Getting from here to there

An Allegory for Justifying Transportation Investments: A Brand New Bathroom!

2012-02-07T19:17:00.000-08:00

There are many justifications for investing in transportationinfrastructure. Some of the most common and widely used claims for why thepublic should spend lots of money on new trains, roads, bike lanes or othersuch things are that such investments will create jobs, lead to new economicactivity and offer future environmental benefits. These are all offered asunambiguously positive characteristics. To evaluate these claims a bit I developedan allegorical situation where a household decides to build a new bathroom ontheir house.

Picture a four person family who lives in a nice littlehouse with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. They decide that their currentbathrooms are old and inadequate and something should be done. They can eitherfix up the two bathrooms they already have or add a third bathroom. They decideto add the third bathroom. So far, so good. The family has a bathroom designedand gets bids for construction. The first bid has five workers completing the projectin a week. The second bid has ten workers completing the project in two weeks.The third bid has 20 workers completing the project in a month. Let’s assumeall bids are under the same labor rules. Should the family “create” the mostjobs and take the month long bid with 20 workers? It seems obvious that thefamily should take the first bid once they have verified that the company ishonest and legit. Jobs are a cost to the project.

But perhaps the family wants to be job creators, so theytake the high bid. They figure they will make it up in new productivity fromhaving a new toilet, shower and sink. Will the new bathrooms make them moreproductive? Are toilets a derived demand? Considering that bathroom use(production) is a matter of inputs (food and activity) it’s not likely that thefamily will start pooping, peeing or showering more than they did prior to thenew bathroom. So productivity is a wash (no pun intended). However, becausethere is a new place to “produce” the location of production will shift. Thismay be in everyone’s interest considering the potential externalities, but thefamily needs to weigh whether the cost of the new bathroom is worth thebenefit.

What about the future benefits? There are potentially manyfrom a new bathroom such as lower water flow and nicer fixtures. Yet thesecould also be achieved through remodeling the existing bathrooms, which willneed maintenance and upkeep anyway. Maybe everyone would be better off with anew hot water heater instead so there is always adequate warm water for theexisting showers. A new bathroom may allow the family to put off fixing uptheir old bathrooms, but not forever, and money spent on a new bathroom cannotbe spent on an existing bathroom.

Ultimately, undertaking a new bathroom addition is somethingthat the family may decide they want to do for a variety of reasons (maybe to accommodatenew members to the household or congestion before everyone goes to school andwork). However, a new bathroom will only shift the time and location wherebathroom activities take place rather than causing each member of the family to poop, pee andshower more. Remember, they have adequate bathrooms now and do not bathe in theriver.

In the bathroom expansion case, I suspect most people wouldinsist on hiring the low labor cost company and would never consider that anadditional bathroom would increase the need for a toilet.* Yet for transportinvestments we tend to argue that we need to invest in what has the highestlabor cost and claim increases in productivity that have not been borne outthrough research. In the US the existing infrastructure needs a lot of work,and new facilities (roads, trains, etc) tend to just shift economic activityinstead of creating new economic activity.** While travel is not entirely a derived demand, it largely is, just likeusing a bathroom. I’m not saying that governments should plan and budget likehouseholds, because they shouldn’t. But we should remember that jobs are a costto projects and that when an economy has a mature, well functioning transportnetwork additions and subtractions to that network will affect the location ofeconomic activity far, far more than create or destroy economic activity.

*It’s entirely possible that the current number of bathroomsis inadequate for peak demand, which the family may want to address, but thisis different than increasing overall use.

**In the UK the official policy of the expected net effect onproductivity of High Speed Rail investment is zero for precisely this reason.

Super Bowl Parking is Slightly Less Than the Average Apartment Rent in Indianapolis

2012-02-05T08:19:00.000-08:00

According to Rent Jungle, the average rent for a one bedroom apartment in Indianapolis is $599 per month. According to this story parking spaces will go for close to $500 for a few hours.

Maybe Someday I'll Retire to Take Care of My Own Little Toll Bridge

2012-02-02T06:16:00.000-08:00

The BBC reported on a toll bridge in Herefordshire that was recently purchased. That's not so unusual, but it was bought by a fellow who will retire on the property and hang around to collect the tolls motorists pay. The even better part is that all the toll income is completely tax free! Such a deal. Maybe future pensions should be funded by giving people roads directly to collect money as they see fit. Lots of public pensions are already investing in P3 projects. This is just more direct!

Here Michael Munger translates the toll bridge story to a nice class exercise for econ students.

Mapping the Growth of Manhattan

2012-01-27T08:10:00.000-08:00

My colleague Vishaan Chakrabarti proposes to fill in New York Harbor in order to connect Manhattan to Governor's Island. Here is a NY Times story about his idea. While I don't really think this should be a priority for the city, it does have precedent and is interesting to think about. The above image shows the growth of the southern tip of Manhattan, and you can see that a substantial portion of the area is built on landfill. Considering the value of land in this area building more of it makes sense. Or made sense then, anyway. Now that employment in the area is shrinking and residential population is growing I don't think the economics of creating new land can justify new landfill. Consider that firms outbid households for real estate because they will either benefit from increased productivity, access to markets or can pass their costs on to consumers. Households seek to maximize their amenity value and reduce transport costs. In the case of lower Manhattan, financial firms--the richest firms in the world--are not outbidding households for these lands. So the commercial value is declining to the point that residential uses are more profitable. That doesn't suggest we need more land.

In any event, here is a link to a map of the Bridge's Survey of Manhattan from 1807. The grid is laid out (I believe this is the Commission that created the grid introduced in 1811 but am not positive) and the original features of the island are noticeable. You can also pan and zoom on the map, which is pretty cool.

Visualizing NYC Taxi Activity

2012-01-25T07:07:00.000-08:00

New York City Taxi Activity from Juan Francisco Saldarriaga on Vimeo.

Above is an animation of yellow cab origins and destinations in New York City by time of day. This is drawn from some current research of mine where I am exploring the ways that taxi services complement conventional fixed route transit. In the video there are a couple of things to notice. First, and I argue most important from a planning perspective, is that taxi origins and destinations are geographically asymmetrical. This matters because it means that individual's travel journeys are multi-modal. If we want to have transit oriented cities we have to plan for high quality, door-to-door services that allow spontaneous one-way travel. Yet for all of the billions of dollars we have spent of fixed-route transit and the built environment we haven't spent any time thinking about how taxis (and related services) can help us reach our goals.

The second thing to look for changes by time of day. In the AM rush lots of Upper East Side travelers head to Midtown. (Origins and red and destinations are blue). By midday Midtown is largely in balance with origins and destinations. In the evening, there are many Manhattan to Queens and Brooklyn trips.

Here is the abstract of my current paper (with Jon Peters and Matt Daus):

ABSTRACT

Taxi services are critical aspects of urbantransportation systems. Taxicabs serve the public in a variety of ways, frommetered fares to informal jitneys, and provide critical mobility for people ofall income levels. Despite the ubiquity of taxi service in cities, there islimited scholarly research that explores how people use taxi service to supporttransit-oriented lifestyles and enhance mobility, and there is scant researchexploring the complementary aspects of taxi service for conventionaltransit. In this paper we argue thattaxi service is a critical aspect of a transit system, and taxi usage exhibitscomplementary characteristics to conventional transit. Specifically, taxi usageis asymmetrical where origins and destinations have very different spatialdistributions. This suggests that taxi riders have multi-modal travel journeys.In many cases taxi trips are part of journeys that began with transit trips,yet planning and expanding taxi service as an extension of transit networks israrely undertaken in practice. We useregulatory and Global Positioning System (GPS) data from New York City as a case to demonstrate theasymmetrical nature of taxi usage and innovative regulatory approaches thatfoster high rates of taxi usage that complement transit ridership.

Columbia Urban Planning at TRB 2012

2012-01-11T16:08:00.000-08:00

The annual Transportation Research Board's conference is coming up and Columbia's Urban Planning Program is well represented. I'll re-post closer to the conference with better formatting, but here are the projects that some of our best PhD students will be presenting. My sessions are listed below theirs.

Xiaohong Pan will present in session 574 (1/24/2012 1:30-3:15):
Senior Population's Transportation Preferences to Access Health Care Services: Insights from 2009 National Household Travel Survey (12-3251)

Population aging is now progressing rapidly in the U.S., which brings significant social and economic challenges to each and every stakeholder in the society. As seniors age, their health care needs surge and they more likely need alternative means of transportation. Considering the increasing burden of population aging that lays on the U.S. health care system, it is important to improve seniors’ transportation access to health care services. However, before planners and policy makers can provide any appropriate and effective assistance, it is crucial to first understand seniors’ transportation preferences to access health care services. Utilizing the most recent National Household Travel Survey (2009 NHTS) data, this paper examines how different socio-demographic, spatial, and transportation attributes affect seniors’ transportation choices to access health care services. The study results indicate that, many seniors are still driving, and they prefer auto travel than public transportation; increasing density alone might not be a powerful and effective strategy to change seniors’ travel mode choices, at least not for the current generation; mode choice of health care trips are inelastic to some transportation attributes, such as travel distance. In addition, the results suggest that,although improving traditional public transportation is important, helping seniors, especially those live in suburban and rural area, to travel using their preferred means is essential as well.

Lauren Fischer will present in session 789 (1/25/2012 4:30-6:00):
Competition from the Curb: Survey of Passengers on Discount Curbside Bus Operators in Eastern and Midwestern U.S. Cities (12-3838)

This study summarizes the results of a survey of passengers using discount “curbside” bus operators to foster a greater understanding of the composition and preferences of the travelers these carriers serve. The study compares the characteristics of passengers on the two largest operators, BoltBus and Megabus, with those using conventional bus lines such as Greyhound. Surveys were administered in the three most heavily served curbside-bus markets in the East and Midwest—six cities in total— resulting in a cumulative sample of 1,025 responses. Curbside bus service is shown to generate a considerable amount of new travel, with newly generated trips accounting for 22.0% of all passengers. In the East, however, curbside bus service is taking a particularly large number of travelers from passenger trains. More than a third of those surveyed (34.0%) report that they would have ridden trains had curbside buses not been available. Ridership is comprised heavily of passengers in the 18-25 age group and overwhelmingly comprised of passengers traveling for pleasure or personal matters rather than for business. Interpreted broadly, the findings support the notion that the curbside-bus phenomenon is not primarily the result of a shift in market share from conventional bus lines. The evidence instead suggests that curbside service should be regarded as a new mode that attracts the vast majority of its passengers from commercial flights, trains, and private automobiles, and that is has grown dramatically in spite of the relative lack of business travelers.

Authors
     Schwieterman, Joseph P., DePaul University
     Fischer, Lauren A., DePaul University

I will be in the following four sessions:

Event Number:	135
Event Title:	Taxi Research: Priorities, Practices, and Opportunities
Event Date:	Jan 22 2012 9:00AM- 12:00PM
Event Location:	Hilton, Columbia Hall 2
Event Description:	The workshop is one of the first activities of the joint taxi subcommittee and will be significant in creating a conversation regarding the role of the taxicab as a part of the transport community. The discussion includes key issues in integrating taxis into general transportation as well as the roles the taxi plays in paratransit. The workshop will attract a wide range of transport professionals, those active in taxi research and those wishing to expand and explore the role of taxis.
Event Agenda:

Title of talk:
Taxi Technologies: Potential for Innovation in Scheduling, Delivery, and Assurance (P12-6770)

Event Number:	175
Event Title:	Best Practices in Parking Management and Pricing: Lessons Learned from Recently Implemented U.S. Programs
Event Date:	Jan 22 2012 1:30PM- 4:30PM
Event Location:	Hilton, Columbia Hall 6
Presiding Officers:	Weinberger, Rachel R. - University of Pennsylvania
Sponsored By:	Transportation Demand Management (ABE50) Emerging and Innovative Public Transport and Technologies (AP020) Congestion Pricing (ABE25) Parking Management (ABE50(1))

Event Description:

Pricing on-street and off-street parking to achieve an occupancy target and providing users with real-time information on parking availability and price would eliminate the issue of drivers circling for underpriced parking. This workshop brings together academics and city parking managers implementing advanced parking policies and systems. Technologies that monitor and transmit parking availability information, advanced metering systems, and data-supported pricing approaches will be covered.

The idea has been advanced that 30% of urban traffic is comprised of people who have arrived at their destinations and are looking, or cruising, for parking. Recent advances in how we think about cruising and in the technology that has been developed to deal with it have allowed cities to implement new strategies to reduce this excess auto use. In this workshop we will discuss cruising and the available tools to address it. We will present four cases highlighting the ways that cities of different size and character have begun to address cruising. We will learn from each other's experiences.
Overview: (40 minutes)
- Cruising for Parking: Public Consequences of Private Choices
David King (Extent and nature of cruising, how cruising and it's impacts on a neighborhood are measured)
- Technology Toolbox for Parking Management and Enforcement
Daniel Mitchell, (Modern meter technology and its use in parking management and enforcement)
Case Studies (80 minutes)
- Jay Primus, San Francisco
- Damon Harvey, Washington, D.C.
- Mary Catherine Snyder, Seattle
- Jessicas ter Schure, Santa Monica
The Future is Here (20 minutes)
- Balaji Prabhakar
Break-out discussions moderated by the panelists (25 minutes)
Re-convening and sharing results of break-out (15 minutes)

Presentations:
  Cruising for Parking: Public Consequences of Private Choices (P12-6255)
     King, David - Columbia University
  Technology Toolbox for Parking Management and Enforcement (P12-6256)
     Sedadi, Amir H. - City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation
  Case Study: SFPark (P12-6258)
     Primus, Jay - San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency
  Case Study: Washington, DC (P12-6259)
     Harvey, Damon - District of Columbia Department of Transportation
  Case Study: Seattle (P12-6260)
     Snyder, Mary Catherine - City of Seattle Department of Transportation
  Case Study: Samta Monica (P12-6261)
     ter Schure, Jessica - Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates
  Frontiers in Parking Management (P12-6262)
     Prabhakar, Balaji - Stanford University

Event Number:	297
Event Title:	Congestion Pricing, Parking Pricing, and Managed Lanes
Event Date:	Jan 23 2012 10:45AM- 12:30PM
Event Location:	Hilton, International Center
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast: Use of Tolls by Taxicabs in New York City (12-2101)

The for hire automobile market (taxis, limousines, vans and car share programs) represent an interesting group of automobile users. From the perspective of travel demand, ownership of an automobile is a key determinant in vehicle usage. As such, users who pay per use may have very different demand patterns than conventional users. In addition, the use of road pricing to manage automobile demand is of considerable interest both to manage congestion and greenhouse gasses as well as to raise revenue. This paper explores an area that has not yet received much study, which is the impact of toll prices on route choice and travel demand in for hire car usage. Utilizing a unique data set of medallion taxi cabs in New York City, the authors are examine impact of road pricing on route choice and travel time for taxi trips between lower Manhattan and LaGuardia airport in Queens. Taxicabs on these trips have the option of using the Queens Midtown Tunnel, which is tolled, or the Queensboro (formerly 59th Street) Bridge, which is free.We find in general that paying a road toll does decrease the travel time to the airport, but that the time reduction does not yield a benefit greater than the toll cost. Taxi passengers should heed the opening lyric of “The 59th Street Bridge Song” and “slow down, you move too fast.” Unless users have extremely high values of time, toll road use in taxis represents a cost greater than the benefit. However, we find that taxi drivers are made better off by taking the tolled tunnel through higher tips and shorter trip times.

Authors
     King, David , Columbia University
     Peters, Jonathan Richard, City University of New York, Staten Island

Event Number:	477
Event Title:	Rethinking Paratransit
Event Date:	Jan 24 2012 8:00AM- 9:45AM
Event Location:	Hilton, Georgetown West
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Taxicabs for Improved Urban Mobility: Are We Missing an Opportunity? (12-2097)

Taxi services critical pieces of urban transportation systems. Taxicabs come in a variety of ways, from metered fares to informal jitneys, and provide critical mobility for people of all incomes. Despite the ubiquity of taxi service in cities, there is limited scholarly research that explores how people use taxi service to support transit-oriented lifestyles and enhance mobility, and there is scant research exploring the complementary aspects of taxi service for conventional transit. In this paper we argue that taxi service is a critical aspect of a transit system, and taxi usage exhibits complementary characteristics to conventional transit. Specifically, taxi usage is asymmetrical where origins and destinations have very different spatial distributions. This suggests that taxi riders have multi-modal travel journeys. In many cases taxi trips are part of journeys that began with transit trips, yet planning and expanding taxi service as an extension of transit networks is rarely undertaken in practice. We use regulatory and Geographic Positioning System (GPS) data from New York City as a case to demonstrate the asymmetrical nature of taxi usage and innovative regulatory approaches that foster high rates of taxi usage that complements transit ridership.

Authors
     King, David , Columbia University
     Peters, Jonathan Richard, City University of New York, Staten Island
     Daus, Matthew , City University of New York, Staten Island

The New Manhattan Core Parking Study is Released

2011-12-16T14:46:00.000-08:00

Here is a link to the New Manhattan Core Parking Study. Here is the description from the website:

In 1982, in the context of the Clean Air Act and national and local concerns about deteriorating air quality, the City of New York adopted pioneering rules to manage the supply of off-street parking in Manhattan’s Central Business District. The 1982 Manhattan Core parking zoning amendments sought, in the words of the City Planning Commission’s report, “to institute land use controls over off-street parking which are consistent with environmental policies and sensitive to the concerns of business and development interests in the City.” While the 1982 amendments recognized the continuing need for limited amounts of parking for vehicles associated with services, business, culture, and entertainment as well as residents, the strictest limits were reserved for public parking. It was anticipated that these limits, together with the redevelopment of sites with parking lots and garages, would, over time, reduce the overall number of public parking spaces and that with fewer parking spaces available, fewer motor vehicles would enter Manhattan’s most traffic-congested areas. These regulations continue to be in effect today in Community Districts 1 through 8, comprising Manhattan below 96th Street on the East Side and 110th Street on the West Side. This area is referred to as the “Manhattan Core” in the New York City Zoning Resolution and includes some of the City’s most populous neighborhoods, major institutions, parks and transit hubs, and the City’s primary Central Business District (CBD), defined as Manhattan below 60th Street.

The most significant change in the 1982 parking regulations was a shift from minimum parkingrequirements for new residential development to maximum parking allowances for parking spaces that are limited to residents of the development, known as accessory spaces. Before 1982, off-street parking was mandatory in residential development in the Manhattan Core; since 1982, accessory parking is optional and subject to strict limits on the amount of parking that can be provided – no more than 20 percent of the number of residential units in Community Districts 1 through 6 and no more than 35 percent of units in Community Districts 7 and 8. Accessory parking for other uses is also subject to maximums, and the total number of spaces provided in a development is capped at no more than 225 spaces for any mix of uses. Under the 1982 regulations, only new developments and enlargements may incorporate parking, whereas prior to 1982 the creation of new parking in existing buildings was allowed as-of-right. In addition, the 1982 regulations require special permits for accessory parking exceeding the maximums as well as for new parking in existing buildings and for all public parking facilities. New surface public parking lots are prohibited in prime commuter areas such as Lower Manhattan and Midtown except by special permit.

