New Geography

Category: Urban Issues

  • Why Rail Transit Doesn’t Work in Atlanta

    One of the more interesting presentations at the 2017 American Dream conference was by Alain Bertaud, a French demographer currently working at New York University. He has compared urban areas all over the world to see how transportation has influenced the layout of those areas.

    He started by comparing Atlanta with Barcelona, Spain. Although both have about the same number of people, Barcelona occupies about 63 square miles while Atlanta covers 1,650 square miles. Barcelona has about 62 miles of rail lines, while Atlanta had about 46 when Bertaud was making his comparison (it’s up to 52 today). In order for Atlanta’s rail system to provide the same level of service to its residents as Barcelona’s, the region would need to build another 2,350 miles of rail lines. At current construction prices, that would cost at least $700 billion.

    The above charts show population densities within 30 kilometers of urban centers, with the first kilometer on the left and the 30th kilometer on the right. The European cities, including Paris, Warsaw, and Barcelona, shown in the first column, are very dense in the center with densities falling to nothing after 22 miles from the center. Asian cities in the second column–Beijing, Jakarta, and Bangkok–are similar. But American cities in the third column–Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York–look very different. Densities do taper off but the centers, even of New York, are nowhere near as dense as in Europe and Asia.

    Moreover, Atlanta’s population growth in the 1990s was mostly in the outlying areas. Only 2 percent of new Atlanta residents located within a half mile of a rail station and only 13 percent located within a half mile of a bus stop, while 85 percent located more than half mile from either.

    New job locations are even worse for transit, with jobs in four of the first five miles from the center actually declining. Only 1 percent of new jobs located within a half mile of a rail station, and 22 percent within a half mile of a bus stop, meaning 77 percent were not reached by transit. (The original chart said 32 percent, but that made the total add up to 110 percent. Dr. Bertaud updated and corrected the chart to read 22 percent.)

    Even as American urban planners, particularly on the West Coast, try to make our cities more like European ones, European and Asian cities are becoming more like American ones. In Seoul, for example, most population growth was in the bands between 20 and 40 kilometers from the center, while most job growth was in the bands between 9 and 35 kilometers from the center.

    The same is true for European cities. While the second chart shown above makes it appear that Paris and other cities are monocentric, in fact they have large numbers of suburban jobs. As Bertaud noted, “Even in metropolitan area like Paris, with an elaborate transit system, the majority of trips are made by cars from suburb to suburb.” Transit ridership in many European cities is flat or declining, while driving is rapidly growing.

    When new technologies like automobiles change the shape of cities, there is no going back. Cities can build rail lines, subsidize dense housing projects, and try to discourage driving, but driving will continue to grow even as transit ridership stagnates, at best, and per capita ridership falls.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo by Nicolas Henderson, via Flickr, using CC License.

  • By Chinatown Bus to New York

    I have long heard of the “Chinatown” buses that ply between Washington and New York. I recently planned a quick trip from Washington, both to try a Chinatown bus and to visit Manhattan. This would be my first intercity bus trip in decades, duplicating my first trip to New York (from Washington), just before college. That time, Trailways delivered me on an overnight schedule to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, just beyond the end of the Lincoln Tunnel. It was very exciting then, as now, just as any visit to Manhattan must be for anyone who enjoys cities.

    From Washington to New York

    Arranging the trip was very easy. An internet search quickly produced Chinatown-Bus.org, which provides links to operators (including non-Chinatown bus services). I chose Eastern Coach, which just a few days before departure had a fare of $22 one-way. Credit card booking was simple on the internet (as it has become for most travel).

    The bus was to leave at 4:00 pm from a point between 7th and 8th on H Street N.W. in Washington. Not knowing what to expect, I arrived more than an hour early, at the same time fearing that it would be necessary to stand outside on the curb for a long time in Washington’s notorious August heat. However, Eastern Coach had a station, or at least an air conditioned waiting room.

    Since I was so early I tried to get on the hour earlier schedule, but was advised that it was already full (I routinely try to get on earlier flights when possible at airports). The personnel were professional and very polite. At about 3:40 pm, we were advised that the bus was waiting for us, approximately 3 blocks away. Eastern Coach personnel directed us to it, where we put our larger luggage under the bus.

    One of the attractions of the service was the advertised electric plugs (for laptops with insufficiently powerful batteries) and free wifi internet service. I couldn’t find any plugs, since they were not at every seat. However, the Eastern Coach people quickly located me a seat with a plug.

    Getting out of Washington was not easy. There was stop and go traffic until Bladensburg Road, after which the driver continued out New York Avenue and entered U.S. 50 toward Annapolis and then Interstate 97 to the Baltimore area. This, of course, is not the conventional route, which would have been on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway (operated by the National Park Service), however that route had serious construction delays. We rejoined the normal route on Interstates 895 and 95 in Baltimore.

    The trip was uneventful, a good thing. The internet worked fine, as I alternated between work and watching the scenery. There are changes along the route that were not evident the last time I drove it. There are the extensive, two-way express toll lanes for a few miles north of Baltimore, which augment the existing free lanes. The Goethals Bridge reconstruction was visible from the New Jersey Turnpike in Elizabeth. In the distance, the deck of the Bayonne Bridge, which is being raised for better ocean port access, could be seen a few miles later. Next comes the historic Pulaski Skyway (photo below), the keystone to “America’s First Superhighway” (page 11), a 13 mile segment from the Holland Tunnel (which leads to Manhattan) opened nearly 90 years ago, reaching to Elizabeth (approximately where it was met by the Goethals Bridge approach).

    Even with the delay out of Washington and the Interstate 97 diversion, we reached the New York terminus by 8:15 p.m., 45 minutes ahead of the very conservative (9:00 p.m.) scheduled arrival. This was made possible by the somewhat unusual lack of delay entering the Lincoln Tunnel as we approached Manhattan. Drop off was on 7th Avenue, just south of 34th Street, in the area of Penn Station. The bus continued to its final stop in Chinatown. The bus cost was so low, that as we neared the end of the trip I decided that using a taxi or ride hailing service was likely to cost more for the final 2 miles of the trip than for the first 240. Thus, I dragged my roller bag and walked to my East 50’s hotel quite comfortably.

    From New York to Washington

    For the return trip, I wanted to use a conventional (non-Chinatown) service to compare the two. In US intercity buses, there is nothing more conventional than Greyhound. I walked to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which I found to be every bit as uninviting as it was decades ago. The only advantage over flying is that there were no security lines, but the boarding process was similar to that of Southwest Airlines, standing in lines by boarding number. The difference was that the standing was longer, because of the shortage of waiting room seats, apparently designed with an exurban city bus stop in mind rather than the holding area for a bunch of 50-plus seat buses.

    Anyway, that was not Greyhound’s fault. I noticed that another non-Chinatown operator, Megabus, serves from its own location outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal, like the Chinatown buses. Seriously, any future trips of mine will involve carriers that do not use the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

    But Greyhound did just fine. We left mid-morning for a trip Greyhound indicated would take 4 hours and 20 minutes. Immediately outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal we sat in stuck traffic for about 10 minutes.

    Like Eastern Coach, there were not plugs at every seat (row), but it was not hard to find a seat with a plug. The internet, however, was another matter. It was much slower than on Eastern Coach and I stopped using it because it was too painful. I had a good book and there is always the scenery. There are few places more picturesque from a highway than the forests of northern Maryland and the view of the Susquehanna River from the Millard Tydings Bridge.

    As in the case of the northbound trip, detours were necessary. The bus driver wisely diverted to the Commodore Perry Bridge and Interstate 95 from New Jersey to Chester, PA due to serious traffic congestion as the New Jersey Turnpike approaches the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Again, the bus used the Interstate 97-U.S. 50 detour at the south end of the trip, to avoid the Parkway congestion.

    There was a single 15-minute rest/meal stop, which I would have been happy to skip. The bus reached Union Station in Washington about 30 minutes later than advertised. Anyone, however, who understands the traffic difficulties in the Northeast should not be surprised by a five hour trip. Greyhound’s fare of $23 competes nicely with the Chinatown buses.

    Other Alternatives

    There are a number of other alternatives for travel between Washington and New York. There is the private car and airlines. Just gasoline for the car is likely to be more than the bus fare. The train is far more expensive (and subsidized by taxpayers). The best fare I could find was four times that of the buses. Amtrak’s Northeast Direct service is scheduled at 3:20, between 1:00 and 1:40 faster than the bus. On-time performance over the past year has been about 75 percent, though dropped to 62 percent in June.

