Here’s the event description, courtesy Houston Tomorrow:

My Houston 2040

A new Happy Hour meeting of the minds
Co-hosted by Houston Tomorrow, GHASP, and Citizens’ Transportation Coalition
Sponsored by Change Magazine and New Living

Thursday, March 11, 2009

5:00 – 6:45 PM
Rudyard’s Upstairs, 2010 Waugh Drive (map)
Free and open to the public. Food and drinks available at bar.

5:30 The Livable Centers plan for Houston’s East End, Meredith Dang
5:55 My Houston 2040, Andrew Burleson

The Idea

Houston Tomorrow, GHASP, and the Citizens’ Transportation Coalition agree that Houstonians can build a better Houston today by thinking about the Houston we may inherit in 2040 and the Houston we want in 2040. Each happy hour will include time for networking and socializing, a topical speaker who will give an informational presentation on Houston urbanism, transportation planning, culture, environment, and more, and a visionary speaker who will give their “My Houston 2040″ talk: what they think Houston will be like in 2040, what they want it to be like in 2040, and / or what they want us to do to make it like they want it to be in 2040.

This month’s speakers

The Livable Centers Plan for Houston’s East End
Meredith Dang, AICP

Meredith Dang is the Land Use Transportation Coordinator for the Community and Environmental Planning Department with the Houston-Galveston Area Council. Her responsibilities include managing H-GAC’s Livable Centers, Subregional Planning, and Eco-Logical programs, providing technical assistance to local governments, and training local officials on land use transportation coordination principles. Ms. Dang is a certified planner and received her Masters in Planning from the University of Southern California and BA from Rice University.

Ms. Dang will explain the Livable Centers program in general, but will focus on the East End Livable Centers Plan.

My Houston 2040
Andrew Burleson

Andrew Burleson is a professional urban designer and real estate consultant in Houston. He started neoHOUSTON in 2008 to add to the local dialogue on urbanism and business. His professional work is concentrated on the design, finance, and entitlement of pedestrian and transit-oriented real estate developments. He has a Master’s Degree in Real Estate Development and a Bachelor’s in Environmental Design. He has lived in various places around the world, mainly Illinois, Texas, and Italy – but now he lives in Montrose.

Mr. Burleson is President of CNU-Houston and works as a Senior Project Consultant for Davico Realty Group.

Transit provides travel redundancy – an additional option for people to get around. Of course this benefits people during Rush Hour, and if the service goes beyond the region it would be beneficial in the event of evacuations as well. But there’s another important everyday benefit to having multiple transit options: it allows asynchronous travel.

What is Asynchronous Travel?

Put simply, asynchronous travel means a group trip where not everyone can start or stop at the exact same place and time. We deal with this kind of trip all the time – the family is going to dinner, but one person needs to make a side trip after dinner, and the rest of the group would like to come straight home.

The solution we inevitably use is to take two cars to dinner – even if there are only two or three people going.

Now, this choice is made because it’s the only practical one available, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only practical choice that should be available. And while it’s a relatively small waste to drive two cars to dinner, the waste becomes much larger when a bigger trip is on the table.

This is what happened to my wife and me yesterday.

Yesterday’s Trip

Yesterday, my Pam and I were going to College Station to see a basketball game. We needed to leave Houston sometime between 5:00 and 5:30. We had a problem, however. Pam teaches music lessons in Katy on Wednesday afternoons. So, we had to figure out a way to both get to College Station, but we were going to be 25 miles apart at 5:00.

Now, we knew that we were going to either be wasting a bunch of time, mileage, or both due to this situation, but we wanted to try and waste as little as possible. There was no realistic way for Pam to get to Katy from our house without driving, so with that in mind we considered these two options.

In the first option, Pam would drive to and from Katy and then we’d drive to College Station together. The problem is, she wouldn’t be back to pick me up until nearly 6:00, and if we tried to leave from our place (and sit in traffic on 290) then we’d never make it to the game on time. So that wouldn’t work.

In the second option, I take extra time off work to drive Pam to and from Katy so that she’ll be there without leaving the car there. This only takes about 14 more miles than Option 1, but takes an extra hour of my time.

