Rail costing

When we drove by the Expo Line construction on Flower St about last year this time, I said to one of my colleagues that I didn’t think there was any way the Expo Line was going to get done on schedule. He said “oh no, they’ll be done” perhaps forgetting that I used to consult on these types of projects and know the difference between “we broke up the streetscape to make it look like we are working” and “we’re actually working.”

The LA Times ran this story yesterday by Ari Bloomekatz. The cost estimate for the Expo Line went from $640 million to $862 million, and they are going to build less than they had costed out. The $862 million line will only go to Crenshaw instead of to Culver City. The original estimate per mile was just under $75 million. Depending on where they stop, the new estimate per mile hits at just under $90 million. It could be less–I don’t have the actual end reported on the revised project.

If we use these numbers to cost out HSR from LA to Fresno, the estimate comes out at $38 billion. Of if you use the original cost per mile figures, you get $32 billion. The California HSR authority’s cost estimate is $34 billion for HSR.

So something here isn’t right. Either we pay way too much to build light rail, a much lower-quality service than HSR, or the HSR cost estimates are whack, or both.

TransCast with Michael Onder

From Metrans, a USC research center, comes a new podcast on transportation:

Mike Onder is the team leader for truck size and weight and freight operations and technology in the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Freight Management and Operations. He has the responsibility for facilitating partnerships with the freight industry and government to collaborate on problems of mutual concern that may be overcome by technology innovation. Mike has served in several capacities with FHWA over the past 15 years, primarily focused on commercial vehicle operations and intermodal freight. He also served in executive and legislative capacities with the State of Florida, and also with the transportation industry in both managerial and technical capacities. Mike is a graduate of Florida State University with a Bachelor’s degree in political science and economics, and a master’s degree in Business and Public Administration.

Here’s the FoxNews Story on Tolls

Here it is. I suck on tv.

How to Sit Masculine on the Bus

From Tales of Mere Existence

Shouldn’t college sports be more fun than this?

I am still learning. ~~ Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

As a college proffie, I am whipsawed by the various frames of undergraduate students I am given. On the one hand, I have a fair amount of experience with helicopter parents trying to call me to advocate for their son or daughter in my class. Not everyday, but often enough; and the message is: “my son/daughter is a Very Special Muffin and a Tender Young Blossom.” The member-of-two-worlds things really gets weird here. On the one hand, 18 year-olds from my hometown are routinely expected to fight and die for American dominance, but the 18 year-olds in my classes? They’d die of low self-esteem, supposedly, if faced with a C.

Then, of course, there’s Bill O’Reilly and his framing of liberal college professors that try to indoctrinate students into liberalism. This paints undergraduates as impressionable young things, like little blank slates to write on, instead of what they are: young adults who have been raised in families and communities and who come to college with ideas of their own. They’re not deferential, and they don’t treat me like I am all-knowing, even if they are respectful of my ideas, which many of them are not even that.

Contrast this, then, with the expectations and discussion around Matt Barkley, USC’s overly debated freshman quarterback. This morning, inevitably, TJ Simers with the LA Times–somebody whose dedication to sucking the fun out of sports is nigh-on Puritanical in its zeal–of course started in with the “We Told You So’s” directed at Peter Carroll. Yes, there I said it: Simers treats college sports like a its religion, and its a religion with all the praise and fun chucked out. His columns always read like he’s some Calvinist elder rebuking sin.

Honestly.

As a college coach, you never have the same team year-to-year. With the pro’s treating college sports as their farm system, team turnover can happen even faster than the college cycle if you are running a successful program the way Carroll has. The NFL has the luxury of placing all the burden of recruiting on the college coaches and then cherrypicks the best. Coaches, like proffies, have a short window of time to try to teach you.

The end result here isn’t that USC had a “bad season”. It’s that Carroll put some of the young guys on the field and let them play. And, golly, they didn’t win all the time. It should be enough for the rest of us to watch them and appreciate them for what they are—learning, growing, becoming—because that is what we all are doing, all the time, if we have any sense of dedication to our craft, regardless of what that is. We learn not by playing it safe, but by putting our challenges past where we reach easily. Getting to a degree of mastery in anything is messy and full of disappointments.

We should note that none of my attitude comes about because I am not competitive. I am one of the most insanely competitive people I know. It’s that ground games take a long time to win, and there is more to any story than one game or one season.

Can we start a petition?

Can we start a petition to ban those #!@!#@ “He went to Jared!” commercials?

Also, an open note to American beer producers: I am a woman, and I watch sports on tv. I am one of those people who watch commercials. I’d be more likely to buy your crap beer if

a) it weren’t crap;
b) it weren’t in cans; and
c) every woman that appeared in your commercials weren’t a stupid/whiney/clingy moron with big apples. Can’t she be a smart and independent woman with big apples? Men will still watch your commercial, and I won’t go through life despising you and actively NOT buying your beer. Did you learn nothing from Loni Anderson’s Jennifer Marlowe in WKRP in Cincinnati?

Give us the road rather than the rail

Residents of Tigard, OR suggested in a poll by the Tigard News that they would rather widen 99W from 5 to 7 lanes than build parallel light rail, and they don’t really want growth via density. They want new developments.

I foresee a dustup.

The comments, as always, are interesting.

HT to Peter Gordon.

From “Fair” and “Balanced” to “Swarthy” and “Unbalanced”

I taped a segment for FoxNews yesterday, which, if they actually use it, should show up sometime today. It’s on the use of ARRA for toll roads.

It’s a sad day

No ideas. I’m working on my proposal, and the president’s speech, the position we are in, and the suffering to come just makes me sad.

It is a basic fact of my adult life that the US has not really ever been in “peacetime.” How much of these have been, in the words of Winston Churchill, “senseless and squalid”? My patriotism can be questioned, of course, but isn’t it rather a lot to expect me to keep supporting all this, again and again, under various rubrics for two solid decades?

The large-scale wars with massive troop deployments began and ended: WWI, WWII, Korea. Not so with Vietnam. While individual conflicts have supposedly ended, they have merged and looped back into one another as a carrying theme of foreign “policy” during my adult life: Libya, El Salvador, Grenada, Honduras, Panama, Libya, Columbia, Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq…Afghanistan.

In my life, I have traversed two worlds; the one I came from, and the one in which I dwell now, a rarified and elite world of ideas, youth, wealth and comfort. The rural world from which I came contains the personnel of contemporary war, along with many young urban kids with nowhere else to go. The denizens of the world I live in now rarely have to think about the military or the war at all. We do not ration. We do not hold vigils. None of us wait for a postcard or sit at our computers for our son or daughter’s turn at the web cam. None expect bad news. Do any of us pray, I wonder, or even stop look at the section of the paper with the local war dead? In Los Angeles, there are many.

It is disturbing to me that our constant state of war seldom touches the most affluent and the most influential. It is not unkindness, but it is instead a reflection of the enormous privilege held by we global elite that we may fiddle while the empire wanes, while the wages of war are played out on the bodies of others.

There is nothing weird here, people

Ok, so today I was in getting my haircut, and I had to wait for my stylist, and while I waited, I skimmed through a copy of something along the lines of Spectacular Style–I can’t find it online, else I would link–and it’s one of those hairstyle magazine for black women.

One of the other customers said, after sitting with me a few minutes, “I can’t believe YOU’RE reading THAT.”

Now, the last I checked, black ladies wear clothing and make up and accessories, all of which are the main reason I look at fashion magazines. Would anybody have said anything if a black lady were reading Vogue? Does it really strike anybody as all that SHOCKING to think a WHITE LADY might LEARN ANYTHING from a magazine that isn’t for white people BY white people?

Good Lord. You folks aren’t paying attention. Because whoever styles Mary J. Blige is a fricking GENIUS.

Book-keepers are literal people

Every time I order something through the uni, I have to give a business purpose for our business office. It’s reasonable, but honestly. I am ordering a printer. What do they think I am going to use it for? Trout-fishing? Amateur bullfighting?

Dubai, debt, and tumbling US shares

For those of us following Dubai, the Beeb has a series of good stories on what is happening to property markets there, who is making the decisions, and what affects is it is having on US trade.

Dan McMillen on the difference between urban economics and regional science

Elsevier has sponsored a series of YouTube interviews with its journal editors. Here is Dan McMillen, explaining the difference between regional science and urban economics. These are short, so you might as want to take a look at the some of the others, including Stuart Rosenthal with one of my favorite journals, the Journal of Urban Economics.

Climate change conspiracy

David Levinson and I chatted via Facebook yesterday about something I posted on scientific illiteracy. I think he and I basically argued the same thing. He argued, succinctly, that scientists often overstate the certainty of their findings and should be questioned. I don’t actually disagree, but I’d argue that pretty much no one group can be trusted, not singly, and that’s why deliberation matters to both knowledge formation and policy. The goals of academic success are not necessarily social goals or even institutional goals, for one. However, I’d argue that mistrust of professional scientists should lead us to a different point than where we are: it should lead us to demand higher levels of personal literacy on math and science than the attrition to where I think we are: full-blown, hands-up-in-the-air, no-bloody-clue what’s going on or how to evaluate claims at a level more sophisticated than relating to personal experience.

Anyway, the interwebs are abuzz with hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Change Research Unit that supposedly prove a worldwide conspiracy to promote anthropogenic climate theories and downplay evidence to the contrary. I’ll link you to BoingBoing, as they have a lot of links you can follow. I urge particularly to read the material from Science Insider and the New York Times.

