Category Archives: Transportation

Compact Mixed Use Developments Do Not Help the Environment

Compact mixed-use developments are the latest development fad. While such developments promise environmental benefits, the reality is often far different. Two of the largest mixed-use developments in the United States have had limited environmental benefits.

Proponents often cite the fact that mixed-use development residents drive less as an environmental benefit. However, since most car emissions (90-95%) come from cold starts and occur in the first 15 minutes of a trip, the number of miles driven is much less important then the act of driving itself. Reducing the distance driven has a very minimal effect on pollution.

One major redevelopment project is Atlantic Station in Atlanta, GA. Atlantic Station is a new mixed-use development built on an abandoned, polluted steel mill. Cleaning up the steel mill itself, which was a superfund site, clearly had major benefits. But the day-to-day benefits of the mixed-use project are less clear. Despite being located just north of the transit-friendly Midtown area of Atlanta the project was not designed to be transit accessible. All residences come with underground parking and most residents commute to work by car. A bus connecting the development with the MARTA heavy-rail system was discontinued because of lack of use.

Most of the residents of the project moved from other mostly suburban areas of Atlanta but since much of Atlanta’s employment is north of the development, residents may not be driving any less than when they lived in the suburbs. The commute to the Perimeter North Area of Atlanta, which has the largest concentration of jobs in the Southeast U.S., is 13 miles from Atlantic Station. Yet it is only 11 miles from the suburb of Alpharetta, 8 miles from Roswell and 5 miles from Brookhaven. Yet many of these suburban residents who moved to Atlantic Station commute to the Perimeter for employment. And since they cannot reach transit, they commute by car. As a result, no more folks are using transit, and some of the Atlantic Station residents are commuting longer distances than when they lived in the suburbs.

The city of Hayward in the San Francisco Bay area has replaced its affordable housing with a new transit-oriented mixed-use development near its Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station. The principle of a transit-oriented development is that most commuters will walk to work or use transit which reduces transportation emissions. However, most of the residences are only affordable to those earning six figure salaries, while most of the employment is in the low-wage service sector. As a result, most of the residents and the workers must commute to their jobs. While approximately 30% use transit, the remaining 70% commute by car. This 30% is still a higher share than the 10% who chose transit when they lived in the suburbs. Perhaps 30% of the retail workers at the development commute by transit, a share not much higher than the San Francisco average.

However, the situation is reversed for the low-income residents. Displaced to the suburbs because their homes were demolished or because their taxes increased so much that they could no longer afford to live in their homes, they now rely on transit which is very limited in the suburbs. When they lived in Hayward, 70% of them rode transit and 30% of them drove. Now displaced throughout the suburbs, only about 10% of them can reach their jobs by transit; 80% now drive and 10% lost their jobs because they could not reach them by transit and could not afford to buy a car. As a result the actual number of people using transit at the Hayward site has actually decreased. More folks are driving, producing more emissions.

There may be lifestyle benefits from building mixed-use developments, but a significant reduction in emissions is not one of those benefits.

Free-flow Highways and Pricing Reduce Congestion and Emission

Conventional wisdom suggests that the most effective way to reduce light-duty vehicle emissions in metro areas is by reducing car travel. Many planners and policy makers have embarked on a policy of removing freeways, adding road diets, installing speed humps and making life miserable for commuters. However, conventional wisdom is completely wrong.

Much of the emissions in large metro areas come from carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds. And most of those emissions occur when cars are traveling in stop and go traffic rather than free-flow speeds. Barth, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Boriboonsomsin, an Environmental Research Scientist at the University of California Riverside found that for Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen Oxides, emissions versus speed is a U-shaped pattern where cars traveling at free-flow speeds (between 40-70 miles per hour) release less carbon dioxide than cars traveling in stop and go patterns (speeds between 0 and 30 miles per hour). In other words, eliminating stop and go traffic and severe congestion improves the environment far more than restricting car travel. In fact study authors found that with adopted tighter vehicle fuel efficiency requirements and engine technology, increasing free flow travel speeds to 40 miles per hour is by far the most effective way to reduce emissions in the light duty vehicle fleet. And most major metro areas face numerous corridors with congested traffic from six to twelve hours per day.