Now, Pam and I only own one car, which we share, so we don’t have some of the options that most folks have. However, because these are common enough when we’re dealing with group travel, I thought I’d lay out two more options that we would have considered if we did own separate cars.

In this scenario, Pam drives to Katy but leaves her car there. I would have then picked her up in Katy, and we would have gone to College Station. On the way back we’d need to go through Katy and get her car, then drive separately. This saves us some time, but it results in 14 additional miles of driving. That’s potentially the best mileage / time balance point, and an option we might have chosen if it had been available to us.

The last option would be the most time-efficient. In this scenario, Pam and I would drive to and from College Station in separate cars – she would leave from Katy, and I would leave from home. This scenario causes us to drive more than 100 extra total miles, however. (By total miles I mean miles accumulated among all cars that are part of the trip, in this case basically two car trips to and from College Station.)

For what it’s worth, we chose none of the above. I decided to drive out to Katy with Pam and work from my laptop in a Starbucks while she was teaching. It saved us a fair amount of time and miles, and we made it to the game with enough time for dinner beforehand. Unfortunately, I didn’t get as much work done as I really needed to, so it was kind of a wash. Oh well.

Imagining Alternatives

Now, the kind of decision making I’m talking about should sound familiar to you – most of us end up doing this kind of calculation in our heads fairly frequently, and depending on the circumstances we make some kind of trade between extra miles on our cars and time saved. But there is an alternative.

Let’s skip 6 years into the future and assume that all of Houston’s currently-planned light-rail is open and operating. In this scenario, Pam could have taken the University Line from our home in Montrose, through Uptown, and arrived at the Northwest Transit Center. From there she could have taken a bus to Katy, and would have had about a 20 minute walk to the high school where she teaches. That trip would probably take about an hour (walking time plus transit time), as opposed to the thirty-five minutes it takes to drive. Not ideal, but not the end of the world.

What does our trip to College Station look like then?

This option saves us about fifty miles of driving as compared to our other options (the mileage accrues to the bus and/or train, instead of our car). Pam ends up losing a little bit of time due to the walk on either end, but we waste less time than if she drove back from Katy to pick me up, or if I drove back and forth to Katy to drop her off and pick her up again later. As compared to the two-car scenarios, this would save us 65 miles (and about 30 minutes on the return trip) as compared to Option 3 (leaving a car in Katy), and it would take a little bit more time but save about 200 miles over Option 4 (both driving separately).

Extrapolating the benefits

If we imagine a better overall transit system the benefits become even greater. Let’s think of some other scenarios.

• If we had better local transit service in Katy, or a bus route that could get us to Northwest Transit Center more directly than the planned light rail, Pam might be able to save a lot more time on her initial trip to Katy.
• If we had intercity transit service, I could get downtown pretty easily using a bus (or future light rail) and take the train (or express bus) to College Station, and Pam could take the car and meet me there.
• If we had intercity transit service and better regional service (including suburb-to-suburb connections) Pam and I might have been able to make the entire trip without driving – she could take regional service to Katy, and from Katy up to a hub in the northwest where we could meet and continue on to College Station.

The additional possibilities are virtually endless. The point of this exercise isn’t to say that our planned light-rail system will fix everything, or that once we have transit all of our travel needs will be met. There will still be plenty of good reasons to drive for a large percentage of trips. However, the more options you have available the better choices you can make.

When I lived in Europe, this was one of the things I found the most liberating. Traveling with a group of people was much more fun because of how much more flexible you could be. If one person in the group decided that they wanted to go home via a different route, it wasn’t a deal breaker. We didn’t need to take extra cars in case we wanted to split up during our trip (although, we almost never drove anywhere in the first place). We didn’t have to worry about people wanting to come and go at different times. It was a really liberating experience.

There are myriad benefits to investing in transportation infrastructure, but it’s important to remember that the most important investment we can make is always to create more options. Whether this means having more connectivity in our local streets; building more HOV lanes; creating new highways and freeways; creating new bus routes; or investing in local, regional, and inter-city rail service; our goal should be to provide as many choices as we can. When we look to prioritize our investments the best thing we can do is identify transportation bottlenecks – trips where there’s only one realistic choice available. Providing an alternative – creating redundancy in our total transportation network, is critical for the efficiency of our economy as well as the safety of our cities.

