New Geography

Tag: Transportation

  • No Fundamental Shift to Transit: Not Even a Shift

    The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) is out with news of higher transit ridership. APTA President and CEO Michael Melaniphy characterizes the new figures as indicating "a fundamental shift going on in the way we move about our communities.” Others even characterized the results as indicating "shifting consumer preferences." The data shows either view to be an exaggeration.

    1935 and 2013

    This is hardly a reliable time for making judgments about fundamental shifts or shifts in consumer preferences. Economic performance has been more abysmally abnormal only once in the last century –during the Great Depression – than at present.

    The last year, 2013, is the sixth year in a row that total employment, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was below the peak year of 2007 (Figure 1). This run of dismal job creation was exceeded only between the Great Depression years of 1929 and 1936 in the last 100 years (Note 1). From World War II until the Great Recession, the maximum number of years that employment fell below a previous peak was two, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2001 to 2003). The Great Recession may have ended, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, but the Great Malaise continues as the economy is performing well below historic levels. Judgments about fundamental shifts and consumer choice today are not more reliable than they would have been in the Great Depression year of 1935.

    Transit’s Market Share: Stuck in Neutral

    But more importantly, there is no shift to transit.  APTA is right to point out that transit ridership has grown faster than vehicle travel in the United States since 1995. Nonetheless, transit’s share of urban travel has barely budged, because its 1995 share of travel was so small. This is indicated by Figure 2, which compares the overall market share of transit to that of cars and light trucks from 1995 to 2013. Indeed, the top of Figure 2 (the 100 percent line) is virtually indistinguishable from the personal vehicle share over the entire period. The bottom of the chart (the zero percent line) is virtually indistinguishable from the transit share. This is not the stuff of fundamental shift.

    Commuting: The Story is Not Transit

    A similar pattern of little or no change is indicated by the commuting (work access) data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

    Over the past five years, as with virtually all the years since such data has been collected, the overwhelming majority of new commuters have driven alone (Figure 3). Indeed, transit has not taken a single net automobile off the road since 1960, and not in the last five years. Between 2007 and 2012, 93 percent of the additional commuters drove alone (Note 2). The drive alone market, which might have been thought to be saturated, actually rose from 76.1 percent to a 76.3 percent market between 2007 and 2012.

    The biggest change has been the continuing loss in carpool use, which dropped from 10.4 percent to 9.7 percent from 2007 to 2012. It is estimated that nearly 450,000 passengers left carpools (excluding drivers), approximately 1.8 passengers for each additional commuter using transit (250,000).

    The largest gain from 2007 to 2012 was in working at home, including telecommuting. Working at home increased from 4.1 percent to 4.4 percent. In actual numbers, working at home added 1.9 times the increase in transit commuting. Its change in market share was greater than that of transit in 42 of the 52 major metropolitan areas. Surprisingly, this includes New York, with its incomparable transit system (by US standards).

    Transit’s share of commuting inched up only 0.1 percentage points between 2007 and 2012. This is so small that if this rate of annual increase were sustained for 50 years, transit’s commute market share would  edge up to only 6 percent (Figure 4), approximately transit’s 1980 market share (doubling to 10 percent would require 130 years). The latest data indicates both gains and losses for transit, with market shares up in 28 major metropolitan areas and down in 24.

    Transit Losses

    In Atlanta, with the nation’s second largest Metro (subway) system built since 1975, a declining overall employment base was accompanied by a loss of 13,000 transit commuters, at the same time that there was an increase in working at home of 19,000.

    In Portland, considered by many around the world to be an urban planning Utopia, the data is hardly favorable. Since 1980, the last year with data before the first of five light rail lines and one commuter rail line opened, transit’s market share has dropped from 8.4 percent to 6.0 percent. While spending billions of dollars on rail, working at home – which involves little or no public expenditure – increased by triple the number of people drawn to transit. And things have not changed materially, even during the claimed "fundamental shift." In the last five years, the working at home increase is more than double that of transit.

    In Los Angeles, ridership at the largest transit agency continues to languish below its 1985 peak, despite having opened 9 light rail, Metro, and rapid busway lines and adding more than 1.5 million residents. Even this decline may be under-stated because of how transit counts passengers. Each time someone steps on a transit vehicle, they are counted (as a boarding). A person who transfers between two or three buses to make a trip counts as two or three boardings, which is what the APTA data reports.

    When rail is added to a transit system, bus services are reconfigured to serve the rail system. This can mean many more boardings from transfers without more passenger trips. This potential inflation of ridership is likely to have occurred not only in Los Angeles, but in all metropolitan areas that added rail systems.

    Transit Gains

    At the same time, gains are being made in some metropolitan areas. Ridership has risen more strongly in transit’s six "legacy cities," the municipalities (not metropolitan areas) of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington. Between 2007 and 2012, 68 percent of the additional transit commuting occurred to employment locations in these six municipalities. This is higher than the 55 percent of national transit commuting that these areas represented in 2012. The much larger share being attracted by these areas in the last 5 years is an indication that transit ridership, already highly concentrated in just a few places, is becoming even more concentrated.  Further, 50 percent to 75 percent of commuters to the corresponding six downtowns reach work by transit.

    Rational Consumer Behavior

    Even when the nation finally emerges from the Great Malaise, only vain hope will be able to conceive of a large scale consumer preference driven shift toward transit. The rational consumer will not choose transit that is slower or less convenient than the car. Where transit access is impractical or impossible, people will use cars. This is the case for most trips in all US metropolitan area, as the Brookings Institution research cited below indicates

    The Brookings Institution research indicated that the average employee in the nation’s major metropolitan areas are able to access fewer than 10 percent of jobs in 45 minutes. This is not only a small number of jobs, but it is a travel time that is approximately twice that of the average employee in the United States (most of whom travel by car).

    More funding for transit cannot solve this problem. The kind of automobile competitive transit system needed to provide rational consumer choice between cars and transit would require annual expenditures rivaling the total personal income in the metropolitan area, as Jean-Claude Ziv and I showed in our 2007 11th World Conference on Transport Research paper (2007). It is no wonder that not a single comprehensive automobile competitive transit system exists or has been seriously proposed in any major US or Western European metropolitan area (Note 3).  Transit is about the largest downtowns and the largest urban cores.

    Unbalanced Coverage

    All of this appears to have escaped many media outlets, which largely parroted the APTA press release. For example, The New York Times, CBS News, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune were as parish newsletters commenting on a homily by the priest, for their failure to report both sides. A notable exception was USA Today, whose reporter consulted outsider Alan Pisarski (who has written for newgeography.com). Pisarski placed the APTA figures in historical context and expressed reservations about restoration of the transit commuting share numbers of 1980 or before. 

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. 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 was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photograph: DART light rail train in downtown Dallas (by author)

    ———————

    Note 1: Current Employment Statistics Survey data, 1939 to 2013. 1913 to 1938 estimated from data in Historical Statistics of the United States: Bicentennial Edition.

    Note 2: The source for the commuting data is the American Community Survey of the Census Bureau, which indicates an employment level in 2012 that is higher than in 2007. The Current Employment Statistics Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates a decline.

    Note 3: I would be pleased to be corrected on this. In 2004, we issued a challenge on this subject, and while there were some responses, none met the required criteria (see http://demographia.com/db-challenge-choice.htm). The criteria are repeated below:

    To identify an actual system or propose a system that provides the following in an urban area of more than 1,000,000 population:

    · Transit choice (automobile competitive public transport service) for at least 90 percent of trips and passenger kilometers in the particular urban area.

    · Automobile competitiveness is defined as door to door trip times no more than 1.5 times automobile travel time.

    The description of any system not already in operation should also include an estimate of its cost, capital and annual operating.

  • Work Access in the Non-centered San Francisco Bay Area

    The San Francisco Bay Area (San Jose-San Francisco combined statistical area or CSA) has a superior access to work systems, including its important work at home element. The freeway system provides primary access between all points, importantly supplemented by arterial streets, and accounts for nearly 70 percent of all work trips. There are more types of transit than in other metropolitan regions (metro, street car, commuter rail, light rail, ferry, and cable car) and generally with a higher level of service. The Silicon Valley virtually defines information technology and is behind the huge increase in working at home, much of it telecommuting.

