American Dream

The White Paper "European transport policy for 2010: time to decide" [see below] published in 2001 sets out a strategy for a sustainable transport system. A key objective of the paper is to shift the balance of transport in Europe from road and aviation towards rail, shipping and intermodal operations by 2010. But is this realistic? Now we know.

A taboo-breaking conference was organized on July 12th in the European Parliament in the presence of Jacques BARROT, Commissioner for Transport, in addition to European industry, e.g. Nokia, with eye-opening contributions. A taxpayer initiative was also launched.

The straw that broke the camel's back was a new study presented by Professor Rémy Prud'homme. It concluded unequivocally that:
* Modal shift from road to rail is impossible and even attempting it will undermine Europe's prosperity. Road transports account for more than 85% and rail transports for a mere 4%. Even doubling rail transports — through massive subsidies to the rail — would reduce road transports by only about 5%, its increase in two or three years.
* Decoupling transport growth from economic growth is a well-meaning but wrong target. We need to decouple the negative consequences of traffic, not traffic itself so long as it is sustainable.
* Many environmental effects of the roads are "threatened by extinction" through tougher standards. Besides, railways are far from being clean, just think of the coal mountains burnt to generate electricity... CO2 needs to be dealt with, but not more harshly in transports than in other sectors of society.
* Roads generate radically more tax revenue than they receive in investments. The very opposite is true for railways. And still we go on discriminating against roads, regardless of their indisputably higher social benefits.

The conclusion of the conference is crystal clear: the current European transport policy steers towards a prohibitively expensive and inefficient utopian ideal.

Ari Vatanen comments: "For much too long European transport policy has been based on myths. The time has come to recognise the facts and stop wasting people's money. Dreams about modal shift from the road to the railways can only handicap Europe without actually leading anywhere. That is why I, together with the Taxpayers Association of Europe, have launched a Transport Commitment to Taxpayers (TCT). I hope as many as possible decision-makers in the transport sector have the courage to sign this commitment. We must finally take action - the mobility and prosperity of Europe are at stake."

Further information:
+32 2 2847995,
avatanen@europarl.eu.int and
http://www.arivatanen.com

Transport Commitment to Taxpayers (MS Word .doc format, 32.5 KB)

Seven questions and answers (MS Word .doc format, 433 KB)

Comprehensive transport report July 2005 (Adobe Acrobat .pdf format, 552 KB)

The items above rebut and respond to the white paper at the link below:

EU WHITE PAPER: European transport policy for 2010:
time to decide (Adobe Acrobat .pdf format, 1.07 MB)

One of the supposed benefits of smart-growth planning in Portland is that it has generated a lively downtown. You can tell how lively it is from these recent statistics:

• One shooting per month in the past several months
• Thirteen aggravated assaults in the first six months of 2005
• 130 arrests on the transit mall, mostly on drug-related charges.

The shootings are particularly bad for business, says the owner of a local nightclub. "Anything that happens out there that casts a negative light on downtown, we all cringe," she added. Many of the shootings take place after the nightclubs close and most of them seem to be gang related.

Although the police say they are taking steps to improve the situation, the owners of other businesses are not optimistic. "There’s no room in the jails," said the owner of a luggage store. "People who break my windows are back on the street before I can get them replaced."

New Urbanists are thrilled that people are moving back into downtowns. Without heavy subsidies, however, few would have moved back to downtown Portland, and these numbers give some indication why.

washingtonpost.com
Hot Housing Market Opens Doors for Fraud
Dream of Homeownership Is Preyed Upon

By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 29, 2005; A01

Quotes:

NEW YORK -- For mortgage scammers, deed thieves and property
flippers, this is the Golden Age.

The chatter in New York, as it is in Washington, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Miami, is of housing riches quickly realized. Prices have tripled in those cities, and 70 percent of Americans now own a home. But for thousands of working-class and poor Americans, the venture into homeownership has brought misery at the hands of the unscrupulous.

"We've never seen so many schemes and such complexity to the fraud," said Sarah Ludwig of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, which has helped lead investigations into predatory lending in New York. "Everyone works to defraud: the broker, the appraiser, the attorney and the inspector. Before a homeowner knows it, they are in way over their heads."

