American Dream

Peter Samuel's brief, which cites a rebuttal of Robert Caro's biography of Robert written by Moses himself (see below) can be read at the link above.

Back in the 1970's, Robert Caro wrote a LONG biography of New York Parks and Arterial Highways official and founder of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (and many other offices) Robert Moses entitled The Power Broker. In my opinion, this is a deeply-flawed book, in part because many of the "facts" presented in it are false. It is also, to a large extent, the ideological foundation for the notion of "induced" demand for highway capacity, though Caro never uses the term.

The Power Broker, in spite of the flaws, is still worth reading if you have the time (over 1,000 pages!). It can be purchased from Amazon.com at this link.

The actual text of the Moses rebuttal can be found here.

Tom Rubin pointed this story out on the Transport-Policy Yahoo! group, and I think it's something that the readership might be interested in here. As for the residents of this area, I think the line "be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it" applies.

July 20, 2005 latimes.com
COLUMN ONE
'Calmed' Roads Led to a Storm
Engineers tried to ease Cheviot Hills traffic by slowing it to push drivers elsewhere. But only residents' anger is flowing more freely.
By Martha Groves
Times Staff Writer

July 20, 2005

Quotes:

For the most part, Glen Friedman loves living in Cheviot Hills, a choice Westside neighborhood with undulating streets and gracious multimillion-dollar houses.

If only he could get in and out of it.

The same goes for Chuck Shephard, a lawyer in Century City who in spring 2004 had to allow 40 minutes to get from his desk to his son's 5 p.m. Pony League games at nearby Cheviot Hills Recreation Center. That's for a 1.4-mile trip that Mapquest, the online service, says should take three minutes.

"People have become prisoners of Cheviot Hills," said Shephard's wife, Robin. "You can't leave in the morning or get back at night."

If it sounds like it's time for a traffic fix, consider this: The city has already instituted its most extensive neighborhood traffic measures ever to slow down and redirect the crush of commuters who pour daily through Cheviot Hills.

Many residents say it's the so-called traffic calming fixes themselves — four-way stop signs, metered signals, road narrowing curb extensions known as bump-outs, re-striped lanes and right- and left-turn restrictions — that are the problem.

The people of Cheviot Hills and traffic engineers are learning a sobering lesson about life in the vehicle-laden big city: In the absence of mass transit that gets people out of their cars, or more roads to accommodate the rising number of motorists, it's not enough to just push the traffic around. One street's sweet relief can quickly mean another's misery.

"Nothing is working on the Westside anymore," said Sandy Brown, a longtime activist. "All these wonderful mitigations, and traffic is backed up for blocks. If you really talk seriously to a traffic engineer, they'll tell you they're out of tricks."

For years, residents of Cheviot Hills have complained loudly to City Hall about traffic — with good reason.

Their affluent enclave of doctors, producers and lawyers, in the heart of the Westside, has long been the cut-through of choice for thousands of commuters trying to get from the Santa Monica Freeway to Century City, and vice versa.

washingtonpost.com
Duncan Suspends Home Building
Permit Violations In Montgomery Spur Review

By Tim Craig and Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, July 19, 2005; A01

Quotes:

Montgomery County officials yesterday froze home building in most new subdivisions across the county while officials examine a variety of lapses in the once-vaunted planning process.

With County Executive Douglas M. Duncan and County Council members reacting to widespread building violations in Clarksburg Town Center, buyers waiting for homes to be built in Montgomery
could face considerable delays and possible cost increases.

Duncan (D) and the chairman of the Planning Board have frozen the issuance of building permits in subdivisions that require site
plans -- about 80 percent of pending residential projects -- until builders can verify that the projects meet height and setback requirements. Projects under construction can proceed, but those that have not broken ground will be subject to another review.

The freeze follows a move in neighboring Prince George's County this year to slow rural development and reflects widespread
concern throughout the suburbs over the pace of expansion and accompanying congestion.

Duncan's announcement came an hour after four council members proposed a broader moratorium on new building permits until
projects' site plans are thoroughly reviewed by county leaders. The council will vote on the emergency legislation, which would be in effect until winter, next week.

Combined, the two approaches represent a rebuke to a planning process that for a generation has tried to steer growth into designated areas near major transit routes. But at least in Clarksburg, one of the county's fastest-growing communities, officials have acknowledged that they were ill equipped to oversee that growth.

Developers and builders predicted dire consequences for home buyers and contractors, with the possibility of interest rates and housing costs creeping up.

"If you buy a house from me that I say I can deliver in six months, you can go out today and get a mortgage that will be good six months from now," said Tom Bozzuto, a developer with projects planned for Clarksburg and near Laytonsville. "If I don't know when I can start the house, you can't get a mortgage at all. You can't lock in an interest rate."

