The Transportationist

An article from the Baltimore Sun: Town aims to redraw its core

One suspects the newspaper article above is not terribly accurate or complete ("Retail and arts space, and possibly an international center for the study of small cities, would front the roadway, replacing the office towers that ring the mall complex area." ... will office really be replaced by art, maybe complemented, but not replaced), but it appears the General Growth Properties plan, which has gone through many iterations, finally begins to account for the Mall as the centerpiece of downtown, and tie it in rather than keeping it separate.

The Howard County govt plan is here (pdf).

My previous posts on Columbia are here.

The meeting is tonight, alas it is not being webcast. The official website is here: Columbia Town Center

Posted by David Levinson at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Minnesota ranks among worst in DWIs, study shows

"Minnesota has one of the nation's worst drunken driving rates, said a government report that says 15 percent of adult drivers nationally report driving under the influence of alcohol in the previous year. Here are the states with the worst records:

1. Wisconsin, 26.4 percent

2. North Dakota, 26.4 percent

3. Minnesota, 23.5 percent

4. Nebraska, 22.9 percent

5. South Dakota, 21.6 percent"

Note, these are also almost exactly the states with the highest social capital according to Robert Putnam's index (see the book Bowling Alone)

Table 4.1 Social capital scores by state
Rank State Score

1 North Dakota 1.712

2 South Dakota 1.693

3 Vermont 1.424

4 Minnesota 1.325

5 Montana 1.296

6 Nebraska 1.157

7 Iowa 0.988

8 New Hampshire 0.779

9 Wyoming 0.6710

10 Washington 0.6511

11 Wisconsin 0.5912

12 Oregon 0.57

(Source: Putnam 2000)
(Kevin Krizek and I discuss Putnam's social capital idea in the book Planning for Place and Plexus

This raises the interesting question: does alcohol lubricate Putnam's social capital?

From a social perspective, drinking alone at home may be better than drinking away from home. But what do I know, I am a teetotaler.

Posted by David Levinson at 07:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Center for Neighborhood Technology: Housing + Transportation Affordability Index

An interesting idea, though I don't really buy the results, since housing as a percentage of income is a choice and there should not be a standard against which we judge this. If I choose to consume more house and less entertainment, who is to say that is "unaffordable". If housing + transport in the exurbs take a higher share of income than the cities, isn't that what the exurbanites prefer, and don't they get better houses than we city folk (i.e. likely to be new with all the amenities and more sq.ft. per person)?

Posted by David Levinson at 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

From the San Francisco papers a while back, I saw a headline ""City rids streets of hundreds of garbage cans: Mayor says high number led to trash overflows""

An article about this: Trash cans cut back on city streets / Mayor defends policy but supervisors, residents complain

On its face, eliminating garbage cans will not eliminate garbage, so what is the mental model Mayor Newsom has?

(a) by increasing the transportation cost of disposal, people will create less waste? (The induced demand argument.
(b) people/businesses are free-riding on public trash receptacles, and that by cutting back, people will fund their own receptacles?

The question needs to be asked why were public trash receptacles initially deployed? One suspects public dumping of waste and littering were problems, otherwise a solution would never have been proposed. Public dumping and littering are not mere aesthetic issues, there is also a significant public health problem. To sustain a large population in a small area, waste must be managed.

The example of Amsterdam may be worth visiting. Receptacles there are port-holes into a much large waste storage dumpster under the ground that is cleared every morning by giant mechanical cleaning machines in a fascinating example of advanced technology for seemingly mundane uses. This applies to recycling as well.

Continue reading "Do Trash Cans Induce Garbage?" »

Posted by David Levinson at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Fat Knowledge: World’s First Zero-Carbon City.

Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, UAE, recently broke ground, employing a design by noted architect Norman Foster. The aim in addition to being carbon neutral is to be zero-waste, applying advanced technologies in every infrastructure system.

Official Press Release:
The Masdar Initiative

And from the Inhabit Blog
Plans for Foster’s Masdar Carbon Neutral City Debut

The wikipedia article:
Masdar City

And finally: A Youtube

Posted by David Levinson at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting article from Joel Kotkin: Lone Star Rising —
The American, A Magazine of Ideas
about Houston, Texas, a city whose airport I have visited, but otherwise I only know what I read.

Posted by David Levinson at 06:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Are accessibility and mobility complements or substitutes? I have a mental model a graph with a y-axis as density, and x-axis as mobility, where the Northeast corner would be high access: high density multiplied by high mobiilty.

