New Geography

Tag: Transportation

  • China Should Send Western Planners Home

    For centuries, the West sent missionaries around the world to spread various gospels. It is no different now, though the clerics tend to hold degrees from planning schools rather than those overtly specializing in theology.

    This could also create tragic results as ideologies created in one context are imported into a totally foreign one.

    China, which is creating a new future, needs to forge its own path for urban development. For one thing China is experiencing unprecedented economic growth on a scale unimaginable in the contemporary West. Over the past two decades, living standards have risen at a rate that may be unprecedented in world history. Gross domestic product per capita still remains below high-income world standards, at one-sixth that of the US level. Nonetheless, there is great regional disparity, with incomes in east coast urban areas above that of urban areas in the central and western regions

    Yet in sharp contrast to the west, which has been heavily urban for over a century, China remains substantially more rural than urban. According to United Nations data, China’s population was only 40 percent urban in 2000. This compares to urban rates of over 70 percent in many high-income nations. But now people are moving in large numbers from rural areas to the urban areas, following the pattern of development that has occurred virtually wherever incomes have risen markedly.

    The reasons for the move are also the same as they have been through history: Urban areas offer great opportunities and generally higher standard of living than rural areas. The United Nations estimates that by 2030, 60 percent of the Chinese population will live in urban areas. This represents a staggering migration – the movement of 350,000,000 people – a population greater than that of the United States and Canada combined.

    Already, China has very large urban areas. Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou have 10,000,000 or more residents. A number of other urban areas have more than 5,000,000 people. Dongguan, the world’s largest unknown urban area is nestled between Guangzhou and Shenzhen on the Pearl River Delta and no one seems to know what its population is – estimates range from 7.5 million to more than 10 million. See Demographia World Urban Areas.

    Western Planners Descend
    To a cadre of western urban planners, developers and architects, China represents the ultimate market. Like the Christian missionaries, they come to China with a sense of both rectitude and guilt about their own countries. They admonish Chinese officials “not to repeat our mistakes.” The primary mistakes, they explain, are urban sprawl (a pejorative term for suburbanization) and automobile use. To go to planner heaven, they must eschew these steps and go straight to the ideal state of smart growth, transit dependence and new urbanist principles.

    Chinese officials visiting the United States, Western Europe, Canada or Australia must wonder at the disconnect between the wasteland described by Western planners and the unparalleled quality of life enjoyed by people in the West. It is not without reason that the Chinese (and for that matter, the Indians, Indonesians, Nigerians, etc. ad nausea) would like to be rich like us. It is not without surprise that the hosts graciously listen, nod and, to their inestimable credit and good fortune of Chinese citizens, largely ignore the bankrupt advice.

    You don’t have to be an American or European to realize that the automobile has created mobile urban areas in which employers and employees have far greater choices or that mobility makes labor markets more efficient. It is not a mistake that housing built on inexpensive land on the periphery of urban areas has made it possible for so many millions to build up financial equity in their own homes, or enjoy the kind of privacy that the more wealthy or well-connected have enjoyed. Nor is it a mistake that nearby inexpensive land has been developed by retailers and other businesses who are, as a result, able to provide lower prices than would otherwise be possible.

    The West has achieved its unparalleled affluence because planners were unable to impose their will to prevent suburbanization and the expansion of mobility. They could not hold back the democratization of prosperity.

    If planners had been in charge, mass low cost, relatively low density housing would not exist. Western nations would now be principally inhabited by renters rather than homeowners. Employees would be limited to those few places they could get on foot or public transport, rather than the whole urban area made accessible by the automobile.

    There would be less wealth and it would be less broadly distributed. “Big-box” stores on the urban fringe would not have emerged, resulting in people paying higher prices with their smaller incomes.

    Indeed, for any who might wish for China to stumble in its competition with the West, it is hard to imagine a more promising strategy than importing Western planning ideas and planners to China.

    China should continue to develop commercial and industrial land on the urban periphery, while expanding the already extensive freeway system to bring production and prosperity to every nook and cranny of the nation. China should continue down the road of allowing people to live how they like, whether it is in the new high-rise luxury condominiums or the lower rise town houses and detached housing (called villas in China) that can be found throughout its urban areas. It is clear that China will continue to become more mobile (and thereby richer and more productive) as car ownership explodes and those who cannot afford cars increasingly obtain the same level of mobility with electric motorbikes.

    The operative word here is “continue.” Generally, Chinese urban planning policies have been a substantial contributor to the nation’s rising wealth. It is to be hoped that the advice of the western planners will continue to be respectfully listened to and largely ignored. The people of China are entering an era of great new opportunity; they should not close the gates just as it arrives.

    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.”

  • City Planning and The Politics of Pollution

    Part Two. Yesterday, in Part One, Critser discussed scientific advances in understanding air pollution. Today, he addresses the social implications.

    The new science of air pollution, with its emphasis on dose-response mechanisms, may remake the traditional advocacy realm of social and environmental justice. In the past, that world has been focused on class, race and ethnicity, classic markers of inequality and vulnerability. Today, the focus is more “exposure driven.” “Dosage… may be something people who have ignored environmental justice can get their heads around,” one researcher at last month’s Environmental Epidemiology conference in Pasadena noted. “It may get people’s attention on something that affects us all.”

    Other new observations are recasting ancient (and highly suspect) urban-suburban dichotomies as well. If one parses the science of small, regional temperature increases—the kind we may see more of in the future—and how those spikes “activate” ultrafine particles, one discovers a disturbing phenomenon: The combination of heat and UFPs makes airborne plant pollens more inflammatory. Such was the finding of Italian researchers studying how traffic emissions and high temperatures in Naples fortify the toxicity of urtica, the common allergen known as the nettle plant. One wonders how the same combination remakes the lovely sage and chaparral environment surrounding Southern California suburbs, even when the region isn’t burning. It is a disturbing prospect for those who believe they have escaped inflammation by exchanging big cities for exurban greenlands.

