Recently in Planning Category

PZ sends me to The Washington Post which discusses the WMATA/Metro strategic plan

Source document here: Momentum: Metro strategic plan 2013-2025

Several comments from a preliminary reading:

1. Metro benefits are presented in terms of reduced car use (p.10). This is the wrong way of looking at the benefits. The main benefits of Metro are the service to riders (more trips, faster trips, higher quality trips), not the reduction in congestion for non-riders. Who knows how many auto trips there would be instead? If Metro were closed for a day, everyone would work from home. If it were a month, people would carpool. If it were a few years, jobs would relocate. The ridiculous assumption that everyone would drive instead, and need to park in garages filling all of the central area are self-negating.

2. The region expect to keep growing, to 8.6 million people in 2040 (including an outer ring that includes many of Baltimore's suburbs). If it continues to grow, it will need more service. Will it continue to grow? I would much prefer a scenarios approach (e.g. high growth/low growth/decline) and consideration of alternative strategies for alternative futures. I bet if we looked at Detroit's plans from 1950 or 1960 or 1970 or 1980, they anticipated growth too (amusingly Google classifies that link as "fiction", unfortunately it is not downloadable, so I can only speculate). Maybe DC will become the east coast's primate city, displacing New York, analogous to London or Paris or Tokyo.

3. It looks like Fleet expansion solves most problems (Table 4), begging the question of why there needs to be new tunnels. (Not that there need not be tunnels, but high crowding is the price to be paid for dense cities, and Washingtonians should become better acquainted with their neighbors, just like Londoners and Tokyo residents). Further, why can't more streets just be converted to bus-only transitways to satisfy the demand? This should require some paint and little else at the margin. (And of course can be as expensive as you want to make it).

4. p. 11 "The Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) added 275,000 households and 295,000 jobs between 2004 and 2010. Of that growth, 6.4 percent of new households and 13.8 percent of new jobs located within one-half mile of suburban and one quarter-mile of urban Metro stations. The land area around these Metro stations comprised only 0.5 percent of the MSA land area, which suggests that Metro-adjacent locations are capturing far more than a simple share of growth" (6.4% of HH is only 17,600 HH, or 2514 per year over 7 years. Metro should do better than that. And a half mile is a pretty long area, most people within 1/2 mile in suburban Washington will not be using transit)

5. p. 12 "The land around Metrorail stations generates $3.1 billion annually in property tax revenues to the jurisdictions. Of these revenues, $224 million of incremental property value is from land near Metrorail stations – extra value that would not exist without Metro. " $224 million in incremental property value revenues (I assume this means taxes) is great. This should be captured to pay for the system improvements. Over 30 years this is $6.6 billion in additional revenue (assuming no additional development and 0% interest rates). Ballpark, this is oneway of capitalizing the value of the system. A value capture district around all the stations would be a good idea.

6. Figure 6 shows that Washington has more vehicle-miles per capita of transit service, and it is claimed this means more competitiveness. I am unconvinced of the causality here:

Do Agglomerating benefitting industries create density and demand public transit,

Or does transit create population density attracting agglomeration-benefitting industries?

I am all for mutual co-location as a theory and explanation, but there are reasons some industries (government and its courtiers, e.g.) likes to agglomerate, which are independent of transportation. Transportation serves and reinforces (and maybe attracts) that industry of course. A city without government (or finance, or one of the few other strongly agglomerating sectors) would see far less demand for central city development and commensurate transit. Since Washington has this industry, it should have more transit than a fast-growing metropolis without such industries (e.g. Phoenix)

More Vehicle-miles per capita without accompanying mode share indicates an inefficient land use pattern. I would think if people were closer together, fewer vehicle-miles of transit needed to be provided to serve the same trips. (The data I think comes from this 2004 study, which perhaps surprisingly has Minneapolis in third place for Economic Competitiveness, Figure 7, despite its relatively poor public transit showing).

David King: Credible Commitment and Congestion Pricing

Sommer Mathis @ Atlantic Cities: Repetitive Debate of the Day: Why Hasn't Washington, D.C. Buried its Power Lines? [See also Transportationist on Underground Utilities]

Brendon Slotterback: A challenge to the market-oriented urbanists . Josh Barro presponds: Homeowners: The Cartel Next Door . [The Transportationist on Zoning and Externalities]

Transit Maps on Squaring ManhattanThe Shape of Manhattan in Transit Maps

Horace Dediu @ asymco Building and dismantling the Windows advantage

Now @ streets.mn Do or do not, there is no plan

David King: By This Logic, Perhaps the Whole Thing is Flawed:

"Second, Rail Authority Chairman Dan Richard explained omitting Anaheim based on the cost of travel time savings:

Electrifying and improving the Los Angeles to Orange County route would cost $6 billion and save only 10 minutes of travel time, said rail authority Chairman Dan Richard.

"Why would we do that, pay $600 million per minute?" he said in an interview Friday.

Let's do the math here. The project is justified on travel time savings, and the Chairman has now said that $600 million per minute is too high a cost. At about $70 million, the current project needs to save more than two hours (116 minutes) to justify the expense if each minute is worth $600 million. Yet Richard says $600 is too high, but by how much? The current (new) business plan offers about 2 hour and 40 minute service from San Francisco to Los Angeles on some routes. (How travel times didn't increase with the blended plan is still a bit of a mystery.) So, can you get from Union Station to San Francisco in less than or equal to 4:40 under current technologies? Yes you can. Flying is faster, even with airport hassles (Try Burbank to Oakland!). Driving is a bit longer, but is much more likely to get you exactly to your destination resulting in similar door to door times."

AEI: A plea for beauty: a manifesto for a new urbanism :

"In her celebrated book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which first appeared in 1961, Jane Jacobs argued that zoning, the concept on which the entire American planning system is based, is misconceived. Zoning leads to a disaggregation of the many functions of the city so that people live in one part, work in another, spend leisure time in a third, and shop in a fourth.[2] Whole swaths of the city are thereby deserted for large parts of the day, and the fruitful interaction of work and leisure never occurs.

Zoning contributes to the dereliction of the city when its local industries die and ensures that the central areas are not places of renewal, but at best museums and at worst vandalized spaces no one can use. In successful cities like Paris, New York, and Rome, workshops, apartments, offices, schools, churches, and theaters all stand side by side, with houses borrowing walls from whatever building has a boundary to spare.

The complaint against zoning is surely right. But it is not a complaint against planning. The great planning disasters, some of which have been studied by Peter Hall, owe their negative impact at least in part to their scale.[3] When the layout of a town is conceived from a master plan, the possibilities for disaster are legion."