Lastly, it’s important to remember that when new options are proposed, it’s not only the daily-users that will benefit. Pam and I may never again need to make the exact same trip we made yesterday – but other people will. In the same way, just because you don’t think you’d use light-rail very often, or ride an express bus, or carpool, etc. – that doesn’t mean that you won’t someday directly benefit from the option being available, and every day benefit from living in a safer, more efficient, and more productive city.

The traditional solution to traffic congestion is to create additional road capacity. But projects like those almost always end up making the original problem worse because they generate what transportation planners call “induced traffic”: every mile of new, open roadway encourages existing users to make more car trips, lures drivers away from other routes and tempts transit riders to return to their automobiles, with the eventual result that the new roads become at least as clogged as the old roads.

Congestion pricing is basic economics. The idea is that if you have a sporadically scarce commodity, such as space in automobile lanes, you can eliminate distribution bottlenecks by adjusting prices in counterpoint to variations in demand. Hotels do this by raising room rates when travel is popular and lowering them when travel is not. That helps to smooth fluctuations in reservation rates, enabling the hotels to make better use of their existing rooms and to increase total revenues without building new capacity, much of which would end up being empty except during periods of peak travel.

The concept works the same way with cars. Rather than attempting to eliminate congestion by laying new asphalt, planners seek to make existing roads more efficient by imposing fees that are high enough to discourage significant numbers of drivers from traveling in the most popular places at the most popular times. This often does open up clogged streets—and London is the example that proponents usually cite—but the overall result is not necessarily a gain for the environment or for public transit. If the result of congestion pricing is simply to spread traffic out, thereby maintaining or increasing total traffic volume while also making driving more pleasant for those who continue to do it, then its putative environmental benefits are fictitious.

To be honest, I don’t have much of an opinion about it. If it were up to me, the freeway system would be privately owned and operated, and I’m sure that if it were congestion pricing would be inevitable. Whether or not that would be better for the environment is probably too complex of an issue to boil down to a simple yes/no declaration.

In any case, I found the article very interesting. If you’re in to such things, you should read the full story.

Well, looks like the City got the message! This year’s Tour of Houston is coming up in about a month, and sure enough they’ve routed it up and down Memorial Drive this year, and given us a nice map of the routes to boot!

Here’s a quick rundown from the City’s official page:

The 2010 Ride is scheduled for Sunday, March 21, 2010 (starting at approximately 7AM).

• Start Location is City Hall, 901 Bagby
• Ride lengths are 20, 40, and 70 miles
• You can now Register Online or Register by Mail
• Online Registration closes on Wednesday, March 17 at 11:59 p.m.
• Event T-shirts will go to the first 2500 participants to pick up their packets
• Prices:
  • 13 and over is $25.00 pre-registration
  • 12 and under is $15.00 pre-registration
  • $35.00 onsite registration for all riders
  • Cash or check payments only on Ride Day

Now, the only thing they need to fix for next year is to quit calling it the Tour de Houston, and start using the appropriate English (Tour of Houston).

Yours truly will be riding in the tour again, and I’ll probably post a few times about the process of getting ready for it between now and then.

Historical gasoline prices adjusted for inflation

The data shown on this graph is staggering. You can see the points in time that I’ve highlighted, and I’m sure you can see the obvious pattern in our economic behavior. Thinking back to recent history, we’ve had a tepid recovery since the big crash in late 2008. What happened? Well, gas prices plunged back under $2.00 a gallon, but have since been steadily creeping back up.

Now prices are hovering around $2.61 a gallon – and what is our economy doing? Mostly it’s sitting still, and many economists aren’t that optimistic about the future.

Could that be because nobody expects energy to get much cheaper than it is now? The EIA expects petroleum prices to rise steadily (2010 Forecast Report – PDF) over the next 30 years. And while the US may be getting more energy-efficient, China, India and Brazil are more than making up for the difference in terms of world demand.

Economists aren’t talking about it in these terms, of course. But maybe they should be.

This is the real problem with an automobile-dependant nation. We are the most auto-dependant nation there is, and we’re the heart of the global economy, so we’ve dragged everyone else down with us. Certainly high energy prices hurt other nations as well, and certainly there are a broad number of compounding circumstances.

