New Geography

Tag: Transportation

  • Sprawl is ubiquitous, even in my beloved Copenhagen

    The year I attended the University of Copenhagen as an undergraduate, I lived in a suburb north of the city and commuted to the central city via bus and rail (the famous S-trains). What a great system, I remember thinking as an impressionable ingénue (you could go anywhere, and trains were on time to the second!). When I returned as a graduate student I lived right in the city center and discovered that great public transit did not obviate the need for extensive walking (I must have worn out five pairs of shoes that year). Besides my two stints as a resident, I have been fortunate enough to return to Copenhagen countless times as a visitor for business, scholarship and pleasure, and I am familiar with the place both as a motorist and public transit user.

    In all the 37 years I have been traveling to and living in Copenhagen, it has always struck me that despite one of the best public transportation systems of which I am aware (in terms of coverage, efficiency, ease of use and affordability), and despite the fact that cars are at least twice as expensive as here in the States (the sales tax on cars is 180%), and despite the fact that gasoline is three to four times as expensive as here, and despite the fact that city parking is difficult, non-existent or prohibitively expensive (and parking fines severe) – despite all of this – rush hour traffic congestion is awful (a constant source of grief and complaint), and the endless streams of cars seem to contain, as in so many cities with lesser alternatives, lone drivers.

    It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The city development plan was designed as a hand with five fingers outstretched – the palm as city center and each of the five fingers as a corridor of residential, commercial and retail development (along rail lines, of course). This was smart growth before the term had been invented. It worked, but what was perhaps unforeseen was that development would also occur in areas in-between and beyond the five corridors. As a result, Copenhagen has become, like so many modern cities, a multi-centered urban metropolis. In order to function in this post-industrial economy and society, residents and workers need to travel freely and frequently to many different points around the metro area, at different times of the day, for different reasons, for different lengths of time, for different purposes. Because the existence of the five corridors has created a defacto hub-and-spoke system, it is difficult and prohibitively time-consuming to use public transit for such travel (and ungodly in winter). So of course Copenhagen has become as car-dependent as Los Angeles.

    Another piece of this picture is that Danes, being a free and intelligent people, prefer suburban living in detached single-family residences over enforced residential density, and prefer owning and driving their own cars over taking public transportation (if given the choice!). So despite a very leftist political orientation among elites, media, academia, government and public policy professionals (including urban planners), and despite a highly socialized component to its otherwise free-market economy, the Danish capital’s suburban job, business and population growth has been outpacing its urban growth for decades.

    According to Ronald D. Utt and Wendell Cox, writing on www.heritage.org (in response to a World Watch report, “City Limits: Putting the Brakes on Sprawl”), from 1950 to 1990 Copenhagen’s population dropped from 760,000 to 465,000, nearly 40 percent.

    Since 1960, the Copenhagen urbanized area (including suburbs) has dropped in population 14 percent, while its land area has expanded 24 percent. And from 1970 to 1990, per capita automobile usage increased nearly 70 percent in the Copenhagen area, while public transit’s market share declined 15 percent.

    This of course is a problem. People are not behaving according to our plans! According to the report “Urban Sprawl in Europe? The Ignored Challenge,” released by the European Environment Agency (based in Copenhagen, by the way), sprawl is affecting almost all of Europe’s cities: “If this trend continues, the European urban area will double in just over a century. Sprawling cities demand more energy supply, require more transport infrastructure and consume larger amounts of land. This damages the natural environment and increases greenhouse gas emissions.”

    The report identifies the key problem as too much local control of urban development decisions, and calls for “urgent action by all responsible agencies and stakeholders to realize common objectives,” or in other words, centralized planning and control. Among the report’s conclusions is this little chill-inducing nugget:

    “The EU has specific obligations and a mandate to act and take a lead role in developing the right frameworks for intervention at all levels, and to pave the way for local action. Policies at all levels including local, national and European need to have an urban dimension to tackle urban sprawl and help to redress the market failures that drive urban sprawl.”

    It’s all pointless, of course: sprawl is ubiquitous, natural, desirable, beneficial, and preferable. As Edward Glaeser (Harvard, Brookings) and Matthew Kahn (UCLA) document in “Sprawl and Urban Growth” (National Bureau of Economic Research), transportation technologies dictate urban form, and in the 21st century the dominant transportation technology is the car. Hence, the urban form of the 21st century is sprawl, or city living based on the automobile. Isn’t this a bad thing? Quite the contrary, per Glaeser and Kahn: “Sprawl has been associated with significant improvements in quality of living, and the environmental impacts of sprawl have been offset by technological change.”

    Robert Bruegmann, author of Sprawl: A Compact History (2005), would agree. He calls sprawl a logical consequence of economic growth and the democratization of society, a pattern of development that has provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful. Add Bruegmann, Glaeser, Kahn, Cox and Utt to the growing component of anti-anti-sprawl policy analysts such as John Carlisle (Capital Research Center), Peter Gordon (USC School of Urban Planning), Peter Huber (Manhattan Institute), Mark Mills (Competitive Enterprise Institute), Steve Hayward (Pacific Research Institute), Anthony Downs (Brookings Institution), and Harry Richardson (Cascade Institute).

    Copenhagen remains one of my favorite cities, a marvelous combination of the old and new. It has a great quality of life and in my experience, the Danes know how to live it. The central city is charming, and the urban sprawl adds to the possibilities and potentials for all manner of experience and opportunity. I’m already looking forward to my next trip back.

