Tag Archives: urban planning

VMT, traffic, and density

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This post provides evidence that increasing density (households per acre) does indeed reduce vehicle miles traveled per household. The thing is that what people experience is not vehicle miles per household, it is “traffic” and the inconvenience of parking. So even if driving per person or household decreases, the inconvenience of daily life will still increase until you get to a point where cars are unnecessary for most daily work, school, shopping, and leisure trips. I picture a curve where convenience decreases with density up to a certain point, and then increases again. People who have experienced only the decreasing side of the curve have trouble understanding what it would be like to get over the hump and up the other side. And this plays right into the hands of the highway-oil-auto industrial complex.

housing policy overview

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A blogger on Planetizen has a good overview of what many professional planners and economists believe would make a real dent in the U.S. housing problem.

We support reforms to allow developers to build more affordable housing types (e.g., multiplexes, townhouses, and mid-rise multifamily) with unbundled parking (parking rented separately from housing, so car-free households are no longer forced to pay for costly parking spaces they don’t need) in walkable urban neighborhoods, including large-scale upzoning, eliminating parking minimums, reducing development fees and approval requirements for moderate-priced infill, plus subsidizing housing for families with special needs.

Most planners also support innovative home ownership models, such as housing cooperatives and co-housing, modest inclusivity requirements (not so high that they reduce housing production), subsidies for households with special needs such as disabilities and very low incomes, and, sometimes, special regulations such as rent controls to limit rent increases.

Planetizen

This sounds about right to me. There are a couple reasons it is hard to do in today’s U.S. The most obvious is the massive political corruption driven by the construction/road/auto/oil-industrial complex. It is hard for politicians, especially local ones, to resist these forces. The second is the consumer preference for auto-dependent suburban development. I would not take this choice away from anyone. I would just stop subsidizing it and make it no longer the only viable choice for most Americans. Many people would like to try out a walkable urban neighborhood, but assume that there is not one available that they could afford. And they would largely be right. There are just not enough of them, and even in the ones we have the public infrastructure (protected bike lanes, frequent/clean/reliable public transportation, parks and trees) lags far behind what the leading cities in Europe and even parts of South America are providing. (Asia is hopeless though.)

The final issue is that you just can’t combine widespread car ownership and use with a walkable urban neighborhood. You have to get the number of cars down, then use all that space you saved for more housing, open space, and other amenities. And obviously, you have to make sure people can still get around.

So the answer is pretty clear – remove density limits (upzone in the parlance) and parking requirements (actually these last two sound a lot like a “free market” to me), then offset some of the disadvantages of urban density with excellent public infrastructure and parks. You may still need some subsidies and non-profit options to help the poor, but ideally that needs to be done at least at the metropolitan area scale if not state/federal scale. It’s a fairly simple formula but a long game and a politically difficult one.

what would a forward-looking infrastructure plan look like?

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The U.S. has neglected its infrastructure for decades and is falling apart. Unemployment and inequality are high, and people are hurting. Real interest rates are negative, there is virtually no risk of inflation, and the U.S. dollar remains strong and stable for the near future. Warm up the printing presses and helicopters! Don’t take it from me, take it from Larry Summers, who is normally in the headlines for cautioning against this sort of thing:

we propose a crude way to take account of this by excluding a specific set of programs and investments from the constraints of pay-as-you-go when strong evidence from academic research implies they would plausibly pay for themselves in present value. This includes well-designed investments in areas like children, education, and research. Infrastructure would ideally be paid for with Pigouvian revenue measures that improve infrastructure utilization, but it too could get an exception to the pay-as-you-go principle.

a paper by Larry Summers and another guy you haven’t heard of

Under these conditions, just directing the fire hose of federal money at infrastructure projects, any infrastructure projects, can’t hurt. It might be good to do that rather than spend too much time coming up with a plan to do it the best possible way. And yet, it could be done better. We could take the time to plan when we are not in a crisis, and then be ready to turn on the taps when a crisis hits (or just crack the taps open to a slow drip when a minor challenge hits and we need to nudge the country back on course.)

Too many proposals about infrastructure just boil down to throwing money at pork barrel highway projects, or else a buzzword soup about things like sustainability and equity without specific proposals. Here is one new proposal from Rice University with some specifics. One thing they propose is that project proposals come from leaders at the metropolitan or regional scale rather than the federal government. I completely agree with this. They suggest focusing on transportation (including public transportation), public facilities (including health facilities and parks), water and wastewater, energy (including renewables), and communications (including broadband). They then get down to a laundry list of specific projects at the local scale that would benefit from funding. Pulling all of this together is a pretty good accomplishment.

