Category Archives: Transportation

Subsidize It, and They Will Come

Posted on June 19, 2014 by | 3 comments

by James A. Bacon

There is a particular intersection near where I live in Henrico County — Patterson Avenue and Parham Road — that gets really jammed up during rush hour and sets my teeth to grinding. I hate it. I curse it. I give its traffic signals the finger. (Yes, I do have incipient road rage issues.) But I suppose I really have no grounds to complain. According to Wendell Cox, writing in New Geography, Richmond is the least congested of the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. No one else comes close.

Cox derived his ranking from a composite of three major traffic congestion indexes: INRIX, Tom Tom and the Urban Mobility Report. One thrust of his blog post is to argue that traffic congestion is correlated with density: The greater the density of a metropolitan region, the greater the traffic congestion.

Adapted from Wendell Cox

Adapted from Wendell Cox

I can’t argue with Cox on this. There is a correlation between density and congestion. And Richmond (the blue dot) is a case in point. We have a relatively low-density metro. He acknowledges that other factors affect congestion as well. One of them, which he does not mention, is simply the size of the metro region. The most congested metros tend to be the largest.

Cox advances yet another explanation: the unwillingness or inability of congested metros to add new transportation highway capacity. Unlike my Smart Growth colleagues, I agree that it is theoretically possible for a region to build its way out of congestion. Theoretically. If money were no object. If Martians came along and beamed down billions of dollars in gold ingots. Of course, in the real world, money is always an issue. My argument is that building highways willy nilly is fiscally unsustainable. If the people who used those roads and highways actually had to pay for them through tolls, not many projects would get built. People always want new roads if someone else will pay for them. If they have to pay themselves, not so much. They’ll find better things to do with their money.

The same holds true of mass transit. People are happy to build new heavy rail, light rail and street cars if they can find someone else to subsidize them. If riders had to pay the full freight, none of them would get built.

The fact is, we subsidize the construction of more transportation capacity than we really need. We hate congestion but we hate it less than paying our fair share of what it costs to make the congestion go away. At some point, the congestion crisis will get so intense that people will be willing to pay out of their own pocket — in other words, when they’re willing to pay the tolls and/or fares — what it takes to build and operate the new capacity. That’s the point at which we should expand the system, not before.

By the way, the Washington metro region is No. 7 on Cox’s composite list of most congested metros, and Hampton Roads is No. 24.

An aside. Cox makes an interesting argument that less congestion offers a competitive economic advantage. “Because traffic congestion increases travel times, it necessarily reduces the share of a metropolitan area’s (labor market) jobs that can be reached by the average employee. A considerable body of research associates greater access (measured in time) with improved economic performance and job creation.” Sounds great. Here in Richmond, we’re waiting…

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Must Read of the Day: Complex Cities

Posted on June 19, 2014 by | 3 comments
watch

Complicated, not complex

As former Bacon’s Rebellion contributor EM Risse likes to say, urban planning isn’t rocket science — it’s a lot more complex. Ed’s quip came to mind when reading the latest post by Charles Marohn on the Strong Towns blog. The thrust of Chuck’s post is that local government leaders act as if towns, cities and counties are complicated systems — similar to a Swiss watch with a lot of moving parts that interact in a complicated but an ordered and predictable way. But local governments and the economies and societies in which they are embedded are complex systems. The various parts interact with often ill-understood feedback loops. Complex systems have emergent properties. Local government actions often have unpredictable results. It’s an important essay. I urge you to read it.

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Posted in Infrastructure, Land use & Development, Planning, Politics, Regulations and Government Oversight, Transportation

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McAuliffe Team Continues Transportation House Cleaning

Posted on June 18, 2014 by | 4 comments

mopping_floorby James A. Bacon

I’ve been out of town attending a conference so I wasn’t able to cover the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB) meeting this month. But based on press coverage and press releases, it sounds like Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s transportation team is getting a good handle on things, correcting some of the more grievous policy decisions of the McDonnell administration. Hitting the highlights…

U.S. 460 probe. The state Inspector General’s Office has joined the Virginia Department of Transportation’s internal probe of the $1.4 billion U.S. 460 connector between Petersburg and Suffolk. The IG inquiry, which should be complete by the end of the month, will examine whether the state followed its own procurement rules, the Times-Dispatch reports. Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne temporarily pulled the plug when it was clear that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was not yet prepared to issue permits for construction. The state racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in potential liabilities on the 55-mile route which would disrupt nearly 500 acres of wetlands.

VDOT to invest in secondary road maintenance. The highway agency admitted yesterday that only an estimated 58% of the state’s secondary roads are rated in fair or better condition, down from 65.8% in 2010, reports the Times-Dispatch. “The secondaries are deteriorating,” said chief engineer Garrett W. Moore. In years past, the state had concentrated on bringing up to standard interstates and primary roads, which together carry 78% of the state’s lane-miles of traffic. Now VDOT will focus on secondary roads. “We’re making up for nearly 20 years of not doing a lot,” Layne said.

Bacon’s Rebellion noted those same numbers in a March article about a Smart Growth America (SGA) report on the national scourge of maintenance under-funding. SGA revealed that VDOT had spent more than two-thirds of its funds on new construction between 2009 and 2011 while neglecting maintenance, allowing road conditions generally to deteriorate. SGA based its findings on Federal Highway Administration data but used a different methodology than VDOT to calculate maintenance and construction spending.