    Dr. Roger Selbert is a business futurist and trend guy. He publishes Growth Strategies, a newsletter on economic, social and demographic trends, and is a professional public speaker. Roger is US economic analyst for the Institute for Business Cycle Analysis in Copenhagen, and North American representative for its US Consumer Demand Index.

  • Resources and Resourcefulness – Welcome to The Real Economy

    By Delore Zimmerman

    The orchard-laden foothills of North Central Washington’s Wenatchee Valley are resplendent at this time of year. The apple and pear harvest is in full swing. The warm golden hues, the crisp mountain air and the bustle of trucks carrying produce to markets near and far provide a stark and welcome contrast to the daily barrage of bad news about the downward spiral of the nation’s financial markets.

    In places like New York, Chicago and San Francisco we can see the result of the demise of once-vaunted vapor traders. They created nothing but debts and are leaving whole economies in shambles.

    But in the Wenatchee Valley one can clearly see the fruits – both tangible and figurative – of the real economy. Over the course of almost ten years a determined coalition of community and business leaders has been working hard and working together to build an economy of substance and promise. The results of their efforts include a picturesque and vital downtown, a thriving and growing fruit and wine industry, a riverfront soon to be animated with housing and community recreation facilities, and a Yahoo data service center.

    These diverse elements make for an economy whose benefits are substantial and meaningful for the people of that region. The City of Wenatchee and the Port of Chelan County are the driving forces behind these initiatives. But the Wenatchee Valley’s success also can be traced directly to the investments and commitment of numerous private and government partners from within the region and from the outside. The Chelan County Public Utility District, for example, operates three hydro projects that deliver clean, renewable, low-cost energy to local residents and to other utilities that serve 7 million residents of the Pacific Northwest. The PUD operates a utility system that now includes local water, wastewater and wholesale fiber-optic services in addition to electricity.

    To capitalize further on its hydro power resources leaders in the Valley are aggressively pursuing an Advanced Vehicle Innovations (AVI) initiative. The AVI Consortium was conceived by the Port of Chelan County in 2005 to establish North Central Washington as a catalyst and center for development, demonstration, and deployment of flex-fuel plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. These are vehicles propelled by a combination of electricity-from-the-grid and bio-fuels (i.e., bio-diesel, ethanol). Both of these energy resources are in plentiful supply in the region.

    So here’s a lesson for our nation’s next stab at building a prosperous national economy. Put the money in the hands of those who can harness local and regional resources and make something useful out of them. It can be fruit, a manufactured product, or a service like data processing. The result is a community that, although not immune to the Wall Street tsunami, retains tangible assets that will survive the current storm.

    This real economy is working right now in the Wenatchee Valley. It also exists in many other communities and regions throughout the nation, from the Dakota plains to the energy corridor around Houston, and the growing industrial districts of the Southeast. These places represent the bright face of America’s future economy. If only they were taken more seriously by those – our nation’s leaders and so-called financial wizards – who are now driving us towards an era of darker expectations.

    Delore Zimmerman is President of Praxis Strategy Group and Publisher of NewGeography.com

  • The future of suburbs? Suburbs ARE the future

    I entered the field of futures research in 1981. No, not futures – contracts to deliver a certain commodity at a certain price at a date certain (God, I wish I had) – futures research, as in scenarios, trends, strategic planning and market planning. Unfortunately the place was soon lousy with what I call “futurism”: extrapolations of the unsustainable to make the improbable look inevitable.

    A current example: suburbs are doomed because of high energy prices (peak oil!), the housing bubble, the obsolescence of the internal combustion engine, and yes, global warming (and what hasn’t been blamed on global warming?). Besides, the urban renaissance is underway; people want to live in the city for the culture, food, music and hipness, don’tchaknow. This is what I read in the Freakonomics quorum on the future of suburbia (New York Times, 8/12/08), and in The Atlantic magazine (“The Next Slum,” Christopher Leinberger, March 2008), The International Herald Tribune (“Life on the fringes of U.S. suburbia becomes untenable with rising gas costs,” 6/24/08), and elsewhere, ad infinitum.

    Well, I could be clever and say that predictions of the demise of suburbs are premature, be in fact they are just plain apocalyptic and absurd. Suburbs are the nexus of American life, have been for decades, and will certainly remain so (because, like, where else are we going to put the next 100 million Americans). Suburbs are where the majority of Americans today, and in the future, live, work, shop, create, consume, recreate, educate and, perhaps most importantly, procreate.

    Suburbs remain home to a majority of Americans and a plurality of American families. Suburban population, business and job growth each outpace those of cities, have done so for decades and will likely continue to do so. In fact, from 2001 to 2006:

    • 90% of all metropolitan population growth occurred in the suburbs (American County Survey, US Census Bureau)
    • Job growth in suburbia expanded at 6 times the rate of that in urban cores (Praxis Strategy Group)

    A small recent surge in mass transit won’t really change this. Of the 130 million Americans who commute to work every day, 41 million – by far the largest number and share – commute within suburbs (i.e. to the same or another suburb). Only 18 million, or 14% of commuters, commute from a suburb to a central city. To put it another way, 60% of commuting is suburb-related in some way. [IAC Transportation (July, 2008)] By the way, 75% of all commuters drive alone in their cars.