Annie Mole: More 3D London Underground Cutaway Diagrams

Recently published: Levinson, David (2011) Network Structure and City Size. PLoS One PLoS ONE 7(1): e29721, January 12, 2012 [doi]

Network structure varies across cities. This variation may yield important knowledge about how the internal structure of the city affects its performance. This paper systematically compares a set of surface transportation network structure variables (connectivity, hierarchy, circuity, treeness, entropy, accessibility) across the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. A set of scaling parameters are discovered to show how network size and structure vary with city size. These results suggest that larger cities are physically more inter-connected. Hypotheses are presented as to why this might obtain. This paper then consistently measures and ranks access to jobs across 50 US metropolitan areas. It uses that accessibility measure, along with network structure variables and city size to help explain journey-to-work time and auto mode share in those cities. A 1 percent increase in accessibility reduces average metropolitan commute times by about 90 seconds each way. A 1 percent increase in network connectivity reduces commute time by 0.1 percent. A 1 percent increase in accessibility results in a 0.0575 percent drop in auto mode share, while a 1 percent increase in treeness reduces auto mode share by 0.061 percent. Use of accessibility and network structure measures is important for planning and evaluating the performance of network investments and land use changes. Keywords: Connectivity, Network Structure, Transportation Geography, Network Science, City Size, Scaling Rules, Accessibility, Travel Behavior, Mode Share, Journey-to-Work

This paper has several features:

1. The paper includes a ranking of 50 US cities by estimated accessibility (Table 3). This estimate is macroscopic, though I think quite plausible, and shows the variation in the 10 minute vs. 20 minute ... vs. 60 minute and composite accessibilities. The composite numbers are more or less what you expect, but some small cities are quite fast, so have high 10 or 20 minute accessibilities by car. Lots of work remains to be done on this (both multiple modes and multiple points in time) but this should be a valuable metric.
2. Larger cities are better connected. They are also more productive. This research suggests a hypothesis (which further research will need to test) that variations in network structure may explain variations of economic output. More connected cities are more efficient. It is not simply how many people are in the city (the classic economy of agglomeration argument) but how they are connected that affects their productivity.

I will also comment about the publication itself. It was published in PLoS One, a first for me. PLoS ONE is a newish, open content journal across part of the Public Library of Science family that aims to represent all fields of study. I did this as an experiment as much as anything. The paper is out less than 4 months after submission, and 2 months after revision. This is *fast*, much faster than for-profit publishers offer. The journal is interdisciplinary, and does not winnow for importance (letting the field do that), instead winnowing for quality of the work and its description. Everyone in the field knows how arbitrary publication is when paper is a constraint. This seems an improvement.

Crossposted at streets.mn and transportationist.org

The Minneapolis Downtown Council recently released "Intersections" a plan for Downtown Minneapolis. I had nothing to do with this plan, and so am free to comment. The plan is organized according to 10 major initiatives for 2025, I will list and comment on them, occasionally with snark, in order [my comments in brackets]:

1. "Double Downtown’s residential population. Expand the residential population to 70,000 as a catalyst for driving Downtown’s next wave of business vitality, social improvement and cultural renewal."

   [This seems like a good idea, the demand has been burgeoning for a couple of decades now, and with the Metrodome site coming available for productive uses again, there is an entire eastern side of downtown which could stand new housing. Demographics seem to be favorable for at least a modest return to downtown, and capturing another 1 percent of the region's total population (or about 7% of its growth over the next 15 years) should be feasible.]
   




2. "Transform Nicollet into a “Must-see” Destination. Extend and invigorate the original mall segment; establish “must-see” destinations along its route. Redesignate the Nicollet corridor as running from the Walker Art Center, through Loring Park to the Mississippi River, and ending at the foot of the Father Hennepin Bridge."

   [Calling this the "Nicollet" corridor is just confusing, since the real Nicollet Ave does something different than passing the Walker. Perhaps the plan wants to change Nicollet to "Eat Street" officially. The residents may have a different view. In short, there must be a better name. As a physical entity, re-establishing the mall, and keeping private cars off of it, are both good things. I am not sure how many "Must-see" destinations need to be along it, since so many of the region's best things are not. And really, "Must-see"? Is this Thursday Night 1990s NBC? The rest of the concept seems good, if a bit over-wrought, "iconic identity", I would have gone with "main street", though that I am sure is not sufficiently high-tech and resembles Sinclair Lewis a bit too much.]

3. "Build Gateway park. A new linear park, stretching from the light rail station on 5th Street to the river, will constitute the new Nicollet’s north end."

   [Good, and converting these parcels into parks drives up the value of the remaining developed blocks (a) by adding amenity and (b) by eliminating competition, good for existing building owners]
   

4. "Create a consistently compelling Downtown experience.
   Deliver a consistently excellent pedestrian experience that inspires people to explore Downtown block after block, no matter the season or time of day—24/7/365."

   [24/7, really? 4 am, you have 35,000 more residents, and you want street life? I don't want people exploring my neighborhood at 4 am. Stuff closes. Stuff should close. Even transit doesn't run 24/7 in some of the world's biggest cities, or if it does, it is very scaled back. This may be aimed to contrast with St. Paul "The city that sleeps".]

5. "Establish a downtown sports district that includes a new Vikings stadium.
   The district, centered around Target Field, will also include a renovated Target Center and the region’s busiest transit hub (the Transportation Interchange), all designed to maximize Downtown’s long-term entertainment value."

   [This is the first really terrible idea in the plan. First why should a Vikings stadium exist. Second, why should it exist in Minnesota, since most people watch football on TV anyway, really they ought to play in a TV studio. Third, why don't they use an existing brand new stadium, and enhance it if need be? It has to be cheaper to just give Zygi Wilf the money in foregone profits than subsidize a new stadium (The Cardinals play at University of Phoenix stadium [this is a joke]). Fourth, why should it exist downtown, when it is only used 8 games a year, and downtown real estate is apparently valuable (so the plan tells us), and everyone drives in and out without actually experiencing much of the city (The term "helicopter fans" might be appropriate). I realize there can be some cost savings with a few more hours of use for existing parking ramps and bars, but that is trivial compared to the wasted real estate (and subsidies, and opportunity costs). (I suspect this is about voicing support for the Vikings downtown rather than a real effort, but downtown Boosters cannot admit indifference.) Do stadiums really interact synergistically?]

6. "Lead the nation in transportation options. Maintain and improve high capacity for commuters on our streets. Increase transit’s mode share for daytime commuters from 40 percent to 60 percent. Increase circulation within Downtown by installing a Downtown Circulator (whether streetcars or zero- emission buses) while intensifying regular transit service in close-in neighborhoods. Emphasize accessible, forward-leaning transportation technology. Improve pedestrian and bicycle mobility. Build the Transportation Interchange as the metro area’s primary transit hub. Secure stable, reliable transit funding for expanding and maintaining the system."

   [The heart of downtown peak hour mode share for transit is about 40% for commute trips. This is the easiest to expand, and given the billions of dollars the region is spending on downtown-oriented rail transit, one would hope the share goes up, especially given there is no employment growth downtown. One can see why the downtown businesses interests advocate this spending, what is harder to see is why the rest of the region does. However, if transit is going to work anywhere in the region, it will be the downtowns and the University of Minnesota. This does fall short of the "doubling" of regional mode share the Metropolitan Council advocates though. Given the reduction in drivers to downtown due to increased transit, and due to the large number of nearby residents who can now walk or bike, what will we do with all the empty parking ramps. Maybe the Vikings can play Indoor Football on them.]
   

7. "Create and sustain a green infrastructure—and showcase the riverfront.
   Establish and intensify the tree canopy throughout Downtown. Create green corridors that connect downtown districts and close-in neighborhoods. Enhance and emphasize the Riverfront as a world-class destination and Downtown’s green focal point. Beautify Downtown’s entry points, including freeway embankments, ramps and medians. Launch a Greening and Public Realm Conservancy to perpetuate the greening program."