These basic categories sound okay to me. I might leave “health facilities” out of it – the U.S. needs a comprehensive, universal health care system now and that is a big enough topic to deserve its own legislation and program. Education is similar. I might add housing. Housing is a huge topic and it is excluded from most definitions of public infrastructure, but it is so intertwined with infrastructure and land use that its problems almost need to be solved at the same time. I like that they included parks – I might broaden this to include other forms of green infrastructure like street trees. Maybe “green infrastructure” is a too buzzwordy term – nothing wrong with “parks and trees”, except maybe there is a gray area whether are talking about any type of park or recreation facility (an urban playground or basketball court?) or whether it has to be quasi-naturalistic. I think I would go with the broader definition. I might add “urban food infrastructure” to the list – this is somewhat nebulous, but again intertwined with the larger infrastructure system and land use issues. You don’t really want the ag industry lobbyists involved, hence the “urban” term.

A bunch of projects do not make a plan. A good plan needs to have a definition of the system that is being planned for, and measurable goals for the state or function of that system that is desired. Then any package of inter-related projects can be evaluated to see how well they meet the goals and at what cost. Then finally, a specific package of projects can be chosen and put in priority order, and funding and implementation details can be worked out. Lots of “plans” skip right to the last step I just mentioned, while others fail because the last two steps are not well enough thought out.

As far as goals, they should be set at the local level, but the basics are fairly obvious, I think:

  • Provide reliable and affordable water, energy, communication, food and waste disposal services for everyone. (This can get wonkier – you want to keep infrastructure in a state of good repair, set and meet level of service goals, and minimize the cost of each component over its life cycle by making smart maintain/repair/replace/upgrade decisions.)
  • Minimize the expense and time of moving people and goods where they need to go. (I think of this as infrastructure minimizing “friction” in the workings of the economy.)
  • Minimize the negative impacts and maximize the positive impacts of the infrastructure system on the environment and public health, or if we want to be more buzzwordy, maximize ecosystem services.
  • Make the transportation system as safe as possible for everyone. (You could roll this into either the transportation or health goals, but it is so near and dear to my heart I give it its own bullet. If we made this an explicit goal, we would not be designing our streets and highways the way we are today in the U.S. By the way, active commutes are very nice and a lot of people might like them if they had the option to give them a try.)
  • Housing – I don’t know enough to articulate this. Basically, everybody needs to be able to afford a decent roof over their heads.
  • Be prepared to react, manage, and recover from disasters and other disruptions that occur. The buzzword is resilience. (Climate change mostly fits under this goal. The words “climate change” are not a goal or a plan in and of themselves. Some bad things that happen are related to climate change, and some are just random bad luck, and some are mixes of the two. We need to be ready for all of them.)

A few more principles I think are important:

  • The federal government could fund this planning at the metro scale. The planning itself would create some government, professional, and academic jobs and build technical capacity. Something similar is already done for transportation so it could be expanded. The plan would need to be on the books, with a goal-based analysis justifying a prioritized list of specific projects selected, to be eligible for federal funding.
  • The funding should go from the federal government directly to metro areas, without passing through state politicians. Otherwise they will use the helicopters to scatter the money over rural areas where it will not do as much economic good or help as many people. States could be given a fair amount of money to plan and implement in areas unable or uninterested in doing it themselves.
  • The metro region needs to have skin in the game. The federal government should match local investments – it could match at a higher or lower rate depending on economic conditions, but something short of 100%.
  • Funding for maintenance needs to be included, and set aside in some sort of trust fund. This would need to include funding for existing infrastructure through the end of its service life, and then funding for new infrastructure to be maintained as it replaces the old. In fact, funding maintenance of existing infrastructure would be the single easiest way to benefit people and the economy right away without the considerable time and effort it takes to get new construction projects up and running. Maybe I’ll rethink my earlier proposal to leave out education, and include maintenance of public schools which would instantly improve the lives of millions of children, parents, teachers and staff. We could hit this hard and have a decent public school system in this country (again) by fall 2021.

So there’s my infrastructure plan. If you are a powerful politician reading this, please feel free to steal it and say you thought of it. My reward will be living in a decent, modern country with a growing economy and a pleasant environment.

New Urbanism: Past, Present, and Future

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I basically agree with the principles of new urbanism (which were based on old urbanism). Communities where people can take most work, school, shopping, and entertainment trips by walking or biking are better for the planet and better for our physical and mental health. With good planning and design, there is plenty of room in the spaces we have already developed to accommodate whatever population growth we are expecting, without continuing to chew up land that could be left wild or used as farmland. The trick is to establish a virtuous cycle where gradually more people buy into the idea of life without private cars taking up half the space. And then some of that space saved has to be invested in good public infrastructure, access to recreation and nature to offset some of the negative effects of density. I think New Urban ideas have blunted suburban sprawl and car-dependency a little in the United States, but only a little unfortunately. There just aren’t that many walkable neighborhoods to choose from, and so people either aren’t familiar with them, and can’t imagine a non-car-dependent lifestyle, or else they assume people of average means can’t afford them, which is true in general of desirable things in short supply.