Now I don't claim to have the answer to this, but I have to wonder how much of this fraud is connected (in some way) to federal government housing subsidy programs? While this Post article does not mention it (for some reason), Washington's neighbor to the north on I-95, Baltimore City, has had a long-running and severe problem with "flipping" of properties in the city and this did catch the attention of local and federal officials, as can be seen from these press releases:

Mayor O'Malley Testifies Against Predatory Lending; City Gets $5 Million to Fight Flipping (HTML);
Walter Hammond Sentenced to 37 Months in Mortgage Flipping Scheme (Adobe Acrobat .pdf, 135K); and
Three Defendants Sentenced in Mortgage Flipping Scheme (Adobe Acrobat .pdf, 60K)

2005.07.29
OPINION & UPDATE
Dulles Toll Road bid dead on arrival

Quotes:

The bid to take over the Dulles Toll Road in a 50 year concession in return for help financing a troubled Metrorail project in the median looks dead on arrival. It doesn't offer enough for a very valuable toll concession, and it foolishly buys into a highly contentious local fight over a proposed rail line which rail promoters want to locate in the median.

"Dead on arrivial" is a bold, perhaps rash, judgment but, to heck, we decided to write it because the situation looks so clearcut.

"A bit over a billion dollars" is hardly a serious bid for a tollroad with 200k trips/day in one of the most affluent and rapidly developing regions of the US. Cintra-Macquarie paid $1.83b for a tollroad doing 50k/day vehicles in the rustbelt-ridden tag end of the Chicago area. Now they probably paid too much for the Skyway, perhaps $600m or $700m too much, but the DTR is a much more substantial toll property. It has to be worth over $2b, maybe $3b.

Second, the proposal gets right into bed with a dubious collection of rail promoters by linking their takeover of the tollroad directly to financing of the rail line which many regard as a federal grant-seeking boondoggle which will saddle the region with a huge continuing liability in subsidies on operating losses. In an area of auto-oriented dispersed development express buses would carry all the expected peak hour transit riders in less than half a lane, according to calculations, and avoid the need for continuing large subsidies.

Dulles Corridor Mobility Consortium (DCMC) as the group which made the bid is called is led by Infrastructure Investment Group of Curtis Coward a northern Virginia financial consultant, with the backing of Autostrade (Italy) and Laing (UK).

"The Consortium is proud and grateful to be able to offer this innovative and cost-effective project in support of Rail to Dulles," says Coward in his cover letter submitting the proposal to VDOT, clearly taking the side of rail promoters on a divisive local issue. This aspect of the proposal probably dooms it right off.

An influential local politician John Herrity, former chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors yesterday came out strongly against the rail-linked bid saying the improvements proposed to the tollroad are "miniscule" and "cosmetic" saying it was "just another way" to get the rail line built. Ken Cuccinelli, state senator representating the 37th district in the DTR's Fairfax County also opposes the rail line and has used the term "boondoggle" to describe it.

Counter proposals are likely which stay out of the rail fight and offer the state a cash sum or an annual share of toll profits in return for the toll concession. Such offers-without-rail-strings would allow the state to make its own decisions as to its spending priorities.

DCMC's proposal was posted on the VDOT website this morning: see http://www.virginiadot.org/projects/pptaDullesCorridor

[Please see URL above for much more]

Officials Intrigued, Cautious About Dulles Toll Proposal

By Steven Ginsberg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 27, 2005; B01

Quotes:

An unusual and enticing proposal by a consortium of private investors to give Virginia a lump sum of more than $1 billion in return for 50 years' worth of revenue on the Dulles Toll Road presents state leaders with an intriguing option.

They could accept the windfall and use the money to quickly improve the state's transportation network, or they could turn it down, betting that they would make more money over the long term by continuing to pocket the tolls.

If the toll revenue is "profitable to the consortium, it ought to be even better for the state," said Stephen S. Fuller, a professor of public policy at George Mason University. But the deal "could
be attractive to the state, because it gets it out of a bind by coming up with a billion dollars quick."

State officials said the money would be used to upgrade the toll road and help pay for a $2.4 billion rail line through Tysons Corner.

The Dulles Toll Road is an eight-lane highway that stretches 14 miles between the Capital Beltway and the Dulles Greenway. It carries about 200,000 vehicles a day and runs through Reston, Herndon and Tysons Corner, home to many of Virginia's leading companies. Tolls on the road range from 50 to 75 cents, and state officials said they would maintain control over the rates as part of any deal.

"This is an extremely valuable asset, and the agreement is for a very long time," said Transportation Secretary Pierce R. Homer. "It's very difficult to predict what the transportation needs will be 10 years from today, let alone 50."

Homer and other state leaders, including Gov. Mark R. Warner (D), said yesterday that although they are intrigued by the proposal, they are eager to receive competing bids. They noted that nine bids were received in a similar deal on a toll road in Chicago that eventually netted the city $1.8 billion in exchange for a 99-year lease.

Ken Reid, a representative of Virginia Mobility Associates LLC, said his company would soon put forth a competing plan to widen the Dulles Toll Road, Dulles Connector Road and Interstate 66 inside the Beltway. Reid said two lanes of each road would become express lanes, open to carpoolers without charge and to solo drivers willing to pay a toll that would vary according to traffic levels.

