American Dream

http://www.demographia.com/db-worldmetro5m-1965.htm

This analysis of metropolitan areas over 5,000,000 shows that more
than 60 percent of growth since 1965 has been in the suburbs. Of
course, this is an understatement, since much of the central city
growth was in greenfield expansions within municipal boundaries or
due to annexations or amalgamations.

In the high income world 97 percent of growth was in suburbs, while
in the both the middle and low income world suburban growth was
slightly greater than core city growth. Again, core cities gained
principally from development of greenfield space (which would be
called suburbanization if it occured in the suburbs) and annexation
or consolidation.

Best Year Since 1947

Again the privatized national rail system in the UK has set a ridership record. Ridership is up 36 percent from before privatization and at its highest level since 1947.

Car Costs Constant, Transit Rising

Calculated from US Department of Commerce and US Department of Transportation data.

Churches look to the heavens Downtown parishes plan to build higher to include parking

L-P’s exit prompts more tax wrangling

Portland gets creative to woo Siltronic

Financial enticements include property tax abatements, energy incentives, grants for capital expenses and work-force training. Multnomah County's Strategic Investment Program and the possibility of designating parts of the Northwest industrial area and Swan Island as an urban renewal area and Federal Housing and Urban Development loan of $26 million.

This is the same county (Multnomah) and City (Portland) that has a brand new county income tax, wants a new real estate transfer tax, is talking about new system development fees and raising transit taxes, school taxes, much more for it's established businesses.

Maybe if They Yell Loud Enough.....

It has been amusing to watch the discussion of the "railigious" in response to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Board (FRB) critique of light rail. Some of the best comedy has been on the "Sustran" email list, where participants have engaged in the following fantasies.

One correspondent chalked up the whole article to an intent on the part of the authors to be "clever." We must recognize that the railigious and the smart growth sheep have a peculiar psychic ability. They frequently comment on the motives of those with whom they disagree, which I suppose is the last resort of people committed to an ideology that cannot be defended. This correspondent went on for paragraphs, never once providing any evidence against the positions taken by the Federal Reserve Board. A copy of this communication was sent to the FRB authors, who will doubtless respond by relying more on religious dogma and less on reason in the future.

Another correspondent had difficulty with the contention of the FRB that it would be cheaper to buy every low-income rider a Toyota Prius. The correspondent got confused by the FRB's financing the car over five years and thought that only a single car could be bought. He or she went on to point out that the life of the light rail vehicle would be perhaps 30 years. Learn to read. Bad as it sounds, FRB is telling us that we could buy a new Toyota Prius EVERY five years... we could junk the one we bought five years ago, even though it would still have substantial value. Yes, it's true. There's no getting away from it.

This type of criticism, whether a tactic or arising from outright ignorance has been frequently used. In fact, not a light rail system has been built in the United States where it would not have been cheaper to lease a new car for each new rider --- in perpetuity for the life of the light rail line Famous Jaguar Slide.

It is notable that we have challenged the public transit industry to propose a transit system that would provide automobile competitive transit service throughout a major modern North American or Western European urban area. Of course there have been no takers, because there is no transit system that can do the job.

But that doesn't keep the railigious from fuming and concocting their witches brew of unsustainable sustainability.

AP Poll on Transportation

AP poll released today. Basic conclusion is that people will pay more taxes to reduce congestion. The distressing point, however, is that more people would like the higher taxes to go to transit, which of course would not reduce traffic congestion. In this regard, the transit-media complex has been successful --- convincing people that transit is the answer, despite the fact that no MPO or transit agency has ever produced a plan that would materially reduce congestion. There's a good reason for it. It's impossible. No urban area in the Western World has a transit system that does more than get people around the core and take them to the core. Everywhere else, cars are needed. And everywhere else is where most people live and where most jobs are.