    Repeat after me: “multi-centered metropolitan region.” This is the model that characterizes most city/suburban regions in the US, where the urban core is just one of several nodes of development or centers of economic, residential, office, industrial, educational and recreational facilities and life. This is the model that, planned or unplanned, has evolved in the United States. It works, we like it, we’re keeping it. I know, congestion is horrible, but it’s horribly unnecessary: as explained by both Roth in Street Smart and by Stanley and Balaker in The Road More Traveled (both books published last year) [can we find a link to sites for these books] , we have the knowledge and means to reduce or even eliminate traffic congestion (more capacity, and more rational use of current capacity), but we don’t have the political will to deregulate, privatize and build.

    Repeat after me again: “mixed-use.” OK? I’m not talking about New Urbanism or smart growth, which are concepts whose utility and desirability are debatable. I’m talking about the availability, in a suburban setting, to access services and amenities, or what Wally Siembab calls “smart sprawl” – retrofitting suburbs of any density so that residents can shop, obtain services and work all within a mile or two of their home.

    One last point: Telecommuting, small home-based businesses and self-employment make suburban living all the more plausible and sustainable. If you add the number of part-time and full-time telecommuters plus home-based businesses, you’re talking about 36 million Americans, more than a fourth of the workforce.

    Welcome to the future: suburbia.

    Roger Selbert is a business futurist and trend guy. He lives in Los Angeles, edits and publishes the newsletter Growth Strategies, speaks and consults [www.rogerselbert.com]. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1973, missed his graduation ceremony and has yet to return. But he thinks Brunswick, Maine was a great college town.

  • The Kids are All Ride

    My eldest child tells me that when she arrived at an East Coast college her classmates—many of whom had never visited LA—would ask, “Does your family live in the city, or outside of it?” Her answer, she says, was always long — really long — and of eye-glazing complexity.

    Anyone who has raised kids in the middle-class neighborhoods of multipolar LA might chuckle at the thought of trying to define urban or suburban. In “inner” San Fernando Valley Barbecue Belt communities like Encino, Sherman Oaks, and Studio City, your family can call for a Deli delivery at 2AM. You might run into entertainment industry executives or movie craft workers lunching at the local coffee shop; many of their offices and studios are right in the neighborhood, as are numerous other “knowledge worker” businesses. And you’re spitting distance (in LA terms, less than a half hour on the freeway) from downtown Hollywood the Getty, or UCLA. If you judge by the restaurant/ workplace/ club scene/ museum index alone, this part of town should qualify as “city,” not “suburb”.

    But you’re also likely to enjoy an unattached home: ranch (modest or luxurious), bungalow (tiny and deteriorating or spiffy and renovated), or McMansion. If you’re in an apartment, it’s likely to be garden style, not a high rise.

    The best of both worlds. Two geographies, joined at the hip? Not quite: it’s a marriage of convenience with a few downsides. First, you can’t talk about being an LA parent without talking transportation. Whether you are in the less dense communities of the valley, the hills, and the beach areas, or in the more urban-feeling neighborhoods like Hollywood, if you’re an LA parent you are tethered to your car.

    When the suburban car-dependent culture melds with urban fear of crime and nightmarish traffic, the end game can be the worst of both worlds.

    Everyone knows that LA’s geography sprawls, and one result has been limited public transportation. To take the subway, we need to drive to the station (8 miles, in our case), and then find parking. Buses are more prevalent, but often stop far from a journey’s start or finish.

    Think it’s just another LA whine about a walk further than curb to car door? I’m a native New Yorker who—I believe—feels more positively about public transportation than many who write for this site. But I challenge you to walk three quarters of a mile on a 108 degree day with a couple of little kids to catch a bus.

    For adolescents, a certain lack of independence is an inevitable result; for parents, the urge to infantilize is rampant. I can say without exaggeration that our first daughter never once stepped out our front door and walked to a specific destination. We lived in the hills — no shops or friends within a couple of miles — surrounded by country-like winding roads… packed with high speed commuter traffic. The local school was only about a mile away, but it was down a sidewalk-free canyon, often littered with dead dogs, cats, coyotes, and the occasional deer, mowed down at the nexus of city and country. Like many LA parents, we drove our kid everywhere.

    We tried a different approach with our second daughter: a street close to busses and the neighborhood’s main drag. Initially, the strategy didn’t work too well. Few of her fourteen-year-old friends would ride a bus. Some had never crossed a commercial street and were afraid to try, and a couple were not permitted to do so (yes, there’s a crosswalk and traffic light).

    The parental DDQ (Daily Drive Quotient) here is magnified by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which does not provide school buses for local kids to reach their district schools. A four mile round trip can become a 40-minutes-twice-a-day time warp. Walk? Sure, if your route has sidewalks; many don’t. Car pool? There’s a reason that school driveways are clogged with Navigators, Yukons and Suburbans. Working parents often need to get to work on time. That translates into the sought-after one-drive-per-week carpool. But only the biggest SUVs can accommodate five families. And for those with kids in two or three different schools, it’s two carpools and all chauffeuring all the time.

    Long commutes to school are a plague in many remote locations. But in Los Angeles, the school system is at the same time famously beset with typical urban education problems: a large poor and non–English speaking population, aging physical plants, and a mind-boggling administrative bureaucracy.

