Tag Archives: Congestion Pricing

Getting my kicks on I-66

The Virginia Department of Transportation started tolling Interstate 66 this week, and boy, people are pissed.

A few thoughts after two weeks of dynamic tolling:

Lots of people were cheating the old HOV rules: The shock over paying the new tolls (which wouldn’t apply for those who were driving the road in compliance with the HOV rules) shows how many people had been cheating the system.

Some drivers feel wronged by changing policies, such as the increased HOV hours and the loss of the HOV exemption for hybrid vehicles, but those folks clearly don’t account for the huge portion of cars driving the tolls up.

Faster may not be the most efficient: VDOT was boasting that the average morning rush-hour speed was 57 mph. The speed limit is just 55 mph; and the old average was something like 37 mph.

The $40 toll isn’t the cost of reducing congestion; instead, it shows the marginal cost of keeping an urban expressway flowing at rural traffic densities, enabling free-flow conditions at the speed limit. It’s a useful reminder for all drivers of just how expensive it is to ensure the kind of speeds too many of them expect.

It’s not clear at all that this is the optimal policy for VDOT to set. They haven’t released any information about changes in traffic volume. The law requires maintaining average speeds of at least 45 mph; if VDOT were to accept lower speeds in the morning without introducing congestion, they might avoid some of the more exorbitant tolls and allow for more drivers to use the road.

There’s precedent for this: Minnesota experimented with a complete shutdown of their freeway ramp meters in 2000. The end result was a determination that they could dramatically improve the system’s user experience without sacrificing the main benefits. But, it took a legislatively mandated shutdown experiment to get MnDOT to make the changes in policy.

Clear communications matter: This isn’t Virginia’s first HOT lane project, nor is it the first time tolls have spiked (though most previous events could be traced to some kind of incident – poor weather, a bad crash, etc). So what explains the backlash?

A big part of the problem appears to be a misunderstanding about the toll rates. During the approval process, lots of folks had a $17 round-trip figure in their head. That’s obviously a lot less than $40 for one-way.

Fredrick Kunkle dug into this in the Washington Post:

“The bottom line is this is very different from what we briefed people it would be,” Del. John J. Bell (D-Loudoun), an opponent of tolling on I-66, told my colleague Luz Lazo.

Others have been blunter in saying the McAuliffe administration misled people. The Republican Party of Virginia accused McAuliffe’s administration of ensuring that the tolls would be switched on only after the gubernatorial election to choose his successor. Loudoun County Supervisor Ron Meyer (R-Broad Run), who is also a member of the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission (NVTC), urged the NVTC to pass a resolution demanding that the tolls be lowered or suspended.

The defense seems like an honest response, but it might as well be included in a reprinting of How to Lie with Statistics.

But Brian Coy, a spokesman for the governor, said the administration never misled anyone. He said that when transportation officials talked about a $17 average daily toll during peak hours, they meant what they said, an average — all short trips and long trips along that section of highway, and with peaks and valleys of demand.

So, that single number was averaging both the dynamic toll rates as well as the different potential routings. An average of an average. But most drives don’t take an average route, they take a specific one. And since the initial communications didn’t discuss a per-mile rate (or an estimated range of rates), it’s not hard to see why people might feel surprised.

Clear communications matter because policies like this have real promise. They depend on political support, and that will be harder and harder to find if people think they’ve been deceived. Tolling, particularly when perceived as a solution to congestion, can be a political winner. Whether the $17 expectation was intentionally misleading or not is beside the point; those expectations have to be managed or a program like this could lose support.

Driverless cars: implications for city planning and urban transportation

Nevada autonomous vehicle license plate. CC image from National Museum of American History.

Nevada autonomous vehicle license plate. CC image from National Museum of American History.

Building on the implications of driverless cars on car ownership, as well as the notion that planners aren’t preparing for the rise of autonomous vehicles,  I wanted to dive further into potential implications of widespread adoption of the technology. Nat Bottigheimer in Greater Greater Washington argues that city planning as a profession is unprepared for autonomous vehicles:

Self-driving cars address many of the safety and travel efficiency objections that Smart Growth advocates often make about road expansion, or the use of limited street space.

