Community Planning Month and transportation

Road Space Comparison comic by Randall Monroe, xkcd comics.

This comic is based on the first done in Germany performance of showing how much space different modes consume on the street.

-- October is National Community Planning Month

Books.  Two of the most important books related to transportation in terms of community planning are Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns: Better Living With Less Traffic by David Engwicht and Cities in Full by Steve Belmont.

Cities in Full is more technical, and now a bit out of date in its numbers, but it is great in putting numbers to the concepts laid out by Jane Jacobs in Death and Life of Great American Cities, including what kind of densities you need to make transit viable.

It lays out the argument for "recentralization" or at least densification, to be able to provide successful communities not dominated by the car.

It's an important book for both land use and transit.  Another key distinction laid out in the book is the difference between "monocentric" and "polycentric" transit systems.

Polycentric systems are spread out, and don't support the kind of intensification and ability to reduce car use in the way that more concentrated monocentric systems do.

He uses the MUNI system in San Francisco versus the BART system serving the Bay Area as contrasting examples.  He also discusses the Metrorail system in Greater Washington as an example of polycentricity.  (SF has about 900,000 residents in 47 square miles. It also has a "transit first" mobility policy as part of the City Charter, passed by referendum.)

But the one thing I figured out that he didn't is that unintentionally, at the core in DC, 31 stations function as a monocentric network within the polycentric network, in a manner comparable to how the MUNI system serves San Francisco.  

Arguably, the five Orange Line stations from Rosslyn to Ballston function monocentrically too, but as a straight line, not as a criss-cross network.

David Engwicht was an activist opposing the widening of a freeway in his community.  He figured out that if there were fewer car trips, roads didn't have to be widened.  This is the basis of the concept of "transportation demand management."  Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns: Better Living With Less Traffic, discusses TDM, humane communities, and mobility.  

He also discusses this in terms of "exchange."  Cities were created to facilitate exchange--all types, not just commerce--in efficient ways, and he diagrams how "too much" road space hinders exchange.

The book is very accessible, less technical than Cities in Full.

Book chapter.  The transportation paper I reference the most in "Transportation and Urban Form: Stages in the Spatial Evolution of the American Metropolis" by geographer Peter Muller.  It's a chapter in a great textbook, The Geography of Urban Transportation, and I don't have a current edition.  I know the paper has been updated since I first read it 15 years ago.

It's key.  It discusses transportation in terms of the Walking City, Transit (Streetcar) City, Recreational Auto, and Metropolitan City eras and how transportation and land use have been organized in those periods.  The Walking and Transit Cities have pretty much the same urban form, denser, shorter distances between destinations, organized to facilitate movement on foot and then streetcar.  It also works well for bicycling.

The Metropolitan City is organized at the scale of the speed of automobile.  It is spread out over hundreds of square miles, with the deconcentration of land use and the separation of land use.  Transit tends to be an inefficient choice as the distances between major destinations is long.

(I collect ephemera--gas station maps, postcards, ads, magazine articles, illustrating mobility patterns from the different eras.)

Bicycling.  It's been a long time since I've read it, but I recall that Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are changing American cities is very good on bicycling for transportation.

Transit First Policy, San Francisco. The City of San Francisco adopted a "transit first" development policy in 1973. For the most part this means that new development in the downtown core has been built without parking, but with access to efficient transit.

For the most part, US transportation policy says that sustainable mobility is a good thing to do, everything in practice and funding prioritizes automobility, and makes sustainable mode support optional, not required.

That's why the SF policy is so novel.

Transit (and bicycling) opposition.  Our land use and transportation paradigm is dominated by the automobile, and this is supported by "special interests" who benefit from it--oil producers, automobile manufacturers, the financiers and constructors of sprawl.  This makes moving transit and biking infrastructure projects forward very difficult ("Petro States of America," Bloomberg).

But it's not just special interests.  The average citizen committed to automobility somehow believes that supporting alternative modes puts into question everything they believe in, and they become vociferous opponents.

A great example is the election of Republican Larry Hogan as Governor of Maryland.  Maryland has strong transit systems in the DC suburbs and Baltimore.  As soon as he entered office he cut tolls on the road system, cut back support of transit, scuttled a new transit infrastructure project in Baltimore and attempted to do the same to the Purple Line in Suburban Maryland, although his involvement has led to a minimum of a five year delay in the project's execution.

