs the developers money, but in the end if they choose to build, it still must generate above "normal profits", otherwise it would be better for the developer to keep their money in a bank account. This results in a transfer of money, but is at least neutral and probably win-win.

Case 3 might result in some social loss (especially if there are, in fact, economies of agglomeration), but what is happening is that the loss perceived by the opponents outweighs the benefits perceived by the developer. There may be of course miscalculations about the opponents willingness to pay or willingness to accept, but in the end the potential gains did not outweigh the potential losses, and the project may not have been as good as claimed.

Whether the zoning reflects the wishes of developers or neighbors depends on context, and as density increases, we would expect the neighbors to become relatively more powerful, if only because the negative externalities of development become apparent to more and more people.

As I implied above, there is not a moral right in retaining the status quo, but from a Coasian perspective, zoning creates the property right in a given level of externalities which rezoning proposes to change. There should still be an approximately efficient outcome in the end, if not for political rent-seeking.

Another from the Pioneer Press, which was quite good today, I might add, I think it has become a better paper than the Star Tribune: Rethinking University Avenue before the trains roll discusses rezoning University in advance of the Central Corridor LRT.

"Change is hard. ... A guy started his question to me last night, 'University Avenue can't be all housing and coffee shops.' "

While I think upzoning University is a good idea given the virtual certainty of the LRT investment, there is clearly skepticism about the planners ideas. Perhaps the excessive use of renderings of upper middle class white people sipping Lattes on a retail street has come home to roost.

In the WaPo, architect

Roger K. Lewis asks "Are trolley lines more than just a fashionable bit of nostalgia?" and writes "Unlike a bus line, a trolley line is a relatively permanent infrastructure investment. Thus with fixed rails and stations, a trolley line can positively affect real estate values and greatly augment economic activity near the line. Property owners, developers and lenders are more willing to incur the risk of investing in projects near a trolley line than in projects near a bus stop."

OK, I hear this argument all the time. Are we forgetting something (from the history of the Twin Cities streetcar system (see Xie and Levinson (2010) How Streetcars Shaped Suburbia Journal of Economic Geography 10(3), pp. 453-470. for a statistical analysis): Streetcars are not permanent. Roads are pretty close to permanent. Subways are pretty close to permanent. Streetcars disappeared from almost all US cities (in Lewis's lifetime). Second, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) can achieve the same effect. Of course BRT is more expensive than a bus stop, and provides better service than buses in mixed traffic, but it is also generally less expensive than trolleys, and a lot more flexible as it can serve in neighborhoods. The evidence from the Twin Cities is that while streetcars disappeared, transit service did not. It is not the technology which is permanent, it is the service. If the demand is there, the service will come; if it is not, the service will leave. See e.g.

Rodriguez, D. A., Targa, F. "Value of Accessibility to Bogotá's Bus Rapid Transit System," Transport Reviews, Vol. 24, Number 5, pp. 587-610, 2004. ; and

Ramon Munoz-Raskin, "Walking accessibility to bus rapid transit: Does it affect property values? The case of Bogotá , Colombia", Transport Policy ,Journal of the Transport Conference on Transport Research Society, Volume 17 (March 2010), pp. 72-84,

Cervero, Robert and Chang Deok Kang (2010) Bus rapid transit impacts on land uses and land values in Seoul, Korea

Perk, Victoria and Martin Catala (2009)Land Use Impacts of Bus Rapid Transit: Effects of BRT Station Proximity on Property Values along the Pittsburgh Martin Luther King, Jr. East Busway

and a dedicated issue of the Journal of Public Transportation

(Lewis article Via Greater Greater Washington .)

Recent working paper

• Iacono, Michael and David Levinson (2010) Location, Regional Accessibility and Price Effects: Evidence from Twin Cities Home Sales

Regional location factors, with measures of regional accessibility foremost among them, exert a strong influence on urban property markets. While accessibility represents an important regional-scale factor, more local influences such as proximity to urban highway links may also positively or negatively influence the desirability of a location. In this paper, we use a cross-section of home sales in Hennepin County, Minnesota from the years 2001 through 2004, along with a set of disaggregate regional accessibility measures, to estimate the value of access to employment and resident workers. We also estimate the (dis)amenity effects of locations near major freeway links that have recently undergone, or were scheduled to undergo (as of the time period covered by the home sales), major construction to add capacity. The richness of the home sales data set allows us to control for a number of structural attributes, as well as some site characteristics, while additional neighborhood characteristics (such as income levels and local educational quality) are added from supplemental data sources. Empirical results indicate that households highly value employment access, while access to other resident workers (i.e. competition for jobs) is considered a disamenity. Proximity to local highway access points is positively associated with sale price, while proximity to the highway link itself is negatively associated with price. The paper concludes with some implications for research and practice of the concept and measurement of the relationship between location and land value.