Our air really not all that bad

By J.J. Ebro
07/26/2005

Quotes:

Hot summer days trigger such concerns about the air we breathe that air-quality forecasts are as much an ingredient in weather reports as Doppler radar images.

In the Loudoun County government building lobby, a traffic light-type device indicates how safe outside air is to breathe. Green is good, yellow is moderate, orange is unhealthy for sensitive groups and red is unhealthy.

On Tuesday, when the high temperature in Leesburg was 102 degrees at 4 p.m., the air-quality map was green, meaning the air was hot but good.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic for most of the day sent ozone spewing into the atmosphere. Compounding that is an invasion of
industrial pollutants riding the wind from areas to our west.

Ground level ozone occurs when strong sunlight creates
chemical reactions between oxides of nitrogen and volatile organic compounds.

But there's a flip side: Our air is getting less bad.

Loudoun is making an effort to further reduce pollution.

But there's not a whole lot Loudoun can do about the "other" dirty air culprit: industrial pollution.

Northern Virginia doesn’t have much heavy industry. But, Salkovitz said, the wind carries in "industrial pollution from hundreds of miles away from areas like the Ohio River Valley, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania over to our area.” He said, research is ongoing to determine “how to break down what is coming over as opposed to what we are generating.”

The EPA’s time-lapse map of the mid-Atlantic region backs Salkovitz. It starts the day out showing all green zones, denoting healthy air and low ozone concentrations. As the day progresses, yellow areas begin to appear in the areas the meteorologist identified, as well as along the Delaware-Maryland corridor. By mid- to late-afternoon, orange spots start growing in the yellow areas and begin to enlarge. As evening and nightfall set in, everything reverts to green.

July 27/August 3, 2005

Traffic model maps congestion
By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News

Quotes:

What do slime mold, airline traffic, fungi, cancer tumors, and computer networks have in common? They all transport something -- nutrients, planes, or information -- from one place to another.

Although there are many examples of systems that solve the classic problem of getting from point A to point B, the extent to which decentralized, or perimeter routes, versus centralized,
or hub-like routes benefit the complicated networks of the real world remains an open question.

Researchers from Oxford University in England have tackled the problem by examining the congestion costs within a network model
that combines paths that go around the perimeter of the network and central hubs that provide shorter paths through the network. Real-world networks are too complicated to describe exactly mathematically. The researchers' model is simple enough to solve exactly, yet realistic enough to provide insights into real networks.

The research is aimed at finding ways to ease bottlenecks in networks involving manufacturing, the Internet and traffic, and
ways to disrupt networks like tumor blood flow and terrorist supply chains. The findings could also help design better networks.

"This general scenario of passing packets -- cars, data, food, information, documents -- between two points occurs in a wide range of systems, said Neil Johnson, Professor of Physics at Oxford University. These include roads, air traffic, the Internet and communications networks, fungi, crime networks, cancer tumors, large organizations, and supply chains, he said.

In each case, the same interplay between centralized and decentralized pathways and control arises. "Going through the
center has the advantage of shorter distance but has a higher risk of congestion and hence longer overall journey-time," said Johnson. "Going around the center has a lower risk of congestion but a larger geographical distance," he said.

From Friday's Sun

Proposal to hire private planner in Crisfield draws wide criticism

Company could be given control over waterfront

By Chris Guy
Sun Staff

July 28, 2005, 8:59 PM EDT

Quotes:

Business and community leaders in Crisfield are up in arms over a proposed agreement they say would turn over virtually all land use decisions in Maryland's southernmost city to a private development firm headed by a former state delegate and a Delaware developer.

According to critics, a management pact between the city and the for-profit company, Crisfield Associates LLC, would allow the company to control "every last gem of waterfront" until 2014
if officials agree to relinquish planning authority.

Under terms of an 8-page document prepared by the company and leaked to business leaders last week, Crisfield Associates would become the city's "exclusive partner, adviser and master developer of present and future City-owned and City-controlled land."

Publicly-owned land outside the city limits that could become part of Crisfield's revitalization plan includes the Crisfield-Somerset County Airport, Janes Island State Park and a public golf course, according the document.

Opponents want the town to appoint a nonprofit management group to oversee downtown revitalization. "If you come up with a plan to rule the world," Phoebus said, "don't be surprised when people are upset."

Japan is threatening to "crack down" on suburban shopping malls as its population flees dense urban centers. The centers of many Japanese cities have lost 10 percent of their residents and 15 percent of their commercial offices in the past decade.