    What, besides moving to Iceland, can be done? Few have thought more about that, at the practical level, than Andrea Hricko, an associate professor of clinical preventive medicine at USC, where she is trying to translate epidemiological data about pollution into practical public health policy. For years, Hricko’s focus was the Port of Los Angeles and the neighborhoods and schools surrounding that diesel-saturated realm. What she found were huge spikes in childhood chronic diseases, especially asthma, as well as other heart and lung problems. She and others succeeded in getting one school relocated—pushed back from the most truck-intensive route near the Alameda Corridor—but even that victory was a lesson in the unintended consequences of regulation.

    “Come over here, you have to see this,” she said to a visitor one day in her crammed office on the medical school campus. On her computer appeared a picture of a group of kids playing soccer. In the immediate background loomed trucks belching the substances that eventually make the port air so heinously foggy. “See, this is where the school was. This was supposed to be the buffer zone, but… being that it is also rare, unoccupied space, and LA schools have so little recreational area, it is now a defacto playground. So you have kids better protected inside, but doing their deepest breathing part of their day right on top of the trucks.” It’s a perfect public health storm, she notes, because “getting kids outside and exercising more is a huge priority in the obesity-diabetes crisis.”

    Hricko’s focus on the ports, arguably the octopus of contemporary industrial Los Angeles, has taught her some hard lessons. You can always get a regulation that says, for example, don’t build a school within X distance of a freeway, but you can rarely switch the scenario around, say, with a ruling that says don’t widen a freeway when it is within X distance of a school. The same is true of building a new rail yard, as is the case just north of the port today. For years, area residents waged war with the railroad and the port to simply locate the new yard closer to the water, which would have drastically reduced the number of short, emission-intensive trips by trucks, and thus hopefully cut down the high rate of respiratory disease in the area. The solution, instead, was to go ahead and build the yard right by the homes, with a promise by state regulatory agencies to install new, high efficiency filters in all area homes. While that protects the children while they’re inside—and, it would seem, suggests a possible boom enterprise for the filter industry—it’s far from an ideal solution. “They’re still spending most of their time outside, and we still need to get them to exercise more while they’re out there. It’s a frustrating exercise.”

    Hricko has also wondered if the same impasse won’t obtain in the arena of the low-income housing juggernaut led by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. One recent hearing concerned an affordable housing complex proposed alongside the 5 freeway near East Los Angeles. As Hricko tells it, that project would be sandwiched between one of the most emissions-choked portions of the freeway and the mass transit Gold Line, which would run just behind it. “There was all kinds of talk about filtering, etcetera, but the real question was never brought to the fore: Perhaps this shouldn’t be considered for housing in the first place.” She notes that a member of the LA County Public Health staff made precisely this point… privately.

    One can understand why. Affordable housing is an important, unmet need in Los Angeles, one with a substantial political establishment behind it and a charismatic mayor in front of it. There is, as a result, an understandable reluctance to get in the way of the parade, especially after years of political impasse. The mayor recently upped the ante and proclaimed a new $5 billion housing initiative, much of which would center on building new housing near mass transit stations. The essence of this transit pod strategy has a fairly sustainable logic: If you can get people to live near mass transit, you’ll dramatically reduce one of the biggest single factors in urban pollution: the numerous short, one-to-five mile trips that people make every day, whether to work or to the store or to pick up the kids at school. You’ll also reduce traffic jams.

    The problem, of course, is human nature, and the naughty desire by poor people, especially in Los Angeles, to be like the rich people, driving whenever and to wherever they want. Compounding this, for the scheme to work, we still must get from the station to work and people will use a car to do that. “For Antonio’s plan to work, you’d basically have to make it a condition of ownership that you don’t have a car. Or, that if you are going to buy this housing, you have to work somewhere on the trainline,” Hricko said with a knowing smile. “Because if you don’t, you still have people driving. You’re defeating your purpose before you ever get started.”

    That’s one realm where a leader like Villaraigosa, with his celebrity status and megawatt smile, could lead by example. But that hasn’t happened so far. Mike Woo, who describes himself as a supporter of the mayor, says “I want to say that I think the mayor’s people are on top of this. I wish I could say that. I really wish I could say that.” Woo notes that there is a slightly bigger time window for solving the housing crunch than is popularly acknowledged. The Planning Commission’s most recent staff report holds that meeting the need for housing in most transit corridors for the next 8-10 years does not require raising the density of housing.

    That’s a rare breather, Woo says. Let’s make the most of it.

    Greg Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Houghton Mifflin 2003), Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Houghton 2005), and Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging (Random/Harmony 2009).

  • Will The New Air Pollution Science Choke City Planners?

    Part One of A Two-Part Series

    Not long ago, Michael Woo, a former Los Angeles city councilman and current member of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, took up a case pending approval by that body: a mixed housing-retail development near the intersection of Cahuenga Boulevard and Riverside Drive. Like many of the remaining buildable sites in the city, the property is right next to a roaring motorway; the windows of some apartments would look right out onto the 134 Freeway. To Angelinos, who have grown up in a car culture, it was hardly a remarkable proposal. But Woo, perhaps one of the brainier members of the city’s political elite—after losing a mayoral race to Richard Riordan in the early 1990s he became a professor of public policy at University of Southern California—had a problem with it, and he couldn’t quite let it go.

    Just a few weeks before, the Commission had witnessed a lengthy presentation by a scientist who’d been studying how living within 500 yards of high traffic corridors—freeways and some particularly busy streets—substantially raises the risk for a number of chronic diseases. “We were all sort of sitting there, looking at this proposal and discussing it through the conventional lens we normally use, when I said, `Wait a minute. Didn’t we just hear a pretty compelling argument about this the other day? Can we talk about that for a minute?’ It struck me that it was impossible to read those studies and then continue approving housing that sits that close to freeways.”

    The Commission then asked for the developer’s point of view on the issue. “As I recall, the only real mitigation that they brought up was almost comic,” Woo says. “Their idea was, you know, we’ve got that covered: We’re going to make sure that residents can’t open the windows that face the freeway.” The project was approved.