    Thus, the time advantage of the train may be illusory in many cases and certainly the bus has a considerable cost advantage (for both riders and taxpayers). Some might find the bus a bit too cramped compared to the train. There is now luxury bus service with three-across seating, rather than four and with plugs at every seat. One such operator is Vamoose, which provides service between New York and Washington (Rosslyn or Bethesda) in five hours. Both stations are near Washington Metro stations and are likely more convenient for people arriving by car than Union Station. The fare is higher, at $60 to $75, but there is no public subsidy.

    I look forward to my next New York trip, Chinatown bus one way and luxury bus the other.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Top photo: Hudson Yards construction (Manhattan), by author

    Second photo: Pulaski Skyway, by Jack Boucher [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Will Donald Trump Expose America’s Great Mass Transit Hoax?

    Whatever you think of President Trump, his claims about the lousy condition of America’s basic infrastructure are widely accepted—even by resisting Democrats grinding their teeth on a L.A. freeway or waiting for a New York or D.C. train to arrive. His call for a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan may be his last best bet for finding bipartisan support.

    The question is if he’s at all serious about the urgent need to fix the failing mass-transit systems we have, or if he’ll repeat what Washington’s done to get us in this mess, and offer funds that encourage cities to build shiny new systems few will actually ride even as the existing ones decay.

    As we’ve demonstrated in a new paper for Chapman University (PDF), nowhere is the infrastructure deficit more obvious than in urban transit, which last year lost over 3.1 percent of its ridership, according to the American Public Transit Association (PDF). Despite the vast sums spent by the federal government on light rail, subways, and trolleys since 1970, most mass transit systems fail to meet the needs of commuters.

    In many cases, as in New York and Washington, vast expenditures on new lines have occurred even as maintenance has been deferred, with overall service deteriorating. Many billions of dollars more have been spent in other cities on new rail systems that haven’t reduced the number of people driving to work.

    How the Feds Failed Legacy Cities

    Rail transit works best in what might be considered the “legacy cores.” Approximately 55 percent of America’s transit commuters have destinations in the urban cores (and many of those rides to the central business districts) of six older cities (not metropolitan areas)—New York, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco. New York, by itself, has a remarkable 56 percent of its jobs in its urban core.

    Between 2006 and 2015, those six metropolitan areas captured 77 percent of the national increase in transit work trip destinations.

    These cities were shaped when public transit held a virtual monopoly on both motorized and horse-drawn passenger transport within U.S. cities. Annual transit ridership peaked in the early 1920s, except for the period around the Second World War, the high-water mark for transit nationally. Between 1960 and 2015, transit’s work trip market share dropped more than 50 percent, from 12.1 percent to 5.2 percent. Until very recently, the demographic recovery of legacy cores, notably New York, drove a slight increase in transit share. But this progress is threatened by growing safety and reliability issues. Part of the problem stems from a decision by New York’s political elite, starting with Michael Bloomberg, to build a new, ultra-expensive line—the Second Avenue subway—while maintenance on other lines deteriorated. This decision reflects political realities including federal incentives for new systems, and the greater political rewards for building shiny new things.

    The result is that service delays in New York have skyrocketed as antiquated signals break down, with breakdowns now twice as frequently as they were just five years ago. After decades of increases, ridership has declined while the extensive commuter rail system serving Manhattan from the suburbs (the nation’s largest) is experiencing its own substantial difficulties.

    The picture is similar in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. secretary of Transportation went so far as to threaten a shutdown of the system due to fatal accidents, attributed to policies that prioritized system expansion over safety. D.C.’s transit ridership, growing for decades, has now declined as well.

    The Real Train Robbery

    Yet even as cities that depend on transit, such as New York, suffer from under-investment, Washington has poured billions into new rail system in cities created largely in the auto-dominated era. Among 19 metropolitan areas that have opened substantially new urban rail systems since 1980, the share of riders using mass transit remains below the national average while the share of those driving alone has increased.

    Nowhere is the power of ideology and entrenched interests over the common good more evident than in Los Angeles, the pioneer for the multi-polar and highly dispersed post-1950 metropolis.

    On the surface, L.A. provides the sunbelt’s best case for transit—it once had a robust transit system, is the densest urban area in the country, has a huge poverty population and ideal weather for waiting outside for the train. L.A. has been widely celebrated as “the next great transit city,” and The New York Times and others are continually celebrating its imminent conversion from a car culture to a train one. Some believers, like Los Angeles architectural critic Christopher Hawthorne, envision “a third Los Angeles” that will see the eclipse of the freeways, single family homes, and suburban neighborhoods.

    Yet despite this Manhattan envy among its elites, L.A. simply does not follow the “model” of urbanist paragons such as New York, Chicago or San Francisco. Downtown Los Angeles is a relative economic pygmy, accounting for barely 2 percent of regional employment, less than a tenth of lower Manhattan’s share. Transit works best when most commuters are headed to a dominant core destination. The more scattered the destinations, the less likely trains can muster a decent commuter share. The entire Los Angeles MTA system carries fewer riders than New York’s Lexington Avenue line.

    Money is not the issue. Since 1990, Los Angeles has opened seven new urban metro and light-rail lines and two exclusive busways at a cost of more than $15 billion. During this period, transit’s work trip market share has dropped from 5.6 percent from 5.1 percent in 2015. Ridership is at least 15 percent below 1985 levels, when there was only bus service and when Los Angeles County had about 20 percent fewer people. No surprise, then, that according to a recent USC study, the new lines have done little or nothing to lessen the area’s infamous congestion.

    Rather than hop on the rails, more residents are addressing traffic woes by simply staying home. By 2015, more Los Angeles-area residents were working at home than were taking transit. Since 1990, the number of people working at home increased eight times as rapidly as the number of people using the transit system. The number of people driving increased even more rapidly.

    This story is repeated in other sunbelt cities. In Houston, 3.2 of residents commuted to work in 2000, before the city’s $1.5 billion new light-rail system opened. In 2015, the share of commuters had dropped by a third, to 2.2 percent.

    It’s Atlanta, though, that most fully epitomizes the futility of conventional transit spending. With the opening of MARTA in 1979, Atlanta built the third largest new metro system (fully grade separated rail) in the U.S. Since then, transit share has plummeted—from 6.8 percent in 1980 to 3.1 percent in 2015, 40 percent below the average national transit market share. Traffic congestion more than doubled over the same time span.

    The most recent addition to Atlanta’s rail system is a central city streetcar line some locals have nicknamed it “a streetcar named undesirable” for its low ridership.

    Even urban planning model Portland, which opened its MAX light rail system in 1986, has seen its transit market share drop from 7.9 percent in 1980 to 6.9 percent in 2015, only modestly above the national transit-riding average. The percentage of people working at home rose from 2.3 to 6.4 percent, at virtually no cost to the public treasury, compared to the more than $3 billion to build urban rail.

    But the award for the country’s most absurd project should go to the Honolulu elevated rail line. In a metropolitan area of barely a million people, the attempt to build a 20-mile elevated train has increased in cost from $5 billion to an estimated $10 to $13 billion, with the feds chipping in $1.6 billion. The impact on state finances—for an estimated 1 percent drop in road traffic—so disturbed former Governor Ben Cayetano, a Democrat, that he’s publicly called on President Trump to cut future funding. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser recently referred to the elevated lines as an “epic fail on rail.”

    The Future of Transit

    Before President Trump or Congress tackle infrastructure, they should work to remove federal involvement in control of local transit spending. Some experts like David Levinson of the University of Minnesota, blame federal policy for distorting investment to new project that favor “ribbon-cuttings for politicians” while resulting in neglect for local operations.

    In most of the country, simply put, localities would be better off not investing in new rail schemes. Americans seem generally happy with their overwhelmingly suburban lifestyle and their ability to reach places of employment faster than most of those in the high-income world can. Today, over 75 percent of jobs are in the suburbs and exurbs combined. Between 2010 and 2015, 81 percent of job growth was in the suburbs and exurbs. Similarly 85 percent of major metropolitan area residents live outside the urban core, in the suburbs and exurbs, where transit service is sparse.

    This is not likely to change much in the near or even medium term. Rather than centralizing, the consulting firm Bain envisions evolution toward a “post-urban economy” that will be more localized and home-based. By 2025, it reports, more people could live “beyond the traditional commuting belt” than inside.

