New Geography

Tag: Transportation

  • Reforming Anti-Urban Bias in Transportation Spending

    State governments have to stop treating transportation like yet another welfare program.

    Among urban and rural areas, who subsidizes whom?

    It’s methodologically difficult to measure net taxation, but the studies that have been done suggest that, contrary to the belief of some, urban areas are big time net tax donors. For example, a recent Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute study found that Indiana’s urban and suburban counties generally subsidize rural ones.

    Just the consolidated city-county of Indianapolis-Marion County sends $420 million more to the state annually than it receives every year. That’s equal to the entire public safety budget of the city. The rest of the metro area sends another $340 million to the state annually.

    Similarly, a 2009 Georgia State University study found that the Atlanta metro area accounted for 61% of state tax collections but only but only 47% of expenditures. A 2004 University of Louisville study found that the state’s three major urban regions – Louisville, Lexington, and Northern Kentucky (south suburban Cincinnati) – generate over half the state’s tax revenues but only receive back about one third in state expenditures, an annual net outflow of $1.4 billion per year.

    The Atlanta and Indianapolis examples are particularly instructive, since both are the capital and by far the largest city of their state. They are sometimes presumed to benefit from disproportionate state spending as a result, but the reality is quite different.

    That’s not to say that this is necessarily bad. The fundamental basis of any government is a commonwealth, a body of citizens who see themselves as fellows, who believe each other’s fates are linked. Thus, generally spreading the burdens on some type of a progressive basis is broadly considered equitable, and assistance to the less fortunate constitutes a core function of government. To the extent that cities generate the most wealth in today’s economy, and have the highest incomes, it is no surprise they pay more in taxes. This doesn’t per se mean there’s an anti-urban bias in policy.

    Indeed, income redistribution is one of the key functions of state government. Actual welfare and safety net programs, including things like health care for the poor, are a major budget item in every state. But it goes beyond that. K-12 education could be treated as a purely local service, but every state spends large amounts on it. One could argue this is strictly to ensure a minimum level of funding equity between rich and poor districts. That is, it’s purely redistributive. Indeed, states sadly spend more time fiddling with funding formulas than in actual education reform and improvement. Even corrections disproportionately and unfortunately affects the poor. We are, in effect, a collection of 50 welfare states.

    The fact that so many of the functions of state government have taken on a redistributive cast also comes with downsides. Most importantly, even functions that should have little to do with welfare or equity have come to be seen through that lens.

    Exhibit A is transportation. Two-thirds of Americans live in large metro areas, yet less than half the federal transportation stimulus funds are going to the top 100 metro areas. Missouri is spending half its stimulus money on 89 small counties that account for only a quarter of the state’s population. In Ohio, the state cancelled plans to spend $100 million in stimulus funds on the crumbling Cleveland Inner Belt bridge in order to divert them to paying for a $150 million bypass around Nelsonville – a town of only 5,000 people. This is part of a plan to construct a four lane divided highway into sparsely populated southeast Ohio as part of a “build it and they will come” economic development plan. Mecklenburg County, NC, the state’s largest and home to Charlotte, received only $7.8 million out of the first $423 million in projects in that state. The Atlantic Monthly described this as a contest between a “mayor’s stimulus” and a “governor’s stimulus” – and the governor won.

    State after state has rural “roads to nowhere.” Without any legitimate economic development strategy on offer for depressed rural areas and small industrial cities, salvation is said to lie in access to four lane highways. The logic is that until every county in America is crisscrossed with these things, somehow residents are deprived of their due. This plays well to rural resentment, allowing people who are by nature proud believers in self-reliance and dismissive of welfare to claim instead that they’ve been cheated out of their “fair share” of transportation money. One suspects at least some deep inside understand the fiscal reality, which accounts for the self-righteous rhetoric designed as much perhaps to convince themselves as others.

    Regardless, a lack of transportation investment is crippling our cities, many of which have congested, crumbling roads and shaky bridges. Earmark reform would help at the federal level. Earmarked projects and “high priority corridors” are too often, as with “strategic” corporate programs, projects for which no traditional justification can be found.

    But beyond this, governance reform at the state level is critical to bring transportation funding allocations in line with real population and economic development measures. That’s not to say that rural areas should get no funding. There are many areas where legitimate state funding is warranted, such as replacing substandard bridges or correcting roads with dangerous geometry. But that doesn’t mean states should spend huge amounts of money on large rural expansion projects of dubious value that rob urban areas of the funds needed for projects with genuine transportation merit and real economic development potential.

    If states won’t act to reform this, then, despite legitimate governance concerns in our system of federalism, the federal government may need to step in to take a more direct role in funding formulas to ensure that a proper share of the money gets sub-allocated to metro areas. The federal government simply can’t allow states to continue diverting critical and limited transport money to boondoggles.

    With metro areas as the economic locus of the 21st century, failing to take action to make sure our cities get the transportation investment they need puts both the state treasury and national economic competitiveness at risk. Cities can only continue to play their role as wealth generators and sources of transfer funds for their states if they themselves are economically healthy, which requires infrastructure investment. As the Indiana, Georgia, and Kentucky examples show, state treasuries and rural funding are dependent on urban economic health. You can’t redistribute money from urban to rural areas if there’s nothing to distribute.

    Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs based in the Midwest. His writings appear at The Urbanophile.

    Photo: Pete Zarria

  • Opposition to High Speed Rail Grows

    The St. Louis Post Dispatch characterizes high speed rail as a “bridge to the 19th century,” in noting its opposition.

    I couldn’t have said it better, though I tried in my Wall Street Journal Oped (“Runaway Subsidy Train”). As usual, some of the best lines in this article fell on the “cutting room floor,” as editors can allow only so many words. The two most important points were:

    • Significant community opposition is developing. Within the last 10 days there have been community and neighborhood protests against new high speed rail lines in France, Italy, Spain and Hong Kong. Further, opposition to the greenhouse gas belching Mag Lev (magnetic levitation) extension from Shanghai to Hangzhou (China) has blocked that project. There is a burgeoning opposition to the swath that high speed rail will cut through the communities on the peninsula south of San Francisco.
    • A traveler using high speed rail from Orlando to Tampa who gets caught at a rental car counter line might not save any time over driving even if the train reached the speed of light.

    The biggest problem with high speed rail is that it requires huge expenditures of public funding in a market (intercity passenger transport) that does not require subsidies. Much of the impetus comes from generous donations to political campaigns by vendors who live off public funding and by a naive cadre of virtual sheep who believe anything that runs on rails walks on water.

  • How the new Apple iPad (and other mobile tech) changes the commuting equation

    Apple’s much anticipated iPad tablet computer was announced today, albeit to some mixed reviews. While the iPad itself may or may not succeed, the overall technology trend line is clear: increasingly rich mobile access to the Internet and email. Oddly, this Business Week columnist thinks the iPad may lead to more telecommuting, when what it really favors is tipping the balance for commuters from driving to transit, where the usually “dead” commuting time can become really productive. Most people are already spending more than two hours a day on email and the Internet – why not put those hours at the beginning and end of the day while commuting so you can spend less time in the office and more time with your family?

    A decade ago, the workplace was much more call and voice-mail driven, which matched up just fine with long driving commutes and cell phones. But the shift has moved strongly towards email and other data-driven communications (texting, Twitter, Facebook, collaboration applications, etc.). Most messages have multiple recipients and can expect to have a string of replies – something voice mail simply can’t handle. People are trying to do this data-driven communication while driving, with very bad effects that are leading rapidly to a comprehensive legal ban.

    As more people realize the productivity advantage of a transit commute, I think there could be a substantial shift. But it might not be quite what you’d expect. Mobile productivity favors one long ride in a comfortable seat – no transfers, no standing ‘strap-hanging’ (like on a subway or full light rail or local bus), and minimal walking (which is not only incompatible with mobile productivity, but also has weather risk and is especially hard on women in heels). That argues for express buses over trains. I recently met with a friend that lives in Manhattan but works in Connecticut. Does he take the subway and then ride the train? Nope – a luxury shuttle bus with wi-fi picks him (and the other Manhattan employees) up right near his apartment and drops him at the front door of work. Point-to-point express buses are the future of commuting. All you need are a couple dozen people that need to get from the same neighborhood to the same job cluster on roughly a similar schedule to justify a daily round trip – and they can all be productive the whole way, whether through individual 3G data connections on their devices or wi-fi on the bus (by far the cheapest option).

    While the climate-concerned may cheer increased transit use, an ironic side effect may actually be increased sprawl. When commuting is truly unproductive time, as driving is, people really hesitate for it to be more than an hour a day, which puts a pretty hard limit on how far home can be from work. But if you can be productive on a bus doing work you’d have to do anyway, you might consider two or more hours a day commuting (as my Manhattan friend does) and look at exurban communities you wouldn’t have even considered before, especially if they have more affordable or newer houses with better amenities and public schools.

    This is the commute of the future, and cities that offer it conveniently, affordably, and comprehensively (all neighborhoods to all job centers) through some combination of public transit, private buses, and HOT lanes will continue to grow and thrive in the coming decades, while those that don’t, won’t.

    This piece is a cross-post from HoustonStrategies.com

  • Phoenix, Put Aside Dreams of Gotham

    Now that Phoenix’s ascendancy has been at least momentarily suspended, its residents are no doubt wondering what comes next. One tendency is to say the city needs to grow up and become more like East Coast cities or Portland, Ore., with dense urban cores and well-developed rail transit. The other ready option is always inertia – a tendency to wait for things to come back the way they were.

    Neither approach will work in the long run. Over the coming decade, Phoenix has to recalibrate its economy into something based on more than being a second option for Californians and speculative real-estate investment. Instead, it needs to focus laserlike on economic diversity and creating good jobs.

    The model here for Phoenix is not New York or San Francisco. Phoenix can’t rival these cities for their 19th-century charm or early 20th-century infrastructure. As we would say back in New York (my hometown): fuggedaboutit.

    Instead of dreaming about Gotham, Phoenix should think more about Houston. Like the Texas megacity, Phoenix is the ultimate late 20th-century town, dependent on air-conditioning, ample freeway space and a wide-open business culture.