But remember what was happening at the very beginning, when this all got started… Californians who were averaging two hour commutes (one-way) in order to be able to afford a “nice” house began to default on their mortgages as gas prices in California crept past $3.00, and as they passed $4.00 the trickle of foreclosures became a flood. From there, the world’s thinly stretched and infinitely interconnected banking system began to collapse.

Still to this day we see that the varying gas prices by region offer a nearly perfect mirror to the recent economic health of various regions of the country. Consider this map:

US gasoline prices by county

What do we see? Texas is outperforming the rest of the US economically – and we’re also the most significant urban state where gas prices have been staying under $2.50 for much of the past 5-8 years.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the relatively unobstructed geography and low gas prices would make a recipe for economic health. Our nation is hard-wired for building suburbia – and we have been since FDR first began orienting federal policy that direction in the 1930’s.

The problem is, building suburbia is no longer a sustainable economic driver. Even in Texas, the physical reality of drive-times and traffic jams are slowly undermining the suburban model – and in many other major urban centers there are geographic limits that pose a third obstacle. But more importantly, world energy supply is not sufficient to sustain the low energy prices this model of development requires.

We have only one choice – to learn how to build (and rebuild) our cities for a low-energy lifestyle. Only then will we be able to create a new economy that can thrive in the harsh economic reality of expensive energy. The good news is, building low-energy cities isn’t hard! The US was the best in the world at building low-energy cities from its colonial days to the 1920’s. Our historic small towns and city centers are already engineered this way.

The Congress for the New Urbanism is the leading body advocating a return to pre-1930’s neighborhood planning and design standards. If you’re interested, you should check out the national organization (cnu.org) and the local chapter (cnu-houston.org).

I’On Village, near Charleston, SC – a New Urban community

View Larger Map

CNU has been hard at work to build new communities that use the old model, achieving vastly better energy and land-use efficiency than conventional suburban neighborhoods. And the best part? They look and feel like the best neighborhoods – not mundanely modular or over crowded – but vibrant, unique, and beautiful. That’s the better future we have to look forward to when we learn to design our cities and towns for people, not just for cars, and in the process unchain our economy from the price of gasoline.

There have been vastly bigger changes under the hood, though. This is stuff that you can’t see, but I think it’s going to make a much bigger difference for readers over the long run than the cosmetic enhancements will. Why? Because we’ve finally got a clean slate for what we’re planning for the future.

As you may recall over the summer, neoHOUSTON partnered with CNU-Houston to revamp the CNU-Houston website and make it more useful, and CNU-Houston became neoHOUSTON’s first affiliate organization. This association is pretty simple and natural, since I’m heavily involved in CNU-Houston. In the months since the neoHOUSTON / CNU-Houston agreement began I was elected President of CNU-Houston, which I’m very excited about.

But other than helping out an organization with its web presence, the “affiliate” idea hasn’t meant anything in the past. That’s partially because it takes time to build effective partnerships and learn what to do with them, but it’s also largely because we didn’t have our technology set up to do what we wanted it to do.

Going forward, neoHOUSTON is going to be less of a personal blog, and more of a hub for urban advocates in the Houston region. Working with CNU-Houston, we hope to develop effective partnerships with a number of other local organizations, and to be able to create a mutually beneficial relationship where affiliated organizations help make each other more visible and more connected. neoHOUSTON’s goal is to simply hang out in the background and provide technical assistance to that end. That’s why our back-end technology is really important.

When are you going to start seeing the results of these efforts? Well, these things take time. I’d say late spring or summer is a safe bet, based on a number of factors. I’ll be excited to announce new partnerships as they are solidified, so stay tuned.

Aside from partnerships with community organizations, I also intend to open up the site to more contributors. We’ve enjoyed some really excellent posts from guest contributors in the last year, and I’d like to increase the frequency with which those happen. I’ll be making a more detailed announcement about guest contributors shortly.

Lastly, regarding technology on the web, if you’ve spent any time programming web sites you’ll quickly come to hate Internet Explorer. Its outdated and non-standards-compliant rendering engine makes browser compatibility virtually impossible to achieve. Fortunately, most neoHOUSTON readers use Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Opera, all of which render the site correctly. For those of you on Internet Explorer 7 or earlier, things may not be so nice for the time being. Know that I’m aware of the issue, and I’m working on it.

