Tag Archives: Urban Issues

Water Issues

Draconian California Water Restrictions

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California has been plagued by a highly-politicized water crisis for months now, despite crisis warnings for years.

The state has fallen prey to the “tragedy of the (water) commons”, where each person feels their single contribution to the water crisis will not impact the overall situation. With this thought, each Californian uses water like it rained yesterday, with no regard to the desperate calls from Governor Jerry Brown for water conservation.

Until now, Californians have faced few real incentives to lower their water consumption levels. Past water infrastructure subsidies have kept the price of water down as political forces ensured a disastrously low price for California’s many residents. The result was a low water price of less than 0.7 cents per gallon in 2014 for San Diego and Los Angeles. In cities such as Irvine, next to the University of California, the price can be as low as 0.2 cents per gallon.

Economists believe simply raising the water price by 10 percent could cut consumption by 2 to 4 percent.

Not limited to simple price increases, however, new California laws are mandating significant decreases in water consumption. These policies include:

  • New cuts affect 276 rights held by 114 entities to pull water from the Delta, Sacramento, and San Joaquin watersheds. Each of these entities could be supplying water to dozens of additional users.
  • Farmers in the Central Valley have already had their surface water allotment lowered or erased in the last few years.
  • In May, about 200 farmers agreed to lower their water usage by 25 percent in exchange for a promise to face no deeper cuts during the growing season.
  • Other restrictions implemented in May limited yard watering to twice a week and between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.
  • Owners of large farms will now have to hand over detailed reports of their water use to state regulators.
  • A recent executive order calls for the replacement of 50 million square feet of ornamental turf, such as municipality-owned lawns or private lawns.
  • For wealthy consumers, districts now reserve the right to install flow restrictors for private use.
  • Top water users are facing cuts up to 36 percent.

While these policies might lower water consumption, they may be a little too much too late. In the end, these draconian measures are sure to enrage those who can afford higher water prices, while also punishing farmers and low-income water consumers.

Transportation

Take a Train – Buses are too Complicated?

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Apparently, when it comes to making a mass transit choice between trains and buses when travelling around town, people should pick the train.

From the Congress for the New Urbanism blog:

Why Buses Are Inferior

Critics of rail often argue that buses are superior; they are cheaper, more flexible and (sometimes) run almost as fast.  But in a recent blog post, Houston planning student Maggie Colson explains why trains are better than buses, even if the train isn’t much faster:

The train system was much easier to maneuver than the bus system. I found the bus system to be more complicated because you had to find the correct bus stop with the bus number labeled on it. In addition, you could easily end up going in the wrong direction – the buses did not have the directions labeled like the trains. On the bus you also had to know where you needed to get off. Unlike the train system, the bus did not stop at every stop and instead you had to push a button to request for the bus to stop. While this is not necessarily an issue once you know the route, trying to navigate for the first time was stressful. Without the use of my smartphone, I would not have found or gotten off at the correct bus stops.

In other words, with buses you really have to know what you are doing.

Ignoring the recent rail disaster in London, are buses inferior to rail?

Transportation

China’s New Urbanization Plan

The Prime Minister of China, Li Keqiang, hopes to see 60 percent of the Chinese population living in cities by 2020 as a result of his “National Plan on New Urbanization.”

  • In 2013, 712 million Chinese residents were living in cities while 600 million were living in rural areas. The urbanization plan seeks to coordinate the development of cities and towns, expecting 100 million new urban residents by the end of the decade.
  • Because those living in China’s cities earn 3.23 times more than those living in rural areas, the state hopes that the plan will boost consumption spending, raising China’s consumption from 34 percent of GDP up to 45 to 50 percent by 2020.

China’s economy is complicated, because it uses central planning along with free markets. Real estate is China’s most popular industry, and land developers lease land from the Chinese government for a leasing fee, then develop it privately. There have been problems, however, with such government involvement. For example, when the city of Ordos in Mongolia built 100,000 apartments with government support, 90 percent of the buildings remained entirely empty because the government misestimated demand for housing in the area.

As more people move to China’s cities, demand for government investment and development will increase. The government could limit its involvement and allow the free market to work.

Xinyuan Zou is a research associate at the National Center for Policy Analysis.

Energy, Land Issues, Property Issues

Suburban Nation: U.S. 86 Percent Suburban

From Jurisdictional to Functional Analysis of Urban Cores & Suburbs

For decades there has been considerable analysis of urban core versus suburban trends. However, for the most part, analysts have been jurisdictional, comparing historical core municipalities to the expanse that constitutes the rest of the metropolitan area. Most core municipalities are themselves substantially suburban, which can mask (and exaggerate) the size of urban cores and understate the extent of suburbanization.