    A century away from becoming “quaint,” Phoenix needs to follow Houston’s example of relentless economic diversification: in Phoenix’s case, away from dependence on tourism and construction. Houston has done this by focusing beyond its core energy sector to fields like international trade, manufacturing and medical services.

    Phoenix’s opportunities may lie elsewhere but may include some of these same industries. The idea is that the region needs to heal its job problem. Only then can the real-estate market rebound on a solid basis.

    This employment focus must replace the current obsession with changing the city’s urban form. Despite the current problems, Phoenix has performed pretty well over the past decade, creating more new jobs than most Sun Belt cities, not to mention job losers like San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. Equally important, it still leads the nation over the past decade in net in-migration among the largest cities

    Unfortunately, some in Phoenix still suffer horribly from Manhattan envy. One prominent Phoenix consultant describes the downtown as “the glorious goose that’s laying the gilded egg” that will turn the city into a dynamic trend-setter of a new urban paradigm. Phoenix, he opined, “won’t be a place of renown till it has the Big It.” In other words, Phoenix will not be a true metropolis until it has its own Times Square, Eiffel Tower, Space Needle or other grand attraction.

    Yet in newer cities like Phoenix, the quest for the “Big It” is often delusional. In Phoenix, the vast majority of the population moved in decades after the original downtown lost its primacy. People have their own notion of what “it” is, and many times, “it” could be in a different center or in more than one center – think Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa, the Camelback Corridor, or a host of other communities.

    The Valley’s $1.4 billion transit system carries barely 15,000 round trips daily – a microscopic proportion of the region’s trips – with the biggest traffic on weekends. Sounds more like Disneyland than New York.

    Nor does the high-end condo, art-museum, convention-center thing seem to be working so well. Too bad the extra $1.5 billion spent sprucing up the area could not have been spent more usefully for less critical things, like police and fire, or better roads and schools.

    Rather than focus on emulating the urban father figures from the past, Phoenix’s best bet lies with its best assets: being reasonably priced, professionally managed and, well, warm and lovely in December. Shedding its real-estate-obsessed cocoon, Phoenix should focus on creating jobs for both present and future residents. That’s how you can grow up and find your own way.

    This article first appeared at The Arizona Republic.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History. His next book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, will be published by Penguin Press February 4th.

    Photo: robotography

  • Florida: From Hard Times in the Sunnier Climes

    By Richard Reep

    Florida’s era of hard times continues. Last week we held a “Jobs Summit ” here in Orlando but heard little but self-congratulation by politicians like Governor Charlie Crist. He praised the Legislature’s budget cuts but had little to claim when it came to reviving the economy.

    The basic reality is this: Florida is not only troubled, but in danger of falling further behind. For example, Suntech China, a solar cell manufacturer, recently worked with the State of Florida to build a solar cell manufacturing plant – in Arizona. Thanks to Florida’s unconvincing efforts, this employer decided to call Arizona its new home.

    The television and movie industry is rapidly expanding out of California into states like New York, Louisiana and New Mexico, thanks to incentives by these states to attract film and TV producers. Florida, with MGM, Universal Studios, Full Sail, and other venues, remains stagnant in this industry.

    While Central Florida is one of the country’s top ten “super regions” of population clusters, it consistently fails to get on the national stage regarding transportation, employment, and return on its federal tax money. For every dollar of income tax sent by Central Florida citizens each year, far less than a dollar comes back in terms of federal spending. Other states, like New Mexico and Alaska, receive our portion of that dollar.

    Publicly funded capital improvement projects, such as Nemours Hospital, continue to be awarded to out-of-state companies, leaving companies here in Florida, already reeling from the collapse of the real estate bubble, in even worse shape.

    Florida, which has little onshore energy resources such as oil or gas, has offshore energy resources that could pump billions of dollars into its coffers. Instead the riches of the Gulf are being exploited by Texas, Louisana, and Alabama.

    Florida, the “Sunshine State,” with vast solar and agricultural potential, has no renewable energy policy. Instead, biofuel and solar research leadership seems headed to Michigan, California and other states.

    Florida has yet to create a policy of sustainability at a statewide level. Instead, the state relies on growth, tourism, and agriculture for employment, hardly a sustainable policy given the catastrophe of 2009.

    While statewide unemployment is over 11%, labeled “Great Recession” by the press, those in the design and construction industry face unemployment estimates between 25% and 33%, levels matching that of the Great Depression.

    Nor are politics in our favor, even though Florida, reversing its generally conservative past, cast its lot with Obama in 2008. But now the promises of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in return for the State’s funding of commuter rail seem to be largely forsaken. During the Jobs summit, Obama’s railroad czar Joseph Szabo assured Florida that its priority would be yielded to Illinois. High-speed rail in Florida is unlikely in our lifetime. Chicago is simply more important than Orlando in today’s politics.

    Clearly Florida is not yet a basket case. With the right help from Tallahassee, Florida can reinvent itself and take advantage of the following natural assets:

    Sunshine still can bring talent and jobs. Sure, we are behind right now, but sunshine brought jobs before WW2 when Florida was ahead in aviation training. The mild climate is far more forgiving on student pilots than places where harsh winters ground light aircraft.