I read through bits and honestly…tempest in a pot of tea. The takeaway lesson:

1. High-profile, successful scientists try to present their findings in a way that has maximum impact; and

2. People are sloppy with what they put in emails.

3. Scholars form camps around theories and methods and thus disagree with scholars from other camps.

4. Scholars debate things. Seriously, nothing I’ve happened on–yet–in the these emails gets as heated as mine with Peter Gordon do. And I believe that Peter and I are cheerful colleagues who like and respect each other but who simply disagree about what the same data mean.

5. This is type of thing makes you look like even bigger jerks when you refuse to release models and information, which they should have done prior to this, period, the end.

Here are all of the emails if you have a lot of time on your hands. When you start reading, you’ll wish this conspiracy had Elvis because the reading gets dull pretty fast.

Security and profiling

John R. Richardson at Esquire discusses Sarah Palin’s comments about how she thinks political correctness prevented proper treatment of Dr. Hasan:

As usual, Sarah Palin captured the idea best. The occasion was her interview with Sean Hannity (a minute of which is shown above), who asked her if she thought that Ft. Hood killer was a terrorist.

“I certainly do,” Palin answered, “and I think that there were massive warning flags that were missed all over the place, and I think that it was quite unfortunate that, to me, it was a fear of being politically incorrect to not — I am going to use the word — profile this guy, profile in the sense of finding out what his radical beliefs were.”

Richardson correctly points out that this isn’t the real meaning of the word “profile” in this context. What she means, he argues, is investigate, which is really different than profiling. Profiling means that because of who is and his religion, we would subject him to scrutiny and surveillance the minute he showed up. His “major red flags”–which I assume were behavioral–are different. It’s the difference between the police saying “we pull over every black guy in a nice car” vs “we pull over every black guy (and every other guy) in a nice car going 80 mph.” One actually displays an evidentiary basis and probable cause, the other uses stereotype as evidence.

The key to social inclusion and justice in these instances is the focus on behavior, not identity, per se, and that focus on behavior goes both ways, as Richardson points out. It isn’t the case that, when moving to new countries, that immigrants should expect that their practices should rule public mores if they can’t be reasonably accommodated in existing cultural practice. It may be accepted that men beat their wives or children in their home country, but there are social contract reasons that invalidate that behavior in new contexts.

Let’s think of it this way: if I went on a shooting rampage tomorrow, would we then begin to argue for profiling of portly female professors? It’s doubtful. Palin routinely argues that she is part of an oppressed minority in the US: the religious right, and she shares a lot in common–superficially–with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The difference is that she is engaged in dialogue and deliberation, not antisocial behavior, and that distinction matters enormously in how society should treat difference.

Michelle O is a knock-out

Ok, folks, I got nothing intelligent to say about sustainable cities today and so I just want to go on record as saying that while I am actually not Barack Obama’s biggest fan, Michelle is honestly the most beautiful first lady we’ve had since Jacqueline Kennedy. Let’s hope Michelle has a happier life, which, if she keeps wearing things like this dress from Naeem Khan, is virtually inevitable. It’s hard to be this fabulous and unhappy at the same time.

Here’s to having a superfantastic, restorative, and restful holiday!

African Americans and the Recession

Damien Goodmon of FixExpo.Org shared this story from the Washington Post. The tagline: 34.5 percent of young African American men are unemployed. Make sure you read to the end:

“Black men were less likely to receive a call back or job offer than equally qualified white men,” said Devah Pager, a sociology professor at Princeton University, referring to her studies a few years ago of white and black male job applicants in their 20s in Milwaukee and New York. “Black men with a clean record fare no better than white men just released from prison.”

Downtown LA Weenie Bicyclists

Andy and I were on the sidewalk the other day with our dogs, and we stopped to chat with another couple who had their dogs, and we weren’t taking up that much space–there was room for people to walk around us–but a bicyclist went around us and yelled “You’re blocking the sidewalk!”

How dare we use the sidewalk for interaction and conversation when he wants it as a dedicated bikeway where he can go 30 mph without cars? If I move out of downtown Los Angeles, it won’t be because of the pervasive pee smell, the dodgy after hours crime, and the ridiculous per-square foot prices for what you get. It will be because of the weenie bicyclists.

Yes, I said it. If you ride your bike on the sidewalk in downtown LA, you are a big weenie. The traffic in downtown Los Angeles is not NEARLY as dodgy or difficult as places, like Georgetown or Manhattan or downtown Paris, where real bicyclists ride–if they want to ride quickly–in the street. There are some of those bicyclists here. But most downtown bicyclists are weenies who bully pedestrians on the sidewalk by going way too fast, missing pedestrians by inches, and just basically being jerks.

I have no problem with people who ride on the sidewalk if they go along at a pace appropriate to the flow of pedestrians. Those are bicyclists who adopt their speed to the right level and act like part of the sidewalk community. But once a cyclist starts going fast enough to really hurt somebody on sidewalk–which is slower than most people think–he or she should get on the street.

Given this behavior, it’s hard for me to support the arguments that most cyclists make for public investment. When bicyclists tend to speak in planning discussions, they take on a heavy tone that they are doing right and the rest of us are doing wrong: they are clean and green and healthy and the rest of the world–and by this they mean car drivers–are lazy planet killers. Only many of the rest of us are not drivers or cyclists. We’re pedestrians. We move slowly. We have toddlers by the hand, bags of groceries in our arms. When bicyclists tear through the space pedestrians occupy, cyclists become the safety equivalent of an SUV–the biggest, heaviest, most forceful kid on the block. So my feeling is that in the eyes of the average downtown bicyclist, I am an obstacle to be shoved around the way they themselves feel bullied and ignored on the street. Instead of making it work through decency, respect, and goodwill, it’s about who is biggest and has the most metal behind them.

I’m sorry there isn’t more space for cyclists and I’ll do what I can to advocate for more, but at some point, bicyclists have to stop acting like weenies in downtown LA. Fine, do all your protests where you take up the whole road, by all means, but don’t expect anybody to respect what you are doing and see this mode of transport as a positive, constructive force if large portions of the biking community are self-indulgent street bullies who make the sidewalk miserable for the rest of us.

Time Lapse Geography of the Recession

HT to David Levinson

This a an animation from The American Observer on the Geography of the Recession. Go see it: unbelievable.

A student threw a very public tantrum the other day and blamed the fact that he was facing the “worse job market since the Great Depression”. This is only marginally and recently true; the thing about my generation, wedged between the very loud Baby Boomers and their equally loud Echo, is that nobody has paid any attention to us, Gen X. But the 17.5 percent rate reported by the New York Times has only *just* exceeded the 17.1 percent of the early 1980s, which I remember quite well. This was in Iowa, where farm loss was routine and which all of our parents feared more than death.

So I listen to people give talks now and they say “the younger generations have never known such hard times as these” and it just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe he doesn’t consider my group young, but it’s not as though there haven’t been poor people during these generations’ lifetime. It’s that we didn’t pay them attention except to treat them like crap, blame them for their own poverty, and use all of the above as an excuse to dismantle the social safety net.

Polar Bear Simulacra

The St. Louis Zoo is putting electronic proxy bears in their exhibit now that their live bears have passed away.

One of my favorite colleagues, Martin Krieger, discussed the idea of simulated nature in piece he published in Science in 1973. He talks, however, about rare natural environments, not zoo environments–the latter being inherently constructed. In a short, concise piece, he develops this notion of “proxy” nature.

It all brings up the question: what is the role of the zoo in the sustainable city? Is there one? Are they destined to become Disneyland natura?

Krieger, M. 1973. “What’s wrong with plastic trees: rationals for preserving rare natural environments involve economic, societal, and political factors.” Science. 179 (4072): 446-455.

Luke, T.  2002. Museum Pieces: Power Plays at the Exhibition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 298 pp.

Interview with Fred Mannering, Editor, Transportation Research Part B

Elsevier has been doing some interviews with journal editors. Here is an interview with Fred Mannering, editor of Transportation Research Part B. TR(B) Methodological is one of the highest-ranked transportation journals we have. There is solid advice in there for research…

The Silverdome and Where the Property Is

If you want more room around the dining table at Christmas, you missed your chance. The Silverdome in Pontiac, former home of the Lions,  just sold for $580K, which is on average less than most condos in my zip code. More than most studio apartments here, in fairness, though not in Manhattan, as David King points out.

It even has a dome!

What lessons are to be learned here? I’m actually somewhat flummoxed. I think the selling price here could be any number of things, depending on the outfit who bought it. I don’t know what they do, but here are a few guesses:

a) This is the cost of the land, less the cost of dismantling and the disposing of the Silverdome. Keep in mind the city was stuck with a million dollar maintenance bill for it, so anything they could do to sell it was fine by them.

b) This the worth of the asset in terms of tax losses to a company.

c) some combo thereof.

As Los Angeles gears up to build another Stadium to attract another football team, you have to wonder. I love The Forum down in Inglewood and it makes me kind of mad that the Sparks and the Kings both left it to sit there. The Sparks? Honestly. Have we just gotten so used to throwing money at footloose sports teams that we don’t even think any more?

Truck Idling and Particulates

When I gave my job talk at USC, I discussed some of my research on how to get truckers to to shut off their engines. My colleagues have since told me they thought this was a dog of topic–it wasn’t a “big enough question”– but I made it entertaining so they hired me anyway based on the strength of my other work.