    The recently released American Community Survey five-year file provides the opportunity to examine state of employment access in all Bay Area municipalities

    Employment Access by Car

    Like every major metropolitan area in the United States, more people use cars or light trucks (for simplicity called "cars" in this article) to get to work than any other mode of transport. In the Bay Area, 68 percent of commuting is by car. Cars provide the overwhelming majority of work access to jobs in 11 of the Bay Area’s 12 counties. This ranges from 80 percent in Alameda County (secondary core municipality Oakland is the county seat) to 91 percent in San Joaquin County, which was recently added to the San Jose-San Francisco CSA (Figure 1). In the 12th county, San Francisco, cars provide work access for nearly equal to that of transit, walking and cycling combined (both approximately 46 percent).

    Employment Access from Home

    Working at home continues to grow and, to an even greater extent than car travel, is relatively evenly distributed throughout the 12 Bay Area counties. The highest percentage is in Marin County, at 9.6 percent. The combination of a technology friendly regional environment and horrific traffic on the primary commuting routes to most of the Bay Area (US-101 and the Golden Gate Bridge) probably drive this figure higher. Contra Costa County and Santa Cruz County also have a high work at home shares, at 7.3 percent and 7.1 percent respectively. This is than 50 percent above the national rate.

    Most surprisingly, however, the lowest work at home share in the Bay Area is in Santa Clara County, the very heart of Silicon Valley. This is slightly less than the national average. Another surprise is counties on the periphery of the Bay Area also have small work at home shares. Sonoma, Napa and San Joaquin counties have work at home shares of under 5.0 percent.

    Outside the core cities of San Francisco and Oakland, more than 1.5 times as many employees work at home (including telecommuting) than access work by transit (Figure 2).

    Employment Access by Transit

    The Bay Area remains monocentric only in aerial photographs and transit market share. San Francisco is served by one of the nation’s busiest metro (subway or underground) systems in the nation, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), which carries over 400,000 one-way rides daily. BART was the first of the major post-World War II rapid transit systems in the United States and was followed by other fully grade separated Metro systems in Washington and Atlanta and individual lines in Los Angeles.

    As we indicated in Transit Legacy Cities, most of the transit commuting (55 percent) in the United States is to just six core municipalities, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, and San Francisco. Approximately 60 percent of commuting to those cities is to the downtown areas, which are also the largest in the United States. Yet these legacy cities, with a majority of the nation’s transit commuting, account for only six percent of the nation’s employment.

    Nearly two-thirds of Bay Area transit commuters work in the city of San Francisco and that figure rises to more than 70 percent, including the city of Oakland, with its strong downtown. Yet, these two core cities have only 21 percent of employment in the Bay Area. The downtowns of both core cities are well served by transit, including BART and radial surface transit systems. Buses serve downtown Oakland, while buses, trolley buses (electric buses), street cars and cable cars are focused on downtown San Francisco.

    The Non-Centered Metropolis

    Even with a regional Metro system, the Bay Area has developed in a strongly dispersed and polycentric form. Polycentricity is represented by edge cities (suburban office centers) such as Walnut Creek (with a BART station), the San Francisco Airport office area (not generally walkable from any rapid transit) and in the Silicon Valley (San Mateo and Santa Clara counties). Even more, however, employment is dispersed well beyond even these nodes.  Authors Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurg have called this phenomenon "edgeless cities," though their other term, the "non-centered metropolis," says it better.

    Outside the San Francisco-Oakland core, the commuting pattern in the Bay Area is little different than in the rest of the nation (as is also the case in New York, outside the urban core). Nearly 80 percent of the Bay Area’s jobs are outside the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, however only 4.0 percent of commuters use transit to jobs located outside these cores. Among municipalities other than San Francisco and Oakland with BART stations, work access by transit is 5.1 percent, only slightly higher than the national average (which includes all urban and rural areas). Commuting by transit is even lower (3.0 percent) to jobs in outside municipalities with BART stations (Figure 3).

    Among the municipalities with BART stations and favorable "jobs-housing balances," only San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley (home of the University of California) attract more transit commuters than the national average. Walnut Creek illustrates the problem of regional transit commuting to suburban locations. Walnut Creek has a strong suburban office center and a stronger jobs-housing balance than all BART municipalities but much smaller Colma. Yet, only 3.5 percent of commuters who work in Walnut Creek used transit to get to work (Figure 4).

    Overall, outside the core cities of San Francisco and Oakland, approximately 20 times as many people commute to jobs by car as by transit.

    The Illusion of Monocentricity

    With transit’s failure to carry large numbers of workers to jobs throughout the Bay Area (not just to the two older core municipalities), planners have switched strategies. Now the focus is on urban villages (transit oriented development), by which people and jobs will be located close together, reducing the need for long automobile commutes. The adopted regional plan, "Plan Bay Area" imagines people living in transit oriented developments and walking, cycling or using transit to get to employment. However, former principal planner of the World Bank Alain Bertaud says that this "urban village model exists only in the mind of urban planners" and worse, that "it contradicts the economic justification of large cities:  the efficiency of large labor markets." (see: Urban Planning 101) That means a lower standard of living and more poverty.

    The reality for the Bay Area and for metropolitan areas around the world is that transit is structurally incapable of replacing the automobile for the bulk of the workforce. The fundamental problem is that no transit system can attract drivers to jobs by offering travel times competitive with the automobile (Note). Transit can compete to some downtowns, but downtowns have only a small minority of employment. Outside of those, trip patterns are simply too dispersed for transit to serve as well as cars. Monocentric cities, to duplicate Bertaud’s logic, exist "only in the mind of urban planners."

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. 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 was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    ————–

    Note: In 2003, I issued a challenge to identify an existing or proposed transit system design that would achieve automobile competitiveness throughout a metropolitan area of more than 1,000,000 in Western Europe or the United States (see: Smart Growth Challenge: Transportation Choice for All, Not Just a Few [Automobile Competitiveness]). No complete responses were received. This is not surprising. In 2007, Professor Jean-Claude Ziv and I authored a paper for the 11th World Conference on Transport Research (2007 WCTRS) that estimated such a system could cost as much as the total gross domestic product of any such metropolitan area each year).

    Photo: Bart A car Oakland Coliseum Station

  • Portland Light Rail Revolt Continues

    In a hard fought election campaign, voters in the city of Tigard appear to have narrowly enacted another barrier to light rail expansion in suburban Portland. The Washington County Elections Division reported that with 100 percent of precincts counted, Charter Amendment 34-210 had obtained 51 percent of the vote, compared to 49 percent opposed.

    The Charter Amendment establishes as city policy that no transit high capacity corridor can be developed within the city without first having been approved by a vote of the people. High capacity transit in Portland has virtually always meant light rail.

    In a previous ballot issue, Tigard voters had enacted an ordinance requiring voter approval of any city funding for light rail. Similar measures were enacted in Clackamas County as well as King City in Washington County. Across the Columbia River in Clark County (county seat: Vancouver), voters rejected funding for connecting to the Portland light rail system. After the Clackamas County Commission rushed through a $20 million loan for light rail (just days before the anti-light rail vote), two county commissioners were defeated by candidates opposed to light rail, with a commission majority now in opposition.

    Further, a Columbia River Crossing, which would have included light rail to Vancouver was cancelled after the Washington legislature declined funding. In a surreal aftermath, interests in Oregon seriously proposed virtually forcing the bridge on Washington, fully funding the project itself. A just adjourned session of the Oregon legislature failed to act on the proposal, which now (like Rasputin) appears to be dead.

    At the same time, Portland’s transit agency faces financial difficulty and has been seriously criticized in a report by Secretary of State. The agency has more than $1 billion in unfunded liabilities and carries a smaller share of commuters than before the first of its six light rail and commuter rail lines was opened. Moreover, the latest American Community Survey data indicates that 3,000 more people work at home than ride transit (including light rail and commuter rail) to work in the Portland metropolitan area. Before light rail (1980), transit commuters numbered 35,000 more than people working at home. Over the period, transit’s market share has dropped one-quarter.

  • Urban Planning 101

    Former World Bank principal planner Alain Bertaud has performed an important service that should provide a much needed midcourse correction to urban planning around the world. Bertaud returns to the fundamentals in his "Cities as Labor Markets."