    Suntech should serve as Florida’s Pearl Harbor. Sure, we lost one solar cell manufacturer, but that technology is barely efficient enough to be viable. Florida could take advantage of this failure to revamp its poor growth management process, which was the reason for the failure to begin with, and actively seek out the best candidate for research and development of photovoltaic technology that would compete with Suntech and win.

    Deregulate Power Generation: The Sunshine State should be a net energy producer, not consumer. We could build a conduit to supply energy, through solar fields, up into the Southeast, as well as down into the Caribbean. There is a rather large island in need of vast amounts of clean power 90 miles away that will need this someday soon.

    Agricultural jobs: The statewide emergency declared as a result of the freeze should be a wake-up call to assist agriculture with some new ideas. Rather than sell dead orange groves out to developers, Florida should assist farmers to convert a portion of cropland to power generation, using solar collectors, photovoltaics, and biofuel crops.

    Media: This is a no-brainer for jobs. The movie industry grew in California because of the climate but is unionized and regulated to death. It’s time for Florida to compete. The next wave of entertainment culture is interactive virtual reality anyway, and the center of this activity has yet to be established, although there is an emerging concentration of firms like Raytheon doing research here. Florida could become a virtual reality technopole if it attracts the right players and provides the right resources.

    Transportation and the National Stage: For too long, Florida’s congressional delegation seems to have labored in the background, and Florida sends too few effective people to Washington. As a state made up of people escaping hard reality up north, we seem to have taken our “live and let live” beach culture too far and it has cost us credibility, capital, and clout. It’s time to reverse this trend and get passionate about our worth as a state and our contribution to America in items that matter. As a destination, Florida must rank much higher than Illinois for travel, and high speed rail should be awarded based on need rather than political favoritism.

    Meanwhile, growth and tourism will come back. They always do. And Florida, instead of losing designers to its competition, could find ways to retain them for the next generation of entertainment and leisure destinations. Housing, presently overbuilt, shouldn’t be ignored, but Florida has much to fix in terms of the quality of housing. Public/private partnerships to increase quality of life over quantity are necessary to make housing attractive and affordable and create quality, desirable communities for the 21st century.

    Florida is truly at a crossroads. For the last hundred and sixty-five years it relied on agriculture, growth, and tourism, but these narrow economic bands perpetuate cyclical booms and busts. Fundamental change can occur if the state’s leadership declares war on business as usual. The state needs to get nimbler to stay competitive when the economy does return. For those who want to stick it out and see Florida through this economic transition, it is imperative that the leadership respond now not just with words, but with actions that effect true, deep, and meaningful change.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

  • E-Bikes, China and Human Aspirations

    The Wall Street Journal recently carried an article entitled “E-Yikes: Electric Bikes Terrorize the Streets of China.” The article describes difficulties arising from the fact that nearly 120 million electric (battery) bicycles (E-Bikes) are now in operation in China, as people have abandoned mechanical bicycles and highly-polluting petrol motorbikes.

    However, to the millions of owners, China’s E-Bikes are a boon, not a bane. E-Bikes are best understood in terms of human aspiration (just like cars in America or Western Europe). People generally seek to improve their lifestyles. Research at the University of Paris, the University of California, the University of North Carolina and elsewhere has clearly demonstrated a strong relationship between higher incomes and higher rates of economic growth where people have greater personal mobility. This is what the E-Bike provides.

    In the large urban areas of the 21st century, even the dense Chinese urban areas, travel is highly dispersed. The efficient operation of the urban area requires an ability to travel from any point in the urban area to any other point in a short amount of time. As effective as public transport can be for trips within the dense (but generally small) urban core or to the urban core from suburban areas, a large share of trips simply cannot be feasibly made any other way than by personal mobility. This includes walking, for very short trips and bicycles for somewhat longer trips. But, it also includes substantial and increasing travel by faster modes of transport, particularly cars and two-wheeled vehicles. E-Bikes have greatly improved mobility. At the same time, the E-Bike has enormously reduced both the air pollution and carbon footprint of two-wheeled personal mobility.

    This is not to discount the traffic and other difficulties. However, the Chinese, like their western counterparts, will continue to seek better lives and that means greater personal mobility. It means that E-Bike usage will continue to grow and that car usage will also continue to grow, as incomes rise. While that will make traffic congestion even worse, the spectacular automobile fuel efficiency improvements ahead will allow massive expansion of personal mobility, while moving in the right direction with respect to the carbon footprint. In the final analysis, the Chinese (and the Indians, Indonesians, etc.) would like to live as well as we do in the United States and Western Europe. And why not?

    Photograph: E-Bike display at a Suzhou (Jiangsu) hypermarket.

  • Traffic Congestion in Atlanta

    I was pleased to have the opportunity to have an op-ed produced on transportation in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on January 17. The op-ed, entitled “Arterial system needed” argued that the most important thing the Atlanta metropolitan area could do to reduce traffic congestion would be to develop a decent arterial street system, something that, unbelievably, does not exist today. Regrettably, the permitted length of the op-ed did not permit much elaboration of the point, or mention of other important issues.

    In metropolitan areas with effective arterial street systems (such as Los Angeles), there is usually a surface alternative to a grid-locked freeway. A skilled driver can use these alternate routes and avoid much of the frustration of congestion. This may or may not improve travel times, but it is certainly better for the psyche. In Atlanta, there are few alternatives to the freeways and even the freeway system itself is very sparse.