    These realities suggest that rather than the “one size fits all” model, metropolitan areas should better customize their transportation spending to local needs. To achieve this, we need to jettison the quasi-religious affection for rail transit and explore in most of the country technologically enabled solutions such as telework, which is growing faster than any form of commuting, as well as rideshare technology. This is particularly true in suburbs, such as Dublin, California, which eliminated their local bus system in exchange for providing vouchers for Uber-like services for those unable to afford or drive cars.

    Over the longer term, the autonomous car could make even more revolutionary impacts on both the urban form and transit. Automated car proponents claim that the cost of operations will be considerably below that of today’s cars. If that should be achieved, the autonomous car could be used to provide door-to-door mobility not only for the elderly and disabled, but also for people who currently cannot afford their own cars. Under any circumstances, this innovation seems certain to further weaken conventional transit outside the cities with legacy cores.

    Ultimately it will take common sense, even more than just money, to fix our transit problems. In dispersed places like southern California, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston, the emphasis may be on using new technologies as well as private express bus service to connect their widely dispersed communities. Monies that go into rail transit, suggest urban analyst Aaron Renn, should be focused on maintaining and improving current service in cities where they make sense. As Renn puts it succinctly: “The priority should be: repairs to existing mission critical rail lines, and helping distressed communities.”

    The current trend of wasting billions of dollars to serve a urban theology may be popular among planners, speculators and engineering firms. It hasn’t been particularly helpful to the people who need to get, in appropriate time and without too much stress, from one place to another.

    This piece originally appeared on the Daily Beast.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr, using CC License.

  • The Precariat Shoppe

    The precariat is a term coined to describe the segment of the population that lives without security or predictability. These days it often refers to the former American middle class that’s currently experiencing reduced circumstances. There’s always been a precariat, but it usually includes a minor subset of the population that no one really likes or cares about. Indentured Irish servants, black slaves, Jewish and Italian sweatshop workers, Mexican field hands, Puerto Rican cleaning ladies… It’s a long list. People are up in arms now because the “wrong people” have fallen in to the precariat that didn’t used to “belong” there. There’s been a sudden realization that sometimes the structure of the economy itself institutionalizes their personal decline. Shocking! I’m not a political animal so I’ll leave those discussions to others to hash out. Instead, I’m interested in how people adapt to the circumstances they find themselves in.

    We’re all familiar with the ice cream man whose truck rolls around with the happy music playing on hot summer days. This one is in Detroit – and it’s an ice cream lady. She bought an old delivery vehicle, did a bit of hand painting, fitted it with chest freezers, and opened for business. It’s a fast, low cost, and flexible way to get a business off the ground even in the most challenging economic environments.

    The ubiquitous food truck fills the gap between the cost, complexity, and risk of opening a brick and mortar restaurant vs. working for someone else. A well constructed food truck isn’t necessarily cheap, but it’s within the reach of many more people than anything in a building. This one is in Los Angeles.

    Here’s a twist on the mobile shop theme that’s a direct result of rising commercial rents. This woman ran a successful second hand clothing boutique for many years and was driven out when her shop rent hit $5,400 a month. You have to sell a lot of schmatta to make that nut. Now she follows various fairs and pubic gatherings with her merchandise in a repurposed school bus. She goes directly to where her customers are most likely to find her. As I’ve heard many times from shopkeepers around the world – it’s not how much money you earn, it’s how much you have left over after all the thieves are paid.

    Here’s a mobile veterinary clinic. Dogs, cats, horses… As the cost of a medical degree, insurance, and real estate have skyrocketed even doctors are taking a long hard look at the whole medical office building situation. The transition from a practice with a full team of professionals to a solo gig in a tricked out custom van can be described as a positive lifestyle change, but it’s almost certainly about money.

    I stumbled on this mobile grocery store complete with fresh produce, real bread, and dairy products. The offerings and prices were substantially better than what can be found at the alternative in this location – a classic food desert where people without access to a car have little choice but to buy low quality industrial food-like products at inflated prices at gas stations.

    Down the street I found a similar grocery truck. I chatted with the family that runs the business. There was a need in the community to bring in groceries as well as an opportunity to make money. The usual chain stores on the main arterial road don’t always work well for either customers or potential shopkeepers. The trucks do. They arrive exactly when and where they’re needed and stock what people want. I noticed health department certificates and Weights and Measures seals. Both trucks were Grade A.

    Here’s a mobile woodworker’s tool shop. These are specialty items not typically found in most hardware stores. This man has a relationship with various brick and mortar lumber yards who find his presence good for business. Social media alerts customers of his schedule. Mobile shops have the ability to specialize and cover a wider territory more economically than a stationary establishment burdened with overhead and a limited static customer base.

    The irony here is that all around the parking lots that host occasional mobile vendors are empty buildings that once housed chain pharmacies, banks, and such. Sometimes new buildings are constructed to house updated versions of the same stores in the same town. Sometimes there’s simply less need for physical operations as activity migrates to the interwebs. But repurposing the vacated spaces is hard. The size, configuration, and cost of these places is fundamentally at odds with the creation of new small scale mom and pop enterprises. The numbers don’t add up. I’ve had nearly everyone I talked to tell me some version of the same story. The combination of expenses, regulations, and the culture of distant corporate management is all agressively hostile to their efforts. And taking on a single employee is often the difference between making money and failing within the first year.

    Here’s one example of the challenges of opening a brick and mortar shop even if you have a generous budget. A prosperous California winery decided to open a tasting room in town to promote its products. The building had been a family paint store since the 1950s. The 2008 financial crash forced it to close. The new owners gave the old nondescript concrete block building a designer facelift. But it was a bumpy road. The climate controlled warehouse in the back was subject to a design review board that spent months rejecting the proposed color of the structure. White was preferred by the owner since it reflected heat most effectively. Evidently pure white was not in keeping with the character of the community. There was a back and forth with the oversight committee over various shades of off white, beige, and creme anglaise. Each time the committee rejected a color the process had to start all over again which delayed the opening of the shop by several weeks – which all costs money.

    The fire marshal insisted on the installation of this bit of plumbing that cost $65,000. I can’t think of anything more flammable than 1950s era paint – not even wine – yet somehow the building managed not to burn for sixty odd years. But no new business could open in this spot until this valve was installed. And then there was the requirement that each seat and stool in the tasting room have a corresponding parking spot on site while not interfering with the ability of a giant fire truck to completely encircle the entire property.

    Here’s the other end of the spectrum. A mother and daughter sell cold drinks at a busy bus stop from an ice chest. Totally ADA compliant!

    But the award for creative entrepreneurial capitalism goes to this mobile video game kiosk that regularly parks outside a San Francisco bar on weekend evenings. Comfortably liquified patrons settle in to folding chairs and play electronic games on the sidewalk. Free! (But please keep the tips coming.) It’s been in the same spot for so long the bar owners must not mind. This is how you work a side hustle when you’re part of the precariat.

    This piece first appeared on Granola Shotgun.

    John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He’s a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

  • First Mile-Last Mile, Intermodialism, and Making Public Transit More Attractive

    In the ever-trendy world of transportation planning people seem to be infatuated with discussions of first mile-last mile public transportation connections and intermodalism. Given all the attention, one would think that the traveling public is anxiously awaiting their next opportunity to transfer vehicles to complete their trip. Nothing can be further from the truth. People don’t aspire to transfer; they don’t aspire to experience an intermodal terminal. They almost always want to get door to door in the fastest, simplest, and most reliable fashion. Transferring between vehicles is a necessary inconvenience, not a virtue.

    The concept of using multiple means of travel to complete a given trip is an outgrowth of the reality that different services and technologies offer the optimal means of travel for different contexts, which can result in trips that require transfers for the overall optimal means of travel. The most obvious example is traveling from, say Chicago to New York. Air travel is the time and cost superior means of carrying out the line-haul component of the trip. U.S. airlines, for example, routinely extract less than $.20 per passenger mile from travelers to transport them between airports while also saving them time and perhaps lodging and meal expenses. But jet aircraft will not pick you up at the door or delivered you to the entrance to your destination. Thus, transferring between modes at airports is a necessary and logical interface between air and surface modes. The opportunity to take advantage of the premium performance of air travel more than offsets the onerousness of navigating through airports and transferring between access and egress modes.

    On other kinds of trips, the onerousness of transferring might not be as easily offset by the travel benefits of the line-haul or primary mode of travel. For many shorter urban trips, it becomes very challenging for the onerousness of a transfer to be offset by the benefits of using a combination of modes or vehicles to complete a trip. Travel modeling has long recognized the onerousness of transferring, thus quantitatively penalizing the need to transfer by calculating time spent transferring as two or more times more onerous than in-vehicle travel time. From a practical perspective, transferring introduces uncertainty into a trip. Your arrival at the transfer point is captive to the system schedules and you cannot necessarily minimize the transfer wait. The second vehicle introduces an additional chance to be impacted by unreliable service. For first-time trips, you need to figure out both the location of the destination and how to get to it. You may lose your seat or place and interrupt whatever you are doing during your travel. You might be exposed to weather or other risks, and you can’t use the time as productively as you might have had a transfer not been required.