Charlottesville Bypass coming to a close. I have received word by means of a Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) press release that the CTB allocated $230 million to fund an alternative to the proposed Charlottesville Bypass that created such a furor in Central Virginia. The project package will create improvements to the congested U.S. 29 corridor north of the city by extending parallel roads that offer alternatives for local traffic, enhancing traffic light synchronization, creating an overpass at the U.S. 29/Rio Road intersection and making other spot improvements. There is no perfect solution but this is the best one available. It will reduce travel time for everyone using the congestion zone: local travelers as well as freight trucks passing through.

Bull in a china shop. Finally, there is this tidbit tacked onto the end of one of today’s Times-Dispatch articles based on emails the T-D scooped up in a Freedom of Information Act request. The emails shed light on decision-making process in the McDonnell administration to ram through spending on the U.S. 460 project before all necessary permits were obtained.

Then-Secretary of Transportation Sean T. Connaughton urged in an email last July that VDOT get permission to hire an outside lawyer and mount a public campaign to demonstrate why a supplemental environmental impact statement “is not needed or appropriate.”

“The message must be that the (Corps of Engineers) is trying to destroy Southside Virginia along the existing 460 and destroy the environment,” Connaughton said in an email to then-Deputy Transportation Commissioner Charles Kilpatrick on July 13.

The secretary further ordered Kilpatrick to solicit the support of communities and their local and regional officials. “We need their aggressive, negative reaction to the (Corps’) desire to destroy the towns along the existing 460,” he wrote.

Finally, Connaughton sought meetings with U.S. Sens. Mark R. Warner and Timothy M. Kaine, both Democrats, and Rep. J. Randy Forbes, R-4th. “We must have them complaining to (the Corps regional office),” he said. “We need to move … quickly,” he concluded.

Continue reading →

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The Rise of Walkable Urbanism and “the End of Sprawl”

Posted on June 17, 2014 by | 2 comments

foot_traffic_aheadby James A. Bacon

The Washington metropolitan region is the national model for “walkable urbanism” in the United States — more so even than metropolitan New York, according to the findings of “Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America’s Largest Metros,” a report released this morning by LOCUS, an organization of smart-growth real estate developers, and Smart Growth America.

The study identified 558 WalkUPs — regionally significant activity centers characterized by a high level of walkability — in the nation’s 30 largest metros. Forty-five of them are located in the Washington region, about half in the District of Columbia and half in surrounding Virginia and Maryland jurisdictions. The overall walkability exceeds even that of New York. While Manhattan is the single-most walkable place in the United States, it accounts for only 0.3% of the New York metro region’s land mass, and outer jurisdictions dilute its overall walkability, explained Christopher B. Leinberger, LOCUS president  and co-author of the report, during the LOCUS annual conference.

Washington’s lead in developing “walkable urbanism,” in contrast to the “drivable suburbanism” that dominated U.S. growth and development between World War II and the Great Recession of 2007-2008, should stand the region in good stead as it faces an economic future made insecure by the retrenchment of its main growth industry, the federal government. Walkable urbanism is closely correlated with the presence of a highly educated workforce, and a highly educated workforce is closely correlated with faster economic growth. While correlation does not necessarily mean causality, an argument can be made the the desirable attributes of walkable urbanism make it easier to attract and retain educated workers who, in turn, contribute to economic growth.

The report findings suggest that there will be future demand for hundreds of millions of square feet of walkable development over the next generation, said Leinberger. “This is likely the end of sprawl.”

A clear sign of shifting market preference is the 74% premium the market is willing to pay for office space in WalkUPs compared to space in Drivable Urbanism.  That’s the reverse of 30 years ago when suburban office parks enjoyed a marked advantage, Leinberger said. Even excluding the New York market, which skews the results, WalkUps enjoy a 44% edge, he said.

While Washington was the star metro, some surprising regions have been coming on strong thanks to dramatic shifts in development patterns in the post-2008 development cycle. Metropolitan Atlanta, which only 20 years ago was the poster child of sprawl, has concentrated 50% of its development in WalkUP districts comprising only 1% of the region’s land mass. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Detroit has seen similarly focused re-development in downtown, midtown and a handful of urbanizing suburbs.

Leinberger attributed Washington region’s success to five main factors. First, the region has the highest overall education level of any metro in the country, Second, the region has been aggressively expanded its Metro rail system; 80% of the WalkUPs in the region are, or soon will be, served by Metro. Third, for the most part local governments put in the right kind of zoning around their Metro stations, encouraging walkable, mixed-use development. Fourth, the region’s real estate industry has mastered the discipline of developing WalkUPs, which are inherently more complex and expensive than green-field development. And fifth, the public sector has done an exceptionally good job of “place management” — creating quality walkable places.

While rail transit gives a big boost to walkable urbanism, said Leinberger, it is not essential. One out of five WalkUPs in the Washington region are not connected to the Metro. Also, many small cities and towns have walkable places. “It sure does help but it is not required.”

Emerick Corsi, president of Forest City Enterprises Real Estate, agreed. “Walkable can be built anywhere,” he said. He cited the example of a town miles outside of Los Angeles where his firm is converting an old shopping center into 2 million square feet of new buildings with the capability to expand a lot more by going “totally vertical.” There is no transit but the development will be highly walkable, he said.