Well, it’s not a dog of a topic. Getting truckers and rail companies to shut off would alleviate PM2.5 hotspots in many locations, including parts of rust belt Pennsylvania. My friend Sacha sent this to me, as she found it at the American Academy of Sciences:

It was very much like Sacha to send me this little reminder that my work, though often treated like it’s uninteresting because it doesn’t have sexy, newspaper-ready sound bites, attempts to demonstrate how important seemingly small changes can be in the real-life environments that poor people occupy. Since my job talk, I’ve been somewhat embarrassed by the research on truck idling that we did–I’ve made excuses, etc–but forget that. I was right and the naysayers were wrong, and this work deserves more respect than it got.

Schweitzer, L., Brodrick, C-J, , and S. Spivey. 2008. “Truck Driver Environmental Attitudes and Behaviors: An Exploratory Analysis.”  Transportation Research Part D. 13 (3): 141-150.

Coastal Imagery

If you have ever longed for the California coast, you can browse about 60,000 photographs on the California Coastal imagery site. There is just amazing stuff here.

Eastside Extension of the Gold Line debuts

You can see some coverage here and here (highly recommended for planning students on how to evaluate street amenities) and a foodie guide for places to eat.

You can ride it free today! Zooooooom!

Kelo (0), the State (0) Pfizer (0) and the Recession (1)

The New York Times today ran this story about Pfizer leaving New London, which used its powers of eminent domain to seize and destroy housing for an “urban village” development. Now that Pfizer is leaving without delivering the development, people are understandably bitter.

I have to say it out loud: I really hate eminent domain. I know we need it for land assembly, but…states that do not respect property rights past a certain, reasonable point are bad regimes.

Transit privatization

The TransportPolitic asks an extremely good question:

If transit isn’t better operated by the private sector, why is it still being privatized?

This essay is a fairly standard description of neoliberalism’s effects on transit policy. I think, however, that the political economy has actually morphed and we have to be thinking a bit differently now. We need a clever political theorist to coin a new term, something better than post-neoliberalism, which is what I think we are experiencing, with Obama and the worldwide recession and the bailouts, etc. Certainly lots of transit companies have gone racing forward for ARRA money, sans private partners.

This is primarily quibbling, however, and the larger point holds: politicians like privatization primarily out of ideology and the desire to demonstrate they have done something–a bit like charging around looking to eliminate political science funding—not because we ever really save real money. What has never been clear to me about privatization is whether it’s not all that cost effective because services like transit, with their comparatively high barriers to entry for anything past jitneys, just do not favor private, for-profit operations versus how much efficiency we just plain lose because we over-regulate and poorly negotiate private contracts. There’s a great deal of politics that run both ways between the rights and the left; not all PPPs have been great, and not all have been ineffective. But almost all in transit have.

One of my favorite books on the subject is Elliott Schlar’s You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For. Hiro Iseki at the University of New Orleans has done some interesting work in the topic, as has Tony Gomez Ibanez at Harvard.

Ut Prosim — Veteran’s Day

On the Virginia Tech campus–a place of startling beauty on even its worst day–there is a breathtaking war memorial. I think of it every Veteran’s Day.

Climate change practices and religion

The Telegraph has this story about an executive who took his company to court because they did not accommodate his desire to live a low-carbon lifestyle. The writers say the story is interesting because it suggests a precedent for how employers will be expected to accommodate environmental “beliefs”–such as providing low-carbon transport. That seems to be a pretty big stretch; it is easier to envision a company not requiring air travel than actually providing more for transport than most already do. But it is notable how this exec was able to argue he was a victim based on his environmental principles.

I need a t-shirt that says “Don’t ask me about HSR or tenure”

I had three unwelcome conversations about tenure yesterday: honestly. All well-meaning, all perfectly wonderful people that I enjoy talking to normally. This is a carryover from the weekend, where I had two more unwelcome conversations about tenure.

Then there is the fact that the answer to everything in my professional life seems to be “no” right now. Interesting opportunity? No, you can’t do that because you don’t have tenure. I suppose this is no different from the million “no’s” you hear during the first five years of not having tenure, but they are rubbing me harder now. I notice that the leaders in my school–people that I really really look up to–routinely say things like “nobody here can do this” or “nobody here can do that” and I think “really? I think I can do that.” Was it a mistake to hire me and the rest of the junior faculty if we aren’t going to fill these roles? And why would you give me tenure if I can’t do at least some of these things? Isn’t that like signing a permanent contract with a hitter who can’t hit or a pitcher who can’t pitch or a janitor who can’t use a mop? It makes no sense to me from an abstract perspective: are the people who are here who “can’t fill these roles” filling other roles that merit lifetime employment? Or were we scattered free agents the department thought were worth hiring but weren’t, hired to do something that now no longer makes sense? Or do universities just keep some people around to make intellectual contributions and that’s enough for them and that’s that? Am I nuts for asking why institutions would agree to this?

Then there is the lack of transparency in the process. Nobody is telling me anything and nobody will tell me anything until the Dean and the Provost have made their decisions, which doesn’t happen for months yet. Months. Until then there  isn’t really anything to tell. I can do nothing about this. Nobody else can do anything about this without breaking the rules and making themselves and the institution vulnerable–neither of which I want either. So I can’t ask, they can’t tell, and that’s that, whether I like it or not.

I remember there was about a month at the end of my dissertation where I didn’t leave my house. I got up in the morning, I turned on the TV to the all-day Perry Mason and Columbo stuff on the local channel, wrote, didn’t answer emails, turned down every invitation, didn’t answer my phone, and never left the house except to go to Trader’s Joes. I think maybe that happened because I couldn’t stand to hear “are you done yet” from one more person, and I needed that privacy to work and deal with my own monkey brain. I don’t have that luxury now.* When I am working, it’s all great. But then somebody comes along and reminds me that there is this Big Thing Going On. Argh.

So there is nothing to report, except that I am grouchy and Reviewer #3 is smart and has me stumped, and maybe I’ll just spend the day painting my nails and watching soaps and playing with my cat.

*In SEVERAL ways I don’t have this luxury: the nearest TJs is six miles away.

Reading Twilight while my soul shriveled up

I read Twilight on the plane home from Miami this week. Jumping Jehosaphat. Is this what teenage girls dream about? Teenage nothing, at least three grown women walked by when they were boarding and said “Oh, I just couldn’t put it down!!” Oh really, I said politely. Because I was ready to throw this book by page 50.*

Seriously. Here’s the plot. Powerful “boy” physically and emotionally dominates a bookish, shy girl who simply doesn’t realize how pretty she is. And she smells good to vampires. In a small town in Washington. Let’s add an emotionally distant good-guy dad and it’s a recipe for girls looking for romantic daddy figures.

I am not kidding. By page 60, he’s saved her. By page 80, he’s saved her again, and *carried her* as though “she weighed nothing.”

Don’t girls dream of power of their own?

My niece loves these; I am sick. What do you say? You have bad taste in books? I sure ain’t buying any for her for Christmas. Does she recognize how crappy and insidious this story is? She’s awfully sharp; is it possible that she reads it lightly and remains unaffected–amused even–by the relationships?

Can we find a book with a heroine that actually has a personality if no power? Ethics tells me I should read more of them, but…please tell me they get better. Please.

By contrast, I just finished Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Transcendent. Here she is discussing the book at Daunt Books.

Daunt Books Debate, Part 1

You can find part two and three from this page.

* I once read that, if a book displeased him when he was reading it, Napoleon would throw the book out of his carriage. I did this once with a book by Joyce Carol Oates (who is really gifted, but she just really annoyed me at one point) and it was so pleasurable and emotionally satisfying I’ve done it ever since with books that annoy me in some way. The Da Vinci Code—wham!-against the wall. Childish, I agree, but very satisfying. It was one of the annoyances of this Twilight book that I was in an airplane and couldn’t chuck it without inviting comment.

The state of American car manufacturers? Not as bad as we think?

The Economist online posted this story online about the state of American carmakers. Is this a comeback, or this is just business as usual?

Denver’s overbudgeted rail system and utterly mysterious connections to foreclosures

Arthur Nelson is quoted in this New York Times piece as saying:

“The underlying lesson is that the further out you go, the more vulnerable you are to losing value in your home,” said Arthur C. Nelson, presidential professor of city and metropolitan planning at the university and author of the research. “Locating near transit and near urban centers is the safer investment.”

Nelson is quoting papers he has done at the county level in metro Washington DC and Phoenix. This is not the right scale of analysis for this kind of thing:

Recent studies at theUniversity of Utah, for example, concluded that foreclosure rates in the Washington area were much lower in counties served by the Metro rail system, compared with the next ring of counties farther out, and that home prices in Phoenix had also fallen in direct proportion to the distance from downtown.

But transit doesn’t serve counties. It serves neighborhoods, and it’s unclear to me that the provision of metro rail does what Nelson suggests: rail is just a technology, one that can also lead to population decentralization. You don’t build density or activity with rail, you build density with buildings and land use which you then serve with rail–and land prices have always been connected to activity. Way prior to rail technologies land in urban centers was more valuable than land on the fringe, and access (by rail or by foot or by car) is an amenity, one that in theory should add value until access becomes sufficiently ubiquitous that people don’t want more.

The reporter goes on:

…money committed years ago in economically flush times emerged as if on cue over the last two years, creating thousands of jobs like rabbits from a hat at precisely the moment an economist would summon them.

I love journalism. Utterly unencumbered by evidence. Of course, if we’d recklessly flung away that public money on schools or water infrastructure instead of rail systems, those thousands of jobs would never have appeared like rabbits from a hat. There are funding tradeoffs. So even if we don’t get passengers, building things is good. I guess.