    Bertaud begins by reminding us that without well functioning labor markets, cities will not be successful. This requires mobility, which he defines as "the ability to move quickly and easily between locations within a metropolitan area" and "the ability to locate one’s house or one’s firm in any location within a metropolitan area." This mobility, he maintains, is indispensable in facilitating growth of the city.

    There is just one exception, according to Bertaud. These are retiree cities, which do not principally rely on mobility for their growth. Yet, Bertaud notes that these are themselves products of the much more numerous conventional cities, where mobility has facilitated growth and in which future retirees accumulate the resources that permit migration to the retirement cities.

    There are also the planned cities for government, such as Brasilia and Washington. Bertaud contends that they have become successful because "more diversified labor market "was grafted " onto the government activities."Before that, however: "The ‘cost is no object’ concept presided over their construction and insured their initial survival as they were financed by taxes paid by the rest of the country." This should give pause to nations, especially in the developing world proposing to build and thereby divert resources from improving the lives of people (see;  Unmanageable Jakarta Soon to Lose National Capital?).

    Imaginary "Urban Villages"

    Bertaud insists on the importance of cities as unified labor markets. Metropolitan areas will be hampered in their development and innovation to the extent that they are fragmented.

    He is particularly critical of planning attempts to create "urban villages" within the unified labor markets (metropolitan areas). He contends that: "The urban village model” implies a systematic fragmentation of labor markets within a large metropolis and does not make economic sense in the real world."

    Bertaud does not accept the notion that:

    "… everybody could walk or bicycle to work, even in a very large metropolis. To allow a city to grow, it would only be necessary to add more clusters. The assumption behind this model is either that urban planners would be able to perfectly match work places and residences, or that workers and employers would spontaneously organize themselves into the appropriate clusters."

    He is concerned at the "prevalence of this conceit in many urban master plans," which he characterizes as "utopian trip patterns."

    According to Bertaud, the urban village "model does not exist in the real world because it contradicts the economic justification of large cities: the efficiency of large labor markets." The cold water of reality is that "… the urban village model exists only in the mind of urban planners."

    Uncontained Self-Contained Satellite Towns

    He supports his claim. Seoul’s satellite communities were intended to be self contained towns (urban villages), in which most residents both lived and worked. Yet, most of the workers employed in the satellite towns live in other parts of the metropolitan area. At the same time, most of the residents of the satellite  work in other parts of the Seoul metropolitan area. He cites Stockholm regulations requiring neighborhood jobs – housing balances as having no impact on shortening commute distances even when such a balance is achieved.

    My own research using 2001 census data indicated that the London area new towns, also intended to be populated principally by people who work in them, had average work trip travel distances more than their diameter (See: Jobs-Housing Balance and Urban Villages in Southeast England). This means that large numbers of people were traveling to work outside the towns. In London as in Seoul, the planners can conceptualize the self-contained satellite towns, but it is beyond them to force the behaviors to make them work.

    Similarly misguided efforts elsewhere, from the San Francisco Bay Area and other California metropolitan areas to Montréal and beyond are destined for similar failures.

    Commuting and the City

    Bertaud cites research by Remy Prud’homme and ChoonWong Lee at the University of Paris showing that the efficiency of cities tends to increase up so long as a large share of the commutes are less than 60 minutes, though optimal efficiency occurs at shorter commute distances. Lest there be any misunderstanding, American cities have average commute times of approximately 25 minutes, according the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, not the hour or two hour journeys of urban legends.

    Defining the City

    This large commuting radius makes it clear that Bertaud does not accept the distorted urban definition that would, for example, define the urban form to not extend beyond the borders of New York City, or worse beyond the Hudson, East and Harlem Rivers – the boundaries of the island of Manhattan. If the city is limited to dense cores, then the "half urban" world recently announced won’t be here for many decades. The city is the metropolitan area – the labor market, which extends to the far reaches of the commuting shed.

    The Bottom Line

    According to Bertaud, 

    "Increasing mobility and affordability are the two main objectives of urban planning. These two objectives are directly related to the overall goal of maximizing the size of a city’s labor market, and therefore, its economic prosperity." 

    That brings us back to first principles. Cities are about people. Planning is justified to the extent that it facilitates the aspirations of people. The city requires prosperity, which Bertaud shows in a much needed first installment of Urban Planning 101.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

    —–

    Note: Alain Bertaud’s "Cities as Labor Markets," was published by the Marron Institute on Cities and the Urban Environment at New York University and is intended to be a chapter in his forthcoming book, tentatively titled Order without Design.

  • The Illusions of Charles Montgomery’s Happy City (Part 2)

    This is the second of a two-part series discussing Charles Mongomery’s Happy City. Read part one here.

    ‘The system that built sprawl’

    Montgomery faces the hurdle of explaining why, if low-density suburbs cause unhappiness, so many millions of people, over so many decades, across several countries, flocked to that way of life. As he writes, ‘since 1940, almost all urban growth has actually been suburban.’ He must account for this fact, even though it means little to him personally. For the green-tinged intelligentsia, working and middle-class people are pawns who rarely think for themselves.      

    Still, in Montgomery’s case the hurdle is high, since his objections to dispersion go much further than conventional gripes about fragile economic foundations. Happy City does peddle the myth, in passing, that the financial crisis brought suburbanisation to a crashing halt. There’s an assertion that ‘census data in 2010/2011 showed that major American cities showed more growth than their suburbs’, and a hope this points to forces ‘systemic and powerful enough to permanently alter the course of urban history’. Montgomery even compares buying a detached home on the urban edge to ‘gambling on oil futures and global geopolitics’. As it turns out, he misconstrues the available data. Suburbanisation barely missed a beat in the United States and continues in earnest. 

    Montgomery’s essential point, though, is that suburban life is contrary to deep-seated human yearnings. This endows him with an even more patronising attitude to working people than his forerunners Richard Florida – who endorses the book – and Edward Glaeser. One line of argument in Happy City, which also features in Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, claims dispersion was forced on people by greedy land owners and property developers in cahoots with weak-kneed or compromised politicians and officials.

    He puts it his way: ‘sprawl, as an urban form, was laid-out, massively subsidized and legally mandated long before anyone actually decided to buy a house there … it is as much the result of zoning, legislation and lobbying as a crowded city block.’ In another chapter, Montgomery warns of the challenge for pro-density New Urbanism: ‘the system that built sprawl – huge state subsidies, financial incentives and powerful laws – is still in place.’ Popular preferences don’t even rate a mention. Similar comments appear throughout the book, adding up to an audacious feat of historical revisionism.

    The standard interpretation of urban evolution, from the walking city to the monocentric and then polycentric metropolis, places breakthroughs in transport technologies first, most notably railways, streetcars (trams) and affordable motor vehicles, followed by mass shifts in transportation modes and population movements second, with land owners and politicians ready to exploit the new conditions. Of course, transportation technologies have such a powerful impact because of pent up demand for space and lower densities.

    Essentially, Montgomery reverses the causative sequence, claiming government and business interests dragged people to the fringes and this induced a transformation of transportation modes, which may or may not have been viable under prevailing technologies. This anomalous theory puts him at odds with some of the most recognised urban thinkers:  

    • Lewis Mumford in The City in History: ‘what has happened to the suburb is now a matter of historic record … as soon as the motor car became common, the pedestrian scale of the suburb disappeared …’
    • Peter Hall in Cities in Civilization, discussing Los Angeles: ‘the car was doing more than decentralize; it was decentralizing in a new way’.
    • Robert Bruegmann in Sprawl: A Compact History: ‘families wishing to live at lower densities could be seen as the primary cause of the growth in … the railroad, public transportation and finally the automobile industry … each of these means of transportation did, in fact, give families increased mobility.’
    • Joel Kotkin in The City: A Global History: ‘as automobile registrations soared in the 1920s, suburbanization across the rest of [the United States] also picked up speed, with suburbs growing at twice the rate of cities.’
    • Shlomo Angel in Planet of Cities: ‘a third and more radical transformation, from the monocentric to the polycentric city, began in the middle decades of the twentieth century with the rapid increase in the use of cars, buses, and trucks.’

    Such quotes can be piled up all day long.    

