Category Archives: urban planning

Taxicabs, Economists & a Revenue Stream

30 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in cities, economics, geography, New York City, transportation, urban planning

≈ 1 Comment

photo by Rogelio Fernandez via Flickr

Evidently, New York City has a taxicab shortage. This fall, two medallions — the license to operate a cab there — sold for $1 million each. That’s because the Taxi and Limousine Commission restricts the number of cabs allowed in the city. Cab numbers were limited in 1937 to 16,900 and fell to 11,787 in the 1940s. Today, there are only 13,237 yellow cabs and those medallion owners are sitting on an investment that’s outpaced the price of gold and the stock market.

Economists hate this system. It has them going on about competition, the invisible hand, market inefficiencies, service shortages, windfall profits, etc. And all these arguments make sense, until you bring physical space into the story. Limiting the city’s taxi fleet is actually a good idea. For Manhattan, anyway. It’s just been limited for too long.

The goal of a taxi system is for any user to be able to always have a free cab at their disposal in all places. The thing is, taxis take up physical space. And when you get too many cabs in Manhattan, you get clogged streets and you may as well walk. So you have to limit the number of cabs. And when you limit the number of cabs, you have to protect consumers from the inflated prices that follow. Besides, if drivers all charged different rates, how much congestion would that cause? People would be perpetually waiting for cheaper cab to hail.

Yellow cabs should be thought of as part of the city’s larger transportation system (and their regulation brought under the city’s Department of Transportation). It’s a transportation system that needs to reduce congestion, expand mass transit, and keep fares affordable. The pent-up need for more taxis could even offer an opportunity. With cab companies signalling that million-dollar taxi medallions are a reasonable investment, the city government should print some money… err allow more taxis. Just figure out what the appropriate number of cabs is for its streets and have some medallion auctions. Then, for a city that’s famously congested, expand transit (perhaps even freeing up the streets for more taxis).

photo by Noel Hidalgo via Flickr

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The Tar Sands Pipeline Loves Suburban Sprawl

29 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by in cities, oil sands, pollution, tar sands, transportation, urban planning

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Open Pit Bitumen Mine. Photo courtesy of Louis Helbig (click for link)

A lot of people are upset about TransCanada’s Keystone XL — the 1,600 mile pipeline that would ship tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to Gulf Coast refineries in Texas. They’re protesting outside the White House. They’re protesting in Canada. Hell, they’re even protesting in Nebraska.

There are plenty of good reasons to hate this project. It’s a complete disaster for the areas surrounding the mines, obviously. But lately, the arguments against the pipeline are piling up in two main areas: the possible mess this stuff will cause in a spill, and the guaranteed mess it will cause when it’s refined and burned. There’s no shortage of opportunities for this pipeline to cause major problems if there’s a spill. The proposed path would cross 70 streams and rivers along with the Ogallala Aquifer, a major supplier of ground-water for US agriculture. There are plenty of bad scenarios that can play out here, but the main issue is going to be the refining of this garbage. It takes two-and-a-half times as much energy to refine as conventional oil. That means your Prius is effectively going to get the same mileage as a Camry. And your Camry is going to get the same effective mileage as a Tacoma pickup truck. And your pickup truck? That will get you mileage closer to a U-Haul.

71% of the oil we use is for transportation. That is, cars and trucks. Driving to work. Driving to the store. If we don’t want this pipeline going across the center of our country, and we don’t want to burn the dirtiest fuel imaginable in our 254,000,000+ cars and trucks, we need to drive less. And while it’s true that higher CAFE standards for new cars will help, and electric cars will help, the energy used to refine tar sands or drill in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, or in the Arctic is going to make quick work of any efficiencies Toyota, GM and Honda squeeze out of their engineers. And alternative energy? Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize winning oil historian says in his latest book that our current renewable technologies aren’t likely to provide enough inexpensive, reliable energy to replace fossil fuels.