This system behaves differently by modes. For transit, cities arrange themselves on a line from the southwest to the northeast (a positive feedback loop between supply and demand). For auto cities arrange on a line from the southeast to the northwest (a negative feedback loop between congestion and demand). Using data one could place specific cities on the graph. One expects places like New York and Hong Kong in the northeast corner, most US cities in the southeast corner, small developing-world cities without widespread adoption of modern automobile or transit technology in the southwest corner. Depending on where you draw the threshold, it is hard to see too many places in the upper northwest corner, as it would be difficult to grow to have high density without mobility. (Why would the city grow without the accessibility advantages?)

Accessibility is a good, but it is not a good without costs, and there are limits to how much people are willing to pay for access. It may also suffer from diminishing returns, beyond a point each unit of accessibility is worth less and less. Places like Minneapolis have yet to reach that point, but surely there are places that have.

Posted by David Levinson at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Yglesias: Austin Contrarian: Density calculations for U.S. urbanized areas, weighted by census tract

The Census definitions are weighted by area, this is weighted by census track population, and produces a different, and some would say more intuitive result.

An interesting calculation, and goes back to the same issue regarding Observation Bias that comes up with transit ridership, although in this case, the observation bias may be weighting by area rather than population (so long as everything is properly defined).

Posted by David Levinson at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the column Filling Up , professional Blogger Matthew Yglesias talks about "Filling Up" the spaces around cities. "The problem issue the traffic which is bad everywhere anyone wants to be."

A solution Yglesias seems to miss: create places where people want to be elsewhere, i.e. if all the current good places are taken (and too expensive in terms of time and money), then create new good places where land is cheaper, either suburbs, satellite cities, or make other existing places "good". Economies of agglomeration, while they still exist, are clearly not what they used to be, and downtowns are far less important. Managing the positive feedback loop that are cities/real estate/accessibility is no easy trick, but it takes a special kind of elitism to think that "interesting places" (to use the term from Brad DeLong's post are inherently limited to a few large cities with long commute times.

(full quote "The filling-up of America so that you can no longer build a detached single-family house within half-an-hour's driving time of the interesting places people want to be, and the consequent rise both in current location premia and expected future location premia")

This Census Bureau Table gives commute times in large cities in the United States. In short, only three cities had an average over 30 minutes (New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia) though another few come close (Go Baltimore!). As a Baltimore native, I take pride we almost make DeLong's list of interesting places, but I am sure I could find reasonably priced housing within 30 minutes of downtown if I wanted to.

Posted by David Levinson at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Open Street Map is a project to have an open source street map of the world created by users. View a Historic animation of their progress.

Clearly the past few months have seen the addition of official databases (especially the US Tiger file). It is interesting how similar this growth is to wikipedia, which was organic, until Rambot started posting official Census data, vastly increasing the US geographic coverage of the encyclopedia, and then resumed its organic pace.

Posted by David Levinson at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Growth of international trade indicates society has not entered an age of "dematerialization" as has been debated. [Herman et al., 1990,Wernick et al., 1996,Heiskanen and Jalas, 2000] While individual objects may be getting smaller, consumers have been steadily acquiring more objects. This paper explores where that acquisition occurs.