   [I like trees.]

8. "Forge connections to the University of Minnesota. Leverage the Central Corridor’s light rail service to create a stronger link between campus and Downtown. Extend green corridors over the freeway trench that separates the CBD from the West Bank campus and establish a major new residential district on and around the Metrodome site. Generate business synergies that benefit both the U’s mission and Downtown’s prosperity."

   [I like Air Rights too.]
   

9. End street homelessness. Extend housing and outreach efforts so that the 300–500 people who sleep outside or in inhumane places have shelter, treatment and job training that keep them off the streets.

   ["We don't want homeless people in Minneapolis" "We don't want people to be homeless in Minneapolis". Ok, call me unfeeling, but somehow I don't think it is the lack of public services that leads the remaining 300-500 homeless to be homeless. From the point of view of Minneapolis as a whole, housing 300-500 people is approximately trivial if the issue is giving shelter. I am fairly confident there are that many vacant hotel units city wide on a random night. More to the point, We could build a shelter for that many people for something in the $10 million range (about $25 per person). Yet if we did that, we would still find 300-500 homeless people. Clearly that is not the real issue. Of course there should be some form of assistance for those who are simply down on their luck, I just think that this ignores the "choice" aspect of homelessness if we are not going to round them up and drug them like we once did (which I do not advocate). And perhaps they are just exploring the city 24/7.]
   

10. Launch a Festival of Ideas and Civic Engagement. An annual festival will bring visitors, innovative thinking and civic energy to a city already noted for its citizen involvement. The festival will focus on creating a better future for all—locally, nationally and globally.

    [What a great original idea]

[Comment: The 345 MB version I have have 10377_PlanBook_forWeb.pdf has some production problems, duplicated pages, and pages out of place, but I did read all 111 pages of it (most were pictures). Otherwise, it is very attractive and fairly well written as planning documents go].

Crossposted at streets.mn and transportationist.org

Zoning has been criticized by many of a libertarian bent as denying individual property owners the right to do what they want with their property. It has also been criticized by densificationists who declaim the damnably high rents induced by real density caps enabled by zoning. I discussed some of these issues relating to height limits yesterday. I am of a libertarian bent and I like density, so why do I, in principle, think zoning is a useful concept?

Buy the sky and sell the sky

Economics talks about negative externalities, the outcome of a transaction between two parties that negatively affects a third. The classic example is air pollution. A has a factory making parts for B, but the factory pollutes the commons (the air), and C is harmed. The best theoretical solutions are either to have enforceable property rights (eliminating the commons), or establish appropriate prices for pollution, or to somehow internalize the costs by having the same person control both the production and consumption of the externality (e.g. the pollution and the air). Since we neither but nor sell the sky, nor even rent it, we must look for some other alternatives.

But regulate the land

On economies of externalities and zoning

The neighbors (the NIMBYs) don't want more development than they bargained for. When they bought their current property, there was a set of laws on the books regulating development on other properties. While legally I don't generally have a property right in someone else's lack of property rights, I have an expectation of policy continuity, and paid something for that expectation when I bought my own property. When someone else tries to rezone their property, (or the government proposes it), they may harm me. I may have more local air pollution, more malodorous neighbors, more broken beer bottles on my front lawn from inebriated friends of the nearby youthful renters who are otherwise undoubtedly good people except when they themselves are drunk at 2 am on a Saturday morning, more traffic on the roads (and thus more time in traffic), more strange cars in front of my house, more crowding in public school, and so on. While there may be great social benefits to this arrangement, either through lowered costs of public service delivery or greater economic productivity associated with the huddled masses, there are quite likely higher private costs similarly associated for at least some.

It is not enough that everyone might be better off. Unless some form of compensation is given to the neighbors from the great benefits such up-zoning entails, there is no reason for them to be in favor.

Zoning creates this Economy of Externality by reducing suboptimal spatial adjacencies that experience suggests generate negative effects. Recall that externalities require not just a polluter but also a pollutee. If no one is in the woods is to hear, the drunk partier did not create a noise externality. If you don't move next to my kosher pig farm, you will not by bothered by its smell. If you do not live next to the gravel pit, its flying shards will matter not.

[Minneapolis has seen these problems with the Pillsbury A Mill project, which has been downscaled both due to local complaints and market conditions].

Compensating for Tacit Rights

This is not to say any particular zoning regulation is appropriate, efficient, or equitable. It is to say there is a 'fact on the ground' that has created a set of tacit rights that ought not be blithely unseated without expecting to provide compensation from the putative gains by rezoning or dezoning to those for whom this implicit contract between the public and private owners has been made. There are lots of options for providing these economic side payments. There has been some preliminary discussion about side payment in research on congestion pricing, but this needs to go much farther. This can be applied for all types of transportation investments and land uses at various scales. There will always be arguments about price, but if the neighbors ask too much, status quo ante prevails (the developer won't develop). If the land use revolutionaries offer too little, the status quo ante prevails (the local politics will not permit approval). If there were truly gains from trade, there should be a core to this transaction. The logic of the ultimatum game might be informative.

We need to enable the neighbors to be winners too if we want them to support changing zoning and other land use regulations.

Reihan Salam at NRO questions the Kotkin hypothesis, asking: "Are people choosing low-density metropolitan areas — or did rising prices in high-density metropolitan areas [like Marin County, in the Bay Area pictured -ed.] drive the population shift?"

What is cause, and what is effect, is not immediately obvious. There are trade-offs. High-density areas are naturally more expensive (due to greater demand, otherwise they would not be high-density). High-density areas are also typically formed by physical constraint, meaning less supply. They are also more regulated due to their higher density. Density naturally produces more regulation because density naturally produces more externalities [See tomorrow's post]. Even expensive metro areas have inexpensive housing in places, it just tends to be either lower quality, or in less desirable neighborhoods.

I wrote Height limits produce a positive externality recently, to which the technology/urbanist/libertarian blogger Timothy Lee tweeted (but I took more than a month to respond to, since I don't live on Twitter), and I replied (this is reformatted for presentation, but I think captures what was said in the right sequence)...:

You don't think there's a shortage of space near multi-line transit stops like Metro Center and Gallery Place/Chinatown?

The higher you build there, the shorter you build elsewhere. There is plenty of land in DC that could be denser at less than 10 stories.

why does taller buildings one place mean shorter buildings elsewhere? There is a region-wide housing shortage.

Regional demand is largely fixed. Someone who can't get in block X will be far more likely to locate in block Y than Charlotte.

you don't think real estate prices affect migration between metro areas?

not much. People have jobs before they migrate. Firms locate for lots of reasons, but a shortage of hsg in a small dtwn no.

there is plenty of moderately priced real estate in metro DC, SFO and elsewhere, how else could poor people live there?

Only if the savings on the labor costs outweigh the savings on economies of agglomeration. This indicates few e of a.

I recommend amazon.com/Gated-City-Kin…

I read Avent and Glaeser, I believe they overstate e of a. The more important point is full social costs. New dev. should pay.