So what do we do? If tar sands are profitable, we’re going to get tar sands gasoline. And if we perpetuate this situation in which we have to drive everywhere, we’re going to buy tar sands gasoline, whether we protest or not. The alternative isn’t going to be what we drive, but where we live. We need to build real cities. Real towns. Walkable neighborhoods. Places where transit can work. Places where we can choose not to drive.

Bitumen Slick. Photo courtesy of Louis Helbig (click for link)

For Downtown Revival, We’re Going to Need to Leave Our Cars at Home

21 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in cities, geography, parking lots, streetcars, transit, transportation, urban planning

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Streetcars, Downtown Rochester, NY, ca 1910

Downtowns need two things to be successful — buildings and customers. Sounds simple.

What makes a downtown great is variety. Lots of storefronts. Restaurants, cafes, coffee shops, bars, shops, galleries, theaters. But how do you get the customers there? Well, some of them live downtown, but the rest are going to drive. And when your customers drive, they need to park. And when they park, you get restaurant, parking lot, cafe, parking lot, bar, parking lot, shop, parking lot, gallery, parking lot, theater, parking lot. And a few parking decks for good measure. Your downtown just lost its potential.

And the people that live downtown? Above the shops and restaurants? Well, we may be seeing a bit of a revival, but unless you’re offering more than bars and restaurants (think grocery store), every one of those downtown residents is going to want a car, too. And they’re going to need to park it in a convenient spot, because they’re going to drive it almost as much as everyone in the suburbs.

And now that everyone’s parked, your downtown has two tiers of street — the handful that are crammed with businesses, apartments and condos; and the surrounding areas with the parking decks, parking lots and the neglected rundown buildings between them. How do we get beyond this?

A streetcar system may be the answer. Connect your inner-ring neighborhoods, job centers and shopping districts to downtown and vice versa. It kills two birds with one stone. You get this potential market for downtown that can get there easily and leave their cars at home. And your downtown residents get connected to a wider range of services. And maybe some of them cut down on the number of cars they need because of it. Couples might need only one car between them. And, with more customers and fewer parking lots, you get the potential for more downtown businesses and more residents. The gaps fill in. It’s a virtuous circle.

I know. Streetcars aren’t cheap. But neither is suburban development. When you build your city on existing infrastructure, you’re not building new water, sewer and stormwater systems. And you don’t have to maintain what you don’t build. You have fewer miles of roads. Fewer water main breaks, snow plows, potholes and sinkholes. And come to think of it, hollowed-out downtowns aren’t cheap either. Your cities will lose their youth and ability to attract new residents without a vibrant downtown. Ultimately, it’s a choice between paying now or paying later.

Failing Schools? Don’t Blame the Teachers

16 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by in cities, geography, schools, taxes, transportation, urban planning

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Racially Integrated Classroom, Berlin Township, NJ, 1952

Education reformers rarely talk about the real issues. It’s not necessarily the schools themselves that are the problem — it’s the geography. We know the good schools are in the expensive neighborhoods. Of course, this is a barrier to low-income families to attend those schools. But it’s not necessarily the teachers, administrators, class sizes, or even the budget that makes those schools better. It’s the students. Well, sort of.

We know that concentrated poverty leads to bad outcomes in city neighborhoods. Well, it’s the same for schools. Family socioeconomic background influences a student’s academic achievement by providing more resources at home, but peer groups are often more influential to learning than socioeconomic background alone. Predictably enough, family income plays a role in whether a student applies for college, too. This isn’t to say that a student’s socioeconomic background is his or her destiny. There are programs that get disadvantaged students the education they need. But when you’re looking at a school with 1,000 students, you can make some pretty solid predictions of the average test score if you know the student body’s average family income. You can see this trend where the entire school district is impoverished of course, but you can see it within school districts, too. Schools with the same funding levels, same class sizes, and same policies, can have vastly different grades. And they’re absolutely tied to the student body’s socioeconomic background. So what’s the solution? Socioeconomic integration.