Our new City Sector Model evaluates the more than 8,900 zip codes in the 52 U.S. metropolitan areas that have more than 1,000,000 residents (“major metropolitan areas”) based on travel behavior and urban form. There are four categories, including  (1) Pre-Auto Urban Core, (2) Auto Suburban: Earlier, (3) Auto Suburban: Later and (4) Auto Exurban. It is recognized that automobile oriented suburbanization was underway before World War II, but it was interrupted by the Great Depression during the 1930s and was small compared to the democratization of personal mobility and home ownership that has occurred since that time.

Canada: A Suburban Nation

The City Sector Model is broadly similar to the groundbreaking research published by David L. A. Gordon and Mark Janzen at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario (Suburban Nation: Estimating the Size of Canada’s Suburban Population) on the metropolitan areas of Canada. Gordon and Janzen concluded that the metropolitan areas of Canada are largely suburban. Among the major metropolitan areas of Canada, the Auto Suburbs and Exurbs combined contain 76 percent of the population, somewhat less than the 86 percent in the United States.

All U.S. Major Metropolitan Area Growth Has Been Suburban and Exurban

Virtually all population growth in U.S. metropolitan areas (as currently defined) has been suburban or exurban since before World War II (the 1940 census). The historical core municipalities that have not annexed materially and were largely developed by 1940 have lost population. Approximately 110 percent of their metropolitan area growth has occurred in suburbs and exurbs. Further, among the other core municipalities, virtually all of the population growth that has occurred in annexed areas or greenfield areas since 1940.

Identifying the Pre-Auto Urban Core

Not being constrained by municipal boundaries is important because core municipalities vary substantially. For example, the core municipality represents less than 10 percent of the population of Atlanta, while the core municipality represents more than 60 percent of the population of San Antonio. The City Sector Model applies data available from the U.S. Census Bureau to estimate the population and distribution of Pre-Auto Urban Cores in a consistent manner.

At the same time, the functional analysis is materially different from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) classification of “principal cities.” It also differs from the Brookings Institution “primary cities,” which is based on the OMB approach. The OMB based classifications classify municipalities using employment data, without regard to urban form, density or other variables that are associated with the urban core. These classifications are useful and acknowledge that the monocentric nature of US metropolitan areas has evolved to polycentricity. However, non-urban core principal cities and primary cities are themselves, with few exceptions, functionally suburban (some of the most significant examples are Mesa, Arizona in the Phoenix area, which had a population of only 7,000 in 1940 and Arlington, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which had a population of only 4,000. Their populations, now both 350,000 or more are virtually all automobile oriented suburban).

The City Sector Model Criteria

Because of the substantial interest of urban planners in minimizing the use of automobiles and restoring transit, walking and cycling as primary urban travel alternatives, it is important to identify the extent of automobile oriented suburbanization to the greatest extent possible. Better information is required, regardless of an analysts’ orientation. (As an aside, this author believes that the data shows planning efforts to lead to lower standards of living and greater poverty, which is discussed in Toward More Prosperous Cities).

A number of data combinations were tested for the Pre-Auto Urban Core, to replicate as closely as feasible the 2010 population of the core municipalities that have virtually the same boundaries as in 1940 and that were virtually fully developed by that time (the Pre-War & Non-Suburban classification in historical core municipalities). The following criteria were accepted (represented graphically).

  •  The Auto Exurban category includes any area outside a principal urban area.
  •  The Pre-Auto Urban Core category includes any non-exurban with a median house construction date of 1945 or before and also included areas with a population density of 7,500 per square mile (2,900) or more and with a transit, walk and cycling journey to work market share of 20 percent or more.
  •  The Auto Suburban Earlier category included the balance of areas with a median house construction date of 1979 or before.
  •  The Auto Suburban Later category later included the balance of areas with a median house construction date of 1980 or later.

Additional details on the criteria are in the Note.

Results: 2010 Census

 The combined Pre-Auto Urban Core areas represented 14.4 percent of the population of the major metropolitan areas in 2010 (2013 geographical definition). This compares to the 26.4 percent that the core municipalities themselves represented of the metropolitan areas, indicating their large functionally suburban components.

The Auto Suburban: Earlier areas accounted for 42.0 percent of the population, while the Auto Suburban: Later areas had 26.8 percent of the population. The Auto Exurban areas had 16.8 percent of the population.

The substantial difference between U.S. and Canadian urbanization is illustrated by applying an approximation of the Gordon-Janzen criteria, which yielded an 8.4 percent Pre-Auto Urban Core population. The corresponding figure for the six major metropolitan areas of Canada was 24.0 percent. This difference is not surprising, since major Canadian urban areas have generally higher densities and much more robust transit, walking and cycling market shares. Yet, the Gordon-Janzen research shows Canada to be overwhelmingly suburban.