    Our kids attended public elementary school in Bel Air. Sounds classy, doesn’t it? Check out the rest rooms; make that singular (the second one did not function during either of their stints). The principal claimed that she could not find a janitor willing to drive to the relatively remote site for the part time job. Our kid’s second grade teacher asked parents to please bring in writing paper because “I would like them to do creative writing, and if everyone pitches in we can make it happen.”

    How could LAUSD be anything but dysfunctional? It’s a behemoth. The student population has now dropped to just below 700,000, but it still has more students than Vermont, Alaska, or Boston has total residents; its population is about twice that of Cincinnati.

    Los Angeles has numerous poor neighborhoods, but you don’t need to raise your children in Beverly Hills to incur the stratospheric costs common to elite cities. Many LA neighborhoods may look like déclassé small towns from the perspective of Malibu or Beverly Hills. But in a ‘real’ small town or city, a teenager on a night out might pay $3.50 for a grilled cheese sandwich with fries (I have a 2008 Wilkes Barre, PA receipt as documentation), instead of about $10 here. And housing costs here, even in extremely modest neighborhoods, and even during the current real estate cataclysm, soar above the national average.

    It’s not just the economics of child-raising in LA that suffer from a clash of suburban and urban. The social blend of the two geographies can also be uncomfortable. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 25 years, and truly love many aspects of life here. But “it takes a village” are fighting words in a place where it can be a challenge to identify—let alone mobilize—the people next door.

    A neighbor on our street recently won a brand-sponsored contest for an ice cream Block Party. We walked over with our daughter and discovered that, as we had suspected, several other teenagers lived within a few houses.

    The older residents explained that ‘everyone here used to know each other, when we all had little kids the same age.’

    The teenagers, of course, went to a variety of schools; parents here often move their kids between private schools, public magnets, and district schools. They had a friendly chat and discovered some friends in common. But I don’t think they will ever meet again. If they do, it will undoubtedly be through some social network that’s irrelevant to the geography of this LA street.

    Zina Klapper is a writer and editor based in the Los Angeles area. She is a partner in Pop Twist Entertainment and a former editor of Mother Jones.

  • Portland and L.A: Not Exactly Long-Lost Brothers

    One of these cities is the perennial Cinderella to urban planners; the other the ugly sister who always crashes the party. One is the well-planned “City of Roses” (no, not Pasadena), a bastion of mass-transit and controlled development along the Columbia River while its gargantuan sister to the south eschews all such enlightened principles.

    That’s the gist at least from this paean to Portland in the LA Times today about what the city could learn from its lithe Northern cousin.

    A few key differences between these two:

    • The vast majority (90%) of job growth in Portland has been in the suburbs

    • Portland is actually far less dense than LA

    • It has a tiny population of immigrants and poor vis-a-vis LA

    • The city is losing families and children and rivals San Francisco for having the lowest percentage of its population under the age of 18 of any major U.S. city.

    And he doesn’t mention Portland’s greatest comparative advantage to LA: amazing beer!

    One thing both cities have in common right now: two of the most dynamic music scenes in the country.

    —-

    Here’s Joel Kotkin’s piece about Portland a few years ago.

  • Telecommute Opportunities

    As gas prices play in the range of four dollars, lots of people are looking for ways to save fuel as part of their work commute or regular household travel. There are some no-brainers like parking the SUV and using the fuel efficient vehicles in the household fleet.

    But a clear winner here is simply not taking that work trip at all – a four-day 40-hour week is a 20 percent fuel saving; a nine-day 80-hour biweekly period is a 10 percent saving. The state of Utah is the first state to go on a mandatory four-day week schedule for state employees with the additional advantage of most offices actually being shut down on Fridays.

    The telecommute option is also win-win. The commuter saves fuel and vehicle wear and there is zero impact on the road system or transportation system nor any deleterious effects on the society. The big question mark becomes the nature of the employment and the view of the employer toward such activities.

    In 2001 the NHTS (National Household Travel Survey) of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) pursued this question in some depth asking respondents about their ability to work from home. Obviously there are lots of people who can’t take advantage of such an opportunity — think emergency room nurses — but many others, particularly in technology-related fields, can. The NHTS shows that almost all groups have some workers whose occupation or industry makes it feasible.

    There are two discrete elements in telecommuting population. There are those who work at home (WAH) and have no other work location. Then there are those who occasionally work from home although they have a regular work place to go to – the real telecommuters. We also need to include among the telecommuters a sub-group – those who have a work-center near home that they can go to instead of the regular work place.

    The NHTS identified about 8.7 million workers who worked only at home, about six percent of workers, considerably more than the census showed in 2000, (and interestingly another 5.4 million with no specific work place). The American Community Survey (ACS), on the other hand, showed only 4.3 million in 2001 rising to just about 5.4 million in 2006; increasing in share from 3.4 to 3.9 percent. Under all surveys, there is a clear growth trend in working at home. In fact, it has been the only “mode” to increase over the last 25 years other than driving alone.

    Overall telecommuting would exceed transit totals nationally if New York is excluded. The decennial census and the NHTS show that the great majority of those who work at home are located in suburbs and rural areas (note that those who live in rural areas and work at home are often called farmers.)

    Who are they?
    Telecommuters tend to be male, older and more affluent. The women who work at home tend to be younger, less well-educated, and less affluent. The men tend to be in business or financial management, or other professional activities whereas women are more likely to be involved in administrative support, service occupations (think daycare) and part-time work.