Leinberger predicted that real estate development in the foreseeable future will be driven by the desire to meet the demand for walkable urbanism. The process won’t necessarily be smooth. Some metros — San Antonio, Kansas City, San Diego — have continued to sprawl. Providing affordable housing in the most desirable areas will be a challenge. But if Leinberger is right and the most walkable regions prove to be the most economically dynamic regions, the success of metros like Washington, Boston, New York and even Atlanta and Detroit will be clear for all to see.

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Posted in Economic development, Housing, Infrastructure, Land use & Development, Transportation

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Will Virginia Embrace the Coming Transportation Revolution or Thwart It?

Posted on June 15, 2014 by | 9 comments
A Lyft car. Idiosyncratic but revolutionary.

A Lyft car. Idiosyncratic but revolutionary.

by James A. Bacon

Has Virginia has given up any pretext of being a market- or innovation-friendly state? The Department of Motor Vehicles has issued cease-and-desist orders to the Uber and Lyft ride-sharing service and slapped the companies with a total of $35,000 in fines. Their offense? Operating order-a-ride-with-a-smart-phone services and giving traditional taxicab companies a good scare.

According to the Washington Post, DMV claims the two companies are operating in violation of state law (although it’s not clear from the article what provision of the law they are breaking). Here’s what a DMV spokesperson had to say:

Virginia DMV supports innovation. … DMV has been charged by the General Assembly to conduct a study of these transportation network companies. We are confident that the solution to transportation network companies operations will come out of the study and we hope that Uber and Lyft will actively participate in the study and be a part of creating the solution. In the meantime, Virginia DMV must fulfill its obligation to highway safety and enforce the law as it is currently written.

Uber and Lyft maintain that they are operating legally, and they will not obey the cease-and-desist order.

Bacon’s bottom line: This dispute is far more important than Virginians realize. It’s way more significant than a dust-up between local taxicab companies and the Silicon Valley up-starts who would compete with them. We are in the early phases of a transportation revolution. Right now, companies like Uber and Lyft are targeting the premium end of the market because that’s where the money is and where they can most rapidly recoup the cost of developing their software apps, administrative systems and algorithms for positioning their vehicles. Once those concepts are refined and proven in the marketplace, we will see them migrate downstream to other market segments. I recently highlighted Bridj, which is providing premium bus service in the Boston area fore highly competitive fares as an example of the next wave of innovation.

The logical culmination of this technology revolution will be the emergence of a wide array of transportation services with different mixes of convenience, price and amenities targeted to different population segments. People will enjoy a far broader array of transportation services than they do now, and it is entirely reasonable to expect new enterprises to begin serving low-income populations in neighborhoods that municipal bus lines do not now serve. This change will be driven by the profit motive — by entrepreneurs filling niches in the marketplace that are now ill-served by taxicabs and municipal bus lines — and will not require government subsidies.

While it may be appropriate to maintain basic minimum regulations — companies and drivers need to carry insurance, for instance — all government has to do is step out of the way. While cities from Chicago to Seattle are throwing up barriers to transportation innovation, Virginia should embrace the trend. DMV should back off while the General Assembly studies the issue. And the McAuliffe administration should make it a core plank of Virginia transportation policy to become the most hospitable state in the country for the likes of Uber, Lyft, Bridj and other heralds of the New Transportation.

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Posted in Poverty & income gap, Regulations and Government Oversight, Transportation

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Safer Streets Require Less Traffic Engineering, Not More

Posted on June 12, 2014 by | 23 comments

by James A. Bacon

A week or two ago, I lamented the disparity between the high cost of traffic accidents in Virginia and the paltry resources devoted to reducing their number. But to say that insufficient attention is being paid to the issue is not to say that no attention is being paid. According to Virginia’s 2012-2015 Strategic Highway Safety Plan, traffic deaths in the state fell 23% between 2006 and 2010. We are making progress.

Since my blog post, the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization (HRPTO) published its own regional safety study. The HRPTO did a number of worthy things. It mapped the location of accidents across the region and honed in on the worst freeways and intersections that offered the best prospects for improvement. The planners asked a critical question: Which improvements offer the best benefit/cost ratio? As Brian Chenault with the HRPTO summarizes the range of possible solutions: “Recommendations run anywhere from restriping pavement, bicycle and pedestrian improvements, optimizing signal timing, adding additional lanes, trimming vegetation, reducing speed limits, adding extra signage/signals, etc.”

As untutored as I am in the arcana of traffic engineering, it strikes me that the HRTPO has identified a number of projects that will provide considerable bang for the buck, at least as measured by traditional traffic-engineering criteria. Some of the tactics it advances are ideas that I have championed, such as making better use of roundabouts and traffic light synchronization. Its recommendations undoubtedly would amount to a net positive for the people of Hampton Roads — and I hope readers will view it in that light even as I discuss its shortcomings.