    Woo doesn’t particularly fault anyone in the exchange, because the implications of the new science of air pollution—much of it driven by pioneering work at USC, the University of California at Los Angeles, and California Institute of Technology—are utterly mind boggling. No one has quite calculated exactly how much buildable land would be excised from use for housing and schools if this growing body of work were to take hold in the policy realm, but, as Woo said, “We can’t hide from this issue anymore. The hard science on the subject is compelling. It makes you fundamentally rethink some pretty key parts of how, where and why we’re building housing in such locations.”

    For decades, pretty much everyone “knew” that smog—usually measured as ozone, the gas that forms from sunlight’s ionizing effect on air particles—caused all kinds of health problems, principally those associated with the lungs, like asthma. But the truth of the matter is that, until ten years or so ago, no one knew how that happened; they didn’t know the “mechanism of action,” the intricate physiological processes that lead to chronic airway inflammation. Epidemiological data was confounding, because some high ozone communities showed lower rates of asthma than low ozone communities. Also, smog levels—measured as ozone—were going down, while asthma rates were going though the roof.

    One suspect was what researchers called fresh emissions, comprised of ultrafine particles, or UFPs, which are so small that they can penetrate the furthest reaches of the lung’s bronchial branches and set off the systemic inflammation that causes respiratory disease. Thus, it was possible to have lower ozone levels and still have increased levels of inflammation, or as USC Professor Robert McConnell notes, “You could have cleaner horizons but still have increasing inflammation to people who live closer to where the particles are being produced.” McConnell has been leading the federally funded Children’s Health Study in Los Angeles for over a decade. “I tell people that I’m studying how pollution causes asthma, and people look at me and say, `I thought we already knew that,’” says McConnell. “The fact is that we assume risks that aren’t there, and we’re ignorant of risks that are there.”

    What caused the sea change in pollution epidemiology—the ability to link exposure to tail pipe emissions and chronic diseases—is as much a story of ingenuity at the lab bench as it is one of persistence against conveniently indolent regulations. At USC, engineers over the past 20 years have invented ways to concentrate particles from the freeway, assess their specific toxicity in human doses, and then test various theses with lab animals genetically engineered to physiologically respond like humans. They have also developed ways to track real-time daily human exposures to ultrafine particles. On any given day in Los Angeles there are mobile smog units measuring how pollution ebbs and flows on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. There are people wearing “personal ambient pollution” backpacks to track how individuals experience different loads of smog throughout their day, part of which may be spent in a low-pollution environment, part in a high. Through modern genomics, we also now know that several highly prevalent gene mutations make some people more susceptible to pollution, and that others make them less susceptible.

    At all three universities, engineers in the aerosol sciences developed machines that could accurately measure not just ozone—a rather crude measure of air toxicity—but also specific toxins, known as ultrafine particulate matter, or UFPs, of less than 2.5 microns. It is stuff so small that it can reach the bottom of the airways; there, it can over-stimulate the so-called inflammatory cascade of the body’s native defense system and turn it into a disease called asthma. At UCLA, cell biologists, toxicologists and lung and heart specialists have even been able to image what happens to the human cell when it’s exposed to high levels of ultrafine particles. It is the kind of image that can make one utterly despairing, but one that also might clue modern physicians, medical researchers and environmental scientists on how to better focus on the issue and perhaps mitigate it.

    A few examples of new directions within the science:

    Ultrafine Particles, Diesel Exhaust And Asthma: A growing consensus holds that, infants, young children, and expectant women experience substantial elevations in risk for deficits in lung function growth when living near high volume motorways. There is less consensus on the recommended buffer zone, ranging from 75 meters to 500 meters.

    Ultrafine Particles And Heart Disease: A growing body of laboratory experiments and human observational work links heart disease, especially the process leading to atherosclerosis and heart attack, to air pollution. Recent work at UCLA and USC on lab mice parked next to the 110 Freeway has suggested an alarming thesis of causality: That chronic exposure to high levels of ultrafine particles may make us more likely to get heart disease because it makes HDL—the so-called “good,” form of cholesterol that “cleans up” the bad form—dysfunctional.

    Diesel, Ultrafine Particles And Alzheimer’s: Work coming out of Mexico City, increasingly LA’s sister city in the environmental sciences, documents how amyloid plaque, one of two suspect brain proteins associated with Alzheimer’s, increases with exposure to air particles, especially in children and young adults.

    Diabetes, High Blood Pressure And Obesity: A small but growing body of research shows that being fat and breathing smog is really bad for you. Worse, high exposures may accentuate existing diabetes and metabolic syndrome, the perfect storm of high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.

    Air Pollution, Expectant Mothers, And Infants: UCLA researchers have repeatedly demonstrated a consistent, dose-dependent relationship between expectant mothers living in high traffic-emission-adjacent housing and premature births, low birth weights, birth defects and respiratory diseases. In a recent report, the UCLA Institute of the Environment concluded that the problems were of such magnitude as to “require drastic changes to motor vehicle and transportation systems” over the next decades.

    In Part Two, Critser explores the politics of pollution.

    Greg Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Houghton Mifflin 2003), Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Houghton 2005), and Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging (Random/Harmony 2009).

  • L.A.’s Big-Bucks Plan for Upper Floors on Broadway Overlooks Facts at Ground Level

    City officials and private business owners recently gathered to celebrate the extended holiday hours of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Metro Red Line train service between Hollywood and Downtown. Private businesses put up $50,000 or so to pay for the Red Line to run an extra two hours — until 3 a.m. — on weekends through December 27. The local business community also came up with private funds for free service on city-operated DASH buses that will offer connections to late-night Red Line riders and others.

    There’s room to question the timing of those moves amid an economic slide. Yet there’s just as much reason to see good sense and courage behind efforts to kick-start economic activity in the face of the frozen confidence of consumers. The effort falls within the realm of a privately financed gamble, too, so that’s fair enough.