    The NHTS survey data indicated that the occasional work-at-homers look a lot like those who work at home all the time. They are preponderantly male, with an average age of 42, and heavily oriented to the higher income groups with the majority over the $75,000 income bracket. They are overwhelmingly drawn, more than 60 percent, from professional and technical management occupations.

    Who cares?
    If telecommuters were loaded onto the national system each day, they would constitute a very large additional burden in terms of system demands and fuel use. Most importantly many are long distance travelers – their average distance to work is 17.5 miles, about 50 percent more than the average work trip length. Most people who work at home occasionally tend to be private vehicle users with a limited number using transit modes or even walking.

    Some options and impediments
    We do not yet know too much about what has happened over the past year’s strong spike in energy price. Clearly, some governments and private players are taking some action. Many state and local agencies have policies supporting telecommuting on a voluntary basis.

    In the private sector, Microsoft, operating in a very congested area of Seattle’s suburbs, now offers bonuses to employees for carpooling of up to $1000 and to foot the entire bill for using vans. They also have developed tele-centers in downtown Seattle for the many reverse commuters who work for them to spend time near their downtown/University residences to avoid peak travel out to the suburbs.

    What remains astonishing is how little government action has been taken an effective and worthwhile response to the energy situation. One good step would be a public information program focused on prospective employers and their willingness to accept such programmatic changes. Within companies, training managers to better handle the complexities of interacting with employees at a distance would be a big plus. Telecom companies could help with better tools and services and ideas; after all, it is a natural market for their services.

    The increasing cost of travel is altering the arithmetic by which commuters weigh their travel choices. Telecommuting represents one important option that needs to be taken very seriously indeed.

  • Skipping the Drive: Fueling the Telecommuting Trend

    The rapid spike in energy prices has led politicians, urban theorists and pundits to pontificate about how Americans will be living and working in new ways. A favorite story line is that Americans will start trading in their suburban homes, move back to the city centers and opt to change everything they have wanted for a half-century — from big backyards to quiet streets to privacy — to live a more carbon-lite urban lifestyle.

    Yet, there has been little talk about what could be the best way for families and individuals to cut energy use: telecommuting. For more than a decade, the number of telecommuters, both full-time and part-time, has been growing rapidly, gaining more market share than any other form of transportation.

    This seems certain to continue with the proliferation of broad-band technology — as well as the effect of high gas prices. By 2006, the expansion of home-based work doubled twice as quickly as in the previous decade, and now is close to nine million, according to the National Highway Travel Survey of the Federal Highway Assn.

    Nationwide, according to the Gartner Group, in 2007 13 million workers telecommuted at least one day a week, a 16 percent leap from 2004. That number was expected to reach 14 million this year. In addition, more than 22 million individuals, according to Forrester Research, now run businesses from home.

    Last year’s skyrocketing energy prices appears to have pushed employers in this direction. A CDW survey of private sector employers this year found that 76 percent now provide technical support for remote workers, up 27 percent from a year earlier. Federal IT support, however, has lagged at roughly 58 percent.

    In some regions, like the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, as many as one in 10 workers are part-time telecommuters. In the Greater Washington Area, more than 450,000 employees telecommuted at least one day a week in 2007, 42.5 percent more than in 2004, according to a survey by Commuter Connections, a regional network of transportation organizations coordinated by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. The percentage of employees who telework surged to 19 percent from 13 percent during that time period.

    Not surprisingly, home offices, particularly in upscale homes, have become a necessity for many buyers — demanded ahead of security systems. A recent study by Rockbridge Associates suggests that more than one-quarter of the U.S. workforce could eventually participate full- or part-time in this new work pattern.

    The potential energy savings — particularly in terms of vehicle miles traveled — could be enormous. Telecommuters naturally drive less, not only to work but for the numerous stops to and from work. According to the 2005/2006 National Technology Readiness Survey (NTRS), the United States could save about 1.35 billion gallons of fuel if everyone who was able to telecommute did so just 1.6 days per week. That calculation is based on a driving average of 20 miles per day, getting 21 miles per gallon.

    A more recent study by Sun Microsytems, which uses telecommuting extensively, found that, by eliminating commuting half the week, an employee saves 5,400 kilowatt hours — even accounting for home office use. They also can save some $1,700 a year in gasoline and wear and tear.

    Related technologies, like teleconferencing, according to another survey, could save another 200 million tons of jet fuel, if 10 percent of air travel were reduced over the next 10 years. There are other signs of a shift to substitute the web for the road — some college on-line classes report a 50 percent to 100 percent boost in enrollment over last year.

    In comparison, the talk of a huge “surge” in transit riders as a result of rising gas prices, represents a welcome, but relatively minor, trend, since transit still accounts for under 1.5 percent of all travel. The vast majority — perhaps as much as 98 percent —- of the recent reduction in gas consumption came as a result of people simply reducing their driving, not switching to the rails.

    Some of this is structural. Most metropolitan regions are simply not set up for efficient public transit; work patterns are increasingly dispersed as opposed to centralized. As a result, the ranks of telecommuters are greater in every metropolitan area in the country outside of the New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston areas.