    The principal elaboration for which I wish additional space had been available had to do with the role of transit. Many Atlanta officials are of the view that transit is the solution to traffic congestion. Many of them join pilgrimages to Portland (Oregon), where planners are only too happy to reinforce this view, with their doctrine to the effect that transit has transformed their urban area. The reality is that, after nearly 25 years of major transit improvements, transit’s market share in the Portland area is about the same as it was before.

    There are proposals to expand the MARTA transit system and tax from the core counties of Fulton and DeKalb to suburban counties. It is hard to imagine a more counterproductive policy approach. This would shower the overly-costly MARTA system with a stream of revenue with which its out of control costs per mile could escalate. The additional cost to taxpayers and riders would be far in excess of any potential benefits. MARTA’s principal problem is not lack of funding; it is rather insufficient cost control.

    The reality is that to reduce traffic congestion, transit would need to attract a large share of urban trips. In fact, however, whether in Paris, Portland or Atlanta, the transit system that could compete for most metropolitan trips has not yet been conceived of, much less developed or even proposed. Because of the necessity to travel from every point in an urban area to every other point, this is simply impossible. The vast majority of travel demand in all major urban areas of the United States and Western Europe is for personal mobility – automobiles – simply because there is no choice in their modern, affluent economies.

  • Airline Security: The War on Service

    Who hasn’t daydreamed about taking revenge on an industry that has managed to parlay the horrors of modern air travel into a multi-billion dollar federal bailout? Although in most cases, I would guess, the fantasy involves the ticket agent’s undies, not our own, going up in smoke.

    As everyone knows, in response to the Northwest flameout, the Obama administration has adopted policies that are almost exactly the same as those of the Bush administration, turning the flying experience into a political advertisement for all the wonderful things that the president is doing to fight the war on terror.

    Karl Rove’s great contribution to the political landscape was to remind travelers, at every security checkpoint, that unknown aliens were threatening the American way of life, and that the only way to keep jihadists off the USS Dreamliner was to vote Republican.

    That re-election strategy clearly now appeals to the Obama administration, which decided, among other tactics, that an effective weapon in the war on terror is to keep Americans out of mile-high toilets in the last hour of flights.

    The general assumption about the Northwest Airlines Underwear Bomber is that he sought to bring down the airliner in the name of Allah, those seventy-two virgins, and Osama bin Laden.

    But is it possible that he was just another over-wrought airline passenger who has had it with strip searches by airport security agents, surcharges to take a bag on a trip, meal service that consists of peanuts and instant coffee, seats that feel like electric chairs, and those walks through arrival halls that feel like Mao’s Long March?

    Wait until bin Laden hears that we’re coming at him with bladder-busting planes. That measure ought to turn the tide, since clearly banning economy-sized toothpaste tubes from the skies didn’t do the trick.

    While the government uses the flying experience to broadcast political messages, the airlines see the war on terror as a chance to re-price a product that has consistently gone bankrupt, often thanks to corporate mismanagement.

    Most businesses start from the assumption that it is a good idea to try to attract customers with good service and quality products. That is the logic behind the business strategy of a department store or a restaurant.

    The airline business model, however, is based solely on being able to advertise low fares. Once the promotions are in place, the airlines take to the skies with cramped seats, mysterious food, nickel-and-dime charges, surly staff, un-hedged oil contracts, and furious customers, with the hope that the government, if need be, will bail out the industry in the name of national security.

    As the government turns airports into prison lockdowns, the airlines’ response has been to convert their pricing policies into a shell game of bait-and-switch, insuring that travelers get it coming and going.

    Airlines and governments alike conspire to use air tickets to bury all sorts of taxes, oil surcharges, fees, levies, new airport subsidies, and old-fashioned handouts under the banner of “passenger safety,” which has become a variation on a protection racket. Station a few x-ray machines in the nation’s airports, and then charge and tax anything you like for a “war on terror;” by my estimates, it’s a “war” that has taken, on average since 2001, less than 1500 American lives annually, and has cost approximately $500 billion a year in new federal agencies, programs, weapons, and appropriations.

    Am I too cynical? Isn’t the goal safety for the traveling public? In the president’s primetime proclamations, that might seem to be the case, but then what explains the national indifference to the some 40,000 annual deaths, and millions of injuries, on the nation’s highways? Where is the war on automobilism? If the goal is to save American lives, Interstate 80 strikes me as a more accessible target than Yemen.

    The problem with highway safety, as opposed to homeland security, is that it’s a financial and, more important, a political loser. Making car passengers wear crash helmets or body armor, logical as it would appear from the risks of the road, does not lead to as many rewards from the electorate as the specter of al Qaeda crouched in an Afghan cave. And which political party wants to run for re-election on the slogan: “Your Taurus: More Dangerous Than The Taliban.”

    Left to their own devices and customer service, and without government handouts, most large airlines would go out of business. Take the decision on the part of most airlines (Southwest excepted, and bravo to them) to charge passengers for having the audacity to take luggage on a trip.

    Airline bag policies tend to be more complicated than the Da Vinci code, and involve arcane formulas about weight, size, and contents that few travelers can understand. The goal is to lure passengers to an airport, read them obscure airline policies, and demand extortionate payments (“If you wanna see your bags again…”).