    It’s another thing altogether for our city officials to take such chances on an economic stimulus program, as they apparently intend to do with a plan to make $150 million a year available for loans to property owners along the Downtown stretch of Broadway.

    The plan, as stated by 14th District Los Angeles City Councilmember Jose Huizar, is to provide incentives for property owners to renovate some of the long-empty upper floors of buildings along the thoroughfare, where many of the structures have few tenants besides ground-floor retailers.

    Huizar has noted that the empty spaces provide no jobs and little tax revenue, and that he hopes to reverse that by lending money to property owners from a pool of federal funds. The funds would finance renovations in hopes of drawing commercial tenants and jobs to the upper floors on Broadway.

    It remains unclear why any of the property owners who didn’t see incentives to renovate their properties during Downtown’s recent boom years would find reasons to do so now. It’s also unclear what sort of tenants would fill the empty spaces. It could be several years before we see anything resembling a hot economy in these parts.

    Again, there is always room for bold ideas that are counter-intuitive. Fortune magazine launched in 1930 — just four months after the stock market crash that signaled the Great Depression — and the publication has done just fine all these years. There’s also room to figure that renovations take awhile, and such work along Broadway might be ready just as the economy picks up.

    This economic mess of ours is big and immediate, though, causing extreme difficulties for folks everywhere. There’s some irony here, because you can get a picture of the pain by walking along Broadway. Don’t bother looking at those empty spaces on the upper floor. Take a gander at the ground floors, where many of the retail shops that buzzed with customers just a short while ago have closed, and those that remain face uncertain prospects.

    It’s enough to make you wonder whether $150 million might be better spent on something other than loans to property owners on the hopes that renovations will someday bring jobs from somewhere to the upper floors along Broadway.

    Meanwhile, there’s never been a better chance of getting a change on the rules that come with federal funds. That should be enough for Huizar and other city officials to re-think their plans. They should consider that Broadway — while it’s not everybody’s cup of tea — has been one of the busiest commercial streets in the city for years. It’s a place where merchants sell, workers earn, and shoppers spend.

    Maybe the action is mostly bargain retail on the ground floor, but Broadway is a working street — and we need all of those we can get right now.

    So why not focus ways to help retailers hang on, and draw more to fill the new gaps at street level? How about renovations for storefronts, with merchants allowed a voice in the process? Or more cops for the area to help improve the atmosphere for shoppers? Or aggressive promotions of the retail scene? All of that might even entice a few more mid- and upper-scale merchants to set up shop on Broadway, sparking some organic changes in the marketplace.

    Pick a program, but keep in mind that this is no time to overlook — quite literally — Broadway’s long-standing role as a street-level heartbeat of our city.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)

  • From Rhetoric to Reality on Transit

    Rhetoric always seems to trump reality in the headline department. This has been evident as a fawning press and commentators have made the most of the decline in driving from high gas prices and the related increase in transit ridership. As gas prices rose to their above $4.00 peak, driving in the nation’s urban areas had declined 2.0 percent over a year. At the same time, transit ridership rose 3.3 percent, leading to the impression that transit ridership increases had accounted for most, if not more than the loss in driving.

    Now, as gas prices dip below $2.00 nationally, $1.50 in some places and to their lowest point since well before Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there are indications that the new riders are returning to their cars. Here in the St. Louis area, where I live, prices are now $1.39, the lowest in the nation.

    The Los Angeles Times, for example, notes lower transit ridership and increased freeway traffic volumes, while the Dallas Morning News notes that it is no longer a challenge to find parking places at DART rail stations.

    As gasoline prices have returned to reality, it is a good time also for the transit rhetoric to be transformed into reality.

    First, the increase in transit ridership was never significant in overall terms. Yes, ridership increases in some systems strained capacity on the already crowded buses and trains taking workers to downtown locations. But, since transit accounts for so little in urban mobility, the increases counted for little in the overall scheme of things. For example, the 10 percent increase in ridership that occurred in the Atlanta area could account, at a maximum, for only a 0.2 percent decline in automobile use.

    The reason is simple: less than two percent of travel in the Atlanta area is on transit. Atlanta was among the leaders. In most other urban areas, the impact of the transit increase was less than 0.1 percent. It is thus not surprising that the decrease in driving and increase in transit translated into a national urban market share increase somewhat greater than 0.1 percent over the last year – that is 1 out of 1,000.

    Second, as much as some commentators applauded the shift, it is important to understand why it occurred. The shift did not occur because people had been convinced that such a move would materially reduce greenhouse gas emissions (It would not – outside the New York City area, cars emit little more greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile than transit). The shift occurred, purely and simply, because it was in the best interests of the shifters. It saved them money and worth the time lost (transit work trip travel times are double that of the car). Now that driving is no longer prohibitively expensive, it is rational to expect much of transit’s ridership gain to be lost.

    Third, the return to the car should not be considered a reflection of the much ballyhooed “love affair” with the automobile. Simply put, people use transit where it makes sense and do not where it does not.

    This can be illustrated by six households on a typical street in Long Island’s Nassau County, an inner suburb that borders the city of New York. One in 6 Nassau County workers was employed in Manhattan in 2000. For them, travel to Manhattan from Nassau County makes total economic and psychic sense. Crossing Queens and maybe Brooklyn – particularly at rush hour – on the way to Manhattan is an experience to be avoided. In addition, train and even bus travel into Manhattan is relatively fast and, once on the island, the subway can whisk you to a dazzling array of locations. No surprise that 75 percent of Mahnattan workers take transit to work.

    But what about the other five workers? Even in New York, transit services to work locations other than Manhattan tends to be sparse. As a result, the other five neighbors who do not work in Manhattan drive to work. It’s not those five have a love affair with the automobile, any more than the Manhattan commuter has romantic attachments to the subway. It simply indicates that for 5 of the workers, using a car makes sense, while for one, using transit does.