I don’t understand what any of this has to do with the issue with Denver’s rail being overbudget. I guess what Nelson and this scattered reporter are trying to say is that rail is still a good investment even when it goes over budget because they think it stabilizes home values and creates jobs?

I have another colleague who is always saying “no excuses!” I’m not sold on Nelson’s analysis, but more than that, I can’t live in a world where the argument is: let’s support transit no matter how much it costs or how the institutions behave because transit golly sure is fine.

How about we do something sort of neat with rail investment? Like….serve passengers well and manage construction costs better?

Rail projects go over budget; but highway projects also go overbudget. Is Denver out of line? Not yet, not according to the distribution of over-runs we routinely see in major projects. No story.

Why, exactly, do we blame Angelina Jolie for Zahara’s hair?

Again, on the body imagery and social inclusion front: Allison Samuels wrote a longish piece in Newsweek fretting about whether Zahara Jolie-Pitt’s white parents, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, know how to deal with a black child’s hair. This is a legitimate concern; black hair needs different care, but honestly….it’s not like Brad’s hair is looking any too good these days, and ditto with Angelina. But I digress.

Let’s start off from this position; the kid looks just fine; in fact, she’s bug’s ear cute, and she seems perfectly ok except for the fact that she can’t go out in public without having her pictures taken and essays in Newsweek happening about her. Who needs that when you are five? For crying out loud. Let’s lay off her, just on the principle that she’s a little kid and deserves a private life and some of us like to pretend we aren’t members of a crumbling empire where people have nothing better to do than wonder about whether celebutot is getting hot combed. I mean honestly; if we are going to worry about anybody, let’s worry about Johnny Depp and why somebody so genetically gifted in the looks department like him routinely leaves his house looking like a carny who is allergic to shampoo.

But second…why isn’t anybody getting all up in Brad’s face about not doing Zahara’s hair? Why are people making all these suggestions to Jolie? Don’t male parents have grooming and care responsibilities?

Warren Buffett and trains

Berkshire Hathaway, Inc–Warren Buffett’s investment machine–recently announced plans to buy out Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp for $26 billion. The web has been in a flurry: clearly this means that a) the economy is getting better and/or b) railroads are the future.

Buffett is fanning the speculation with his comments:

“It’s an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States,” Buffett, who has been building up his rail holdings for several years, said in a statement. “I love these bets.”

Maybe this is just sour grapes, but I lost my shirt betting on Burlington Northern during the early 1990s; I’m less sanguine. While timing is important in markets, nothing about the existing economy suggests to me that Buffett is going to get back the 31.5 percent over closing that he spent to get it, and while rail freight operations are better than they were, they still aren’t great, and there are infrastructure bottlenecks that keep the US companies from growing anymore. Burlington Northern already does a lot of trailer on flatcar (TOFC) shipping, and while it may be possible to capture more of that comparatively profitable market, one of the key questions will be how much more.

Matt Kahn suggests that Buffett is betting not on railroads but on higher energy pricing through carbon taxes. One of the commenters notes that the coal-rail connection will look a lot different with carbon taxes than the rail looks alone. This point is also made by John Kemp at Reuters: the marginal boost to rail freight could be easily offset by a marginal hit down on coal. Does anybody besides me wonder how big a carbon tax would have to be in order to prompt major shifts? I’m thinking big-ish.

In the end, I rather agree with Andrew Leonard at Salon Buffett likes to play with trains. I think it’s rather more than that. I suspect that Buffett understands and takes seriously his role as a financial thought leader. He is almost 80 years old (good for him). He wants to use his position as a thought leader to inspire hope, as he knows that perceptions matter more than reality in many aspects of investments and markets, and so he is throwing his weight and resources behind what he thinks are meritorious businesses: land in a dying Midwest city, freight associated with a lower carbon footprint industry that has struggled to turn a consistent yield, etc. on the hope that a turnaround will make these undervalued assets more productive again.

Linsey Marr on the Discovery Channel: Women, Particles and Marathons

Linsey Marr, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is one of many bright spots in my short career at Virginia Tech. She recently completed a study with Matthew Ely of the Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine that was featured on the Discovery Channel. The study compared marathon performance in seven cities: Boston, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Duluth, MN.

The team found a significant relationship between lower performance and particulate pollution, but not between carbon monoxide, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, or sulfur dioxide. This was surprising for the researchers, but I don’t necessarily think so. If you think about most marathons or race situations, they clear out all the traffic and divert the parallel routes the whole way–which would move carbon monoxide away from the race route. Sacramento and Los Angeles have the worst ozone problems of these cities, but not necessarily on any given day; in Los Angeles, a marathon route on the west side would have the same ozone levels as Cedar Rapids IA (negligible); farther inland they would be higher but not necessarily at ground level, where runners breathe. So there may be a mismatch between monitor measures and what runners are actually taking in.

In any case, it’s an interesting study and a reminder of why I loved working with her so much and why I miss her so much now that I’ve left: asking interesting questions is the best part of our job.

Body image, mothers, classism, fashion, Karl Lagerfield, and social inclusion

I guess I am digressing today, but given that I study social inclusion in sustainability, the issue of body imagery does matter.

In response to the trend towards larger than size 0 models on runways and in magazines, Karl Lagerfeld (lead designer for both Chanel and Fendi), commented:

No one wants to see curvy women,” Lagerfeld was quoted as saying on the website of news magazine Focus on Sunday.

“You’ve got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly,” he added.

The world of fashion is about “dreams and illusions”…

This has been quoted all over the web, along with commentaries, such as this and this. The latter includes some images of the exceptional plus-size visions from Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano.

Here’s what interests me. In all the (legitimate) outrage directed at Lagerfeld among we podgy writers, nobody to my knowledge has called him out on the misogyny and classism of his comments. Fat mothers sitting in front of TVs eating chips? Oh really? That’s what mothers do? Really? Because the last time I checked in, mothers were working their asses off. Some of those mothers are fat and some of them are thin, but they deserve to have their role, work and contributions treated with respect. The only things he doesn’t mention are cigarettes, welfare checks, and feeding Pepsi to their grubby babies. You know why he doesn’t mention those? He doesn’t have to; it’s already there in the subtext.

Moreover, why does Karl assume that dreams and illusions require the exclusion of fat people or mothers, or their children for that matter? Planning, my field, is about dreams, too; city dreams. When people dream about the city, they tend to leave people out of those dreams, too; poor people, people of color, anybody who is unpopular, for whatever reasons. Is it that real people with real lives don’t belong in dreams, or are our dreams messed up if they don’t involve real people at least at some level?

Finally, I don’t think anybody, mothers or anybody else, has ever seriously said that slender models are “ugly.” Karl’s self serving comments try to frame this discussion as a reflection of ugly step-sisterhood and sour grapes rather than what it is: a legitimate critique of the body homogeneity in an influential industry. Size 0 models are women who fall towards the extremes of multiple, joint statistical distributions (height, weight, age) and as such they are not representative of a wide range of women. It’s fair to point that out and be concerned about what these types of largely unattainable standards communicate about women’s bodies. It’s not about the chips, Karl.

Crystal Renn is a size 12. Isn’t she magnificent? That skin! Those brows; her bone structure. My my.

Dangit, so much for the local industry/transit connection this time out

Today’s LA Times features a story about the demise of a contract to build rail cars locally in LA. This is a sad story, actually, demonstrating the huge gap between dream and implementation.

Freight and Livability, reflections

Last week I participated in roundtable specifically requested by the Federal Highway Administration on freight and livability. “Livable communities” of one of the themes that has been intended to unify Federal programs into–whether intended or not–a cohesive set of ideas about urban policy. Not unlike many terms that describe the city, livability can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but when asked to give a definition, I argued essentially that livability means “a nice place to live.” In the big scheme of things, that is not really asking all that much of urban planning. After all, planners should be in the business of developing nice places.

The question they asked: are freight and livability mutually exclusive. Everybody else pretty much said “no”; I said “yes, pretty much.” The other folks on the panel are air quality people; it seems pretty clear that we have to, and we will, begin to clean up freight fuels to the point where, at least, we won’t making people sick. However, there is a significant nuisance aspect to freight shipping, and that’s where I rather held out. We would need a radical reshaping of the forms and structure of the freight industry to get rid of that nuisance factor, and nothing about the existing trajectory of the industry suggests this is going to happen. Current factors emphasize economies of scale rather than diversity of scope or small-scale distribution.

MTA Tap Card Implementation Problems

This story on the KPMG audit of LA MTA’s TAP card implantation is so not good news. It’s a mite old, but it’s worth talking about as it is a major issue for transit operations. The story from the audit: the program cost much more than the MTA wanted, other agencies have resisted its usage, and there is no close end in sight.

It’s interesting to me that no passenger complaints made their way into the article. My TAP card works just fine–mine is an annual pass. Andy, however, tries to load day passes onto his when getting on the bus, and in general that process is confusing, time-consuming and more than once hasn’t worked–leaving him having paid $5 on one bus with no record that allows him to use the pass on other systems because the process didn’t “take” on the bus. That’s a problem.

The reason why the MTA needs this to work is that payment vehicle matters immensely in transit operations. First off, it is meant to to allow passengers to dispense with scrambling for change, etc. In addition, TAP cards are intended to lower boarding times in order to keep buses running on a schedule. That can’t happen with difficulties loading the passes during boarding.

Los Angeles 1890

Best city moments

If getting a PhD in urban planning and living in a the center of one of the world’s largest aren’t hints, I love cities. There are certain moments in cities that I find absolutely exquisite.