    Happy City is open to the same criticism as Glaeser’s book, namely that as a matter of chronology, urban dispersion took off before the interstate highway system, tax deductibility of home mortgage interest, the relative decline of inner-city schools, many development controls, and other factors cited by both as having pushed Americans to the periphery. In Downtown: Its Rise and Fall 1880-1950, Robert Fogelson explains that ‘by the mid and late 1920s, however, some Americans had come to the conclusion that the centrifugal forces were beginning to overpower the centripetal forces – or, in other words, that the dispersal of residences might well lead in time to the decentralization of business.’ And suburbs have been popular in countries other than the US, like Australia, where these sorts of factors are absent.

    Blinded by science

    For his part, Montgomery envisages an alternative past, in which demands for space and mobility hardly figure. ‘Well, the path that led … to today’s sprawl was not straight’, he writes, ‘it meandered back and forth between pragmatism, greed, racism and fear.’ Rewriting history may be audacious, but that’s just the beginning. The book doesn’t stop at denouncing suburbanisation as a form of organised compulsion. Montgomery’s ultimate purpose, drawing on ‘happiness science’, is to expose suburban life as a mass delusion. ‘We need to identify the unseen systems that influence our health and control our behaviour’, he writes.     

    Much of Happy City is devoted to a succession of studies and experiments by a range of neuroscientists, psychologists and behavioural economists on the conditions that stimulate feelings of well-being and contentment. Montgomery focuses on research into different spatial environments: densely or sparsely populated, high-rise or street-level, crowded or uncrowded, mixed-use or homogenous, auto-dependent or walkable, near or far from nature, and so on.

    Many people have no clue that their deeper inclinations are out of synch with their surroundings, he maintains, painting a less than flattering portrait of human nature. ‘The more psychologists and [behavioural] economists examine the relationship between decision-making and happiness,’ he repeats in various ways, ‘the more they realize … we make bad choices all the time … in fact we screw up so systematically …’

    Building a case that most of us are hobbled by delusions, Montgomery delights in claiming ‘we are far less rational in our decisions than we sometimes like to believe …’, and ‘we regularly respond to our environment in ways that seem to bear little relation to conscious thought or logic.’ Personal motives can be reduced to a stew of physiological and chemical stimuli, all summed up in a single paragraph:  

    Neuroscientists have found that environmental cues trigger immediate responses in the human brain even before we are aware of them. As you move into a space, the hippocampus, the brain’s memory librarian, is put to work immediately … it also sends messages to the brain’s fear and reward centres … it’s neighbour, the hypothalamus, pumps out a hormonal response … before most of us have decided if a place is safe or dangerous … places that seem too sterile or too confusing can trigger the release of adrenaline and cortisol, the hormones associated with fear and anxiety … places that seem familiar … are more likely to activate hits of feel-good serotonin, as well as the hormone that … promotes feelings of interpersonal trust: oxytocin.

    Nowhere is it acknowledged that if rational choice is devalued, people might end up being treated less like autonomous citizens and more like laboratory rats. Happiness ‘can’t be summed up by the number of things we produce or buy’, the book insists, ‘but the firing synapses of our brains, the chemistry of our blood …’

    Montgomery proceeds to grab hold of anything that discredits the real-life choices of suburbia’s teeming millions. One of many concepts he takes from neuroscience is ‘information propagation’. By operation of the hippocampus and other parts of the brain, we are told, our ‘concept of the right house, car or neighbourhood might be as much a result of happy moments from our past or images that flood us in popular media as of any rational analysis.’ From psychology he borrows the concept of ‘adaptation’, described as a ‘characteristic that exacerbates such bad decision-making [namely] the uneven process by which we get used to things.’

    He considers these important explanations for the appeal of suburban lifestyles when denser neighbourhoods are better for physical and mental health, at least according to his interpretation of studies and experiments on walking, cycling, social encounters, community activities, public space, streetscapes, grid planning, on-street parking and traffic velocity.  

    But his method of selecting a body of research, cobbling the results together, and equating this to the preconditions for a happy life, suffers from a fallacy of composition ─ the error of inferring that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. Although Montgomery claims ‘most people, in most places, have the same basic needs and most of the same desires’, it doesn’t follow that research findings on parts of life should add up to a real whole life.

    Kirk Schneider, a prominent American psychologist, writes in Psychology Today that ‘prevailing studies of happiness … represent but a circumscribed range of how such phenomena are actually experienced on the ground, so to speak, in people’s everyday worlds.’ Schneider cautions that ‘those things represent only slices of life, not life itself.’

    There’s no reason why urban planning should start from abstract assumptions drawn from a bunch of controlled experiments, rather than from masses of people weighing up their full, lived experience.   

    In this and other ways, the book succumbs to a disturbing strain of authoritarianism. History teaches us to beware a state that deals with people through the prism of theories which second-guess their inner thoughts and feelings, rather than according to their outward conduct. Freedoms are at risk whenever powerful functionaries claim to know what people are thinking, because of ‘false consciousness,’ ethnic stereotypes, biological determinism, or whatever. And Montgomery is no freedom-fighter: ‘we are pushed and pulled according to the systems in which we find ourselves, and certain geometries ensure that none of us are as free as we might think.’  

    ‘Make them feel rich’

    In the end, Happy City fails to prove the assertions trumpeted in its opening pages. It fails to produce any direct evidence connecting flatlining assessments of well-being or rising rates of depressive illness to ‘sprawl’. Nor is there any indirect evidence from which a connection can be inferred. Just as research on parts of life don’t add up to a whole real life, neither can studies and experiments finding discontent in particular conditions translate to generalised disenchantment with a whole way of life.

    Montgomery’s style is to fill the gaps with a series of conveniently chosen anecdotes and vignettes, some designed to trash suburbia and others to wrap a glowing aura around transit-oriented density. Randy Straussner’s super-commuting horror story, which never goes away, is an example of the former. But the star of the book, and prominent case of the latter, is ‘The Mayor of Happy’.

    At the helm of impoverished Bogota between 1998 and 2001, Enrique Penalosa cancelled a highway expansion plan, used the funds for hundreds of miles of cycle paths, hiked fuel taxes by 40 per cent, banned drivers from commuting by car more than three times a week, introduced car-free days, dedicated a new chain of parks and pedestrian plazas, and built the city’s first rapid transit system. This made him a guru to green urbanists like Montgomery, who was inspired to write Happy City.

    ‘We might not be able to fix the economy’, Penalosa is quoted as saying in the book, ‘we might not be able to make everyone as rich as Americans … but we can design the city to give people dignity, to make them feel rich.’ Confronting an unemployment rate of 18 per cent when Penalosa left office, however, many Bogotans would have longed for the real thing. 

    John Muscat is a co-editor of The New City, where this piece first appeared.

  • California’s Potholed Road to Recovery

    California’s economy may be on the mend, but prospects for continued growth are severely constrained by the increasing obsolescence of the state’s basic infrastructure. Once an unquestioned leader in constructing new roads, water systems, power generation and building our human capital, California is relentlessly slipping behind other states, including some with much lower tax and regulatory burdens.

    The indications of California’s incipient senility can be found in a host of reports, including a recent one from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the state a “C” grade. Roads, in particular, are in bad shape, as many drivers can attest, and, according to another recent study, are getting worse. The state’s shortfall for street repair is estimated at $82 billion over the next 10 years.

    Remarkably, given how Californians spend and tax ourselves, we actually bring up the rear in terms of road conditions. Indeed, one recent survey placed California 47th among the states in road quality. In comparison, low-tax Texas notched No. 11, showing that willingness to spend money is not the only factor.

    Greater Los Angeles is particularly affected; L.A. roads have been ranked by one Washington-based nonprofit as the worst in the nation. Bad roads cost L.A. drivers an average $800 a year in vehicle repairs, and a full quarter of roadways were graded “F,” meaning barely drivable. The region that gave birth to the freeway and the dream of quick, efficient travel, now has worse roads than some much poorer, less-important, lower-tax cities, such as Houston, Dallas or Oklahoma City. Not surprisingly, Los Angeles has been ranked has having the worst traffic congestion in the nation, but San Francisco and San Jose also make it to the 10 metros with the worst traffic.