The problem with the study is that the authors approach the safety issue from a traffic-engineering perspective. Not surprisingly, every traffic-engineering challenge has a traffic-engineering solution. Indeed, for some safety problems, traffic-engineering solutions are entirely appropriate. But for many, they are not. In many instances, the best solution is precisely the opposite of what traffic engineers recommend.

mercury_boulevard
For purposes of illustration, let us look at the intersection of Mercury Boulevard and Power Plant Parkway, as shown above. (Click for larger image.) This particular intersection averaged 43 crashes per year between 2009 and 2012, the second most of any intersection studied. The HRTPO’s analysis attributes the high accident rate to a variety of micro-factors, which can be summed up by noting that the traffic patterns here are highly complex, leading to a high number of rear-end crashes and side-swipes. The report makes three recommendations:

  • Add a painted triangle yield line with YIELD pavement markings
  • Relocate stop bars
  • Add a flashing “signal ahead” sign
  • Add a pedestrian signal and crosswalk with ladder striping

What’s the common denominator here? It’s the expectation that more signage and clearer road markings will induce drivers to drive more safely.

Now, let’s take a radical leap. At the 2014 Congress for the New Urbanism conference last week, Ben Hamilton-Baillie, an English consultant who specializes in reconciling traffic movement with quality public spaces, showed a clip of San Francisco street traffic filmed days before the 1906 earthquake. There were no marked lanes. There were no turn arrows. There were no traffic lights. There were no street signs. Pedestrians, trolleys, horses, horse-drawn carriages, bicycles, pull-carts and automobiles shared the street. At first view, it seemed like chaos. People were jay walking and standing around in the middle of the street. Cars weaved between lanes. Vehicles made U-turns. It was a traffic engineer’s nightmare. But no one — at least not in this 12-minute film clip — experienced a mishap. Watch the clip. It’s mesmerizing.

Undoubtedly, some accidents did occur in those days and people did get hurt. Such incidents provided the pretext for the traffic engineers to step in. In the 1920s and 1930s, they segregated vehicular traffic from pedestrian traffic — roads became the domain of cars, and people were relegated to the sidewalks. Not only would this arrangement create safer streets, it was thought, keeping people off streets would allow cars to travel faster, thus increasing the carrying capacity of streets and reducing congestion. That is the path cities have traveled for some 80 years now, with the result that contemporary Americans cannot imagine any other way of doing things. Today, the traffic-engineering solution to every problem is more signs, more lane markings, more signals, more information overload. Continue reading →

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The Smart Transit Revolution

Posted on June 10, 2014 by | 5 comments

by James A. Bacon

Bridj, a Boston start-up, bills itself as “the world’s first smart transit system which uses big data and luxury shuttles to adjust to your individual commuting needs.” The company charges $6 per ride, or three times that of a city bus, but it provides Wi-Fi connectivity and luxury seats, and it saves riders time by providing direct service between destinations. For well-heeled commuters, the top-of-the-line service is vastly preferable to either the city bus or driving and paying for parking. If the experiment works out — it launched this month — Bridj could significantly enlarge the market for mass transit.

Not to blow my own horn (Arooo-ga! Arooo-ga!) but I’ve seen this coming for a long time, ever since Uber launched its luxury transportation service as an alternative to traditional taxicabs. The smart phone revolution is making it easier than ever to match rides with riders, reserve seats and make payments. Meanwhile, the ability to process massive volumes of data enables companies to optimize the deployment of their vehicle fleets.

What I find fascinating is that Bridj and start-ups providing similar services in Chicago and San Francisco (see the post in City Labs) are demonstrating that there is a demand for mass transit not being met by one-size-fits-all municipal bus service. As typically happens with the introduction of a new product or service, the first wave of entrepreneurs targets the affluent market because that’s where the money is. One would expect that as these business models prove themselves and as technologies and algorithms are perfected, these private transit companies will begin providing differentiated services for other market segments. One could readily imagine a less luxurious Bridj-like service catering to middle-class riders, and tighter-packed, less comfortable but cheaper services providing mobility to lower-income individuals.

Extending the smart transit revolution from well-heeled riders to the rest of the population will be good all the way around — it will provide more transit options for a wider variety of people. It will get more cars off the road, reduce pollution and cut the demand for parking. There will be only one set of losers — local municipal transit monopolies. We can expect push back from the transit companies against Bridj, just as the taxicabs have sought to block Uber in city after city. The transit companies will wail about the private carriers “skimming the cream” and the disasters that will befall their lower-income riders if they go bankrupt.

There’s nothing stopping municipal transit companies from embracing the same technologies and the same strategies. They won’t, of course, (a) because they are innovation-stifling monopolies, (b) they are dependent upon state and federal subsidies, which come with all manner of strings attached, (c) they are subject to the dictates of local politicians and (d) they lack the financial wherewithal or management skills necessary.

If I were a local elected official in Virginia, especially if I were in a suburban county where lots of my constituents drove to work downtown, I would be on the phone begging Bridj to expand to my metro. And I would promise that when they came, my community would roll out the red carpet.

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Posted in Regulations and Government Oversight, Transportation

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Brat and Cantor: Two Unsavory Choices

Posted on June 7, 2014 by | 54 comments

BratCantorWebBy Peter Galuszka

The hottest political race coming up is the Republican primary this Tuesday involving the 7th Congressional District now represented by Eric Cantor, a powerful conservative who is House Majority Leader and could possibly one day be Speaker of the House.

His opponent, college professor David Brat, has gotten much national attention because Brat is trying to out-Tea Party Cantor who tried to shed his Main Street background and led the insurgent Tea Party parade during their days of glory back in 2010.