1. Just before a subway arrives. You can hear it coming, and suddenly the stale air of the platform lifts away with a whoosh of fresh air.

2. Twilight during rush hour. The winter sun is going down, and there are throngs of people on the street, waiting for buses, on Broadway and Hill. The light in Los Angeles takes on a magical quality, like candlelight, and the heat lifts. On Friday and Saturday night, there are clubbers mixed in with commuters, girls with their fancy on and their young men, most with bad taste in cologne.

3. When a whole family stops for an ice cream at a street vendor. They gather, there is an animated debate; they form a cluster on the sidewalk, and usually Dad pays. Little voices are excited.

4. The street washer at 4 a.m. The sounds are usually below me, and I hear them when I have insomnia. There is the occasional bus down 9th street, but the street washer only comes once a week. If am awake and feeling all the peace and isolation and anxiety that insomnia entails, it is a reminder that there is another human soul out there, awake and thinking, and that the day is coming.

5. Saturday morning, when lofties throng through the street with their week’s arrangements from the flower district. Calla lilies, sprays of miltonia, roses and designer jeans, and probably later, pancakes.

6. When girls going to night clubs encounter my dogs, Max and Tyler, during their evening constitutional, while my courtly spouse receives stares and glares from dates and hookup wannabes. “Oh they are soooooooo cuuuuuuuuuuuuute.” There is bending over, there is giggling, the dogs are made much of, and my nonplussed spouse thinks nothing of the fact that he just received more attention from females half his age than anybody without millions has any right to expect.

I’m 29! Again! Woo! Happy Birthday to me!

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

The Passing of John Meyer

On October 20th, Parkinson’s Disease knocked down Harvard’s John Meyer for the last time.

The seminal books to which he contributed:

The Urban Transportation Problem

Autos, Transit and Cities

Going Private: The International Experience with Transport Privatization

Things will be a little less from here on out.

On the ligher side

Well, today Dr. S (I love writing about myself in the third person) has to go be an expert on freight and livable communities, so here’s some Ann Margaret to look at. In addition to having two first names AND being from exotic Canada, she knew what to do with a feather boa. Much better than the smog, climate change, taxes, or politics that I usually talk about, isn’t it?

We could save a lot of money by getting rid of Oklahoma

In another instance of an opportunistic politician going after small money and getting in the NYT, Republican Senator Tom Coburn is riding high on his brilliant plan to get rid of government waste by going after political science funding in NSF. We’ll leave aside the fact that this is really really small money we’re talking here–we might as well just not fund 20 box culverts–and just go after the heart of this: we need to not fund political science research at the Federal level because this senator wants to claim a ‘win’ and lots of people resent professors, particularly those associated with the humanities or social sciences because we supposedly aren’t curing cancer or, in Coburn’s case, coming up with the newest, most profit-enhancing ranch or oil technology, or since he’s a doctor, a new technology that would allow doctors to spend on average 5 minutes with patients instead that lengthy 7 minutes they spend now. It could save lives.

I also think it is imperative that scholars do relevant work. But the decision rule at NSF or any funder should be about ideas–not disciplines, necessarily–and what seems on its surface less useful sometimes proves over the long term to be immensely useful. So those early experiments in behavioral economics were not particularly well-received. But I’d say they look pretty useful now, don’t you think? Nash’s early work on game theory went unrecognized for years, and now it’s one of the most valuable tools in the anti-terrorism toolkit I suspect Coburn approves of highly. Lots of computer science things absolutely necessary to military and industry began with little abstractions in math or philosophy. Knowledge and human capital are like quicksilver to forecast, and yet the consequences of them are all around us, all the time.

So let’s turn this issue on its head and go after some big money. Do we really need Oklahoma? Is it relevant for anything? Now, we can’t afford to go indulging in jingoistic arguments about how Oklahoma is significant to Oklahoman’s identities and whatnot; that’s just like the “life of the mind” arguments Coburn wouldn’t want us to listen to about political science. Let’s actually look at whether the state of Oklahoma is a worthy and efficient usage of public funds. Couldn’t most of the administrative functions of the state be absorbed rather easily into those of its neighboring states? Couldn’t its universities just close down and send their students elsewhere? Or couldn’t they simply get renamed the University of Texas-Stillwater or the University of Texas–Oklahoma City?** Wouldn’t that save a lot of money? Let’s go at it hard and faster: in two generations, I suspect we will be able to govern most of the US population via mayors’ offices and metropolitan planning organizations. Aren’t states struggling financially? States still wield a lot of political and financial capital because of past political decisions, not because of efficiency criteria, and now that we are an urban country in an urban world, aren’t states by and large redundant? Shouldn’t we be thinking about dismantling them?

I think the answer is no largely because states, like universities, are major employers and provide a lot of economic development for their surrounding cities more so. Maybe some political scientists can apply to NSF for some grant funding to prove me wrong here–to establish a compelling rationale for state-level governance over local or regional administration…

**I’m pretty sure just by writing that, I probably caused a Sooners fan to burst a blood vessel in his temple.

Distributive justice research in transport finance

Most of the research in transportation and social welfare concerns distributional outcomes, or more prosaically, the question of who gets what out of transport finance policy. The research on distributive social justice in transportation occurs primarily in three, largely separate fields: social inclusion, environmental justice, and the major topic of this manuscript, tax incidence. The research on social inclusion addresses the extent to which mobility limitations—either physical or financial—affect the distribution of individuals’ access to social and economic opportunity. Because taxes and user charges can raise the costs of gasoline or transit fares, they can create (or lower) financial barriers to mobility, and by extension, to social inclusion (1). The research on social inclusion in the US is perhaps best represented by the enormous amount of research on spatial mismatch.

Environmental justice research and activism has raised awareness about the distributive consequences, particularly for impoverished communities of color within metropolitan regions, of the external costs from transportation-related pollutants and environmental health costs associated with auto usage (3-9). Other types of external costs, like noise and pedestrian crashes, have also been shown to be higher in low-income communities than in more affluent neighborhoods (12). These costs can be measured by additional sick days or expenditures on things like air conditioner or air filters. Because of these types of costs, the social equity question arises from failing to expect motorists, low and high-income alike, to consider the external costs of their choices and enabling travel over and above a social optimum in a way that decreases the welfare of others.

The tax incidence research, by contrast, asks how much individuals and groups pay under different finance methods relative to other groups. This research examines the regressivity or progressivity of tax payments and revenue allocations (2). Regressive taxes or fees ask low-income individuals to sacrifice a comparatively larger percentage of their resources, usually measured in income, to pay for taxes than is required of those with higher incomes. Progressive taxes, like a graduated income tax, take an increasing percentage of income as income increases overall. These definitions are inverted in the case of tax allocations rather than costs. Incidence research tends to ask a very different question than social inclusion research: do socially marginalized groups, particularly class minorities, pay a disproportionate amount of their income for a tax? Most taxes, save for graduated income, are regressive in terms of out-of-pocket costs. It is possible for a tax to be regressive, while revenue distribution may be progressive, so that low-income individuals may pay in disproportionately and benefit disproportionately. It is important to maintain the distinction between social exclusion and tax incidence because regressivity and progressivity are general measures of tax fairness, not proxies for whether mobility is affordable. Gas taxes have been found to be regressive, in general, but with an out-of-pocket cost estimate of $25 to $28 a year per household per car, the Federal gas tax is hardly a prohibitive sum.

However, tax and finance structures affect relative prices among modes and thus can influence both the overall affordability of mobility—the social inclusion concern—and the amount/type of driving going on—the environmental justice concern. The policy goals surrounding all of these issues can and do conflict, depending on the context and the policy design. Among the most significant equity concerns over congestion pricing is that low-income motorists will have to forego trips. With tolls, mobility on congested roadways would become less affordable, creating a barrier to social inclusion for low-income motorists and their families. But by protecting low-income motorists from financial barriers to mobility by undercharging everybody, policy may burden communities with excess emissions and surface traffic. The results from the environmental justice research suggest that that these costs are born unequally as well, so that by not pricing trips off the road, policy burdens low-income communities and families within them.

Though most of the studies in tax incidence examine the distribution of the out-of-pocket costs associated with pricing, the very best studies acknowledge the role that prices play in altering both the distribution mobility overall and the external costs associated with that mobility. Unfortunately, there are very few studies that take such a comprehensive view.

1. Lucas K. Locating transport as a social policy problem. In: Transport, Social Exlusion, and Environmental Justice. 2004. p. 7-14.

2. Due JF, Mikesell JC. Sales Taxation. Washington, DC: Urban Institute; 1994.

3. Schweitzer L, Valenzuela Jr A. Environmental Justice and Transportation: The Claims and the Evidence. Journal of Planning Literature. 2004 ;18(4):383-398.

4. Schweitzer L, Stephenson M. Right Answers, Wrong Questions: Environmental Justice as Urban Research. Urban Studies. 2007 ;44(2):319-350.

5. Houston D, Wu J, Ong P, Winer A. Proximity of Licensed Childcare to Near-Roadway Vehicle Pollution. American Journal of Public Health. 2004 ;96(9):1611-1617.

6. Houston D, Wu J, Ong P, Winer A. Structural disparities of urban traffic in southern California: Implications for vehicle related-air pollution exposure in minority and high-poverty neighborhoods. Journal of Urban Affairs. 2004 ;26(5):565-592.

7. Jerrett M, Finkelstein M. Geographies of risk in studies linking chronic air pollution exposure to health outcomes. Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A. 2005;68: 1207-1242.