So, welcome to our refreshed web site, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed designing and writing it!

That said, I wanted to take a closer look at what the President actually said. Is it worth getting excited about, and if so, why? When I first heard the remarks I didn’t find them to be all that… remarkable. So what did it look like after a little digging?

The Speech

Let’s start by looking at the critical segment from his speech (emphasis added):

Two years ago, I addressed your gathering and I outlined a new strategy for urban America that changed the way Washington does business with our cities and our metropolitan areas.  And since taking office, my administration has taken a hard look at that relationship — from matters of infrastructure to transportation, education to energy, housing to sustainable development.  My staff has traveled around the country to see the fresh ideas and successful solutions that you’ve devised.  And we’ve learned a great deal about what we can do — and shouldn’t do — to help rebuild and revitalize our cities and metropolitan areas for the future.

So the budget that I’ll present next month will begin to back up this urban vision by putting an end to throwing money after what doesn’t work — and by investing responsibly in what does.

Our strategy to build economically competitive, environmentally sustainable, opportunity-rich communities that serve as the backbone for our long-term growth and prosperity — three items:  First, we’ll build strong regional backbones for our economy by coordinating federal investments in economic and workforce development — because today’s metropolitan areas don’t stop at downtown.  What’s good for Denver, for example, is usually good for places like Aurora and Boulder, too.  Strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America.

Second, we’ll focus on creating more livable and environmentally sustainable communities.  Because when it comes to development, it’s time to throw out old policies that encouraged sprawl and congestion, pollution, and ended up isolating our communities in the process.  We need strategies that encourage smart development linked to quality public transportation, that bring our communities together.

All of this is on the money, especially his frank statement that we need to link development and transportation together. However, this also happens to be all conjectural at this point. The President continues (emphasis added)…

That’s why we’ll improve our Partnership for Sustainable Communities by working with HUD, EPA, and the Department of Transportation in making sure that when it comes to development, housing, energy, and transportation policy go hand in hand.  And we will build on the successful TIGER discretionary grants program to put people to work and help our cities rebuild their roads and their bridges, train stations and water systems.

Third, we’ll focus on creating neighborhoods of opportunity.  Many of our neighborhoods have been economically distressed long before this crisis hit — for as long as many of us can remember.  And while the underlying causes may be deeply-rooted and complicated, there are some needs that are simple:  access to good jobs; affordable housing; convenient transportation that connects both; quality schools and health services; safe streets and parks and access to a fresh, healthy food supply.

So we’ll invest in innovative and proven strategies that change the odds for our communities — strategies like Promise Neighborhoods, neighborhood-level interventions that saturate our kids with the services that offer them a better start in life.  Strategies like Choice Neighborhoods, which focuses on new ideas for housing by recognizing that different communities need different solutions.  And, by the way, we’re also expanding the successful Race to the Top competition to improve our schools and raise the bar for all our students to local school districts that are committed to change.

Now things are sounding a little more interesting. To see where these things stand, let us next examine the programs that the President says he wants to focus on.

Program #1: The Partnership for Sustainable Communities

Lost in the midst of the healthcare mess this summer, the EPA, DOT, and HUD announced a new interagency agreement called the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. The Partnership is intended to bring all three agencies into cooperation, and provides a set of common principles to work under. Those principles, as listed in the announcement dated June 9, 2009 (here) are:

• Provide more transportation choices. Develop safe, reliable, and economical transportation choices to decrease household transportation costs, reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil, improve air quality, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and promote public health.
• Promote equitable, affordable housing. Expand location- and energy-efficient housing choices for people of all ages, incomes, races, and ethnicities to increase mobility and lower the combined cost of housing and transportation.
• Enhance economic competitiveness. Improve economic competitiveness through reliable and timely access to employment centers, educational opportunities, services and other basic needs by workers, as well as expanded business access to markets.
• Support existing communities. Target federal funding toward existing communities—through strategies like transit oriented, mixed-use development, and land recycling—to increase community revitalization and the efficiency of public works investments and safeguard rural landscapes.
• Coordinate and leverage federal policies and investment. Align federal policies and funding to remove barriers to collaboration, leverage funding, and increase the accountability and effectiveness of all levels of government to plan for future growth, including making smart energy choices such as locally generated renewable energy
• Value communities and neighborhoods. Enhance the unique characteristics of all communities by investing in healthy, safe, and walkable neighborhoods—rural, urban, or suburban.