Duncan's freeze will affect about 200 building permits -- which could range from subdivisions of single-family homes to high-rise condominium buildings -- awaiting official approval
in zones requiring a site plan. Applications will have to be resubmitted for further scrutiny.

Md. panel begins look at another bay bridge

Plans are in earliest stage, but opposition heating up

By Chris Guy
Sun Staff

July 18, 2005

Quotes:

There is no good place to build a new Chesapeake Bay bridge, no place that won't cost billions, no place that won't take 20 years to plan and construct, no place that won't prompt a tooth-and-nails battle with nearby residents, slow-growth forces and environmentalists.

But leaving things the way they are with one crossing would make current rush-hour tie-ups seem like child's play, and weekend backups could routinely stretch 12 miles in the doomsday gridlock predicted by traffic experts, who foresee more than a 40 percent increase in the number of vehicles using the existing bridge by 2025.

More than a half-century since the Bay Bridge spanned the Chesapeake and 30 years after its three-lane twin spurred a quickening march to and from the Eastern Shore, a 19-member state task force is taking tentative steps to find another crossing.

To transportation planners, those look like a baseline for state officials who eventually will have to choose a site. To residents in counties that could be affected, the diagrams seem to be aimed at them.

In Kent County, Chestertown Mayor Margo Bailey began making a stink when she heard that Kent County was included in the northernmost bay zone. She has already started distributing an incendiary petition that says state officials are considering a "massive bridge and interstate-like corridor ... the biggest threat in the 363-year history of our county."

Republican Del. Richard A. Sossi -- who represents Kent County as well as Kent Island, where the current 4.35-mile spans make life difficult for him and constituents who live on the island -- says jokingly that he plans to nominate Bailey for a state "Chicken Little, the sky is falling, award."

"I just do not see anything more for Kent Island," said Sossi, who has lived there for 30 years as traffic gradually increased to the point where islanders are left virtually housebound on weekends. "You can't put 20 pounds of feathers in a 10-pound bag."

Sossi says the alternative is to build somewhere south of the current bridge, which links Sandy Point and Kent Island, a choice that he says could siphon traffic from Southern Maryland, the Washington suburbs and Northern Virginia. That leaves zones 3 and 4, which include Talbot and Dorchester counties
on the Eastern Shore and Anne Arundel and Calvert counties on the west side of the bay.

Environmentalists such as Dru Schmidt-Perkins of 1000 Friends of Maryland have barely begun to look at the
issue. Still, they worry that any new bridge will generate a new round of development in rural areas that are ill-equipped to handle it.

The state's Reach the Beach campaign of the late 1980s, a series of road improvements aimed at speeding the trip to Ocean City, clearly shows the unintended impact of improving access to the Eastern Shore, she says.

"Any [additional] crossing, north or south, and there will be an explosion of growth, beyond what we're already seeing on the Shore, on both sides of the bay," Schmidt-Perkins said. "This is a long way from happening, but it would not reduce
traffic anywhere. It would increase traffic."

Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun

For readers not familiar with Maryland's geography, Kent County and Kent Island are both part of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. But Kent Island is in Queen Anne's County (not Kent County), and is where the current Bay Bridge spans touch down on the Eastern Shore side - Kent Island, thanks at least in part to growth restrictions in the Baltimore and Washington suburbs, has become a de-facto suburb of both, and of Annapolis, which lies not far from the western end of the Bay Bridge.

This was an op-ed that Rob penned in 2002 in the aftermath of the defeat of a proposed sales tax increase in Virginia to fund transportation improvements. You can see the full article here.

Quotes (emphasis added by me):

Leading the opposition were environmentalists and other anti-road advocates: what Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan calls the "congestion coalition." Those activists succeeded in convincing voters who face some of the nation's worst traffic that sprawl causes congestion and that more roads only worsen it. Tax supporters never seriously tried to rebut those contentions. That's why many well-intentioned voters with strong environmental sensibilities aligned themselves with conservative anti-tax forces to defeat the measure.

The Environmental Defense Fund asserted that "despite billions of dollars in investments in suburban expressways, congestion has gotten worse." It was citing the myth of "induced demand" -- that more roads only result in more driving. What's surprising is not that they constantly repeated that refrain, but that so many people seemed to believe it. Perhaps that was because opponents cited studies by advocacy groups such as the Surface Transportation Policy Project, the chief propagandist for the "congestion coalition." What motivates the STPP and its fellow travelers is an animus toward the kind of lifestyle most Americans have chosen. They think it is wrong for Americans to try to win their patch of suburbia. A better way to live, according to these social engineers, is in an apartment complex above a Metro stop. In short, while they claim they are anti-sprawl, they actually are anti-car, anti-suburbs and anti-growth.