More recently, his administration actively prevented the accommodation of bicycling on a Southern Maryland bridge connecting the state to Virginia ("Judge gives go-ahead for Maryland to demolish old Nice-Middleton Bridge: Bridge spans Potomac between King George, Va. and southern Maryland," Virginia Mercury).

Inerestingly, the federal government supported the demolition.  Instead, at key choke points/opportunities in the transportation system, bicycle access should be prioritized, not hindered.  By contrast, done by DC and Virginia there are bicycle connections across the Wilson and 14th Street Bridges, which are highway bridges otherwise.

I was surprised to learn when I was a bicycle and pedestrian planner in Baltimore County, that the Federal Highway Administration has tons of resources on bicycling and walking.  They just don't require the states to prioritize biking and walking.

Failures in execution make transit development and expansion that much harder.  Besides the fact that opposition to transit (and bicycling) infrastructure should be expected as a matter of course, failures in execution of projects tend to be blamed on the mode, not the execution or the politics around it.  But failures are seized upon by opponents elsewhere as justifications to not move forward on projects in their jurisdiction.  This is why I argue that transportation planners have a duty to the profession to not f* up ("Sometimes you have to wonder if transit/transit projects are being deliberately screwed up to make transit expansion almost impossible" "A tenure of failure doesn't deserve encomiums: Paul Wiedefeld, WMATA CEO").

Relatedly, my line is because opposition and opprobrium is part and parcel, it's best to start where you will be wildly successful and build from there, rather than in a place that "needs it more" such as on equity grounds, but presents many more barriers to success.

Examples of transit infrastructure project failures that make pursuing transit projects elsewhere more difficult include:

- DC's streetcar -- failures led Arlington County to drop their parallel project

- Maryland Purple Line -- years and years behind schedule

- HSR in California ("We Told You Why and How California’s High-Speed Rail Wouldn’t Work. You Chose Not To Listen," Reason Magazine)

I know they're libertarian and opposed from the outset, but it's a good example of what transit is up against.  All the more reason to be reasonable in the projects you set up and their expectations.  Why not make rail transit absolutely amazing in the Greater SF and Southern California regions first, then connect them?

Automobile interests don't favor mass transit

 Tesla cars awaiting delivery.  Odin Jaege, Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Nothing new here.  But Elon Musk, in reality, is no friend of the environment.

1.  Elon Musk said he came up with the hyperloop to diminish planning and funding for high speed rail in California ("Elon Musk Is Convinced He's the Future. We Need to Look Beyond Him," TIME Magazine).  From the article:

He has a history of floating false solutions to the drawbacks of our over-reliance on cars that stifle efforts to give people other options. The Boring Company was supposed to solve traffic, not be the Las Vegas amusement ride it is now. As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.

2.  His tunnels project, The Boring Company, is operative in Las Vegas, but is nothing special ("Elon Musk’s Boring Company to expand underground tunnels in Las Vegas," The Hill).  

Understanding the value of dedicated lanes, above ground or underground, is well understood.

-- "London Mayor proposes roadway tunnels to divert surface motor vehicle traffic and congestion," 2016 

I've proposed it for DC for years.

-- "Who knew? There's been a freeway deck in Oak Park, Michigan over I-696 for almost 30 years," 2018

There would be a lot more throughput for mass transit underground in Las Vegas, rather than his car-based "solution."

The capacity for cars is less than 2,000 people per hour per lane, for a shuttle 6,000, for rail more than that.

George Monbiot's "Pollution Paradox" makes the point that special interests profiting from "pollution" are the most motivated to spend money on lobbying and image development ("The Power of Big Oil," PBS Frontline) to ward off change.

While electric vehicles are "better" than gasoline-powered vehicles when it comes to the environment, even better is a focus on sustainable land use and mobility paradigm, reducing the need and demand for personal transit.

From the TIME article:

A much more sustainable alternative to mass ownership of electric vehicles is to get people out of cars altogether—that entails making serious investments to create more reliable public transit networks, building out cycling infrastructure so people can safely ride a bike, and revitalizing the rail network after decades of underinvestment. But Musk has continually tried to stand in the way of such alternatives.

My joke is that EVs are merely "next generation asphalt nation."

But sure, were I in the position to choose, I'd rather have one over an ICE car.

USA Today newspaper and network investigation on special interests writing a significant number of state legislative acts

State Legislatures are notorious for passing legislation putting unfunded mandates on localities and restricting the ability of cities to pass laws.  For example, concerning the environment, smoke free environments, business initiatives, etc.