    But it’s not just the roads that are in bad shape. Other basic sinews of the state’s infrastructure – ports, water systems, electrical generation – are increasingly in disrepair. Conditions are so poor at Los Angeles International Airport, admits new L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, that “there’s nothing world class” about the aging facility. This is critical for a city and region with significant global pretensions. Since 2001, LAX traffic has declined by more than 5 percent, while double-digit gains in passenger traffic have been logged by such competitors as New York, Miami, Atlanta and Houston.

    Meanwhile the Los Angeles-Long Beach port system, facing greater competition from the Gulf Coast, as well as other Pacific Coast ports, has been beleaguered by regulations that, among other things, mandate moving heavy loads with zero-emission but expensive, underpowered electric trucks that further undermine port productivity. Rather than see the ports as job and wealth generators, ports also have become increasingly sources for revenue for hard-hit city budgets.

    Overall, the bills are mounting; California faces an enormous shortfall in infrastructure. One study, conducted by California Forward, puts the bill for the next 10 years at $750 billion.

    The case for addressing infrastructure needs should be compelling on its own but, given fiscal limitations, it’s critical first to set some sense of priority. California, particularly under the current governor’s father, the late Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, spent upward of a fifth of its budget on basic infrastructure; today that share is under 5 percent. Rather than build the infrastructure that might spark the economy, as the elder Brown did, we have chosen, instead, to spend on government salaries and pensions, which, however well-deserved, require a transfer of wealth from the private sector to the public sector that brings only minimal benefits.

    These shortfalls are made even worse by ideological considerations that, in this one-party-rule state, overcome even the most rational approach to infrastructure development. The ruling class in Sacramento speaks movingly about the Pat Brown legacy, but has little interest in mundane things like roads, bridges, port facilities and other economically useful infrastructure. Instead, the powerful green and planning clerisy is focused on transforming the state into a contemporary ecotopia, where people eschew cars, live in crowded apartment towers and ride transit to work. Economic considerations, upward mobility and the creation or retention of middle-class jobs are, at best, secondary concerns.

    This ideological bent leads to grossly misplaced priorities. Consider, for example, the billions of dollars being proposed for building Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature project, a $68 billion, 800-mile high-speed rail system, even as state highways erode. The bullet train, which even liberals such as Kevin Drumm at Mother Jones magazine have pointed out, has devolved into a boondoggle with costs far above recent estimates and, given the lack of interest from private investors, something unlikely to offer much of an alternative to commuters for decades to come. Unlike many liberal commentators, who tend to favor crony-capitalist projects with a “green” cast, Drumm denounced the entire project as being justified with projections, such as for ridership, that are “jaw-droppingly shameless.”

    In addition, the project’s future has been clouded by legal challenges from a host of complainants stretching from Central Valley farmers to suburbanites on the San Francisco peninsula. In December, Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny in Sacramento County accused the state high-speed rail authority of ignoring provisions in the authorizing legislation for the project designed to prevent “reckless spending.”

    Public support for this misguided venture has been fading, thankfully. Even before Judge Kenny’s decision, a USC/Los Angeles Times poll showed statewide voter opposition rising to 53 percent, while 70 percent would like to have a new vote on the legislation that authorized the project.

    At the same time, federal funding, critical to keeping this failing project afloat, grows increasingly unlikely. California Congressman Jeff Denham, also a former supporter of the project, joined with Congressman Tom Latham to ask the federal Government Accountability Office if further federal disbursements could be illegal, given the uncertainty of the state funding needed to “match” the federal dollars. With Republicans likely to retain the House after the 2014 elections, it seems all but certain that high-speed rail – at least the statewide system proposed by its advocates – is heading to a less-than-spectacular denouement.

    This tendency to allow ideological considerations to overcome logic suffuses virtually the entire planning process across the board. For example, devotion to alternative energy sources leads the state to reject the expanded use of clean, cheap and plentiful natural gas in favor of extremely expensive renewable fuels, notably wind and solar. This may have much to do with the investments by crony capitalists close to Democratic politicians – think Google or a host of venture-capital firms – as with anything else. Under the right circumstances, such as government mandates, even unsound investments can make some people rich, or, in this case, even richer.

    But the cost to the rest of society of such Ecotopian policies can be profound, and could cost as much as $2,500 a year per California family by 2020. High energy prices will severely affect the state’s already-beleaguered middle- and working-class families, particularly in the less-temperate interior of the state.

    The commitment to expensive energy also makes bringing new industry – such as manufacturing or logistics – that can provide jobs ever more problematical. Similarly, money poured into follies like high-speed rail also weaken the state’s ability to fund, directly or through bonds, more-critically needed, if less-politically correct, transport infrastructure.

    Given these clear abuses of the public purse, it is not surprising that some Californians may simply want to close their wallets. Yet this would be a disservice to future generations, who will need new roads, ports, bridges and electrical generation. California needs to rediscover its historic commitment to being an infrastructure leader, but only after acquainting ourselves once again with the virtues of common sense.

    This story originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

  • Highway Eye-4, Revisited

    Interstate 4. It is a unique highway which is cursed by many drivers in Central Florida, and many more who come here in search of rest and relaxation. While Californians raise all highways to royal status — Interstate 5, for one, is referred to as “the five”, as if it were some kind of important personage — Floridians just call their central artery I-four. My decision to chronicle I-4 was sparked by a recent experience. Along with my family, I was caught in a traffic jam as we headed east on I-4 outside of Disney World. I have been stuck on this very spot many times. But on this trip, as we sat listening to Janis Joplin, something new happened.

    Along this stretch, one can take an off-ramp that runs parallel to the interstate, linking it to one of Central Florida’s toll roads. It travels for a couple miles in close proximity, and is elevated along a ridge of grass about 10 feet above the surface of I-4.

    A ditch and a grassy embankment separate the off ramp and the interstate. As we watched, a driver in the right lane of I-4 turned off of the interstate, crossed the shoulder, went down into the ditch, and climbed up onto the parallel road, speeding away and out of the traffic jam. At first, one person did it, and then others followed. And then, about 500 feet ahead, we saw another stream of cars doing the exact same thing. And then, ahead of that stream, yet another stream of drivers drove over the embankment. It wasn’t one or two cars, it was dozens and dozens; an en masse sheet flow ripping up the grass. People, fed up with the traffic mess, had taken matters into their own hands. And they were speeding away.

    That is a phenomenon I haven’t seen before: collective abandonment of a pathway, even one that is highly discouraging. But then, maybe it’s nothing new. I-4 has inspired bizarre and unusual behavior for years.

    Back in 2012, I shared some highlights of this unique roadbed. For example, a haunted part lies, perhaps not coincidentally, close to the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp. Just a couple of weeks ago, a section of the underbrush along the highway’s edge was cleared, revealing a hillside cemetery. At the fence line there was newly painted stucco. In this area, I-4 is rumored to have a ghost or two from an early pioneer family that walks along the side of the road. Whether the highway was paved over part of the cemetery or the high-speed rumblings awakened the dead remains to be investigated.

    In the 1980s and 1990s, living in Tampa, I actually kept an I-4 log book in the car. Occasionally an incident was worth writing down, but it ended up mostly as an inventory of objects encountered along the interstate:

    • About 300 feet ahead of me a cardboard box tumbled off the rear bed of a pickup truck. The rolling, disintegrating contents included a boat chair on a 2 foot tall post and a light with wires flying off of it. I drove right over them. The chair made a very loud clunk.

    • In Lakeland, a road crosses over I-4, with a ramp that goes down the embankment and turns abruptly onto I-4, sort of like a driveway. There is no acceleration lane because a railroad bridge abutment is immediately ahead. At this entrance ramp, one late afternoon I was behind a pickup truck without a gate that rolled down the ramp and accelerated quickly to merge into traffic. As it did, a huge, greasy black transmission fell off of the back. The ground shook when it hit, and I heard the thud.