    Indeed, if one is looking for true love affairs, look to refrigerators or toilets. It can be expected that all six houses have them. Of course, such a characterization would be ludicrous. People tend to adopt those products and practices that make their lives better. For those few (in the national context) who work in the largest downtown areas, transit makes their lives better. For those working elsewhere, cars do. Finally, it can be expected that when all six workers go to a supermarket, the furniture store or Jones Beach, they use the car. Even Manhattanites abandon transit to motor on weekends to their second homes across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania in the Poconos.

    Some transit advocates believe the answer is to expand transit service so it can be as convenient and time-effective as an automobile. There are two difficulties with this. The first is that any such expansion would likely cost more to build and operate, each year, than the total personal income of any urban area attempting it. This is probably why no one has ever seriously proposed it. There is another issue: history shows that new money for transit does not produce a corresponding increase in transit ridership. From 1970 to 2006, US transit expenditures rose 270 percent, after adjustment for inflation. Over the same period, transit use rose less than 20 percent. The result – only 7 cents of new value (new transit ridership) was obtained for each new $1.00. So any infusion of new cash to expand transit service is likely to be largely wasted.

    Talk of auto eroticism or of a transit oriented future can capture the romantic sense in people and planners. But the reality remains that people will choose the mode of transport that makes their lives better, not those that make their lives more difficult.

    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.”

  • Will we be over-stimulated?

    Stimulus fever is in the air, and with the election of Sen. Barack Obama to become the 44th US president, it’s now reaching a fever pitch. US automakers have already made the rounds on Washington DC, meeting with Congressional leadership to generate political support for another $25 billion in government subsidy to avoid bankruptcy. Now, congressional leaders and some economists are clamoring for $150 billion to $300 billion in additional stimulus to goose the national economy – all this on top of the $700 billion financial services “rescue package” passed in October.

    Harking back to the days of the Great Depression, many policymakers see transportation spending in roads, highways, and transit as an effective job creation program. Indeed, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials has identified 3,109 “ready to go projects” worth $18.4 billion that could, in theory, produce 644,000 jobs.

    That’s more than double the number of jobs that disappeared in October according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Unemployment edged up to 6.5% in October as the economy shed 240,000 jobs. The number of employed has fallen by 1.2 million workers since the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, wages for those with jobs increased an average of 3.5% over the last year, significantly lagging inflation (for urban consumers) of 5.3% during the same period. More than half of that fall occurred in September, October, and November.

    These numbers embolden economists and pundits alike. Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, advises President-elect Obama to be bold and audacious in his fiscal stimulus:

    “My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little. In short, Mr. Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.”

    Krugman’s observation is an extraordinary statement because little evidence exists that this kind of discretionary fiscal policy has a meaningful impact on the economy. Alan Aurbach, one of the nation’s leading macroeconomic policy experts and an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, examined fiscal policy during the 1980s, 1990s and early part of 2000s and concluded:

    “There is little evidence that discretionary fiscal policy has played an important stabilization role during recent decades, both because of the potential weakness of its effects and because some of its effects (with respect to investment) have been poorly timed.”

    Where fiscal policy has been effective it’s been through “automatic stabilizers”– programs such as social security and unemployment insurance that maintain income levels regardless of current economic conditions. Of course, these programs are not discretionary—they are ongoing programs resistant to manipulation by politicians responding to the immediate political climate.

    In short, a blanket infusion of cash through a one-time (or two or three) Congressional stimulus package(s) focused on transportation is not likely to be effective. This is true for a number of reasons. The key should not be how many miles of concrete we pour, or even how many jobs we create. Instead the focus should be on how much the investment creates a more productive and globally competitive American economy.

    It’s true transportation spending will ramp up construction jobs, but these are temporary ones that provide little stimulus to the advanced service, information technology, and manufacturing jobs that are critical to the long-term growth of the US economy. In addition, construction jobs tend to be seasonal, hardly the type of job creation that builds long-term economic expansion.

    More substantively, the transportation needs of a globally competitive, service-based economy differ fundamentally from those of the industrial economy that benefited so much from federal highway largess in the 20th century.

    In the 1950s, transportation investment was rather straightforward. Mobility was relatively low and restricted. Most households owned a car, but usually just one. Most households lived close to where they worked and walked to meet their daily needs. Typically, the wife stayed home, dropping the husband off at the train or bus station to take mass transit into work, picking him up at the end of the day. Many families could afford to allow one spouse to stay at home.

    A national transportation infrastructure program was relatively easy to identify during this period (even if it was politically controversial): connect major urban cities to create a unified economy, keep freight moving, and ensure workers could get to their places of employment. An Interstate Highway System linking the Central Business Districts of major cities, complete with beltways to shuttle employees and through traffic around these centers, created a highly efficient hub-and-spoke highway network.

    Today’s travel environment is far more complex, and doesn’t lend itself to the hub-and-spoke system. Current travel patterns point to a transportation network that should focus on improving point-to-point travel in a dynamic economy, more of a spiderweb than a hub-and-spoke network, as Adrian Moore and I point out in our new book Mobility First: A New Vision for Transportation in a Globally Competitive Twenty-first Century.

    In an era of customized travel, massive infusions of funding into a transportation network designed for the industrial era won’t be effective. Moreover, the legislative process is likely to be far less efficient at allocating transportation funds in a meaningful way without a system that allows travelers and highway users to determine what projects get the highest priority. What politicians or even federal planners think is important may not be to travelers. Only by adopting the latest and newest technology to gauge user willingness to pay, most usefully through electronic tolling, can the right projects be put in the right place at the right time while also ensuring a sustainable funding stream for the road network.

    Perhaps not surprisingly, economists Clifford Winston and Chad Shirley, writing in the Journal of Urban Economics, estimate that the return on investment to highway spending has fallen from 15% in the 1960s and 1970s to less than 5% in the 1980s and 1990s. They suggest one reason for the decline in productivity impacts has do with the fact that the highway system is already built out. Another reason is that federal transportation policy often targets unproductive investments – such as “Bridges to Nowhere” – rather than high-priority items, reducing transportation spending’s effectiveness at boosting overall economic growth.