Just-in-time production revolutionized manufacturing, enabling both a reduction in inventories as supplies arrive only shortly before needed, and an improvement in quality as poorly made inputs are no longer stored for long periods of time, but can be quickly identified and feedback provided to the supplier. The widespread adoption of the just-in-time process is itself the product of the logistics revolution, information and communications technologies, containerization in shipping, and the interstate highway system. It has seen a concomitant change in the retail sector, which has brought about fewer and larger stores at a greater distance from the end consumer. The notion of just-in-time consumption has not received the same attention as just-in-time production. The phrase itself, though seemingly a natural mirror to the more widely used "just-in-time production" only generates 821 hits in Google, of which only a few are on-point, in comparison to over 153,000 for "just-in-time production". ² Yet many goods and services are already consumed in a just-in-time manner. Most notable is energy, which is delivered on-demand to users, who no longer store coal at home for the furnace, but instead buy natural gas or electricity as needed. (The slowly vanishing home heating oil remains an exception). Other services that are provided on-demand or just-in-time include water and sewer, communications (both telephony and television). What is in common about these disparate technologies is their network nature, the large infrastructure required to enable using the flows on-demand. While sewer is a continuous service for most people (those who do not have septic tanks), garbage is typically only collected periodically (e.g. once a week), and recycling less so (e.g. fortnightly). Other goods once saw regular to-the-house delivery, especially in suburban areas. Foxell [2005] writes of goods and services found in Metro-land, the idyllic north London suburbs built by the Metropolitan railway in the early twentieth century "This service economy is illustrated by the variety of tradesmen that called at our home: the milkman twice a day, with a horse-drawn cart; the baker once a day, with a large upright barrow on two wheels, the handles of which lifted him off the ground when going down hill; the postman thrice; the butcherÕs boy by bicycle twice a week; and the grocer twice a week. Others like the coalman or the Gas, Light & Coke Co. in their steam-powered Sentinel lorry also made regular deliveries. Over a longer period, visits could be expected from the men from the Prudential [insurance], Hoover [vacuum cleaners], Singer [sewing machines] and the like ∆ all using a service call to take the opportunity to sell new products. There was something reassuring about seeing such familiar faces and catching up with the latest gossip. In addition there were the itinerant callers such as Walls Ice Cream man on his tricycle as well as the French onion sellers, gypsies with pegs and posies, rag and bone men, tinkers [metalsmiths] and the knife-sharpeners with their pedal-driving grinding wheels." Today, the vast majority of those goods are not acquired at home but in stores or online. Delivery services have replaced salesmen, as the two functions (delivery and sales) are now distinct and specialized. Today's visitors might be the post office, FedEx or UPS, and the pizza delivery boy. Just-in-time does not require delivery to the residence, it can involve ubiquity in the placement of stores, so that they are near the end consumer. Traditionally the retail store was just that, a place where a community could store goods, and individuals could take or buy them as needed. Many planners would like to make the ability to acquire goods just-in-time without the use of a vehicle a normative planning standard. For instance, a report, Beyond 2010: A Holistic Approach to Road Safety in Great Britain calls for the "pint of milk test", for all new developments, whereby a resident can get to a shop to buy a pint of milk in 10 minutes or less without getting in their car [Parliamentary Advisory Council on Transport Safety, 2007]. The idea of 10 minutes comes from people's willingness to walk, people are less willing to walk longer distances than shorter, and 10 minutes (or one-half mile (0.8 km)) seems to be a threshold over which walking tolerance seems to drop. This distance was derived from several empirical studies, including Pushkarev and Zupan [n.d.], who showed the median walk by travelers accessing the New York subway was 0.35 mi (0.57 km), while the median walk to access commuter rail stations in suburban New Jersey was 0.5 to 0.6 mi (0.8 - 1.0 km). Results from the 1983/84 National Personal Transportation Survey reported by Unterman [1990] found shorter distances: 70 percent of Americans will walk 500 feet (0.15 km) for normal daily trips, 40 percent walk 1,000 feet (0.31 km), and only 10 percent walk a half-mile (0.8 km). The pint of milk refers to a standard quantity of a highly perishable and frequently consumed good. The objective of avoiding car use is obvious for a group advocating road safety. The pint of milk test has received some currency in England, being noted by several studies in recent years [Bennett and Morris, 2006,Marsh, 2004]. This is a particular issue in a crowded city like London, where auto ownership is lower than suburban areas, roads are more crowded, and parking more difficult even for those with a car. The trends in retailing have been clear in the United States for a long time. Stores are getting larger and gaining larger market areas [Yim, 1990]. Small stores serving local areas have been losing market share to larger stores which bring with them economies of scale. Efforts to reverse this trend have met with resistance from retailers, consumers, and neighbors [Nelson and Niles, 1999]. Illustrating this trend, the Food Marketing Institute reports in 2006 there were 34,019 supermarkets (with $2 million in sales or more, noting the median annual sales for a supermarket was $17 million, and average size was 48,705 sq. ft. ( m²)). The average number of trips per week consumers make to the supermarket was 1.9. ³ In 1930, The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, at the time the leading US supermarket, alone had 16,000 stores with a combined revenue of $1 billion (or per store revenue of $62,500 in 1930 dollars, estimated to be $754,000 today) ⁴ [The Rise and Decline of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea company, n.d.] Handy [1993] claims "the automobile instigated a collapse of the retail hierarchy by encouraging the growth of community and regional centers at the expense of local shops and the central business district. The result has been a cycle of dependence, in which suburban communities are designed for the automobile leaving residents little choice but to drive." As with stores, houses too are getting larger. New suburban homes have more space to store goods in-house. While urban residents export storage to common stores, suburban residents more likely to have second freezers, have more space to store stuff. While the number of freezers per household in the United States is declining as second freezers are being retired and not replaced, the number of refrigerators is increasing slightly, due to households obtaining second refrigerators. [Wenzel et al., 1997]. While no immediate inference can be made about this, other trends are also at work. Total refrigerated and frozen space has not been computed, though the average size of a house's primary refrigerator or freezer is likely increasing. Food may last longer in refrigerators than it used to due to the addition of preservatives (though the trend of increased consumption of organic foods may reverse this). Further globalization may mean that fewer goods are seasonal and need to be accumulated prior to their being out-of-season. Persson and Bratt [2001] note that e-shopping may induce the installation of a second set of fridge/freezers per household to receive delivered goods. This additional electricity consumption has environmental consequences; already, there are 2.2 refrigerators and freezers per household in New Zealand (Roke, 2006) cited in [New Zealand Ministry for the Environment, n.d.]. If urban residents do undertake more just-in-time consumption than suburbanites both because of the higher storage costs associated with smaller houses, and the greater opportunity afforded by more stores nearby, we would expect to see this show up in the travel behavior data that is collected by urban regions.