    My own bag horror story began when, for an internship in Dubai, my daughter booked onto British Airways, which allows one bag on international flights and charges $50 for a second, which she had.

    Her BA flight was cancelled due to snow in London, and the airline rerouted her on Air France, after an assurance that she could travel to Dubai with two bags. Instead, when she checked in with Air France, that airline demanded $320 to take her second bag (normal size and weight) to Dubai.

    After Air France finished treating her like a shoe bomber, it took an hour for their staff and that of British Airways to arbitrate the second-bag crisis, while my daughter, having been subject to a twelve-hour delay, stood by in tears. I imagine that such unhappy scenes play out thousands of times every day in airports around the world. What other business alienates its customer base for $50?

    Beyond bag hustles, what keeps many airlines in business today is that they have become accomplices in the National Security State, part of a daily pantomime to terrify the traveling public into subsidizing all sorts of undeclared wars, drone missile appropriations, and endless sweetheart contracts to the likes of Blackwater.

    Under this Faustian bargain, the airlines get to charge $50 (if not $320) for extra bags, or $200 to change a reservation, and the government gets to charge $500 billion for homeland security.

    Having tried and failed with Big Brother airlines and airports, why don’t we give the market a chance to sort out the security problem? How much worse could it be?

    Leave it to each private company to decide whether they want to frisk their passengers or not (“Fly Freedom Airways, and Leave the Cavity Searches to Us!”), or charge for luggage, drinks, peanuts, or meals.

    Let each airline decide if they want to take off with armed guards or not. Maybe one of the airlines could dress up its pilots to look like the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

    Finally, let the passengers handle in-flight security. After all, they put out the fires of the Underwear Bomber.

    Matthew Stevenson is author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited and An April Across America.

  • High-Speed Rail: Toward Least Worst Projections

    It comes as welcome news that the United States Department of Transportation Inspector General is concerned about the integrity of high-speed rail projections, “including ridership, costs, revenues and associated public benefits.” The issue has become ripe as a result of the $8 billion for high speed rail that the Obama Administration slipped into the economic stimulus bill early in 2009.

    The response was more than 250 applications from 30 states totaling $57 billion. It is easy to understand the Inspector General’s concern, though no-one should be surprised that the demand for free money outstrips the supply. Applicants range from the huge California High Speed Rail proposal, to a greenhouse gas belching magnetic levitation (maglev) line in population-losing Pittsburgh, to comparatively modest railroad grade crossings that could improve both railroad and highway safety.

    In a January 4 letter to the Federal Railroad Administrator, Inspector General Mitchel Behm announced an evaluation of “best practices” with respect to high-speed rail forecasts, noting that “it is of critical importance that the Federal investments are directed to the most worthy projects.” For starters, the Inspector General needs to understand that there are is no such thing as “best practices” in high-speed rail forecasts. Best practices and high speed rail in the same sentence sounds like a line from a comedy routine. The record of ridership, revenue and cost projections in high speed rail projects is abysmal.

    An Object Lesson: The Las Vegas Monorail Default: This was brought home earlier this week, when the privately financed Las Vegas Monorail defaulted on its bonds, principally because its ridership was absurdly over-projected. Even before the economic implosion (2007), the Las Vegas Monorail was carrying only 21,000 riders per day, far below the 53,500 riders that had been predicted for 2004 by the world-class planning firm retained by the promoters. In 2000 we produced a report predicting that the Monorail would carry between 16,900 and 25,400 daily riders. The reality was in the middle of that range. Of course, no venture could survive with consumer demand 60 percent below projections and default was inevitable, as we predicted. People who purchased the bonds may have overlooked the shaky foundations of the project, assuming that the state required bond insurance would make them whole. It did for the first defaulted payment, however the bond insurer, Ambac, itself is also in financial difficulty. Abmac has been characterized as “a borderline insolvent bond insurer.” Following Ambac’s debt payment, the Las Vegas Monorail filed for bankruptcy improbably claiming that it was necessary to permit expansion to the airport.

    High Speed Rail Follies: Of course, the Las Vegas Monorail is not a high-speed rail line, but high-speed rail projects are subject to the same risk of absurdly inaccurate projections of ridership, revenue and costs.

    High speed rail has often been touted by proponents as being profitable. However, they usually exclude such basic costs building the system and buying the trains. This is like a household that claims to be saving, but does not pay the mortgage. Proponents routinely repeat claims of profitability for one line or the other, without the slightest concept of reality. Indeed no less than Iñaki Barrón de Angoiti, director of high-speed rail at the International Union of Railways in Paris, said that high speed rail is not a profitable business and said that short Paris-Lyon and Tokyo-Osaka routes are the only ones in the world that have “broken even.”

    The California proposal, in particular, anticipates substantial private investment. Anyone courageous enough to invest will want due diligence performed by consultants other than those who produced the numbers to support the Las Vegas Monorail bond issue.