    All this suggests that blanket spending on transportation projects may not have substantive long-run impacts on the economy. In fact, it could work against job creation and productivity if the added spending reinforced a transportation network that is already poorly suited to the needs of a modern, 21st century services-based economy.

    Douglas Elmendorf and Jason Furman, writing for the Brookings Institution, report that infrastructure spending has a lackluster record for boosting short-term economic growth. The focus should be elsewhere. For example, we should look more to the longer-term impacts of investments that actually increase productivity and competitiveness.

    Infrastructure should be seen, then, as a way to boost the speed of information and movement of goods, not as a quickie jobs program. Congressional leaders and urban planners should keep these cautionary points in mind as they ponder the need and efficacy of yet another stimulus package.

    Samuel R. Staley, Ph.D. is director of urban policy at Reason Foundation (www.reason.org) and co-author of Mobility First: A New Vision for Transportation in a Globally Competitive Twenty-first Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

  • Of Houses, Castles and the Universal Dream

    As I sit here in Beijing Capital International Airport waiting for a flight to Taiyuan, I realize something universal about people. Whether in the suburbs of Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Xi’an, Shenyang, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Nanjing or even in the historical accident of Hong Kong, some of the most beautiful single-family detached housing in the world is here. It is not extensive, because it is not affordable to the great majority of Chinese. The Chinese call them “villas.” It is, however, the most expensive of housing and a goal to which many of the nation’s rising entrepreneurial class aspire.

    It may be that it was called a dream first in America, but its beginnings go back much further. For much of human history, most people who lived in large cities were forced to put up with virtually inhuman densities. By definition, large cities were compact. Indeed, they were often not a lot larger in their geographical expanse than smaller cities. Why? To be efficient labor markets, cities had to be small, so that all of the workers could get to all of the jobs – and in those days the only way to get around was by foot. As cities got larger, especially during the industrial revolution, densities rose in some neighborhoods to 200,000 and more per square mile. The lower East Side of New York topped out at 375,000 in the 1910 census and has since dropped by 75 percent.

    The lack of sewers, clean water and the rampant filth bred disease and discomfort far beyond that experienced by any in today’s America, or for that matter today’s Europe, Japan or any other developed world country. The residents put up with it because it was better than staying in the countryside where there were fewer jobs, opportunities, or any hope for a better life. It says much about how difficult rural life was.

    But not everyone lived in such crowded conditions. Throughout history, the most wealthy have had their castles, estates and mansions. This was true in the cesspool of 19th century American and European industrial cities, just as it was in Rome.

    The coming of mechanized transport, especially urban and suburban commuter rail systems changed all this. In the latter half of the 19th century the upper middle class began to enjoy a small modicum of estate life. These communities were set in places like Riverside in Chicago and Llewelyn Park in New Jersey and even the semi-detached housing suburbs of outer London. In these places, better transport made it possible for a larger share of the population to live without urban crowding, with their own private grounds, however humble.

    Transport was to get even better and, as a result, the suburban option spread. The popular, modern start of the mass-produced automobile oriented suburb was Bill Levitt’s Levittown, built in a Long Island potato field. These modest less than 750 square foot homes, with their yard, seemed nothing less than estates to the thousands of military personnel and others who gave the name to the American Dream. Levitt and Detroit had combined to make it possible. For the first time in history a large proportion of households to own their own, albeit miniaturized, castle.

    Although not quite estate link, the average home has grown, with the average size approaching 2,500 square feet. Many Levittown homes have been expanded to accommodate a more affluent lifestyle. All of it is what I like to call the democratization of prosperity – an unprecedented sharing of the wealth that started not far beyond the borders of New York City.

    For the traveler interested in seeing urban areas beyond the touristic haunts, it is clear that the dream has expanded far beyond America. This is not surprising, because human beings, in general, seem to prefer their own space and will buy it if they can afford it. The Great Australian Dream involves detached housing that is nearly as large as new housing in the United States – even as planners struggle to force new houses on lots so small that a fire in one will likely spread to others. The large urban areas of suburbs from Canada to the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Sweden, Germany and all other developed nations all have experienced a rapid expansion of suburban living.

    The extent of the Universal Dream becomes even more compelling when one travels the developing world. Virtually the same pattern is evident in new suburbs of Beijing, Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Istanbul and Cairo. All have a smattering of single-family detached housing. Unlike the developed world, however, it cannot be afforded by much of the middle income population.

    None of this is to suggest that there are not some who would prefer a condominium on the upper East Side of New York, or in Chicago’s Gold Coast or in the precincts of the ville de Paris or the core of Stockholm. These people, however, constitute a minority, at least in part because a quality urban life comes with a price tag often far higher than that of the suburbs. For most people with middle class incomes, the best option remains a house that offers comfort, privacy and space at a price they can afford.

    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”

  • Two-Timing Telecommute Taxes

    Telecommuting — or telework — is a critical tool that can help employees, businesses and communities weather the current financial crisis, and thrive afterward. However, right now, the nation is burdened with a powerful threat to the growth of telework: the telecommuter tax. This tax is a state penalty imposed on Americans who work for employers outside their home states and sometimes telecommute.

    Proposed bi-partisan federal legislation called the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act would abolish the telecommuter tax. To help assure that the nation can take full advantage of the economic relief telework offers, Congress must pass this bill – either as stand-alone legislation or as part of a new economic stimulus package.

    Relief for Employees

    Working from home (or alternative sites close to home) can save struggling families money on gasoline, parking, train and bus fares, dry cleaning, business wardrobes and work-week meals. They can save on dependent care by providing some of the necessary care themselves during the time they previously spent commuting.

    Telework can also relieve the considerable strain on Americans nearing retirement who have unexpectedly lost their pensions and must now continue working. Working indefinitely may be a hardship for many older employees. Some may not be able, physically, to continue making a daily round-trip commute. Some may need to move closer to their adult children who live out-of-state, either to receive physical help from them, or to help them with child-care costs by baby-sitting. If Americans who have been robbed of their retirements can work from home at least some of the time, they can stay on the job without having to travel as often or live as close to their offices.