New Urbanism: Past, Present, and Future

The New Urbanism, initially conceived as an anti-sprawl reform movement, evolved into a new paradigm in urban design. Recently, however, some researchers have argued that the popular appeal of New Urbanism has eroded, the movement has lost its significance, and critical research on the broader theme has tapered off. In response, this article investigates whether the movement has lost its currency and explores the future of New Urbanism in the context of contemporary circumstances of development. The article begins with a brief description of the conceptualization of New Urbanism as an exception to the development trends of the time. Collaborative efforts of its protagonists that have contributed to the integration of New Urbanist concepts into other programs, policies, and development regulations are presented in the next section to describe its expansion, to clarify its mainstreaming, and to call attention to its broader impact. The concluding section presents contemporary circumstances of development and changes that are intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, including those related to the nation’s demographics, climate change, technological advances, rapid growth of the digital economy, and acceleration of e-commerce to explore the significance of New Urbanism for future development.

Urban Planning open access journal

top urban planning books of 2020

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Planetizen has an annual roundup of urban planning books. Certainly urban planners should care about urban planning, but urban planning is not just for urban planners. It touches on topics of interest to engineers, economists, social scientists (separate from economists? discuss amongst yourselves), and generally people who are concerned/interested in people or the environment. Because cities and their suburbs are the environment where the vast majority of people live.

Some animals and plants also live there, and this particular list is notable devoid of any books on parks, trees, urban ecology, or even environmental quality issues like air pollution or water pollution. It has a number of interesting books on housing. Some urban problems like transportation and land use and air quality have a range of solutions that experts loosely agree on, even if politicians and bureaucrats fail to implement them and special interests actively obstruct and spread disinformation about them. Adequate and affordable housing for everyone is the big urban problem that has never been solved and really has no clear cut consensus on what should be done. The basic puzzle is that as a particular city or neighborhood becomes a nice place to live, prices get bid up, and then over time only the relatively affluent can afford to live there. Once the snowball starts rolling, the people who live there will use their political power to try to limit increases in housing supply (for example, resisting greater heights or apartment buildings or smaller lot sizes). Government can try to intervene by allowing/requiring greater density, or it can go the other way and allow automobile-dependent low-density sprawl to develop. The latter chews up land that could be put to better use (or left wild), pollutes our air and water, cooks our planet, and contributes to everything from diabetes to mass pedestrian death to drunk driving. Governments should stop essentially paying people to live in the suburbs, and let people who make this choice experience the true cost to themselves and everyone else on the planet. But that’s just my view and lifestyle choice and I try to be tolerant of others, up to a point. And actually, I occasionally consider retreating to a quiet, cheap suburban life somewhere in the middle states from time to time. But if I did that I would be aware that it was cheap because the government was subsidizing me at others’ expense.

  • Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing
  • Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
  • Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis
  • Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (mortgages and lending, both on the public policy side and private sector side, are part of the puzzle)
  • The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach

There are a few books more about urban and regional planning proper:

  • City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (sounds like a U.S.-centric version of Cities of Tomorrow, a classic and awesome introduction to urban planning history. Even the cover is similar to the version of that book that I have.)
  • The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs
  • Designing for the Mega-region: Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale (could we please have high speed rail to connect our mega-regions? Oh, I forgot, this is the United States and we just can’t have nice things.)

Finally, the book that caught my eye most is specifically about pedestrian deaths (Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America), and if you didn’t already notice this is an issue near and dear to my heart. Pedestrian deaths, and motor vehicle-related deaths more broadly, are going to cause coronavirus-level death and carnage each and every year into the foreseeable future, long after the coronavirus shock is in the rear-view mirror. Solutions are known, and would have all kinds of virtuous spillover effects on our urban areas. And yet we fail to understand or act, decade after decade after decade.

Wouldn’t it be fun to just disappear to a mountaintop hermit cabin for a week and read a stack of books on a topic? Well, my idea of fun is not everybody’s idea of fun. Also, I’m not Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, and can’t just leave my family or my day job for a week.

coronavirus changes to keep

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This article in Axios lists some changes brought about by the coronavirus that we might want to keep after the coronavirus.