	Minneapolis	St. Paul	Remainder of Hennepin County
Year Structure Built	1926	1929	1970
Sq. Ft.	1773	1826	2152
Sq. Ft. per Person	822	755	810
Households with No Cars	5900	2800	2500

Table 1 illustrates some of the differences between the City of Minneapolis, suburban Hennepin County (Hennepin excluding the City of Minneapolis), and the City of St. Paul in neighboring Ramsey County. Residents of Minneapolis live in older houses (average year built of 1926 vs. 1970 in the suburbs) with 1773 square feet vs. 2152 in the suburbs. However because of the lower household size, city residents actually have slightly more area per person. Further Minneapolis residents are more likely to be carless. According to the 2000/2001 Twin Cities Travel Behavior Inventory among residents of the City of Minneapolis, 12.8 percent of daily trips were for shopping ⁵ while for Hennepin County excluding the City of Minneapolis the number was 12.2 percent ⁶. Thus Minneapolitans devote 5 percent more of their trips to shopping than suburban Hennepin County residents. Minneapolitans also make slightly more trips than their suburban brethren, 3.81 per day vs. 3.70 for suburban Hennepin. Unfortunately, it is difficult to ascertain whether total trip making is rising because of differences in survey methodology over time, though one expects it is. ⁷. Given the small differences and their temporal instability, it probably is unreasonable to make much of them The evidence weakly supports the hypothesis that city residents who have somewhat higher accessibility to neighborhood stores and somewhat reduced storage space at home shop more frequently. Broadly, there are two types of places, those that satisfy the pint of milk test, and those that don't. Similarly, there are two kinds of people, those who care about the pint of milk test and those who don't. The problem comes from the mismatch of those who care but live in places that are unsatisfactory. (Those who don't care but live in places passing the test are probably okay). If self-selection is at work, these cells are not randomly distributed, but people who want to live in particular environments do so. People who prefer milk-accessible areas bid up prices in those areas, while those who are indifferent (or perhaps lactose-intolerant) move out. However, if preferences change faster than spatial structure, there may be a mismatch. Policy that excludes mixture of residential and commercial development may also foster a mismatch. Evidence from the Twin Cities bears on the issue (Figures 1 to 4). According to the American Housing Survey [US Census Bureau, n.d.], over 80 percent of residents in the City of Minneapolis report satisfactory neighborhood shopping within a mile of home, compared with 70 percent of those in suburban Hennepin County (Figure 1). Despite that positive assessment of shopping, suburban Hennepin residents have a better opinion of their own neighborhood than those in the City of Minneapolis (Figure 2). The problems these urbanites report in greater numbers than their suburban counterparts are noise and traffic, crime, and odors (Figure 3). When people move, they are doing so to places they believe are better, but for all residents it is the home that is better than previous much more so than the neighborhood, and in Minneapolis, only a third rate their current neighborhood as better than their previous (in contrast to half of suburban residents) (Figure 4). To the extent neighborhood shopping enabling just-in-time consumption of the pint of milk is important to people, cities fare better than their suburbs, but if the cost of that neighborhood shopping is other urban ills, people will make the trade-off, sacrificing access to retail to have access to quite and congestion free, safe, and pleasantly smelling suburban environments. Whether this is a social good is another question entirely, and depends on relative efficiency of urban goods delivery services, energy efficiency of in-store displays vs. at-home refrigeration units, and numerous other questions.

References

Bennett, J.  Morris, J. 2006 , Gateway people, Technical report, Institute for Public Policy Research.

Foxell, C. 2005 , Rails to Metro-Land., Clive Foxell, Chesham, Bucks, England.

Handy, S. 1993 , "A Cycle of Dependence: Automobiles, Accessibility, and the Evolution of the Transportation and Retail Hierarchies", Berkeley Planning Journal , Vol. 8, pp. 21-43.

Heiskanen, E.  Jalas, M. 2000 , Dematerialization Through Services: A Review and Evaluation of the Debate, Ministry of Environment: Edita, jakaja.

Herman, R., Ardekani, S.  Ausubel, J. 1990 , "Dematerialization", Technological Forecasting and Social Change , Vol. 38(3), pp. 333-347.

Marsh, G. 2004 , "Tesco piles 'em high: Flats above supermarkets are a good buy", The Times , Vol. June 18, 2004.

Nelson, D.  Niles, J. 1999 , "Market Dynamics and Nonwork Travel Patterns; Obstacles to Transit-Oriented Development?", Transportation Research Record , Vol. 1669, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, pp. 13-21.