Not so long ago, school districts used to try to integrate students through busing policies. It was mostly because they were being forced to integrate racially, but because so many black families were (and are) living in poverty, these policies integrated students economically as well. Busing was rarely popular, especially in affluent schools, and it’s not used much anymore. Instead, schools now are trying to integrate through more of a market approach. School districts created magnet schools by concentrating resources, adding special programs (Mandarin Immersion, anyone?) in schools located in racially- or economically-isolated neighborhoods. Now the affluent white students bus themselves and the school district is more integrated than if attendance zones were based solely on neighborhood boundaries. There’s promise for charter schools to act this way, but they’re often more segregated than neighborhood schools.

The problem is, purposefully integrating schools is a giant shell game. While low-income students are stuck in the same neighborhoods, high-income families can avoid integration relatively easily. They want to send my kid to what school!? Not a chance. She’s going to (take your pick) private school, Catholic School, Montessori School. Or, we’re moving to the ‘burbs. And, the larger the city, the larger role geography plays. Low-income students often need to overcome great distances and travel time to attend integrated schools. And where district lines are drawn between rich and poor, you’re stuck.

Some people are looking for solutions in housing policy. Integrate the schools by integrating the neighborhoods. Gentrification can be a bad word, but I’m of the opinion that there’s more harm in the urban sprawl caused by school chasing than by high-income families moving into cities. Besides, there are many successful urban housing developments that make provisions for low-income families and create mixed-income communities. Limiting the amount of subsidized housing and thus lowering the poverty density of a given area can also influence who attends what school. It seems that the ultimate solution is to look beyond the free market. The widening gap between rich and poor is going to exacerbate this issue. And failing our students isn’t the best long-term plan.

Dear Missouri, Please Don’t Cut Your Historic Preservation Tax Credits

07 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in cities, historic preservation, Jobs, taxes, urban planning

≈ 3 Comments

Anheuser-Busch Brewery, Saint Louis

Missouri, I know you’ve been walloped by decades of deindustrialization and now the Great Recession. You’re being forced to make some terrible choices when it comes to your state budget. On the chopping block is your historic preservation tax credit. It may seem trite to cry for the potential loss of this program. I mean, shouldn’t you be spending taxpayer money on schools and roads and bridges? Yes, but hold on a second. You need to think this through. Where are your historic structures? In the middle of your cities! For the last 50 years, people have been abandoning your cities for the suburbs. In the meantime, you’ve had to build new roads, install new water and sewer lines, build new schools, and take care of this more spread-out infrastructure. Those buildings in the middle of your cities are worth keeping around. Worth investing in. They’re your history. They don’t make ’em like that anymore and it’s not going to be cheap to fix them. But it’s worth it. Here’s why:

1. Your state tax credit helps bring federal tax credits into Missouri. That’s 20% of the money spent rehabilitating National-Register-listed income-producing buildings and 10% for pre-1936 commercial buildings. That’s a lot of free money for your local economy. And, again, where are those old commercial buildings? Oh, right. In the middle of every city and town in your state. Besides that, your state tax credit can be used for residential buildings, too (federal tax credits are only for commercial buildings).

2. This is the only thing that’s going to put building contractors back to work. How many new subdivisions have you seen going up? Shiny new strip malls? Me, neither. That’s because nobody’s buying. You know what some people are doing, though? They’re picking up old historic houses and commercial buildings for a song and fixing them up. You want to keep that going?

3. Jobs in historic preservation are local. When your average developer rehabs a building (if he doesn’t tear it down to begin with), he uses contemporary products. Let’s take the windows, for example. Do you want the contractor to buy 25 vinyl windows for this historic building? Let’s not even take into consideration how bad that would look, since the windows won’t be the right size for the building and you can never paint them and they’ll only last 10 years. Would you rather have a man in China making those windows, or would you rather hire a craftsman from Missouri to rehang the windows, fix a few broken pains and reglaze them? I’m going with the guy that pays taxes in Missouri.

4. People are buying the neighborhood, not just the house. They want to be able to walk to a corner store, ride their bike, sit on a front porch. They want sidewalks and interesting architecture. They want places where people feel invested in the future. Places they can be proud of. Your historic neighborhoods are all those things. Developers don’t build neighborhoods like this anymore, so you’d better preserve the ones you have.