    If you do have to transfer, you want it to be as quick and convenient as possible. While basic amenities such as restrooms and convenience retail might be appreciated, the local traveler is most often interested in getting quickly to their destination and not turning the transfer experience into a retail opportunity or recreational outing. For longer distance intercity trips where the traveler may be captive to more lengthy waits between travel segments, additional retail and personal service accommodations might be appreciated to the extent that they don’t disadvantage other passengers by excessively increasing walk distances or causing other delays.

    The vehicle travel to and from the transfer location should deviate from the optimal origin-destination travel path as little as possible. If one does have to suffer a transfer, they would much preferred that the point of transfer not dramatically impact the circuity of their travel.

    The growing motivation for providing first mile-last mile connections derives from the logical desire to increase the accessibility to public transportation for more homes and destinations. A multitude of efforts in recent years have been carried out to quantify accessibility of residents and activities to public transit. Early work carried out by CUTR indicated that about half the homes in the America were within a half a mile of a transit route. A slightly higher share of employment locations were similarly within a half a mile of transit. More recently, sophisticated software tools have been developed to evaluate accessibility via transit, such as initiatives by the Brookings Institute and the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory, as well as tools such as Transit Score. The collective message of these analyses indicate that, in general, access to transit both geographically and temporally is, on average, limited. Hence, folks are interested in improving first mile-last mile connections with the hopes of making transit more attractive and productive.

    Historically, line-haul premium transit services provided feeder bus, park-and-ride, and kiss and ride (drop off) opportunities so that travelers could access these premium modes, most typically for longer-distance commute travel. More recently, additional means of access, including bikeshare, carshare, and transportation network company (TNC) connections (i.e., Uber, Lyft, etc.), are being deployed. Automated shuttles are being evaluated as yet another means of enhancing the appeal of line-haul premium travel modes. These concepts make sense in contexts where the line-haul mode is sufficiently attractive by virtue of its speed or cost advantages that the traveler is willing to incur the inconvenience, time cost, trip circuity, or other potential negative characteristics of incurring one or more transfers to complete a trip.

    Better first mile-last mile connections work where they work. But where is that and what planning and service investments makes sense to enhance first mile-last mile connections? Individuals who use intermodal connections do it either because there is no viable alternative or because the disutility of transferring is more than made up for by being able to take advantage of the line-haul mode of travel. This is most possible in situations where the line-haul mode is superior to other travel options, typically meaning it is faster by virtue of fewer stops, exclusive guideway, signal priority, utilization of a higher performance travel path (freeway versus arterial), and that the transfer penalty is minimized most typically by having high-frequency service on the line-haul. Faster travel speed is typically only virtuous in instances where the distance of the trip is sufficient to accumulate enough marginal travel time advantage to offset the transfer induced delays. Thus, enhancing first mile-last mile connections has the greatest leverage for longer distance trips and premium services.

    Over 60% of person trips according to the last National Household Travel Survey, are less than 5 miles in length, over 75% less than 10 miles in length. Many of the shorter trips are unlikely to be appealing as trips requiring first mile-last mile connections to travelers who have choices. Absent extremely high quality first mile-last mile connections, the circuity and delays likely to be introduced by a first mile-last mile connection(s), as opposed to a direct door-to-door single vehicle trip, are unlikely to make this arrangement attractive for travelers with choices. Such services could incentivize more trips or increase convenience by shortening walk access for travelers without personal vehicle options.

    So what does this have to do with anything? Numerous communities are striving to leverage their transit investments and increase mobility for their populations by exploring additional first mile-last mile connections. Though well intentioned, first mile-last mile programs will be most successful if fully informed by an understanding of traveler behavior in general and market conditions in particular. Context has implications in terms of the magnitude of ridership response as a result of improved connections based on the geography of deployment and the trip pattern emanating to and from that geography. First mile-last mile connections are most likely to attract new travelers if they offer high-quality connections, support high performance modes, and serve sufficiently long trips such that the circuity and transfer disutility can be amortized over a longer line-haul premium service segments.

    In addition, equity considerations may become an issue. Additional investments in first mile-last mile connections will have to be evaluated in the context of alternative investments in service and facility improvements. Additionally, attention needs to be paid to the question of who will benefit, both geographically and demographically, from various first mile-last mile connections. How much should be spent to coax travelers with personal or private sector mobility options to use public transportation, or should resources be directed to basic service improvements for those dependent on transit?

    Experimentation and a learning curve are to be expected as new technologies, business models, and deployment strategies are deployed and experience accumulates. But it will be important to glean a well-informed sense of the public and user costs, travel impacts, and environmental, safety, and other impacts. The role of new technologies and service models in enhancing connections to public transportation is important, but like everything about public transit, it’s not so easy to make it work.

    This piece first appeared on Planetizen.

    Dr. Polzin is the director of mobility policy research at the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida and is responsible for coordinating the Center’s involvement in the University’s educational program. Dr. Polzin carries out research in mobility analysis, public transportation, travel behavior, planning process development, and transportation decision-making. Dr. Polzin is on the editorial board of the Journal of Public Transportation and serves on several Transportation Research Board and APTA Committees. He recently completed several years of service on the board of directors of the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority (Tampa, Florida) and on the Hillsborough County Metropolitan Planning Organization board of directors. Dr. Polzin worked for transit agencies in Chicago (RTA), Cleveland (GCRTA), and Dallas (DART) before joining the University of South Florida in 1988. Dr. Polzin is a Civil Engineering with a BSCE from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University.

    Photo by Jeremy Brooks, via Flickr, using CC License.

  • Smaller American Cities Need to Focus on Private Sector Job Growth Downtown

    I’m back from a short break. While I was away my debut contribution to City Lab was published. In it I argue that the next frontier for smaller cities (meaning metros in the 1-3 million raise) in their downtown development efforts needs to be a focus on growing private sector jobs.

    There’s a reason it’s call the Central Business District. Commerce is the beating heart of a downtown. Here’s an excerpt:

    For downtowns in major American cities, these are boom times. The urban centers of New York and Chicago boast record high employment. In San Francisco and Seattle, there’s an explosion of residential construction, dining, and entertainment options, as well as a commercial rebirth in high-end, white-collar employment.

    But in many smaller cities, the downtown renaissance doesn’t rest on such solid ground. Look to downtown Cincinnati or St. Louis and you’ll see large growth in residential and entertainment offerings, and major investment in civic spaces and buildings. What you won’t see is the same level of success in becoming growing centers of commerce.

    For decades, jobs have been leaving downtowns and heading to the suburbs. In 2015, a City Observatory report suggested this might be turning around based on 2007-2011 data, but many downtowns were still losing jobs in that time, including Kansas City, Minneapolis, and San Antonio. A 2015 analysis by Wendell Cox found that just six cities were responsible for about three-fourths of all major-city downtown employment growth from 2010 to 2013: New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Houston. This shows the disparity between the major business and tech hubs and all the rest.

    Click through to read the whole thing.

    This piece originally appeared on Urbanophile.

    Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

    Photo: The tallest building in Indianapolis was recently renamed after tech giant Salesforce. Image via Salesforce.com.

  • A Reporter Rode Denver’s Airport Light Rail–And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next

    Here’s a heartwarming story of a man who rode Denver’s airport light rail once, and it worked for him, so now he wants everyone in his Virginia city to pay higher taxes to build light rail to the local airport in case he might want to ride it again someday. How thoughtful and touching.

    Of course, there are a few problems with his story. First, what he rode wasn’t light rail, which averages about 20 miles per hour; instead, he rode a commuter train that averages 38 miles per hour. So if he manages to persuade people in Virginia to build light rail to his local airport, he will get something far inferior to what he rode in Denver.

    Second, the writer is guilty of survivorship bias, which is an assumption that because something worked for him, it will work for everyone else. But the Denver airport train doesn’t work for everyone else, partly because it is unreliable and partly because transit is slow for anyone who isn’t near an airport line station.

    In fact, it works for very few people. There are just 144 daily round trips between downtown Denver and the airport. Of course, people can get on the train in places other than downtown Denver, but the majority of people in the Denver area who want to go to the airport would have to first go downtown, presumably on a bus or another rail line.