Looking back after almost 30 years, these regulations have proven to be compatible with a growing, successful Manhattan Core. They allow limited amounts off-street parking to be provided with new development and allow some developments to provide additional parking by special permit. In doing so, the Manhattan Core regulations strike a balance between discouraging auto commuting in a highly traffic-congested part of the city where transit access and walkability are excellent while recognizing that the need for off-street parking remains even when auto commuting is restrained.

However, certain deficiencies in the existing regulations have become apparent over the years since 1982, as has the need for additional data to better understand how off-street parking is utilized within the Manhattan Core. In 2008, with the assistance of a Federal grant, the Department of City Planning launched a study to collect data about off-street parking in the Manhattan Core and to use that information in assessing the zoning regulations. Much of this research was conducted through a survey of users of over 100 public parking facilities. The Manhattan Core Public Parking Study contains the results of that survey and detailed analysis of Census and other data as well as policy goals for a possible update of the regulations.

The 2012 Alternate Side Parking Suspension Calendar is a Model of Urban Diversity and Religious Tolerance

2011-12-15T13:46:00.000-08:00

Behold the days in 2012 that New York City will suspend alternate side parking rules. This is what diversity looks like in the form of suspended parking regulations, because all New Yorkers, regardless of what language they speak or faith they follow, really hate moving their cars for street cleaning. Also available in Chinese (not sure of the dialect), Haitian Creole, Italian, Korean, Russian and Spanish.

If Your Forecasts are Always Wrong, Should You Stop Making Forecasts?

2011-12-14T10:28:00.000-08:00

Engineers and planners are regularly tasked with predicting the future. Prediction exercises are useful for thinking about what facilities and investment we need in the future. Prediction exercises are also invariably wrong. Errors occur because trends change, preferences evolve, external forces intervene and/or models are flawed. In transportation and land use planning, these errors lead to permanent changes in our cities, often for the worse, yet no one is held accountable for these errors. Prediction error is not limited to transportation, however. Here is a link to an engineer who laments the limits of his work. (h/t David Levinson) And here is an op-ed in New Scientist arguing that economic prediction models have much to learn from meteorology. This sounds promising as the weatherman is never wrong.

But here is something we can learn from weather forecasters. Two prominent hurricane forecasters have quit making long range forecasts because the forecasts are always wrong. They will only do near term forecasts. From the Ottawa Citizen:

OTTAWA — Two top U.S. hurricane forecasters, famous across Deep South hurricane country, are quitting the practice of making a seasonal forecast in December because it doesn’t work.
William Gray and Phil Klotzbach say a look back shows their past 20 years of forecasts had no predictive value.
The two scientists from Colorado State University will still discuss different probabilities of hurricane seasons in December. But the shift signals how far humans are, even with supercomputers, from truly knowing what our weather will do in the long run.
Colorado State has been known for decades for forecasts of how many named storms and hurricanes can be expected each official hurricane season (which runs from June to November.)
Last week, the pair made this announcement:
“We are discontinuing our early December quantitative hurricane forecast for the next year … Our early December Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts of the last 20 years have not shown real-time forecast skill even though the hindcast studies on which they were based had considerable skill.”
The two will still make the traditional forecasts closer to hurricane season.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly said they were stopping all forecasts.

I think this is a promising approach and can be applied to transportation systems. If your long-range forecasts are always flawed, the best solution may be to stop making long-range forecasts.

Adapting to Climate Change: Tea and Olives are Now British Crops

2011-12-11T12:35:00.001-08:00

Britain is known for tea, but until now tea has always been an imported product. Thanks to the magic of a warming planet--or at least a warming Cornwall, British farmers have developed tea crops. They grew over 10 tons this year. From this story:

London - British farmers are experimenting with crops such as olives and nectarines which have traditionally been imported from southern Europe while the first British tea plantation has opened with a changing climate set to transform the nation's countryside.
Flowers will bloom early and crops will be harvested sooner as Britain marches towards what the government describes as a “wetter and warmer” UK.
Britain's first tea plantation has opened in Cornwall in south-west England, the country's warmest region and the centre of much of the current crop experimentation.
“We had an opportunity when temperatures in Cornwall turned warmer and we started a farm in 1999 but we had our first harvest in 2005 and our yield has improved every year,” said Jonathan Jones, commercial director at the Tregothnan Estate.
Tregothnan now grows 22 varieties of tea and is expecting a record harvest in excess of 10 tons this year. The estate has also been experimenting with growing edible flowers.
Mark Diacono, a farmer in neighbouring Devon has been trying to grow a wide array of crops including olives, pecans, szechuan pepper and apricots and also lists vineyard on what he calls “climate change farm” on his website.
“I just made a list of all the foods I liked, knocked out all the things others grow perfectly well locally or are cheaply available. I researched and found out that some that had not been grown here before might be possible given new varieties and climate change... so I planted,” Diacono told Reuters.

Climate change doesn't get all of the credit, as seed technologies have improved as well. But this linked story highlights a difficult issue for the politics of climate change, which is that some areas will be made better off while many will be certainly much worse off:

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Britain's farming and environment ministry, said his department was closely monitoring the impact climate change was having on crops.
“There is no question that climate change will have significant effect on crops. Climate change might be beneficial for the UK at least because we will have a larger growing period with shorter winters and earlier springs,” Watson said.
“By 2050, the impact will largely be positive for crop growers but that will depend on where you are in the UK.”
Watson cautioned, however, that climate change does also raises serious concerns for a country such as Britain that relies heavily on food imports.
“If we take the world as a whole, with an increase of 2-3 degrees the overall impact will be negative. We are 65 percent food sufficient and the rest 35 percent is imported, mostly from Europe,” he said.
“So far, the supplies have been secure but the question is will the international markets be a secure food source? And at the same time, with the economic growth in China and India, will they push hard for increased food supply?

So the news is still bad overall. But it is worth noting that Britain now has a domestic tea crop for the first time ever. Maybe Port will be next.

Commuter Subsidies and Tax Expenditures

2011-12-10T05:29:00.001-08:00

Ron Lieber writes about the commuter tax expenditures in today's NY Times. He calls them benefits and tax breaks, but they are accurately called tax expenditures, or government spending through the tax code. Lieber rightly points out that the current expenditures favor drivers and that the potential transit expenditures are set to get cut by about half starting next year. Here is a previous post of mine about this.
What I learned from the story is a bit of history of the program. Senator Daniel Patrick Moyninhan lead the Senate in demanding the high parking tax expenditures:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late New York senator, led the charge on the changes. The senator’s concern, according to Mr. Filler, was that eliminating the parking tax break might cause some workers to find jobs closer to their suburban homes, thus putting city employers in his and his Capitol Hill colleagues’ states or districts at a disadvantage.

Lieber continues:

At an economic moment like the one we’re in today, the idea that people would switch jobs because of the loss of a parking garage tax subsidy seems rather quaint. But whatever the soundness of the logic, rules at the time required legislators and policy makers to pay for all new tax breaks in full. So in an effort to appease subsidy-happy drivers, lawmakers figured out what the average monthly parking rates were and tested the resulting $155 figure. What they found was that capping the monthly benefit at that level would bring in enough new taxes from the formerly untaxed parking subsidy to pay for a $60 public transportation benefit.

I'm not sure what is quaint about the idea that parking affects people's location decisions. These folks could get subsidized to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars a month! That's a lot of wool, as the kids said in the days when Moyninhan was a kid saying colloquial things.

The troubling issue is Moyninhan's fear that people might work closer to home if they didn't get subsidized parking. Not only have jobs and households continued to suburbanize, having people work near home should be encouraged. These expenditures are also tilted toward the wealthy, so we can't really argue that they are equity enhancing. It does seem that if the government is going to spend so much on transit investment it should at least have consistent complementary policies to encourage transit usage.

What Ever Happened to the People Mover? Or, How Federal Priorities Shape Local Transportation Investment

2011-12-08T13:20:00.001-08:00

Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities writes about the downtown people movers that were once seen as the future of urban transport. The link is here. From the story:

The "downtown people mover" is an automated, driverless transit car that most people, such as Lyle Lanley, would call a monorail. The monorail will end up an asterisk in the annals of urban transport, but there was a brief moment in history when it was the next great thing. In mid-1970s, at the peak of its potential, nearly 70 cities wrote the government expressing interest in building an automated transit system. In the end only three were completed.

The "peak of its potential" is a bit misleading, however. From later in the story:

In the early 1970s, several airports embraced this type of technology. But cities didn't give it serious consideration. Congress was ticked, so it did what it often does when upset: issued another report [PDF]. This one urged the government to encourage urban automated transport projects through capital grants issued to suitable applicants. Sixty-eight cities replied with interest in this Downtown People Movers program, and 38 submitted full-blown proposals.

But the start of the Reagan administration brought with it a reduction in federal support for people movers, and in the end only three were completed: in Miami, Detroit, and Jacksonville.

The promise of federal money created the demand for 68 projects and 38 proposals at a time transit systems were suffering from disinvestment and rapidly declining ridership. The Detroit People Mover is now in danger of shutting down as it strains public budgets. The Miami service still operates, but overall people movers were examples of technological fetishes that favor specific modes rather than actual service improvements or improving transit service for users.

Technological fetishes are common, and too often federal dollars generate demand for technology rather than improved mobility and access. The U.S. is now going through a "streetcar revival." The US DOT claims that streetcars will lead to more mobility and more jobs. First the jobs:

One important benefit of America's streetcar revival is the return of domestic streetcar manufacturing and the jobs that industry will create. The Tucson project, for example, has already ordered cars from theOregon Iron Works. And Rockwell Automation, in Wisconsin, has engineered the first domestic streetcar propulsion technology in a generation. Three other US companies have expressed interest in manufacturing girder rail for streetcar systems. I think you'll agree that a new segment of American manufacturing is a very promising development.

I'm not wild about using transportation planning as industrial policy, but that's what is happening here. By justifying streetcars as a manufacturing issue we have to keep building streetcar systems to support the industry. Considering the precarious state of federal funding for transit, no one should count on permanent growth for this sector. This Inhabitat post helps explain why we are going through a streetcar revival:

Urban greenies across the US may finally get what they desire — streetcar lines in their home cities. Due to a change in federal transportation policy under President Obama, 22 American cities are reportedly considering building or expanding streetcar lines. Not only would the streetcar construction help revitalize many American cities, it could promote greater adoption of public transit and decrease reliance on cars.

When Obama took office, the administration made it easier for cities to obtain federal funds in order to build or expand streetcar lines. This past February, the Department of Transportation gave grants to Tucson, Detroit, Dallas, New Orleans and Portland to create new streetcar lines. A total of 22 US cities are reportedly considering streetcars, including Los Angeles, Baltimore and Atlanta, among other towns. If the cities secure funding, construction could start within the next year or two.

In the past few years the number of cities pursuing streetcars increased from one or two locally financed projects (including yet another Detroit project) to dozens because of federal preferences for the technology. The only reason there is a revival is because the US government is paying for it, not because transit riders are demanding it. Riders want better service to where they want and need to go and are much less concerned with the modal technology.

Going back to the US DOT post, there is this claim:

Streetcars foster livability. They connect urban destinations and spur redevelopment of urban spaces into walkable mixed use, high-density communities. Transportation projects like streetcars spark America’s neighborhoods into become safer, healthier and more vibrant. In fact, in several cities, streetcars are reviving some of the very same neighborhoods they once helped create.

Transportation can't be all things to all people, and I say that as someone who really likes transportation and thinks everything has a transportation angle. I wish transit investment had magical properties to create jobs, revitalize US manufacturing, create high density communities and spark safer, healthier and vibrant neighborhoods. But it doesn't, at least not as a primary cause. (Does anyone else still consider that travel is largely derived demand? This characteristic of travel is ignored in the political fights over transport investment.) If transit investment was a magical as the US DOT says it is, then there is no reason that the US DOT needs to set priorities and provide funding*. If transportation and transit was as transformative as claimed, then cities and states should have no problem paying for new projects. Ultimately, however, transportation investment (transit or otherwise) simply redistributes economic activity rather than create new economic activity**.

But in the end, many of these streetcar projects will make traffic congestion and pollution worse by operating in mixed-traffic***, offer slow travel speeds (due to the congestion) and further strain transit agencies operating budgets and shift resources away from buses and other existing services. As for walkable, mixed-use, high-density communities, you don't need transit investment for those. Cities just have to change the zoning code (there are many ways to do this) and lenders have to finance the projects.

Federal funding can help overcoming status quo bias by offering other peoples money to finance new projects. But by attaching modal technologies to funding the US government only ensures that cities will apply for the favored technologies rather than making investments that make the most sense in a local context. People movers, commuter rail, light rail, streetcars, and maybe high speed rail have all had their time in the sun thanks to federal involvement. The Interstates were jammed through cities in part because of federal involvement. Even the reviled Robert Moses was after Interstates because of the federal money attached to them. (Remember, he couldn't toll the Interstates directly so they didn't increase the wealth of his fiefdom except through construction.)

Overall, federal involvement distorts transport investment in ways that should make auto enthusiasts and transit advocates queasy. I suspect that federal involvement in transport investment has peaked, but as long as federal dollars come with strings attached we will still pursue the latest incarnation of the people mover as preferences change. I really hope that the next trend isn't pod cars.

*For instance, if California high speed rail is as special as the promoters say it is then it would be irresponsible for California not to build it and there shouldn't be any need for any type of federal subsidy. You could just charge each of the expected 60 million California residents to pony up their contribution of $1,600 each to build the system, plus the cost of tickets.

** For instance, current practice in the UK for evaluating high speed rail is to assume the net effect on the real economy of high speed rail investment is zero. This reflects that activities will shift around the country but new activity will not likely materialize. The UK government assumes that transport investment only affects the the location, not scale or efficiency, of economic activity. See David Banister and Mark Thurstain-Goodwin (2010) "Quantification of the non-transport benefits resulting from rail investment," Journal of Transport Geography. David Banister has written other articles and books about this issue.

**See Re´my Prud’homme, MartinKoning, and PierreKopp (2011) "Substituting a tramway to a bus line in Paris : Costs and benefits," Transport Policy 18, pp. 563-572. Not only did traffic get worse, CO2 emissions increased. The effects were not uniformly spread across the Paris region, however. Some areas improved, but the net effect was negative.

Go Read Urban Magazine: The Zoning Issue

2011-12-05T11:21:00.001-08:00

Students from Columbia University's Urban Planning Program publish Urban magazine and have produced an excellent new edition that focuses entirely on zoning. Since the 1961 New York Zoning Resolution turns 50 this year, New York planners have spent a lot of time thinking about the potential and limitations of zoning. In the magazine there are articles on how zoning works and many pieces on specific aspects and consequences of zoning.
You can read the edition here:
http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/urbanmagazine/files/2011/12/Fall2011_ONLINE.pdf

There are three articles I want to highlight, though the entire magazine is impressive. First, Eric Goldwyn explains how Zuccotti Park came to be through innovation in the zoning code that created privately owned public spaces. The second article is by Sara Beth Rosenberg, and she writes about the long history of vending from metered parking spaces. This may sound mundane, but the city is struggling to enforce parking regulations as businesses are setting up shop curbside. Curb parking is the best real estate deal in New York and metered spaces are now used by food trucks, delivery vehicles, shipping companies and other commercial users. These uses bring many of the externalities that the zoning code sought to minimize.

The third article of note is "Density is not Destiny" by Jake Schabas. Jake challenges the perceived importance of density for robust transit service. Using examples from Zurich and elsewhere, he makes the case that service quality matters more than planners generally think. He also nicely summarizes the decline of U.S. transit systems in the middle of last century and why there wasn't a grand conspiracy against transit.

Toyota Presents the Future of Cars and the Craziest Parking Structure Ever

2011-12-05T09:55:00.001-08:00

Check out this video to see the future of cars from Toyota:

Click to the 3:40 mark to check out the crazy future of parking structures.

New Adventures in Security Theater

2011-12-04T09:22:00.001-08:00

Airport screenings in the U.S. are inefficient, inequitable*, and rightly criticized for being "security theater" more than actual security.** Anyway, Glacier International Airport in Montana took the theater aspects seriously and produced the following video. I suppose this is supposed to make security easier and less traumatic (and funny! Don't forget to joke with the TSA agents because they love it when travelers make jokes!), but airport security looks extra ridiculous after watching this:

*The most inequitable part of airport security is the extra line that first and business class passengers get to use. Those people don't pay for that privilege. Airport screening is paid for through a flat fee that everybody pays. Everybody pays the same amount for security so everyone should get the same security treatment. And members of Congress should be required to wait in the long line. Every time I've seen a Senator or Representative (probably about six or eight total) in a TSA line they have been ushered to the first class line.

**James Fallows highlights the Department of Fear's recent poll to rename the awful sounding Department of Homeland Security here. Here is the DOF's post about it. The winning naming idea was to just name the department after the highest bidder. Sounds about right.

An $800,000 Parking Space in Manhattan's Suburban Neighborhood of Chelsea

2011-12-03T08:13:00.001-08:00

Glauco Lolli-Ghetti lives in an 11th-floor apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. His unit has a parking space which happens to be in him living room. Here is the NYTimes story, and some explanation:

Mr. Lolli-Ghetti has one of the world’s most expensive parking spaces, a costly talking point in a city where residents spend dearly to shelter their cars. His three-bedroom apartment at 200 11th Avenue — now on the market for $7 million — includes a 300-square-foot “en suite sky garage” that would be valued at more than $800,000 if priced at the same rate per square foot as the rest of the apartment.
It is not the parking spot in the sky attracting buyers to the new 19-story building at 24th Street, Mr. Lolli-Ghetti says, but the Hudson River panorama, the floor-to-ceiling windows and the thousands of square feet of space. Still, the sky garages in the building, which was designed by Annabelle Selldorf, are what has drawn the most attention.
“This is about as close to a suburban home that you can achieve in an urban area like New York,” he said. “You walk out your door and three steps later you’re in your garage.”

Yep, one of the things that attracts residents to Manhattan is the suburban feel. I will also note that street parking outside of this building is free.

Is this a trend? We don't know, but other buildings are doing this:

Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel Appraisers said there was no rule of thumb for how much a parking spot adds to the value of an apartment.

“It was clearly a marketing hook,” he said. “It doesn’t mark the beginning of a trend.”

Despite the building’s delayed opening — it was originally set for completion in 2009 — there are signs that the concept may hold some appeal, at least at the top end of the market. Last month, plans for a 57-story building in Miami Beach with apartment parking were approved. The project, a joint effort of the Porsche Design Group and a local developer, suggests that there are wealthy drivers who will pay for the privilege of pulling up directly to their front door.

In any event, there aren't very many people who can afford $800,000 for a parking space so if it is a trend it won't be a national craze.