The most effective way to add this needed capacity is to add variably priced express lanes on freeways which provide an option for the driver (the pricing is dependent on congestion to keep traffic moving at 45 miles per hour or higher). For busy arterials the principal is the same. Commuters could use variably priced bridges to keep traffic moving at 35 miles per hour or higher. On both types of roads, the priced lanes are completely optional. The priced lanes would be new; commuters would always have the option of using the existing free lanes.

In addition to having the users pay for a large part of the improvement, this policy would increase speed and decrease congestion. This pricing also encourages people to travel only as needed, reducing induced demand (the tendency of new roads to generate new car trips), which is the reason most planners dislike freeway and arterial improvements. Such improvements would also improve the fuel efficiency of buses and improve transit service. If the goal is to improve the environment, speeding up travel by adding lanes and pricing those lanes is the most effective solution.

Smart Growth: Destroying Housing Opportunity from California to Australia (and Beyond)

Two recent stories provide further  evidence on the extent to which urban containment policies (also called smart growth, growth management, compact city policy, livability and urban consolidation) raises house prices relative to incomes, thereby reducing housing affordability. Because housing represents the largest element of household budgets (not transportation as a US government website implies), urban containment policy reduces discretionary income — the money households have left over after taxes and paying for necessities. This leads to a lower standard of living and more poverty, and violates the fundamental purposes of urban planning, described by former World Bank principal planner Alain Bertaud as:

“Increasing mobility and affordability are the two main objectives of urban planning. These two objectives are directly related to the overall goal of maximizing the size of a city’s labor market, and therefore, its economic prosperity.”

Two recent stories describe the effects of urban containment policy on the standard of living:

The Economist and Urban Containment “Fat Cats”

“Free Exchange” in The Economist came  down strongly on the side of economics in a review of housing affordability.

According to The Economist, the unusually high cost of housing in San Francisco (and other places) is principally the result of tight land use regulation, which makes it expensive or impossible to build. If “local regulations did not do much to discourage creation of new housing supply, then the market for San Francisco would be pretty competitive.” Add to that Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Portland and a host of additional metropolitan areas, where urban containment policy has driven house prices well above the 3.0 median multiple indicated by historic market fundamentals.

The Economist explains the issue in greater detail: “We therefore get highly restrictive building regulations. Tight supply limits mean that the gap between the marginal cost of a unit of San Francisco and the value to the marginal resident of San Francisco (and the market price of the unit) is enormous. That difference is pocketed by the rent-seeking NIMBYs of San Francisco. However altruistic they perceive their mission to be, the result is similar to what you’d get if fat cat industrialists lobbied the government to drive their competition out of business.” (Our emphasis).

Of course urban planning interests have long denied that that rationing land is associated with higher housing prices (read greater poverty and a lower standard of living). Nonetheless urban containment policies not only drive up the price of land, but do so even as they reduce the amount of land used for each new residence, driving prices per square foot of land up as well.

The Economist notes that unless the direction is changed, housing policy will continue to be “an instrument of oligarchy. Who knows. But however one imagines this playing out, we should be clear about what is happening, and what its effects have been.”

Land Prices Skyrocket as Residential Lot Sizes Fall in Australia

The extent to which smart growth policy (urban continament policy or urban consolidation policy) is associated with higher land (and house) prices is illustrated by a recent press release from RP Data in Australia. The analysis examined the vacant building lot prices for the period of 1993 to 2013.

During the period, the median price of a vacant lot rose 168 percent after adjustment for inflation.This is nearly 5 times the increase in the median household incomes of the seven largest capital cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and Sydney).

But it gets worse. The median lot size was reduced nearly 30 percent. This should put paid to the myth that urban containment reduces lot prices as it reduces their sizes. The same dynamic has been indicated in the United States.

Australia has been plagued by huge house cost increases relative to incomes in association with urban containment policy. Before the adoption of urban containment policy, it was typical for house prices to average three times or less than that of household income. Now, Sydney has the highest median multiple (median house price divided by median household income) of any major metropolitan area in the New World, with the exceptions of Vancouver and San Francisco. Melbourne, the second largest metropolitan area in Australia, has a median multiple of 8.4, making it fifth most costly in the New World, behind San Jose. All of Australia’s major metropolitan areas are “severely unaffordable,” including slow-growing Adelaide (6.3), as well as most smaller areas.