    Unfortunately, the Virginia writer never bothered to ask what share of air travelers take the train and Denver’s Regional Transit District hasn’t released that information. But we know that, in 2016, an average of 104,000 air travelers a day went to or from Denver International Airport. RTD says that an average of 10,256 people get on or off the train at the airport station each weekday, which is slightly less than 10 percent of air travelers. Based on the experience in other cities, a significant number of those are from the more than 30,000 airport employees. So the train probably carries between 5 and 10 percent of air travelers.

    Third, the writer has no perspective on the huge cost of rail, especially since he only had to pay a tiny fraction of the cost of his ride. From downtown to the airport, Supershuttle costs $25 and Uber costs about $35. The airport train is $9, which sounds like a good deal. But Supershuttle and Uber drivers both pay gas taxes that covered virtually all of the costs of I-70 and the other highways to the airport, while train riders paid none of the $1.1 billion construction cost and only a fraction of the operating cost of the airport train.

    Contrary to the above headline, you probably will believe that the Virginia writer made the same mistake that many Americans make when they ride trains in Europe. They see other people riding them and assume they are seeing a cross-section of the city or country they are visiting. They fail to find out about all the people who aren’t riding the trains and why the trains don’t work for those people. Nor do they ask who is paying for and who really benefits from all the subsidies to passenger rail transportation.

    The reality is that the Denver airport line would have been a huge waste of money and should never have been built even if it hadn’t had an 89 percent cost overrun. With that overrun, Denver is basically bankrupting itself so a few people can take a train to the airport which the city nearly bankrupted itself building.

    This piece first appeared on The Antiplanner.

    Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute specializing in land use and transportation policy. He has written several books demonstrating the futility of government planning. Prior to working for Cato, he taught environmental economics at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Utah State University.

    Photo by Jeffrey Beall (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

  • MREs Are Not For The Weak

    Friends recently visited from Pittsburgh – a city I know well and am quite fond of. We spent time wandering around San Francisco doing the usual tourist things together including some museum stops that featured work by Pittsburgh native son Andy Warhol and a special exhibition of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch which was actually more disturbing and pervy than I expected.


    Over dinner in my kitchen a neighbor stopped by and the conversation turned from art to a gentle teasing over my prepper activities. “Has Johnny given you the tour of the grain he keeps stockpiled under his bed?”  The Pittsburgh wife asked if I had supplies of MREs – Meals Ready to Eat. The question was halfway between earnest curiosity and bemusement over a peculiar hobby. My reply was quick and emphatic. “Prepackaged military rations are for pussies. I make my own” The table broke out in laughter.

    The idea that anyone can prep by buying highly processed store bought goods manufactured at a great distance – and probably paid for with a credit card – is missing the point entirely. Real preparedness doesn’t come in a box. Preparedness is about organizing your ordinary everyday life in a way that makes you less dependent on larger attenuated systems and the cash economy. The two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, but MREs will only get you so far. Once you eat the last mylar pouch of turkey tetrazzini you have to figure out where to get more money to buy more manufactured rations.

    What I engage in is closer to homesteading – or the modern incarnation given what’s possible within my particular circumstances. I think of it as household scale import replacement that counteracts the vulnerabilities of our highly leveraged modern just-in-time supply chain. If your goal is to have food on hand in a crisis – be it personal or societal – then store bought food in the pantry is an excellent first step. But the next step is to start producing and processing your own food. This isn’t about “self sufficiency” or going “off grid.” It’s about a steady transition toward a household economy that can more easily function outside the larger systems if they should wobble. Having the physical equipment and skills to fend for yourself ahead of the curve will serve you better over the long haul. And the stuff I make myself is a lot better than MREs.

    This piece first appeared on Granola Shotgun.

    John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He’s a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

  • The Pittsburgh Conundrum

    Forty years after the decline of the steel industry, Pittsburgh has emerged from the ashes of deindustrialization to become the new Emerald City. Its formidable skyline gleams with homegrown names—PPG, UPMC, and PNC. Touted as the “most livable city” by the likes of The Economist and Forbes, its highly literate and educated workforce has contributed to a robust and diverse local economy known as a center for technology, health care, and bio-science. It is a leader in startup businesses. Uber and Ford’s announcement in 2016 that they would base development of their self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, rather than in Silicon Valley, is a telling example of the power of high-tech image and low costs.

    Pittsburgh also ranks high in housing affordability. Residents can easily walk or bike to public libraries, museums, and arts and entertainment venues. Some see Pittsburgh as a model for economic development and a new urbanism that could revitalize the Rust Belt and other former industrial regions.

    In short, Pittsburgh seems to have responded more effectively to the challenges of deindustrialization than many other cities. Hunter Morrison, winner of the American Planning Association’s 2015 Burnham Award for his work on regional planning in northeastern Ohio, notes that Pittsburgh has done better than Cleveland in several areas. It has retained more of its residents, largely minority households; stabilized its working-class neighborhoods without relying on gentrification; and steadily attracted educated millennials. Morrison also says that Pittsburgh has held on to its historic working-class culture and civic identity more than have other legacy communities. “The concept of the ‘Steelers Nation,’” he says, “goes well beyond a marketing campaign and appears to be embedded as a deeply felt personal identity by people of all classes. The retention of dialect, food, symbols, team colors, and attitude is remarkable and, I would argue, increasingly unique.”

    But is there really such a thing as Pittsburgh exceptionalism? Or, as with other successful cities, do we need to ask: A renaissance for whom? Residents like Kathleen Newman, a working-class studies scholar and professor at Carnegie Mellon, see gentrification expanding with Pittsburgh’s drive to attract high-tech industries. This threatens the city’s remaining working-class neighborhoods and its already small African American middle class. Some resistance to gentrification has emerged—protests over the construction of high-income housing and a Whole Foods Market in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood, for instance. Residents are also proposing their own alternatives for affordable housing.

    And there are more fundamental questions: Can—does—Pittsburgh’s success extend beyond city limits? Can it resurrect its broader Rust Belt region? What can Pittsburgh do—what can we do—for the broader regions that it has left behind?

    Pittsburgh was always more than its city limits. The seven counties composing the metropolitan region include surrounding towns that contributed to Pittsburgh’s industrial might in the 20th century, such as Braddock, Homestead, Aliquippa, and McKees Rocks. But the area beyond Pittsburgh, extending from these towns through western Pennsylvania, has not experienced the revitalization that has transformed the city. From Weirton, West Virginia, to the west, Uniontown to the south, Johnstown to the east, and Sharon to the north, economic recovery has been, at best, uneven across the region. Apart from a few newer suburbs like Cranberry and some older revitalization projects, such as the Waterfront complex in Homestead, the region continues to be plagued by the long-term effects of deindustrialization and disinvestment. Along with underperforming schools, violence, and pollution—including, according to a recent report, lead contamination—the region still struggles with employment and population declines. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows wide swings in employment over the last decade, but non-farm employment in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area declined by about 15,000 between October 2016 and March 2017. A University of Pittsburgh study reports that 23 percent of Pittsburgh residents live in poverty, and 43 percent earn less than 200 percent of the poverty level. Furthermore, outside its urban core, a larger number of individuals actually live in poverty than in Pittsburgh itself. In the seven-county Pittsburgh metropolitan statistical area, fully 79 percent of the people living in poverty reside outside the city limits.

    Both the city and the surrounding area are also losing population. Census data show that Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County lost almost 4,000 people in 2015 and 2016, while the seven-county region lost nearly 9,000 people on top of the more than 6,700 lost in the previous year.

    The Pittsburgh story, then, involves more than a shining city on many hills. As a case study for thinking about economic development and urban planning, we have to go beyond the city itself. If you drive out of the busy downtown, away from the academic neighborhoods, and past the new suburbs, you cannot help but see the remains of the troublesome legacy of deindustrialization. Deteriorating factories, empty parking lots, dilapidated housing, and vacant lots all bear witness to the continuing material and social costs of economic restructuring. Urbanists, developers, and politicians have much to learn by expanding their view of Pittsburgh.

    IN 2013, CARNEGIE MELLON University organized the 25th anniversary conference of the original Remaking Cities Congress. Pittsburgh was chosen as both site and symbol for its “25-year transformation from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy.” The conference brought together 300 leading national and international urban and city planners, economic development specialists, and architects to consider the state of efforts to revitalize deindustrialized communities. Many conference participants praised Pittsburgh as a prime example of the new urbanism that promotes walkability, diverse housing, quality architecture and design, increased density, mixed-use neighborhoods, smart public transportation, and commitment to sustainability and quality of life.