    • Malfunction Junction is the intersection of I-4 and I-275 in Tampa. I was travelling south on I-275 heading underneath I-4, driving my parents’ 1972 Ford Torino station wagon. This is a tank of a car, all steel with a 302 V-8 engine. I still have dreams about it. I was going perhaps 50 early on a Sunday morning into downtown. Ahead of me by about 6 car lengths was a rusty pickup truck stacked with bales of hay. As the highway ducks under the I-4 bridge, it curves right and it slopes. The pickup was just under the bridge when a bale of hay fell off of it. With no possible reaction time, I plowed right into the hay. The nose of a Torino actually comes to a point, which sliced into the bale of hay, and blew it apart as I drove through, leaving behind a huge, golden-tan cloud. It didn’t leave a scratch on the car — only a single hay straw was stuck in the windshield wiper. What stands out about this incident, even today, was that the hay gave no resistance whatsoever: when the car hit it did not shudder or make any noise at all. It was like driving through smoke. Such was the power of the Torino.

    These incidents now seem almost archaic; circus sideshows from a bygone era. They are great Florida folk tales, stories of bubbas for after dinner entertainment. The events are faraway both in time and in spirit from the darker forces that haunt our population on the road today.

    Those who are here on vacation, trying to relax and enjoy some family time, are tormented by a solid, stopped-up traffic-choked road full of millions of others who have come here to do the exact same thing. People reached a threshold of pain and crossed it, taking matters into their own hands and seeking stress relief during a vacation that was planned as stress relief in the first place. I-4 has become a metaphor for our times.

    2009 and 2010 were years that really beat people up. By 2011 and 2012, many had adjusted their expectations and gotten really cynical about the future. Last year, things changed again. For some, the world has gotten worse. For those who were so swiftly unemployed and have become re-employed, the new working conditions are different. They work much harder, for less than before. They face uncertainty every single day, a holdover from the white-knuckled years. The stress wears on the inner compass, and the temptation to cut corners gets greater and greater.

    When brazen self-interest spreads like wildfire, a sort of highway mob rule, if you will, I think that we as a society may be on the edge of something new and wild, as if the guardrails of rationality have weakened.

    This little incident on Interstate 4 may be isolated, or it might be a symptom of a sea change. People who have been patient and docile have taken a beating over the last several years. We have put up with mental and emotional abuse as we’ve tried to make the world better for our children. In doing so, we’ve — mostly — stayed grimly entrenched in the collective good; the shared social values and the rule of law over men.

    But when one or two people break off and steer their own course, how quickly many others follow. These are dangerous times, and our inner moral compasses are more important than ever before. We didn’t preserve our collective sanity through all of the wicked and sorrowful events of the recent past, only to lose it all now. In the coming year, we must hold on for a little longer, and rebuild moral capital for future generations.

    Richard Reep is an architect and artist who has been designing award-winning urban mixed-use and hospitality projects, domestically and internationally, for the last thirty years . He is Adjunct Professor for the Environmental and Growth Studies Department at Rollins College, teaching urban design and sustainable development. His writing has focused on art and architectural criticism, and on localism and its importance in establishing sense of place. He resides in Winter Park, Florida with his family.

    Flickr photo by Dean Shareski: Traffic on I-4, Orlando.

  • Urban Planning For People

    The recent publication of the United States Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) 2014 Annual Energy Outlook provides a good backdrop for examining the importance of current information in transportation and land-use planning. I have written about two recent cases in which urban plans were fatally flawed due to their reliance on outdated information. In one case, San Francisco’s Plan Bay Area, the planners are ignoring reality, and a court challenge is underway. In the other, a court invalidated the city of Los Angeles Hollywood Plan.

    Progress In Automobile CO2 Emissions

    The new Annual Energy Outlook forecasts continuing and material progress in improving energy efficiency, reducing fossil fuel consumption and reducing carbon dioxide emissions from cars and light trucks (light vehicles). Per capita carbon dioxide emissions from light vehicles are projected by EIA to fall to 51 percent below the peak year of 2003 (Figure 1).

    The gross (not per capita) 2040 carbon dioxide reduction from light vehicles is projected to decline 28 percent in 2040 from 2003. Most significantly, the reduction is to occur as gross driving miles increases 29 percent (Figure 2). The actual 2040 emissions are likely to be even lower, because the 2014 Annual Energy Outlook assumes no vehicle fuel economy improvements after 2025. Improvements in vehicle technologies and cars using alternative fuels, and under government incentives, seem likely.

    The emissions forecast improvements have been stunning, to say the least. The 2002 Annual Energy Outlook had expected a 46 percent increase in carbon dioxide emissions from light vehicles between 2000 and 2020. The revised forecast – which takes into account what actually has occurred – says there will be a 9 percent decrease.

    This is the result of multiple factors. In 2002, EIA predicted a 55 percent increase in driving between 2000 and 2020. The 2014 Annual Energy Outlook revises that figure to 22 percent (Figure 3). Fuel economy is improving, which is being driven by stronger regulations as well as technological advances.  

    Driving is Down

    Driving per capita fell nine percent from the peak year of 2003 to 2012. This decline is not surprising given the sorry state of the economy and high unemployment. Gas prices have risen 85 percent (inflation adjusted) over the same period. The decline in driving is modest compared to the increase in gas prices – a 0.9 percent reduction in driving per capita for each 10 percent increase in gasoline (Figure 4), inflation adjusted. This is half or less the reduction in transit ridership that would be expected if fares were raised by the same percentage.  

    Meanwhile, little of this reduction in driving has been transferred to transit. The increase in transit per passenger miles per capita captured less than one percent of the driving decline. Indeed, the daily increase in per capita transit use is less than the perimeter of a 20-to-the-acre townhouse lot.

    With fewer jobs, higher gas prices and the new reliance on social media, as well as a rise in people working at home, people may have become more efficient and selective in their driving patterns (such as by consolidating shopping trips). Certainly those with jobs use their cars for those trips above as much as before.

    Meanwhile, the EIA forecasts that driving per capita will rise gain, once the economy is released from intensive care. However, with the near universality of automobile ownership, the potential for substantial increases is very limited.

    Hiding Success?

    It might be thought that the planning community, with its emphasis on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, would be rushing to incorporate these into their plans and even to herald the improvements.

    Yet, this is not the case. San Francisco Bay Area planners hid behind over-reaching state directives to "pretend-it-was yesterday" and employed out of date forecasts for vehicle emissions. Data in Plan Bay Area documentation shows that 95 percent of the projected improvement in greenhouse gas emissions would be from energy efficiency improvements. These have nothing whatever to do with its intrusive land use and transport strategies. The additional five percent requires social engineering residents into "pack and stack" high density developments, virtually outlaw detached housing on plentiful urban fringe land and will likely cause even more intense traffic congestion.

    California’s high speed rail planners have made the same kind of mistake, using out-dated fuel economy data in their excessively optimistic greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

    The Illusion of Transit Mobility

    Part of the problem is an illusion that people in the modern metropolitan area can be forced out of their cars into transit, walking, and biking, without serious economic impacts (such as a lower standard of living and greater poverty).

    Transit is structurally incapable of providing automobile competitive mobility throughout the metropolitan area without consuming much or all of its personal income (of course, a practical impossibility). But there is no doubt of transit effectiveness and importance in providing mobility to the largest central business districts (downtowns) with their astronomic employment densities (Note 1). Yet, outside the relatively small dense cores, automobile use is dominant, whether in the United States, Canada, Australia, or Western Europe. The transit legacy cities (municipalities) of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, with the six largest downtown areas account for 55 percent of all transit commuting in the United States.

    The Delusion of Walking and Cycling as Substitutes for Driving

    Illusion becomes delusion when it comes to cycling and walking. Walking and cycling work well for some people for short single purpose trips, especially in agreeable weather. However, walking and cycling are inherently unable to provide the geographical mobility on which large metropolitan areas rely to produce economic growth. True, cycling does approximate transit commute shares in smaller metropolitan areas, like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Bremen, but still accounts for barely a third of commuting by car according to Eurostat data. Prud’homme and Lee at the University of Paris and others have shown in their research that the economic performance of metropolitan areas is better where more of an area’s employment can be reached within a specific period of time (such as 30 minutes). That leaves only a limited role for walking and cycling.

    Toward an A Non-Existent Nirvana?

    The "Nirvana" of a transit-, walking-, and cycling-oriented metropolitan area proves to be no Nirvana at all. We don’t need theory to prove this point. Take Hong Kong, for example, with its urban population density six times that of Paris, nine times that of Toronto, 10 times Los Angeles, 12 times New York nearly 20 times Portland, and nearly 40 times that of Atlanta.