Firms move to save on labor costs (which are connected to housing costs) all the time.

If everyone paid full social cost, (and compensated losers) build away. In the absence of FSC pricing, we regulate.

Clearly Twitter is not a good way to have an academic discussion. Blogs are much, much better. There are several points wrapped up in this:

• Empirical questions about Intra-urban vs. Inter-urban migration
• The rights of the property owner vs. the rights of the community
• Economic productivity (positive externalities?) vs. Pollution/Congestion etc. (negative externalities)
• Empirical questions about the scarcity of land
• Empirical questions about what constitutes good urban form
• Empirical questions about the need to be downtown or simply in the metro area [plenty of suburbs even in DC would be happy to accommodate growth]

In short, I think height limits are not the dominant issue in any US metropolitan areas. This is not to say that regulation does not matter at all, as there are lots of regulations beyond height limits, but that its effect is limited. I discussed this previously in Zoning and Externalities.

If there is value, where are the side payments from otherwise rejected developers? My perhaps cynical view, 'No side payments, no evidence of super-normal social profits, no evidence of huge value being lost'. While the developer may be losing potential profits, society is not, as those who are negatively affected are not being given compensation to offset the negative effects they would receive were the project to go forward. I realize there are transactions costs limiting the ease of implementing side payments, but surely some institution could arise to facilitate this.

I also wrote on the Limits to agglomeration, suggesting that agglomeration economies arguments are overstated, and in fact it is agglomeration externalities that create density, not (or not so much) vice versa.

DC and New York are both edge cases, being political and financial capitals respectively, both of which at least historically generated important economies of agglomeration.

One of the critical problems here, as with much research is the difference between marginal and average effects. E.g. Clearly transportation matters. If there were no transportation there would be no economic activity. However, that does not mean that a marginal increase in transportation supply will have a significant, or even positive, effect on economic activity, that depends on context. The network is mature, the marginal returns to new investment now are much lower than the historical average returns. Similarly, the marginal returns to density might be much smaller than average returns. Cities exist for a reason. That reason is economies of agglomeration in various forms. That said, where cities are continuing to grow, those economies must be valuable. Where suburbs are growing, the daily face-to-face inter-firm interactions emerging from the classical 19th and early 20th century transit-based downtown has declined relative to the need to be within auto-commuting distance of places that are to be dealt with on a short-term basis. When new cities grow, new patterns of economic activity are forming, and these may be more valuable than incremental changes to mature cities.

All of which is to say cities and their economies are dynamic, and the first order factor is the underlying market economics, while regulations (which are themselves the product of political market preferences) are second order effects.

Lisa responds to my earlier post in: Is transport too expensive? The Transportationist gets us thinking

To reduce her excellent post, she has 4 hypotheses to add to my 8:

9) The highest demand areas for maintenance and new stock occur in places that are expensive.

10) Project creep.

11) Envy is a much bigger problem in public works than in personal life,

12) Benefit cost is only as good as the integrity of the data and the analysts, and the whole process is too easy to roll.

In the comments to my original post,

Dick Mudge (I think) added another, which is

13) Federal funds favor capital-heavy technologies and investments.

"knowing home" writes:

14) Transportation planners also must demonstrate their projects will address potential peak traffic 20 years down the road, when it is assumed congestion will have increased dramatically.

PWG writes:

15) Planners and engineers are paid as percentage of total project cost

16) Materials are scarcer (and thus more expensive)

17) Regulations like ADA and environmental protection are driving up costs

*Updated 12/3* David King adds two more via FB:

** Updated 12/5 ** The Economist writes about the UK:

21) Poor commissioning.
"Since the competition for infrastructure investment is global, not national, Britain faces a further problem: project costs are “excessively high”, according to Infrastructure UK, a Treasury body charged with helping the private sector invest. That is partly because regulation tends to be rigorous and planning onerous. But Infrastructure UK reckons stop-start investment and poor commissioning are also to blame. It hopes that laying a pipeline of projects now will help to cut costs by £2 billion to £3 billion a year."

*** Updated 12/6***

**** Updated 12/8 ****

***** Updated 12/9 *****

So we are now at 17 19 21 24 31 38hypotheses. Martin Luther had 95, so we may close in on that.

Crossposted at streets.mn and transportationist.org

When I was growing up (in suburban Maryland), there was an ad on local TV from Crown Books. Founder Robert Haft asserted "books cost too much", which led him to create Crown Books, and helped put independent booksellers out of business decades before Amazon became villain #1 among the literati.

Transportation costs too much.

Yet unlike independent booksellers, we weep not for the independent contractors and businesses that charge so much for transportation infrastructure, equipment, and operations.

• Signalized intersections (~$175K),
• buses (~$400K),
• roundabouts (~$300K),
• loop detectors (~$5K) (ed. installed),
• diamond interchanges (~$9M),
• bridges to nowhere Houlton, Wisconsin (~$668M),
• light rail lines (~$1.4B),
• high-speed rail lines (~$100B), etc.

are just some of the all quite pricey elements of transportation in early 21st century America. It sure seems like we should be able to build this cheaper. Think about it, $175K for 12 lightbulbs on a timer. What's going wrong?

I have several hypotheses (please add others in the comments):

1. Standards have risen. Our obsession with safety, features, environmental protection, and quality drive up the cost. Engineering design is often 20% of project costs. If only we would tolerate a few more deaths, a bus without AC, pollution, and frequent breakdowns, our initial costs would be lower. But when do reasonable investments become gold plating? Does the firetruck really need to do a 360 degree turn on the cul-de-sac, or can it back out?
2. Principal-agent problem. Public works agencies are spending Other People's Money, and so are less motivated to get value for dollar than an individual consumer on their own. This principal-agent problem prevails in lots of organizations, but especially so in public works where the bias is not to have a failure. There was an old saying in business, no one ever got fired for buying IBM. The same holds in public works, where rocking the boat with new or innovative technologies is not sufficiently rewarded.
3. Thin markets. There is no Amazon.com or eBay for public works. I cannot go on Amazon and buy a transit bus or an interchange. The internet has not driven down prices in this field the way it has in so many others. As a result a few vendors can collude or orchestrate higher prices than would be faced in a more competitive market.
4. There are in-sufficient economies of scale. When everything is bespoke, there is no opportunity for standardization and economies of scale. While many rail against cookie-cutter design, it is only with cookie-cutters that we get lots of cookies.
5. Projects are scoped wrong. We have investments that don't match actual demands. And this is not just for megaprojects. We have big buses serving few passengers. We have overgrown highways. We have a fear of building too small and having congestion or crowding so we build too big.
6. Benefits are concentrated, costs are diffuse. As a result, the known beneficiaries lobby hard for projects, but not just to build it, but to build it in a way that is expensive. Costs are diffuse, it is seldom worth the taxpayer's time to oppose a project just because of its costs, which are spread among millions of other taxpayers.
7. Decision-makers are remote. Remote actors cannot have precise information about local conditions, and in the absence of a free market in transportation (there is generally one buyer, who is generally a government agency), prices are not clear. As a result these remote actors misallocate because they are misinformed. This notion derives from the Economic calculation problem and Hayek's Fatal Conceit.
8. No one actually does B/C analysis. A recent headline in the San Jose Mercury News says:

   Bay Area transportation projects to be judged on benefits vs. costs - :
   

   ""Talk to any business person about not having a benefits-vs.-cost discussion and they'll say, 'Duh, you mean you don't do that?' " said the commission's executive director, Steve Heminger. "They insist on it, but in the transportation profession it is not all that common. ... This levels the playing field.""