Part of Bottingheimer’s concern is a lack of quantitative analysis, particularly as it relates to the impacts of self-driving cars. However, the real debate is about qualitative values that feed into our analysis.

The officials responsible for parking lot and garage building, transit system growth, bike lane construction, intersection expansions, sidewalk improvements, and road widenings need to analyze quantitatively how self-driving cars could affect their plans, and to prepare alternatives in case things change.

There is one over-arching problem with this approach: our current quantitative analysis all too often is nothing but bad pseudo-science. Donald Shoup has extensively documented the problems with minimum parking requirements in zoning codes, for example. Here, poor policy with vast unintended consequences is based on some level of flawed quantitative analysis, the kind that does not acknowledge the inherent uncertainty in our understanding or ability to project the future. Instead, the analysis is based on assumptions, yet the assumptions are really value-laden statements that carry a great deal of weight.

Even the very structure of the planning and  regulation for the future carries a bias: a requirement to provide parking spaces in anticipation of future demand will, by nature, ignore the complexity of the marketplace for off-street parking and the natural range of parking demand.

Bottigheimer is also concerned about the impacts of self-driving cars on future land use forecasts:

Planners need to examine how travel forecasting tools that are based on current patterns of car ownership and use will need to change to adapt to new statistical relationships between population, car ownership, trip-making, car-sharing, and travel patterns.

By all means, we need to adjust our forecasting tools. However, we shouldn’t be doing so simply based on the arrival of a new technology. We should adjust them because they’re not particularly accurate and their erroneous projections have large impacts on how we plan. Driverless cars aren’t the problem here. The problem is in our assumptions, our inaccurate analysis, and our decision-making processes that rely on such erroneous projections.

Leaving the limitations of quantitative analysis aside for the moment, we can still hypothesize (qualitatively, perhaps) about the future world of driverless cars. Assuming that autonomous vehicles do indeed reduce car ownership and begin to serve as robo-taxis, we can sketch out plausible scenarios for the future. We assume car ownership will decrease, but vehicle-miles traveled may increase.

City Planning and Street Design:

One of Bottigheimer’s chief concerns is that “planners and placemaking advocates will need to step up their game” given the potential benefits for safety, increased car capacity,

As mentioned above, much of the ‘safety’ benefits are about cars operating in car-only environments (e.g. highways), when the real safety challenges are in streets with mixed traffic: pedestrians, bikes, cars, and buses all sharing the same space. In this case, the values planners and placemaking advocates are pushing for remain the same, regardless of who – or what – is driving the cars. The laws of physics won’t change; providing a safe environment for pedestrians will still be based on the lowest common denominator for safe speeds, etc.

The biggest concern should be in the environments that aren’t highways, yet aren’t city streets, either. Will driverless cars forever push stroads into highway territory? Borrowing Jarrett Walker’s phrasing, technology can’t change geometry, except in some cases at the margins.

Instead of a technical pursuit of maximum vehicle throughput (informed by quantitative analysis), the real question is one of values. The values that inform planning for a place or a street will set the tone for the quantitative analysis that follows. Maximizing vehicle throughput is not a neutral, analytical goal.

Congestion: 

Congestion is a more interesting case, as it will still be an economic problem – centralized control might help mitigate some traffic issues, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental economic conundrum of congestion. Here, too, the economic solutions in a world of human-driven cars will have the same framework as one with computers behind the wheel.

Driverless cars might change the exact price points, but they don’t alter the basic logic behind congestion-mitigation measures like a cordon charge in London or Stockholm, or like Uber’s surge pricing (efficient and rational as it might be, but perhaps too honest). Again, technology can’t fundamentally change geometry. Cars will still be cars, and even if driverless cars improve on the current capacity limitations of highways, they do not eliminate such constraints.