Two Trends in Auto Ownership

2011-12-02T07:09:00.001-08:00

The Wall Street Journal has two stories today (both gated) about trends in auto ownership. The first (link here) is about the decline of auto ownership in Japan. The intro:

You wouldn't know it from the buzz ahead of this weekend's Tokyo Motor Show, but Japan has fallen out of love with cars.
The country's domestic auto sales have fallen in eight of the past 10 years. Demographics are part of the reason—the population is shrinking while more people are living in cities and riding public transit.

The second story is about the resurgent sales of SUVs in the US. From this story:

The sport-utility vehicle is making a comeback.
After being largely shunned during the recession, high-riding SUVs and workhorse pickups are regaining favor as U.S. consumers grow more confident and fuel prices remain below the $4 a gallon level that triggered a shift away from larger vehicles.
The rebound was clear Thursday as U.S. auto sales in November hit a 13.6 million annual pace, the strongest in more than two years, with sales of trucks and SUVs surpassing cars at many auto makers. The results are boosting Detroit auto makers that suffered when gas-guzzlers got the cold shoulder in 2008.

There are two distinct trends in these stories. The first is that there is a shift away from auto ownership for many people, not just in Japan, and primarily younger people. We do not know precisely why this is occurring, but it likely has more to do with the cost of autos than the provision of transit. Cars are expensive, especially for a generation whose income has not increased much over the past twenty years. The other trend is that there really isn't much evidence that US consumers are turning toward small cars when they decide to buy cars. I've posted about this before. Americans may be driving less, and fewer may be buying cars, but when they do buy cars they still like big ones.

Sixty Percent of Mall Parking Spaces are Empty, Which is Good News Apparently

2011-11-27T06:38:00.001-08:00

I may be the only person who was eagerly waiting for this year's press release about Black Friday sales from Remote Sensing Metrics, but my wait is over! Remote Sensing Metrics is a company that uses satellite images to count occupied parking spaces at mall and big box retailers to estimate expected sales. This year the company counted parked cars and thinks the holiday shopping season will be comparable with last year because parking lots were almost 40% full on early November weekends. That's great. Over 60% of parking spaces--required by minimum parking requirements in the zoning code--are empty, and that's good news. Egads! From the press release:

Remote Sensing Metrics reported today that measurements of car traffic at US malls on the weekends leading up to Black Friday were running even with last year and encouragingly above 2008 or 2009 levels.
On the last Saturday in October mall parking lot traffic grew 11% above 2010 with lots at 39% full versus 35% last year. 2008 and 2009 saw lots at 37% and 29% full respectively.
Parking lots were 38% full on the first Saturday of November 2011, matching last year’s fill rate, while 2008 and 2009 saw depressed levels of 27% and 23%.
Shoppers took a bit of a breather two weekends prior to Black Friday as car traffic for November 12th, 2011 dropped to 27%, which was a 7% decrease versus 2010’s 29% average fill rate. On the same Saturday in 2008 and 2009 lots were 26% and 31% full respectively.
Big increases in retail traffic are normally seen starting on the Saturday prior to Black Friday weekend. In 2010, malls were over 40% full for the first time since 2007.

This business exists because we require way too much parking to be built and all of it is free to the driver (To be clear, I don't fault the business for identifying an opportunity to collect and sell these data.). Everybody should be offended and outraged that over 60% of required parking spaces are unused almost all the time. Sure, the spaces may be full on a few shopping days per year, but that does not mean that acres of empty parking lots is a reasonable use of land on the other hundreds of days annually.

Should Chicago Get Kicked Out of Illinois?

2011-11-23T08:59:00.001-08:00

Two Republican legislators in Illinois propose kicking Chicago out of the state:

DECATUR — Two Republican Illinois lawmakers say Chicago-style politics are dominating the state and they have a solution.
State Reps. Bill Mitchell of Forsyth and Adam Brown of Decatur have proposed separating Cook County from Illinois and creating a 51st state.
WAND-TV in Decatur reports the representatives held a press conference Tuesday in Decatur to talk about their proposal.
Brown said Chicago is overshadowing the rest of the state. Mitchell says families in other parts of the state believe Chicago is “dictating its views.”
They’ve proposed Cook County, which is the second most populous county in the U.S., to become one state and the other 101 counties in Illinois to become another.

I like this idea, but I also think the two dudes proposing this have it wrong. I expect that because of the concentrated wealth and value in the city Chicago (Cook County) would be likely be better off and the rest of the state would be worse off if this happened. I also suspect that investment decisions and urban policy would improve because Chicago wouldn't have to appease rural constituents. Rahm Emanuel should take up this challenge. It's potentially a natural experiment for public choice economics.

Various Parking Links of Interest

2011-11-23T05:46:00.001-08:00

I missed this last week, but the NY Times had an op-ed by Alan Draper who argues that alternative side parking holidays in New York City foster cultural and religious compassion and understanding. The link is here. From the op-ed:

EUROPE can’t seem to cope with diversity. Controversies over head scarves in France, police brutality in Britain, minarets in Switzerland, and the success of xenophobic right-wing parties in Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium, reveal the depths of the challenge.
As European countries try to integrate immigrants from Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, they have found the transition from a homogeneous society to a multicultural one painful. The economic fallout from the euro zone debt crisis is likely to make assimilation even harder.
In its search for solutions, Europe would do well to look to the streets — of New York City. Seriously.
The city’s alternate-side parking calendar, which sets out the holidays when street-cleaning rules are suspended (so drivers don’t have to move their cars), is actually a model for managing the challenges of diversity.
Over decades, the calendar has grown to include numerous holidays that are sacred to various religions. And we’re not just talking Passover and Good Friday, Yom Kippur and Christmas. There’s Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha for Muslims; the Solemnity of the Ascension, the Feast of the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception for Roman Catholics; and a raft of Jewish holidays from Shavuot and Succoth to Shemini Atzeret and Simhat Torah. The parking rules are also suspended on certain cultural holidays, like the Asian Lunar New Year, Rosh Hashana and Diwali, the South Asian festival of lights.
Observing these holidays — even if only for the purpose of street cleaning — is not just a symbolic way of acknowledging religious and cultural pluralism. Their existence on the alternate-side calendar alongside civic and legal holidays, like Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents’ Day, Labor Day and Thanksgiving, when schools and government buildings are closed, helps to normalize the idea of diversity.

Here is a letter to the editor in praise of the op-ed:

I couldn’t agree more that suspending alternate-side parking for the holidays of different religions recognizes diversity. My brother and I have used the parking calendar since our days at Columbia College, and for us it has developed into a bow to many religious holidays.
Recently, my brother called to wish me “Happy Id-al Fitr” (the end of Ramadan for Muslims), and I didn’t have to move my car. That same day, a Muslim patient came into my office, and I wished him the same. He has wished my a “Happy Shavuot,” my Jewish holiday (a biblical pilgrimage festival).
And we didn’t have to move our cars on either holiday. We both marveled at parking and peace in New York.

Perhaps parking regulations are the key to world peace.

The other neat parking link is from Streetsblog, where they are asking readers to send in examples of parking structures degrading the pedestrian environment. Click through for nice photos and discussion.

An Overview of Our Bit City Conference

2011-11-22T14:17:00.001-08:00

Alley Lyles, one of Columbia's fine Urban Planning students, wrote a nice overview of the Bit City Conference we hosted earlier this month. Read all about it at Untapped New York or click this link.

How Transportation Policy Gets Made

2011-11-22T07:45:00.000-08:00

Congressman’s War Hero Son Would Have Wanted Highway Bill Passed

Rethinking Transit Services

2011-11-18T16:16:00.001-08:00

Lisa Margonelli wrote a nice piece in the NY Times that highlights some new ideas about transit provision that includes some of my current research. Link is here. Here is the exciting part of the story where I get to see my name in the local paper:

But transportation does not have to be a public enterprise, as an example on the extreme urban side of the spectrum has shown: The hundreds of private “dollar vans” that zip around the streets of Brooklyn and Queens looking for passengers offer an intriguing model of transit that meets customers’ needs because drivers are the owners and operators of the vans. While many of these vans are legal and insured to carry passengers, some are not, and all of them suffer from archaic laws that prohibit them from picking up passengers at curbs. Trundling down Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue, Winston Williams’s Ford 350 van is worlds away from rural Maine. Like Williams, most of his passengers this weekday morning are former residents of Caribbean islands where jitney-style vans provide cheap transit, and they’re familiar with the ritual of flagging down vans and paying two dollars to ride. Williams’s company, Blackstreet Van Lines, runs eight vans, collecting hundreds of people a day. One morning as I ride with Williams, he talks about business ideas — expanding routes to carry hipsters places where subways are inconvenient, branding vans to build a presence, putting advertising on the vans to increase profits. The biggest hurdle to increasing ridership, he says, is resolving the legality of the whole fleet — both legalizing pickups and eliminating the unpermitted vans.
Legal issues aside, private vans provide services no public system could support, says David King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University. The concentration of vans along Flatbush means that sometimes there’s a van every minute, so riders don’t have to wait. Sometimes they’ll take a mother and child to daycare and then wait at the curb while the mother walks the child up to the door of the facility — something a city bus would never do. Always on the lookout for customers, the drivers make routes where customers don’t have other options. A van between Chinatowns in Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, for instance, can take as little as 20 minutes when the subway would take over an hour. King says that he sees potential to enhance transit options for everyone by incorporating dollar van type services.
For one thing, dollar vans quickly learn passengers’ desired routes, like traveling between Chinatowns. This sort of knowledge could help public transit planners design systems that keep up with riders’ real needs. Dollar vans’ ability to scale up dramatically intrigues King. “According to our estimates, the dollar vans are carrying 120,000 riders a day in New York, which makes them the country’s 20th largest bus system.”

Lisa will write part two of this series next week. I'll have more to say about these issues over the next few weeks.

Livestreaming Bit City 2011 Today. It's not too late to participate

2011-11-04T05:30:00.000-07:00

If you can't make today's Bit City Conference, we are livestreaming the event here: http://bitcityconference.org/
We are taking questions for the panelists via Twitter: #bitcity #wood11411 @Bit_City @dk2475

Thoughts on "Goldilocks Density" and Pedestrian Oriented Development

2011-11-03T06:34:00.000-07:00

Lloyd Alter at Treehugger posted a piece that challenges the current infatuation with density that is popular among urbanists these days. Part of the pro-density support stems from perceived environmental advantages of density realized through carbon emission reductions. In his piece, Alter argues that the Glaeserian approach to density--which is essentially all density is good, should be encouraged and a city of skyscrapers will be economically, culturally and environmentally beneficial-- is incomplete or wrong. Alter argues that transportation is a larger influence on emissions.

Here is a famous graph from Newman and Kenworthy that many scholars use to support the idea that density is green:

and here is what Alter says about it:

Glaeser, Owen, Alex Steffen and a lot of other people point to this now famous graph from UNEP, which plots energy consumption against density, to demonstrate that New York's density makes it greener than any place in America. Except it doesn't; New York in fact isn't dense at all (Manhattan is, but that is only one of five boroughs) it is just spiky, at 2050 people per square kilometer. Surprisingly, Los Angeles is denser, at 2750 people per square kilometer. Paris is 50% denser and it is pretty much six stories high throughout.
In fact the more you look at this graph, the screwier it is. Sure you have Hong Kong at one end and Houston at the other, but in the middle nothing is clear. Teeny Australian cities are not dense at all but consume less energy per capita. Copenhagen is barely denser than New York and uses a quarter the energy per capita. The longer you look at it, the less convincing it is.
Density is in my opinion, ends up being almost completely irrelevant. What matters is how you get around in your cities, not how tall the buildings are.

Alter is right about transportation. There are green benefits from density, and there are economic benefits from commercial density of certain types of firms and industries (contra to Ryan Avent's claims in The Gated City there isn't any evidence or theory that supports the idea that residential density drives regional economic growth). However, transportation is the largest source of environmental damage. Alter makes another point worth highlighting because he sort of glosses over the full importance of it. Alter writes:

Our road systems, our highways, all designed for one thing: to let people use a couple of tons of steel powered by a tankful of gasoline to move a few pounds of flesh between two points. And while it is true that people do this less in Manhattan than they do in Los Angeles, it has nothing to do with density and everything to do with walkability.

The point to highlight is walkability. We tend to plan public transportation through technological fetishes. (For instance: light rail transit, streetcars, commuter rail, high speed rail, etc.) New systems are often built speculatively in conjunction with land use regulatory changes and an expectation that people residential and commercial activity will follow and ridership will appear. Now that we have been building new systems and promoting land development for a couple of decades we are starting to understand what effects have occurred. I'll quote from a piece by Sam Staley in Planetizen this past August to summarize the evidence:

For a while now, I've wondered if we have been mislabeling the development around well functioning transit stops as transit-oriented developments (TODs). This may seem odd, because numerous studies have shown that property values can increase by 20% to 40% percent around transit stops, particularly rail stations (although the increases are uneven).
The beginnings of my skepticism began when I started looking at transit ridership at these stations. For example, a quick look at boardings at Dallas light rail stations finds little, if any, relationship between transit ridership and investment around the station (see slide 7). Arecent study (February 2011) of more than 200 TODs in California by the Public Policy Institute of California found no evidence that they boosted employment. (See also this study of Atlanta MARTA stations in the Journal of Urban Economics.) And, more tellingly, a survey of residents in Portland, Oregon by sociologist Bruce Podobnik at Lewis & Clark College found that residents of the New Urbanist TOD Orenco Station utilized transit more than conventional suburbs, but not any more than older Portland neighborhoods. In fact, most residents (two-thirds or more) continue to use their car to get to work rather than transit. Moreover, transit use has actually declined as a share of commuting trips in recent years (see Table 5).
So, what explains the increase in property values?
I believe it's the pedestrian access. The accessibility provided by density and mixed uses generates the value around these stations areas, not the transit access per se (and hence the mislabeling). In short, these stations areas are Pedestrian-Oriented Developments (PODs), not TODs. Indeed, Podobnik's survey of Orenco Station residents hints at this. In Table 5, 50 percent of survey respondents in Orenco said they walk to stores or shops five times a week or more (up from 11 percent five years earlier).

What we are seeing, and what Alter suggests in his Treehugger piece, is that walkability is where we should be focusing our efforts. Density is fine but not necessary, and too much density may be undesirable for many people. Transit is nice but unlikely to be much more than a niche market in the US, at least the way transit agencies are organized now. Since no city pursues transit oriented development policies without the transit component, we don't really know if denser, walkable communities will work. But it is much cheaper to pursue Pedestrian Oriented Development than Transit Oriented Development or unlimited density development.

There are additional benefits to POD. The largest one relates to planning and designing transit networks. Rather than the current approach of speculative transit construction in an attempt to lure new "choice" riders who will live in a new development in the future to commute by transit, we can re-orient out approach to improve transit in areas where people who will use it already are. Considering that commuting is about 20% of total travel, large investments focused on commute travel will have smaller potential environmental benefits than focusing on non-work travel. And the folks in the PODs are already reducing auto trips for non-work travel.

The other main benefit to POD is that it is completely under local control to change the zoning code. Cities don't have to wait for uncertain state and federal subsidies to encourage pedestrian oriented developments. Shifting planning policy to pedestrian orientation can happen quickly (not that it will) and locally, and likely deliver large benefits at low cost. What's not to like?

Goodbye to the NRP, One of My Favorite Local Finance Programs

2011-11-02T14:07:00.000-07:00

On January 1 of next year the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program will shut down. The StarTribune reports on the changes here. From the story:

For 20 years, a $300 million civic experiment won international plaudits for reshaping Minneapolis from the neighborhoods up. Now the city is preparing for life after the Neighborhood Revitalization Program.
On Jan. 1, the program's director for most of its existence, Bob Miller, will lose his job and the governing board of the quasi-independent NRP will be replaced. The program's functions will be taken over by a new city neighborhoods agency that's part of Mayor R.T. Rybak's administration, but many longtime neighborhood activists think they won't have the same power they wielded for two decades.
"City Hall listened when we had some money to play with, when we said we have $300,000 and we want you to fix this street," said Rita Ulrich, director of the Nokomis East neighborhood group, one of more than 60 funded by NRP. "I'm not sure that they're going to listen when we say we want you to spend $300,000."
In the late 1980s, city leaders worried that the arrival of crack cocaine, the decline in rental housing caused by federal tax law changes and a sense of deterioration would cost the city its middle class.
The Legislature responded by authorizing the NRP, which sent property tax revenue from city development projects to priorities set by neighbors.
Up to $20 million annually went to parks, schools, libraries and, especially, housing.
NRP is credited for fostering the multicultural haven of restaurants on Nicollet Avenue S. known as Eat Street. It allowed a North Side neighborhood to research suspicious property sales, leading to the federal take-down of a vast mortgage fraud ring. It generated thousands of fix-up loans or grants to property owners.

Overall this program was well received and largely worked as hoped. Elena Fagotto and Archon Fung examined the program through the lens of empowered participation in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in an article published in 2006. They found that:

"Although NRP distributed resources to all neighborhoods, from the most deprived to the wealthiest, not all areas received equal amounts. NRP systematically favored disadvantaged neighborhoods through a progressive funding allocation formula that included factors such as neighborhood size, poverty level and dwelling units’ condition."

Here is their conclusion:

"Two elements lay behind NRP’s success: the availability of resources and provisions for continuous resident participation at the neighborhood level. Power and resources were a tremendous stimulus for citizens to mobilize and participate, not only in planning, but also with their ‘sweat equity’ in thousands of volunteer hours. NRP was designed to both require and foster sustained citizen participation. The availability of substantial resources to empower residents’ decisions drew many in Minneapolis to engage in local planning and development decisions. They also used those resources to reinvigorate dozens of associations that connect volunteers and activists to city government. Despite its blemishes, the Minneapolis experience powerfully shows how public resources can be deployed to increase the civic and political engagement of citizens for public purposes."

It is unfortunate that the program will not go on. Certainly some money was wasted in the program (and a lot of murals were painted), but it also gave communities much more input and authority over investment decisions. Minneapolis is also moving away from community involvement over spending just as more cities are looking at participatory budgeting as a strategy for community revitalization and involvement. I don't know that the city will be worse off overall for not having the NRP as they still may invest the same amount, but certain neighborhoods--especially disadvantaged ones-- will certainly be worse off compared with the twenty years of the program.

Fagotto, E. and A. Fung, Empowered Participation in Urban Governance:The Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program. International Journalof Urban and Regional Research, 2006. 30(3):p. 638-655.