   Heminger was appointed executive director in 2001 and hired in 1993, and only *now* they are doing benefit/cost analysis. At any rate, looking at the ratios presented in the story, they are clearly doing it wrong. Whether it is common or not I will leave to politicians or political scientists, however it has been the textbook procedure for a very long time. I suppose it is progress to at least acknowledge using B/C analysis even if the implementation is flawed

We are simultaneously spending too much and not spending enough. Because we mis-prioritize where the money is spent, we have inadequate resources for other things. We cut corners.

My favorite example is the bus stop sign which says "bus stop". While this is better than no bus stop sign, or one that said "Buses Don't Stop Here", it is still quite uninformative, it doesn't say which bus stops here, when it stops, where it is going, what is the frequency, when it operates. Why don't we have better bus service operations? In part because the scarce resources that could be devoted to that are instead spent on expensive new capital investments that serve a much smaller fraction of the population.

We can all think of things that we would like the transportation system to do, that are technically feasible, but it doesn't, because resources are scarce. They are scarce because of misallocation.

The costs of gold plating are several. Money spent on project X cannot be spent on project Y. This is the monetary opportunity cost of misallocation. Land devoted to project X cannot be devoted to project Y. More land also means greater distances to traverse. This is a spatial opportunity cost.

There is a tension between the risk of gold plating (focus on benefits to the exclusion of cost) and of corner cutting (focusing on costs to the exclusion of benefits). But there is available to us a balance, building something which maximizes the difference between benefits and costs, not just looking at benefits or costs. Insufficient attention is placed on the trade-off, too much on the ends by advocates of one side or the other.

When we are out-of-balance, people distrust that their tax money is wisely spent. If people see lots of examples of mis-expenditure, they will cut how much they are willing to allocate to transportation. Mis-expenditure thus causes the system to deteriorate in two ways. First it reduces inputs to the system, money that could be spent. Second it allocates money away from genuine public needs (starting with adequate maintenance and operation of existing facilities) and towards unnecessary wants, thereby increasing unmet needs.

We need to break this cycle of distrust if we want to adequately fund transportation needs (not wants). This requires institutional changes in how transportation services are provided. Asking the same people for more money is unlikely to be very successful. As has been mis-attributed to Benjamin Franklin: Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

John Gruber @ Daring Fireball does not like vision videos: The Type of Companies That Publish Future Concept Videos:

"DeVilla isn’t the only one who accused me of Apple-biased hypocrisy regarding my stance on Microsoft’s “Future Visions” vs. Apple’s “Knowledge Navigator”. It is true that when I linked to Andy Baio’s post about “Knowledge Navigator” a few weeks ago, I didn’t add any commentary.

But the exact same criticism I have for Microsoft today applies to 1987 Apple. “Knowledge Navigator” encapsulates everything that was wrong with Apple in 1987. Their coolest products were imaginary futuristic bullshit. The mindset and priorities of Apple’s executive leadership in 1987 led the company to lose what was then an enormous usability and user experience lead over the rest of the industry, and eventually drove the company to the precipice of bankruptcy. That 1987 Apple was a broken company is so painfully obvious from today’s vantage point that I didn’t think it needed to be mentioned." [links and emphasis added]

This applies to planning as well, which is very much about "imaginary futuristic bullshit" which most people either (a) can't grasp, (b) dislike, (c) naively believe religiously, or (d) find underwhelming.

I think you need both a vision to shape direction and concrete incremental decisions to move you in that direction. Whether a vision helps or hinders incrementalism depends on the vision and who it is pitched to. (The classic argument of "Perfect being the enemy of the Good" often delays useful projects to the point nothing is accomplished). I am sure Steve Jobs had an internal vision, but he did not want to reveal it before it was ready. He was dealing with private goods.

Public works on the other hand cannot really be sprung on the public anymore. Hence visions, and plans.

A major downside is getting locked into a bad vision, a misguided line on the map, or a poor investment strategy because the vision or plan became an implicit contract. Unlike vision videos, which if wrong or distracting can easily be discarded, the plan somehow becomes permanent.

In a previous post I identified the size of the pedestrian city as on the order of 50,000, let's do this a bit more systematically.

Let's illustrate with some assumptions:

• One-way Travel time budget (B) = 0.5 h
• Walking speed (S) = 5 km/h
• Walking network radius (Rn = S/B) = 2.5 km
• Network circuity (C) = 1.25
• Walking euclidean radius (Re = Rn/C) = 2 km
• Walking euclidean area (potential) (Ae=Pr*Re^2) = 12.56 km^2
• Population density (D) = 5,000 persons per km^2 [As a point of reference, the current population density of Manhattan is 27,485/km^2, which I would argue is only enabled by 19th century technologies like elevators and transit. Rome currently has a population density of 2,101/km^2]
• Population within TTB threshold (P=D*Ae) 62,800

Obviously you can construct a spreadsheet and play with population densities, which are highly disputed in ancient times. One sees claims that the City of Rome in ancient times had a population of 1 million people, but it is unclear over what area that was measured, and some estimates of those densities far exceed the densities of modern elevator cities (like Manhattan). I believe it is possible that high crowding occurred, but I think it unlikely that such crowding extended over large areas.

Also one can have a pedestrian city that exceeds the one-way walking travel time budget, but not a city one interacts with on a daily basis. This is more the equivalent of adjacent and overlapping cities, and likely have multiple cores.

Recent working paper:

• Huang, Arthur and Levinson, David (2011) To game or not to game: teaching transportation planning with board games. (working paper)

Traditional "chalk and talk" teaching in civil engineering has gradually been replaced with the idea of active learning focusing on encouraging students' knowledge discovery with innovative pedagogical methods and tools. One interesting tool is the board game. This research examines the efficacy of adopting transportation board games as a tool in graduate-level transportation planning and transportation economics classes at the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Minnesota from 2008 to 2010. In these classes, a weekday night was scheduled for playing transportation board games. Students were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the games on their learning and to write a self-reflective paper about their findings. The majority of the students reveal that their understanding of the planning process, network deployment, and practical issues, and and their ability to form opinion about transportation planning has been improved. Their summaries on the game economy and its implications on planning validate that their understanding obtained from this game process has met the pedagogical goals. Our analysis further shows that students who are moderately/highly visual, sensing, active, or sequential, all else equal, tend to learn more effectively through this approach than those who are not. Overall, this research suggests that properly incorporating board games into the curriculum can enhance students' learning process in transportation planning.

I did not know until recently about the: City of North Oaks:

"Located in the Twin Cities, just northeast of St. Paul, Minnesota, North Oaks is a unique suburban community.  With a rich history and emphasis on retaining the natural environment, North Oaks celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2006.

Approximately 4500 residents call North Oaks home.  Because residents' properties extend to halfway across the road, all residential roads in the City are private and for the use of North Oaks residents and their invited guests only.