But if you want to see just how intellectually barren both men are, read what they wrote in opposing columns in the Richmond newspaper this morning. They show just how out of touch they are and how they are dominated by a tiny group of hard-right fanatics who have split the state GOP.

Brat is an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College in the quaint railroad town of Ashland that might be a set for a Jimmy Stewart movie.

He spends a lot of time debunking Cantor’s ridiculous claim that he is a “liberal” college professor but the very fact that he is doing this is a throwback to the Old Virginny days of yore. First, off, what is wrong with being a “liberal professor?” Are we supposed to have academics that pass a litmus test? Maybe Brat would have House UnAmerican Activities Committees on colleges to make sure that “liberal” professors don’t poison young minds.

Secondly, the use of the term is an exercise in euphemism that smacks of the Massive Resistance days when a candidate was accused of being a “social engineer” if he or she backed integration and civil rights.

And while Brat makes some fair points about Cantor masquerading as a budget hawk, his ideas on finally dealing with undocumented foreign-born residents are downright scary and are obviously intended as a populist ploy to the lower elements of voters.

Indeed, Brat’s column raises serious questions about just how well he understands economic reality, especially when it comes to immigration. Forces are aligning for some kind of long-overdue resolution of immigration. He claims Cantor backs amnesty for undocumented workers. (If so, what’s wrong with that?)

Brat paints a weird picture in which “illegals,” working in collusion with giant corporations, are stealing jobs from “real” Virginians. I won’t go into the borderline racist and nativist aspects of his statements. They smack of the older days of the No Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan that wanted to keep non-Protestants, such as Catholic Irish, Poles, Germans and Italians, or Chinese or Japanese, out of the country.

Strangely and even more troubling, Brat simply doesn’t understand the American labor market. One of the reason so many immigrants are in some sectors of the economy, such as construction and poultry processing, are because the jobs are dirty, messy and there aren’t enough native-American workers willing or able to do them. That is why turkey processing plants in the Shenandoah Valley have so many hard-working Hispanic immigrants. Ditto construction jobs.

At the other end of the spectrum, Professor Brat ignores the dilemma at the high-end of the economy. American universities are not producing enough software and other engineers so we have to import them through visa programs. Some companies are so hungry for foreign intellectual talent that immigrants end up working just across the border in Canada where it is easier to get visas although their efforts support American firms.

This may come as news to Brat in his little college town, but the world is becoming more global and, like it or not, there will be more foreign-born people working here and elsewhere. His complaint that illegals are getting soldier jobs that Americans might want is strange. The military needs to wind down after 13 years of war. One wonders if Brat even has a passport and has traveled overseas.

Cantor’s column is the usual Eddie Haskell boilerplate. He spends a lot of time tearing down the Affordable Care Act. Republicans have launched at least six unsuccessful assaults on it and still refuse to accept the Supreme Court’s decision of a couple of years ago.

Generously funded by the managed care industry, Cantor raises no alternatives to the current health care system that is plagued with overbilling, a lack of transparency and has cruelly prevented millions from getting coverage because of “pre-existing conditions.” Granted the roll out of exchanges was a mess last year, but health care sign ups have exceeded expectations in Virginia. The expected number was 134,800 in enrollment plans under the ACA. At the beginning of May it was 216,300.

Neither candidate talks about crucial issues such as income inequality, climate change or America’s changing role in world diplomacy. Neither talks about about poverty or smart growth or student debt.

Cantor is likely to win Tuesday but neither man seems worthy of leadership. They are just more evidence about how the right-wing fringe has been allowed to highjack the agenda. As this continues to happen, Virginia will be stuck in its ugly past.

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The Cost of Automobile Crashes

Posted on June 2, 2014 by | 5 comments
accident

Traffic accidents: a bigger problem than congestion by a factor of four.

by James A. Bacon

Virginia transportation policy is driven overwhelmingly by a desire to mitigate transportation congestion and, to a lesser degree, to promote economic development. Rarely does traffic safety enter into the discussion of which transportation improvements we finance.

As evidence that congestion is one of the state’s foremost pressing concerns, elected officials can point to the annual Urban Mobility Report, which documents the cost of congestion in the nation’s metropolitan regions. In 2011, according to the 2013 report, congestion cost the nation $121 billion in lost time and wasted gasoline. But consider this: The economic cost of motor vehicle crashes amounted to $277 billion in 2010, finds a new study by the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration, “Economic and Societal Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes, 2010.” If you include the economic value of lives snuffed out — and why wouldn’t you, considering that the Urban Mobility Report counts the value of time lost sitting in congestion — the cost soars to $871 billion.

Think about that — the economic value of traffic accidents outweighs that of traffic congestion by four times but the overwhelming share of public transportation resources is funneled to relieving congestion. The question Virginians should ask themselves is this: Why are we spending billions of dollars to build new roads, highways and mass transit facilities and spending mere millions on making our transportation systems safer? By any rational measure, we have a twisted sense of priorities.

One can’t help but wonder why that is. The answer, of course, is political. I see two dimensions. First is popular perception. Nearly all of us experience the frustration and aggravation of traffic congestion to some degree. That means everyone can relate to the desire to tame congestion. By contrast, only a fraction of Virginians experience traffic accidents, and those incidents are by their nature episodic rather than chronic. Moreover, we tend to think of congestion as something that can be addressed by building more stuff, while we attribute traffic accidents to human frailty. It is less obvious to people how we can build safer roads that can protect us against, say, drunk drivers, distracted driving or road rage.