See The Illusion of Transit Choice

HTML Version
PDF Version: Suitable for Framing

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has published an article indicating that it would be less expensive to buy each of the low-income riders of the St. Louis light rail system a new Toyota Prius every five years. Even after such an expenditure, there would be nearly $50 million left over each year. The new Priuses, FRB indicates, would add little to the traffic congestion since light rail ridership is so small in relation to to automobile use.

It should be noted that the St. Louis light rail line could be characterized as one of the the "least-worst" in the nation, carrying more daily riders on a new single line system than anywhere else.

Vancouver Alone Among Densifying Core Cities

1. Fully Developed: Densifying
Core cities that have substantially retained their 1950 boundaries, inside of which there has been little undeveloped land, and which are at their peak population. There is a single example, Vancouver, Canada.

2. Fully Developed: Not Densifying
Core cities that have substantially retained their 1950 boundaries, inside of which there has been little undeveloped land, and have lost population. There are 71 examples. (Some core cities are now growing again, but generally remain far below their peak populations).

3. Not Fully Developed: Population at Peak
Core cities that have expanded their boundaries since 1950 or have had substantial tracts of undeveloped land. For example, while New York is at its population peak, much of two boroughs (Queens and Richmond) had substantial amounts of undeveloped land in 1950. The three remaining boroughs, all of which were fully developed in 1950 remain below their population peaks.

4. Not Fully Developed: Population Falling
Core cities that have expanded their boundaries since 1950 or have had substantial tracts of undeveloped land and have lost population. For example, the US city of Milwaukee nearly doubled its area by annexation during the 1950s. Yet the latest estimates show its population to be below the pre-annexation 1950 figure.


High-income world:
Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore United States, Western Europe (pre-2004 enlargement European Union, Norway, Switzerland and enclaves within that area).

High-Income World Metropolitan Areas: Core City & Suburban Population Trends

Australia Metropolitan Areas & Core Cities: 1965-2001 (2004629)
Canada Metropolitan Areas & Core Cities: 1951-2001 (2004629)
Hong Kong Metropolitan Area & Core City: 1965-2001 (2004629)
Israel Metropolitan Areas & Core Cities: 1965-Present (2004629)
Japan Metropolitan Areas & Core Cities: 1965-2000 (2004629)
New Zealand Metropolitan Areas & Core Cities: 1965-2001 (2004629)
Singapore Metropolitan Area: 1965-2001 (2004629)
United States Urbanized Areas & Core Cities: 1950-2000 (2004629)
Western Europe Metropolitan Areas & Core Cities: 1965-Present (2004629)

The Congress for the New Urbanism's annual meeting attracted nearly 1,400 planners and developers to Chicago, where they could see for themselves density, mixed uses, and rail transit. Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, few of them understood what they saw.

The Chicago Tribune quotes one of them as saying of the region's rail lines, "To have this wonderful subway system, light rail lines, and to see it actually work." Never mind that Chicago has no light rail; to say that the region's transit system "actulaly works" ignores the fact that Chicago transit has lost nearly 20 percent of its riders in the last fifteen years.

Someone else said, "I don't think there are many places you can drive this far and not see sprawl." Of course, there aren't many urban areas in the U.S. as large as Chicago. But Chicago has suffered (or enjoyed, depending on your point of view) a huge suburbanization of residents and jobs in the last four decades. In the 1990s, for example, the urban area gained more than 300,000 jobs, but Chicago itself lost 18,000 jobs.

A researcher who works for the Congress for the New Urbanism was quoted as saying, "This is a group of people who get the complexities of places." In fact, they don't get it. Cities are not only more complicated than we understand, they are more complicated than we can understand. Planners who think they understand cities and can design utopias are fooling themselves.

As it happens, I attended part of this conference and was repeatedly amazed at how naive many people were. Participants would spout theories without backing them up with facts. They would repeat dogmas that everyone else at the conference believed to be true even though anyone with access to data easily found on the web could prove them false.