    This trend is particularly marked in growing regions in the South and West. In Portland, the mecca for light rail, there are nine telecommuters for every rail commuter. In 2008 Nustats survey, covering Austin, Dallas-Ft. Worth and El Paso telecommuting (at 12 percent) was cited four times as much as using public transit to reduce gas consumption.

    Perhaps even more important, telecommuting and related technologies represent a potential sea change for the future shape of families and communities. Already women are well-represented among telecommuters, in part so they can stay home with their children. In a world with fewer permanent employees and longer hours, telecommuting could help mothers stay in the workplace even while rearing children. A growing number of fathers are also looking to work at home to participate in child-rearing.

    In many ways, this represents a return to patterns that existed before the Industrial Revolution. In pre-industrial societies, members frequently worked at home or walked to work. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, with its need for mass standardization — demanding the efficacy of office and factory. Marx, the ultimate chronicler and prophet of the Industrial age, saw how “agglomeration in one shop” was “necessary” for human progress.

    Writing a century later, Alvin Toffler foresaw how the rise of the “electronic cottage” would return work to the home — where it had been before. As he put it, “social and technological forces are converging to change the locus of work” — back to the home, neighborhood and village. This is part of what Toffler envisioned in his “Third Wave” society, a breaking away from the “behavioral code” of “second wave” industrialism, where work and family were segregated

    These trends will continue as economic relations between business firms become less constrained by proximity. Information inputs can come from any source, and increasingly, any place. Of course, there will be serious constraints to this development. Perhaps, most important, will be the reluctance of managers —both private and public — to allow this dispersed work

    There are also interests, like urban office developers and real estate developers, who might find these trends troubling. Many new urbanists and environmentalists, who one would think would favor this energy-saving trend, tend to ignore or downplay the digital frontier — preferring a return to the dense, transit-dependent patterns common a century ago.

    Even telecommunications firms, which logically should be pushing this shift, seem unable to tailor their products for home-based work, according to a recent Forrester Research study. Morley Winograd, a former AT&T executive, says these companies have persisted in separating their “consumer and business customers.” As a result, they have been slow to abandon what he calls “the obsolete gene” in their corporate DNA, and target the home-based business

    Yet in the future, Winograd, now executive director of the Institute for Communication Technology Management at USC’s Marshall School of Business, says that developers, corporate executives and, presumably, telecommunications companies will be forced to focus more on this growing segment.

    Indeed, new suburban developments, like Ladera Ranch in Orange County, have incorporated such mixed usage into their floor plans — with separate entrances for business clients. Suburban historian Tom Martinson, believes that the Ladera plan will “be in the history books in 20 years” because it anticipates “an incredible change in the way we live and work.

    Many leading companies also see the potential of full-time and part-time telecommuting. Particularly amenable to this trend are leading technology and business-service firms. At IBM, for example, as much as 40 percent of its workforce operates full-time at home. Other companies, including Siemens, Compaq, Cisco, Merrill Lynch and American Express, have expanded their use of telecommuting, with increased productivity

    As more companies let go of their “command and control” approach to management, this practice seems likely to increase. Certainly the employee demand is there; one-third, according to one survey, would choose this option, even if it meant somewhat less pay. Teleworkers also generally show a higher job satisfaction

    This is also being adopted in some states and cities. Georgia, for example, approved tax credits this year for creating and expanding telework.

    But perhaps the biggest impetus, suggests Winograd, the former telecom executive, is the gradual ascendancy of younger workers. The millennial generation — the subject of his recent book, “Millennial Makeover,” co-written with Mike Hais — “have grown up up with the Internet and stay connected to the world on their laptops or cellphones 24/7” and sees “distinctions between work and life as arbitrary and unnecessary.”

    These younger Americans will likely see no reason to spend an hour in a car, bus or train to get from one computer screen to another. Once adopted by employers, this shift may do more to reduce the carbon imprint than all the current calls for largely unwelcome shifts in the daily lifestyles of many American

    Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and executive editor of www.newgeography.com. This article also appears at The Washington Independent.

  • Louvre Café Syndrome: Misunderstanding Amsterdam and America

    Tourists, journalists and urban planners are often smitten with what might be called the “Louvre Café Syndrome.” This occurs when Americans sit at Paris cafes in view of the Louvre and imagine why it is that the United States does not look like this. In fact, most of Paris doesn’t even look like this, nor do other European urban areas. Like their US counterparts, European urban areas rely principally on cars for mobility (though to a somewhat lesser degree) and their residents live in suburbs that have been built since World War II.

    The last example of Louvre Café Syndrome comes from Washington Post Writer’s Group columnist Neal Peirce, who suggests that Amsterdam, with its bicycles, is the model for America to follow in a time of high energy prices.

    Not only is this view incorrect, but Amsterdam is not even a model for the Netherlands. The largest urban areas of the Netherlands, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, have been “stuck in neutral” with respect to growth for at least 45 years. United Nations data indicates that since 1960, 97 percent of urban growth in the Netherlands has occurred outside these two large urban areas. While the population of the two largest urban areas has increased approximately 10 percent, the urban population outside these areas has increased by 120 percent.

    And how do these urbanites that have chosen not to live in Amsterdam or Rotterdam travel? Try by car. Overall, in the Netherlands, approximately 85 percent of travel is by car — a figure that is nearly identical to the United States. All of the subway and light rail ridership in the Netherlands is less than the annual increase in car use. Some model.