    Relief for Employers

    Employers (both public and private) can use telework to slash real estate and energy expenses. When fewer employees work on-site every day, employers need to rent, heat, cool and light less office space.

    Implementing telework can also reduce recruitment and turnover costs: Employers offering flexibility can attract top-tier candidates from a wide geographic area, and generate loyalty among valued employees.

    Telework can reduce business interruption costs when an emergency or other major disruption occurs near the main office. If, for example, a severe storm, fire, bomb threat or transit strike affects the employer’s area, a staff trained to work remotely can keep operations running smoothly.

    And organizations adopting telework can become more productive. Employees can replace commute time with work time; concentrate better because they are less exposed to the frequent interruptions typical in busy offices; reduce absenteeism by completing tasks at home instead of taking whole days off when they have to meet non-work responsibilities, like caring for sick children, and reduce “presenteeism”, the phenomenon of employees showing up at the office when they are too sick to be productive and are likely to compromise the health and productivity of co-workers.

    Relief for Communities

    Telework can bring new Internet-based jobs to rural areas with sagging economies. It can also bring new home buyers to such regions: Americans who want to maintain their high paced, big-city careers in a slower paced, more scenic environment. A significant growth in the population of home-based workers in these communities can also produce growth in businesses catering to their needs, such as home office supply stores and business service providers.

    The Telecommuter Penalty Tax

    Despite the important help telework can provide during and after the financial meltdown, states may punish nonresident teleworkers by subjecting them to a telecommuter tax. New York has been particularly aggressive on this front.

    Under the “convenience of the employer” rule, when a nonresident of New York and his New York employer agree that the employee may sometimes work from home, New York will tax him on his entire income, both the income he earns when he works in New York, and the income he earns when he works at home, in a different state. Because telecommuters’ home states can also tax the wages telecommuters earn at home, they are taxed twice on those wages.

    In some cases, a telecommuter’s home state may give him a credit for the taxes he pays New York on the income he earns at home. However, even in such cases, the employee may be penalized for telecommuting. When New York taxes income at a higher rate than the home state, the telecommuter must pay taxes on his home state income at the higher rate.

    By subjecting nonresident employees to double or excessive taxation if they telecommute, a state like New York needlessly limits the strategies available for coping with our ailing economy.

    Harm to Employers

    By deterring telework, the telecommuter tax frustrates businesses trying to decentralize their workers and prevents them from exploiting telework’s business benefits.

    In addition, the hefty payroll obligations the telecommuter tax imposes on businesses can force companies to relocate. Indeed, The New York Times reported this year on a small business that planned to leave New York because tackling the state’s claims under the convenience of the employer rule proved too draining. (See David S. Joachim, “Telecommuters Cry ‘Ouch’ to the Tax Gods,” The New York Times, Special Section on Small Business, Feb. 20, 2008.)

    Further, by thwarting the growth of telework, the telecommuter tax encourages traffic congestion, a menace to productivity. Excessive traffic can, for example, cause employees to arrive late for work and delay customer deliveries.

    Harm to States

    In addition to employees and employers, telecommuters’ states of residence also suffer under the telecommuter tax. Consider a Virginia resident who telecommutes most of the time to his New York employer. If Virginia grants the telecommuter a credit for taxes paid to New York on his home state income, Virginia forfeits its tax revenue to New York. In so doing, Virginia effectively subsidizes public services in New York (like transportation, police, fire and other emergency services) while it makes the same services available to its resident who is working in Virginia. States currently struggling with steep budgetary shortfalls cannot afford to cede their own revenue to other states. The employee who telecommutes, meanwhile, suffers under a reduced budget for home state spending.

    Even the state imposing the tax loses. In addition to driving business away, New York’s telework tax policy can drive part-time telecommuters away. Because the convenience of the employer rule applies only to nonresidents who spend time working in New York, nonresidents can avoid the rule by avoiding the state: They can increase their telecommuting from part-time to full-time, or take jobs in their home states. When nonresidents stop traveling to New York for work, New York gives up the opportunity to tax any of their wages, and New York restaurants, hotels and other businesses lose the income these teleworkers would have generated on their commuting days.

    The Remedy

    The Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act would eliminate these ills, prohibiting states like New York from taxing the income nonresidents earn at home in other states.

    The bill has bi-partisan support in both Houses of Congress, including the support of lawmakers from Connecticut, Maine, Mississippi and Virginia. Outside Congress, the measure has been endorsed by advocates for telecommuters, taxpayers, homeowners and small businesses.

    To help assure that the greatest number of employees and businesses can maximize telework’s economic benefits – during the current crisis and afterward – Congress should pass the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act. Whether as an addition to a new stimulus package or in a separate measure, Washington must see to it that telecommuter tax fairness becomes the law.

  • Regulating People or Regulating Greenhouse Gases?

    It seems very likely that a national greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction standard will be established by legislation in the next year. Interest groups are lining up with various proposals, some fairly benign and others potentially devastating.

    One of the most frequently mentioned strategies – mandatory vehicle miles reductions – is also among the most destructive. It is predictably supported by the same interests that have pushed the anti-automobile (and anti-suburban) agenda for years, often under the moniker of “smart growth.”

    Regrettably, these interests have never understood the economic importance of rapid travel – mobility – throughout the nation’s urban areas. Indeed, one of the factors that makes American metropolitan areas so competitive is that, judging by work trips, travel times are the best in the world for their population. The secret to that success is the ubiquitous mobility of the automobile, which allows people to travel from virtually any point to any other in an urban area in a relatively short period of time. It also helps that automobile travel has become so inexpensive that it is available to more than 90 percent of the nation’s households. Restrictions on driving would change that.