8. Jerrett M, Burnett RT, Kanaroglou P, Eyles J, Finkelstein N, Giovis C, et al. A GIS-environmental justice analysis of particulate air pollution in Hamilton, Canada. Environment and Planning A. 2001 ;33955-973.

9. Loh P, Sugerman-Brozan J, Wiggins S, Noiles D, Archibald C. From asthma to AirBeat: Community-driven monitoring of fine particles and black carbon in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Environmental Health Perspectives. 2002 ;110297-301, Suppl. 2.

10. Marshall JD. Environmental inequality: Air pollution exposures in California’s South Coast Air Basin. Atmos.Environ. 2008 7;42(21):5499-5503.

11. Bachman W, Sarasua W, Hallmark S, Guensler R. Modeling regional mobile source emissions in a geographic information system framework. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies. Feb ;8(1-6):205-229.

12. Chakraborty J, Schweitzer L, Forkenbrock DJ. Using GIS to assess the environmental justice impacts of transportation system changes. Transactions in GIS. 1999 ;3(3):329-258.

13. Crane R, Schweitzer L. Sustainability, transport, and the built environment. Built Environment. 2003 ;29(3):238-252.

The difference that refining makes

Just in case anybody thinks diesel engine fuel standards have not made a difference, check out the smoke here at the beginning of this clip from the marvelously campy 1980s mini-series Monte Carlo. You don’t–or you shouldn’t–generally see this level of particulate emissions from any diesel engine at this point due to much more stringent refining requirements, both in the US and and in Europe.

And you get Joan Collins and George Hamilton!

Freight rail destruction of wildlife and ill-advised political metaphors

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said with regard to health care reform that he’s “the cow on the tracks. You’re gonna have to stop that train to get this cow off the track to move forward.”

Um, yeah. That sometimes happens if you see the cow on the tracks with enough time to stop the train. Otherwise, these types of collisions are always rather one-sided, and not generally in favor of the cow.

See that V-shaped object on the front of this engine? This photo is a rather pronounced version of the object–called, in fact, a cow-catcher–which go on the front of engines specifically to deflect objects to one side or another of the track.

Freight rail destruction of wildlife is a serious issue, just like highway destruction of wildlife. This summary and bibliography give a nice introduction to the problem.

The funniest thing I have read in a really long time

“If you think fat people have no self-discipline, consider the fact that they haven’t killed you yet.”

Fat Blogs by Miss Conduct, Boston Globe

PYTs and public transit

One of my favorite students, Alexene Farol, is writing away about the effect of image on public transit. It’s worth a look. The problem, she argues, is that we work in a image conscious city, and the bus doesn’t fit with the urban hipster image so embossed on urbanist’s minds.

Violence in Lahore and the Urban-ness of Terrorism

The terrorist strike in Lahore is not getting as a much news time as it needs. Along with the violence that has hit Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta, and Rawalpindi, it suggests a geographic spread to the Taliban’s activities and a set of dominoes falling. I am not well-schooled enough in international relations to really understand what is going on here, but it’s worrying both for its cost in human life and what it portends for the future of Pakistan.

In my class on the Urban Context, I ask students to explain whether (or not) terrorism is a uniquely urban phenomenon. One of the things that strikes me about many terrorists (not all) is that they use city and country in particular ways. Bonnie and Clyde*, though ostensibly not political murderers, were discussed in the media as rural bandits who stole from city fatcats and took down the man’s police lackeys. The Weather Underground used the anonymity of the city to hide in plain sight. Timothy McVeigh selected an urban location to avenge what he considered to be a rural wrong. The city becomes the site of the enlarged state; it is also the platform for major social and cultural change. As such, it’s a target for those who want radical social change, either through the ostensible opposing of it (let’s go back to what we imagine Islam was in the 17th century) and those who wish to speed it up.

*Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.

Geographic Sample, or Most of It

If anybody is actually interested, this is about 80 percent of our geographic sample of the Chicago region–what I’ve been so obsessed with coding the past few days.

This is our study on travel demand, evacuation, and social networks. I’m getting excited to see the whole sample coming together!

California’s War Dead

The LA Times has a comprehensive listing of California’s losses.

Air quality, congestion, and pricing

One of my former students posted this story from the Wall Street Journal to Facebook yesterday. ARGH. Does the WSJ do no research in its reporting any more? So a time delay will shift drivers to transit but a charge for driving wouldn’t? Are WSJ reporters not required to understand basic econ anymore?

Congestion can be either good or bad for air quality depending on the geographic distribution of alternatives, the fleet, and the context into which the emissions enter. Congestion charging can in theory price trips onto the road under hypercongestion (the famous backward-bending demand curve), and thus may allow for greater VMT. But this is not true even in theory if the charging scheme is priced for VMT reduction or rationing rather than optimizing flow–those are different things, and the New York pricing plan was zone-based, so it most likely would have eliminated trips, not increased them! Higher throughput might affect emissions via flow optimization, but it is not apparent from either monitors or lab experiments that idling among a smaller number of cars/trips is objectively better for air quality than fast throughput from a larger number of cars/trips (and there may be a substitution effect in the traveling fleet that most people think is an air quality benefit; or there may be a freight effect which would not produce benefits [1]; we don’t know). Different types of emissions also vary with engine cycle, so it may be wash in total but a trade in emissions type.

Studies prior to the implementation of London’s cordon toll predicted fairly large reductions in emissions [2]. After the charge’s implementation, monitors throughout the metro area demonstrated significant and progressively distributed improvements in pollutant concentrations [3,4]. Now, it’s not likely that we can attribute all of that change to the cordon toll, as accompanying the toll were rapid increases in bus supply (so much so that train trips also went down concurrently following the implementation of the cordon toll; I suspect that congested trains were traded for less-congested buses for short trips, particularly after the transit bombings in July of 2005).

Traffic calming, transit-oriented, density-based efforts in Paris—without the concomitant tolling efforts that London put down—have been found to increase emissions substantially, so New York may not be doing itself any favors with unpriced congestion [5]. Concentrations in some congested areas, like San Francisco, have not been improving as quickly as in other places. It may be that these simply reflect that when air quality is generally good in high-growth areas, reductions occur marginally more slowly than in places where concentrations are comparatively high. (IOW, it’s hard to improve on good.) However, it can also be that worsening congestion has caused higher emissions and that is being reflected in some regional monitors.

Some of the smartest transportation people in the world are at New York universities, but why would we actually CALL THEM to get some ideas for this WSJ peice? For most of these people, it wouldn’t even a long-distance phone call for the WSJ reporter. See? Look at this list! This is a dream team of people to ask rather than just talking out of your backside. BAD WSJ.

But then, as my friend Chris Redfearn once noted, discussions like this require people to keep more than one idea in their heads at once. If we are throwing around the “dubious” term, congestion on transit–and this exists virtually everywhere in the world that isn’t in the US–is most definitely NOT good for the environment: see Mexico City, see virtually every Asian city over 10 million people, and the many scooter engines on the road rather than transit trips.

[1] Marr, L. C. and R. A. Harley. 2002. Modeling the effect of weekday-weekend differences in motor vehicle
emissions on photochemical air pollution in central california. Environmental Science and Technology, 36:4099–4106.

[2] Beevers, SD, Carslaw DC. The impact of congestion charging on vehicle emissions in London. Atmospheric Environment. 2005 Jan ;39(1):1-5.

[3] Atkinson R, Barratt B, Armstrong B, Anderson H, Beevers S, Mudway I, et al. The impact of the Congestion Charging Scheme on ambient air pollution concentrations in London [Internet]. Atmospheric Environment. In Press, Accepted.

[4] C, Beevers S, Armstrong B, Kelly F, Wilkinson P. Air pollution and mortality benefits of the London Congestion Charge: spatial and socioeconomic inequalities. Occup Environ Med. 2008 Sep 1;65(9):620-627.

[5] Bouf D, Hensher DA. The dark side of making transit irresistible: The example of France. Transport Policy. 2007 Nov;14(6):523-532.

Vegas 40 years ago

I have been coding data, which is boring, and I’ve had the first season of the Rockford Files on in the background, which appeared (much like me) in the early 1970s. In the pilot, there is an image of the strip. Here’s screen shot–it’s fuzzy, but you can still see it–look at those open tracks of land.

Today:

Woo Woo Elinor Ostrom!

Elinor Ostrom has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics along with Oliver Williamson.

Dr. Ostrom is the first female recipient of the prize, and perhaps even more exciting, is an institutional scholar who studied the commons. She’s an absolute giant in the field of environmental governance. It’s an inspired choice, one that suggests the committee is beginning to recognize the importance of interdisciplinary work and ideas on economics.

Beyond that, she’s a super nice lady.

This has been the first time I have smiled in weeks! We’re all supposed to pretend we’re all equal now, or else all the guys around me will start citing Lifetime Network and how tough they have it, but the academic world is highly male-dominated even though our professions–civil engineering, urban planning–have changed. I have dozens of great male role models around me, and I appreciate them all. But I have only a handful of women. Maybe the scarcity shouldn’t make a difference, but it does. Research and writing are lonely endeavors, and I can’t even begin to describe how isolating and alienating the tenure process is. You need to be able to know that people like you can succeed in the game. At least I have always needed that.