The City owns no property.  With residents owning the roads, the North Oaks Home Owners' Association owns the park and recreation areas and trails throughout the City.

This website is run by the City of North Oaks and serves as a major communications tool for the entire community. Here you can find information about the operation of our local government, homeowner's associations, community news, promotion of local events and answers to many frequently asked questions. "

I would visit, but I would not be allowed in, unless someone scores me an invite. I wonder if their international roughness index is better or worse than similarly situated suburban subdivisions.

View Larger Map

(Via Bruce Benson.)

Alexandra Lange at Design Observer does not like the New Apple HQ

Wouldn't it have been more radical for Apple to double down on an actual town? To act more like J. Irwin Miller in Columbus than CG chairman Frazar Wilde in Bloomfield. Miller hired Alexander Girard to spiff up Main Street, and masterminded adaptive reuse of the old storefronts to provide his employees and his neighbors what they needed in town. Cupertino leaders fell all over themselves in their desire to keep Apple's taxes in town, but wouldn't it be better to benefit from some of its knowledge and physical assets?

This is a classic trade-off. Interaction between people is of course good for generating ideas, productivity, etc. But which interactions, between which people, do you want to maximize: Interaction within the firm (a la Apple's HQ) or interaction between the firm and the outside world (Lange's proposed solution)? Given finite time budgets, more of one means less of the other. For Apple, with its secretiveness part of the formula of its success, the answer is obvious. For many universities, the issue is the same (town vs. gown), even without the profit motive. The most productive work-related random interactions I have are on-campus, not between me and some random town-folk (sorry Minneapolitans I meet on the street).

This is the same argument as Eric Raymond puts forth in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which argues in favor of the Bazaar model of software development (which gives us Open Source products like Linux) rather than the Cathedral (Microsoft or Apple, e.g.). Open source and open content are good things (my Open source and open content projects include the Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive, Simulating Transportation for Realistic Education and Training, some wikibooks, and the Journal of Transport and Land Use), and interaction with the community is a good thing, for the community. As an employee of a not-for-profit University, I am enabled to do these community-benefitting works.

But if open dissipates the quality of internal interactions, or costs the profits necessary to justify a high fixed cost investment, the reasons for resistance are quite clear. Apple's business model is such that it cannot make large multi-year investments if someone else can get their ideas and come to market at the same time without the investment. In some areas, those with high fixed costs but low excludability (ideas are easy to steal and hard to protect, hence patents) and low rivalry (my possessing an idea does not prevent you from possessing it) require secrecy for development. If the fixed costs of development were low relative to the variable costs of production, the isolation and secrecy would be less critical, since the cost of production would be proportional to units made, that does not describe software, where all of the investment is up front.

The Linux strategy of openness works quite well at producing low-level operating systems (which underlie Android phones, servers, cable boxes, and airplane entertainment systems (see figure) among the countless other systems out there), but not well at User Interface, for that someone needs to come along and put something proprietary on top, or hardware/software integration. Google did a UI stack on top of Linux with Android and essentially gave it away in exchange for advertising revenue (if they are not selling to you, they are selling you). This is a different business model.

Getting Around Minneapolis reports on Feet of street :

The brilliant blog Mapping the Strait posted an infographic yesterday comparing the feet of street per resident of 8 American cities.

The metric is supposed to give an indication of the amount of infrastructure per resident, to augment standard persons per area measures of population density.

According to the Design Guidelines for Streets and Sidewalks, Minneapolis has 1,423 miles of roads and vehicle bridges, not counting freeways. My rough Google Earth measurement of freeways within city limits is 30.3 miles (that includes the part of 62 on the border but does not include highways 55 & 121 because I think they are in the city’s measurement, although that’s just a guess). That makes for 7,673,424 feet of streets and highways, or 20.1 feet for each of the 382,578 residents counted in the 2010 census. We’re closer to Detroit, Phoenix or San Antonio than Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or Chicago on this count.

That doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable result to me, although by measuring residents only you ignore the significant market for infrastructure represented by workers. In that case cities such as San Antonio or Houston that contain most of their employment catchment area in their city limits are going to be more accurately portrayed by this metric. One of the commenters at Mapping the Straight asked for this metric by area of paved surface – I think using lane feet would be better than centerline feet, but probably less widely available. Fun to think about anyway.

London Reconnections discusses possible extensions to the Docklands Light Railway, shown in the figure. The official version is here: DLR - Development Projects - The future of DLR - Where we go Next

The privately operated (under franchise agreement) DLR opened in 1987, after 3 years of construction and just a few years after conception (in 1982 according to TfL (though antecedents can be seen as early as the 1973 Docklands Study, according to the London Dockland Development Corporation) ), to serve the emerging Docklands regeneration project centered at Canary Wharf.

Containerization of shipping changed the nature of the industry, which migrated in the 1960s and 70s from London to Felixstowe. The Docklands development replaced the newly abandoned shipping docks in East London with an emerging financial center, an American-like downtown for London. Almost immediately upon opening, construction started on extensions. Success begat success, and proposals and funding for extensions to this new, Docklands-centered automated public-transport technology continued to flow in. As can be seen from the top map, extensions continue to be proposed, notably to Charing Cross. The early DLR segments took advantage of abandoned railway lines, and while not a green-field, it was a relatively open brown-field canvas on which to work.

The planning for the Jubilee Line, then the "Fleet Line" (after Fleet Street and the River Fleet), apparently began around 1965. The first section opened in 1979, two years after the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth for which it was named. The line temporarily terminated at Charing Cross station, as shown in the poster. It was to continue eastwards, along Fleet Street.

In 1999 the Jubilee Line was extended to Canary Wharf as well, but this eastward extension resulted in the abandonment of the then 20-year old extension to Charing Cross, as a new routing split from the old in Green Park. The decision to do this can be seen as early as the 1990 Jubilee Line Extension options map. At this point the expensive Charing Cross station was just over 10 years old. Stations are often more expensive (and require more tunneling volume) than the lines which they connect, so this is a major rethink, not some temporary train halt which was subsequently bypassed. Jubilee Line Extension is said to have cost 3.5 billion pounds, which delayed other significant potential construction projects, such as Crossrail and the Chelsea-Hackney line.

There are several points to be made about this:

• No one in the 1970s anticipated abandoning the Jubilee line portion of Charing Cross station, certainly not so soon after construction.


• No one in the 1970s (or 1980s or 1990s) anticipated that the DLR might one day reoccupy Charing Cross station, or even construct such a large cross-London network centered on the Docklands. (I did see speculation about this in the first decade of the 2000s). While the Underground system is centered on the Square Mile of the City of London, with many branches and a Circle Line, DLR has a new hub, with a new technology, that inter-connects with the old at several key stations, and if the extensions are built, at several more.


• In order to build anything, you must have a vision. Rarely does construction start without a fixed end point in mind (this is not SimCity) That construction once made is largely irreversible, though it may be abandoned, and it provides opportunities for reuse, it creates "facts on the ground" that are hard to undo. The City of London street network is a perfect example. Even after the Great Fire of 1666 or the bombings of World War II, it greatly resembles the facts on the ground at the time of William the Conqueror.