-- "States Are Blocking Local Regulations, Often at Industry's Behest," New York Times, 2015
-- "Blue Cities Want to Make Their Own Rules. Red States Won't Let Them," New York times, 2017

It's not news that the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-business and anti-tax lobby figured out that they could have a lot of impact by focusing on state legislatures.

What is news is the depth of their success, as documented by USA Today in a two-year investigation that includes follow up, state-specific articles published in various Gannett Newspapers across the country.

From "What is ALEC? 'The most effective organization' for conservatives, says Newt Gingrich":

The American Legislative Exchange Council became the nation’s best-known "model"-bill factory over its four decades by providing more than fill-in-the-blank legislation.

The industry-sponsored group has weathered controversy and flourished because it also offers conservative Republican elected officials a social network, access to campaign donors and a blueprint for how to accelerate their political careers.

The networking takes place at ALEC's annual meetings, where the group fetes and entertains lawmakers and their families. Relationships are forged over drinks and dinners, where lawmakers sit alongside conservative luminaries and corporate chiefs.

“What ALEC does is more than provide the model bills, they provide relationships,” said Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, an assistant professor at Columbia University who has studied the influence of ALEC and other conservative groups on state legislatures. “They approach you when you are first elected and build these enduring social connections with you.”

By the end of each ALEC conference, attendees leave motivated to evangelize for conservative policies and equipped with ready-made legislation.

-- "Copy, Paste, Legislate: A visual introduction"--
-- "Used car dealers didn’t want to fix deadly defects, so they wrote a law to avoid it"
-- "Stand your ground, right to work and bathroom bills: 5 model bills that spark controversy"
-- "How we uncovered 10,000 times lawmakers introduced copycat model bills — and why it matters"
-- "What's the solution for model bills? Reveal who wrote them, critics say"

And coverage by other newspapers in the Gannett Newspaper chain includes:

-- "Bills banning local plastic bag regulations use ALEC model," Montgomery Advertiser
-- "Model bills have foothold in Montana Legislature," Great Falls Tribune
-- "Kentucky lawmakers didn't write these bills. But many are now laws," Louisville Courier-Journal
-- "Mississippi leads nation in filing legislation that other people wrote," Jackson Clarion Ledger
-- "Why some Iowa legislation looks a lot like bills crafted by special interest groups," Des Moines Register

For all the complaints about USA Today's origins as "McPaper" ("At 25, 'McPaper' Is All Grown Up," New York Times), these days, like the New York Times, it uses its position as a "national newspaper" to undertake investigations that have implications beyond a particular city or state.

Apparently, the investigation grew out of reporting over the years by the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic concerning the impact of measures of and involvement by ALEC in the state legislature ("Unchaining Democracy in Arizona," Blog for Arizona).

I really want to like Post columnist Charles Lane, but ...

Charles Lane was the editor of The New Republic Magazine when Stephen Glass fabricated stories for it.  There is a movie about this and Charles Lane was portrayed by actor Peter Sarsgaard, and I think Peter Sarsgaard is a great actor...  but still, TNR is a conservative, although somewhat centrist, publication so given my political proclivities, it's hard for me to believe that Lane's writings would appeal to me, even if I think that the guy who portrayed him in a movie is a great actor.

These days Lane writes a column for the Washington Post and today's column, "Common interest rarely wins the day," illustrates the point.  I've been meaning to write a not dissimilar piece but from a completely different foundation.  Lane argues that academic writings on "collective action" (citing the work of Mancur Olson) demonstrate that it's really really really really hard to get people to agree on a big scale which is why big government programs tend to fail.  (I would argue this problem actually derives from something else, bureaucracy and a way of looking at the world, and is better explained through the writings of people such as Max Weber, Robert Michels, John Friedmann, and James Scott.)

I would argue that some types of services within society, be it providing for national security and a military to protect the nation from other nations, overseeing the financial system, providing for an integrated road network, welfare, social services, and health care, etc. are best provided when organized and funded and delivered at a very large scale.  (There are other services too, that should be "national," ranging from railroad service, coordinating air travel, dealing with the airwaves, national parks, etc.)

You can call providing these services "collective" in order to scare up ideas of say the failed "collectivization" of agriculture in the Soviet Union, but the reality is that for example with social welfare, to me the economic and other problems that result aren't the "fault" of the locality where the people live, but are the responsibility really, of all of us.  That is the justification for not expecting only localities for having to fund and address resulting problems.

That doesn't mean that you should nationalize industries like the British did (such as with the coal industry) or own companies outright like British Petroleum or British Airways.

