Talking About Walking, Plus Bonus Links!

Christopher Hawthorne is writing a series of pieces in the LA Times about the boulevards of Los Angeles. The first piece is about Atlantic Boulevard. The story is here and includes some nice interactive pieces. From the story:

The boulevard, in fact, is where the Los Angeles of the immediate future is taking shape. No longer a mere corridor to move cars, it is where L.A. is trying on a fully post-suburban identity for the first time, building denser residential neighborhoods and adding new amenities for cyclists and pedestrians.
In the process, the city is beginning to shed its reputation as a place where the automobile is king — or at least where its reign goes unchallenged. Cities across the U.S. followed L.A.'s car-crazy lead in the postwar era. This time around we might provide a more enlightened example: how to retrofit a massive region for a future that is less auto-centric.
Especially among younger Angelenos, including foreign-born immigrants and transplants from other American cities, there is a hunger for better-designed roadways and new ways of getting around. And L.A.'s political leadership is finally responding.

A point to consider is that public policies are responsive to market demand just like real estate development and blue jeans. Public officials are interested in supplying the types of projects and facilities that improve their chances of getting re-elected. Up until recently one way to up the electoral odds was to maximize external funding for large scale construction and subsidy because the officials could always claim employment benefits. External money gets funneled to projects that voters value, but also reflect the funding priorities of the funding agency (in transport this is often federal). What is happening in LA now reflects local finance in many cases, primarily through Measure R.

The city (and county) is reacting to voter demands for quality of life improvements rather than strictly mobility improvements. In many cases what LA is doing with their boulevards is extremely hard to do with federal money for a few reasons including over-reliance on travel time savings and a focus on mobility over accessibility.  Planning transportation as a quality of life concern has great potential for positive change and better financing models. I'll be presenting some recent work of mine along these lines ate the "Walking and the Life of the City" Symposium on June 7 at NYU Wagner's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. Details here.


Somewhat related, here are some thoughts from Erin Chantry from last week's CNU meetings, where walking was a major topic of conversation.

And this post by David Levinson about Bay Area density and urban economics should be required reading. A lot of the "all density all the time" urbanism misreads or overstates much from urban economics models.

The Productive Value of Transport Infrastructure

Gideon Rachman writes in the Financial Times that:

Spending on infrastructure – “shovel-ready” projects, as President Barack Obama has called them – is, of course, a standard Keynesian solution for an economy that is caught in a downward recessionary spiral. Under normal circumstances, such spending might be a great idea.

In Europe, however, there are plenty of reasons to be sceptical. If building great roads and trains were the route to lasting prosperity, Greece and Spain would be booming. The past 30 years have seen a huge splurge in infrastructure spending, often funded by the EU. The Athens metro is excellent. The AVE fast-trains in Spain are a marvel. But this kind of spending has done very little to change the fundamental problems that now plague both Greece and Spain – in particular, youth unemployment. 

Worse, in some ways, EU funding for infrastructure has created problems. In Greece, milking the EU for subsidies became an industry in itself: and political connections were a surer route to wealth than entrepreneurial flair.

Story at this link.

We often hear about the productivity and economic benefits of large transportation investments. In the US the California high speed rail line is touted as a boon to employment, the environment and the economy. It's worth considering under what circumstances transport infrastructure investment will actually achieve some of these goals.

Transport investment leads directly to jobs in construction and manufacturing sectors. These are the direct employment benefits that people love. These jobs are also the direct employment costs of the project, so employment related to building infrastructure is not an unambiguous good. If the public spends money to support employment, which is common and popular policy decision, then we should try to focus investment where it is most cost effective. It's plausible that European countries are somewhat better off because of the employment infrastructure investment provided, but that's far from certain and the debt costs are now crushing.

Outside of direct employment gains, where are the expected productivity gains? All of the new rail and road (and airport) investments were not enough to avoid financial catastrophe. This is likely because the incremental gains from new investment were not sufficiently great to overcome the incremental costs. What is the economic value of shifting travelers from air or car trips to rail trips? Travel time savings are not an obvious productivity gain even though travelers may be individually happier. Since the air and road connections were already high quality the shift from air to train or car to train shifted existing economic activity rather than create much new economic activity. Some areas gained while other areas declined as new infrastructure improved or reduced accessibility. The net benefits are small.

In countries with poor or non-existent infrastructure the potential gains are huge. China, for instance, has poor quality roads and much of the country lacks reasonable access to the wealth of the eastern part of the country. In such cases high quality transport networks can unlock economic gains by lowering transportation costs. This was the case with the US Interstate system, which fostered cheap, reliable transport by truck.

When we invest in transport infrastructure to goose economic activity or realize productivity gains (I'll leave environmental issues for another time) we have to evaluate the costs and benefits based on current conditions. Transport infrastructure isn't magic, but it is critical, and money spent on glamour projects is money that can't be invested elsewhere. Supply side trickle down economics doesn't work for income taxes and doesn't work for supply side transport investment. Much transport investment redistributes economic activity rather than increases economic activity. Such investments may be net positive but is often net negative. It's important to understand clearly what happens with investment and invest wisely.