Bibiana McHugh Added to Friday's Bit City Conference

2011-11-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

Exciting addition to our Bit City Conference: Bibiana McHugh from Portland's TriMet will present recent work on open data for transportation improvements. Here is some additional info about her work:

The visionary behind Google Transit, TriMet’s Bibiana McHugh is making trip planning easier by improving access to transit data.
Perhaps you plan trips on TriMet’s Interactive Map. Or, maybe you like using your new smartphone to find out when your bus is arriving, or have an app that wakes you up as you approach your MAX station.
One person’s determination has helped make these and other useful tools possible: TriMet’s IT Manager of Geographic Information Systems, Bibiana McHugh.
This smart, data-savvy woman—with the support of the IT Department—has put TriMet “on the map” for our willingness to share transit data.
While traveling abroad in 2005, Bibiana was frustrated that transit information was hard to find online. She came home thinking it should be as easy to plan a transit trip as it is to get driving directions, no matter where you are.
“Our transparency allows people to use our data and develop smart, innovative mobile applications to help riders—at no cost to TriMet.” —Bibiana McHugh
She set out to make that happen. Bibiana contacted Google, Mapquest and Yahoo to see if they were interested. At first, there was no response. But she kept at it, and, eventually, Google responded.
The team went into action, collaborating with Google engineers to make TriMet’s schedule data work with Google Maps.
“We had to boldly go where no transit agency had gone before,” says Bibiana with a quick smile. “As as result, we were the first to share our data and participate with Google Transit, which lets you plan transit trips in Google Maps.” She adds that the great group of people she works with—and TriMet’s commitment to open data—really made it happen.
The Google Transit project not only made trip planning easier for TriMet riders, it was a catalyst for the entire transit industry. Today, nearly 500 agencies participate, giving people all over the world better tools to get around.
But Bibiana didn’t stop there. Since then, her team has made nearly all TriMet data accessible for anyone to use. Schedules, stops, and even real-time arrival information are available for developers on trimet.org.
“Our transparency allows people to use our data and develop smart, innovative mobile applications to help riders—at no cost to TriMet,” says Bibiana.

Conference registration is still open and still free. Come early, stay late. Full details and registration at this link: http://bitcityconference.org/

The Political Acceptability of Toll Roads: Tax All Foreigners Living Abroad

2011-11-01T05:47:00.000-07:00

Jarrett Walker at Human Transit has a post describing Arizona's proposal to institute tolls on I-15 in the NW corner of the state. It's a 30 mile stretch of road, and is drawing opposition. The opposition isn't coming from Arizona, however. It's coming from Utah. The road doesn't actually serve people in Arizona. Walker explains:

Arizona's Interstate 15 segment is later described as being "in the state's northwest corner," but why not state the obvious? It's not connected to the rest of the state, Arizona has no towns on it, and it's frankly a bit hard for Arizona to get to. It's the segment between Mesquite, Nevada and St. George, Utah in this image (click to sharpen):

So if a journalist can't print a map, they could at least clarify that virtually no Arizona residents use this highway, which would be enough to make the politics clear. Arizona's toll-road bid is the opposite in spirit of Virginia's, designed exclusively to soak out-of-state drivers. Given the road's location, and its irrelevance to most Arizonans, the positions of all sides are totally understandable. Would that really spoil the "conflict" that journalism supposedly needs?

What is happening in this situation is the ideal tax for Arizona: tax all foreigners living abroad (a Monty Python line). This is a well known phenomenon in road tolling. David Levinson has written a lot about this, and tolling at states lines was advantageous for many of the small Eastern US states. Here is one piece Levinson has written, and here are more resources.

In the case of Arizona's I-15, since the state bears the negative externalities from the road, plus the land costs, I don't have any trouble with them charging drivers and collecting the revenue. Here is a paper I wrote (with Mike Manville and Donald Shoup) that provides additional details about this. Of course, Arizona has monopoly power in the case of I-15 and there aren't really any substitutes, so if this passes US Congress (it's an Interstate, not a state road) the price will have to be regulated.

Big Day for California High Speed Rail:UPDATED

2011-10-31T15:48:00.000-07:00

Update: Here is a link to the LA Times story on the new California High SPeed Rail Authority report. The cost is now $98.5 billion (estimate when California voters passed Proposition for $9 billion in funding = $43 billion) and the construction time has been extended by 13 years to 2033 from 2020. One new option it to run the entire train on elevated tracks over the 5 freeway between Los Angeles and Bakersfield. See the below video about a similar design in San Jose to see how that might look.

Original post:
November 1 is a big day for California's high speed rail plans. The California High Speed Rail Authority will release a report that will update the business plan for the proposed system. Here is a news report from the Sacramento Bee about what is expected. It will not be surprising if the new report is the beginning of the end for the HSR system. Costs are higher than expected, and private investors are unwilling to invest speculatively in the project. Private investment was supposed to play an enormous role in financing and building the system, but without revenue guarantees there is no interest from the private sector.

Even if the system gets built, it won't be pretty according to this new video (via David Levinson and Systemic Failure):

I doubt anyone will want to live or work anywhere near that infrastructure, especially with trains running every five to ten minutes as promoted by the HSR supporters.

Here is a Pasadena Star News op-ed that is pessimistic about high speed rail but optimistic about higher speed rail.

Tangentially related, here is a story about the struggles of the Ontario airport. A HSR connection will not help the problems detailed.

How the IRS Screws Transit Riders and Rewards Drivers

2011-10-28T06:33:00.000-07:00

It is the season of choosing benefits for 2011 for many people, and that means that we get to pour over details of the commuter benefits section of the IRS tax codes.* For 2011, many transit riders get screwed. In 2010 workers were able to pay for up to $230 per month of transit fares with pre-tax income, thus reducing their taxable wages. There was also a $230 allowance for parking. Starting in 2011, the IRS will only allow $120 in transit fares to be paid with pre-tax income, yet parking remains at $230. See IRS Publication 15-B for details (pdf).

In many cases, and certainly for most low income workers who rely on transit, $120 per month is more than adequate for a transit pass. The lowest income workers are also unlikely to take advantage of the tax break for various reasons, so perhaps this tax change isn't that big of a deal. But for people who rely on commuter rail $120 does not cover there monthly fares. For someone in the New York area, this change in the tax code will cost them about $360 per year in taxes (if they pay about 25% of wages in taxes, which is probably low). Is that enough to change behavior and cause these workers to switch to driving? Perhaps if their employer provides parking. But more importantly, these tax expenditures reflect the misplaced priorities of US transportation policy, which I will summarize in haiku since that seems to be the thing to do this week:

Parking should be free/
Priority to drivers/
Poor alternatives

*It's not obvious to me why we have commuter benefits in the tax code. It seems the value of commuting is that you earn money at a job. No one is making decisions at the margin about whether or not to have a job based on commuter benefits, but people do make locational and transportation decisions based on the distorted economics of these tax-free benefits.

Bit City Conference on November 4

2011-10-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

Bit City: Transportation, Data and Technology in Cities is next week on November 4. The event is free (though please register through this site) and offers a chance to hear leading scholars discuss current research and issues of GPS data, crowd-sourcing, legal issues of privacy and contracts, and how new technology can change the way we approach transportation planning. Please come if you can. If you can't, we will be livestreaming the event. Check the website for details.

Views of the Future

2011-10-27T10:38:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has a new ad promoting its version of the future. (Watch below.) It is striking to me that this future is a lot like the present, just with different gadgets that let us do the same thing we do now marginally better.

How well will Microsoft do in the prediction game? Probably pretty well since they are likely working on all of the ideas they feature. AT&T did really well predicting the future way back in 1993:

And Apple was extremely prophetic in 1987:

But do these views of the future get anyone all that excited? Some of these ideas presented are potentially revolutionary, but most are just doing the same thing a bit better. My larger point, however, is that these visions of the future focus on marginal improvements rather than big ideas. Even though the military is still working on flying cars (get this week's update here and the 1958 update here), the future depicted by technology companies is pretty much a future of going to more meetings, which is not exactly a space-age concept. We're not really even space-age anymore, for that matter.

Here is a bold vision of the future from Disney in the 1950s:

And here is what AASHTO says now:

AASHTO sounds sensible and boring, and will be well served by the productivity gains from Microsoft, I suppose.

So what is exciting for the future? Flying helicopters with your mind, of course! Clever researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed software that allows the user to fly around the Minnesota campus by thinking hard while wearing a special hat. Here is the paper, and video is at this io9.com link. Let's see more views of the future with mind control, autonomous cars and other technologies that fundamentally change the things we do (so we can do different things) instead of marginal improvements of what we already do. After all, we're still waiting for the telecommuting revolution to kick in.

Reinventing the Wheels: Monday Oct 31 at The New School

2011-10-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

On Monday, October 31 I will be presenting at "Reinventing the Wheels: Improving Urban Transport in the Global City." See photo for details, but the panels look great.

If a Bridge is Stolen and No One Notices Does It Make a Sound?

2011-10-07T13:52:00.000-07:00

I think we can all agree that if you steal a bridge and no one notices within an week we probably didn't need the bridge very much. This is (was) evidence of overbuilt infrastructure. At least there is less to take care of now. Click the link for details:

$100K Steel Bridge Dismantled, Stolen From Rural Area - Pittsburgh News Story - WTAE Pittsburgh

Charge Utilities Rent for Disrupting Traffic

2011-10-04T06:11:00.000-07:00

London has a major problem with roadworks, apparently, and there are renewed calls to charge the offending utilities rent for any road lanes taken out of service while performing tasks underground. Christian Wolmar explains:

Back in the early 1990s I remember attending press conferences about
proposed new legislation that would make the utilities pay rent for the
lanes that put out of use, thereby inducing them to carry out the work
faster. To no avail: the utilities protested, blocking any attempt to
enforce the legislation.
Now we are back to the starting line on that idea, with the Government
consulting on “lane rental” and promising legislation. We’re told we might
have a system in place in London by next spring.

This is an interesting idea that seems like it could generate high levels of popular support and real benefits in terms of less disruption and new revenue.

"The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" is Now Online

2011-10-03T14:10:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite planning related films (The Towering Inferno being another) is now available via YouTube. It is still useful for planning techniques and understanding public space. If you haven't seen it you should watch it.

Estimating Value of Time from Choosing to Travel by Acela

2011-10-03T13:16:00.000-07:00

I'm going to Washington, DC this week, so I had to book a ticket to get there. Flying costs about $250, but that doesn't include time and money costs of getting to the airports. Ultimately, flying is too expensive and takes too long so I take the train when I go to the capital once or twice a year. I usually take the Acela, too, but I think I am over-valuing my value of time. Select Northeast Regional trains will get me to DC in 3 hours and 12 minutes for a $78 base fare. The Acela will speed me there in 2 hours and 49 minutes for $222. (Fares are each way.) So I am paying $144 to save 23 minutes (this suggests I would pay $375 to save an hour), a slightly nicer seat and a frustrating wireless experience.

This assumes, of course, that the Acela is on time, which is not always the case. Last time I took the Acela it was 45 minutes late getting to my destination, more than wiping out any time savings, and I was not offered a refund for the extra expense. When I rode the TGV from Paris to Lyon this summer, the train was 45 minutes late and there were nice people waiting on the platform in Lyon with envelopes to use to send in your ticket for a refund. This happens a fair amount with the TGV and they are well equipped to handle it. (Of course, the Japanese Shinkansen was tardy by a cumulative .6 seconds for 2010 so no one worries about refunds there.)

In any event, the Acela premium is steep, and it reflects high values of time (and the fact that someone else is picking up the tab). My train better be prompt!

The Ig Noble Peace Prize Awarded for Crushing Cars Parked in the Bike Lane

2011-09-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

I love the Ig Noble awards. I love them even more now that they awarded the 2011 Ig Noble Peace Prize for this:

PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.

REFERENCE: VIDEO and OFFICIAL CITY INFO

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Arturas Zuokas

Here is an important field experiment in driver safety:

PUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE: John Senders of the University of Toronto, CANADA, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.

REFERENCE: "The Attentional Demand of Automobile Driving," John W. Senders, et al., Highway Research Record, vol. 195, 1967, pp. 15-33. VIDEO

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: John Senders

And since this is a blog post, I'll mention the prize for literature:

LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.

REFERENCE: "How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done," John Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 1996. Later republished elsewhere under the title "Structured Procrastination."

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Colleague Deborah Wilkes accepted the prize on behalf of Professor Perry.

My Monday lecture isn't writing itself.

You can watch the whole ceremony here:

Is NIMBYism a problem for density?

2011-09-29T16:50:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of chatter about the perils of NIMBYismfloating around these days, largely due to Ryan Avent’s recent ebook, The Gated City, and related pieces inthe NY Times and The Atlantic Cities.Avent’s arguments are that density is good for economic health andproductivity, and the reason there isn’t more dense residential development is,in large part, due to NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) that prevents newconstruction. I’m sympathetic to Avent’s arguments, but I’m not sold on hisdiagnoses. The economic literature Avent relies on for his 'density leadsto productivity' arguments measures employment or firm density, not residential.You can have a dense commercial center without dense residential development,and this is an important point because it challenges the NIMBYism premise.

If NIMBYism is preventing dense development, we should seeevidence (not just anecdotes in the local papers) that developers are bringingplans to the city and getting struck down by the local community. Local regulations prevent dense residentialdevelopment, but NIMBYism is not the same as zoning restrictions. Certainlycommunities block drug treatment centers, wind farms and other types of usesall the time, but there is not really much evidence that NIMBYs block residentialdevelopment based on density. So what do we know about NIMBYism and local regulations, and arethey preventing productivity gains by limiting development?

Other than economists, two groups of scholars have exploredthe role of NIMBYs and zoning in preventing development, which are legalscholars and urban planners. One of thebetter known and well regarded legal scholars is William Fischel, who in his2007 book The Homevoter Hypothesisargued that NIMBYism can work itself into long range planning efforts andexcessive local zoning, and these types of effects start to occur when abouttwo-thirds of the households are homeowners. Fischel also points out thatrenters are rarely NIMBYs as they are not overly concerned with maintainingtheir investment because they can simply move if they don’t like the directionof the neighborhood. Homeowners, bycontrast, worry about outcomes that may potentially reduce the value of theirproperties, and these property owners tend to overestimate the likelihood oflousy outcomes. In this sense they are acting rationally to protect their realestate, and Fischel argues that the way to resolve this is to guarantee aminimum value to insure against any losses. (He wrote the book before thehousing market crashed, which was a time pretty much everyone thought homeprices only go up.) Fischel also argues that NIMBYism is equally againstcommercial and residential construction, and his examples largely useopposition to detatched single family homes rather than large apartmentbuildings.

In the scenarios described by Fischel NIMBYism is a problembut can be solved through compensation to those expecting harm. Avent, in the Gated City, argues that the potentialdevelopers should be compensated by those who want to block development.Avent’s solution is unworkable, but Fischel’s turns out to be closer to howNIMBYism actually works. In a 2001 paper in Urban Studies, Anthony Matejczyklooks at how NIMBYism plays out in Saint Paul, Minnesota. What he finds is thatdevelopers and communities tend to cooperate and compromise far more often thanabandon the projects due to opposition. This changes the projects, and maybereduces the size of projects, but hardly prevents any new, dense development.

Jonathan Levine is one of the few scholars who have lookedat developer preferences. In his book ZonedOut he uses data from Boston and Atlanta to model how the zoning codelimits development. He finds that the zoning code is more restrictive thandevelopers prefer in central cities and close-in suburbs. More distant suburbshave zoning that more closely matches developer interests.

So it is really the zoning code and local land useregulations that restrict development more than an active NIMBY opposition. Theorigins of local officials supporting restrictive zoning are important, andunder considered by Avent’s (and others’) critiques. Let’s look at Palo Alto,which Avent uses as a poster for the harmful effects from NIMBYism and an example of potential lost productivity.In the 1960s Palo Alto was growing like crazy, as was the Bay Area, and thenumber of housing units grew by 21 percent during the decade, and most of thatgrowth was between 1965 and 1970 in multi-family units. In 1970 Palo Altocommissioned a report on how to develop the 7,500 acres it acquired ten yearsearlier that sat in the foothills. It was expected that this land would bedeveloped with residential uses, and probably in low-density detached homes.Then three things happened. First, the Ramapodecision occurred, broadening the rights of cities to restrict development. Second,the Palo Alto report came back (years later) with a “no build” option that waseconomically favorable. Prior to this report development was always assumed,and now “no build” is standard operating procedure. Third, Proposition 13 camearound and reduced the ability of local government to raise money through theproperty tax. (Another related phenomenon was that during this period of timethe wounds of urban renewal and heavy fisted, failed development were stillfresh. People legitimately and rightly wanted to prevent that kind ofdevelopment from happening again and viewed real estate developers as theproblem.)

These three occurrences provide ample fodder for restrictingdevelopment. Cities do not actually want too much residential developmentbecause residents are expensive. Kids want to go to school, families expect 24-hourpolice protection, and so on. In addition, restrictions on property taxes makesales and other local option taxes more important. Palo Alto was doing greatwith commercial development associated with Stanford, and any new residentswould reduce their financial health and increase obligations. It should benoted that Palo Alto has been restricting development for decades now and hasdone quite well economically. In any event, broad new powers to restrictgrowth, preservation of open space, limiting the number of expensive residentsand promoting commercial uses all add up to less growth than some may hope, butthese are all perfectly rational bureaucratic decisions that, at least in my opinion,do not amount to NIMBYism. Like Fischel, I expect that opposition can be boughtoff, and this happens all the time through exactions, direct payments to thecommunity, and other compromises. The real menace is regulations and decadesold incentive structures that distort the zoning choices public officials make.And where NIMBYism is problematic, the effects are often quite local as densedevelopment can occur elsewhere in the city or region. If NIMBYism was aleading deterrent to desirable development we would see some cities within aregion embrace development and capture the benefits. Yet we don’t see that. Wesee similar growth restrictions through metro areas, and I agree that these are less than optimal. NIMBYism is a problem, butnot likely a leading obstacle to development according to the publishedresearch.

Announcing Bit City: 2011: Transportation, Data and Technology in Cities

2011-09-28T16:05:00.000-07:00

Here is evidence that I am a productive member of society. Sarah Williams and I are organizing a conference titled Bit City: 2011: Transportation, Data and Technology in Cities. Details at this link. We have some of the best thinkers is the business coming to talk, and the conference is open to all. You should come. More details to follow, and here an overview followed by the schedule:

CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION
There is more data in the world than ever before, and there will soon be far more. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) , “In 2011 alone, 1.8 zettabytes (or 1.8 trillion gigabytes) of data will be created, the equivalent to every U.S. citizen writing 3 tweets per minute for 26,976 years.” New data collected from embedded devices in common items such as clothing, cell phones, vehicles, roads, buildings and anything else you can think of will fundamentally change the way we plan, finance and move about our cities.

Over the last several years many private and public sector agencies have been interested in how data, social media, mobile technologies, and data visualization can help us plan for an manage our urban environments. IBM has coined the term “Smart Cities” to describe the recent development in this area, while CISCO calls it “Intelligent Cities”.

BitCity is how we describe the recent conversation about the possibilities to use data and technology to enhance our cities. On the most basic level a “bit” is at the core of recent discussions around how data and technology can enhance our cities because it is “the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications”. It’s our increased capacity to store, communicate, and visualize our everyday lives in the form of bits that has renewed a conversation about how data can be used to plan and manage the future of our cities.

The BitCity debates are meant to expose innovation and innovators, highlight the current state of research, and provide room for a conversation about the policy needs and implementation barriers for using data and technology in planning our cities.

This first in our series of BitCity debates will provide historical precedents for this debate and focus on current applications as they relate to transportation. We have focused BitCity: 2011 on transportation because of the field’s strong links to data and technology. Many examples have already been developed by planners, engineers, logistics firms and software developers giving us an opportunity to present and analyze them at BitCity 2011.