These goals represent a significant change from any previous guidance these organizations have been working for, and that in and of itself is laudable. In particular I appreciate the focus on energy security, and the recognition that sustainable communities can be (and should be) designed at all scales from the most intensely urban to the most rural. The Partnership lists methods for achieving these goals (see previous link), and I think on the whole they are reasonable ideas.

So the Partnership for Sustainable Communities is a sound idea, what about the other programs?

Program #2: Promise Neighborhoods

According to the Department of Education, the Promise Neighborhoods program exists to do the following:

This new initiative would provide competitive, 1-year planning grants to non-profit, community-based organizations to support the development of plans for comprehensive neighborhood programs, modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone, designed to combat the effects of poverty and improve education and life outcomes for children, from birth through college. The core idea behind the initiative is that providing both effective schools and strong systems of support to children and youth in poverty and, thus, meeting their health, social services, and educational needs, will offer them the best hope for a better life. Grantees that develop promising plans and partnerships would be eligible to receive implementation grants the following year. The Department will encourage grantees to coordinate their efforts with programs and services provided by other Federal agencies, including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Justice, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

This is an interesting program. Basically it’s saying that kids need more than just a good experience in the classroom in order to succeed as adults – they need life outside the classroom to be good for them as well. The challenge is that we live in a country where parents aren’t doing so great. Moderate to low income parents are increasingly not involved in their kids lives, as single-parent households and households where both parents are working full-time make up the vast majority of homes. (As an aside, high-income parents are increasingly over-involved in their kids lives, but that’s a separate problem).

So basically, this program exists to try and identify many of the things that these kids aren’t getting at home, and see if they can be provided at a neighborhood level. These include things like basic medical care and nutrition, as well as after-school care. Mostly, as I understand it, these efforts are aimed at keeping kids out of trouble when they’re not in the classroom. That’s a worthy goal, but sadly this is mostly a response the a greater societal challenge of contemporary parenting rather than a revolution in education.

Program #3: Choice Neighborhoods

Choice Neighborhoods looks like a little more interesting concept than Promise Neighborhoods. Here’s a summary of the program from the United Neighborhood Centers of America:

Choice Neighborhoods is a $250 million initiative intended “to transform neighborhoods of extreme poverty into functioning, sustainable mixed-income neighborhoods with well-functioning services, schools, public assets, transportation, and access to jobs.”

And as reported in the Washington Post:

The Obama administration is proposing a new program that aims to transform the nation’s poorest neighborhoods from head-to-toe: taking 10 urban centers with high concentrations of public housing and improving it while adding day care centers and even farmers markets, sidewalks and parks.

The $250 million proposal is a planning experiment and one of the most progressive proposals under consideration for the next budget year, building upon the Hope VI program, which over the past 17 years has torn down nearly 100,000 of the worst public housing projects in the country.

The initiative, if approved by Congress, will operate in the same way by redeveloping public and assisted housing, but it will include community development, and applicants will have to prove the transformation would be catalytic, said Bruce Katz, a senior adviser to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan.

This makes a lot of sense. If you’re going to have the government intervene in the housing market, the only way it makes sense is to create incubator environments that can revitalize a neighborhood. There should be two main goals: first, the affordable housing component should be designed in such a way that it is transparently distributed throughout the target neighborhood. It’s critical to avoid the super-concentration of poverty that occurred in the old modernist “housing projects,” and it’s also beneficial to avoid stigmatizing children. Children growing up in a mixed-income community aren’t going to be instantly labeled as “poor,” or, “troubled,” and that in and of itself can go a long way toward improving their situation.

But the second part of the program is what makes vastly more sense. There is, frankly, no point in investing in neighborhood development of any kind when the school system for that neighborhood is failing. It’s a waste. Able parents will not put their kids into a failing school system, so if that’s what you have you’ll be steadily concentrating poverty by default as those with means go elsewhere and only those without means remain. High vacancy leads to lower and lower prices and property values, which begins to institutionalize poverty in a neighborhood.