Qualitative Concerns:

Instead of twisting ourselves in knots over projections about the future that are sure to be wrong, planning for autonomous cars should instead focus on the values and the kind of places we want to plan for. We should adjust our policies to embrace the values of the communities (which alone is a challenging process). We should be aware about the poor accuracy of forecasts and work to build policies with the flexibility to adapt.

Managing on-street parking: zoning is not the way

Park sign. CC image from Pixel Jones.

We don’t manage our limited parking resources very well. However, that leaves us lots of room to improve our policies.

A recent Freakonomics podcast entitled ‘Parking is Hell’ provides a nice entry-level synopsis of the challenges involved in using market forces to better manage this valuable resource. The podcast features interviews with parking scholars, including Don Shoup. They address the fallacy of the idea of ‘free’ parking, the idea of using price to better allocate this resource, and the practical challenges to better management of on-street parking (such as the abuse of handicapped parking placards, as well as the rampant illegality in parking practice).

Despite the cold, hard logic behind the idea of performance parking, it’s not an easy political sell. Similar experiences with de-congestion road pricing in Stockholm show reluctance at first, and then broad support for the program once the benefits can be demonstrated, and revenues directed towards locally-controlled improvements. Still, no one likes the idea of someone proposing an increase to your daily costs in exchange for uncertain benefits.

That risk-aversion applies to parking, too – and perhaps explains a great deal of the reluctance to embrace a whole host of parking reforms, both for on-street parking management, but also for zoning code off-street parking requirements. The evidence for the ineffectiveness of these requirements in managing on-street parking is huge; the unintended consequences are large.

Zoning requirements won’t manage on-street parking for you. Consider this case from Boston, where air quality regulations capped the total supply of off-street parking garages, but the city fails to manage on-street parking effectively:

The steep costs at our garages mean that only the well-off and the truly desperate ever wind up parking in them. The rest of us find ourselves in a never-ending chase for metered street parking, which is an absolute steal. Because the price is absurdly low for such a rare commodity—there are around 8,000 metered spaces in Boston—drivers are willing to circle the block for as long as it takes to find an opening, like vultures in search of prey. The $10-an-hour difference between a garage and a metered spot in Boston gives “drivers a license to hunt,” says Mark Chase, a local parking consultant,“but it’s not a guarantee of a parking place.” The result, naturally, is congestion. Studies from around the country have shown that as much as 34 percent of all traffic in downtown areas involves drivers just looking for parking spaces.

Meanwhile, Boston has set aside a ton of spaces for resident-only parking in neighborhoods, and it charges nothing for the permits to use them. And what happens when it doesn’t cost anything to keep cars parked on the street? They stay there. Today more than 311,000 vehicles are registered in Boston, and more than 87,000 of them have residential parking permits. Each of those cars takes up around 160 square feet—the size of a street spot—of prime city real estate.“You have some of the most valuable land on earth, and you’re giving it away for free to cars,” says Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, and the author of The High Cost of Free Parking. “It’s preposterous.”

Enter a new development proposal, aiming to build car-free, promising not to rent to car owners and therefore not make Boston’s off-street parking problem even worse:

Paul Berkeley, president of the Allston Civic Association, said residents support Mariscal’s plan for an airy, green building, but said the no-car idea would not fly.

“It’s well-intentioned and it could be successful, but people felt that in that location there was too much of a risk of people having cars and just putting them in front of houses nearby,” he said.

So, they tried to reconfigure the development with 35 spaces for the 44 units. Even that is not enough to satisfy the zoning code, as the article notes that the current code requires an absurd two spaces per housing unit. Patrick Doyle notes that the real problem here is not with community skepticism about all the new residents being car-free, but with the absurdly low price for on-street parking. Such ignorance of the basics of supply and demand is not a recipe for good management.

Consider the opportunity costs. It’s not as if requiring parking only hits a developer in his/her pocketbook (though it does). Parking takes up a lot of space, and the geometric requirements for cars to circulate into a garage and have appropriate turning radii to get in and out often do not match up with the geometry of small urban lots ripe for infill development. In Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger writes about the same Boston development:

His proposal also highlights the hidden reality – true in cities everywhere – that our modern buildings largely take their first architectural cues from cars.