So why is Ostrom’s work so important to cities? I’m glad you asked. Central to Ostrom’s work are exemplars where “commons” are governed successfully (and less so) among users. Garret Hardin, an influential ecologist who passed away in 2003, first brought the commons to our attention through a paper in Science, whereby he noted that rational individuals have an incentive to over-use the commons in the absence of clearly defined property rights [1]. Ostrom’s work studied the role of institutions and agreements in adjudicating the usage of the commons, so that destruction of common pool resources was not inevitable nor necessarily the purview of individual property rights alone, though I would argue many of the factors she highlighted in her work amount to the creation of jointly held property rights [2]. In other words, her work addresses the fundamental question of the city: that is, how do we get along together, how do we make decisions–good ones–about the shared goods (and environments) that affect large groups of people where property rights are perhaps fuzzy.

Marginal Revolution has a discussion up. The comments leave quite a bit to be desired as they smell of sour grapes, but as with men and Lifetime movies, it’s not often that I get to hear economists, the veritable jewels within the crown of the social sciences and usually all-too-confident in their entitlement to act as consultants to power, fret about whether their status is slipping. IT’S ONE PRIZE, PEOPLE, CHILLAX WOULD YA?

**My apologies to Oliver Williamson, but he’s a bit of a no-brainer here and I suspect his reputation can withstand being given short shrift in an obscure planner’s blog.

[1] Hardin, G. (1968). Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162, 1243-1248.

[2] Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Things that scare me, in no way related to cities

1. Crocodiles. Eek.

2. Junior high English teachers. This is just common sense.

3. Dolls. They have eyes, they don’t blink. Creepy.

4. Aliens. Star Trek has never satisfactorily explained what all this probing was about, and I don’t believe any of that pre-Prime-Directive ranny-gazzoo.

5. Snakes, spiders and rats. There is a reason that vampires don’t run with guinea pigs and koala bears.

6. Sharks. If you’ve ever watched Spring Break Shark Attack, either the original or the sequel, or the discovery channel, you just plain know: DON’T GO INTO THE WATER.

7. Getting floss stuck in my teeth. What if it never comes out?

8. Fish hooks. They may seem like inert metal barbs, but they are really sitting there, plotting against my eyeballs. I just know it.

9. People with velociraptor sternums. Where do those come from? Madonna, whom I admire as a business woman, is looking way too much like an East German weight lifter these days for comfort.

10. Everybody on my tenure committee, people who used to be friends and colleagues and mentors, and are now people behind closed doors and closed conversations.

11. My own monkey brain. The more I don’t think about tenure and how much it is bothering me, the more the anxiety comes out in odd, unpredictable ways.

I’m going to go back to coding.

Top 10 Cities for Cellulite

MSN brings us the Top 10 US Cities for Cellulite.

Boogity Boogity. And here’s the surprise! One of the poorest cities in the country is Numero Uno–Birmingham, Alabama, a place where the expected life span of an African American man is nearly 10 years lower than those of a white woman–and yet the cellulite discussion is done, of course, in a way that drips with misogyny. Real health means nothing compared to how one of our pet sex objects might look in her bikini.

Oh, even more health boogity boogity. There is no cure for cellulite. I’d kind of like to fret more about a cure for Alzheimer’s, AIDS, cancer, Lou Gehrig’s disease, arthritis, Parkinson’s and, oh, I dunno, A BUNCH OF REAL HEALTH CONCERNS.*

*Yes, I know obesity is a health concern, but there are a lot of really thin and healthy people running around the world with cellulite. I’m tired of the way in which something that is merely unsightly is conflated with real risks.

Top Twenty Movies About New York

In no particular order, these are Dr. Schweitzer’s favorite movies about/set in New York:

1. West Side Story
(even though a lot was filmed on sound stages)

2. Serpico

3. Taxi Driver

4. Annie Hall or Hannah and Her Sisters

5. Breakfast at Tiffany’s

6. Ghostbusters

7. You’ve Got Mail or When Harry Met Sally

8. On the Waterfront

9. The Goodbye Girl

10. Fame

11. The Cotton Club

12. Finding Forrester

13. Three Days of the Condor

14. Rosemary’s Baby (the Dakota! What a building!)

15. The Godfather

16. Super Fly

17. The Odd Couple

18. Funny Girl

19. Butterfield 8

20. Guys and Dolls

(bonus one: Saturday Night Fever).

Dear Glenn Beck and Michelle Bachmann

If you think for five seconds anybody outside of a psych ward thinks you are anything other than opportunistic attention grubbers for trying to legitimize the brutality directed at a Census worker in Kentucky, you would be wrong. Rural constituencies can speak to disenfranchisement for themselves, and they do, and they share nothing in common with the murderers who did this except geography. People in rural areas can and do routinely engage in civil society and discourse; they respect democracy, the social contract and human life. Yes, Ms. Bachmann, I know you think you are positioning yourself to be the next Sarah Palin. Let’s think about how that worked out. How’s about…oh, I don’t know….having enough faith in the ideas upon which modern conservatism was founded that you don’t slither into the smarmiest pits where you seem to think the political movement now resides. Stand up straight, woman, and think about Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk [1, 2]. If you take the higher road, you could be the star you want to be.

But just let’s try out the logic so I can get this straight: the strategy seems to be to terrorize people trying to take a count of population and data so that the gummint doesn’t know you are there–i.e., systematically undercounting the 2010 population in rural areas. You know what? That actually works for me, since California is broke and we could use the Federal funds that might have gone to these other places. I normally would worry about what undercounting means for the poverty in Appalachia, but since we have poverty here to deal with, I’ll skip it. Census dude, count me twice if you want, and here’s a donut for you to boot.

[1]Kirk, R. 2001. The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Regnery Publishing. 7th edition.ISBN 0-89526-171-5

[2] Rusello, G, 2004, “Russell Kirk and Territorial Democracy,” Publius 34: 109-24. Issn: 0048-5950.

Down from 39 million to 32 million

I need this house. If the government bought me this house, I would Invest in America. I would Stimulate the Economy. I would Pursue Sustainable Development. I would Live Right.

I really, really, really would. Really.

Dealing with the black dog today–thus, no real content.

Spotlight on fellow Bruin TH Culhane

aka the“National Geographic Energy Man”. What can I say? TH is one of the brightest, most fundamentally decent, and most enthusiastic men I have ever had the pleasure to know.

Here’s more about his work at his blog “Solarcities” and, of course, his work helping change energy sources in the Cairo slums.

DC’s Union Station Bike Facility

Here is rendering–it’s rather hard to find pictures online–you can see the whole plan at the DC DOT’s’ Bicycle Advisory page. My friend Scott brought it up at breakfast this morning, my last day in my beloved DC. The work was done by KGP Design Studio. Don Paine was the lead architect who is quoted in an NPR story as saying “the system to Washington is part of a larger shift toward “dispelling the notion that the car is an essential part of our daily lifestyle.”

The system will require a subscription, and it will be nice: it will have bike parking, lockers, and a repair shop. But it’s meant for 130 bikes at a go. Now, dangit, it’s nice and I’m happy they are putting these out and putting money into high-quality design, but 130 bikes is a 130 people, or a few more with child seats. I don’t mean to be difficult, but that’s a pretty marginal service for the money that went into this thing. The architect then says: ” This is a monumental paradigm shift for the typical American”. But a previous report on bike station users suggests that 30 percent of those users were previously drivers. I can’t find that original report, but at 130 people in DC’s case, that’s 40 people, versus the other 90 who are already bicyclists and receiving a new service. So we shifted 40 people, maybe. Is the planet really going to get cooler at this pace? Or should we be honest about what we are doing: making places nicer for multiple modes for select users? Is that particularly wrong?

Top Ten LA Movies

Again, I have no real ideas so I am going to write about silly things. Here’s to Tinseltown:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. Chinatown
3. The Big Sleep
4. LA Confidential
5. 500 Days of Summer
6. Heat
7. Sunset Bouelvard
8. Repo Man
9. Get Shorty
10. Barton Fink

How have the public health people missed this?

Zsa Zsa Gabor’s stretching with somebody whose name may, in fact, be “Swarthy McBeefcake.”

The only thing this doesn’t have is cocktails.

Holla Back! at street harassers

Holla Back gives people the opportunity to “out” public harassment. Go check it out. It’s all over.

This reminds me of one of my favorite transit stories of all time. I was on the Paris metro when I was pretty young (early 20s) and a man was pestering me, and he began doing something that really is best left for private, and this tiny little French woman–somewhere between 80 and 200 years old–leapt spryly out of her seat and began to wallop the guy with her umbrella as she shouted at him in French. I’m not talking minor, little old lady whacks, I’m talking full swings that would make Manny Ramirez take note. My harasser leapt off the train at the next platform and I was free to take the rest of my ride in peace.

Paul Romer’s Charter Cities

As usual, the Freakonomics blog has some interesting stuff on it–in particular, this interview with Paul Romer on his idea to create charter cities as a means of changing the institutional context for development.

Maybe I’ll return to these idea when I am not racing around at a conference….

A Public Service Message to Young Male Wannabes

Having a loud and ungentlemanly discussion on an airplane about a young woman’s body is a rude and stupid thing to do. Dressing up your misogyny with supposedly ghetto terms like “junk in the trunk” doesn’t make you sound like a hip and edgy young white guy. It makes you sound like what you are: a jackass who surfs “urban dictionary.”

Just a little tip from your Auntie Lisa

Will seniors downsize and relocate?

My colleague Richard Green noted that he saw a good presentation from Irina Telyukova on whether elderly households will downsize for the sake of downsizing. I’d like to get a copy of Telyukova’s paper, as this is a particularly thorny problem for transportation.