    At this point, it is unclear exactly how any attempt to restrict driving might be implemented. It is clear, however, that the consequences will weigh most heavily on the nation’s lower-income, disproportionately-minority households. Any price mechanism would put limits first on the low income households who cannot afford the higher prices. At the same time, attempts to reduce the demand for automobile use by forcing more new development into existing urban footprints (urban areas) would make traffic congestion more severe, increase travel times and intensify air pollution. This approach would fall more harshly on low income households simply because housing prices (and rents) would rise disproportionately in urban areas as the option of opening new suburban developments on inexpensive land is removed or severely restricted.

    Mobility is crucial to the economic viability of urban areas and to their citizens, rich and poor. It does no good to claim that alternative transit services will be provided, because they generally cannot compete. According to data from the 2007 American Community Survey, the average transit work trip takes twice as long as the average single-occupant automobile work trip. This means that the average commuter would spend at least an additional eight hours traveling to and from work in a week.

    For low income households, this could mean the difference between employment and unemployment. How will a low-income single parent, for example, drop children off at day care centers and continue to work by transit? It might be considered a fortunate case if this could be accomplished in triple the time of the automobile commute.

    These dynamics were further demonstrated when University of California Berkeley researchers concluded that African-American unemployment could be substantially reduced if cars were available to non-car households. Brookings researchers put it more directly: “Given the strong connection between cars and employment outcomes, auto ownership programs may be one of the more promising options.” Or, as a Progressive Policy Institute report suggested, “In most cases, the shortest distance between a poor person and a job is along a line driven in a car.”

    There is good reason to believe that technological solutions will make it possible for us – including low income households – to continue to live our lives as we do now while substantially reducing GHG emissions. People are already driving less and shifting to more fuel-efficient cars. Volkswagen plans to market 1,000 prototype 235 mile per gallon cars in 2010. They are only two-seaters but could be used for a large share of travel. If, in 2030, one-quarter of US car travel was by such cars, the average fuel economy would be about 75 miles per gallon and concern about cars as a source of GHG emissions would be a thing of the past. And this does not even consider the alternative fuel advances – electric cars, natural gas, hydrogen – that are on the horizon.

    There is a broader problem with the idea of restricting driving. This strategy is less about the environment and more about regulating people’s behavior. It is not people that require regulation, it is GHG emissions. There is a subtle but important difference.

    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.”

  • Recalibrating Destination Marketing

    In the dark days following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., when traveler anxiety hit previously unknown levels, there developed among tourism marketers a new emphasis on targeting what was then called the “drive” market. During a time when formerly fearless flyers were concerned that airport delays could add hours to their trip or that there might be another attack on the nation’s air passenger system, a new sort of traveler’s calculus evolved: Would it be quicker to make a trip of 500 miles or less by simply driving to the destination rather than allowing the extra two to three hours for airport security that the airlines and the FAA recommended?

    Today, with the unpleasantness of air travel at what’s perceived to be an all-time high, many of the post-9/11 circumstances seem to be upon us once again. Now, though, with gasoline prices also setting historic highs, it is no longer advisable to refer to something called the “drive” market. Instead, the term of the moment in the travel and tourism industry is the “in-state” market, the idea that people are less likely to travel by air and would prefer vacationing closer to home, giving us this past summer’s buzziest buzz word in travel, the “staycation.” For harried destination marketing professionals, anxious to keep the hotel rooms in their cities occupied, giving some thought as to whether this trend is one that will pass quickly or not is certainly worthwhile. Here are some things to consider:

    • A recent poll commissioned by the Travel Industry Association (TIA) indicated that 41 million airline trips were avoided during the past year by passengers not because the fares were too high, but because air travel has become too inconvenient. The TIA estimated that the trips that were avoided represent a $26 billion loss in consumer spending, including $4.21 billion in federal, state and local taxes that would have been collected. Most observers agree that the airlines’ current proclivity toward nickel and diming passengers with nuisance fees to compensate for higher jet fuel prices is unlikely to make passengers more inclined to fly to their destinations.
    • At the annual meeting of Destination Marketing Association International in late July, several sessions touched on the necessity of destinations to work with local attractions not typically considered tourist attractions—such as farmers’ markets, central business districts and seasonal and cultural festivals—in a way that will prompt locals to spend what would normally be their travel budgets in their own hometowns. Interestingly, the most recent TIA/Ypartnership TravelHorizons survey indicated that among travelers expecting to take vacations in or near their hometowns, 22 percent planned to stay in a hotel, motel or resort.
    • These developments fit with what urban policy expert Joel Kotkin calls the “new localism,” the trend toward people becoming less geographically mobile than at any time since the advent of commercial aviation. According to Kotkin, high energy prices and an increased concern regarding environmental impact are causing more people to seek recreational and cultural experiences that are closer to home. And Kotkin, who’s writing a book on the subject, believes this is a long-term trend that will continue to grow between now and the year 2050.

    While no one is predicting the immediate demise of long-haul domestic or international air travel, it does make sense for destination marketing professionals to consider recalibrating their marketing efforts with these new realities in mind. As always, the best advice is to maintain an approach that balances a destination’s marketing efforts between the most sought-after visitors and the visitors that the destination is most likely to attract.

    This is an approach that assures a destination that even if the city-wide conventions they covet do not materialize, hotel rooms and convention centers can still be filled with the multitude of meetings and events organized by groups that are local, state and regional in scope. For the majority of cities that can only dream of hosting a once-in-a-lifetime Super Bowl or the Olympic Games, there are countless youth and amateur sporting events that generate millions of hotel room nights year in and year out. Setting a course that is mindful of the healthy volume of business available in a destination’s own backyard is the natural hedge against the larger phenomena that seem to be developing and over which the typical destination marketing executive has very little control.

    Timothy Schneider is the president & CEO of Schneider Publishing, the Los Angeles-based company that publishes Association News and SportsTravel magazines and organizes the world’s largest conference for the sports-event industry called TEAMS: Travel, Events And Management in Sports. TEAMS 2008 will be held October 21-25 in Pittsburgh. The group travel markets served by Schneider Publishing generate 106 million hotel room nights annually. For additional information, please visit www.SchneiderPublishing.com or call toll-free (877) 577-3700.