New Zealand Ministry for the Environment n.d. , Technical report.

Parliamentary Advisory Council on Transport Safety 2007 , Beyond 2010: A Holistic Approach to Road Safety in Great Britain, Technical report, Parliamentary Advisory Council on Transport Safety. Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7046200.stm.

Persson, A.  Bratt, M. 2001 , "Future CO 2 savings from on-line shopping jeopardised by bad planning", Proceedings of the 2001 ECEEE Summer Study ÔFurther than Ever from Kyoto .

Pushkarev, B.  Zupan, J. n.d. , "Where Transit Works: Urban Densities for Public Transportation", Urban Transportation: Perspectives and Prospects , pp. 341-344.

The Rise and Decline of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea company n.d. .

Unterman, D. 1990 , `Accommodating the Pedestrian: Adapting Towns and Neighborhoods for Walking and Bicycling. Personal Travel in the US, Vol. II: A Report of the Findings from 1983-1984 NPTS, Source Control Programs'.

US Census Bureau n.d. , American Housing Survey for the Minneapolis St. Paul Metropolitan Area, Technical report, US Census Bureau. 1998AHS: Minneapolis h170-98-9.

Wenzel, T., Koomey, J., Rosenquist, G., Sanchez, M.  Hanford, J. 1997 , "Energy Data Sourcebook for the US Residential Sector", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Report , Vol. 40297.

Wernick, I., Herman, R., Govind, S.  Ausubel, J. 1996 , "Materialization and Dematerialization: Measures and Trends.", Daedalus , Vol. 125(3), American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Yim, Y. 1990 , The Relationship Between Transportation Services and Urban Activities: The Food Retail Distribution Case, PhD thesis, University of California, Institute of Transportation Studies.

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Footnotes:

¹David Levinson is RP Braun-CTS Chair of Transportation Engineering; Director of Network, Economics, and Urban Systems Research Group; University of Minnesota, Department of Civil Engineering, 500 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA, Email: dlevinson@umn.edu, web: http://nexus.umn.edu ²By just-in-time consumption, I mean acquisition of a good by the end consumer shortly before its use, rather than being acquired and stored for future use. ³http://www.fmi.org/facts_figs/superfact.htm (now offline and found in Google cache; Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Progressive Grocer magazine, U.S. Census Bureau, and Food Marketing Institute ⁴Conversion factor from Samuel H. Williamson, "Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1790 - 2006," http://MeasuringWorth.Com, 2007. Alternative conversions include:

• $754,491.02 using the Consumer Price Index
  
  
• $631,644.95 using the GDP deflator
  
  
• $2,355,247.64 using the unskilled wage
  
  
• $3,715,127.08 using the nominal GDP per capita
  
  
• $9,042,420.50 using the relative share of GDP
  
  

⁵2,223 shopping trips, 17,353 total trips (4555 people) ⁶828 shopping trips, 6785 total trips) (1830 people) ⁷Calculations using the 1990 TBI indicates that Minneapolitans reported on average 4.70 trips per person in 1990, while suburban Hennepin residents reported 4.85 per person

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File translated from T_EX by T_TH, version 3.38.
On 8 Nov 2007, 16:59.

Posted by David Levinson at 05:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the NYT: Causes of Death Are Linked to a Person's Weight

"Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease."

So if suburbs cause obesity, and obesity reduces the death rate overall, then suburbs are good and cities bad for public health.

Posted by David Levinson at 04:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From LA Times: Angkor was a city ahead of its time .. the city had of about a million people spread over an area similar to LA before the industrial revolution.

Posted by David Levinson at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Spontaneous City

The Wiktionary (the dictionary counterpart to Wikipedia) says that the word "spontaneous" derives from the late Latin word "spontaneus", from Latin "sponte" meaning "of one's free will, voluntarily". That meaning still holds, but the word has acquired an additional meaning, acting "without planning". Planning in contrast is "the act of formulating a course of action" or drawing up "a set of intended actions, though which one expects to achieve a goal". The words are not strictly antonyms, but they are very far from synonyms. To act spontaneously requires there be no specific forethought, to plan imposes structure and intention upon action.

When I was younger I worked in Silver Spring, Maryland at the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission - Montgomery County Planning Department (MNCPPC-MCPD). While there I worked on a number of plans and policies, most notably the Annual Growth Policy (AGP) which aimed to regulate the pace of development, and by regulating pace differently in different areas, it also affected the sequence of development. The AGP did not intend to affect the ultimate development of an area, that was left for the plan.