    America is a growing nation. Between now and 2030, approximately two-thirds of the urban growth in the developed world is projected to occur in the United States — that is a considerable number given the fact that the US accounts for less than one-third of the developed world’s urban population today. The strategies that work in urban areas with stagnant growth — such as Amsterdam — will not work here.

    As for the bicycles, one could also point to walking and the large share of travel that it represents in Manhattan or the Chicago Loop. A European felled by Louvre Café Syndrome might visit these places and imagine that the urban area looks the same all the way to the urban fringe — that the citizens of New Brunswick, Westfield or Aurora live in residential skyscrapers and that they walk everywhere. Such a view would be as faulty as Peirce’s vision of Amsterdam.

    It helps to think of things in context. Amsterdam would barely rank in the top 50 metropolitan areas of the United States. The Netherlands has a population less than that of two American metropolitan areas (combined statistical areas), New York and Los Angeles. Finally, all of the Netherlands — urban and rural areas — would fit into an area approximately 1.5 times that of the New York metropolitan area.

    You can’t see everything from the Louve.

    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.”

  • Thoughts on the Future of Seattle: A Vision of 2040 for Pugetopolis

    I have been attacked as a defender of ‘sprawl’ although I consider myself a man of the left, with a political-economy philosophy that is ‘social democratic – far to the left of the contemporary Democratic party. I view global warming as very serious, but consider continuing global warfare over resources, land and religion, and increasing national and global economic and political inequality as even more critical.

    As a realist/naturalist/skeptic, rather than idealist, I believe a scientist’s goal is to understand and explain the rich variety of actual needs, motivations and behavior of individuals, groups and institutions. I chose geography instead of planning, because I am uncomfortable with a normative approach of telling people how they ought to behave (in the absence of adequate theory and evidence).

    In my long career in planning I have become skeptical about many things that are widely considered “progressive.” This includes disbelief in two icons of a normative New Urbanist planning: urban growth boundaries and rail transit. In my original testimony to the Growth Strategies Commission 20 years ago, I warned that use of a crude geographic tool (growth boundaries) would lead to land and housing price inflation, leapfrog development and would benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. Sadly, this proved to be the case. Rather than use zoning to create open space, I believe fairness dictates it be acquired through public purchase for public use.

    On rail, my skepticism grew out of considerations of class fairness, since it squanders limited public resources for limited results, and again benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. The real transit problem is not capacity but accessibility to people and jobs. I like trains and have been on dozens of rail or subway systems around the world, many successful, others relative failures. Unfortunately, the geography of Seattle militates against rail’s success here.

    Before we try to guess what greater Seattle might or could (not “should” or “will”) look like in 2040, we must be clear about the nature of the geographic setting, and needs and preferences of its people. For example, there are distinct populations who prefer denser urban living (structures and neighborhoods), and those who prefer less dense living (single-family homes and neighborhoods). Some economic activities require dense agglomerative settings; others need greater horizontal space or external connections.

    In the immediate Seattle region currently about 40 percent of people and jobs are at the denser more agglomerative and 60 percent at the less dense, more dispersed end. Unfortunately for New Urbanist idealism, far more than half of people do not live within walking or biking distance to work or school. By 2040 the share of people preferring or accepting denser urban living in the close in areas could rise to 50 percent (for demographic and land cost reasons) but that will still leave 50 percent or 2.5 of 5 million people preferring a lower density environment. Planners should have learned that many people need private space (yards) as well as public (parks and playgrounds). And it is truly difficult to envision a higher share of more agglomerative jobs; costs of transportation will likely bring residences and workplaces closer to the peripheral communities.

    Another inescapable reality is that trucks will remain the dominant mode for goods transport and that the car, personal transport, will still, yes, be the dominant mode of person movement. Transit (and walking and bicycling) could rise to 25 percent and carpooling could become a lot higher, but cars, far more efficient and greener, will still be the rule. It is absurd to imagine otherwise – this is precisely the kind of innovation that at which American technology excels.

    Most political leaders and senior planners know these “realities” perfectly well but seem to have trouble reining in the their often overly idealistic staff. Yet an intelligent view of what will be in 2040 rests on facts and people’s demonstrated preferences, not on New Urbanist theorizing.

    So what does 2040 look like? The population will likely grow but the forecast of a 50 percent increase is far from sure. The odds are better than even that growth will be moderately less, because of demography (aging population, lowering fertility of past immigrants), and the high cost of Seattle for residence and for business. Instead we likely will see growth spill over to less costly and restrictive cities like Spokane, Bellingham, Yakima and the Tri-Cities.

    We don’t know the likely degree of housing affordability and of the relative severity of constraints on the land supply. Again based on history and demography/education, I’d say the odds are in favor of continuing constraints, over-regulation and housing unaffordability.

    Personal transport will still prevail in 2040, but much of transport technology and policy is uncertain. There will probably be new trains, because people seem to want them, although their contribution to mobility will be modest.

    Smaller communities around Seattle would be well-advised not to allow themselves to be pulled too closely into a downtown-centric transit network since, as Nobel economist Paul Samuelson showed in 1956, this almost guarantees that the outlying centers will lose high level functions and income to the central node. Tacoma, Everett and Bellevue would each be better off developing themselves than subordinating their destiny to downtown Seattle. Bellevue’s success as a competitive edge city is because of the barrier effect of Lake Washington!