For example, at one session an aerial photographer, Alex MacLean, showed photo after photo of "sprawl" which he lambasted because it was ugly, auto dependent, or otherwise violated New Urban principles. Of course, the residents and users of these areas rarely look at them from the air and in fact find them essential for their day-to-day needs.

• Big-box stores that New Urbanists consider ugly sell a wide variety of low-cost goods to people who might not otherwise be able to afford those goods.
• Cul de sacs that violate New Urbanist ideas about "connectivity" in fact protect neighborhoods from crime and traffic accidents.
• Suburban homes that appear "cookie cutter" from the air in fact are highly customized by their residents (and the cookie-cutter epithet could just as easily be applied to many New Urban developments).

I was invited to the conference to see if there were any areas of agreement between New Urbanists and free-market urbanists. I told them that free-market urbanists supported New Urbanism as long as it is optional, but we oppose all efforts to use government coercion, regulation, or subsidies to promote New Urbanism. I also said free-market urbanists would join them in opposing subsidies to the automobile (and making transit more efficient) as well as opposing zoning rules that forbade marketable New Urban developments (provided residents of existing neighborhoods would have a major say in the future of their neighborhoods).

Some of them heard me but many did not. I hope we can continue the dialog with those who aren't so interested in controlling other people's lives regardless of what those people want.

This analysis of a rail proposal that will face Denver voters this fall shows that the so-called FasTracks plan will produce slow, expensive trains. Bus-rapid transit would be faster, more frequent, and save taxpayers $4 billion in construction costs and $30 million in annual operating costs. The link will download an 800-KB pdf.

Houston's 47 (to date) accidents between cars and light rail caught the attention of the New York Times. The Times notes, "At an annual sand castle competition this month, no fewer than 11 entries depicted trains and crashed cars, with titles like "Metrozilla" and "Weapons of Mass Destruction."

To minimize accidents, Houston build a fountain next to the tracks that alert motorists by spraying water high in the air when a train is coming. So far, 15 cars have hit the fountain.

Of course, say transit agency officials, all of the accidents were the motorists' fault.

All Agree No Traffic or Air Pollution Impact

Also see Charlotte light rail report Breach of Faith

Costs of Sprawl Reconsidered


Executive Summary: The Costs of Sprawl Reconsidered: What the Data Actually Show
by Wendell Cox and Joshua Utt
Executive Summary #1770

The Costs of Sprawl?

The "anti-sprawl" movement has received much attention in recent years, and has been successful in implementing its "smart growth" policies in some areas. Much of the justification for the current campaign against the low-density (sprawling) urban development that Americans and Western Europeans prefer is based upon assumptions that it is more costly than the more dense development of central cities. A federally financed research project (Costs of Sprawl) concluded that we can no longer afford sprawling development and that failure to force more dense development in the next quarter-century would impose more than $225 billion in additional costs.

Current Urban Planning Assumptions

The urban planning profession generally contends that the following assumptions (called in this paper Current Urban Planning Assumptions) are compelling reasons why greater control should be exercised over land use to fight urban sprawl.

1. Lower spending will be associated with higher population densities.
2. Lower spending will be associated with lower rates of population growth.
3. Lower spending will be associated with older municipalities.

Research to Date

Most of the research on which these assumptions are based is theoretical, projecting standard costs into the future. It makes no attempt to test the actual expenditures of more dense, slower growing, and older municipalities compared to municipalities with the suburban land-use patterns that have developed over the past half-century. The research contained in this paper examines the actual data on municipal expenditures and finds that the Current Urban Planning Assumptions are unreliable and that other factors--principally, variations in employee compensation per capita--explain virtually all of the variation in municipal expenditures.

However, before describing this research, it is important to examine the Costs of Sprawl claims. Although $225 billion in additional costs sounds like a lot (and there are many questions regarding this claim), the cost is actually modest because it is spread over a quarter-century and an average of 115 million households. In fact, in the last 20 years, the average annual increase in local government expenditures in the United States has been 25 times the annual Costs of Sprawl projection.