“When you remove the car component as the main design challenge,” Mariscal says, “your way of thinking about design is completely different. The possibilities that open for a more environmentally friendly and human design – they are endless.”

Furthermore, the kinds of older neighborhoods we love in our cities usually pre-date zoning requirements for parking. Their very existence is non-conforming. When you suddenly add a very different geometry to design around as a legal requirement (the car and associated parking), you fundamentally change the shape and design of the kind of buildings you build and of the city that will result.

Do your requirements actually make sense? It seems like a basic question to ask. However, lots of requirements exist because they were the default when a code was written, often without much in-depth consideration or any easy mechanism to regularly re-evaluate them.

Consider New Haven, CT. The City asked some out-of-town developers what it would take to make New Haven an attractive place for them to do business. In the vein of a dating game show, the city wanted to know what a developer’s ‘turn offs’ might be:

Demands for lots of parking ranked high on the turn-off list.

“You asked what is an automatic turn-off. … Market research shows [the amount of parking] needed is X. We flip open the zoning code and we find out the requirement in the zoning code is two times that,” replied Patrick Lee, co-founder of a Boston firm called Trinity Financial. “It is a lightning rod … Oftentimes we often just say, ‘That one is too, too hard.’ … When the zoning catches up with the market or gets close to it, we’ll come on back and have the conversation [about building]. Even if you’re doing surface parking, it eats up so much land it ends up being a cost-driver in your pro forma.”

This raises the question: why even require parking at all if the market is a) willing to forgo it, or b) willing to build it? Eliminate that problem, and you don’t have to worry about forcing your zoning to “catch up” to the market. At the very least, some mandatory periodic review of the requirements (in the same vein as the zoning budget idea, but for a specific provision of the code) would help ensure the requirements in place make sense.

None of this changes the need for rational management of on-street parking. Zoning requirements cannot do that for you.

Links: iPhones and airports

CC image from Yutaka Tsutano

Rail to Dulles: MWAA Board member Robert Brown suggests eliminating the Dulles Airport rail station and replacing it with a people mover to connect to the Route 28 station as a means to save costs.  Yonah Freemark finds the concept intriguing, offering some operational considerations that could make it work.

However, the notion that building an entirely new landside people mover system will save money is ludicrous (IAD’s AeroTrain just clocked in at $1.4 billion). Likewise, while the concept would be an interesting solution to connecting an existing airport to an existing rail link (such as between BWI and the BWI rail station), the fact that the rail line has not yet built is a perfect opportunity to ensure that the airport itself is ‘on the way,’ to borrow Jarrett Walker’s terminology.

Freemark notes that one benefit of this concept would be to reduce travel time to the core and/or Tysons, but several other concepts considered by Metro would probably provide more utility to larger areas of service.

Meanwhile, Dulles offers a connection to the world via it’s ‘accidental aerotropolis.’

iPhones and agglomerations:  When I last touched on the Aerotropolis, I noted Aaron Renn’s observation that the book isn’t so much about airports and cities as it is about globalization.  One such element is the extensive description of the extraordinary agglomeration of manufacturing infrastructure and firms in Shenzhen.

This weekend’s New York Times contains a lengthy article on why the iPhone and other similar devices are not manufactured in the United States.  In his blog, Paul Krugman sums up that article in one word: agglomeration. Some key snippets from the article:

But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

Since we’re talking about iPhones and not cheap Christmas ornaments, the availability of materials and the skill of the labor is more important than the cost of that labor – all benefits of the large agglomeration of technology firms in Shenzhen.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

More thoughts on iPhones, agglomerations, and jobs from Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen.

Likewise, an interesting set of charts looking at market share for various computing platforms – starting from more traditional personal computers, but eventually adding in smartphones and tablets.  While smartphones and tablets aren’t yet substitutes for a personal computer, they’re getting closer.