    The plenary speakers included urbanologist Richard Florida, the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz, the architect David Lewis, and Prince Charles, who had played a pivotal role in organizing the initial conference. Alongside numerous self-congratulatory presentations about how cities were reinventing themselves, however, ran a darker undercurrent of uncertainty. In his plenary presentation, Florida noted how the new urbanism was fostering inequality, outmigration, and racial divisions. His analysis became the foundation of his new book, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do about It.

    Florida had been in a good position to observe changes in Pittsburgh and other cities associated with the knowledge economy. He taught at Carnegie Mellon while researching his book The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, which argued for the power of technological determinism in shaping urban regeneration and economic growth. Initially published in 2002, the book instantly became a touchstone for economic developers and urban planners. Esquire magazine named Florida one of the “Best and Brightest” in 2005, and Businessweek called him a Voice of Innovation in 2006. Within several years, Florida became a beacon for those suggesting that postindustrial cities should concentrate on attracting a “creative class” of writers, painters, musicians, software developers, engineers, and doctors.

    At the Remaking conference, however, Florida focused (as he does in his new book) on the unintended consequences of the growing knowledge economy he had earlier championed. While obliquely addressing Pittsburgh and its region, his analysis of the growing inequality, injustice, and resentment shown toward this and other cities captured, among other things, the growing populist unrest in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio—a pattern that would play out a few years later in the 2016 election.

    Florida’s change of heart did not surprise Chapman University professor Joel Kotkin. As Kotkin argued in The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us and The New Class Conflict, the new urbanism lay at the heart of an emerging class conflict. Unlike industrial conflicts between owners and laborers, this class conflict pitted a postindustrial elite made up of high-tech oligarchs and policy, media, and academic experts against the middle and working classes. According to Kotkin, the rise of the knowledge economy and new urbanist planning strategies had erased the idea that the city could be a place of hope for advancement for those in poverty. Instead, the poor, many of them people of color, were displaced by rising housing costs as white residents returned to the city and developers created a “Disneyland” of “restaurants, shops, and festivals.” For Kotkin, the American dream could now be found in the suburbs, where it was cheaper to live and survive in uncertain economic times. He argued that suburbs have become more racially diverse, and people with lower incomes had more opportunities to own property and build community.

    But Kotkin’s suburbanist dream has also come under scrutiny. Urbanists have claimed that suburban sprawl increases demand for land usage and water, police, and fire services, as well as car dependency. The opioid epidemic has also reached the suburbs. Long commutes disconnect suburban residents from community life. Online shopping causes suburban malls to close, shattering local retail economies. Shoddy construction and poor materials long associated with suburban tract housing have become increasingly apparent.

    Most crucially, studies make clear that poverty has grown most rapidly in suburban areas. Florida has countered Kotkin’s optimism. “The suburbs,” he has written, “are no longer the apotheosis of the American Dream and the engine of economic growth.” Citing David Lewis, he wrote that “the future project of suburban renewal would likely make our vast 20th-century urban renewal efforts look like a walk in the park.”

    Debates between urbanists and suburbanists have consequences for planning and policy—just as the rift between metropolitan residents and other Americans has political consequences. In the 2016 presidential election, voting patterns in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania reflect this divide. While many commentators focused on racial, educational, gender, and generational gaps, The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein argued that none of these divides “proved more powerful than the distance between the Democrats’ continued dominance of the largest metropolitan areas, and the stampede toward the GOP almost everywhere else.” Nationally, Democrats won an average of 72 percent of the vote in counties with an urban core. But they lost in suburbs, midsize cities, and small and very small cities, and the farther these places were from cities, the bigger the loss for Democrats.

    The voting in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania followed the national trend. Real Clear Politics reported that Hillary Clinton won culturally cosmopolitan areas “most commonly seen as centers of economic growth, political power, or cultural production,” but Trump made gains in the popular vote in traditional Democratic areas like Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and other smaller cities in the middle of the country, when their decaying suburbs and exurbs were lumped into the tallies.

    Pittsburgh and Allegheny County voted Democratic at 56 percent. This was only slightly lower than the levels of 2008 and 2012. But in surrounding counties in western Pennsylvania, support for Democratic candidates dropped. With larger turnouts in areas with greater Republican support, like Butler and Westmoreland Counties, western Pennsylvania could not deliver the votes necessary for the Democrats to win Pennsylvania. In addressing the decline in support for Democrats even in the city, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said it best: “What we saw [on Election Day] was Democrats voting Republican.”

    Clearly, the Republicans and Trump were successful in reducing support in what had been traditional Democratic areas by mining the divide between urban and suburban/rural areas, benefiting from the politics of resentment toward urbanism and economic elites.

    FOLLOWING THE ELECTION, deliberations over new urbanism, urban-suburban identities, and the urban crisis have intensified as part of the debate over our future economic policy. The competing narratives have been shaped by such think tanks as Brookings and New America, representing a range of liberal and conservative political viewpoints.

    For example, New America co-founder Michael Lind joined with Kotkin to produce a new report arguing that the solution to America’s economic problems lies in the revitalization of the heartland. In “The New American Heartland: Renewing the Middle Class by Revitalizing Middle America,” Lind and Kotkin reject the view that the coasts, epitomized by Silicon Valley in California and the finance industry in New York, should be the drivers of the American economy. They claim that what they call the “Gulf of Mexico watershed”—an admittedly imprecise geographic area—better reflects an ongoing population and economic shift away from the coasts toward middle America. This New American Heartland includes the older manufacturing rust belt, broad agricultural regions, and resource-extracting areas along the Gulf Coast. In other articles, Kotkin suggests this was the very region responsible for the election of Donald Trump.

    Lind and Kotkin reject both Democrats’ and Republicans’ belief that America’s economic future is tied to knowledge, media, and finance industries that require the higher-skilled and better-educated employees located in coastal areas, and they also point out that even knowledge workers are leaving the coasts. While they do not deny that automation and offshoring have reduced employment in manufacturing and goods-producing industries, they believe that “the tradable sector” is far more essential to American prosperity than its share of current employment suggests. This sector includes manufacturing, industrial agriculture, energy, and minerals, fields that are dominated by large firms and complex supply chains. Once again indirectly criticizing the failures of urbanists’ visions of technology as the source of economic growth, they argue that every city and county cannot be Silicon Valley, and that the lower housing and energy costs and weaker regulatory environment in the “New Heartland” will drive future economic growth and development.

    Lind and Kotkin’s political colors become more apparent in their discussion of the role of government in revitalizing the New American Heartland. They call for the government to supplement efforts of the private sector, but they also warn that “misguided regulations” could “thwart economic development.” For example, they note that regulatory attempts to mitigate the “possible” harms of climate change only increase the costs of fossil fuels. They are more concerned about possible dangers to energy industries, American jobs, and productivity growth. Instead, they suggest, the federal government should largely limit its support to basic science research and development, infrastructure, and tax support for state and local government and public-private partnerships.

    Brookings scholar Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Aspen Institute, offer a similar but decidedly smaller geographic analysis, minus the anti-coastal attacks and criticism of technology industries. In The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy, they argue that metro areas, like Greater Pittsburgh, will drive economic growth because they are home to clusters of universities, local businesses, hospitals, museums, and advanced technology and manufacturing industries, what Katz and Bradley call “innovation districts.” They encourage planners and government officials to develop new strategies based on “Emergent Metros.”

    Like Lind and Kotkin, Katz and Bradley raise doubts about the role of the federal government. They believe that the metropolitan revolution is “exploding this tired construct” about federal solutions. Instead, they argue, cities and metro areas “are becoming the leaders in the nation: experimenting, taking risk, making hard choices and asking for forgiveness, not permission.” This, they suggest, will lead to “only one logical conclusion: the inversion of the hierarchy of power in the U.S.”

    That inversion, however, would put business elites and their closely affiliated local foundations in power. The examples that Katz and Bradley highlight all involved a shift in power from elected government officials to unelected business and economic leaders and nongovernmental organizations, leaving local electorates, community groups, and neighborhoods with little power to do anything other than rubber-stamp the decisions made by local elites. They minimize the involvement of popular movements in urban issues. They contrast both the Occupy and Tea Party movements with their metropolitan revolution, which they describe as “reasoned rather than emotional, leader driven rather than leaderless, born of pragmatism and optimism rather than despair and anger.”