But it probably means that if you want to have a postal service serving every household or a health care system focused on outcomes rather than private sector profit, then organizing, funding, and delivering services at the national scale makes the most sense.

Similarly, rather than encouraging states and localities to sell off their assets to the private sector for cash today, it would make more sense to create a National Infrastructure Bank, not unlike how the Bank of North Dakota operates at the state level, so that more of the value of public assets is capured by the public as opposed to the private sector.

While Lane discusses how special interests or organized interests ("Small groups") are particularly good at acting collectively, I would argue that they aren't acting "collectively" so much (although Olson would have disagreed with me) as they are acting "selfishly" to best represent and to shape, in particularly favorable ways if they can, their interests.

While this explains the success of special interests and the failure to change what "government" does because often those organized interests interfere with doing the "right thing", Lane's column doesn't really address broader questions about scale and appropriateness and how best to deliver programs and services.

Basically the small group acting "collectively" to represent their own interests isn't analogous to the large group ("the people") acting collectively or on a national scale.

This is a different issue from whether or not "entitlement funding" (Social Security, Medicare) needs to be rightsized according to future demographics and funding realities.

Lane writes:

Obama was surely right to maintain that there is such a thing as a public good: infrastructure, social equality, national and global security. He was also right that government is better suited than markets to provide some of these — contrary to the most simplistic Republican rhetoric.

But the president’s paean to collective action lacked Olson’s realism. The question is not just how much more government we need or want, if any. It’s also how much more government we can afford, in light of its purposes and given the risks Olson identified — which have already materialized in the form of unsustainable but politically untouchable entitlement programs.

But I would argue that Lane isn't thinking broadly enough about what the "public good" and "infrastructure" mean in the context of the 21st Century rather than as expressed in the 18th Century writings of Adam Smith.

While Lane argues that realists oppose the "collective" because it won't work, I see instead special interests cloaked in "realism" organized to maintain their special privileges, access, control, and rewards.

Health care is a perfect example.  (Although I wouldn't argue that the legislation setting up what is pejoratively called "Obamacare" goes far enough, in large part because the legislation was designed to preserve the ability of the private sector to continue to profit from this system.)

Interestingly, the arguments about the collective today and the opposition doesn't appear to be very much different from the opposition to the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, as painted by David Brinkley in the book When Washington Went To War.

Crying wolf in DC and California

Last week, the Los Angeles Times had an op-ed, "Business and employment: A 'job killers' list disproved," about how businesses often claim, in the starkest and hoariest terms, that X or Y law or regulation is a job killer, will destroy businesses, etc., but the reality is far different. From the piece:

Since 2003, the California Chamber of Commerce has published an annual hit list of bills it labels job killers. The list has included state legislation to protect consumers, workers and the environment, and to raise revenue to fund public services or support middle- and working-class families. ...

The chamber's argument is always the same: If "job-killer proposal X" passes, companies will go bankrupt, shrink or move out of California. Excessive taxes, regulations and paperwork, especially on small businesses, will crush private sector investment.

If all this sounds familiar, it's because business lobbies have made these claims every time California has increased the minimum wage; every time businesses have had to disclose or limit toxic material in workplaces, consumer products and communities; every time California's wealthiest or most profitable corporations have been asked to pay their fair share of taxes; and every time legislators and voters have taken action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. ...

But if we look backward, we find that the job-killer predictions are often wrong. Despite the chamber's political clout, some of the bills on its lists became law. So it is possible to evaluate whether the organization was providing honest analyses or crying wolf and engaging in scare tactics. ...

The chamber continues to promote its job killer list, despite the fact that its dire warnings of economic doom have been consistently wrong. And it does so despite the fact that Californians broadly support laws and protections that have made our air cleaner, our workplaces safer and our families more secure. Businesses do well when workers do well. That's what makes for a healthy economy.

Nonprofit arts organizations are making similar claims with regard to a proposed tax on admissions tickets to nonprofit events, according to "D.C. sales tax extension strikes a sour note>" from the Washington Times. From the article:

Should the theater tax become law, the “ripple effect would be quite profound,” far outweighing its estimated $2.3 million in additional tax revenue for the city, says Linda Levy Grossman, president of the Helen Hayes awards. Now-thriving areas such as the Penn Quarter arts and entertainment district would be especially hard hit, with its restaurants, shops and parking garages emptying as arts patrons stay home or take their business outside the city.

Any special interest is likely to cry wolf, to argue that they are exceptional and therefore deserve special treatment. It's not usually the case that this is true and I doubt that it would be the case for arts events in DC either.