Streetsblog New York City reports on the recent HSR conference Low Expectations for High-Speed Rail at NYU Conference

My talk on Economic Development and High Speed Rail gets a prominent mention:

"The most controversial comments of the day came from Professor David Levinson, a transportation engineer at the University of Minnesota. Pointing to pictures of surface parking lots next to high-speed rail stations in Japan and Europe, he argued that "there is no advantage to adjacency" -- that high-speed rail stations are barely more likely to spur walkable development than airports.

He also walked through a body of research showing that high-speed rail gives a significant economic boost to whichever city serves as the system's hub, but does little for cities on the spokes. Showing maps of hub-and-spoke networks proposed by municipalities from around the country, he noted that every city, no matter how small, imagined itself at the center."

This is not quite what I said, or at least, not quite what I thought I said, but it's not too far off. I meant, the economic boost for the hub is weak, the economic boost for the spokes is approximately non-existant.

A Keynote version of the slides are available here.

The paper is here.

I will be at High Speed Rail: Leveraging Federal Investment Locally at NYU on Wednesday:

HIGH SPEED RAIL: LEVERAGING FEDERAL INVESTMENT LOCALLY
The Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management is pleased to announce High Speed Rail: Leveraging Federal Investment Locally, a symposium to be held on June 16th, 2010.

Following the January 2010 rail funding announcement by the U.S. Department of Transportation, interest in rail investment - and what it means for American communities - has continued to expand. Conversations are taking place across the country, bringing in new participants as well as experienced professionals from around the world to discuss the new corridors. In focusing on how to implement new rail corridors there is a risk of overlooking the need to manage the regional impacts of the nodes that comprise these systems. Leveraging Federal Investment Locally will enhance the national dialogue on high-speed rail investment through a focus on how new facilities will be linked to existing regional transportation infrastructure and economic development efforts. In addition, there will be an examination of the political context of establishing new rail infrastructure in a democratic nation where land use is controlled locally.

Presenters include:

Polly Trottenberg, Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation
David Levinson, University of Minnesota
Anthony Perl, Simon Fraser University
Frank Zshoche, Managing Director, Civity Management Consultants, Hamburg Germany

The event is co-sponsored by Parsons Brinckerhoff and presented in Partnership with the American Public Transportation Association (APTA).

When: 6/16/2010 8:30am-2:00pm
Location:
The Kimmel Center, Rosenthal Pavilion
60 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012 map

Recent working paper (extending recent blog posts):

• Levinson, David, (2010), Economic Development Impacts of High Speed Rail, No 000072, Working Papers, University of Minnesota: Nexus Research Group.

This paper reviews the state of high-speed rail (HSR) planning in the United States c. 2010. The plans generally call for a set of barely inter-connected hub-and-spoke networks. The evidence from US transit systems shows that lines have two major impacts. There are positive accessibility benefits near stations, but there are negative nuisance effects along the lines themselves. High speed lines are unlikely to have local accessibility benefits separate from connecting local transit lines because there is little advantage for most people or businesses to locate near a line used infrequently (unlike public transit). However they may have more widespread metropolitan level effects. They will retain, and perhaps worse, have much higher, nuisance effects. If high-speed rail lines can create larger effective regions, that might affect the distribution of who wins and loses from such infrastructure. The magnitude of agglomeration economies is uncertain (and certainly location-specific), but presents the best case that can be made in favor of HSR in the US.

Our long awaited research report Access to Destinations, Phase 3: Measuring Accessibility by Automobile
is now available.

Abstract

This study describes the development and application of a set of accessibility measures for the Twin Cities region that measure accessibility by the automobile mode over the period from 1995 to 2005. In contrast to previous attempts to measure accessibility this study uses travel time estimates derived, to the extent possible, from actual observations of network performance by time of day. A set of cumulative opportunity measures are computed with transportation analysis zones (TAZs) as the unit of analysis for the years 1995, 2000 and 2005. Analysis of the changes in accessibility by location over the period of study reveals that, for the majority of locations in the region, accessibility increased between 1995 and 2005, though the increases were not uniform. A "flattening" or convergence of levels of accessibility across locations was observed over time, with faster-growing suburban locations gaining the most in terms of employment accessibility. An effort to decompose the causes of changes in accessibility into components related to transportation network structure and land use (opportunity location) reveal that both causes make a contribution to increasing accessibility, though the effects of changes to the transportation network tend to be more location-specific. Overall, the results of the study demonstrate the feasibility and relevance of using accessibility as a key performance measure to describe the regional transportation system.