• In order to move forward, you must be willing to abandon old visions. The DLR and Jubilee Line Extensions were new visions, built on top of (and beneath) old constructions, not old visions. They were even willing to abandon one major fact on the ground (Charing Cross station) so as not to be wed to a vision that no longer worked.


• Facts on the ground create new constraints, new opportunities, new ways of looking at the world. There are many possible lines in a network, but only a few can actually be built. We are far from "optimal", and I suspect we always will be, but we need to consider what is the best decision given the world as it exists, not the world as it might be according to some plan.

We ought not be too locked into our plans, we forego many opportunities by clinging to the zombie maps of long-dead officials.

Some nice naval-gazing about the planning profession, Thomas Campanella writes: Reconsidering Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of American Planning: Places: Design Observer:

"The second legacy of the Jacobsian revolution is related to the first: Privileging the grassroots over plannerly authority and expertise meant a loss of professional agency. In rejecting the muscular interventionism of the Burnham-Moses sort, planners in the 1960s identified instead with the victims of urban renewal. New mechanisms were devised to empower ordinary citizens to guide the planning process. This was an extraordinary act of altruism on our part; I can think of no other profession that has done anything like it. Imagine economists at the Federal Reserve holding community meetings to decide the direction of fiscal policy. Imagine public health officials giving equal weight to the nutritional wisdom of teenagers — they are stakeholders, after all! Granted, powering up the grassroots was necessary in the 1970s to stop expressway and renewal schemes that had run amok. But it was power that could not easily be switched off. Tools and processes introduced to ensure popular participation ended up reducing the planner’s role to that of umpire or schoolyard monitor. Instead of setting the terms of debate or charting a course of action, planners now seemed content to be facilitators — 'mere absorbers of public opinion,' as Alex Krieger put it, 'waiting for consensus to build.' [9]

The fatal flaw of such populism is that no single group of citizens — mainstream or marginalized, affluent or impoverished — can be trusted to have the best interests of society or the environment in mind when they evaluate a proposal. The literature on grassroots planning tends to assume a citizenry of Gandhian humanists. In fact, most people are not motivated by altruism but by self-interest. Preservation and enhancement of that self-interest — which usually orbits about the axes of rising crime rates and falling property values — are the real drivers of community activism. This is why it's a fool’s errand to rely upon citizens to guide the planning process. Forget for a moment that most folks lack the knowledge to make intelligent decisions about the future of our cities. Most people are simply too busy, too apathetic, or too focused on their jobs or kids to be moved to action over issues unless those issues are at their doorstep. And once an issue is at the doorstep, fear sets in and reason flies out the window. So the very citizens least able to make objective decisions end up dominating the process, often wielding near-veto power over proposals.

....

Late in life, even Jane Jacobs grew frustrated with the timidity of planners — Canadian planners this time. In an April 1993 speech — published in the Ontario Planning Journal — she lamented the absence of just the sort of robust plannerly interventionism that she once condemned. Jacobs read through a list of exemplary planning initiatives — the Toronto Main Street effort; the new Planning for Ontario guidelines; efforts to plan the Toronto waterfront; and plans for infill housing, the renewal and extension of streetcar transit, the redevelopment of the St. Lawrence neighborhood, and on and on. And then she unleashed this bitter missile: "Not one of these forward looking and important policies and ideas — not ONE — was the intellectual product of an official planning department, whether in Toronto, Metro, or the province." Indeed, she drove on, "our official planning departments seem to be brain-dead in the sense that we cannot depend on them in any way, shape, or form for providing intellectual leadership in addressing urgent problems involving the physical future of the city." This, I hardly need to add, from a person who did more than any other to quash plannerly agency to shape the physical city. [14]

"

The net is the planners have no vision, and no one else does either. The question then arises, is vision necessary, or even good? Those who believe in the merits of the decentralized world would argue that vision, especially big visions, is more likely to do harm than good.

I would argue we need some form of vision, on which to base current decisions. But we need to continually re-evaluate those decisions, and that vision. We cannot get stuck on zombie plans, which is what visions often lead to, but we also cannot act aimlessly.

A few days ago I was quoted discussing the so-called high-speed rail project between Chicago and the Twin Cities saying "It's deader."

Peter Bell discussed the many "Near death experiences" of the Central Corridor LRT, which recently got fully funded from the federal government, and is now (almost assuredly, irreversible, as these things go).

Well, of course, in transportation, nothing ever truly dies as long as the line on the map is a memory in the mind of an advocate. A decision to not build a project is easily reversed, since "no" involves no investment in fixed costs, unless something is done in its stead. This is especially a problem if the right-of-way for the facility is being preserved, through either land purchases or prohibitions on development.

Following the lead of John Quiggin, who titled a book "Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us", we might call these old ideas "Zombie Transportation", projects that are now "bad" (or at least no longer "good") ideas, effectively seemingly dead, yet still live in people's minds (and occasionally, like the California HSR, get partial funding before their plug is eventually pulled).

There are lots of other projects one can think of that were lines on maps for decades before being realized. Maryland 200 (the Inter-County Connector), Minnesota 610 are two that come immediately to mind, on the map for 60 and at least 40 years respectively.

In many cases, the problem is simple, ruthless, benefit/cost analysis, the B/C ratio, which may have once been above 1.0, falls to a lower level due to changed circumstances, increased costs due to environmental or other concerns, or a change in demand associated with different finance (tax to toll) mechanism or price of energy. Yet because it is a "commitment" (political, or moral) to a community that their turn will come, they too will get their line built, the line on the map never comes off the map.

Once a project is completed and open, it is essentially irreversible, it will almost never be shuttered before it physically fails (a few exceptions to be noted: e.g. collapsing urban freeways in San Francisco), or requires replacement (Streetcars in many US cities). And even then, many facilities which should be shuttered continue to be maintained and operated, and later reconstructed instead. The difficulty with gravelization is an extreme example of this.

We need a better system for truly killing bad or obsolete ideas in transportation, for culling the losers or the no longer winners. Otherwise, agencies will look at decade old maps, say to themselves: "what remains unfinished", and proceed along to build zombie facilities despite newer priorities rising to the fore and old ideas ceasing to be effective.

Tyler Cowan on Brasilia ... Does Brasilia work? : ""

There are a few quick lessons:

1. Sorry Jane Jacobs fans, planned cities do sometimes work. Take a look at postwar Germany too.

2. “Planned” cities are often less formally planned in their entirety than you think, and that is true for the greater Brasilia area. Brasilia is a mix of planned and unplanned elements, and it’s the mix which (mostly) works. We should not demonize either the “planned” or “unplanned” aspects of that blend per se.

3. Even when matters are quite screwed up from the policy or optimality side, mobility enforces an equality of average rates of return. This is one of the most neglected insights of economics.

David Metz writes about a great paper by Bridget Rosewell Planning Curses

"Planning Curses
'Planning Curses' is the title of a paper by the economist Bridget Rosewell, published by think tank Policy Exchange, which challenges conventional approaches to justifying investment in infrastructure. Economic models are too complicated and have a poor track record; and welfare analysis as the basis for benefits means little to those affected by investments - for instance the notional travel time savings from transport investments.