    In contrast, Richard Florida envisions a more critical and stronger role for government in supporting urban transformational changes. In The Urban Crisis, he argues that a “disconnect between the vital economic role of cities and our policymakers’ neglect of them” has led to a crisis. Florida still believes, as he wrote in The Rise of the Creative Class, that cities are most economically successful when they bring together the three “Ts”—technology, talent, and tolerance. Cities remain platforms for innovation, wealth creation, social and progressive values, and political freedom, and these, in turn, contribute to the health of suburbs and outlying areas. However, he now argues that cities must resist the “winner-take-all urbanism” that fosters economic inequality and segregation. He offers seven keys for more equitable development: reforms in building, zoning codes, and tax policies; infrastructure investment to spur density and clustering and to limit sprawl; affordable rental housing in central locations; turning low-wage service jobs into family-supporting work; addressing poverty through greater investment in people and places; helping build stronger and more prosperous international urban cities; and empowering local communities and local leaders to strengthen their own economies. No doubt many of these reforms would make cities more affordable and attractive to the middle and working classes, but they would also require massive government subsidies. For Florida, then, the federal government has a central role to play in alleviating the urban crisis.

    The real problem for Florida is not the coastal elites and tech hubs and oligarchs so vilified by Lind and Kotkin. Rather, the problem lies with “urbanized knowledge capitalism” itself, which has clear winners and losers, as evidenced by the economic segregation, wage and income inequality, and home unaffordability that plague the urban centers of knowledge capitalism. This urban crisis is not limited to coastal areas. It affects cities and metros of all sizes across the country. To address the underlying crisis of this “secular stagnation,” Florida believes, the federal government must move beyond the usual but vague debates over infrastructure spending and make “strategic investments in the kinds of infrastructure that can underpin more clustered and concentrated urban development.”

    WHAT IS MISSING FROM the larger discussions of urban and regional development are any fully formed progressive solutions. Even the most progressive of recent political campaigns offered little. While Bernie Sanders championed “New Deal Reforms” and a “new Bill of Rights” that, he claimed, would create “an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy,” other than making housing affordable and increasing wages and benefits, he put forth no concrete plans for dealing with the broader crisis of urban and regional economies. Some of Richard Florida’s more progressive pillars found their way into Martin O’Malley’s campaign, but that never got off the ground.

    More recently, the Center for American Progress has put forward a progressive solution, a report entitled “Toward a Marshall Plan for America: Rebuilding our Towns, Cities, and the Middle Class.” It argues for developing a commission to design a “domestic Marshall Plan for jobs and community investment.” The Marshall Plan Commission would be “under the direction of national, regional, and local leaders.” They would “seek input from urban and rural leaders who represent labor, business, education, health, faith, community, economic development, and racial justice to help understand the problem; lift up promising practices; develop bold ideas; particularly for people who did not attend college.” The plan encourages the building of “community institutions that support incomes, employment, and mobility” through greater infrastructure spending, investment in education, public employment, improvements in access to child care and health care, tax reform, and increased wages and social security, among other strategies. Overall, the plan can be read as a provisional “New Deal Lite,” a thinly disguised re-do of the center’s contributions to Hillary Clinton’s economic platform, with belated attention to the working class and nonmetropolitan America.

    There is a good reason why no one has offered clearer strategies, though. As Pittsburgh shows, there are no easy answers to challenges facing metro regions. When we look beyond that city’s core, we clearly see that even the place most often praised for having gotten economic renewal right still battles uneven development and inequities just beyond the city limits. None of the strategists offer much hope for the many former mill towns and rural communities in western Pennsylvania. Without a new and enduring infusion of economic vitality, smaller towns and rural areas outside the upscale metropolitan hubs will show persistent signs of economic struggle. Some may be beyond repair.

    It isn’t that the Pittsburgh story is wrong. It is simply incomplete. The narratives about this city, like the broader debates among new urbanists and economic and urban planners, do not fully consider the continuing costs of deindustrialization, disinvestment, globalization, and neoliberal austerity programs on individuals and communities. These personal, community, and national costs rival the displacements caused by natural disasters and armed conflicts. The devastation of economic change has left far too many with limited options and little power to improve their lives or communities.

    Even if someone could offer clear solutions, however, their proposals would still have to surmount political gridlock. Neither party seems poised to take on this crisis in any effective way, which only contributes to the disillusionment of many voters and to a growing divide that, as Brownstein argues, splits urban residents from those living in suburbs, small towns, and rural areas.

    Even with the best of intentions, urban planners and economic developers are complicit in sustaining the broken socioeconomic system that Florida suggests is central to the urban crisis. They need to recognize that the problem goes beyond even secular stagnation, segregation, gentrification, inclusion, regional integration, and the business and government efforts so prominent in their narratives. The problem is with capitalism as it currently exists—its reliance on inequality and racism, and its externalization of its social costs. This is not to say that economic and social improvements cannot be made through some of the reforms suggested previously. But they won’t solve the underlying problems that come from capitalism’s subordination of social needs to its economic necessities.

    Urbanists need to consider long-term strategies based on values, and not just spatial considerations, that address the concrete needs of people. What makes our urban and regional crisis seem so intractable, ultimately, is this very tension between market forces and ethical and moral solutions.

    This piece originally appeared in The American Prospect.

    John Russo is the former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University and currently a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

    Photo by Dllu (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Increase in Long Commutes Indicates More Residential Dispersion

    A recent New York Times story chronicled the experiences of “extreme commuters,” those who travel two hours or more each way to work. The article focuses on people who commute to New York and notes that there is little or no data on extreme commutes. The Census Bureau, through the American Community Survey (ACS) does not survey two hour commutes. Its maximum classification is 90 minutes or more, though The Times focuses on the 60 minutes and over data, 2013 ACS.

    Regrettably, The Times is not terribly clear in its portrayal of the ACS data, in noting that the 21 percent of residents spend more than 60 minutes getting to work, not mentioning whether it is the New York figure or the national figure. It is New York. The most recent 2015 data shows that only 9.0 percent of US workers spend 60 minutes or more getting to work. The New York metropolitan area figure was 21.4 percent.

    However, The Times picks up on what’s going on in commuting. People are driving farther to qualify to live the lifestyles they prefer. Urban growth continues to be overwhelmingly in the suburbs, approximately 90 percent since 2010.

    Distribution of 90 Minute and Over Commuting

    Despite the frequent portrayal of long commuting as the norm, only 2.2 percent of the nation’s workers travel 90 minutes or more, one way to work. Moreover, that long commuting is concentrated in and near just a few combined statistical areas (CSAs), the larger the larger metropolitan area definition that combines adjacent metropolitan areas like Bridgeport-Stamford with New York, San Jose with San Francisco and Riverside-San Bernardino with Los Angeles. Figure 1 shows that 17 of the 25 metropolitan areas with the largest share of 90-plus minute commuters are in or adjacent to just four combined statistical areas (CSAs).

    Figure 1 shows that 17 of the 25 metropolitan areas with the largest share of 90-plus minute commuters are in or adjacent to just four combined statistical areas (CSAs), the larger metropolitan area region definition that connects places like New Haven County and Fairfield County with New York, San Jose with San Francisco and Riverside-San Bernardino with Los Angeles.

    Seven of the metropolitan areas are in the New York CSA, including New York (NY-NJ-PA), Bridgeport-Stamford (CT), Allentown (PA), Trenton (NJ), Kingston (NY) and East Stroudsburg (PA). The San Francisco CSA has three metropolitan areas among the longest commute metropolitan areas, San Francisco, San Jose and Stockton, as well as adjacent Modesto and Merced. The Washington CSA has four metropolitan areas in the longest 25 commutes, including Washington (DC-VA-MD-WV), California (MD), Hagerstown (MD) and Winchester (VA-WV). Seattle, by far the smallest CSA with more than one metropolitan area in the longest commute CSAs, has two, Bremerton (WA) and Olympia (WA).

    East Stroudsburg (New York CSA) has the largest share of 90 and more minute commuters, at 14.3 percent. Stockton (San Francisco CSA) has the second largest number, a much lower 8.0 percent. Nearby Modesto (adjacent to the San Francisco CSA and a candidate for inclusion after 2020) is at 7.8 percent. Winchester and Hagerstown (Washington CSA) are at 7.3 percent and 7.0 percent respectively.

    None of this is surprising, considering that each of these markets is plagued by urban containment land use policies that force up house prices. Harvard research indicates that domestic migration is being driven by the differential in house prices and people have been leaving the New York, Washington and San Francisco CSAs for other parts of the country. Seattle has done better, simply because its expensive housing is still a bargain compared to the much more onerous house costs in coastal California, from which migrants are being drawn. The trend in long commutes suggests another dimension to the domestic migration story, as households disperse more in the same general area.