Getting Priorities Right

Research on these impacts led London School of Economics professor Paul Cheshire to conclude that urban containment policy is irreconcilable with housing affordability. This means that urban containment policy is irreconcilable with a better economic future for households, including those in poverty.

The purposes of urban containment policy are largely driven by a particular vision of the urban form and a manifestly wrongheaded belief that rationing land and limiting mobility can contribute materially to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The issue is neither urban design nor the expensive and ineffective strategies of urban containment. People are more important — their standard of living and reducing the number living in poverty. There is a compelling need to reorient urban policy in this direction (see Toward More Prosperous Cities).

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For a complete listing of median multiples by major metropolitan area, see the 10th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.

Additional information on the RP Data research is available at Australian Property Through Foreign Eyes

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Note: This article is adapted from contributions by the author to the newgeography.com

Solar Roads: Driving to the Future

If Back to the Future is any indication of our real future, we won’t need roads. As cool as it would be to have flying cars, our world is stranded with realistic ideas. This is why a couple from Idaho has designed a solar roadway that does more than just support our infrastructure.

The idea of a road paved with solar panels has been kicked around for years, but no one has been able to efficiently create a proper alternative to current roads. These Hexagonal Solar panels are linked to create a network that;

  • Absorb sunlight to produce energy through means of the built in solar panels to provide electricity for homes and businesses.
  • Can replace power lines as the main means of transporting electricity throughout cities.
  • Withstand 250,000 pounds. Currently, the Federal weight limit for heavy vehicles is 80,000 pounds.
  • Utilizes LED technology to illuminate roadways and safety lines. Considering a study done in the United Kingdom, LED marker illumination can reduce nighttime accidents by 70%.
  • Has the ability to melt ice and snow using heat generated from stored electricity. On average there are 467 deaths due to icy conditions each year.
  • Also can change shapes, creating additional handicap spots if all remaining are taken.

Smart roadways are a natural technological step in the advancement of infrastructure, and can be considered a priority in advancing cities. The team that created the tiles is beginning with a parking lot as the initial public trial, and then will move on to bigger projects. The Federal Highway Administration has acknowledged the product and guided them in establishing the ability and store and move storm water through the tiles.

According to their Indiegogo, they are attempting to stay away from large investors as a way to keep jobs in America, which is similar to the strategy, piloted Elon Musk and Tesla. While this project is revolutionary, it is important to keep in mind the economic risks with a new technology. In order to advance, the environmental and economic risks must be weighed effectively and allowed to expand to the market naturally. This blogs’ current advice would be to;

  • Work with toll companies to create a private grid that can expand the technology, while allowing the company to sell off the power generated by the tiles.
  • Remain unsubsidized by the government, and instead work with American companies such as Google and Tesla to keep jobs in the United States.
  • Attempt to rework the tiles as roof shingles, in order to reduce the amount of upkeep involved in roads and allow consumers to purchase them independently. Roadways are generally government expenditures, and it would leave no access to independent homes aside from driveways and patios.

Keeping renewable energy in the hands of the private sector is an important task going forward if renewable and sustainable technologies are to continue advancing.

Road Pricing Can Reduce Pollution

California’s Legislature is considering modifying the cap and trade program in order to charge drivers a direct carbon tax at the pump. Sacramento should be applauded for realizing that the state’s cap and trade program needs revision, but legislators should put the program out of its misery and kill it. Instead, the body and other Legislatures across the country should enact market-based pricing to reduce emissions from the transportation sector.

Three of the largest emissions sources are volatile organic compounds (VOC), nitrogen oxide (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO). VOC emission rates decline as travel speeds increase up to 65 mph, NOx emission rates decline as travel speeds increase up to 35 mph and CO emission rates decline as travel speeds increase up to 25 mph. As a result typical rush hour traffic speeds of 5-20 miles per hour reduce emissions more than free flow speeds of 30-60 miles per hour. Reducing congestion can help reduce emissions.