Bridget Rosewell wants us to pursue projects on the basis of their contribution to the economy, not to 'welfare', with business cases which engage business; and to use long-term frameworks for thinking about the future, rather than plans or blue-prints.

A stimulating critique of the standard approach."

Alan Pisarski onLivability and All That

Livability is one of those once innocuous words, like sustainability, that now receive almost unquestioned acceptance in the bureaucracy, academia and the media. After all, words like sustainability and livability have no acceptable negative form. Who could be in favor of anything unlivable, insensitive, unhealthy or unsustainable?

Back in the late seventies, when I served as Special Assistant for Information Policy in the Office of the Secretary, our shibboleth was "balanced". Can anyone be in favor of unbalanced transportation? It didn't matter that the word had no meaning and we couldn't explain it to others, it still became standard in the rhetoric of secretarial officers. In an unkind moment a reporter asked the present DOT Secretary Ray LaHood what he meant by livable, given that the department had just added it to its criteria for giving away money. He replied vaguely it was something about being able to walk to work and the park and a restaurant, to a doctor and a few more things.

well worth reading the rest ... a full dismantling of the flavor of the month.

Tom Vanderbilt has curated the Nimble Cities project at Slate.

There are some good ideas (nothing I haven't seen before, unfortunately, though lots that has yet to be implemented). Clearly the voting was gamed by at least some of the participants. ("Humanity's Highway to a Sustainable Society Submitted by George Schrader"). I am pleased to see the Land Value Tax ("eliminate the property tax") getting some love (if not some gamesmanship), as well as ultra-narrow cars. Lots of attention for bicycles (3 of top 10), especially given their current mode share in US cities.

Reallocating roadspace (modally, directionally, by vehicle type, dynamically, etc.) needs far more attention than it gets.

London has just posted the Mayor's Transport Strategy . This is an exceedingly well done (and aesthetically pleasing) plan, even if you don't agree with every specific.

From the BBC New UK high-speed rail plan unveiled

The line would serve Birmingham and Manchester, getting passengers from Glasgow to London in just two hours and 16 minutes, the rail firm said. It rejected several alternative routes, including the east of England.

Judging from the map (linked below), the architecture of the line is clearly to feed London, all of the ancillary cities are as if on a tree with the xylem and phloem oriented to London, it would not be terribly good for say Manchester to Edinburgh or Manchester to Birmingham.

"The firm said that the line would account for 43.7 million journeys per year by 2030, which would result in 3.8 million fewer vehicle journeys and fewer carbon dioxide emissions.".

Finally, the cost is esimated at $55B for 1500 miles of rail (presumably including triple or quadruple tracking in some sections. Planning will take 5 more years. It is hoped by the promoters the first section (London to Birmingham) will open in 2020. Speeds will max at 200 mph.

Also see: London to Glasgow in five minutes, a video showing the West Coast Main Line (which this proposal seems to duplicate) and was recently modernized for 9 billion pounds.

I attended the Open House for Franklin Ave/East River Road Intersection, where the County and consultants revealed their plans. These are described in the (what I thought was defunct) Bridgeland News article.

My views are here.

In short, instead of a Monderman-esque Shared Space, or even a roundabout, they are tweaking the signal timings and reconfiguring the approach lanes. The main change there is on the Franklin Avenue bridge, which will reduce to 1 lane in each direction on the west side, and flare to two lanes at the approach. This will no doubt improve things (in terms of vehicle delay from most approaches and pedestrian delay) over the baseline, and at least it is relatively cheap, but this, as they officials admit, is a short-term fix, and the intersection will need to be revisited post-Central Corridor.

Recently published:

King, David, Kevin Krizek, and David Levinson (2008) Designing and Assessing a Teaching Laboratory for an Integrated Land Use and Transportation Course. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board #2046 pp 85-93 [doi]

The intersection of land use and transportation policy is becoming an increasingly important focus for all urban planners. This focus, however, challenges the academic community to design effective courses that teach the concepts and professional skills required for professional experience. Integrated land use and transportation courses should engage students to develop interdisciplinary skills while becoming familiar with, for example, travel behavior and zoning policies. Laboratory courses (or segments of courses) as part of graduate curricula provide platforms to further emphasize skills. A common pedagogy problem is devising laboratory assignments that are integrative, cumulative, practical, and interesting for students. Furthermore, laboratory projects should introduce students to real-world problems and techniques while exploring broad planning themes. This paper presents uses four years of laboratory segments from a land use-transportation course (LUTC) at the University of Minnesota to evaluate the needs and results of practitioner-oriented land use and transportation planning education. The laboratory used group projects where students proposed integrated developments using air rights above existing (and sunken) urban freeways in the Twin Cities. The projects provided a practitioner-oriented project through a collaborative and reflexive learning process. This article describes the completed projects, as well as the technical skills, integrated approach and visionary planning necessary for successful execution. The students addressed complicated problems associated with large-scale development by researching neighborhood demographics, characteristics, and pertinent regulations. They used their research to analyze traffic impacts, propose zoning regulations, and outline costs and benefits from their proposal using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), statistical analyses, assessor data and traffic engineering manuals. Using the completed student projects and comparisons with other land use-transportation course and laboratory projects the authors demonstrate how these laboratory components serve multiple pedagogy goals.

Keywords: Air Rights, Transportation-Land Use Planning, Education

Recently published:

Iacono, Michael, David Levinson and Ahmed El-Geneidy (2008) Models of Transportation and Land Use Change: A Guide to the Territory Journal of Planning Literature 22: 323-340.
[DOI]

Modern urban regions are highly complex entities. Despite the difficulty of modeling every relevant aspect of an urban region, researchers have produced a rich variety of models dealing with interrelated processes of urban change. The most popular types of models have been those dealing with the relationship between transportation network growth and changes in land use and the location of economic activity, embodied in the concept of accessibility. This article reviews some of the more common frameworks for modeling transportation and land use change, illustrating each with some examples of operational models that have been applied to real-world settings. It then identifies new directions for future research in urban modeling and notes the important contributions of the field to date.

Key Words: transportation planning • land use • mathematical models • urban growth • gravity model • microsimulation

The following was recently published:

Xie, Feng and David Levinson (2009) The Topological Evolution of Road Networks.
Topological evolution of surface transportation networks
Computers, Environment, and Urban Systems 33(3) 211-223 [doi]

This study explores the topological evolution of surface transportation networks, using empirical evidence and a simulation model validated on that data. Evolution is an iterative process of interaction, investment, and disinvestment. The temporal change of topological attributes for the network is also evaluated using measures of connectivity, density, heterogeneity, concentration, and connection patterns. The simulation model is validated using historical data from the Indiana interurban network. Statistical analyses suggest that the simulation model performs well in predicting the sequence of link abandonment in the interurban network as well as the temporal change of topological attributes. The simulation model is then applied on different idealized network structures. Typical connection patterns such as rings, webs, hub-and-spokes, and cul-de-sacs emerge in the networks; the spontaneous organization of network hierarchies, the temporal change of spacing between parallel links, and the rise-and-fall of places in terms of their relative importance are also observed, providing evidence for the claim that network topology is an emergent property of network dynamics.

PACS numbers: 89.75.Fb, 89.75.-k, 89.75Kd