Station Domination: via Tyler Cowen, an interesting post from Matt Glassman on the cost of Metro station advertising and the linkages between national politics and the local transit system.

In need of a good decongestant:  Housing Complex takes a look at slight optimism from COG staffers on de-congestion pricing, and makes note of a lengthy Washingtonian piece on the subject.

Parking, lots and lots of parking!

Parking Meter

There’s been a horde of great parking posts in the last few days:

First, Jarrett Walker documents San Francisco’s new adventure in market pricing for on-street spaces:

The goal is to ensure that there’s always a space available, so that people stop endlessly driving in circles looking for parking.  People will be able to check online to find out the current parking cost in the place they intend to visit.  Parking garages will have a better chance of undercutting on-street rates, so that those garages can fill.  If you’ve ever driven in San Francisco, you know that it’s hard to decide to use a garage because, well, if you just drive around the block once more, you might get lucky.  Under SF Park, if you just drive around the block once more, you’ll probably find a space, but it will cost more than a garage, especially if you’ll be there for a while.  So drivers are more likely to fill up the garages.

Jarrett illuminates some of the problems with truly dynamic pricing – ideally, you’d want to have a price set for a given location and time so that a driver knows what they’ll likely have to pay prior to beginning their trip.  This is similar to all sorts of other goods, where the prices are fixed for consumers, even if the actual prices fluctuate more often.

Jarrett also notes the potential for San Francisco to predict and target prices based on the data these meters will collect.  The city has collected lots of useful parking data, the question is now about using that data and infrastructure effectively.  Walker notes:

In a recent post on congestion, I observed that current road-pricing policy requires us to save money, a renewable resource, by expending time, the least renewable resource of all.  If you’ve ever circled a block looking for parking, while missing or being late for something that’s important to you, you know that the same absurdity is true of our on-street parking policy.  SF Park deserves close watching.  And if it doesn’t work well, ask yourself:  “Is it because it doesn’t make sense to charging for parking based on demand, or is it because they were too timid to do it completely?”  The answer will almost certainly be the latter.   The policy itself relies only on free-market principles that already govern many parts of our economies, because they work.

Indeed, market forces do work.  Similarly, Tyler Cowen raised the subject in this weekend’s New York Times. Cowen focused on all aspects of Donald Shoup’s excellent book The High Cost of Free Parking. In addition to market pricing for parking spaces in order to ensure efficient use, Cowen also addresses parking development requirements:

If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.

The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars — and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars — and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life.

Market Urbanism chimes in specifically about  minimum parking requirements, taking note of New York City’s efforts to change their laws (including references to Streetsblog’s coverage of the issue earlier this year). Many more also chime in, including Cowen’s personal blog – with posts expounding on his NYT article, Arnold Kling’s response, and Cowen’s response to the response – all worth reading.  As usual, Ryan Avent also responds.

In a similar vein to the parking discussion, Ryan Avent also offered this paper up for review, drawing the conclusion that congestion pricing works best in places that have good transit networks – i.e. where there is an effective alternative to driving.  The abstract notes that the two congestion pricing successes had solid transit systems to rely on.  Ryan notes that congestion pricing can be used for improving transit, but it might be politically necessary to front the costs of those transit improvements prior to implementing the congestion charge.

The limited polling prior to the death of New York’s congestion pricing plan also suggested this – dedication of revenues to transit improvements was crucial for garnering public support.  New York, of course, has the advantage of a transit system as an alternative means of transport.  If a city without such infrastructure were to implement such a plan, might some borrowing against future revenues (similar to Los Angeles’ 30/10 plan) be in order?

The true cost of gasoline

nyt-oil-6

The New York Times’ oil map now includes a close-up of the landfall area around the Gulf Coast.