Other reports in the series can also be downloaded here

I have now placed a copy of my presentation Transport, Land Use, and Value from April 30 at the UTRC based at CCNY online.

A PDF of the presentation is available at:

Transport, Land Use, and Value

The movies themselves can be downloaded here:
Movies

The webcast (including a Q&A session) is available here:
City College of New York University Transportation Research Center April 30, 2010 [webcast (Flash, 98 minutes)]

Thank you to UTRC for inviting me to New York, I enjoyed giving the talk and meeting everyone there.

Let me know if you have any questions about the presentation.

High-speed rail while providing potential benefits at the nodes, guarantees costs along the lines. Evidence from hedonic price studies (the same kind of studies that were used to assess the accessibility benefits of public transit in a previous section) show that each additional decibel of noise reduces home value by 0.62 percent (Levinson et al. 1997). Using the methodology in (Levinson et al. 1997) , the noise per train, and the number of trains per hour determine a noise exposure forecast. Applying the noise exposure forecast to the number of houses effected by each level of noise, and summing over all of the houses, and multiplying by the value of each house, gives the economic noise damages associated with the trains. So for instance, for a project running 20 trains per hour at 241 km/h through an area with 1000 housing units per square kilometer, each with a value of $250,000 would produce a total noise damage cost per kilometer of track of $1.975 million, a not insignificant cost. For a line of 500 km, this would be a system noise cost of nearly $1 billion. These relationships are non-linear, even one train per hour would produce a total cost of $269 million. Running 20 trains at an average speed of 350 km/h would produce a cost of $1.5 billion.

The noise damages can be avoided if preventive measures are adopted. These include acquiring a much wider right-of-way so there is no housing near the tracks, or noise walls. Whether those costs are less expensive than accepting damages depends on the circumstances.

`The estimated functions show that HSR accessibility has at most a minor effect on house prices" in Taiwan. [Andersson et al., 2010]

Examination of local land uses around international high-speed rail stations suggests that were it not for commuter traffic, the effects on land use will not necessarily be localized near the station, the way they would with a public transit station. Downtown stations, if they were to see land use benefits, should see higher local densities, higher local rents, and the construction of air rights over the station and local yards.

Eurostar is a heavily used high-speed rail line connecting London and Paris, serving 9.2 million passengers per year. Gare du Nord in Paris, which serves Eurostar, has local land uses largely indistinguishable from other areas of Paris. St. Pancras in London similarly. Ebbsfleet International Rail Station and Ashford International Rail Station are surrounded by surface parking lots.

Tokaido Shinkansen, connecting Tokyo and Osaka and serving 151 million passengers annually, is an order of magnitude more successful. The densities around stations on this line are visibly higher, but still air rights are partially, but not fully developed, indicating limits to how valuable the land is, even in Tokyo. Shin-Osaka station is adjacent to surface parking lots.

The development effects are not local (unlike public transit stations), which is not surprising since if they are serving long distance travel they are also serving less frequent travel, and as a consequence the advantages of being local to the station are weaker. Where they share space with local transit system hubs, the effects would be difficult to disentangle.

I will be in New York on Friday April 30 giving a talk on Transport, Land Use, and Value hosted by the local University Transportation Center at City University of New York.

Given transportation creates land value, and recognizing the problem of underfunding transport infrastructure, new funding sources can be used to increase transport investment, create additional land value, and improve social welfare. This presentation considers co-evolutionary process between the development of land and transport networks. Using data from the rail and Underground in London and the streetcar system in the Twin Cities, the empirical relationship is established statistically under several different contexts, and hypotheses about the positive feedback nature of the interaction are tested.

Time & Location
Baruch College Conference Center
151 E. 25th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY

9:30 am - Breakfast & registration
10:00 am - Seminar

Cities along Northstar corridor wait for development by Ambar Espinoza, Minnesota Public Radio December 7, 2009

St. Cloud, Minn. -- Minnesota's first commuter rail line has been up and running for three weeks now, but it has yet to spur any development along the route of the train.

The article implies Northstar has failed because there is no development after 3 weeks. That is unreasonable. The better argument is that Northstar has been in the works (planning plus construction) for some 5 years, and no development has occurred yet. Certainly once construction started, it could be seen as a government commitment.

I suspect there will eventually be some development, but exurban development does not justify the enormous subsidy.