Population Density: As would be expected, the Pre-Auto Urban Core areas had the highest densities, at 11,000 per square mile (4,250 per square kilometer). The Auto Suburban: Earlier areas had a density of 2,500 per square mile (1,000 per square kilometer), while the Auto Suburban: Later had a population density of 1,300 per square mile (500 per square kilometer), while the Auto Exurban areas had a population density of 150 per square mile (60 per square kilometer).

Individual Metropolitan Areas (Cities)

The metropolitan areas with the highest proportion of Pre-Auto Urban Core population are New York (more than 50 percent), and Boston (nearly 35 percent), followed by Buffalo, Chicago, San Francisco-Oakland and Providence, all with more than 25 percent.

It may be surprising that many of the major metropolitan areas are shown with little or no Pre-Auto Urban Core population. For example, five metropolitan areas have no Pre-Auto Urban Core population, including Phoenix, Riverside-San Bernardino, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Orlando, Jacksonville and Birmingham. By the Census Bureau criteria of 1940, two of these areas were not yet metropolitan and only Birmingham (400,000) had more than 250,000 residents. Only the larger metropolitan had strong Pre-Auto Urban Cores. Many of the newer and fastest growing metropolitan areas were too small, too sparsely settled or insufficiently dense to have had strong urban cores before the great automobile suburbanization that followed World War II. Further, many of the Pre-Auto Urban Cores have experienced significant population loss and some of their neighborhoods have become more suburban (automobile oriented). Virtually no urban cores have been developed since World War II meeting the criteria.

Thus, no part of Phoenix, San Jose, Charlotte and a host of other newer metropolitan areas functionally resembles the Pre-Auto Urban Core areas of metropolitan areas like Chicago, Cincinnati or Milwaukee. However, new or expanded urban cores are possible, if built at high enough population density and with high enough transit, walking and cycling use.

Despite the comparatively small share of the modern metropolitan area represented by the Pre-Auto Urban Core in the City Core Model, the definition is broad and, if anything over-estimates the size of urban core city sectors. The population density of Pre-Auto Urban Core areas is below that of the historical core municipalities before the great auto oriented urbanization (11,000 compared to 12,100 in 1940) and well above their 2010 density (8,400), even when New York is excluded. The minimum density requirement of 7,500 per square mile (not applied to analysis zones with a median house construction data of 1945 or earlier) is slightly less than the density of Paris suburbs (7,800 per square mile or 3,000 per square kilometer) and only 20 percent more dense than the jurisdictional suburbs of Los Angeles (6,400 per square mile or 2,500 per square kilometer). Some urban containment plans require higher minimum densities, not only in urban cores but also in the suburbs.

The United States: An Even More Suburban Nation

In describing the Canadian results, Professor Gordon noted that there is a tendency to “overestimate the importance of the highly visible downtown cores and underestimate the vast growth happening in the suburban edges.” That is true to an even greater degree in the United States.

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Note: The City Sector Model is applied to the 52 major metropolitan areas in the United States (over 1 million population). The metropolitan areas are divided into the principal urban areas, with areas outside categorized as exurban. The principal urban areas in Los Angeles and San Francisco encompass the smaller Mission Viejo and Concord urban areas, which are adjacent. As a result, some smaller urban areas, such as Palm Springs (Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area), Lancaster (Los Angeles metropolitan area) and Poughkeepsie (New York metropolitan area) are considered exurban. Areas with less than 250 residents per square mile (100 per square kilometer) are also considered exurban, principally for classification of large areas on the urban fringe that have a substantial rural element.

The Pre-Auto Urban Core includes all non -– exurban areas in which is the house construction date is 1945 or before. In addition, the urban core includes areas that have a population density of 7,500 per square mile (2,900 per square kilometer) or more and a transit, walking and cycling journey to work market share of 20 percent or more, so long as they are in the urban area.

The analysis zones (zip codes) have an average population of 19,000, with from as many as 1,000 zones in New York to 50 in Raleigh.

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This article is adapted from From Jurisdictional to Functional Analysis of Urban Cores and Suburbs, originally published in newgeography.com. That article contains charts, tables and representative maps.

Energy, Environmental Education, Global Warming, Land Issues, Property Issues

The Atlanta Transit Tax: For the 1 Percent

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Voters in Atlanta, with some of the worst traffic congestion in the nation, are being asked to approve a new tax that would spend more than 50% on transit, in an urban area where transit carries only 1% of travel (Figure). No one is naive enough to think that the new billions for transit would improve traffic congestion. Worse, the distorted program would contribute to worse congestion by spending on billions on transit, which cannot reduce traffic congestion, instead of on roadways, which is the only way that traffic congestion can be reduced.