There were a number of flaws with the AGP, but one I thought most important was the attempt to pro-actively anticipate the future rather than responding to decisions. The AGP established "staging ceilings" for each area of the county (about 30 or so), the was the maximum number of jobs and housing units permitted in that area, so that public facilities would be adequate. One fundamental difficulty was that the optimal number for one area depended on what actually happened in other areas, which of course was unknown until that development actually occurred. Thus the staging ceilings in one area were conditioned upon ceilings in another area, that may or may not have been exceeded (there were lots of ways ceilings could be exceeded, but if the ceiling were exceeded, the area was placed in moratorium for new development).

This experience, contemporaneous with the fall of Communism, shattered my naive beliefs about planning, and along with reading Hayek's The Fatal Conceit, it also shattered what I had not thought deeply about in terms of the problems of forecasting. Growing up in the 1980s I had some belief in markets, clearly the economy was doing better in the unregulated Reagan years than in the 1970s. Yet I also understood there were market imperfections, externalities, and public goods that an unregulated market just did not properly account for.

I had grown up in Columbia, Maryland, a highly planned new city from the 1960s, and clearly I was constantly reminded in the promotional literature, it was a better place to live with fewer problems than unplanned sprawling suburbs or the decaying inner city. One of the main critiques of Columbia was its sterility, its lack of life. Things were not out of place there, there were no non-conforming uses.

Could one plan without planning?

The first notion I had while at MNCPPC-MCPD was the idea of just-in-time or dynamic planning. Instead of trying to proactively predict the future, could we just respond to market proposals with a yea or nay (and other feedback). If the proposal met standards, it would go forward, if not, it would be rejected. The standards would not be site specific, but instead be geared toward assessing things public agencies should be concerned about, namely ensuring public facilities remained adequate. I was thinking mainly about replacing the AGP growth management system, rules about zoning and so on were not really in my purview. This was really more like dynamic regulating than dynamic planning.

The difficulty raised with this is that it reduces certainty for private-sector actors, who under the AGP at least knew in advance whether public facilities were adequate. Certainty is not the only value on which a public policy should be judged, I could establish certainty by prohibiting all development, and that would not be good for the private-sector either. Further, developers who have already been approved might like the idea that their competitors cannot go forward because all of the available infrastructure capacity has already been committed.

The second notion came later, while a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, as a way to replace zoning. The the role of the public is to establish a vision for the future, and the role of public servants is to facilitate and enable that vision. The vision is not generally site-specific but vague. Development would be judged by whether they moved toward the vision or against it. No plan would be written, no zoning enacted, only the vision would be expressed.

This decreases certainty even more. But it challenges developers to achieve consensus with the neighbors of potential projects.

After teaching a transportation-land use course at the University of Minnesota for a few years, I stumbled upon a third notion. This was to challenge the core tenet that planning actually creates better places.

What does one want from a place?

One thing I want is vibe or vibrant communities. I also want the ability to do what I want when I want. This I will call "spontaneous action". Spontaneous action requires at least two elements.

The first is the presence of things I want to do. This presence is both spatial and temporal. The thing must be where I want it to be, and it must be open or available when I want to use it.

The second is the ability to reach those things when I want to. I need to have a means of transporting myself conveniently from where I am to where I want to be when I want to go there. There must be both destinations and networks that satisfy action.

There are many locations that have networks, and people who have vehicles, that allow them to move about easily. In any small town or rural community, someone who has a car can easily move about, but there is nowhere to go. These areas have high mobility.

Some places have lots of activity. Cities in general have high density. However because of crowding it may be difficult to move around very much, these places may be congested, limiting the speed and comfort of travel.

In the best places, there are lots of places to go and things to do, and the network is constructed with appropriate differentiation so that are fast links connecting dense places. The net is that even if one can reach things faster than in a small town, because the slow speed is compensated for by the short distance and the relatively high speed links, these areas have high accessibility.

Different people want different things. If we all wanted the same things, life would be pretty boring. Still accessibility is something that many people do want.

Places with higher accessibility allow more spontaneous action than places with lower accessibility. Land prices are higher in places with high accessibility both because of the scarcity of such places and their value.

There is a premium to be paid for "spontaneous action", an option value that people hold, even if they never go to a show, or a game, or the museum, or the particular specialist shop (the bookstore specializing in gambling books I found in London e.g.), the accessibility gives them the option of engaging in that activity.

(As used here, spontaneous action is limited to what others are willing to allow or accommodate. There are many things for technical or economic reasons I cannot acquire and many activities I cannot engage in because they do not exist).