The Verdict

Looking at the President’s speech, I was initially a little underwhelmed. While a lot of urbanists were getting pretty excited, my gut reaction was, “what’s new here?” However, I think that in looking closer at the meat of what the President had to say, and what changes have occurred at the agency level throughout the past year, there is really starting to be some positive momentum. President Obama has been saying the right things about cities since he was on the campaign trail, and I’m glad to see that some of that is beginning to translate into action.

The question I have is why isn’t the President focusing on these issues more publicly? The healthcare situation is a political nightmare, and it’s sinking his job approval and costing him most of his political capital. If things continue as they are going right now, healthcare has a real chance at making Obama a one-term President.

The neighborhood development and transportation policies he’s put forward, on the other hand, seem well-grounded in best practices and a heavy dose of common sense. While not everyone is going to agree with every part of it, these policies are sound, and would probably garner widespread support. The fact that no notable opposition to them has emerged speaks to that reality. Why not make the public more aware of what the administration is doing that people widely support, instead of letting people think that healthcare is the only item on the President’s agenda?

It’ll be interesting to see what the President covers at the State of the Union address tomorrow. The room is going to be tense. Maybe spending time talking about some of the less controversial aspects of his administration would help.

Obama Administration Proposes Major Public Transportation Policy Shift to Highlight Livability

Changes Include Economic Development and Environmental Benefits

In a dramatic change from existing policy, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today proposed that new funding guidelines for major transit projects be based on livability issues such as economic development opportunities and environmental benefits, in addition to cost and time saved, which are currently the primary criteria.

In remarks at the Transportation Research Board annual meeting, the Secretary announced the Obama Administration’s plans to change how projects are selected to receive federal financial assistance in the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) New Starts and Small Starts programs. As part of this initiative, the FTA will immediately rescind budget restrictions issued by the Bush Administration in March of 2005 that focused primarily on how much a project shortened commute times in comparison to its cost.

“Our new policy for selecting major transit projects will work to promote livability rather than hinder it,” said Secretary LaHood. “We want to base our decisions on how much transit helps the environment, how much it improves development opportunities and how it makes our communities better places to live.”

The change will apply to how the Federal Transit Administration evaluates major transit projects going forward. In making funding decisions, the FTA will now evaluate the environmental, community and economic development benefits provided by transit projects, as well as the congestion relief benefits from such projects.

“This new approach will help us do a much better job of aligning our priorities and values with our transit investments” said FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff. “No longer will we ignore the many benefits that accrue to our environment and our communities when we build or expand rail and bus rapid transit systems.”

FTA will soon initiate a separate rulemaking process, inviting public comment on ways to appropriately measure all the benefits that result from such investments.

In general I think this is a sound policy move. Trying to justify transit in terms of congestion relief is foolhardy – study after study has shown that there’s so much latent demand for freeway space that any traffic that is absorbed by transit is simply going to be replaced by people who had been avoiding the roads due to congestion but now believe the congestion to have lessened sufficiently that they are now willing to drive.

This doesn’t reduce freeway congestion, and many anti-transit folks therefore claim that the transit system didn’t accomplish anything. However, they could not be more mistaken. The end result is that a greater number of total passengers are moving through the corridor, which creates an economic benefit. Most specifically, in major urban centers where land prices are extremely high, every person who can arrive without needing to park a car means more profitable activities can occupy the space that would otherwise have been required for that person’s car.

The only problem I can foresee with this announcement is the vague reference to “community and environmental benefits,” which are going to be hard to quantify. I think these benefits do exist, but when facing a rabid anti-transit crowd who will work day and night to “prove” that whatever is built is a waste of money, it’s critical not to use amorphous and unquantified benefits as justification. If the US DOT can come up with a solid formula to account for the financial value of Transit-Oriented Development, and can create a logical, defensible metric for monetizing other community and environmental benefits, then this will be a big win for cities across the country.

CNU Accreditation is a new process that recognizes professional New Urbanists. Over time I expect its value will grow, for now the biggest impact is that large development projects interested in earning LEED-ND certification earn additional credits for working with CNU-A professionals.