The second dimension is that traffic accident victims are not organized as a political force. By contrast, developers, construction contractors, labor unions, architects, engineers and an array of special interests stand to gain financially from expenditures on roads and mass transit justified on the grounds of traffic congestion. Through linkages to business organizations such as the chambers of commerce, these self-interested groups are able to mobilize the broader business community behind their initiatives.

Thus, the real estate/construction industry has donated $10.5 million in 2013-14 to Virginia political candidates, the largest of any group excepting the financial industry. Not a single traffic safety-related group appears in the Virginia Public Access Project’s list of miscellaneous, single-issue contributors. Environmental groups have contributed $4.8 million in 2013-14 but traffic safety ranks way down on their list of priorities compared to global warming, the Chesapeake Bay and uranium mining.

Perhaps another reason that safety warrants so little consideration in the Old Dominion is that the economic loss from traffic accidents in Virginia is lower than in most states. Traffic accidents cost $5.7 billion (in 2010 dollars), for an average cost of $713 per person or 1.6% of personal income. Only four other states (Hawaii, California, Minnesota, Oregon) experienced lower costs as a percentage of income. Be that as it may, the $5.7 billion toll is horrendously high compared to the level of public attention it receives.

As a practical matter, what could Virginia do to make streets and roads safer than they already are? First, take a look at where the traffic accidents occur. The NHTSA study indicates that intersection crashes resulted in 8,682 fatalities, 2.2 million injuries and 10 million damaged vehicles in 2010 — more than half of all crashes, a quarter of all fatalities, 50% of all economic costs and 45% of all societal harm.

I would hypothesize, subject to verification, that a disproportionate number of accidents take place in a relatively small sub-set of roads — typically commercial corridors that combine relatively high speeds (45 miles per hour) with lots of traffic signals, cut-throughs and driveways creating complex traffic patterns where cars collide at relatively high speeds. Many accidents could be remedied by better street design — turning our stroads (street-road hybrids) into Complete Streets that accommodate buses, pedestrians and cyclists intermingling at lower and safer speeds.

The other big killer category is “roadway departure crashes,” in which people run off the road. This accounted for 18,850 fatalities, 795,000 injuries and 2.4 million damaged vehicles, accounting for 26% of all economic costs and 35% of societal harm. Many of these accidents take place on windy, two-lane, undivided roads. Surely it would be possible to reduce the number of these accidents through such measures as road-straightening projects, wider shoulders and better marking in the most accident-prone stretches. Continue reading →

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Why Executive Fiats Are Needed

Posted on June 1, 2014 by | 19 comments

idiot gets shotBy Peter Galuszka

Two initiatives — one on the state and the other on the federal level– show just how untenable the politics of confrontation has become. It is forcing the executive side to take charge at the expense of the legislative.

Democrats Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Atty. Gen. Mark Herring are exploring ways to have the governor take emergency authority to continue operating the state of no budget is passed by June 30. Herring has brought in a constitutional ringer from the University of Virginia to help out.

Meanwhile, on Monday, President Barack Obama will unveil new rules to stem carbon dioxide pollution at electricity power plants. This will most likely involve some kind of cap and trade system that actually has worked for a couple decades for preventing emissions that contribute to acid rain.

Obama is late in promulgating the rules because King Coal and its well-paid lobbyists and members of Congress want to blunt the impact on coal-fired electricity plants that provide about 40 percent of the electricity in this country. They and the annoyingly boring global change naysayers have rendered Congress useless in addressing one of the most pressing issues of our time. Result? Gridlock.

So, Obama is taking executive power through existing law, namely air pollution laws that date back to Republican Richard M. Nixon.

It’s a shame that there can’t be intelligent discussion about either issue. In Virginia’s case, the stubborn resistance by conservative Republicans in the House of Delegates to expanding Medicaid has deadlocked action on passing a $96 billion two year budget.

Turns out that the fiscal situation is even more dire because of a $350 million shortfall this year in revenue which is the result of many wealthy Virginians taking advantage of capital gains tax law changes that made it better to ditch stocks last year as they did. The shortfall will only snowball if nothing is done. Localities and state employees will be severely impacted.

Hence McAuliffe is seeking out a Constitutionally-acceptable way to keep the government going regardless of what hard-liners like House Speaker Bill Howell do.

So, there you have it: rule but executive fiat. To be sure, in Virginia’s case, there are possible ways to get out of the mess, namely Republican Sen. Emmet Hanger’s compromise plan on Medicaid. But when it comes to global warming, forget it. The power of the Koch Brothers and the fossil fuel industry is simply too great. No matter what practically every climate scientist in the world says, we are having to answer to the deniers.

Hang on. June will be a lively month.

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Urbanizing the Burbs: Fairfax Circle Plaza

Posted on May 30, 2014 by | 22 comments

rt50
by James A. Bacon

Route 50 through the City of Fairfax is a classic stroad, a street-road hybrid, that originated as a state highway and degenerated into a local access road for commercial development, with the result that it serves neither function — moving cars or providing local access — especially well. In a lengthy stretch around Fairfax Circle, the “highway” is flanked by disconnected, low-density and low-value development such as gas stations, fast food, auto dealerships, shopping centers and the like. It’s typical of the “suburban sprawl” development that has dominated Fairfax City and County, and the rest of Virginia, since World War II.