CONTACT INFORMATION
David King, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning
Sarah Williams, Co-Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab
bit.city.conference AT gmail DOT com

9AM-9:30AM | OPENING REMARKS
Welcome to BityCity : 2011 – Transportation Data, & Technology in Cities, The Sig Grava Symposium on Infrastructure.

SPEAKER:

Elliot Sclar
Professor Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation & School of International and Public Affairs

9:30AM-10:30AM | KEYNOTE

SPEAKER:

New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner
Janette Sadik-Khan

10:30AM-10:45AM | BREAK

10:45AM-12:15PM | PANEL
“Start-Up” Transportation Planning: Entrepreneurial Approaches to Transport Problems

Many planners and software developers have embraced smart phones as a potentially transformative technology to improve urban mobility through better, faster and more accurate information. New York City actively supports developers through annual “Big Apps” contests, and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) launched a similar project to encourage “start-up” developers to build apps that improve service. This panel discusses recent applications and successful projects where new data has improved transportation and mobility.

SPEAKERS :

Candace Brakewood & Michael Frumin
Doctoral Student in the Engineering Systems Division, MIT
Systems Engineering Manager, MTA Bus Customer Information Systems

Di-Ann Eisnor
VP of Platforms & Partnerships, Waze

Rachel Sterne
Chief Digital Officer, New York City Media

Moderator : Benjamin De La Peña, Rockefeller Foundation

12:15PM-1:15PM | LUNCH

1:15PM-2:45PM | PANEL
Travel Surveys to Crowd Sourcing: Using New Forms of Data in Transportation Planning

Transportation planning has always been reliant on data. Travel surveys, traffic flows and other data have long been used to inform policy and investment. Yet one of the biggest conversations around data in the city are new sources of data (cell phones, GPS tracking systems, sensors), that offer a new way for transport planning. Real-time information, traffic management and on-the-fly routing can lead to efficient use of existing facilities, reduced congestion and lower environmental damage. Transit agencies can use location and user data to increase ridership and lower costs. This panel explores how new and crowd-sources data complements conventional planning and how these data may lead to transformational ways of thinking about transportation problems.

SPEAKERS :

Michael Batty
Director, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London

David Levinson
Director, NeXus: Networks, Economics and Urban Systems Research Group, University of Minnesota

Mitchell Moss
Director of the Rudin Center for Transportation, New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service

Moderator : David King, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation

2:45PM-3PM | BREAK

3PM-4:30PM | PANEL

Private Data, Public Good: Issues of Copyright, Contract and Content

New sources of data and the influx new firms to transport policy and planning present unique legal issues. One of the biggest questions is whether data collected and stored by private companies be used for a public good? Developing software and collecting data for planning purposes in an opportunity to improve public services and transport planning, but these services have new legal precedents and need contracts that reflect that in order to ensure the benefits for the City. This session highlights the legal issues surrounding copyright, contracting and public use of data collected through cell phones, GPS devices and other sensors.

SPEAKERS :

Matthew W. Daus, Esq
University Transportation Research Center
Former Commissioner of the TLC

Francisca Rojas
Postdoctoral Fellow, Transparency Policy Project
Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Jane Yakowitz
Visiting Assistant Professor, Brooklyn Law School

Moderator : Kenneth Crews, Director, Copyright Advisory Office, Columbia University Libraries; Faculty, Columbia Law School and Munich Intellectual Property Law Center

4:30PM-5PM | CONCLUDING REMARKS & FUTURE DIRECTIONS

BitCity will also be series of conferences designed to help unravel issues at the core of how we can use the overwhelming amount of data available to help make better cities. Each conference will explore how data and technology are used in different urban specialty areas (Transportation, Public Health, Criminal Justice, Housing, Environmental Policy) in order to better understand the real world impacts of these technologies.

SPEAKERS :

Dr. Anthony Townsend
Research Director, Institute for the Future

Moderator : Sarah Williams, Co-Director, Spatial Information Design Lab; Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation

5PM – 7PM | RECEPTION

Gatto's bill would tap roads for renewable energy

2011-09-27T12:34:00.000-07:00

This would be neat if it works, though requiring new technologies is risky.
Gatto's bill would tap roads for renewable energy

Are Traffic Calming Devices Killing Bike Racers?

2011-09-25T09:04:00.000-07:00

The NY Times has a story about an increase is danger, including death, in professional cycling. Here's how one racer describes the problem:

“When I started racing, they told me that crashes are part of the contract,” said Marco Pinotti, a prominent Italian rider who broke his pelvis in another crash in this year’s Giro and was hospitalized for several weeks. “This is a dangerous sport, and it will always be a dangerous sport. But I think in the last few years, it looks like crashes have increased and become more severe because the speed is higher, the technology of the bikes has changed, and the level and size of the peloton is higher, much higher.”

Pinotti recovered from a crash he had, though his teammate Craig Lewis has had a harder time. Here the Times floats a hypothesis about why danger is increasing:

Pinotti and Lewis were brought down by a common problem. In a bid to slow auto traffic, towns, cities and villages throughout Europe have narrowed roads near their entrances, added speed bumps and introduced islands and traffic circles. In the Giro, Pinotti and Lewis came around a corner on a descent and struck a small metal pole on an island in the middle of the road.

This seems like a testable hypothesis, except the cycling organizations oddly don't keep crash statistics. But this may be an unintended consequence of traffic calming! (Note: I generally support traffic calming techniques.)

Adventures in Chinese Urbanism: Canceling the Empty Cities

2011-09-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

In a startling twist to rapid urbanization in China, one of the cities west of Shanghai has been canceled. See this story from the Atlantic for a few details:
China 'Cancels' an Entire City

The city had four million people, so this seems like a big deal. That's like canceling Manhattan and Brooklyn! As the story describes, this move was made for growth considerations. Considering the reliance on land development for public revenues on which cities rely (property taxes are rare), I wouldn't be surprised if these types of consolidations happen with greater frequency in the future. Canceling a city may seem extreme, but urban growth in the US over the past century was often conducted this way, though we generally called it annexation.

Animated Map of Auckland's Transit Network

2011-09-19T05:48:00.000-07:00

I hadn't seen this before, but here is another animated map or a transit network. Click the link for additional details about the project.

An animated map of Auckland's public transport network from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.

Park(ing) Day 2011

2011-09-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

It is another Park(ing) Day, and I'm happy that the enterprising Urban Planning students here at Columbia have set up shop on Broadway. Here is a picture of their concept:

The idea is to bring urban agriculture to fire escapes. Which is completely illegal and against the fire code, but a provocative idea nonetheless. Check out the map of Park(ing) Day installations in New York at this link.

California Hybrid Drivers Upset They Aren't Special Anymore

2011-09-14T14:20:00.000-07:00

The LA Times reports that hybrid and low-emission drivers are upset that they will no longer be able to drive solo in California's carpool lanes. From the story:

Drivers of electric and other alternative-fuel vehicles enjoy a special perk: They can drive solo in California's carpool lanes.But under a controversial plan proposed by local traffic agencies, those drivers will have to pay to use two heavily used carpool lanes that are being converted to toll roads.It has riled electric-car shoppers and alternative-fuel-vehicle advocates who worry that this is the first step in chipping away at a California tradition of letting solo drivers of autos with new technology and low emissions onto carpool lanes.

I love that the hybrid exemption is now a "California tradition." The way the program worked, and it's less than 10 years old so not exactly a tradition handed down from generation to generation, is that qualified vehicles could get stickers that allowed solo drivers to use the cars in car pool lanes. About 85,000 sets of stickers were issued, and the program hasn't expanded for a while so the number of cars in the program is declining. (Stickers are non-transferable.) These solo drivers did clog the carpool lanes, and a hybrid with one passenger is not necessarily less polluting than a SUV with three people, and it likely is worse in terms of CO2 per passenger mile. This was a poor program on environmental, equity and efficiency grounds, and everyone should be happy it is coming to an end. Converting the free HOV lanes into toll lanes, as California is doing, is a good idea. State Senator Lowenthal is worried:

"There is a real risk that if they do it here, they might try to do it elsewhere," said state Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach.)

But we should be so lucky.

Understanding Value of Time

2011-09-14T12:42:00.000-07:00

XKCD explains value of time.

China's Empty Cities are Still Empty

2011-09-11T08:12:00.000-07:00

Ordos is a new city in China that was built to house more than a million people, but it's greatest claim to fame is being a ghost town. (There is an old city of Ordos, too). David Levinson commented on Ordos at The Transportationist.I've commented on China's rapid urbanization here.Al Jazeera has returned to Ordos and found that it is still mostly empty.This link has their story. Here is part of their story that highlights the bizarre world of Chinese urbanization:

Others who later visited Ordos, including economist Ting Lu of Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, pointed out that the real estate was not sitting idle, but had all been sold. So while the city lacked human beings, it was certainly supplying this odd demand from Chinese purchasers for empty apartments.Ting Lu went on to recommend it as a "must see for emerging market investors".However, Ting Lu's bullish assessment of Ordos was challenged by Patrick Chovanec over at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management. He wrote a rebuttal, which you can read here in full.Below is Chovanec's main point:"Demand for empty residential units as a store of value [like gold] is real demand, but it's also a historical aberration. It's based on a highly unstable set of unique circumstances, including (1) limited investment alternatives for Chinese savers, (2) a limited track record, since China converted to private home ownership in the early 1990s, in which investors have never really seen a sustained downturned, and (3) minimal holding costs for idle property, including the absence of any annual property tax." Right. Keeping your savings in the bank yields very little because interest rates are so low in China. Inflation hit a three-year high this past July at 6.5 per cent, meaning that wherever Chinese store their savings, it had better yield something that can keep up with the rate of inflation.The stock market is no longer a popular choice for many ordinary citizens, who find it too unpredictable. That really only leaves property to dump your money.Ordos is one oversized, inefficient bank vault.And when we decided to check in after two years to see how "Bank of Ordos" was doing, we found a surprise: construction is still happening at a fierce pace. Ordos now boasts Asia's largest fountain show. Its theatre has managed to hold a few concerts this year. There are definitely more signs of life than the last time around - but still comparatively little relative to the size of the city. We came to realise just how little when our team got thirsty midway through our shoot and decided to buy water.

This is a weird situation. My guess is that eventually the city will fill with people and businesses, either by choice or governmental action. I'm not convinced that fulfilling the promise from the investment in the city decades late will make the overall investment worthwhile. I know China has plenty of cash and they have to invest it somewhere, but it seems likely there is some more productive use of those monies than building Asia's largest fountain show in an underpopulated desert city.

Evolutionary Theory, Social Networks and Cities

2011-09-07T10:34:00.000-07:00

The New Scientist has an story by David Sloan Wilson about how evolutionary theory can improve urban life (Use link below). Wilson applies his knowledge of evolutionary processes to the ideas of people like Elinor Ostrom. One way he has applied his work to practice is through a "Design Your Own Park" project (details at this link) that brought communities together to improve their lives. One compelling finding of Wilson's is that people adapt to the neighborhood where they live more than they change the neighborhood after they arrived. These findings are important for understanding how policy interventions are likely to play out among the population at large.

Social scientists have long searched for clues as to how powerful social networks are for shaping behavior, and Wilson's work contributes to this field. There are not obvious characteristics, however. Duncan Watts, in technical research and in his book Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer, argues we know less about contagion than people like Wilson suggest. Watts' research suggests that while a few "super-influencers" can provide more influence than the public at large, the difference is not as great as we intuitively imagine. Watts explains these results as influence is spread through a contagious (or perhaps evolutionary) process, the ultimate outcome of adoption or decline has more to do with the overall structures of networks. (See pages 94-104 of his book for detailed explanations.)

This is all interesting stuff. Many transportation policies that I favor, such as cycling, walking and shared-travel, are not really the types of interventions that will succeed based on large investments that galvanize or attract the public. These policies need some type of social mechanism to promote adoption. In certain cases we see similar behavior for car buying, where Berkeley drivers like to buy Prius. In addition, social networks as a framework for policy design can help address problems of heterogeneous preferences. As of now there are not too many planners doing research in these fields, but hopefully that will change soon enough.

Original story at New Scientist is here:
Evolutionary theory can make street life better - life - 29 August 2011 - New Scientist

Springfield, Ontario

2011-09-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

Toronto's Mayor Rob Ford has a brother, Doug Ford, who is described as an "idea man" by the National Post. Here are his ideas:

a monorail connecting Union Station to the shore, a 1.6-million square foot shopping mecca, soccer pitches and ice pads in a slumbering power station, and a Ferris wheel at the foot of the pier.

This is all fine and dandy, but when I hear "idea man," "ferris wheel," and "monorail," I can only think of Lyle Lanley:The monorail is small beans compared with his idea to build a football stadium in the middle of Lake Ontario. In the Toronto Star Eric Miller of the University of Toronto gives some perspective:

When it comes to Ford’s waterfront plan, however, Miller says, “The monorail is the least stupid part of this whole project.”

Rail Forum Takes The Fun Out of The New Fountains of Wayne Record

2011-09-02T14:12:00.000-07:00

Fountains of Wayne have a new record, and on that record is a song called "Acela." It's a number about a dude, his girlfriend who stood him up, and a train. Because the song is titled after and features the Acela Express, a discussion thread developed about it on Rail Forum. The comments on the thread take the fun out of the song. Here is a sample:

I get the impression from the song that, while its lyricist may have ridden the Acela once or twice, he doesn't really understand much about how train travel works. For one thing, if all the protagonist wants to do is to get back to New York, why is he riding all the way to Boston? Why didn't he just get off the train at Stamford, or New Haven, or wherever? It seems to me that the lyricist is making the common mistake of thinking of train travel as being like air travel, and forgetting that the train makes intermediate stops. Or maybe he's assuming that you're somehow not allowed to get off the train at a stop earlier than the one you're ticketed for.

From this mirthful point the thread continues into an earnest discussion of what, exactly, were the ham and eggs on the Chattanooga Choo Choo. I'm happy people care about these things so dearly, but they take the fun out of a Fountains of Wayne song, which is pretty hard to do.For good measure, here's Harry Nilsson singing about the state of US railroads in the early 1970s:

Musical GPS helps cyclists find their way

2011-09-02T13:28:00.000-07:00

One Per Cent: Musical GPS helps cyclists find their way

The video explains the concept, but essentially music is played louder in the ear toward the direction you should be traveling. This is an interesting wayfinding application.

Autonomous Cars are Closer Than You Think

2011-09-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

MIT researchers are experimenting with autonomous cars in mixed traffic. They're small and don't have passengers, but still pretty cool. The software predicts what humans will do, which may allow for robot cars and regular cars to co-exist on the roads. More at this link:
A Smarter Planet

Perhaps robots driving in mixed traffic will lead to a unique type of road rage, but one that ends very badly for humanity.

What Liner Notes Taught Me About Doing Research

2011-08-31T17:13:00.000-07:00

We have welcomed a new cohort of future planners here at Columbia, which means I better figure out what to teach them next week. (I kid!) One of my ongoing challenges with new students is teaching the process of research, in particular reviewing literature. With online databases collecting literature is easier than ever, but only once you have identified the journals and other sources to stick in your Reader feed, email alerts or whatever else you use. However, establishing the literature to keep an eye on is not easy. Often students are unsure how to do a literature review or identify what scholars they should read. I know that I used to share their confusion, but I also know that I always knew how to trace ideas and sources through the literature because I grew up reading liner notes. Prior to the internet and with magazines an occasional source, discovering new bands and music was something that I did by combing through the notes on the record sleeves. This turned out be an actual skill that greatly assisted my academic career. Who knew? Maybe this is justification to make my students listen to Junkyard. The first one to find the connection to Big Boys wins.

Europe Envy: Texas Wants High Speed Roads. Will More Texans Die in Crashes?

2011-08-31T15:40:00.000-07:00

On September 1st Texas will be able to raise the speed limit on highways to 85 miles per hour if they can find sections safe enough. Safe, like the really flat and straight piece of road where the guy in the video below drove his $2 million Bugatti Veyron into a Texas lake. In his defense, the idiot was reaching for his cell phone.

In any event, the Texas legislature has Europe Envy! Here is what one of the statesperson had to say about raising the speed limit:

"They have high-speed roadways in Europe, and there could be some merit in having some of those highways in Texas," said Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, who introduced the bill. "Given the right engineering, we should consider it."

I wonder what other policies Europe has that Texas Republicans think are worthwhile. What does Lois Kolkhorst say about high speed trains? She didn't like the Trans-Texas Corridor much.

Throwing cold water on the idea was Jerry Johns of the Southwestern Insurance Information Service:

"Obviously, the two things that kill most people on our highways are speed and alcohol. Increasing it to 85, or even 75, will have a dramatic impact on the death and injury rate on those highways where it's implemented," said Jerry Johns, a spokesman for the Southwestern Insurance Information Service.

It's true that speed and booze are the two biggest reasons that people die in cars. No one says we should drink more before we drive, so why should we drive faster?

The answer to this is a bit complicated, but there was a natural experiment in higher speed limits and fatalities when states were allowed to raise the speed limit from 55 to 65 miles per hour. (Remember, the 55 miles per hour speed limit was not chosen for safety, it was chosen and implemented to save fuel.) If speed kills, then we expect to see an increase in deaths, but that's not what happened. Charles Lave and Patrick Elias looked at the data and found that deaths went down system-wide. This counter-intuitive result was because enforcement resources were shifted from speeding infractions in remote areas to areas with greater problems. Rural deaths increased by about a third but urban deaths declined. Since there are far more miles driven in urban areas the percentage changes may distort the absolute changes in deaths. Here is their abstract:

Abstract
In 1987, most states raised the speed limit from 55 to 65 mph on portions of their rural interstate highways. There was intense debate about the increase, and numerous evaluations were conducted afterwards. These evaluations share a common problem: they only measure the local effects of the change. But the change must be judged by its system-wide effects. In particular, the new 65 mph limit allowed the state highway patrols to shift their resources from speed enforcement on the interstates to other safety activities and other highways—a shift many highway patrol chiefs had argued for. If the chiefs were correct, the new allocation of patrol resources should lead to a reduction in statewide fatality rates. Similarly, the chance to drive faster on the interstates should attract drivers away from other, more dangerous roads, again generating system-wide consequences. This study measures these changes and obtains surprising results. We find that the 65 mph limit reduced statewide fatality rates by 3.4% to 5.1%, holding constant the effects of long-term trend, driving exposure, seat belt laws, and economic factors.

So while the double nickel was saving gas it was costing lives and led to poorly allocated resources. Unintended consequences get you every time.

AquaDam Deployed!

2011-08-27T12:28:00.001-07:00

IMG00694-20110827-1239, a photo by MTAPhotos on Flickr.

Looks like LIRR to Penn Station is safe for up to five feet of water.

