American Dream

Traffic Circles Voted Down by Three to One

Traffic circles installed in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district for the supposed purpose of cleaning the air and making streets safer were soundly rejected by a vote of local residents. Residents complained that the circles actually made the streets more dangerous for pedestrians and, by leading cars to slow and then accelerate, increased pollution. The San Francisco Fire Department also tested the circles and found they presented major barriers to their fire trucks (photo in story).

The city's Department of Parking and Traffic mailed ballots to local residents, 37 percent of which were returned. Of these, 77 percent voted against the traffic circles. As a result, the department has agreed to end plans to install more circles and to remove the four circles that it had already installed.

Engineer Says Monorail Plan Is Flawed

After getting burned by cost overruns for light rail, Seattle voters were foolish enough to vote to extend the city's signature monorail line south. Now a structural engineer says the $1.75 billion line will be obsolete and dangerous as soon as it is completed. While Monorail Project officials hint that the engineer is just disgruntled because he didn't get a contract to work on the project, the engineer claims he refused to work on a project that is so certain to fail.

Light-Rail Line Will Cost Even More Than Its Critics Predicted

Seattle's rail-transit agency, Sound Transit, estimates that an extension of a light-rail line to the University of Washington will cost $1.7 to $1.85 billion -- and that doesn't include inflation, contingency reserves, or $110 million already spent on the project. Sound Transit is currently spending $2.4 billion to build a 14-mile line from downtown Seattle to Tukwilla.

Seattle voters originally approved a line from the University to Sea-Tac Airport. But cost overruns led Sound Transit to build only from downtown, several miles south of the University, to Tukwilla, several miles north of the Airport. At $170 million a mile, the shorter line, which is now under construction, is one of the most outrageously expensive light-rail routes in the nation.

MBTA Set to Begin Passenger ID Stops

Another reason not to build (or ride) rail transit: Better carry identification if you ride rail transit in Boston, as transit police plan to stop people and ask for identification and what they are doing riding transit.

Neil Goldschmidt, the former mayor of Portland and governor of Oregon and father of Portland's light-rail system, resigned from most of his public and private posts after a news story revealed that he had an illegal sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl when he was mayor. This has led to endless ruminations by people worried about the Goldschmidt legacy. One interesting article describes many Goldschmidt-connected people, including Representative Earl Blumenauer and the former head of Portland's transit agency whose family also owns the construction firm that built many of Portland's transit-oriented developments, as the light-rail mafia. The Portland Tribune published a more lengthy, and rather formidable, list of members of Neil's Network.

Speaking of transit security, a rocket launcher was found near a rail-transit station in Atlanta.

Fox News reports that Homeland Security is worried about terrorist threats to rail transit and has ordered transit agencies to undertake additional security measures. Some agencies are worried they don't have the funds to do it. Here is an easy solution: Stop building rails and rely on bus-rapid transit instead.

Unbeknownst to local property owners, Sheridan (a suburb of Denver) plans to condemn their land and sell it to developers who will put in retailers whose sales tax revenues may be more lucrative to the city. The Denver Post article fails to mention that the land in the urban-renewal district surrounds a light-rail station.

The lucky residents of Ottawa, Ontario are going to get another $600-million light-rail line as part of a "world-class transit system" and the city of Ottawa's "smart growth management plan."

Although overall homeownership rates have risen in the past few decades, homeownership rates for low- and moderate-income families have fallen, says a new study reported in the Eugene Register-Guard. The study, published by the Center for Housing Policy, says that in 1978, a median-priced home cost four times the annual median income of a working family with children, while today it costs five times that much. You can download the study itself from here.

Low-income condos built as part of a New Urbanist development at the site of Denver's old Stapleton Airport have a high vacancy rate. According to the Denver Post, the developer thought the low-income condos would be attractive to single mothers and "people of color," but most buyers have been single white men right out of medical school. The developer says she "underestimated the bias that families have for wanting detached housing or a little yard of their own." So she is now marketing the subsidized housing to people whose lifetime earnings will likely be in the millions of dollars.

Spread-City Everywhere

Great essay by UC-Berkeley planning professor emeritus Melvin Webber in this spring's edition of Access. Webber explains how technological advances in transportation and information have given people and companies greater "locational freedom" and how physical proximity (high-density development & settlement) is no longer a prerequisite for economic growth and prosperity.

UCLA is holding a conference on smart growth with all the usual suspects. For more information, see their web site.

After spending $9.9 million on environmental studies, light rail is effectively dead in Louisville -- at least for the time being -- because of "no money and no political will," says the Louisville Courier-Journal.

Impact Fees On Trial in NC

BY MARK SCHULTZ : The Herald-Sun
mschultz@heraldsun.com
May 13, 2004 : 9:10 pm ET

DURHAM -- A judge granted class-action status Thursday to a lawsuit filed by a group of Durham County homebuilders challenging the county's recently approved school impact fees on new housing.

(full story at link above)

Another urban-renewal project along Portland's Martin Luther King Boulevard is known to the locals as "black removal."

Officials want to declare Portland's most economically active edge city "blighted" so they can justify skimming $45 to $55 million in property taxes to subsidize transit-oriented developments along a proposed commuter rail line.

Evaluating Criticism of Smart Growth
By Todd Litman
Victoria Transport Policy Institute
8 April 2004

Must Read! A 'critique of the critics' of Smart Growth put out by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. Included in this report on the 'critics' pages are notables such as; Wendell Cox, Edward Glaeser and Matthew Kahn, Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson, Edwin S. Mills, & our very own, Randal O’Toole!

On a serious note though, this paper is 70 pages of how the criticisms are being refuted. There are many links referring to the Demographia Website and Wendell's research. Whole sub-chapters in response to each of the named critics.
sgcritics.pdf