Econometric Analysis

The source of data for this paper is the United States Bureau of the Census database for 2000. We used this database to conduct an econometric analysis that sought to identify the factors that are most important in explaining the differences in municipal expenditures. Data were available for more than 700 municipalities in the year 2000. We developed three econometric models.

The first, the General Government Model, was used to estimate the impact of factors such as population density, crime rates, and 11 others on municipal expenditures per capita. With respect to the Current Urban Planning Assumptions, no practical relationship was found between municipal expenditures per capita density, population growth rate, or community age. The impact of density of municipal expenditures was found to be statistically significant, but the predicted impact was trivial. Theoretically, if the nation were to reverse 40 years of suburbanization, the annual savings per capita would purchase a dinner for two at a moderately priced restaurant.

Further, the combination of factors that seemed likely to affect municipal spending (both those related to the Current Urban Planning Assumptions and others) explained less than 30 percent of the variation in municipal expenditures per capita. The other two econometric models showed that none of the Current Urban Planning Assumptions bore a statistically significant relationship to the variation in municipal wastewater charges or water charges. This is particularly significant, since these infrastructure functions are among those cited most often in claims that suburbanization imposes additional costs.

Nominal Analysis

A nominal (ranking) analysis of the actual data was also performed. The actual data indicate relationships considerably at variance with the Current Urban Planning Assumptions. The highest density, slowest growing, and oldest municipalities all had higher-than-average expenditures per capita. The oldest municipalities had the highest expenditures.

Employee Compensation

By far the largest expenditure category for municipalities is employee compensation. A further nominal analysis indicated that virtually all of the variation in municipal expenditures per capita could be explained by the variation in employee compensation. For example, the highest density quintile of municipalities spent $68 per capita each year more than the average. Wages and salaries in the same municipalities were $91 higher.

Special Interest Control and Entrenchment?

In short, this analysis indicates that higher payroll costs are associated with larger, older municipalities. Local government employees have a significant, concentrated interest in improving their compensation and working conditions. This could be indicative of a political "entrenchment" that results from special interest control--an influence to which older municipalities would be more susceptible. Other special interests could exert similar influence, although employee compensation alone appears sufficient to account for the variation in municipal spending. It seems much more likely that the differences in municipal expenditures per capita are the result of political, rather than economic, factors--especially the influence of special interests.

St. Louis Continues Drop

More than 2000 years ago, Carthage had risen to prominence on the Mediterranean Sea, with more than 500,000 people. Then it was sacked and salted into oblivion by the Romans, with resulting 100 percent loss of population. More than 100 years ago, St. Louis had risen to prominence among cities west of the Alleghenies. It peaked in 1950 and has now lost more than 60 percent of its population. This is less than Carthage, but the actual number lost, more than 500,000 is virtually the same.

It has been a long, steep slide for Carthage-on-the-Mississippi. In 1870, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the nation. Actually, it should be considered third, because one of the larger cities was Brooklyn, which began its career of forgotten-ness when it was forcibly merged into New York by the state legislature in 1898. The Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooner’s television series kept the name from disappearing, but by 1960 they were gone.

Big Dig/Light Rail Firm & Associates in Trouble?

Today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the local transit agency may fire Parsons Brinckerhoff and companies associated (the "Cross County Collaborative") in building the under-construction light rail extension.

According to the paper...

The region's transit agency is threatening to dump the four engineering companies overseeing construction of its new $550 million light-rail extension because of project delays and management problems.

...

Cross County Collaborative is a joint venture of four engineering companies: Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Quade and Douglas Inc.; STV Inc.; Jacobs Civil Inc.; and Kwame Building Group Inc. They are the prime contractors for the design and construction management work.

...

"It has now been eight months since the notice of default for design services and the CCC has not cured the design defaults," Salci said in the letter.

The Metro chief executive said the collaborative "was not satisfactorily managing and coordinating" its tasks and "continued to allow the schedule to slip."

...

FYI...
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