The July 31 vote is in 10 counties of the 28 county Atlanta metropolitan area. The measure would raise the sales tax by one cent, for $8 billion in transit and highway projects over 10 years.

In a metropolitan area in which barely one percent of travel is by transit, the tax measure would devote more than one-half of the funding to transit (see Figure).  As we wrote in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution commentary, the focus of any transportation revenue issue should be on reducing travel times, whether by transit or highways. This is how transportation improves an urban economy. The reality is that with nearly all travel by highways and transit’s inherently slower travel times, much of the tax money would be spent on strategies that have virtually no hope of reducing travel times or traffic congestion.

Atlanta’s Traffic Congestion: Promoters of the tax claim that the highway projects will reduce traffic congestion. Atlanta is well known for its serious traffic congestion. There are two reasons for this:

(1) Atlanta has a sparse freeway system, which is limited to little more than a belt route (I-285) and three radial freeways (I-20, I-75 and I-85) that converge into two downtown. Seven years ago, we rated Atlanta as having the least effective freeway system among major US urban areas. Nothing has happened to change that rating, except for the addition of 750,000 people. This tax issue will do virtually nothing to improve roadway travel on the regional level.

(2) Perhaps even worse, Atlanta’s regional arterial (high capacity streets) system is virtually non-existent. For this reason, we proposed (in 2000) development of a one-mile terrain constrained grid of arterials . A local editorial writer found this so hard to deal with it that he misrepresented it as a mile grid of freeways to make it look extreme. Later, the Atlanta Regional Council (ARC), the local metropolitan planning organization, included a somewhat more modest (but useful) arterial grid in is regional plan.

The Transit Tax: Fixing What Should have Already Been Fixed: The transit projects have virtually no potential to reduce work trip travel times and thus no potential to reduce traffic congestion. Approximately one-fifth of the transit funding would be used to rehabilitate and upgrade the MARTA subway system, a need that should have been legitimately funded from the existing MARTA sales tax.

The Transit Tax: Subsidizing Land Speculation: Another nearly 20 percent of the transit funding would be spent on the “Belt-Line” streetcar project in central Atlanta. The Belt-Line is more “city building” (read “real estate speculating”) than it is transportation. It will do nothing to reduce work trip travel times. Further, it is exceedingly costly. The extravagance of this project is illustrated by an annualized capital cost alone (principally construction) high enough to pay the lease on a new mid-sized car for each new regular passenger.

The Transit Tax: Emulating Miami? The history of transit is fraught with cost increases and project cancellation and delay as transit agencies, unable to control their rising costs, can spend money for day-to-day operations that had been planned to build new transit lines. This has happened with a vengeance in Miami, where a 2002 transit tax to expand the rail system has largely been frittered away in higher operating costs. It could happen in Atlanta.

The Road Projects: In a metropolitan area in which personal mobility predominates, roadway improvements, such as expansions, an arterial grid in Atlanta’s case and completion of the GA-DOT HOT (high occupancy toll) system provide the greatest potential for reducing travel times. There is another significant benefit to highway investments. As traffic speeds increase fuel efficiency improves and both air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.

With less than 50 percent of the funding going to roads, less than one-half the potential benefit of the $8 billion can be achieved. This ineffective return is felt by low income citizens almost to the same extent as everyone else. While 88 percent of all commuters in Atlanta travel by car, the figure is only slightly less (83 percent) among low income commuters (Figure 4).

What’s Right About Atlanta: For all its problems, Atlanta has much to be proud of. Former World Bank principal planner Alain Bertaud said of Atlanta in a 2002 study:

 While income and population were rising very fast, Atlanta managed to keep a very low cost of living. A worldwide cost of living survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2002 found that Atlanta had the lowest cost of living among major US cities and ranked 63rdamong major cities around the world. This achievement is remarkable in view of the rapid rate of growth of the metropolitan area over the last 20 years. It shows that while demographic and economic growth has certainly contributed to generate pollution and congestion, the various actors responsible for the management of metropolitan Atlanta must have done a lot of things right. High income growth and high demographic growth combined with a low cost of living suggests that labor markets are functioning well and that housing does not encounter important supply bottlenecks. (Note on Atlanta’s Superior Housing Affordabilitiy)

 Atlanta’s leadership should go back to the drawing board. A rational proposal is required to reduce Atlanta’s travel times (which are longer than its major US competitors, such as Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston) and grow the economy. There’s no point in spending more than 50 percent on the 1 percent.

(More at The Atlanta Transportation Tax: Too Much for Too Little.)

 

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Note on Atlanta’s Superior Housing Affordability: Atlanta was most affordable major metropolitan area in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and Hong Kong in the 8th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.