If any readers are interested in CNU-Accreditation, I’d be happy to share my experience in preparing for and taking the exam. It was actually a lot of fun to work through the material, and if you’re thinking about it I’d highly recommend going for it.

…a survey of nearly 1400 shoppers in downtown San Francisco [found that] less than one-fifth drive to shop, and that they spend less money in aggregate than shoppers using other transportation modes (PDF). The study indicates drivers spend more each trip than transit riders, but visit less often and account for far fewer total visits and therefore spend less total.

The data contradict the stereotype that shoppers drive to shop and by consequence need on-street parking or free parking to attract them to downtown and prevent them from shopping at malls in suburban areas.

…72 percent of business owners surveyed in commercial districts said they thought their customers drove alone to shop, while another 15 percent assume customers drove some of the time (PDF).  Further TA data show that while commercial districts in high car ownership neighborhoods like West Portal see up to 41 percent driving shoppers, nothing comes close to the near 90 percent perception among business owners (PDF).

In other words…

Perception: 72% of business owners believed that their customers exclusively drove to shop, while another 15% believed their customers drove sometimes, and only 11% believed that their customers mostly arrived by transit or walking.

Reality: 84% of shoppers in Downtown San Francisco travel by some means other than a car, and these shoppers spend more money per month than the 16% who drive.

That the non-drivers spend more money downtown isn’t shocking to me – for retail trips people are highly inclined to shop near where they live and a lot of people live near downtown San Francisco. For people who live near the city center to visit often and spend a small amount of money on many occasions sounds very typical of urban living everywhere.

What’s surprising is that in a place where 84% of people are not driving, 72% of business owners believed that their customers were all arriving by car. That’s a huge disparity between perception and reality.

Local Disconnects

Now, I’m certain the numbers for any given district in Houston are nowhere near San Fransisco’s – but what are they?  The perception is that about 98-99% of people drive everywhere, I wonder what the reality is in popular urban shopping districts like Rice Village, or the River Oaks shopping center. That would be a really interesting study to perform. I bet the results would be surprising.

Throughout the US there’s this widely held assumption that everyone, everywhere prefers driving to any other mode of transport – and that the few who say otherwise don’t really mean it at the end of the day. There’s a perception that people will not use alternative transportation for ‘daily life’ trips such as shopping and running errands – they’ll only use it to avoid commuter traffic. And there’s this idea that even the people who support transit “really just want everyone else to use it.” I don’t think that these perceptions are based in reality.

It’s this perception that jades us when we read Dr. Klineberg’s annual report. Consider these statistics from the summary report (pdf):

When asked to choose the best long-term solution to the region’s traffic problems, 50% called for “making improvements in public transportation, such as trains, buses, and light rail,” up from 42% in 2007 and 40% in 2005. Another 25% thought traffic might be improved by “building bigger and better roads and highways,” and 20% chose “developing communities where people can live closer to where they work and shop.”

At the same time, 82% said they drive alone to work. Also in the 2009 survey, 54% agreed that, “Even if public transportation were much more efficient than it is today, I would still drive my car to work.” Nevertheless, 41% disagreed with this statement, suggesting the potential for transit.

There are some surprising numbers in here if we stop to think about it:

• First of all 18% of Houston already uses some alternative transportation to get to work. That’s a lot more than I would have guessed by the perception on the street.
• Second, 70% of Houstonians believe that better transit and/or walkable communities are the best long term transportation solution. Again, much more than one would expect given the general attitude around Houston.
• Finally, 41% of Houstonians would actually like to use the new transit system they believe should be built. Again, to say that 41% of Houstonians are interested in changing their current commuting behavior is surprising, if not shocking.

But we tend to be dismissive, rather than surprised. “Yeah well, those people aren’t for real,” we say.

But maybe they are for real, and as the new light rail lines are built we’ll have more opportunities to find out. The Red Line was only expected to carry about 15-20 thousand passengers a day, and it’s been carrying around 40 thousand. Are the projections for the new rail lines similarly underestimating ridership potential?

Only time will tell. And somehow I feel certain that even after the rail is in place and well-utilized, the perception will still be that no one uses it.