Road pricing is one effective way to reduce emissions. The long-term solution is to enact mileage-based user fees (MBUFs) to drive on all roads. MBUFs would vary based on type of road and time of day. Traveling on a freeway during rush hour would cost more than traveling on a local road in the middle of the day. This pricing could help divert traffic from traveling during peak periods to traveling during off-peak periods. It would take only a shift of 5-10% of all vehicles to substantially reduce congestion and emissions.

States from Florida to Washington are still testing MBUFs, so a shorter-term solution is also needed. Managed lanes and managed arterials can be part of the temporary solution. Managed lanes are optional variably-priced freeway lanes with guaranteed travel speeds of 45 miles per hour. Managed arterials include priced bridges or tunnels that allow drivers to bypass congested interchanges. Such lanes and bridges allow drivers the option of paying a small fee for congestion relief. Traffic in managed lanes and managed arterials emits fewer emissions since vehicles travel at approximately 45 miles per hour on managed lanes and approximately 35 miles per hour on managed arterials. And traffic in the non-priced lanes also emits fewer emissions because with fewer vehicles in their lanes they encounter less congestion and travel faster.

Stranded on “3-Mile Island”

It is 7am in the morning, and the second cup of coffee is just not cutting it. However, traffic congestion has been relatively smooth along the tollway and work is not too far away. Then, suddenly, traffic bottlenecks from several lanes down to two, and the quality of the road declines considerably. Essentially, a parking lot has been formed between one stretch of the toll road and another. In the Dallas Fort-Worth gridlock between the two George Bush Tollways is a daily occurrence for thousands who commute to work every morning.

Bottleneck Traffic

States around the country are looking for better ways to build roads, without taxpayer funds. Thus, a market for tollways has been created that has been able to keep up with the growing demand of growing metropolises. There are drawbacks to this growth as federal law from 1965 prohibits the removal of Interstate Highways in order to build tollways. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (D-Texas) authored a federal amendment to the same law in order to broaden the ban to include exist such as; turning an auxiliary lane, HOV lane into a toll lane or building a toll lane alongside the existing Interstate or State Highway. None of these are taxpayer friendly as the auxiliary and HOV lanes were originally paid for with tax dollars, and for them to become toll lanes would be an inexpensive way for toll companies to collect revenue at the hands of the taxpayers.

SH 161 in particular creates many problems for the taxpayers, toll associations, and the government to deal with. Because the stretch of road only is 3 miles, and is already a connector between two tollways it would be common sense to transform it into a tollway in order to improve traffic congestion and road safety. The road has minimal lighting and there are only two lanes in each direction which are severely deteriorated. One proposal that exists is sponsored by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDot) which claims that for 3.7 million dollars it can open the shoulder as another lane to ease bottle necking. The loss of the shoulder would create many hazards for accidents along the road so TxDot would build dead end driveways along the road and increase the amount of tow trucks on call to move stalled vehicles quickly. This however is and can only be a short term solution. This does not repair the roads, or increase the amount of lighting, and without a shoulder the danger of the road could increase as drivers can no longer safely pull off at any given time. One long term solution is to build a lane alongside the free lanes in order to add lanes while giving the benefit of the freeway.

The budget is not what it once was because the funds supplied from the federal government relies directly on the gas tax which has not been raised from 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. Due to inflation, more fuel efficient cars, and now electric cars the fund is getting smaller and smaller. The population of the DFW metroplex increases 1 person every 4 minutes and needs proper highway infrastructure in order to support the continued growth. These issues are not specific to Texas, and every state with a fast growing metroplex is suffering similar growing pains. In order to support this growth a comprehensive federal plan must be created soon or else the amount of goods and services being transported will continue to slow down.

Rethinging the Way Transportation Infrastructure is Funded

States are taking matters into their own hands

It may come as a surprise to you, but there is a quiet revolution in transportation funding underway these days. Faced with a depleted Highway Trust Fund and uncertain prospects for more money from a deficit-conscious Congress, many states are taking matters into their own hands and aggressively pursuing more fiscal independence.

A survey we have recently conducted documents significant funding initiatives in 18 states. Some states have raised their gasoline taxes (MD, WY, MA, and VT). Others have shifted to a tax on fuel at the wholesale level (e.g.PA). Still others have enacted dedicated sales taxes for transportation (e.g. AK, VA) or floated toll revenue bonds (e.g. OH).

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