  • not just remote work, but remote hiring and onboarding – There are now people working at the local branch of my company who I have never met in person. Conversely, it seems no more weird to work online with people anywhere in the world* who I have never met in person, than it does to work with someone local who I have never met in person. This gets us closer to the economists’ dream of a truly mobile workforce that could iron out some inequities. (* Time zones still exist, and I can tell you from working with U.S. staff while I was living in Asia, working in the middle of the night still sucks. I worked with someone in South America last year though who was only one time zone away from mine, and that worked out great. India – I love you guys but the time zone thing is just too brutal…)
  • new movies streamed – well, okay, if you’re a big movie buff… but I do see the distinction between movies and TV shows with a series of hour-long episodes slowly dissolving, and the shows tend to be higher quality. I suspect 2-hour movies that take a year or more to produce and then release may be on their way out.
  • more seamless delivery of everything – yes, but we still need street and parking design in our cities to catch up
  • telehealth and teletherapy – yes, this seems good. I’d like to see home visits make a comeback basic routine health care – no real sign of that yet, although my life insurance company did recently send a nurse to my house to check my weight and blood pressure, stick me with a needle and collect a cup of my pee. So it can be done. Here’s an idea – let’s do vaccination this way.
  • Maybe some states are realizing the internet needs to be treated like a public utility going forward. We’ll see….
  • better remote education tech – this article mentions smaller class sizes and better parent-teacher-school communication. I agree – some of what the remote model lacks could be offset by more one-on-one and small-group attention where it will do the most good.

I’d like to add timed tickets to this list. I’ve seen a few museums, parks, etc. do this in the past, but it has become much more prevalent to buy a ticket that gets you in within a certain window during the day, and this has a huge crowd control benefit. Things are just much more enjoyable when they are less crowded. I also like restaurants and stores that let you check in online, then text you when your table or customer service person is ready for you. Let’s get rid of standing in line forever!

metropolitan planning organizations

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If you live in a decent sized metropolitan area, your metropolitan planning organization forces local officials and other stakeholders to get together across political jurisdictions and make decisions about how to prioritize transportation projects in the context of a long term plan. The results then get sent up to the state, which uses it to allocate funding.

The article has a number of criticisms. MPOs have tended to favor highways over other forms of transportation, and these have often disrupted disadvantaged communities. They have tended to favor suburban areas. They have tended to favor new construction over maintenance of what is already constructed.

I have always thought MPOs are good even if they are imperfect because (1) they force stakeholders to work together at the right geographic and economic scale for infrastructure planning, (2) they force some kind of long term plan to be put down on paper, (3) they force the prioritization of site-level projects to be justified in the context of that long term plan, and (4) they bring in state and federal money to get projects in the ground based on the priorities of local actors that have “skin in the game”. In the absence of this process, either political jurisdictions would plan in isolation, or more efficient but less democratic structures would be created that largely cut out elected officials, voters and taxpayers. Engineers and officials not trained in planning would tend to jump right to analysis of site-level projects without a real plan. State and federal funding either would not happen at all or would be based on political lobbying. Corruption would likely be more common. And systems that are less in public view would tend to be neglected until major, obvious failures occur that affect peoples’ lives.

What I just described covers the state of water infrastructure in the U.S. pretty well. I think we should expand MPOs to cover other kinds of infrastructure rather than just transportation. MPOs are one of the reasons that politicians and the public think infrastructure=transportation and transportation=infrastructure. They do some rational planning and economic analysis at roughly the rate geographic scale and time period, then feed that into a messy political process to rank site-specific, short-term projects, then direct taxpayer money to projects that are likely to benefit the citizenry, while sharing the wealth at least a little bit. Unless you want to go authoritarian, it’s a reasonable approach to get infrastructure done in a democracy. I think it’s better and more equitable than the ratepayer-funded utility model followed in the water, energy, and communication industries.

10% drop in vehicle miles traveled predicted long-term

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KPMG says some of the sharp reduction in vehicle miles traveled during the coronavirus crisis is likely to be permanent, with people getting used to working from home and shopping online. The numbers they came up with are a 9-10% reduction in vehicle miles traveled (this factors in both a decrease in personal vehicles and an increase in delivery vehicles, if I understand the article) and a drop in car ownership from 1.97 to 1.87 per household.

Google’s pedestrian foot traffic data

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The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article showing foot traffic at various locations around the city during the coronavirus shut down compared to average. As might be expected, foot traffic is down pretty much everywhere except grocery stores, where it is up slightly. This matches my personal observations. It doesn’t match the media accounts of crazy lines at grocery stores and big box stores in the suburbs. Maybe this is because in a dense walkable city, we have many small stores instead of a few large stores, and people tend to spread out their shopping over the entire day and week and to buy just a bag or two at a time that they can carry home. There are odd, sporadic shortages, but I have not observed any extreme shortages of basic goods.

The data supposedly come from Google. I tried to find out more about how, where and when Google is collecting this data, and came up short after 15 minutes or so of looking.

Now, I admit that clearly dense cities with a lot of social interaction have their down side right now. The big dense cities are also where the most international arrivals happen, and this factor along with density might be why they are the worst places to be right now. Hopefully they also have the largest medical facilities with the most experienced medical staff, but whatever we have is clearly not going to be enough to help everyone who needs help in the next month or so.