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Ezra Klein provides some much-needed context as to the true cost of oil, and in turn the gasoline we buy to power our cars.  The key part is framing the overall cost in terms of externalities:

Most of us would call the BP spill a tragedy. Ask an economist what it is, however, and you’ll hear a different word: “externality.” An externality is a cost that’s not paid by the person, or people, using the good that creates the cost. The BP spill is going to cost fishermen, it’s going to cost the gulf’s ecosystem, and it’s going to cost the region’s tourism industry. But that cost won’t be paid by the people who wanted that oil for their cars. It’ll fall on taxpayers, on Gulf Coast residents who need new jobs, on the poisoned wildlife on the seafloor.

That means the gasoline you’re buying at the pump is — stick with me here — too cheap. The price you pay is less than the product’s true cost. A lot less, actually. And it’s not just catastrophic spills and dramatic disruptions in the Middle East that add to the price. Gasoline has so many hidden costs that there’s a cottage industry devoted to tallying them up. At least the ones that can be tallied up.

Klein lists pollution, congestion, the need for our military to secure oil reserves, and citing some other research from Ian Parry at RFF, he concludes the premium is $1.65 per gallon of gas – which put on top of the current average cost per gallon of $2.72, would mean we’d need $4.37 gas to cover the true costs – a number Klein notes is almost certainly an underestimate.  However, Klein notes that while higher gas prices would certainly curb some driving (and data suggests this to be true), the larger move over the past decades has been the entrenchment of our auto-dependence, and thus our gasoline dependence.

The key to reducing use is to provide alternatives:

That gets to the bigger issue, which is that energy sources are cheap or expensive only in relation to one another. And the heaviest anchor beneath our reliance on oil is that, at this point, there’s nothing to replace it with.

“We’re pretty much stuck with our dependency on oil,” Parry says. “We don’t have any substitutes. Even if we hugely increase the price on oil, we’d only have limited impact on it. People need to drive and get to work.”

In urban situations, reducing oil use means reducing driving.  A key part of that equation would be to provide more alternative transportation modes. If we were to raise the price of oil via an increase in the gas tax, that revenue could be used directly to build those new transportation infrastructures – internalizing the externality.

In other urban, externality pricing schemes, linking the revenue generated from the tax to a tangible benefit for users is the key to gaining political support.  Donald Shoup talks extensively about funneling parking revenue to parking benefit districts; polls in New York suggested that dedication of congestion pricing revenue to transit improvements was the key to securing popular support (if not legislative support). Linking revenues to the tax is a key part of helping people understand the value of the virtuous cycle – no matter how counter-intuitive it might be.

Weekend reading

DC-Streetcars-Planned-Streetcar-Radius-Map

Excuse my timing on this, as this doesn’t leave much weekend to play with – but here are some items worth noting from the previous week or so:

Streetcars bridge the gaps: Yonah Freemark has an excellent post on DC’s evolving streetcar network and its ability to fill the gaps in Metro’s network.  Yonah’s excellent visuals (as usual) help frame the discussion.

New maps: New York gets a new map – Second Ave Sagas has the breakdown.  The map decreases clutter, though nothing compared to the more schematic designs for other systems.

Metro too cluttered: Speaking of clutter, Massimo Vignelli thinks Metro’s gotten too cluttered since he and Harry Weese came up with the signage scheme for the system decades ago.

Congestion pricing:

Grid vs. Sac: David Alpert notes a (perhaps the only) redeeming quality of the cul de sac; Jarret Walker notes the many advantages of gridded street networks.

Cities Getting the Shaft

I’ve got a couple of articles I’ve been meaning to write about for a couple of days.

First, the New York Times has a nice piece on how cities are losing out on their fair share of the stimulus money.

“If we’re trying to recover the nation’s economy, we should be focusing where the economy is, which is in these large areas,” said Robert Puentes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, which advocates more targeted spending. “But states take this peanut-butter approach, taking the dollars and spreading them around very thinly, rather than taking the dollars and concentrating them where the most complex transportation problems are.”

The 100 largest metropolitan areas also contribute three-quarters of the nation’s economic activity, and one consequence of that is monumental traffic jams. A study of congestion in urban areas released Wednesday by the Texas Transportation Institute found that traffic jams in 2007 cost urban Americans 2.8 billion gallons of wasted gas and 4.2 billion hours of lost time.