    Within the past few days, the non-partisan California Legislative Analyst’s office issued a critical report of the new California High Speed Rail business plan. The most damning criticism was that the plan “appears to violate law, because it assumed operating subsidies, which were prohibited by the bond issue passed by the voters of the state. This is particularly relevant to the USDOT Inspector General’s inquiry, since the California High Speed Rail Authority has been claiming for years that the project would not require operating subsidies. California, needless to say, is not in a position to be offering subsidies of any kind.

    Cheerleader Projections: There is plenty of reason for concern:

    Taiwan’s high-speed rail line, the only fully privately financed line in the world, has attracted approximately one-half of its projected ridership and has suffered considerable construction cost overruns. During its first few years of operations, its debt has been restructured, its bonds downgraded, expansion plans have been suspended and the Taiwan government has now taken majority control of the board. It should not be long before Taiwan taxpayers will be footing the bill.

    The new high-speed rail line in Korea is attracting approximately one-half of its projected ridership, while its costs were three to four times the projected level.

    This problem is all documented in Megaprojects and Risks: An Anatomy of Ambition, by Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University, Nils Bruzelius of and Werner Rothenberger of the University of Karlsruhe and former chairman of the World Conference on Transport Research. The authors examined decades of major transportation projects in Europe and North America and identified a general pattern of projection inaccuracy. With respect to the systematic cost projection errors, Professor Flyvbjerg says: “Underestimation cannot be explained by error and is best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying.” He further notes that “The policy implications are clear: legislators, administrators, investors, media representatives, and members of the public who value honest numbers should not trust cost estimates and cost-benefit analyses produced by project promoters and their analysts.”

    The California High Speed Roller Coaster: The proposed California High Speed Rail system seems poised to break “lower the bar” even further with respect to performance relative to projections. The ridership projections have been like a roller coaster. In 2000, the California High Speed Rail Authority’s modelers predicted, in an “investment grade projection” that the system would carry 32 million riders a year by 2020. Then, in 2007, the projection gurus raised the “base” number to 69 million by 2030 and added a “high” number of 97 million. By the time the high speed rail bond election was underway, some Authority board members went around the state citing a number of 117 million riders that included commuter ridership.

    Within the last month, the Authority has released a new plan indicating that ridership will be 41 million in 2035 (See Figure). If the 2000 ridership projections were “investment grade” then the subsequent projections have been “junk bond grade.”

    Joseph Vranich and I projected annual ridership of 23 million to 31 million for 2030 in a report published by the Reason Foundation (The California High Speed Rail Proposal: A Due Diligence Report). We also predicted, based upon our analysis of high speed rail systems worldwide, that the costs will rise by as much as another 70 percent to cover the usual cost overruns and to build portions of the system not included in the projections.

    The erratic ridership projections are just the beginning. We also found the proposed fare structure to be far too optimistic (fares far too low). Apparently the California High Speed Rail Authority agrees, because it has doubled its proposed fare levels. Meanwhile, its costs continue to rise, despite having risen by half from 2000 to 2008 (inflation adjusted), at the same time that the size of the proposed system was shrinking.

    Perverse Incentives: Part of the problem here lies with incentives. The “world class“ consulting firms have no incentive to produce reasonable numbers. Indeed, some actually participate in later stages of the projects and as a result have exactly the opposite incentive – an interest in projections being optimistic enough that the project gets approved.

    Solutions: The Inspector General might look at removing the incentive for misrepresentations and exaggeration, by prohibiting the participation of planning consultants in the implementation phase of high speed rail projects. Another modest proposal could revolutionize major project projections. Perhaps the world class consulting firms should be required to guarantee their projections financially.

    We certainly wish the Inspector General the best, though he has certainly set a standard (“best practices”) not likely to be achieved. But perhaps he can move the industry from absurdity to least worst projections.

    Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

  • Beyond Neo-Victorianism: A Call for Design Diversity

    By Richard Reep

    Investment in commercial development may be in long hibernation, but eventually the pause will create a pent-up demand. When investment returns, intelligent growth must be informed by practical, organic, time-tested models that work. Here’s one candidate for examination proposed as an alternative to the current model being toyed with by planners and developers nationwide.

    Cities, in the first decade of this millennium, seem to be infected with a sort of self-hatred over their city form, looking backward to an imagined “golden era”. The most common notion is to recapture some of the glory of the last great consumerist period, the Victorians. During this time, from the 1870s to the early 1900s, many American towns and cities were formed around the horse-drawn wagon and the pedestrian. This created cities with enclaves of single-family homes and suburbs that seem quaint and tiny in retrospect to today’s mega-scale subdivisions and eight-lane commercial strips.

    One bible for the neo-Victorians was “Suburban Nation,” a 2000 publication seething with loathing and anger over urban ugliness. In a noble and earnest effort to repair some of the aesthetic damage, the writers proposed a grand solution. Their goal was essentially to swing the development model back to the era of the streetcar and the alleyway, the era when cars were not dominant form-givers and families lived in higher density and closer proximity.

    In the last decade, this movement gained traction with hapless city officials often tired of hearing nothing from their citizens but complaints over traffic and congestion. They embraced the New Urbanist movement which promised to turn the clock back to an era of walkable live/work/play environment of mixed neighborhoods. In the new model, the car would at last be tamed.