5. Your cities and town governments like these neighborhoods because they’re cheaper to serve. They don’t have cul de sacs; they have grid street patterns that are cheaper to plow in the winter, they don’t get traffic backups, and they’re close to existing fire houses, police precincts, and schools. Their water and sewer systems are under-capacity since neighborhood population is way off its peak. And since people have been investing in your downtowns for the last decade or so, hopefully these neighborhoods are closer to work for a lot of people, too.

6. Historic buildings are energy efficient. Well, they are when you take into account where they are. Historic buildings, like I said, are in the middle of your towns and cities. They require less driving for the people that live there because they’re closer to downtown and, well, each other. Transit systems serve them easier and people can walk to their destinations easier. And have you ever considered the energy it takes to tear down a building and construct a new one? Stuff them with insulation and fix the windows and they’re as good as anything you can build today.

7. These buildings are your icons. Did I mention these building are in the center of all your cities and towns? They’re what people think of when they talk about Missouri. They’re your past. They’re the reason people send postcards. They’re the reason people come to visit and decide they’ll stay. Don’t mess this up!

Parking Lots are Bad Neighbors

29 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by in cities, incremental change, urban planning

≈ 4 Comments

Parking Lot #33 by Jason Brockert

City planning was a reaction to industrialization: smokestacks make bad neighbors, so cities created zoning. Who would want to live near a smoke-belching factory? It was dangerous and unhealthy. And it smelled bad. London had “dark satanic mills.” Pittsburgh was “hell with the lid off.” But, zoning has since evolved to not only separate the industrial from the residential, but to separate commercial from residential, and residential (apartments) from residential (single-family). What in the world is zoning protecting me from there? The way I see it, it’s cars. Well, parking lots. And that’s creating a cycle of urban decline and reliance on oil (and deteriorated water quality, poor air quality, obesity, yada, yada).

We’ve had two themes running through planning for the last 75 years, and where they overlap is in the parking lot. The first theme is, make it easy for me to drive my car anywhere, whenever I want. Second, keep those cars away from my house! Here’s the problem: When you live in a city where everyone has a car, your stores need to have parking lots. But, who wants to live next to a parking lot? So zoning ends up separating your neighborhood grocery from your neighborhood. Then everyone has to drive there. Then it needs a bigger parking lot. Etc.

Right now, most cities have parking requirements built into their zoning codes. Want to put a yoga studio in your house? Good luck. You’ll probably have to supply enough parking spaces as if every person taking yoga with you drove by themselves. (And, be honest — they probably would.) But, big retailers, churches, and office buildings very often supply much more parking than is required. The retailers build their parking lots for the biggest shopping day of the year, churches want enough parking spaces for every seat in the sanctuary, and the owners of office buildings want flexibility for any possible tenant. And when you get a bunch of these buildings next to each other, you get parking lot after redundant parking lot. And you have to drive there.

So, how do we begin to solve this mess and pull our cities back together? It may fix itself, but not in a way that many of us would enjoy. If gas prices rise sharply, people won’t want to drive as much or as far as they do now. In the end, the market will react and we’ll probably see a trend back to neighborhood-scale retail and services. But what if we actually wanted our city policies to create a place where we could choose not to drive?

City policies could squeeze from two directions — do away with some minimum parking requirements and add parking maximums. It probably won’t destroy any neighborhoods to allow businesses up to a certain square footage to rely on on-street parking. And I’m sure we could come up with reasonable numbers for a maximum number of parking spaces for different land uses.

And what if we separated parking requirements from individual buildings? We do that in many downtowns. By virtue of locating in a walkable urban center, building owners are not required to provide parking, and it somehow works out. What if we did that in other places? Just said, we have enough parking here. No asphalt required. Or, no more asphalt, period. In growing suburban areas, it might actually inspire useful development of those empty spaces. And it could discourage tear-downs in more urban neighborhoods, too.

This is an incremental policy change, obviously. But building a city is incremental itself. Without changing the whole framework for city planning, this is how we make better places to live.