    This vibrant, exciting metropolitan area cannot deliver on a standard of living that competes with Western Europe, much less the United States. Despite the high density, the overwhelming dominance of transit, walking, and cycling, Hong Kongers spend much longer traveling to and from work each day than their counterparts in all large US metropolitan areas, including New York and in most cases the difference is from more than 50 percent (as in Los Angeles) to nearly 100 percent.

    The problem goes beyond the time that could be used for more productive for rewarding activities. Housing costs are the highest among the major metropolitan areas in the eight nations covered by the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. Hong Kong’s housing costs relative to incomes are more than 1.5 times as high as in the San Francisco metropolitan area and almost five times as high as Dallas-Fort Worth. Meanwhile, the average new house in Hong Kong is less approximately 485 square feet (45 square meters), less than one-fifth the size of a new single family US American house (2,500 square feet or 230 square meters), though Hong Kong households, are larger (Note 2).

    When households are required to spend more of their income for housing, they have less discretionary income and necessarily a lower standard of living. This loss of discretionary income trickles down to people in poverty, whose numbers are swelled by higher than necessary housing costs.

    Planning is for People

    Contrary to the current conventional wisdom, the prime goal of planning should not be to achieve any particular urban form. What should matter most is the extent to which a metropolitan area facilitates a higher standard of living and less poverty.

    ——————

    Note 1: In 2000, employment densities in the nation’s six largest downtown areas (New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and Philadelphia) was three times that of the downtowns in the balance of the 50 largest urban areas, and 14 times as dense as outside the downtown areas.

    Note 2: According to the 2011 census, the average household size in Hong Kong was 2.9 persons. This is more than 10 percent larger than the US figure of 2.6 from the 2010 census.

    ——-

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

    Photo: Prius photo by Bigstock.

  • Derailing Europe’s Bike Trains

    In a fit of what now appears to have been madness, over the last ten days I attempted to live the life of a small plastic figure in an architect’s model community. I wheeled my bike through railroad stations, and took eco-friendly cycle lanes. The goal was to use only a combination of trains and my bicycle to attend a series of meetings in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. I hoped that the harmonious state of the European Union, not to mention the environmental friendliness of both trains and bikes, would allow me to whiz between Bordeaux, Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam and then pedal the last kilometers to my hotels. Is this not the dream of European planners who have banned cars from many historic downtowns, and annually vote some €40 billion a year in railroad subsidies?

    Like many utopian schemes, my model week of travels worked better on paper than in practice. I made a large loop from Geneva to Bordeaux, Paris, and Amsterdam, and stopped long enough in many other cities to ride around the “centreville”. When it was over, I came to the conclusions that European rail transport, and perhaps even the larger European Union, remain Balkanized, and that taking a bicycle on a business trip involves the same logistical planning as departing on a Crusade.

    While getting on and off thirty trains (on the weekends I made detours to historic sites), I learned that many European railroad companies hate bicycles, especially on crack express trains, and that bikes are largely exiled to insignificant “milk” trains that go nowhere at slow speeds.

    More distressing, national borders — largely in disuse on auto routes across Europe — are alive and well whenever you attempt to bring a bicycle across state lines on a train, as that opens up the possibilities of more fees for rail companies, or at least the chance for conductors to deliver nationalistic rants.

    Between Amsterdam, Brussels, Lille and Geneva, for example, I paid out more than $60 just to bring along a bike, although on many trains I had to stand with it in the vestibule. The EU’s motto, “Unity in Diversity,” might as well read, “What makes you think you can put your bike there?”

    Herewith is a not-at-all comprehensive guide to bike-training around Europe. Be particularly mindful if you believe the Community is a happy jamboree of continentals singing hymns to Brussels:

    France: Bikes are allowed on some high speed TGV trains (Train à Grande Vitesse), but only after a passenger has physically gone to a station and paid for a reservation. Online bike reservations are not possible (that would make it too easy).

    Local TER trains (Transport Express Régional) welcome bikes aboard at no extra charge and have convenient hooks and bike carriages. Except for a few long distance “Intercités” trains, TER is local, which is why it took twelve hours and numerous train changes to travel with a bike from Geneva to Bordeaux, the first leg of my journey.

    I changed in Bellegarde, Lyon, and Saint-Pierre-des-Corps before heading to Bordeaux. Later, I made whistle stops in La Rochelle, Poitiers and Tours. Nearly all the cities on my route were a delight to see on a bike, as, of course, was Paris, which is as bike-friendly as any large city, although Parisian cyclists ride as though they inhabit some wild Expressionist painting.

    Belgium: I went from Paris to Lille and then across Belgium on several trains, all of which took my bike, but few of which had any place to store it.

    Nor is the French fee paid to transport a bike recognized in Belgium. So much for the common market. Belgium imposes its own set of arcane rules for passengers trying to sneak a bicycle across the border.

    Even though I had passes for the trains and my bike, there was always some reason I ran afoul of the Belgian conductors, who in torrents of Flemish, French, or English would berate me for the temerity of traveling in their country.

    Mao would have called these encounters “struggle sessions,” and I grew to dread being asked for “self-criticism” every time I boarded a Belgian train. A few of the conductors were kindly, but some in Flanders were so bitter over what appeared to be nothing that I wondered if their rage wasn’t part of a larger crackup, maybe one involving the entire country?

    I did love my rides around Brussels, Antwerp and Ypres, but was shocked at the contrast between wealthy (Germanic) Flanders and depressed (French-speaking) Wallonia.

    Flanders has wealthy farms, an industrial base, global trade via the Rhine, inflowing tourist dollars from Bruges and Ghent, and the European Union in Brussels.

    Wallonia is the dowager of a forgotten Belgian empire (maybe lost in the Congo?) — with abandoned coal mines, lots of subsidies from the north, lazy union work rules, and a sense that the future isn’t what it used to be. It does not even have Brussels, which floats along the uneasy divide: linguistically part of Wallonia; legally attached to Flanders.

    If the Flemish politicians are anything like their train conductors, I can easily imagine them throwing the Walloons off at the next station, with a long lecture about their failures as an economic entity or their lack of sufficient documentation.

    The Netherlands: The Low Countries are celebrated for their bicycle culture; bikes in Amsterdam careen like split atoms. That affection ends at the doors of the train, on which bikes are a regulated industry.

    I loved biking across the bridges over Amsterdam canals, especially at night when the Christmas lights were lit and the city had the feel of a Venetian carnival. Nevertheless, on the rails, a bike became an albatross, subject to myriad rules about the difference between a “national” and “international” bike pass, and regulations that prohibit bikes on certain trains during rush hours.

    Because of a tunnel fire, my bike and I were waylaid in the Hague’s damp air for more than an hour. When finally rerouted to Gouda and Rotterdam, I was told in a scolding manner that I would have to get off the trains for another two hours during peak travel times, even though the cars were empty. So much for those newspaper articles about modest Dutch royalty tooling around the country on their bikes.

    It took almost eight hours to travel with the bike from Amsterdam to Lille, France. These cities are three hours apart on high-speed trains, although none of those trains allow bicycles.

    ***

    The answer to these frustrations, of course, is for me to buy a folding bicycle — although a good one costs more than $1500 — if I wish to persist in the dream of getting around Europe by train with a bike.

    A “folder” may be worth it, however, because European cities are best seen over handlebars. Sadly, while a folding bike can be snuck aboard fast trains as “normal luggage,” the other, perhaps larger problem of the European bike-train dream is that international train journeys have become the travel choice largely of the expense-account crowd.

    For example, one-way train fare from Geneva to London is $350, but don’t even think about taking along a bicycle. Or, you might get it from Geneva to Paris on a TGV (add $15 more to the ticket), but Eurostar’s bike policies (add another $35) are more arcane than the Treaty of Westphalia: Bikes over a certain size go as registered luggage, but sometimes travel on different trains, making connections convoluted.

    So fly, rent a car, sit in traffic, and sleep in motels near auto route interchanges. In other words, so long as you don’t try to see the continent with a bike and by train on the same trip, or on a budget, the state of the European empire is fine.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.

    Flickr photo by K Paulinka: Bike Storage at Leiden train station parking lot, Netherlands.