    Yet, looking at most of these communities, the past has not created a better future. More often they have created something more like the simulated towns lampooned by “The Truman Show”. These neo-Victorian communities ended up with some of the form of that era, but devoid of employment and sacred space. They also created social schisms of low-wage, in-town employers and high-salary, bedroom community lifestyles marking not the dawn of a new era but the twilight of late capitalism as the service workers commute into New Urbanist villages while the residents commute out.

    Meanwhile, planners who believe that practical design solutions and the vast quantity of remnants from the tailfin era are “almost all right” have remained quietly on the sidelines. This silent retreat, a natural reaction, now puts many good places in jeopardy as the activist planners try to “fix” neighborhoods and districts that were not broken to begin with. We risk losing some of the important postwar building form that well serves the needs of its users and, rather than being blacklisted, should be held up as a valid, comparative model for use by developers seeking to build good city form when the pent-up development demand returns.

    It is time to hit back. Midcentury modern – the era from about 1945 to 1955 – has become a darling style of the interior design world, has yet to be recognized as a valid model for urban development. For too long, neighborhoods built in this era have been treated poorly by the planning community. Yet this period created a critical transition between the archaic beloved streetcar suburbs and the 1980s commercial car-must-win planning. They provide a valuable, forgotten lesson when the middle class’s newfound prosperity was expressed by low-density, car-oriented mixed-use districts that were still walkable and expressed through their form a certain heroic optimism about the future.

    With building fronts set back just enough for parking, yet still close together to give a pleasant pedestrian scale, these little districts remain abundant in the landscape of our towns and cities – nearly forgotten in the fight over form, perhaps because they are doing just fine. They were built when everyone was encouraged to get a car, but before the car became a caveman club pounding our suburban form into big box “power centers” and endless, eight-lane superhighways of ever-receding building facades. These districts were developed before the local hardware store was replaced by Home Depot and many remain intact, thriving, and chock-full of independent business owners. Many of these are true mixed-use districts – with light industrial, second floor apartments, retail and other uses peacefully coexisting.

    In small commercial districts developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a balance was struck between the traditional town form and the car, a balance that has been forgotten in the planning war being waged today. This era produced many neighborhoods and districts that are “almost all right”, in the words of noted Philadelphia architect and thinker Robert Venturi, when defending Las Vegas to the prissy academic community.

    To go right to a case study, take the Audubon Park Garden District in Orlando, Florida. Adjacent to Baldwin Park, a Pritzker-funded New-Urbanist darling of 2002, this district is a vintage collection of mixed-use commercial, residential, and industrial buildings constructed in the 1950s. Set back from the curb approximately 42 feet, the mostly one-story storefronts allow parking in front yet are visible and accessible to pedestrians. The car is accommodated in the front of the store, making access easy and convenient, yet the pedestrian can walk also from place to place without long, hot trudges. Drivers see the storefronts. Scale is preserved. (See attached file for street elevations).


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    The architecture, instead of recalling nostalgic, Victorian styles, is influenced by the art deco and populuxe styles of the Truman era, when America was united, self confident, and victorious. And the businesses reflect an organic mix serving neighborhood needs, their storefronts and facades created by themselves, not by some Master Planner, theming consultant, or fussy formgiving designer. Here, one finds customers in dialogue with shopkeepers, blue collar and creative class mixed together, a few apartments over their stores, and a localism that has endured for fifty-odd years, largely forgotten because it works.

    Places like this three-block district, and others like it, need to be championed. Decoding just what works here, and how it elegantly accommodates the car and the pedestrian, is critical to counterbalance the coercive impact of the New Urbanist movement and present a working model to future developers.

    When New Urbanism was a fledgling movement, it represented a necessary alternative to car-dominated planning principles, and offered a choice where there previously was none. Today, the rhetoric of this movement has sadly forced out all other choices and emphasized one form – that of the streetcar era – over all others. This increasingly authoritarian movement shuts out all other choices today, and now threatens places like Audubon Park with its singular vision by sending in planners to “workshop” an ideal, Victorian makeover. Such actions, if implemented, will destroy the healthy, functioning connective tissue that makes up vast portions of our urban environment for the sake of a romantic notion of form over substance.

    Instead of enforced, and often overpriced, nostalgia, we would do better to seek out districts planned after the car and have worked through time, and hold them up as valid choices to implement when planners are considering a development. These districts, whether a single building, a collection, or a whole community, will become important models as the pendulum swings back from the extremes that it reached by 2007 and 2008.

    For too long, planners and developers have chosen to be silent in the face of the often strident rhetoric espoused by “smart growth” and New Urbanist ideologues. Meanwhile, a tough analysis of New Urbanism’s successes has yet to be seriously undertaken, and alternative models presented. Cities across the nation are considering a move to form-based codes which would lock out districts like Audubon Park and doom existing ones to Victorian makeovers. Useful, diverse and workable places will be destroyed to fit a “one size fits all” ideology.

    So before midcentury modern becomes just another furniture style, a window of opportunity exists to fight back. These kinds of districts dot the cities and towns of America and deserve to be held up as alternative models for new development. Instead of a dogmatic slavishness to nostalgia, planners and developers need to stand up to the preachers of preapproved form, and look for multiple solutions for future urban form. Smart growth should not supersede the arrival of a more flexible, diverse approach of intelligent growth.

    Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.