The opposite of spontaneous action is scheduled action. If I cannot engage in things when I want, I must plan in advance when to do them. This may be because of other people's constraints, or limitations to the transportation system, or hours of business of the thing I seek. The advantage of a large city is the increased flexibility, the high frequency of transit services, and the increased likelihood of finding a 24-hour store specializing in what you seek (London notwithstanding

Spontaneous development

Land use planning emerged for a reason, it was a response to the negative features of unplanned, uncontrolled development. Some people did things, like build quarries, that really upset their neighbors. The "nuisance" lawsuit was thought to be insufficient, and quite reactive, would it be possible to proactively avoid this problem? Zoning was one response. Zoning would implement plans, and provide "visions" for individual parcels. It provided certainty at the cost of flexibility. It also capped density in many places, perhaps below where the market density would have been. (It is very difficult to do counter-factual analyses of something like this, and the extent to which zoned density exceeds actual density we can say that the market requirements were lower than the zoning, but when the actual density equals the zoned density, the market desires were probably greater than that permitted, but by how much is impossible to say with certainty).

Zoning is not a requirement of today's cities, Houston, Texas is often pitched as A city without zoning , though there are contractual covenants and other private equivalents of zoning in many areas of the city. Moreover, the city has numerous other regulations affecting land use.

Spontaneous development would still need to respect property rights and rule of law, though the law would be more limited than found in many places today.

Does planning lead to more or less spontaneous action?

Can we plan and regulate cities to achieve more spontaneous action than an unplanned city?

Presently, that question must remain a question, the question of "can we plan" is very different than "do we plan".

We can think of a graph with two-axes.

On the x-axis we have degree of spontaneous action, with the zero point marking a totalitarian city under siege with a curfew imposed, and the right point complete freedom to consume whatever the market can produce.

On the y-axis we have degree of spontaneous development, with the zero point marking a pre-planned communist state and the topmost point complete freedom to develop. The question is, what is the shape of the curve? Does spontaneous development enhance or constrain spontaneous action? Is there any relation?

Degree of Spontaneous Development
high
|
|
|
|
|
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0--------------------------------- Degree of Spontaneous Action
0 high

Spontaneity in a can

One of the features of modern planning is the attempt to provide vibe and spontaneity in the urban environment. The festival marketplace is a classic example. If only we can create an exciting, but controlled atmosphere, then we will have achieved the best of spontaneously arisen places without their defects. The market for these festival marketplaces has been mixed though. For every success like Baltimore's Harborplace, there is a failure like Minneapolis's St. Anthony Main. The very regulation that aims to limit the negative effects minimizes the spontaneity to the point of failure.

Unlike SPAM, vibrant spontaneity does not come in a can, it is not some formulaic easily reproducible phenomenon.

Discussion

There are numerous interesting examples one could look at.

There are various types of places which involve different types of planning by non-governmental agents:

Event City - Fairs, Festivals, Shows, Conventions, Sports

Enveloped City - Skyways, Subways, and Shopping Malls

Planned City - Columbia

In addition one could compare cities/places that have various degrees of land use control and various degrees of spontaneous action. New York has a high degree of spontaneous action, and probably once had a high degree of spontaneous development (though this was on a pre-specified grid network). Many developing cities still have spontaneous development to the consternation of city officials, though the alternative might be no development at all.

We also need measurements of spontaneous action. Travel and activity surveys tend to ask what was done, but not about what wasn't done, or how long the activity was planned for. A new type of data gathering instrument is required to fully assess the question. Do people in large cities spend more or less time planning their actions? How far in advance do they plan? (there is some research on this to be sure, but nothing I am aware of allows inter-metropolitan comparisons. We can look at the number of trips made, but that is only a partial indicator, because many trips have substitutes, we need to determine the quality of those trips as well.

References

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/plan http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/planning http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spontaneous Levinson, David (1997) The Limits to Growth Management. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 24: 689-707 http://nexus.umn.edu/Papers/GrowthManagement.pdf Levinson, David (2003) The Next America Revisited Journal of Planning Education and Research Summer 2003, Volume 22, Number 4, pp. 329-345. http://nexus.umn.edu/Papers/NextAmerica.pdf Hayek, Friedrich (1988) The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. The University of Chicago

Posted by David Levinson at 06:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The London Green Belt has been in place since just before World War II when Patrick Abercrombie's study recommended establishing a ring around the city which would remain unsuburbanized (one hesitates to say undeveloped, as farms are there). Now with the housing shortage, people are again suggesting the Green Belt is "a success we should build on":

Build on the green belt, and build now-Comment-Columnists-Minette Marrin-TimesOnline
.

Back in the day, the solution was to build new towns outside the Green Belt. Gordon Brown is proposing more of these. Towns like Welwyn and Letchworth were built as Garden Cities by Ebenezer Howard, and, but, by design are relatively small (on the order of 33,000 residents for Letchworth, 55,000 for Welwyn Garden City). From my visits, they seem excellent places to live, though the scale may be slightly off outside the town center (the residential density is a bit low, creating excessive walking distances).

Stevenge, (population 80,000) a post-war new town, (built on a much older town) is very much like Columbia, with large elements of Radburn, many pedestrian tunnels to access the town center and train station. There are also traffic roundabouts everywhere, so cars need not stop at signals. I felt like I grew up here.