  • High Speed Rail Decision: Victory for Rule of Law

    California Judge Michael Kenny has barred state bond funding for the California high speed rail system, finding that “the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority failed to follow voter-approved requirements designed to prevent reckless spending on the $68 billion project.” These protections had been an important in securing voter approval of a $10 billion bond issue in 2008. Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters suggested that without the protections in Proposition 1A, the measure “probably would have failed” to obtain voter approval.

    According to the court decision, the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) had failed to identify $25 billion of the funding that would be necessary to complete the first 300 mile segment. This was required by the terms of Proposition 1A as enacted by the legislature and approved by the voters. Yet, without a legally valid business plan, CHSRA was steaming ahead, at least until the court decision.

    The principal longer-term significance of the ruling is that “rule of law” remains in effect in California. Elizabeth Alexis, co-founder of Californians for Responsible Rail Design (CARRD), a group opposed to the project,  told the Los Angeles Times that CHSRA had been conducting itself as if it were “above the law” (Note 1).

    Judge Kenny’s decision means that the state of California cannot ignore its laws, even when its leadership finds them politically inexpedient. Just like the businesses from the largest companies to the smallest used car lot, the law forbids the state from making legally binding promises and then casting them aside arbitrarily.

    The Court Decision

    The San Diego Union-Tribune summarized the court decision as follows:

    Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny ruled that the California High-Speed Rail Authority could not proceed with using billions of dollars in bond funds to begin construction because it had not credibly identified funding sources for the entire $31 billion it will take to finish the 300-mile initial segment, nor had it completed necessary environmental reviews for the segment. These requirements were among the taxpayer protections written into law by California voters in November 2008, when they voted narrowly for Proposition 1A to allow the state to issue $9.95 billion in bonds as seed money for the project. Kenny said the state must develop a plan that comports with these requirements.

    The Union Tribune further reported that Judge Kenny rejected arguments by the state Attorney General that state the legislature, rather than Proposition 1A (now state law which has not been repealed) was the final authority on how the bonds are used.

    The Los Angeles Daily Newsindicated that the decision left the high speed rail project without either a funding plan or the ability to borrow money. The only remaining source of construction funding is a federal grant, which requires a match of state funding.

    Background

    Proposition 1A and the high speed rail project have had a difficult history.

    A $10 billion high speed rail bond issue to support the project (then called Proposition 1) was scheduled for 2008, after having been postponed twice. There was concern, however, in the state legislature that Proposition 1 had insufficient fiscal, environmental and management guarantees to attract a majority vote of the electorate. As a result, legislature enacted and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Assembly Bill 3034, which added substantial protections and recast the ballot measure as Proposition 1A. Assemblywoman Catherine Gagliani, the author, said that the legislation “establishes additional fiscal controls on the expenditure of state bond funds to ensure that they are directed to construction activities in the most cost-effective and efficient way.”

    Leading high speed rail proponent and then CHSRA Chairman Quentin Kopp (Note 2), applauded Assembly Bill 3034 indicating that “Californians will now be able to vote on a high-speed train system grounded in public-private financing and guided by fiscal accountability with the guarantee of no new taxes to fund the system,"

    The Promised System

    In the voter ballot pamphlet, proponents told voters that the proposed system would operate from San Francisco to Los Angeles and Anaheim, as well as through the Inland Empire (Riverside-San Bernardino) to San Diego and to Sacramento. This complete system was to cost $45 billion, according to the proponents (a figure that had already risen substantially).

    Like many other large infrastructure projects, costs were soon to explode. By 2011, the cost had escalated to a range of almost $100 billion to more than $115 billion. Further, the promised extensions to Sacramento and the Inland Empire and San Diego were not included in that price (Note 3).

    From High Speed Rail to “Blended” System

    The political reaction to the cost escalation was negative, leading the CHSRA to radically revise the remaining San Francisco to Los Angeles and Anaheim line. CHSRA removed exclusive high-speed rail tracks in the San Francisco-San Jose and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. The cost of this "blended" system was estimated at $68 billion. CHSRA maintained its claim that the legislatively required travel time of 2:40 could be achieved without the genuine high speed rail configurations in the two metropolitan areas. Sacramento Beecolumnist Walters characterized this expectation as based on “assumptions that defy common sense.”

    Former CHSRA Chair Quentin Kopp withdrew his support at this point, referring to the “blended system” as “the great train robbery.” Kopp also raised the possibility that the new plan could violate Proposition 1A, a judgment that Judge Kenny’s decision confirmed.

    Kevin Drum, of Mother Jones may have provided the best summary of situation as it stands today:

    Its numbers never added up, its projections were woefully rose-colored, and it was fanciful to think it would ever provide the performance necessary to compete against air and highway travel. Since then, things have only gotten worse as cost projections have gone up, ridership projections have gone down, and travel time estimates have struggled to stay under three hours.

    Drum had previously characterized CHSRA claims as “jaw-droppingly shameless,”adding that “A high school sophomore who turned in work like this would get an F.”

    Where From Here?

    Proponents have not given up. As The Economistreported, proponents took comfort in the fact that “Judge Kenny did not cancel the project altogether.” The Economist continued “But if that is a victory, it is not clear how many more wins California high-speed rail can handle.”

    The stalwart supporter San Francisco Chronicle editorialized that the court decision was a “bump” in the path for the project. Yet even the Chronicle conceded that: “The court results are a serious warning sign that the financial fundamentals need work.” 

    Too Big to Fail?

    Columnist Columnist Dan Walters fears that to make the financial fundamentals work would require making the project “too big to fail:”

    As near as I can tell, the HSR authority’s plan all along has been to simply ignore the law and spend the bond money on a few initial miles of track. Once that was done, no one would ever have the guts to halt the project because it would already have $9 billion sunk into it. So one way or another, the legislature would keep it on a funding drip.

    Such a strategy would force California taxpayers to fill the gargantuan funding gap, which for the entire Los Angeles to San Francisco line now stands at approximately $65 billion. With the federal funding of approximately $3 billion, the state is 95 percent short of the $68 billion it needs.

    California taxpayers may not be so accommodating. Even before Judge Kenny’s decision, LA Weekly reports that a USC/Los Angeles Times poll shows statewide opposition now to have risen to 53 percent of voters, while 70 percent would like to have a new vote on Proposition 1A (see “Californians Turn Against LA to SF Bullet Train”).

    Even the federal funding is being questioned.  California Congressman Jeff  Denham, also a former supporter of the project, joined with Congressman Tom Latham to ask (link to letter) the United States Government Accountability Office if  further federal disbursements could be illegal, given the uncertainty of the state funding needed to “match” the federal grant.

    Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the majority whip in the US House of Representatives has indicated that he will work with others in Congress to deny further federal funding to the project.

    The San Jose Mercury-News, which like the Chronicle had been a strong supporter of Proposition 1A in 2008 has long since climbed off the train. In an editorial following Judge Kenny’s decision, the Mercury-News decried the project’s “bait and switch,” tactics and called for “an end to this fraud.”

    The Winners: California Citizens

    At this point, the words of legendary New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra seem appropriate: “It ain’t over till it’s over.” However, Judge Kenny has rewarded California citizens with something that never should have been taken away from them – a government that follows its laws.

    —-

    Note 1: This is not the first time that the state has run afoul of the law on the high speed rail project. According to the Sacramento Bee:

    The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association had challenged the ballot language for Proposition 1A, arguing the Legislature used its pen to “lavish praise on its measure in language that virtually mirrored the argument in favor of the proposition.” The appeals court sided with HJTA [stating], “the Legislature cannot dictate the ballot label, title and official summary for a statewide measure unless the Legislature obtains approval of the electorate to do so prior to placement of the measure on the ballot.”

    Unlike the present decision, the state suffered no consequences for its violation and Proposition 1A was not invalidated.

    Note 2: Chairman Kopp is a retired judge, former state Senator and former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

    Note 3: Joseph Vranich and I have authored two reports questioning the ability of the California high speed rail system to meet its objectives (financial, environmental, ridership, and operations). The first, The California High Speed Rail Proposal: A Due Diligence Report, was published by the Reason Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association in 2008. The second, California High Speed Rail: An Updated Due Diligence Report, was published by the Reason Foundation in 2012.

    —-

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

    Photo: US Constitution (from National Archives)