At long last, the stars are aligned to re-develop much of this corridor as high-value, higher-density, mixed-use property that will fill the city’s coffers with greater tax revenue at little offsetting cost — and create an attractive place where people are more likely want to live and do business.

fairfax_circle_plazaOn Tuesday, City Council approved a plan by Combined Properties build two apartment buildings with 400 units, ground-floor retail, and a 54,000-square-foot grocery store. Structured parking will replace large parking lots. Expanded sidewalks, buffers and a frontage road with parallel parking will create a pedestrian-friendly environment. While the plan has imperfections, the results will be vastly preferable to what’s there now.

Fairfax Circle typifies the re-development that is taking place in “suburban” counties across Virginia and much of the country. As I explained in “The Evolution of the Burbs,” suburban jurisdictions are selectively urbanizing. Low-value commercial property on major thoroughfares like Rt. 50 (Lee Highway) will be re-developed in mixed uses, at higher densities, with more walkable surroundings, often with access to mass transit. (Fairfax Circle is within walking distance of the Vienna Metro.) Yes, growth is occurring in the “suburbs” but it’s looking more like Fairfax Circle and less like the shopping centers and cul-de-sac subdivisions of yore.

Cities and counties can either allow this re-development to occur in a haphazard way, or they can create a planning framework for the pieces to fit together. The City of Fairfax completed but never passed a Fairfax Boulevard Master Plan. As Douglas Stewart writes in Greater Greater Washington:

Many of the project’s shortcomings stem from the fact that Fairfax City still does not have a clear plan for Fairfax Boulevard. An adopted plan that sets forth clear guidelines for street connectivity, green infrastructure, affordable housing and other elements would make the process easier for applicants and more beneficial for the city.

Rules governing street connectivity and storm-water infrastructure are essential to ensure that future projects integrate harmoniously with Fairfax Circle. An affordable housing component is more problematic; it will add costs, creating a higher financial burden for re-development without really addressing the affordability issue. (See Emily Washington’s essay, “How Affordable Housing Policies Backfire.”) Be that as it may, we’ll be seeing a lot more development like this and, for the most part, that’s a good thing.

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Posted in Housing, Infrastructure, Land use & Development, Transportation

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Quote of the Day: Doug Koelemay

Posted on May 30, 2014 by | 3 comments

koelemayAs it appears increasingly likely that Congress will throttle the flow of federal transportation dollars to the states, state officials are looking at alternative financing mechanisms such as Public Private Partnerships (P3s). As it happens, Virginia is one of only four states with extensive experience with P3s — the others are California, Texas and Florida — so it’s no surprise that Governing magazine touched base with Doug Koelemay, the McAuliffe administration’s P3 chief, for comments in a recent article.

Koelemay, who heads the state’s Office of Transportation Public-Private Partnerships, … stresses the need for an open process in developing the agreements. Public notice and comment periods are often “sterile” and yield little useful information. But more public involvement can help planners develop better projects, Koelemay says, because they can understand the public’s concerns as consumers of transportation services.

P3s are an invaluable tool for building transportation mega-projects. But as experience in Virginia has shown, there is a built-in tension between protecting the confidentiality of P3 contract negotiations and maintaining openness and transparency. The public is not well-served by a process in which a negotiated contract is presented with a take-it-or-leave-it option. Of course, the public is not well served either by an open-ended process that allows for continual modifications and revisions leading to mission creep and cost overrruns.

I’m not sure how to balance the conflicting considerations. There are no easy answers. Koelemay is clearly signaling that the McAuliffe administration is leaning toward greater openness and transparency.

— JAB

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Will Google Cars Boost City Productivity?

Posted on May 30, 2014 by | 9 comments
Prototype of the Google self-driving car.

Prototype of the Google self-driving car.

The spread of Self-Driving Cars (SDCs) will lead to tremendous increases in the productivity of cites, argues Brian Wang in The Next Big Future blog. Wang builds his argument on claims by Google that the ability of SDCs to drive faster and closer with greater safety than human-driven cars will effectively double the capacity of roadways. In turn, doubling roadway capacity will eliminate a major limit to urban density. Doubling effective density, according to a variety of economic research, will result in a 12.5% increase in productivity. Furthermore, in today’s conditions, doubling a city’s population requires only an 85% increase in infrastructure to support it; strip out the need to upgrade roads, and infrastructure spending is even less. “In general,” writes Wang, “creating and operating the same infrastructure at higher densities is more efficient, more economically viable, and often leads to higher-quality services and solutions that are impossible in smaller places.”

Sounds great. Just one problem. Wang ignores the crucial distinction between roads and streets. Roads and highway, designed for the efficient movement of automobiles between far-apart destinations, very well could double in capacity if Google’s calculations are correct. However, city streets serve a very different function, especially as the Complete Streets movement takes hold. Streets provide local access to cars, buses, bicycles and pedestrians alike; they also help define public spaces. Doubling the speed of cars in city streets would displace other modes of conveyance despite ample evidence that people are yearning for more walkability. In other words, it won’t happen. City dwellers won’t let it happen.

It is appropriate to think of SDCs as a solution to the problem of congested roads and highways, and far-sighted transportation planners should begin scaling back their estimates of how much new construction will be needed over the next 20 years to achieve desired levels of mobility. But it would be folly to turn city streets over to SDCs at the expense of bikes, buses and pedestrians. That would destroy cities’ greatest competitive advantage in the emerging knowledge economy.