The Importance of Taxis: Hurricane Edition

2011-08-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

This weekend New York is expected to be hit squarely by a hurricane. As a precautionary measure, the MTA will shut down the subway system beginning Saturday afternoon. While weekend ridership is somewhat lower than weekday ridership, this means that this weekend over 5 million trips that are usually made by transit riders will be affected. Here is a piece from the Village Voice about how challenging regular weekend service work is, which concludes as follows:

The moral of this story: be rich enough to take cabs everywhere when you can't take the subway, and pay extra-special attention to those small posters the MTA puts up in stations so you know how difficult the struggle to leave your neighborhood will be. Of course, repairs have to be done, and at first glance it probably makes more sense to have them done on a Saturday afternoon than at 9 a.m. on Monday. But on closer inspection, it might not be that logical after all.

Cabs are a great complement to transit, and because of that I am happy to see that NYC has implemented emergency taxi rules for the weekend:

Yellow & livery cabs move to “zone-fare” plan on Saturday w/reduced fares, group rides, & liveries allowed to make street pick-ups

You can't have a robust transit system without a robust taxi network, and not just for emergencies. Taxis and transit are complements, and in the case of this hurricane, much needed redundancy. Since the transit system will be shut down, ferries will likely be too dangerous and walking will be insane, any activity that happens in the city this weekend will depend on taxis and liveries. (There are about 13,000 yellow cabs and 30,000 liveries, plus about 800 vans in the city.)

Straphangers Campaign ranks C train as the worst

2011-08-24T11:36:00.000-07:00

The C train is unreliable, and the 2 is terrible because it's too crowded. At least there is still service!
NYC group ranks C train as the worst - NYPOST.com

John Whitehead Runs the Numbers on Charlotte's Light Rail Extension

2011-08-24T06:19:00.000-07:00

John Whitehead is confused about the stated benefits of the UNC Charlotte light rail extension. The project will now cost over $1 billion for nine miles and 11 stations. The trains will travel the distance of the line in 22 minutes. Whitehead, crafty economist that he is, does a quick cost benefit analysis of the project:

According to the Blue Line Extension Fact Sheet [PDF], there are an expected 24,500 average weekday trips by 2035. Assuming that these begin in 2017 and assuming that the travel time savings is 20 minutes (the total trip time across the 9 stops is 22 minutes) yields an estimate of the annual time saved at 424,667 hours (average travel time to work is 25 minutes in Mecklenberg County). Assuming an hourly wage rate of $27 (household income divided by 2000 hours) and attributing 100% of the wage to the value of time saved yields an annual benefit estimate of about $11.5 million. Note that all of my assumptions are likely generous.

As far as I can tell the annual benefits just cover the "estimated $11.5 million in operating costs." That means that the benefits of lower congestion, stronger neighborhoods, improved environmental quality, etc. would need to cover the $1.7 billion construction costs. If each household in Mecklenberg County is willing to pay $100 annually for these benefits (a round number guess), households grow at 2%, and future benefits are discounted at 2%, the present value of nonmarket benefits is $868 million. This falls short of the construction cost by over $200 million. It would take an annual willingness to pay of $250 per household for the benefit/cost ratio to reach 2.

This is certainly not the best use of a billion dollars.

Megatrends That Weren't - By Joshua E. Keating | Foreign Policy

2011-08-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

Predicting the future is hard. Foreign Policy looks at some trends and predictions that were supposed to change the world but failed to live up to the hype. The five they list are:
1) The Japanese Superpower
2) The Permanent Economic Boom
3) Peak Oil
4) The Resource Crunch
5) The Internet Fad (Though this wasn't really a trend as much as just general skepticism from certain people)

Now we worry about China (Will anyone make the US-China equivalent of Gung Ho?), and lots of people still worry about peak oil and population bombs. I suppose these folks are right to worry in the sense that oil is finite so we may use it all and at some point there will be a point of peak population, but no one knows when these will happen. More importantly, it's not obvious that these are unambiguously bad situations (Note that "peak oil," which is not a problem, is not the same as environmental damage from burning fossil fuels, which is a problem). All of the "mega-trends" listed here were misunderstood in large part because those who believed in them assumed that everything outside of the trend itself would stay the same. Consider peak oil, where there is a finite supply on the planet. If we assume that prices, extraction technologies and available substitutes remain the same we're screwed. But there is no reason to assume any of those factors will remain unchanged. Eventually prices will rise, technology will allow us to adapt and substitutes will become available, but at this point we don't know what these changes will actually be.
Megatrends That Weren't - By Joshua E. Keating | Foreign Policy

Hold Your Skepticism About Google's Robot-Cars - Technology - The Atlantic Wire

2011-08-06T06:45:00.000-07:00

From the Atlantic, Google's safety record is still really good:
Hold Your Skepticism About Google's Robot-Cars - Technology - The Atlantic Wire

Google's Self-Driving Car Crashed!

2011-08-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

Google's self driving car crashed, but it was still the driver's fault.
From Jalopnik (Click the link for exciting photos of people standing around and more of the story):

Self-Driving Cars
By Justin Hyde Aug 5, 2011 11:45 AM
22,306 124
This is Google’s first self-driving car crash

This photo of what looks like a minor case of Prius-on-Prius vehicular violence may actually be a piece of automotive history: the first accident caused by Google's self-driving car. Whose name should the cop write down on the ticket? UPDATE!

Sent in by a Jalopnik tipster, the photos were snapped earlier this week near Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. The Prius — recognizable as a Google self-driving prototype from the roof equipment that's smaller than a typical Google Streetview image collector — appears to have rear-ended another Prius.

Google released a statement to Business Week:

A Google spokesperson gave us this quote about the accident: "Safety is our top priority. One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car."

Ironic that the car got in an accident while being manually driven. Maybe they should have stuck to letting the robot control things.

Somewhat related, Patrick Smith at Ask the Pilot pushes back on the widely held beliefs that planes generally fly themselves here. Smith's point is that there will be lots of human control on vehicles (planes, in his case) for the foreseeable future.

Dumb Ways to Save Gas

2011-08-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

Shell Oil is sponsoring John and Helen Taylor to drive around the country demonstrating how parsimonious they are with their gasoline. Here is the Shell Oil webpage for the "Smarter Driving Tour."

Let's meet the Taylors:

About the Taylors

The Taylors are passionate about fuel economy. They have two companies, Fuelacademy and Eco2driving whereby they run global education programs, teaching drivers how to reduce their fuel consumption, reduce CO2 emissions, save money, drive smarter and safer. Between them, Helen and John hold 88 world records of which 42 are for fuel economy.

Forty-two records for fuel economy? What the heck is that? What are their other 46 records? Feats of excess and unnecessary driving? Most congestion caused due to driving slower than traffic? Here is a link to their all of their world records, which are apparently adjudicated by FuelAcademy, which is the Taylor's driving business.

I'd also like to point out that they aren't any tips or tricks for saving fuel actually listed on the Smarter Driving Tour webpage. You have to go to the Smarter Actions page here, which just restates what the federal government says here.

Anyway, if you want to save gas, drive less. That's the best way. But I don't think you can get any records for it.

China Envy: Autonomous Cars

2011-08-03T17:09:00.000-07:00

China Daily reports on Chinese researchers who developed an autonomous car that drove 285 km. From the story:

The car, a Hongqi HQ3 with full intellectual property rights developed by the National University of Defense Technology, traveled in daytime, taking only three hours and 20 minutes to finish its trip under full computer and sensor control.
"We only set a maximum speed and then left everything to the car itself," said Dai Bin, a professor in the research team.
"It knew the speed limits, traffic patterns, lane changes and roads using video cameras and radar sensors to detect other cars. It was all controlled by a command center in the trunk," Dai said.
The car encountered several complicated situations that made the test even more difficult.
"We had fog and thundershowers as well as the complex route and unclear lane markings in some sections," he added.
He noted that the car was not equipped with GPS, but relied solely on its sensors and lasers to detect the surrounding environment and choose the correct route.

I believe that most of the current autonomous vehicles under development and testing do not rely on GPS. They are all sensor based. I love that China Daily made note of the "full intellectual property rights developed by the National University of Defense Technology."

Point/Counterpoint: The 710 Tunnel Project in Los Angeles

2011-08-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

USC Professor James Moore argues for the 710 tunnel here, saying it is necessary and cost effective. The core of his argument:

The regional need for building the last 4.5 miles of the basic local freeway grid — between the end of the 710 Freeway in Alhambra and the intersection of the 210 and the 134 freeways — is beyond any informed dispute. Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Southern California Assn. of Government studies show that this project would offer more relief from congestion and pollution than would any other local highway project. The 218,000 daily vehicle trips postponed or diverted by the 710 gap are nearly half the number of trips affected by the recent closure of the 405 Freeway.

About half of these trips are burdening other freeways, and about half are tying up surface streets. As a result, we face a self-inflicted "Carmageddon" every day. Public polls of 26 cities and political districts find not a city or district in which the majority opposes the tunnel. (South Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge are evenly split.) A review of poll results collected by Godbe Research in 2004 and by the Rose Institute in 2000 shows Los Angeles voters favored completion by 5.6 to one, and San Gabriel Valley residents by 5.7 to one.

Many of the voices that had been against a bulldozed surface connection have been muted by the underground tunnel alternative, which would leave elegant, mature neighborhoods intact. Tunnels are expensive, but they solve problems, and the technology needed for the 710's tunneling project is proven.

Michael Dieden argues against the 710 project here, claiming that Moore's thinking is outdated and any investment should be in mass transit. From his op-ed:

But most importantly, why spend the precious time and money on yet another obsolete freeway when the entire country, and world for that matter, is abandoning freeways and moving to mass transit, both bus and rail? Moore needs to let go of the past and embrace the future, which relies on no more public money for freeways and increased investment in public transportation.

For example, why not build a trolley on Huntington Drive through Alhambra, South Pasadena and East L.A. on the same route as the old Red Car, which would absorb much of the 710 traffic and make each transit stop an economic catalyst for job growth and new transit neighborhoods? In lieu of wasting money on the 710, the region's public policy goal for the San Gabriel Valley should instead call for linking the great educational institutions of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena City College, the Claremont colleges and Cal State Pomona with transit, thereby allowing "creative nodes" to be built at each station, creating hundreds of entrepreneurial small businesses and well paying jobs.

The last 50 years of transportation planning in L.A. have not been about "talk," as Moore states, but about the struggle to transform the means by which we transport people, save neighborhoods and create more walkable and livable neighborhoods. Southern California once had a great transit system; it was destroyed by freeway advocates. That system failed, and it is incumbent on this generation to replace it and finish the public mass transit system throughout the region.

As near as I can tell they are not talking about the same thing (Moore discusses traffic and Dieden talks neighborhood preservation and land development around transit). Dieden makes a common and critical error by ignoring freight and goods movement, which is a major contributor to congestion, pollution and traffic in Los Angeles. As nice as mass transit investments are, they really don't do anything to reduce congestion (at least how we build them in the states). The Gold Line that Dieden praises in his op-ed only carries about 34,000 passengers per day, while the 710 gap affects about 218,000 vehicles, which at average vehicle occupancy is nearly 10 times the total number of travelers. Also, in the case of local transit projects generally ignore "job growth" claims. Transport investments redistribute economic activity rather than create economic activity. Jobs "created" near transit largely come from elsewhere in the region.

But whatever your preferences for getting around, we simply can't ignore roads. Transit investment can be worthwhile and should be encouraged, but that doesn't mean we should never invest in roads. The 710 tunnel very well may do more for quality of life in the affected areas than trolleys.

Anyhoo, point/counterpoint.

There Isn't Any Traffic in North Korea

2011-08-03T05:26:00.000-07:00

This piece in The Atlantic on North Korea is fascinating. Lots of photos, which is novel, and the views of the infrastructure are amazing. There are clearly no cars, trucks or trains operating regularly. There is scant evidence of electricity. And the traffic cops, shown above, have nothing to do.

UPDATE:
HEre is a whole YouTube channel dedicated to North Korean traffic bots.

Civil rights group: Highway bill needs 'equity' - The Hill's Transportation Report

2011-08-01T18:29:00.000-07:00

Civil rights group: Highway bill needs 'equity' - The Hill's Transportation Report

For Whom the Road Tolls

2011-07-31T12:25:00.000-07:00

For Whom the Road Tolls

(The title of this post is from the link, though "For Whom the Road Tolls" has been used by many in the context of tolling including me.)

Weird Reminders That Old Vehicles Were Never Safe

2011-07-30T14:57:00.000-07:00

1) Two people were killed when they crashed in their Wright Brothers replica airplane.
2) This guy crashed a Model T and died after a wheel fell off.
3)(see video above from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety)"In the 50 years since US insurers organized the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, car crashworthiness has improved. Demonstrating this was a crash test conducted on Sept. 9 between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. In a real-world collision similar to this test, occupants of the new model would fare much better than in the vintage Chevy.

"It was night and day, the difference in occupant protection," says Institute president Adrian Lund. What this test shows is that automakers don't build cars like they used to. They build them better."

The crash test was conducted at an event to celebrate the contributions of auto insurers to highway safety progress over 50 years. Beginning with the Institute's 1959 founding, insurers have maintained the resolve, articulated in the 1950s, to "conduct, sponsor, and encourage programs designed to aid in the conservation and preservation of life and property from the hazards of highway accidents."

A decade after the Institute was founded, insurers directed this organization to begin collecting data on crashes and the cost of repairing vehicles damaged in crashes. To lead this work and the Institute's expanded research program, insurers named a new president, William Haddon Jr., who already was a pioneer in the field of highway safety. In welcoming Dr. Haddon, Thomas Morrill of State Farm said "the ability to bring unbiased scientific data to the table is extremely valuable." This scientific approach, ushered in by Dr. Haddon, is a hallmark of Institute work. It's why the Institute launched the Highway Loss Data Institute in 1972 — to collect and analyze insurance loss results to provide consumers with model-by-model comparisons.

Another Institute milestone was the 1992 opening of the Vehicle Research Center. Since then, the Institute has conducted much of the research that has contributed to safer vehicles on US roads. At the anniversary event, current Institute chairman Gregory Ostergren of American National Property and Casualty summed up a commitment to continue what fellow insurers began in 1959: "On this golden anniversary of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, we celebrate this organization's accomplishments toward safer drivers, vehicles, and roadways. We salute the vision of the Institute's founders and proudly continue their commitment to highway safety.""

Who Buys Electric Cars?

2011-07-30T04:28:00.000-07:00

In Fast Company, Minorities Are Being Left Out Of The Electric Vehicle Revolution. From the story:

The Prius is an emblem of the environmentally aware upper middle class, and at this point, electric vehicle purchases are mostly limited to early adopters who have the cash to experiment with an entirely new kind of vehicle. And according to a report (PDF) from the Greenlining Institute, cost and lack of consumer education may shut low-income communities and communities of color (specifically in California) out of the electric vehicle revolution--even though these communities are in dire need of the cleaner air that comes along with having fewer gasoline-fueled cars on the road.
The report presents a number of obvious yet unsettling statistics: 70% of hybrid owners in California are white, even though Californians of color are more concerned about air pollution than whites; 20% of hybrid owners are Latino and even fewer are African-American--even though the overall state population is 60% non-white. An impressive 92% of residents who buy EVs in the state have an income of $75,000 or higher.
This is all largely because of a lack of consumer education, at least among minorities. "There’s the message and there’s the messenger," said C.C. Song, lead author of the report, in an interview with Capitol Weekly. "The marketing just doesn’t reach to these communities. People of color, growing up, the cool cars are the Mercedes, the Lexus." For many of these potential customers, it's not about a lack of income--Latinos, for example, increasingly represent California's middle class. Even though 39% of California residents are Latino, the group makes up just 19% of hybrid buyers.

A couple of relevant papers on this subject by Matt Kahn:
"Green Market Geography: The Spatial Clustering of Hybrid Vehicles and LEED Registered Buildings"The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, Volume 9, Issue 2 (1999)

"Do greens drive Hummers or hybrids? Environmental ideology as a determinant of consumer choice"Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Volume 54, Issue 2 (2007)

Evaluating Los Angeles Bus Service: It's Better Than You Think

2011-07-30T04:11:00.000-07:00

Tom Rubin at New Geography has a nice post that explains different ways of evaluating bus service, and shows that the Los Angeles system performs well under various metrics. The post is here. Here is the lede:

As the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) prepared for its most recent round of major bus operations reductions, Metro CEO Art Leahy has been quoted:

"(T)oo many bus lines with excessive service has led to regular budget deficits1."

"How full are Metro buses today? Overall, Metro buses are running at an average of 42 percent capacity. Of course, that doesn’t mean that all Metro buses are less than half full. Another measure to gauge bus usage is called ‘load ratio’ — the ratio of passengers to bus seats at the most crowded part of a bus route. By that count Metro’s average load factor is an average of 1.2. (For example, 48 passengers on a 40 seat bus). Many other large transit agencies are running load factors of 1.5 to 1.72 ."

The "42 percent" capacity is evidently the average passenger load (APL) divided by the number of seats – in other words, on average for the full year, each 40-seat MTA bus had about 17 passengers on board.

Forty-two percent might appear to be a low value, particularly in comparison to other modes of transportation like scheduled airlines, where it is common to have a 100% load factor on some flights. However, Lufthansa doesn't stop at Wilshire/Vermont to pick up passengers between LAX and JFK – transit service is scheduled for peak load factor; that is, attempting to approach, but not exceed, a maximum load factor at the point on the line where the number of people on board is largest.

In the second quote, we have a mixture of load factors terms and data. Almost all transit operators have load factor standards, which they set for each mode of service (bus, light rail), time of day, day of week, and type of service (main line arterial bus service, long-haul commuter, neighborhood circulator). For Metro, the peak load factor criterion had been 1.20 – the 48 passengers on a 40-seat bus – since this was imposed by the Consent Decree that settled Labor/Community Strategy Center v MTA in late 1996 until very recently.

In that quote, Metro is comparing services standards to actual performance. It is certainly true that, until the passage of the new policy a few months ago, Metro's 1.20 service standard was one of the lowest in the industry for larger city operators. However, Metro routinely failed to meet this standard, which was a major source of complaints by the plaintiffs in L/CSC v MTA – and MTA's overall average passenger loads have among the highest in the industry for decades.

Comparing actual results to actual results is far more meaningful than comparing service standards to service standards. Is 42 percent low, high, or what? The standard methodology for determining this is peer group comparison. The Federal Government makes transit data available though its National Transit Database – which we used for the 2009 reporting year.

The whole post is a nice explanation of how transit service and performance are measured, but the punchline is that Los Angeles bus service compares very well to other systems.

The professor and the policymaker

2011-07-29T06:22:00.000-07:00

(via Environmental Economics)

Does Metro Transit Know Why Ridership Is Up?

2011-07-28T06:06:00.000-07:00

In the Twin Cities (Minnesota), transit ridership is up. Here is a press release from Metro Transit:

July 27, 2011

MINNEAPOLIS – (July 27) – In the first half of 2011, customers boarded Metro Transit buses and trains 39.6 million times – 1.2 million more rides than the same period last year (a 3.2 percent increase). Ridership in the month of June of this year is up 6 percent over June 2010.