Ironically, Japan's problem is not overpopulation but a shrinking population. Rather than let its declining population breath easy, the government is determine to force the ones who are left to remain in or return to the city centers. Glad I don't live in a place like that! (Wait a minute -- I do.)

The Oregon legislature is considering a bill to ban the use of eminent domain for private purposes. Dave Hunnicutt, of Oregonians in Action, says his group will put the measure on the ballot if the legislature does not pass it.

While Oregonians are upset with the Kelo ruling, eminent domain is not as big an issue Oregon as it is in California, where the Coalition for Redevelopment Reform plans a rally in San Jose on August 13. Redevelopment agencies in California freely use eminent domain for their projects, but in Oregon, whose planning motto is "if you throw enough money it at, they will come," agencies mainly prod development with tax-increment financing.

An Oregon city you never heard of, for example, is planning to spend millions of dollars of tax-increment finance money on so-called "urban renewal" projects such as a new stadium, a shopping center, and a city hall.

Incidentally, if you missed the Preserving the American Dream conference, Iowa State University economist David Swenson gave an excellent presentation on why tax-increment financing districts fail to spur regional economic development. Instead, all that happens is that development takes place that would have otherwise taken place (though not necessarily in the same location) and developers start to expect that all their developments will be subsidized.

Plan to tighten zoning restrictions has farm family alarmed and angry

Martha and Harold Clark love the land and its traditions, but they are concerned that a proposal to further limit development will create 'mayhem' for their heirs and others.

By A Sun Staff Writer
Originally published July 24, 2005

Quotes:

Martha and Harold Clark learned the value of estate planning the hard way. They vowed never again.

Over three years, the Clarks got their affairs in order, certain that their three children and five grandchildren would be financially secure.

In the past two weeks, though, their confidence has turned to alarm, anger and a sense of betrayal.

The causes of their profound emotional shift are proposed changes to further restrict development in western Howard County.

Those changes, Martha Clark says, will produce economic "mayhem" for her heirs and for other farming families in the county.

Harold Clark (everyone calls him Bucky) avoids discussing the issue because he straddles two worlds as a property-rights farmer and as a member of the advisory board to the county's agriculture land preservation program.

So Martha Clark does the talking, and she is furious.

"It's a disaster," she says. "They're going to cause severe damage to people."

The proposals were drafted by the county's Department of Planning and Zoning under a threat from Annapolis of banishment from the state's land preservation program if stricter controls on growth were not adopted.

The department is recommending, among other things, a prohibition on selling density, or building rights, with the region zoned rural conservation, which includes the majority of land in the west. It further proposes to restrict cluster subdivisions in that area to one unit per 10 acres from one unit per 4.25 acres.

washingtonpost.com

City Of the Future

Unless it keeps its citizens safe, the modern metropolis may go the way of ancient Rome

By Joel Kotkin
Sunday, July 24, 2005; B01

Quotes (from the article):

You've got to hand it to those Londoners. They refused to be cowed by the July 7 terrorist attacks. And when new explosions in the underground last week threatened to paralyze the city again, they carried on with characteristic British stiff upper lipness. But admirable as their urbanite resilience has been, it shouldn't blind us to the reality that the bombings in the British capital underscored: that the great challenge facing the world's major cities today is finding a way to make life safe for their citizens.

Though current fashion is to blame causes such as energy, food and water shortages for urban decline through the centuries, the truth is that far more cities have fallen due to a breakdown in security. Whether the menace is internal disorder or external threat, history has shown repeatedly that once a city can no longer protect its inhabitants, they inevitably flee, and the city slides into decline and even extinction.

While modern cities are a long way from extinction, it's only by acknowledging the primacy of security -- and addressing it in the most aggressive manner -- that they will be able to survive
and thrive in this new century, in which they already face the challenge of a telecommunications revolution that is undermining their traditional monopoly on information and culture, and draining their populations.

As businesses and industries escape the urban core to operate in small towns and even the countryside, demographic surveys show that the population is going with them. After a brief, welcome surge in inner-city populations in the late 1990s, most older American cities have lost more people than they gained since 2000. Families, retirees and immigrants, all the key sources of new population growth, are largely deserting the urban core. This is true not only for perennial losers such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Detroit, but also places that enjoyed a brief resurgence in the last decade, like San Francisco, Minneapolis and Chicago.

Nor is this flight a mere American phenomenon: Inner-city population has been dropping in London, Paris, Hamburg, Milan and Frankfurt. In many of these cities, the only rapidly growing group is immigrants, most of them Muslim, including many who are increasingly targeted by and susceptible to Islamist extremism.

Note: WashingtonPost.com had a follow-up online chat with Joel Kotkin on Monday, 25 July 2005 - it can be viewed here.