Ryan Avent also chimes in:

It’s absolutely crucial that the new transportation bill do more to focus spending at the metropolitan level. And indeed, this is one of the goals of the Oberstar transportation bill. As that is unlikely to get anywhere in this legislative session, it would be nice if in filling the highway trust fund’s budget gap the Congress tacked on a reform giving states an incentive to use federal money where the people are — for the sake of short and long term economic performance.

I don’t have anything to add other than to emphasize the importance of keeping our cities humming along.  They are the economic engine.  I will again emphasize my thought that we can kill a couple birds with one stone here – given the simultaneous needs to increase transportation funding and reform the way we distribute those funds, as well as the stimulative effects such spending will have.

To Toll or not to Toll, that is the question.

Chris Bradford offers a nice summary of a great back and forth between Yonah Freemark and Ryan Avent on the need and desirability for tolling congested roadways.  Chris summarizes the dispute well, documenting Ryan’s desire to reduce congestion and Yonah’s concern about such charges being regressive.  However, Chris raises several key points:

Second, tolls encourage a number of shifts.  Yes, shifts to transit, which seems to be Yonah’s main concern, at least when the transit system is underdeveloped.  But they encourage other shifts, too.  Shifts to other routes and shifts to other times.   Commuters are the least likely to be nudged to other routes or times.  The most sensitive are those who use congested roads for local trips.  Take the soccer mom who hops in the SUV and enters a congested highway to get to the grocery store a mile down the road.  She imposes enormous costs on others.  Tolls make her internalize those costs and nudge her to use the local streets.

This is a crucial element that’s often overlooked.  Performance pricing, whether for congestion or parking or transit usage, will encourage mode shifts, temporal shifts, and spatial shifts.  It’s vitally important to consider all three potential shifts and plan for them accordingly.

Green Spaces in DC

My friend and colleague Mike Lydon forwarded me a great page from the National Building Museum’s Green Building exhibit.  The site has nice little videos on several DC neighborhoods, emphasizing their green aspects.  The videos include profiles of Dupont Circle, U Street, Columbia Heights, and (soon) Barracks Row.

Links – Stimulus Package

Paul Krugman takes note of Joe Biden’s recently souring perceptions of the economy, as well as the fact that it appears another stimulus package would be a nice boost right about now:

But never mind the hoocoodanodes and ayatollahyaseaux. What’s important now is that we don’t compound the understimulus mistake by adopting what Biden seems to be proposing — namely, a wait and see approach. Fiscal stimulus takes time. If we wait to see whether round one did the trick, round two won’t have much chance of doing a lot of good before late 2010 or beyond.

So, we have to spend money right now.  Hmmmmm.  If only we had something in this country that needed lots and lots of money…

There’s a power drain out there at the NSA.  Apparently those code-breaking supercomputers require a whole lot of juice.  Aside from the security reasons for decentralizing operations like this (which is certainly not a new idea amongst the Feds), it’s an interesting idea to think about the consequences of decentralizing more ‘abstract’ facilities like data centers while still opening the door for centralization of personnel and employment.

They put a price on congestion in New York.  Charles Kamonoff pegs it at $160 per trip.  Felix Salmon’s early conclusion:

Komanoff’s still working on this spreadsheet, but tHe main message is pretty clear — that smart congestion charging would be great news for New York, and probably for most other dense cities as well.

AC chimes in as well:

The basic point is sound:  we severely underestimate how many people we delay when we enter a congested network of roads.  If you’ve ever tried to make the trip crosstown Manhattan in the middle of the day, you understand just how much delay one driver can cause.

Komanoff recommends congestion pricing.  A good idea.  But he also proposes making buses free, which is a bad idea (and one floated in Austin occasionally).

I tend to agree that completely free transit is a bad idea.  We have congestion on our system in DC as it is at the peak hours.  There’s something to be said for the psychology behind charging a nominal fee for a service.