    Long Commuting is Expanding

    Further, long commuting is expanding. Between 2005 and 2010, the increases were modest, with a market share rise of 3.0 percent among residents traveling 90 minutes or more to work and 0.3 percent among those traveling from 60 to 89 minutes to work. This is not surprising, given the Great Financial Crisis, which began during that period.

    However, there was a substantial increase in the trend after 2010. Between 2010 and 2015, the share of residents commuting 90 minutes or more increased 725,000, a market share increase of 13.6 percent. There was an increase of 1,550,000 among residents traveling from 60 minutes to 89 minutes, a market share increase of 12.5 percent (Figure 2). This combined increase of nearly 2.3 million 60 minutes plus commuters is substantial. It is more people that commute to work in the San Francisco metropolitan area (not counting those who work at home) and a larger number than the commuters in all but 10 of the nation’s metropolitan areas.

    This continuing dispersion is also indicated in data from the City Sector Model, which shows that suburban and exurban areas continued to attract 80 percent of the new jobs after 2010 (see “America’s Most Suburbanized Cities” and “Suburbs (Continue to) Dominate Jobs and Job Growth”).

    Comparisons by Mode of Travel

    Data by mode of travel is available only at the 60 minutes and over level, and for just 132 of the metropolitan areas. The percentage of those driving alone for 60 or more minutes is lower than the overall 9.0 percent average, at 7.0 percent. Car and van pool commuters are 60 plus commuters 10.7 percent of the time.

    Transit has a far higher level of 60 plus commuting, 38.3 percent at the national level. This is 5.5 times the rate of people driving alone (7.0 percent). While this may be surprising, it is consistent with what is obvious about transit commuting — that it takes about twice as long as commuting by car. And, transit provides scant job access compared to cars, even in the largest, best served metropolitan areas. On average, major metropolitan area resident can reach more than 40 times as many jobs in 30 minutes by car as by transit (the overall one-way work trip travel time is 26 minutes).

    Indeed, among the six metropolitan areas with the “legacy” cores that attract approximately 55 percent of the transit commute destinations in the nation, transit riders much more likely to travel 60 minutes or more to work than those who drive alone. In Philadelphia, the ratio is 3.8, while New York and Chicago transit commuters are 3.6 times as likely to travel 60 minutes or more than those who drive alone. In Boston the figure is 3.1 and San Francisco is 3.0. The smallest difference is in Washington, where transit commuters are only 2.4 times as likely to commute more than one hour than those who drive alone (Figure 3).

    In fact, transit commuters were more likely to travel 60 minutes or more to work than those who drive alone in all of the 53 major metropolitan areas (Table). New York has the largest share of residents commuting 60 minutes or more, at 21.4 percent. Washington is second, at 17.3 percent, San Francisco at 17.0 percent, Riverside-San Bernardino, which is adjacent to Los Angeles, at 16.9 percent and Boston at 14.8 percent. Buffalo, Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, Kansas City and Milwaukee have the smallest share of their residents traveling 60 minutes or more to work, ranging from 2.5 percent to 2.7 percent.

    More Dispersion?

    The Times article that suggests that the increasing flexibility of companies toward full time working at home could permit people to disperse even more. Despite press reports that working at home is declining, its prospects look good. From 2014 to 2015, working at home experienced the largest increase of any work access mode except driving alone. The increase in work at home was 300,000, while the work at home share rose 5 percent in a single year according to ACS data. Moreover, Global Workplace Analytics reports a 115 percent increase in regular working at home among the non-self employed workforce since 2005, 10 times the increase in the workforce.

    These trends indicate that dispersion is continuing in US metropolitan areas as well as between metropolitan areas, as people seek better standards of living.

    Additional Data

    90 and Over Commute Shares by Metropolitan Area

    60 and Over Commute Shares by Mode by Metropolitan Area

    COMMUTE TIMES 60 & OVER MINUTES BY MODE
    US Major Metropolitan Areas: 2015
    Share by Mode
    All Workers Rank (Longest to Shortest) Drive Alone Transit Transit X Drive Alone
    UNITED STATES 9.0% 7.0% 38.3%          5.46
    Atlanta, GA 13.3%                    7 12.1% 40.5%          3.36
    Austin, TX 7.2%                  24 6.5% 27.9%          4.32
    Baltimore, MD 12.0%                    9 9.5% 46.2%          4.85
    Birmingham, AL 6.5%                  31 5.7% 30.0%          5.31
    Boston, MA-NH 14.8%                    5 11.8% 36.6%          3.11
    Buffalo, NY 3.4%                  53 2.5% 18.0%          7.21
    Charlotte, NC-SC 7.1%                  26 6.3% 33.7%          5.38
    Chicago, IL-IN-WI 14.4%                    6 11.0% 38.7%          3.50
    Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN 4.8%                  42 4.1% 31.7%          7.68
    Cleveland, OH 4.9%                  41 3.7% 33.0%          9.00
    Columbus, OH 4.2%                  46 3.7% 25.1%          6.80
    Dallas-Fort Worth, TX 8.7%                  16 7.7% 43.6%          5.65
    Denver, CO 7.8%                  21 6.2% 38.0%          6.18
    Detroit,  MI 6.8%                  30 6.1% 42.5%          6.95
    Grand Rapids, MI 4.3%                  45 3.6% 25.5%          7.04
    Hartford, CT 5.0%                  38 4.5% 23.0%          5.09
    Houston, TX 11.9%                  10 11.0% 39.0%          3.55
    Indianapolis. IN 5.0%                  39 4.6% 39.4%          8.64
    Jacksonville, FL 5.6%                  34 4.6% 39.6%          8.56
    Kansas City, MO-KS 3.6%                  50 3.2% 21.1%          6.51
    Las Vegas, NV 4.6%                  43 2.5% 45.9%        18.65
    Los Angeles, CA 12.5%                    8 10.8% 40.6%          3.77
    Louisville, KY-IN 4.4%                  44 3.6% 31.3%          8.60
    Memphis, TN-MS-AR 3.8%                  48 3.3% 37.1%        11.25
    Miami, FL 10.0%                  13 8.3% 43.1%          5.23
    Milwaukee,WI 3.8%                  49 2.7% 27.2%          9.89
    Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI 5.5%                  37 4.5% 21.2%          4.68
    Nashville, TN 8.2%                  18 7.7% 29.6%          3.84
    New Orleans. LA 7.9%                  20 6.7% 37.9%          5.64
    New York, NY-NJ-PA 21.4%                    1 11.9% 42.1%          3.54
    Oklahoma City, OK 3.6%                  51 3.1% 7.5%          2.40
    Orlando, FL 6.9%                  28 5.6% 42.8%          7.66
    Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD 11.4%                  12 9.0% 33.8%          3.78
    Phoenix, AZ 6.8%                  29 5.3% 41.9%          7.95
    Pittsburgh, PA 8.0%                  19 7.3% 20.3%          2.77
    Portland, OR-WA 7.4%                  23 5.2% 28.9%          5.59
    Providence, RI-MA 9.1%                  15 7.3% 54.7%          7.47
    Raleigh, NC 6.0%                  32 5.0% 42.8%          8.61
    Richmond, VA 4.9%                  40 4.0% 33.1%          8.17
    Riverside-San Bernardino, CA 16.9%                    4 15.0% 48.5%          3.25
    Rochester, NY 4.0%                  47 3.1% 32.7%        10.43
    Sacramento, CA 7.6%                  22 6.5% 34.7%          5.37
    St. Louis,, MO-IL 5.8%                  33 4.6% 36.3%          7.85
    Salt Lake City, UT 3.5%                  52 2.1% 23.3%        11.34
    San Antonio, TX 6.9%                  27 5.8% 41.5%          7.17
    San Diego, CA 7.2%                  25 5.6% 37.5%          6.73
    San Francisco-Oakland, CA 17.0%                    3 12.5% 37.2%          2.97
    San Jose, CA 9.4%                  14 7.5% 48.1%          6.43
    Seattle, WA 11.8%                  11 8.9% 33.6%          3.78
    Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL 8.4%                  17 7.9% 33.2%          4.22
    Tucson, AZ 5.5%                  36 3.7% 29.5%          7.99
    Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC 5.6%                  35 4.8% 40.1%          8.35
    Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV 17.3%                    2 13.9% 35.7%          2.57
    Derived from American Community Survey, 2015

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photograph: New Jersey Transit Commuter Train (by author)