“Transit ridership has continued to grow through the second quarter as more commuters choose to avoid high gas prices and congested freeways,” said Metro Transit General Manager Brian Lamb. “If this pace continues, it appears that 2011 could rival the record ridership of 2008.” In 2008, regional transit ridership was the highest in half a century.

“As the region continues its gradual economic rebound, Metro Transit is well positioned to continue to grow as more people return to work and assess their commuting options,” Lamb said. “Already nearly 80 percent of customers are using buses and trains to get to work and school.”

Lamb said bus maintenance reliability is at an all-time high and bus on-time performance is approaching 90 percent despite widespread road construction projects.

“Real-time technology has taken the guesswork out of transit punctuality and getting timely information about trips is easier for customers than ever before with our web and phone tools. The increases in ridership reflect the improved quality of the transit system,” Lamb said.

Comparing bus ridership with the same period last year, urban local service is up 4.1 percent, express service is up nearly 3.3 percent and suburban local service has increased 3.4 percent. Northstar commuter rail had a 4.4 percent ridership increase over the first half of 2010. Ridership on the Hiawatha light-rail line is down 2.3 percent compared with the first half of last year. In the month of June, the line celebrated its seventh anniversary of service with ridership nearly 5 percent higher than June a year ago. Customers rode the Hiawatha line a record 10.5 million times in 2010.

In each of the past four years, ridership on Metro Transit vehicles has exceeded 76 million – a benchmark that had not previously been surpassed since 1982.
Metro Transit is a service of the Metropolitan Council. Customers boarded Metro Transit buses and trains 78 million times in 2010.

###

The StarTribune picked up the story and gave it a headline: "Higher gas prices = higher ridership"

I'm happy transit ridership is up, but to infer any causality to why from that press release is silly. What Metro Transit is claiming is that people have shifted from driving to transit, yet there are any data on driving. It could be that there are more people in the Twin Cities, the economy is better, fewer people can afford cars (nevermind the gas), etc.

I don't like these stories that only have percentage changes, either, as they cloud the total effect. For instance, the Northstar commuter rail had an increase of 4.4 percent. Great! Sounds like a lot. But there are less than 1,000 people using the train daily. (David Levinson explains the train here.) A 4.4 percent increase isn't that much. Is it actually noteworthy that 40 or 50 more people are riding the train this year compared to last?

A final problem with releases and stories like this is it sets up transit as something necessarily opposed to driving. You either drive or take the bus. But many people switch from walking to transit. We ought to be able to consider transit a success if it is well-run and people use it regardless of what happens with driving. In the Metro Transit case, does the increase in riders lead to improved financial conditions for the agency? It should, and that is something to promote that has nothing to do with drivers.

***I have no idea what this means (from the release):"Already nearly 80 percent of customers are using buses and trains to get to work and school." He can't mean that there is an 80 percent mode share for transit, I hope.

The Gas Tax Will Expire in September

2011-07-27T09:59:00.000-07:00

All but $.043 per gallon of the federal gas taxes are set to expire on September 30. Exciting!
POLITICO: The next meltdown: Gas tax renewal - Ben Smith - The next meltdown: Gas tax renewal

Giglio: Another way to fund roadways - Milford, MA - The Milford Daily News

2011-07-25T16:57:00.000-07:00

Giglio: Another way to fund roadways - Milford, MA - The Milford Daily News

Urban Land Institute on Air Rights Development Over Freeways

2011-07-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

Cap Parks: "A cap park over the 101 Freeway in Hollywood, California, would create badly needed park space, improve the infrastructure, create sustainable green space, and spur economic development."

Lakewood, California

2011-07-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

The NY Times has a feature on Tom Johnson's new Book about Lakewood, California Lakewood: Portraits of a Sacred American Suburb. It looks like an interesting book.

This isn't the only loving memoir of Lakewood, however. D.J. Waldie wrote a book called Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, which is great and I recommend it.

Something about Lakewood clearly affects people. Certainly the tired and counter-productive tropes about the soul-sucking powers of suburbs are meaningless for Lakewood (as they are everywhere, for that matter).

Taming Beijing's Traffic

2011-07-24T09:05:00.000-07:00

China Daily has a story about new efforts to reduce congestion in Beijing. The City is considering ""both economic and administrative measures" to further reduce the use of private cars and divert private car owners to public transport."

The article mentions a few things about public transit that are worth noting, and potentially a better way to think about transit than convention. First:

Meanwhile, Liu said that constructing a denser underground transport system in downtown areas will be another key component in reducing congestion on the roads.

"Eighty percent of new rail transit lines will be built in downtown areas," he said.

We talk about density of housing and employment a lot but rarely think about network quality as a desirable feature. A dense network is better than a hub and spoke type network because density connects more people to more destinations within a given amount of time. But the second point sounds like Beijing has some more prosaic work to do:

Zhang Changqing, an expert on public transport law at Beijing Jiaotong University, pointed out that usually the city's subway stations and bus stations are not located near each other due to uncoordinated planning.

"If the bus and rail systems could be linked, it would be a cutting-edge advantage," he said.

Cutting edge! I like that, and this type of coordination is really amount making the transit network denser. The last thing to pull out of the story is about parking:

The report noted a sharp reduction in the number of cars in parking lots due to the rise in parking fees, with a 12 and 19 percent drop in the number of cars in parking lots and off-street garages.

The Ministry of Public Security said that Beijing had 4.64 million vehicles by June, but only 2.5 million parking spaces.

Over two million cars don't have a parking space! That's a lot of cars. I wonder how much of the congestion in Beijing is simply due to people driving around looking for a place to park.

A Plausible Thought About the Future: The Telecommuting Boom - The Atlantic

2011-07-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

A Plausible Thought About the Future: The Telecommuting Boom - The Atlantic

Carmageddon in Repose

2011-07-19T05:56:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles survived Carmageddon. People stayed off the roads, did other things than drive around, and construction workers did their jobs. It all went well. That has created a cottage industry of chattering about how Los Angeles is ready to abandon their cars, shift to transit and generally change their way of life based on the events of one weekend. (See here, here, here, here, and plenty of other places for posts along the line of "Carmageddon will change the way we think about transportation.) To be clear, that's one weekend where everyone was told to stay off the roads or even think about driving.If you had to absolutely, positively exert your mobility rights the best possible alternative was to race airplanes on bicycles. (I'm happy the bikes won.)

All of the talk about changing transportation forever is nonsense. Weekend travel is often discretionary, and often the demand for discretionary travel is elastic. People have lots of options for occasional short term shifts in their travel. It is often the case that when a non-recurring event, such as a road closure, Super Bowl, or, I dunno, maybe the Olympics, comes around that people are warned away from driving and the traffic nightmares never materialize. The warnings are often so effective that the roads are completely empty. Even in Los Angeles, which had the Olympics in 1984. Dire warnings of clogged freeways worked so well that the Kenyan marathoners trained on the deserted 10 freeway. Here is a short story from the LA Times comparing Carmageddon to the "traffic miracle" of 1984. From the Times in 1984:

Years of warnings and intense preparations apparently paid off Friday as a predicted paralyzing combination of Olympic and commuter traffic failed to develop on the busiest day yet of the Games. Instead, drivers enjoyed another day of free-flowing freeway traffic across Southern California.

“Black Friday,” transportation officials smugly pointed out to reporters, had become “Good Friday.” Then, for the first time in more than a year, the experts uncrossed their fingers.

The driving public had apparently listened to the traffic congestion warnings and predictions. And the locals were not the only ones who noticed.

“Los Angeles hasn’t lived up to its reputation for traffic,” summed up Martha Orr of San Jose, who took a shuttle bus from Century City to the Coliseum Friday morning to watch the first day of Olympic track and field events ….

Traffic to Friday’s long slate of Olympic events at 19 venues had been expected to combine with normally heavy commuter traffic to produce freeway headaches. However, drivers cruised along nearly congestion-free freeways for the fifth consecutive day….

Here is a KCET story about the traffic miracle as well.

In 1984 it wasn't just motorists who changed their ways for a couple of weeks as employers shifted work schedules:

But The Times noted back in 1985 that it wasn't exactly a miracle: " [It was] no fluke but resulted to a large degree from employer policies during the Games (23% of major employers surveyed used staggered shifts; 33% permitted flextime)."

So how did the 1984 Olympics change LA's approach to transportation? Here is a 1985 LA Times story describing the lessons learned, and they sound an awful lot like the chattering going on right now about Carmageddon:

"The success of Southern California's transportation system during the 1984 Olympic Games was unprecedented. The free-flowing traffic was a sharp contrast to the expected massive gridlock on the highway system. The coordinated efforts of the public and private sectors facilitated implementation of many (traffic management) techniques that proved instrumental in reducing traffic problems," said the report, commissioned at the request of county Supervisor Harriett Wieder.

"Although the success was short-lived, there are some lessons to be learned from the Olympic traffic success. It was a demonstration that transportation systems management can significantly reduce congestion on our roads," the report said, noting that a number of such techniques are already being use or are under study in Orange County.

Among them:

- Shifting trips to and from work to off-peak hours. Allowing employees to come to work either earlier or later than usual, or scheduling four-day work weeks, helped reduce rush-hour traffic. The Orange County Transit District is conducting a "flex-time" study to determine how more flexible working hours can reduce freeway congestion.

Transportation officials found that 97% of the companies they surveyed offered staggered work hours during the Olympics, compared to 19% before the Games.

ITT Cannon temporarily shut down plants in Santa Ana and Fountain Valley, removing 2,800 commuters from the road, an option which is not available year-round.

- Encouraging car-pooling and van-pooling. County officials have calculated that even a small increase in ridesharing--for example, increasing car occupancy from 1.2 to 1.3 riders--could eliminate most stop-and-go traffic during rush hours. The study found that despite extensive marketing of the car-pooling approach during the Olympics, the level of ridesharing increased very little during the Games.

The study added: "Where possible, employers should minimize work-related travel. Besides supporting shared transportation, companies can promote fewer field trips, plan meeting schedules that do not contribute to peak hour traffic, reduce shipping and deliveries and provide shuttle services where appropriate."

- Promoting bus travel. The Los Angeles Games were the first events since the Olympics at Melbourne in 1956 not to have a rail system for transit use, but ridership on Orange County Transit District buses was up 12% during the Olympics, in part because of extensive information distributed about bus service and free rides to event sites from park-and-ride facilities.

"The Olympic experience proved that when motivated to do so, the public will park their vehicles and ride buses to their destinations," the study suggested.

The report recommended three courses of action for the Transportation Commission to help implement its suggestions: provide the public with information on Olympics-style traffic management, support OCTD's employer "flex-time" studies and continue to promote "alternative solutions improving the traffic situation."

I'd like to highlight the suggestion that bus travel should be promoted. This was in 1985, just about the time that LA started a decades long rail building spree. Transit ridership has only just recovered to the level of the mid-1980s. From the LA Times article from last summer:

L.A. officials to mark 20th anniversary of Metro Rail system
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority says there have been more than a billion boardings on its rail and bus lines since the Blue Line opened. But critics say ridership has been reduced.
July 23, 2010|By Dan Weikel, Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles officials will hold a major event Friday near Staples Center to mark the 20-year expansion of urban rail service in the county and what they see as a dynamic shift that will transform the nation's car capital into a model for mass transit.

But although the region now has a gleaming system of subways and light-rail trains, some transportation experts say the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's $8-billion effort — less operating costs — has done little to reduce traffic congestion or increase the use of mass transit much beyond the level in 1985, when planning for the Metro Blue Line began.

Rather than bolster ridership, these experts say, the emphasis on rail has come at the expense of the MTA's vast network of buses and may have cost the agency at least 1.5 billion passenger boardings from 1986 to 2006.

"Overall, the push for rail has forced transit ridership down," said Tom Rubin, a veteran transit consultant and former chief financial officer for the MTA's predecessor. "Had they run a lot of buses at low fares, they could have doubled the number of riders."

So beware of lessons learned, and really beware of using a short-term adjustments in elastic travel demand for making the case for preferred projects (such as an expensive rail system). Carmageddon only demonstrated that people are capable of staying off the road for a couple of days. Essentially the good people of LA cooperated with the state to help build a new car pool lane (which won't do anything to solve congestion, but nevermind). Considering how much people complain about traffic, it was the least they could do. Just don't expect them to do it every day.

Evidence of Inelastic Demand for Airport Parking

2011-07-18T17:32:00.000-07:00

Fromer's reports on airport parking as the latest target of extra fees:

Like many travelers, Hal Frost is accustomed to being hit with fees everywhere he goes, from the airport check-in counter to the hotel front desk. But long-term parking used to always be pretty straightforward: the rate he was quoted was the rate he paid.

Not anymore.

When he parked his car in New York recently through a site called NetParkNFly (www.netparkfly.com) he found several fees added to his bill, including a fuel surcharge fee, a customer service fee, and an access fee. There's no explanation of these extras on the company's website.

Read more: http://www.frommers.com/articles/7374.html#ixzz1SVRcBrAV

Hal Frost, like others I'm sure, should take this as a lesson in elasticity of demand with respect to price. You simple can't slap all kinds of fees on a good or service if the extra charges will cause people to use substitutes or avoid the purchase. Airport parking, however, seems to be inelastic in this instance so if you add additional charges onto the cost of parking demand will not decline that much. There are currently few options to parking at the airport so adding these charges will not cause a large reduction is parking demand. Hal Frost should complain about his lack of travel choices, not the cost of parking.

100 Years Ago Tolls Were Discontinued on the Williamsburg Bridge

2011-07-18T17:06:00.000-07:00

From DNA Info:

LOWER EAST SIDE — Demonstrators will turn back the clock on the Williamsburg Bridge Tuesday by constructing a replica toll booth to draw attention to the revenue lost by eliminating bridge tolls a century ago.

The throwback event, organized by the NYC Bridge Centennial Commission, will include a vintage-looking tollbooth at the corner of Delancey and Suffolk streets manned by a collector dressed in 100-year-old uniform, classic cars, and 1911 dimes for pedestrians and motorists to symbolically pay for their passage.

The action seeks to draw attention to the fact that the city could have theoretically raised about $31 billion at tollbooths over the past century that could have paid for transportation infrastructure projects, like the Second Avenue subway or direct rail access from Manhattan to the city’s airports.
The Williamsburg Bridge will get a mock tollbooth Tuesday in an effort to raise awareness for lost infrastructure costs. (Jill Colvin/DNAinfo)

The tolls on East River Bridges were discontinued on July 19, 1911, when they had been generating approximately $250,000 per year.

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20110718/lower-east-side-east-village/transportation-buffs-install-tollbooth-on-williamsburg-bridge#ixzz1SVMn2uNT

I wish I had time to make it down there tomorrow.

Treating Bad Driving as a Disease

2011-07-18T05:46:00.000-07:00

Dr. Jin Huiqing believes bad driving is a disease, and potentially one that is hereditary, according to this story in the Telegraph. From the story:

He has studied the records of thousands of Chinese bus, van and taxi drivers, put dozens through neurological tests and examined hundreds of blood samples. Since last year, he has been trying to find gene markers for bad drivers.

"Cars can be fitted with the highest levels of equipment: safety belts, air bags, and so on. Roads can be more regulated. But people, how can you help them become better?" Dr Jin said in an interview in the central city of Hefei, where he is based. "People still need to be controlled, they must face restrictions."

He tries to target the root cause of crashes by identifying the physical or psychological traits of poor drivers, such as risk-taking or poor response time under stress, and keeping them off the streets or ensuring they get adequate training.

The cost of traffic casualties is so high that accident-prone people should at least be barred from driving commercially, he said.

I'm not sure this explanation qualifies bad driving as a disease, but it was only the headline of the story that claimed such anyway. The idea that some drivers may need additional training makes sense, and considering how wacky some Chinese drivers education and testing are (such as learning to drive a sedan on 2x4s set out as rails), there are potentially large gains from education if it reduces crashes:

Traffic accidents are now the leading cause of death for Chinese aged 15 to 44, the World Health Organisation says.

The LA Times covered the story, too, though Chris Woolston doesn't mention that Dr. Jin Huiqing has (according to the Telegraph) "a lucrative business selling his road safety programme to Chinese municipalities." In any event it should come as no surprise that there are good drivers and lousy drivers, and the lousy drivers should get additional training or get off the road. Of course, this is quite hard to do as just about everyone thinks they are above average drivers.

Finding Better Uses for All Those Empty Parking Spaces

2011-07-15T08:43:00.000-07:00

Minimum parking requirements are a major problem for cities around the world. Minimum requirements lead to lots and lots of free parking, which in turn leads to more driving, more pollution, higher housing costs, lower quality urban design and oodles of other problems. (See this paper for details, or read the book.) One of the challenges with reforming parking minimums is that too many people worry that no one will ever build parking again ever and no one will ever again be able to find a place to park. But people worry too much about the parking supply in the future even when the evidence is overwhelming that there is more than enough parking already built.

In order to get to sane parking policy we have to come up with some way to reduce the amount of parking required through the zoning code. One promising way to support such a transition is to take advantage of existing, underused spaces. In some European cities developers have to do a parking inventory near any proposed development. Then developers contract with owners of existing parking nearby instead of building new parking capacity. You can read about various European strategies in this nice report from ITDP. Expanding on the idea that existing parking can be better utilized, a UK company called ParkatmyHouse has a service where you can sign up and offer your unused parking to people who will rent the spaces through the website. BMW iVentures likes this idea so much they just invested in the business. This is a promising way to transition from too many spaces required to better management of parking facilities. A firm like ParkatmyHouse can assemble the multitude of available spaces in a way that no individual owner will, resulting in high overall occupancy, more efficient uses of available spaces and fairer pricing of parking and development. American cities should figure out how to adapt this business model in order to institute real parking reform.

Carmageddon is Here!

2011-07-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

Part of the 405 in Los Angeles closes this weekend to help construction of a very expensive car pool lane. If I understand correctly, traffic will be backed up from Sepulveda to the Mississippi River, and if you haven't already gone to wherever you want to spend the weekend you're in trouble.

Anyway, I'm glad I'll only be dealing with whatever subway closures the MTA will surprise me with this weekend. Carmageddon seems like a good time to revisit the home movie classic "405 The Movie."

Drivers Choose Free Bridges Over Toll Bridges in NYC

2011-07-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

The New York Post has a story on a new report from NYC DOT. The DOT data shows that traffic on the tolled bridges onto Manhattan has declined while the traffic on the free bridges has increased. (I can't find a link to the actual report or a press release for additional info.) These shifts occurred due to higher tolls implemented by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to help pay for large deficits including the transit systems. From the story:

"It's just a case of bridge shopping," explained Sam Schwartz, a traffic expert and former city transportation commissioner.

Schwartz argued that the numbers provide further proof of the need for congestion pricing, where every route into Manhattan would carry a price tag.

"It's really very bad for the environment," he said of the drivers roaming around seeking cheaper alternatives.

"They're polluting a lot, driving extra miles, using more gasoline."

City Councilman James Vacca (D-Bronx), a strong opponent of congestion fees, reached the opposite conclusion.

"We may be reaching the point of diminishing returns with the constant toll and fare increases," Vacca said. "If they keep raising it further, I'm worried about the impact on jobs. The reality is, some people do have to take their cars to work."