Milton Keynes (population 185,000) on the other hand is much larger, but terribly overscaled, with large gaps between the residential and downtown areas. This creates opportunites for infill, but in the meantime there is an excessive amount of surface parking in the town center. Unlike the other towns I named above, the shopping mall (the largest single level mall in the world?) is disconnected from the train station.

Despite its imperfections, this model of new towns has a number of advantages over just adding another suburb in the Green Belt. They provide (or at least can provide) a coherent center and place. By increasing "surface area" they reduce the distance between people and the countryside. Every development in the Green Belt makes existing Londers that much farther from the country.

Now, one might suggest if the Green Belt is to be preserved, it should be done the right way, by buying the land (or development rights), rather than by fiat or regulations. This certainly seems a better way of controlling the use of land if property rights are to be respected. But the point here isn't about the mechanics of how land should be preserved, but about what constitutes a better urban form

A) A giant unbroken conurbation where rings of development are fully contiguous

OR

B) A large conurbation with satellite cities.

The latter, while it might increase average distance to the center, decreases distance to the edge. It also provides more variety and differentiation of the bundle of attributes that we call property.

Perhaps the market should decide, but the market fails in providing numerous public goods (access to the countryside being an example), as some things are very difficult to establish easily enforceable rights for.

Posted by David Levinson at 02:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Two new movies/simulations of the co-evolution of downtown Minneapolis and its skyways system have been postedhere

These are large movies (132 and 137 MB), so be forewarned.

These are based on research done by Michael Corbett as part of his MS classwork and Feng Xie as part of his PhD. The research paper underlying this can be found:
Evolution of the Second-Story City: Modeling the Growth of the Minneapolis
Skyway Network to be presented at the upcoming World Conference on Transport Research in Berkeley.

Posted by David Levinson at 06:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to an article from 5 years ago, BBC NEWS | UK | Prison overcrowding 'at crisis point'. Apparently it still is: BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Jail system in 'serious crisis'.

This "perpetual crisis" is simply a queueing problem: There is an arrival rate of prisoners (how many people we jail), there is a departure rate (how many people we release), and there is a storage capacity (how many we keep behind bars). To relieve this perpetual crisis, we can
1) reduce arrivals
2) increase departures
3) increase storage, either by adding capacity or making better use of the space through double or triple bedding.

The various strategies have been tried, reducing arrivals most notably last week when the beleagured Home Secretary (Attorney General/Secretary of Homeland Security more or less for US readers) was chastised by a judge who refused to jail a paedophile because of a memo from the Home Office about prison crowding.

Capacity will take some time to expand, especially given the inaction to date.

We could increase departures, but then prisoners would not serve their full sentences (and we know that prisoners who are safe to release after 7 years must somehow remain very dangerous after 6 years and 364 days).

The problem in thinking about this is the implicit (and wrong) assumption of inelasticity of demand, if we changed the cost, we would get just as many prisoners.

So how about pricing? Charging prisoners for their stay would probably not work, most can't afford it, and we would have to send them to debtor's prison.

Maybe we could charge someone else.

Prison cells are a scarce commodity, valuable to the communities seeking to send more of their own into the slammer. Each community (via their judges) would administer a "prison budget". The judges could bid on cells in an auction (envision eBay), perhaps a Dutch auction, for each of their potential prisoners, the highest N bidders get to imprison their least favorite baddies. There would of course be different classes of prison cells, and a certain number enter the market each week (e.g. 5 cells of maximum security with a 6 year stay, 19 cells of medium security for a 3 year stay). We might even get an options market, and trading between communities if the match didn't work. Prisons could transform security levels to better match market demand. It shouldn't take too long for a new equilibrium to emerge.

This might open up the option for new suppliers to enter the market, driving down costs. I don't know the legal nicities of this over here in the UK, but in the US many states have private prisons, and one could easily see the least dangerous baddies condemned to an underperforming Motel 6 instead of prison.

Communities would reveal through this process which crimes they really dislike based on how much they are willing to pay to imprison different people who committed different crimes.

Just a thought.

Posted by David Levinson at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"Security is the enemy of efficiency". I don't know if anyone has said it before, but it has become clear to me that the primary outcome of most security systems is to make my (and others') life less productive. Whether I am safer as a result I have no evidence to produce.

Continue reading "Security is the enemy of efficiency, or attention is a scarce resource" »

Posted by David Levinson at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This article: Region's Job Growth a Centrifugal Force starts badly "As a consensus builds that the Washington region needs to concentrate job growth, there are signs that the exact opposite is happening." and gets worse.

Continue reading "Dispersing jobs: good or bad?" »

Posted by David Levinson at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)