— JAB

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Re-Thinking the Sidewalk

Posted on May 28, 2014 by | 14 comments

tree_rootsby James A. Bacon

The vast majority of sidewalks in my home town, Richmond, Va., are made of concrete slabs. Concrete materials are inexpensive and the sidewalks are easy to install. But in a burg like Richmond, where people dearly love their trees, concrete pavement presents a problem. Tree roots lift or crack the slabs, creating hazards for pedestrians. Replacement can get costly — as much as $35 per square foot in Los Angeles.

So, the race is on to re-think the humble sidewalk, reports the Atlantic City Lab. Is it practicable to use other materials? Can sidewalks be integrated into storm water management systems? Can they be used to generate energy? Is their sole function to enhance walkability?

Some locales have run underground tubes carrying hot water under sidewalks to keep them clear of snow and ice. Others are tinkering with ways to convert the kinetic energy of footsteps into electricity, which can be used as an off-grid power source. Yet others are replacing concrete with recycled, hard-rubber mats that bend and buckle under tree roots without cracking. One English university is working on a self-healing sidewalk.

Senior Land Use Planner Eric Selbst at the site of the walkable solar paneled pathway. Photo credit: GWU.

Senior Land Use Planner Eric Selbst at the site of the walkable solar paneled pathway. Photo credit: GWU.

Another cool experiment is taking place in George Washington University’s Loudoun County, Va., campus. In 2013 the university completed what it billed as the first walkable, solar-paneled pathway in the world. Under ideal conditions, the sidewalk between Exploration and Innovation halls generate enough electricity to power 450 LED pathway lights below the panels. The university hired a Spanish company, Onyx Solar, to install the solar sidewalk. The installation generated dozens of  headlines — “Walking on Sunshine” may be the best —  but the media has been remarkably uninterested in following up.

My questions: What was the cost to install such a sidewalk? How much money will it save by eliminating the need for lighting? How well have the solar panels held up? What happens when tree roots grow underneath? What are the ongoing maintenance costs?

While scientists and engineers dabble with new materials and technologies, the more important question may be to ask what sidewalks are for. Do they serve a purely utilitarian function of allowing pedestrians to get from Point A to Point B? Or should we take a broader view of sidewalks as critical elements of the public realm? Sidewalks help define the public space along a street. Wider sidewalks create space for benches, restaurant tables, planters, trash receptacles and other public furniture. A well designed sidewalk can make a place inviting, a poorly conceived sidewalk can ruin a place.

We take sidewalks utterly for granted. They deserve a lot more thought and consideration than we give them.

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Posted in Infrastructure, Transportation

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A Dystopic Future of Road-Clogging Robot Cars?

Posted on May 27, 2014 by | 6 comments
robocar

Robocar on a mission!

by James A. Bacon

Whether we’re ready for them or not, the United States will be flooded with self-driving cars (SDCs) within 10 to 15 years. Envisioning a future in which people subscribe to  driverless-car sharing services, some urbanists look to the future with equanimity: When people don’t need to own cars outright, they’re more likely to take mass transit more and use cars only for trips that require extra carrying capacity.

Others see driverless cars reviving the long-distance commute by allowing commuters to spending their time emailing or web surfing rather than focusing on the road. Then there’s Robin Chase’s nightmare vision of cities plunging into hellish congestion as robo-cars clog the roads running incessant errands for their owners.

As founder of car-sharing company Zipcar and peer-to-peer car-sharing enterprise Buzzcar, Chase has an interesting perspective. She wants to see car-sharing spread. She thinks it would be “thrilling” if SDCs morphed into a form of public transportation owned by municipalities, rental car companies or ride-sharing companies. When people use shared-car services for trips where only a car will do, they are more likely to walk, bike or ride transit for other trips. Fewer car trips equates to less congestion and pollution.

But Chase shared her fear at Internet Week in New York City last week that people will purchase SDCs and send them into the streets to run errands on their behalf. As Issie Lapowsky sums up her argument in Wired, “Why walk 10 blocks to the dry cleaner, when your car can drive there and back on its own? And who cares if traffic’s terrible at that time of day? Cars don’t get impatient.”

“The future of autonomous cars that are personally owned is a nightmare,” Chase said. “I’m going to venture, 50 percent of the cars in the street will have no one in them.” Ultimately, this could wipe out potentially more efficient services like taxis, busses, Uber, Lyft, and yes, Zipcar. “It’s going to take all of them out,” she says.

Chase raises a possibility that cannot be ruled out, but I don’t see the nightmare scenario transpiring. First, there will be many errands that Self Driving Cars cannot perform. For instance, not many people will send their car to Kroger and let their milk and chicken sit uncooled in the car trunk until they get off work. Neither will people send their cars to Lowe’s to choose a suite of patio furniture. Second, when SDCs do pick up the laundry, they will replace trips in which drivers would have picked up the cleaning themselves. SDCs won’t create new trips; they’ll substitute trips. Indeed, one could argue that the proliferation of SDCs could displace errands that are tacked onto a commute from rush hour to less congested times of day.

I’m open to other views but, at this point in time, I just can’t get panicked about our streets getting overrun with robo-cars.

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