Overall, traffic into and out of Manhattan was relatively flat between 2008 and 2009, dropping by a thin 0.2 percent, from 1,830,907 vehicles to 1,828,065.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/city_drivers_taking_bridge_to_free_RoACgqCcwqRGun3810zFrJ#ixzz1S6nbzNtI

Needless to say, I'm with "Gridlock" Sam on this issue. Councilmember Vacca is right that some of his constituents have to drive to work, but they are likely driving within the Bronx or to nearby counties rather than lower Manhattan. I would like to know how much extra driving people are doing to avoid tolls. Are they willing to drive 10 extra minutes to avoid about $5 in tolls? Five extra minutes? What are the drivers' values of time? My guess based some work I am doing on taxi travel between Manhattan and LaGuardia airport is that drivers who avoid toll bridges are making a rational and justified decision unless their value of time is extremely high (in the neighborhood of $150 per hour). There really ought to be tolls on all bridges and tunnels into and out of Manhattan. East River tolls could generate nearly $1 billion annually and be much simpler to sell and explain than congestion pricing.

Here is a brief history from the NY Times of why the East River has so few tolls.

“If the party says there’s no cost overrun, there’s no cost overrun.”

2011-07-12T13:34:00.000-07:00

Virginia Postrel writes in Bloomberg about Bent Flyvbjerg's work on the exceptionally poor forecasting used to justify transportation projects. She confuses the meaning of average and median and ignores the substantial variance in forecast error, but the overall message is correct in that there are biases built into the system of financing transport projects that skew forecasts of usage and costs. Flyvbjerg explains it doesn't have to be this way:

He would like to see better incentives -- punishment for errors, rewards for accuracy -- combined with a requirement that forecasts not only consider the expected characteristics of the specific project but, once that calculation is made, adjust the estimate based on an “outside view,” reflecting the cost overruns of similar projects. That way, the “unexpected” problems that happen over and over again would be taken into consideration.

Such scrutiny would, of course, make some projects look much less appealing -- which is exactly what has happened in the U.K., where “reference-class forecasting” is now required. “The government stopped a number of projects dead in their tracks when they saw the forecasts,” Flyvbjerg says. “This had never happened before.”

Or there is the Chinese approach to avoiding cost overruns:

Unfortunately, the world’s biggest infrastructure projects, including the recently opened high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai, are subject to no such checks, or even to scholarly examination. Flyvbjerg has been trying for years to get data on project costs in China, to no avail. “Their data are simply not reliable,” he says. He quotes an unidentified Chinese colleague who said, “If the party says there’s no cost overrun, there’s no cost overrun.”

Others have looked at other reasons for forecast inaccuracy. Here is a paper by Pavithra Parthasarathi and David Levinson in which they consider the effect of demographic forecasts on roadway forecast inaccuracy. There are reasonable as well as unjustifiable reasons for forecast inaccuracy, but ultimately all forecasts are wrong. We can make better predictions but we will never be perfectly right, but we can do better.

Checking In on London's Bike Share Program

2011-07-12T06:44:00.000-07:00

London Hire Bikes animation from Sociable Physics on Vimeo.

London's Boris Bikes have been around for a year, and the Guardian had a post about how the program is working out. (The program is officially called Barclay's Cycle Hire and is run by Transport for London. Boris Bikes is a nickname because Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, pushed for the project.) Like most transport initiatives, the results are mixed. The bikes are well used and there is little thievery of the cycles, but the benefits are not widespread. However, also just like most transportation problems, the limits of bike share are related to parking. Here are some explanations of the problems:

Not everyone has retained their affection for the scheme. "It is a very good idea but in practice it is unusable," says Stephen Bayley, who was jury chair of the 2011 Brit Insurance Design awards, which actually gave Barclays Cycle Hire the transport prize. "I used it from nearly day one, but I gave up about three months ago when I had to go to nine different docking stations before I could park my bike, which took over an hour. It's not a reliable transit system for working people, it's an amusing curiosity for tourists."

This is a recurring complaint. The bikes make 20,000 journeys a day, but in a relentlessly predictable pattern, with huge spikes during the morning rush hour at the major rail stations and then again, in reverse, as commuters dash back to catch their evening trains. The largest terminal, at Waterloo station, can house 126 bikes, but TFL admits it could have five times as many and still not satisfy demand. More frustrating, as Bayley discovered, is when you successfully hire a bike but cannot find a place to return it at your destination.

On a tour of the nerve centre for Barclays Cycle Hire, near King's Cross, I raise the issue with Kulveer Ranger, Boris Johnson's director of environment and digital London. "It's true," he says. "We can't guarantee that you will be able to find a bike or be able to dock it. The bus network can carry 6.5 million people a day, the tube 4.5 million, but there are only a few thousand bikes, so not all Londoners are going to get them when they want them. If you have to make an urgent meeting, you've got to think, 'This scheme does not do it for me.' But it does work when I'm relaxed and I want to make a journey."

What is happening is locals are using the bikes as a complement to the transit system. This is good, but look at the types of people taking advantage of the program:

But a residual concern remains who is using the scheme: overwhelmingly white men aged between 25 and 44, many of whom earn more than £50,000 a year. For a scheme that has already cost £79m, with a further £45m for the extension to cover the Olympic Park next year, can we really justify this "posh-boy toy"? "If you look at the normal demographic for cycling, it's exactly the same," says Ranger. "But that will change as we move into year two or three and we see people getting comfortable with it."

This gets to one of my major concerns with bike share, car share and many other sustainable transport initiatives. These projects increase the transport choices for relatively wealthy people. I don't have anything against helping "posh-boys", but there are opportunity costs associated with these programs, and I worry that programs that help the well off come at the political and capital expenses of those who really don't have many good choices.

What Happened to Chinese Air Fares After High Speed Rail Service Began?

2011-07-08T08:21:00.000-07:00

As should be expected, economy airfares between Beijing and Shanghai collapsed last week as the new high speed rail link opened. This article from the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation nicely describes what is happening to air and train fares throughout China.

Transit Service Restored After ADA Lawsuit

2011-07-08T08:06:00.000-07:00

Last year the New York MTA cut dozens of bus lines. These cuts had dramatic effects on many people in areas where subway service is unavailable or impractical. The New York subway system is not very accessible to people with limited mobility. In the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn a few people affected by the service cuts filed a lawsuit against the MTA on grounds that the cuts violated the American with Disabilities Act. This week the MTA settled the suit and restored two express bus lines into Manhattan.

The Brooklyn Eagle reports here. From the story:

In their lawsuit, Ryan and Halbert, who are both wheelchair-bound, charged the MTA with human rights violations after the agency eliminated the B37 bus on Third Avenue. The elimination of the bus line left two groups of people - the physically disabled and senior citizens - without reliable means of transportation, Daus said.

“Subways are not accessible,” Daus said.

The R line, which runs on Fourth Avenue, does not have handicap-accessible subway stations, he noted. None of the stations has an elevator.

Bay Ridge was hit harder by transit service cuts than other communities, according to Jonathan R. Peters, a professor of finance at the College of Staten Island. Peters said the community has a large population of senior citizens and residents who are physically disabled.

“There was a disproportionate impact,” he said.

The lawsuit, filed last year, was moving along in court when the MTA suddenly agreed to make changes in local transit service.

This is a pretty big deal but not getting much attention. The MTA is vulnerable to charges of violations of the ADA.

Related, here is a story from the LA Times describing new efforts to restrict apron parking as cars blocking the sidewalk also violate the ADA. From that story:

But in the last few years, apron parking has been attacked by a growing and eclectic group of critics, including former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and a UCLA professor who is a leading authority on parking. They say blocking the sidewalks forces pedestrians to make needless detours and violates the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The city decided to act after being sued by plaintiffs who said apron parking broke laws regarding the disabled. The city attorney's office recently advised the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to start enforcing the parking laws.

Room for Debate on Full Versus Partial Road Closures for Repair

2011-07-08T06:36:00.000-07:00

The NY Times' Room for Debate hosts a discussion about the merits of full road closure for repair and construction versus piecemeal approaches. There isn't much debate as everyone pretty much says close the whole road and get it over with faster and at less cost. The public can handle a few days of severe disruption.

A Times article described the commotion in Los Angeles over the complete shutdown of one of its busiest freeways for repairs. "It's going to be a mess," said Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of the 53-hour closing of Interstate 405 that begins in a week.

In New York City, highway repairs are usually done piecemeal, with single lanes or segments of lanes closed but at least part of the road left open to traffic. Sometimes that leaves one lane smooth and pothole free, while the adjacent one resembles a pocked lunar landscape.

Why doesn't New York City adopt the Los Angeles strategy? Would it be feasible to completely close several miles of a major city highway, like the Brooklyn-Queens, Gowanus or Major Deegan Expressways, for major repair work? Would such a short shutdown be less disruptive in the long run than frequent closings for resurfacing on a single lane or section of a lane, or for pothole filling and patchwork?

Perhaps Beijing and Shanghai Aren't As Densely Populated As We Thought

2011-07-07T09:25:00.000-07:00

From the NY Times' "Room for Debate" blog, this time about the potential strain of infrastructure spending on debt, Yasheng Huang makes the following observation:

The Chinese cities do not lack buildings, which they have in surplus. The cities lack people. Beijing and Shanghai have some of the lowest population densities among the world’s big metropolises. The current infrastructure is more than adequate to accommodate China’s urbanization.

The new ghost cities of China are well known, as are the "cities in a box" concepts being developed by Cisco and others. I hadn't realized that the building boom outstripped demand by residents in the largest cities, however. I'm sure Beijing and Shanghai are still plenty dense in any case.

Should There Be Allowed Uses for Parking Spaces?

2011-07-06T13:01:00.000-07:00

Over the past few days there have been a few news articles that highlight unintended consequences from poor on-street parking management. Los Angeles is working to eliminate "pop-up" car markets, New York City is pushing food trucks out of midtown, and The City Fix is upset that car share cars don't get subsidized, cheap parking. All of these complaints revolve around the fact that the price of parking at a meter has nothing to do with anything. The prices are too cheap, so entrepreneurial types take advantage of low, low rent, just like Kip and Henry did when they needed a nice place to sunbathe (Skip to 0:49 in the video above).

There are lots of food truck supporters who do not think there is anything wrong with food trucks using street spaces to sell their offerings. The fact that food trucks can park cheaply is a feature, not a bug, so to speak. Yet food trucks do undermine local permanent restaurants. Trucks rarely increase overall foot traffic to New York neighborhoods. The trucks tend to go where people are by design, which also happen to be the same places that have existing delis and restaurants. This isn't necessarily a bad situation, but it isn't ideal. Ultimately, however, existing delis and restaurants have real and valid concerns about food trucks stealing business. These concerns should not be minimized or ignored.

Selling cars from street spaces seems a bit more of an obvious problem, but really the car sellers are taking advantage of the same ability to avoid paying rent as the food trucks. Clayton Lane at City Fix isn't concerned that all street parking is too cheap. He's concerned that his preferred business has to pay reasonable rents to store their equipment. The business model for car sharing makes way more sense with free parking than it does if you have to pay for parking. This does not mean that car share companies should be given free parking and more than it means that any other special group should.

Simply charging market rates for meter parking isn't likely to resolve the policy questions involved with these issues. Here is a story about people living in vans in Los Angeles. Cities generally don't let people live in vehicles on streets. There a quite a few who live in RVs in New York because parking spaces are way cheaper than rent. (Again, see the Bosom Buddies intro.) Perhaps people will be happy to have whatever uses may occur in parking spaces so long as they pay for it, but I doubt it. I suspect only preferred uses, such as food trucks, will have support from various constituents, but don't forget not everyone likes food trucks. They are noisy, they often smell of whatever they are cooking, and sometimes they blow up. Food trucks are great if you like what they are selling, just as buying a car parked on the street if you happen to need to buy a car, or free street parking is great if you live in a van.

I do like food trucks, and I also am concerned about parking management. Almost any commercial activity will value a parking space more than drivers at peak periods.Obviously Will Smith shouldn't be able to live in a trailer in SoHo, right? What if he paid market rates for those parking spaces? How do you set the market price, by demand for parking by motorists or rent per square foot for apartments? In some cases this may be good and in some cases this may be bad, but there are consequences that shouldn't be glossed over. What uses should be allowed is a serious issue for local officials. Do we need a zoning code for parking spaces? I hope not, but perhaps we do.

Google Now Lets You Know When to Get Off the Bus

2011-07-06T10:11:00.000-07:00

From the Google blog is an announcement of Transit Navigation (Beta):

Today we’re releasing Google Maps 5.7 for Android. From Bangkok to Baltimore, we’ve added Transit Navigation (Beta), updated access to directions, better suggested search results and a photo viewer to Place pages—all of which can help you whether you’re traveling to an unfamiliar part of town or visiting a city across the world.

Transit Navigation (Beta)
Google Maps Navigation (Beta) currently provides over 12 billion miles of GPS-guided driving and walking directions per year. Now, GPS turn-by-turn (or in this case, stop-by-stop) navigation is available for public transit directions in 400+ cities around the globe with Transit Navigation.

Transit Navigation uses GPS to determine your current location along your route and alerts you when it’s time to get off or make a transfer. This is particularly helpful if you’re in a city where you don’t speak the language and can’t read the route maps or understand the announcements. After starting your trip with Transit Navigation, you can open another application or put your phone away entirely and Google Maps will still display an alert in your notification bar and vibrate your phone when your stop is coming up.

There is a short video on the Google blog that demonstrates how it works. Is this enough to get people to take transit or give up their iPhones for Android? We shall see, but this is pretty neat.

We Will Soon Drive Flying Cars: New Developments

2011-07-05T06:17:00.000-07:00

The Terrafugia flying car has been granted road-safety exemptions. Here is an article from the Register about it. From the story:

Following representations by Terrafugia to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), it has been agreed that production Transitions can use "tires that are appropriately rated for highway speeds and the vehicle weight". They will also be allowed to substitute lightweight polycarbonate windows for traditional automotive safety glass, which is not only heavy but could shatter in such a way as to obscure a pilot's vision in an airborne bird-strike situation.

It had been hoped that Transitions would be delivered from 2009, but Terrafugia has been dogged by delays. A proof-of-concept vehicle did fly in 2009 (pictured) but test results were evidently not all that one might wish as a major redesign followed. New test machines are now being built, and the company has stated that production might commence this year.

Even if all goes to plan, the future of the Transition may not be as rosy as it once seemed. Despite a helpful weight exemption from the aerial feds, according to the new spec a fully-fuelled Transition will be able to lift only 330lb of passengers and payload: it can't get airborne carrying two normal American men. Also the price has ballooned from $148k to $250k.

Only rich, abnormal American men will fly the things, but a milestone nonetheless.
(h/t David Levinson)

In other developments, New Scientist reports on a project sponsored by the European Commission called MyCopter that aims to develop "flocking algorithms" that will allow personal copters (and flying cars) to adapt to each other and not crash. A swarm of copters will learn and follow traffic rules, essentially creating a road network in the sky. Exciting stuff.

Can Loyatly Programs Improve Public Transit?

2011-07-05T06:05:00.000-07:00

Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic briefly profiles Balaji Prabhakar of Stanford University, who argues that loyalty programs similar to frequent flyer miles are a promising way to improve transit service and reduce peak hour crowding. Madrigal reports:

His big idea is to create "frequent commuter programs" in which people who travel on public transit would be rewarded for patronizing the system varying amounts depending on when and how far they travel. Prabhakar thinks the system could help create greater public transit usage and simultaneously decrease congestion. And he's deploying behavioral economics to transform the small monetary rewards a city could offer into something more. They tried a pilot program with Infosys in Bangalore and are rolling out a larger program with Singapore soon.

I think this is a promising idea and I know of a few other studies underway along similar lines. For crowded systems this can benefit all riders by spreading ridership over a longer period of the day, which should improve service on the edges of rush hour and off-peak through increased demand. This also reward many low-income riders who do not work 9-5 and would disproportionately benefit without changing travel behavior or taking service away from other riders.

On The Value of Flexible Transit: Getting to Your Drug Test on Time

2011-06-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

Here is a tweet at Dollar Van Demos that nicely explains the value of flexible transit, including taxis, dollar vans and other types:

yeah! . @AzanaBaby Today is my day. I tell Dolla Van driver I'm late for drug test & he decides to drop me all the way there OUT OF HIS WAY!

High quality door-to-door service is extremely important for lowering auto usage. In transit dependent areas these services may be provided formally or informally, but they will likely be provided somehow. Let's hear it for the driver and his commitment to service, and I hope they passed their drug test!

European Driver Stifling and and Transit Fares

2011-06-27T09:40:00.000-07:00

This NY Times article titled "Europe Stifles Driver in Favor of Mass Transit and Walking" is getting a lot of attention around the transport blogs and communities today. The article is a nice overview of many cities' actions, and many cities in Europe certainly have a different approach to mobility than US cities. I'm glad that better parking regulations were mentioned as well as the constraints of the older built environment of the central cities. These are important pieces of the puzzle for a less auto-dominated city, lower emissions and safer streets.

However, the piece fails to talk about the cost of transit. The high cost of gas in Europe is mentioned. The article states that a gallon of gas costs over $8 per gallon, and I don't think the author means diesel which is more popular than gas. Diesel is cheaper than gas by 10-20% due to lower taxes. That said, high transit ridership, lower auto usage and more walking and cycling in Europe occur with higher transit fares than in the US. Here is one compilation of transit fares around the world, and here is another for subway fares only. Broadly speaking, the US model of low transit fares has not resulted in high levels of transit ridership but has eliminated a lot of potential revenue from transit operations. See tables of farebox recovery ratios from around the world here. High transit fares in Europe (and Asia) don't necessarily "stifle" transit ridership. Having a well-funded transit system is a critical aspect of achieving social, environmental and safety goals.

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One point unrelated to transit fares is that there is evidence that European metros are suburbanizing (or sprawling). Will anti-auto regulations inhibit or contribute to sprawl? That's a huge question and something to watch closely. Here is one piece by Wendell Cox about European sprawl. Cox responded to another piece by Michael Lewyn, and Lewyn was challenging Robert Bruegmann's idea that sprawl in inevitable.

Chicane Chicanery?

2011-06-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

Here is a story about Newton Township, PA's attempt at traffic calming with waving lines and rubber posts. The anecdotal evidence is decidedly mixed as to the effectiveness of the project.

View more videos at: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com.

Narrower streets, speed bump/tables, lit crosswalks and other improvements may be better solutions here. That road looks like a speedway, and taken together brings to mind this conversation with an engineer:

(via Jalopnik)

How much is a parking space worth? $60k in Park Slope!

2011-06-17T11:54:00.000-07:00

(via Curbed)
Here is a listing for a parking space in Park Slope, Brooklyn, available for $60 (negotiable!) plus $270 per month in maintenance. Using the handy mortgage calculator on the listing site you can see that this space is yours for the low price of $525.25 per month, each month, for the next 30 years at 5% interest and including taxes and maintenance.

Here is the Curbed NY post.