    So given these considerations, what will Seattle and its region look like in 2040? Look around you because the future city will look and feel amazingly like the present city, just as the city today is much like the city of 1975. It will be somewhat denser, especially in the core region but overall the urban footprint will grow only slightly and begrudgingly. Instead, most substantial growth in Pugetopolis will occur in satellite towns and adjacent counties and beyond, which is not necessarily a bad thing but may offend many planners.

    In this new configuration, the central city of Seattle will do fine – due to its popularity, site and situation benefits (and the high land prices). There will be continued gentrification, dominated by the childless affluent, and displacement of the less well off to some of the older, less amenity rich suburbs. Inequality will remain high and segregation by class will probably increase. Transportation congestion and substantial long distance commuting will not have lessened, despite trains or the implementation of demand management, because of likely over-investment in large glamour projects, and the continued separation of residences and jobs.

    Experience suggests to me that the future Pugetopolis will continue to be the uneasy compromise between the idealist visionaries of the golden city and the dictates of the human condition and the economy. This is not a pessimistic forecast, rather a realistic one. The metropolis of 2040 may well be a somewhat better place than it is now, but just not very!

    Richard Morrill came to Seattle 53 years ago for graduate school, and after stints in Illinois and Sweden, returned to the University of Washington Geography department in 1961, where he has taught for 44 years.

  • Long Island Express: The Surprisingly Short Commutes of Suburban New Yorkers

    One of the most enduring urban myths suggests that most jobs are in the core of metropolitan areas, making commuting from the far suburbs more difficult. Thus, as fuel prices have increased, many have expected that people will begin moving from farther out in the suburbs to locations closer to the cores. Indeed, in some countries, such as Australia, much of the urban planning regime of the last decade has been based upon the assumption that urban areas must not be constrained because the residents on the fringe won’t be able to get to work.

    Like many myths, this one has limited conformity with the truth. This can be seen even in New York, the New York metropolitan area (the combined statistical area), which is home to the second largest central business district in the country and by far the most well-developed transit system in North America. Yet, despite this, a close examination of work trip data from the 2006 U.S. Census American Community Survey shows a pattern of shorter work travel times for many of the most far-flung areas while those located closer to the core often experience longer commutes.

    These findings parallel earlier Newgeography.com reports about Chicago and Los Angeles, which indicated a somewhat similar pattern. Although white-collar workers close to key job centers – such as downtown Chicago or west Los Angeles – enjoy relatively short commutes, those living in the close in, but less high-end districts tend to suffer the longest commutes.

    So, somewhat surprisingly, workers who live in the outer suburbs of New York have the shorter work trip travel times, at 29.8 minutes than the New York metropolitan average of 32.9 minutes. Workers living in the inner suburbs spend 30.7 minutes getting to work. Those living in the outer boroughs of New York City have the worst commute times at 41.5 minutes. This contrasts sharply with the 30.1 minute average for workers living in the core borough – Manhattan, home of more than 2.2 million jobs.

    One possible conclusion here is that the best way to balance jobs and housing is not to concentrate employment or residences in any one place. High levels of centralization are extremely convenient for those who can afford to live near the Manhattan core – where there are nearly 275 jobs for every 100 resident workers. But it is far less a good deal for those who live in the outer boroughs with only 68 jobs for every 100 resident workers. Richmond (Staten Island) has the largest deficit of jobs, with 56 per 100 resident workers, while Kings County (Brooklyn) has the lowest deficit, with 73 jobs per 100 resident workers.

    In contrast, and somewhat contradictory to conventional assumption, jobs and housing are mostly in balance in New York’s suburbs. Among the inner suburban counties, there are 97 jobs for every 100 resident workers. The inner suburban counties also demonstrate a balance among themselves. The largest deficit is in Hudson County, with 89 jobs per 100 resident workers – a figure well above any of the four outer New York City boroughs. Bergen County has the highest surplus, with 102 jobs for every resident worker. Virtually all other outer suburban counties for which there is data have jobs-housing balances superior to all of the New York City outer boroughs.

    A similar pattern persists in the outer suburbs where there are 93 jobs for every 100 resident worker in the outer suburban counties. Mercer County, which contains three large employment draws, the New Jersey state capital (at Trenton), Princeton University and the Route 1 information technology corridor, has 126 jobs for every resident worker (only Manhattan is higher).

    The extent to which jobs have become dispersed around the metropolitan area is illustrated by the work trip travel times to job locations, rather than by residence location. The average worker commuting to Manhattan, the ultimate American business district, travels 48.5 minutes one-way to work. This is approximately double the national average. Workers commuting to the outer boroughs of New York City spend 36.9 minutes. The situation is much better in the suburbs. For jobs in the inner suburban counties, the average one-way work trip travel time is 29.3 minutes. Perhaps surprisingly, people working in the outer suburban counties spend the least amount of time getting to work, at 24.8 minutes, roughly the national average.

    These findings suggest that much of the conversation about convenience and location between suburbs and cities has been distorted. The notion of suburbanites, particularly in the outer ring, enduring long commutes needs to be re-examined as should the efficiency of high dense employment centers. The greatest advantages to concentrated employment in New York, it seems, devolves to those who can afford to live closest to the central core, something increasingly out of reach for most New Yorkers. For those who can’t afford a nice apartment in Manhattan, it’s not necessarily the best of all bargains.

    For details see Demographia New York Employment & Commuting: 2006.