Thus it's not surprising that when the STPP studied 70 metropolitan areas, it found no relationship between building roads and reducing congestion. However, the study conveniently failed to control for the fact that localities that expanded roads faster did so because they had faster-growing populations. As common sense suggests, once that is controlled for, places that added roads faster than population cut congestion.

Finally, the anti-growth proponents constantly reminded voters that over the past 20 years, road building kept up with population growth, yet congestion got worse. See, it's pointless to build more roads! However, commuting to work contributes most to congestion. Because of the rise of two-earner households and other factors, employment grew more than twice as fast as roads. No wonder congestion tripled.

[Begin comments]

This op-ed article from the Washington Post Outlook section "tells it like it is," and is consistent with my own knowledge of the Southwest area of the District of Columbia. Had I written this, I would have added that a major reason for all of that urban renewal in this part of D.C. was planning for the Metrorail system, an effort that dated back to the 1960's, in particular the Green Line, which was eventually built through these neighborhoods, but did not open until the 1980's, long after the "urban renewal" projects had torn down the old and replaced it with the new.

The late Julius Hobson, Sr. a liberal D.C. activist (no, I did not agree with many of the stands that he took, but I respected him deeply anyway) and later politician of tremendous integrity (unlike some of his peers) used the term "Negro removal" (he may have been the first to use it) to describe what went on in the Southwest area of D.C.

[End comments]

A Wreck of a Plan
Look at How Renewal Ruined SW

By Charlotte Allen

Sunday, July 17, 2005; Page B01

Quotes:

When I read about last month's Supreme Court decision permitting the city of New London, Conn., to use its power of eminent domain to seize working-class homes so that developers can build a waterfront office, residential and hotel complex, my first thought (after pitying the homeowners who thought that their property rights meant something) was: Oh no, not another misbegotten urban renewal program.

That's because I live in Southwest Washington, where nearly every day I contend with the wreckage -- architectural, socioeconomic and cultural -- from the first time the Supreme Court issued such a ruling. That was the 1954 case of Berman v. Parker, allowing a public entity to seize the heart of the District of Columbia's southwest quadrant -- a huge swath of working-class homes and businesses -- so that developers could build . . . a waterfront office, residential and hotel complex.

The sorry truth is that governments aren't very good at rejuvenating neighborhoods. Revitalization is strictly a job for the private sector, as our own experience here in Southwest Washington is proving.

Then there's our marina. In most localities, the yacht docks are high-end real estate, crowded with boutiques and eateries. Not in Southwest, where, courtesy of Berman v. Parker, the land abutting the Potomac docks is owned by the National Capital Revitalization (that word again) Corp. (NCRC), a District-chartered quasi-government agency and successor to the federal agencies that seized the waterfront back in the '50s. Right now, the waterfront is a concrete wasteland of unused parking lots, untended trees and a couple of big-box restaurants and nightclubs.

The NCRC also owns the land under what the planners decided in the late 1960s would be our economic magnet: the Waterside Mall. Perhaps it's the '70s architecture, glaringly hideous even by New Southwest standards, or the vast Soviet-style rear plaza that blocks off Fourth Street physically and cuts it off psychologically from the rest of the District, but Waterside never flourished. The mall was half-empty even before its major tenant, the Environmental Protection Agency, relocated in 2002 after years of begging and pleading to be allowed to move to Federal Triangle, where there's more civilization.

Around the same time, the NCRC devised a plan with two developers to tear down the mall, reopen Fourth Street and build an attractive constellation of office, street-level retail and residential space. But that plan went on hold in February, perhaps indefinitely, when the putative anchor tenant, Fannie Mae, beset by regulatory and financial problems, retracted its commitment to lease space there.

It's tempting to dismiss Southwest as an aberration of the hubristic urban planning of the 1950s, except that hundreds of smaller-scale eminent-domain-fueled redevelopment projects have followed relentlessly in cities across the country, including failed "Renaissance" centers in Pittsburgh and Detroit. Think of Detroit demolishing the entire ethnic neighborhood of Poletown in the 1980s to build a General Motors plant that never delivered on its promised 6,000 new jobs. The District now proposes to knock down homes, warehouses and bars for the new stadium (which is at least arguably a genuine public use). In Anacostia, the NCRC last week filed a condemnation suit against the Skyland Shopping Center, whose unglamorous but viable community-serving businesses (laundromats, fast-food outfits, a Murry's Steaks) are to be replaced by a presumably higher revenue-generating shopping complex -- even though the intended Target anchor store has yet to commit to move there. Given the NCRC's track record, Skyland could remain a vacant lot for decades.

Author's e-mail:

charfleur@aol.com

Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer and co-editor of the Independent Women's Forum online blog, InkWell.