There is a great deal of faith in the planning world that the aging of America (and western Europe/Australia) will boost up public transit, as eventually seniors give up driving. Sandi Rosenbloom has a couple of nice papers which discuss this issue [1,2]. The news is not good. Past trends suggests that as we get older, we stay put. We age in place, until we can no longer manage on our own, at which point the decline comes quickly. Part of this has to do with a discussion that Richard and I had: he and his wife have worked very hard; they are both professionals; they are very successful, they have raised their children, and yet they bought a house they really really really love even though it’s technically too big for them. I am reminded (as I am often) of my friend David Forkenbrock, who built his dream home–a fantastic place he loved so much that outside offers couldn’t blast him out of the University of Iowa despite the ghastly winters.

These seem reasonable enough things to want to enjoy into your latter life. Why not? A place for the grandkids to stay, for the kids to use for long visits.

Are there any reasons to assume that the boomers will buck trends? There is part of me that says “perhaps” but I suspect the change will be marginal. However, I’ll skylark a bit about why they might differ:

1. Boomers have to date been the most mobile and global generation; they’ve had money and comfort and a great deal of political power due to their numbers. They may have less need to rely on their housing for equity than previous generations of seniors due to their wealth, and they may have less concern over the transactions costs of moving, again due to wealth. However, these are all factors that may, in fact, allow them to age in place more readily as they may be able to afford homecare and lawncare and all sorts of services that make single-family home living easier when you get older.

2. Because of their wealth and their lower demand for services like schools, it may be that the TOD trend becomes more focused on retirement and lifestyle communities. Trust me; if my experience as a professional planner means anything, it’s that developers love residential density and neighbors hate it. If you can convince the neighbors that you’re moving in a bunch of old dears who won’t drive, park, party or take up room in their kids’ classroom, density gets easier to build. See above comment about political economy.

3. Seniors may be particularly responsive to new taxes, which I think we will see, that make suburban living relatively costlier. They may not be, but they may be.

All that said, I think I’m stretching. It’s easier to drive than it is to take transit; if it weren’t, then all of these “transit and walking fight obesity” people can’t be right. As Rosenbloom points out, this generation of women, in particular, were far more mobile than their mothers. The numbers on transport side do not suggest that seniors are going do much different than they have before.

[1] S. Rosenbloom, C. Katz, and J. Monk. Women’s travel at various stages of their lives. In Full Circles: Geographies of Women Over the Life Course, pages 208–242. Routledge, London, 1993. Book, Section

[2] S. Rosenbloom. Sustainability and automobility among the elderly: An international assessment. Transportation, 28(4):375–408, 2001. Journal Article.

Calatrava’s Liege Train Station

Take a look a over at Inhabitat. If you’re going to build a station, I guess, go big or go home.

The Future Was Better In the Past

It is a truth universally acknowledged among my grouchy social scientist friends (aka economists) that many planners are not particularly good social scientists. This may be because planning isn’t about urban social science. It’s about imagination.

So imagine my glee when I found Paleofuture, a website dedicated to unearthing visions of the future from the past. Oh, do they have highway and train visions, as you can imagine:

The Highway to Russia
Highways by Automation
Disney’s Highway of the Future(you gotta see this one)
the 600 mph train of the future (1901)
the US Senate Monorail
Amphibian Monorail
Space colony with monorail
Aerial Monorail of the future
Speed is the Key (1965)

Formosa 1140

One of my gripes about the New Urbanism is that the architects who promote it are long on social mission and short on actual, well, design. There are an awful lot of Calthorpe developments that are very well-intended but in another 10 years are going to wind up looking like rather a shabby and cookie-cutter set of multi-family units, painted in pastels, around what will be a nice streetscape of then-mature trees.

However, the paradigm-shifting nature of the New Urbanism has led those with more edge and gusto to thinking about density–which brings me to Formosa 1140 by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects. Take some time to play around their website–it’s very nice. You’ll maybe remember Lorcan O’Herlily as the architect who built this structure next to Schindler’s iconic house in WeHo.

1140 Formosa has gotten a lot of ink. It’s in Dwell this month, for example.

This is four stories with 11 units of lofts than run about 1,500 square feet. There is a park provided on the property, and the exoskeleton of red metal is meant to absorb heat. Behind that are walkways meant into increase social interaction.

Some writeups and descriptions:

dezeen
stylecrave
arch daily

The architect suggested it was “like living in a dorm.”

What do you all think? Lovely? Heinous? They almost had me until the dorm comment. Did other people enjoy living in dorms? I live in a very expensive building now, and we smell pot way too much from the trust fund kids down the hall. And then there was the time Andy encountered a loud fight between the pot-smoking trust funder (I think his dad was an NFL player) and his girlfriend about whether he wanted to allow her to video them…you know… what Paris Hilton got famous for videotaping. I repeat: this argument occurred in the hallway. Isn’t that a discussion one has inside? Like in hoarse, outraged whispers so the neighbors don’t hear you? (To the young man’s credit, he was the one saying ‘no’ to the exercise; but I think we can say this is the sort of thing one doesn’t necessarily want one’s pudgy, middle-aged professor neighbors knowing about one, right? Right?)

However, as I said to a group of real estate developers last week, density and infill are here to stay in LA, which caused a loud round of complaints about how government needs to use eminent domain to assemble property for them; I strongly suspect they would rapidly grow uncomfortable under such a loose property rights regime because it would eventually affect what they could sell for, at the very least. Governments that do not respect private property tend not to be ones that behave all that well; there are a few examples of good middle ground between individually held and collectively held rights. The major questions to me seem how do you make design something we can afford in housing, given that something like Formosa 1140 goes for luxury prices already, and given that we do have problems with land assembly.

East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice

Several of my favorite Facebook Peeps posted links to this LA Times Story about East Yard Communities–the organization that inspired me to write my dissertation.

I always wonder about this with folks who advocate for shifting more freight to railroads as a means of improving the environment. First, rail freight generally has such a cost advantage if that if you can ship by rail, you already do. And second, it’s not like there aren’t emissions from rail freight. With the much cleaner diesel fuel standards, both trucks and trains should be better. But still.

A Link to East Yard Communities Website

Blogging suspended in favor of real writing

while Dr. Schweitzer, voted “most likely not to finish her ACSP paper”, attempts to bust the odds and complete a paper that Phil Berke doesn’t conclude is the product of a deranged mind.

Speaking of Phil, his work is on sustainability and it rocks, so go read that. Yeah–that’s the ticket.

Another SPPD faculty tapped for the Obama Administration

from our website:

Erroll Southers ’98, who regularly teaches a class at USC on homeland security issues, has been nominated by the Obama administration to run the Transportation Security Administration.

The department oversees the screening of passengers and luggage with the aim of preventing terrorists from boarding planes and to avoid the transportation of weapons and chemicals that can be used in terrorist attacks.

Southers is a USC adjunct professor with a specialty in counter-terrorism and homeland security. He is associate director of the USC Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security university research center where he created a certificate program aimed at working professionals whose jobs throughout the world intersect with anti-terrorism measures.

He believes that attacking terrorism requires multi-pronged approaches.

“Terrorism engages every discipline: sociology, education, physics, engineering,” he said in an earlier interview with USC. “It’s an interdisciplinary solution. As globalization increases, terrorism will not be confined to any one region or country.”

Outside of USC, Southers has served since 2007 as chief of homeland security and intelligence for the Los Angeles World Airport Police Department, where he has been in charge of counter-terrorism and security measures.

Southers earned his master’s degree in public administration at the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development. He is founding member of the SPPD Alumni Association.

His past experience includes four years with the FBI, where he was part of the SWAT team, and work as a detective in the Santa Monica Police Department. From 2004-06, he served as deputy director of the California Office of Homeland Security

Southers’ nomination still needs to be confirmed. If approved, he would also be in charge of 50,000 airport screeners and be involved in discussions over whether they can join a labor union, according to news media reports. In a press release, the federal union AFGE, which represents border and customs workers, said they are looking forward to working with Southers

Mohamed Atta, Urban Planner/Philosopher King

Slate has a set of pieces by Daniel Brook on Mohamed Atta’s urban planning thesis. Except for the self-conscious throat-clearing at the beginning where Brook spends way too much time blithering on about how he knew the thesis was important when others overlooked it, this is a nice, insightful look at the ideological ramifications of urban planning. It is an unavoidably normative profession. Think about “Smart Growth.” Nobody is in this because they want “Dumb Growth.” The same is true of policy. People don’t study because they want to help foster bad government. Those of us in the policy/planning/management and, perhaps to a lesser degree, development, are here because we think those things can be done better.

The window into Atta’s thesis that Brooks provides helps us understand the terrorist’s worldview. There is a fundamentalism present in his work on Aleppo, though few contemporary urban planners would see much to fault in his grand vision to tear down freeways and high-rises to restore the Islamic vernacular. This is the danger of grand plans that planners can not cover with any amount of New Urbanist gloss: major social change is hurtful. It takes time and healing, even when it is ultimately for the good. It was wrong to build highways on communities, as French planners did, and chances are just as good that Atta’s grand vision of demolishing high-rises would also hurt in ways other than just the bricks, mortar, and glass and Westernism he intended to. In urban planning, like everything else, two wrongs seldom make a right.

This is a cautionary tale. I’m about ready to go to ACSP where I will be regaled with would-be philosopher kings explaining to me how high-speed rail will save the planet and make fat people, like me, walk more so we will be thin. I doubt any one will tell me about the significance of bus benches. We do not think small, we philosopher-kings, and as a result we miss those kinds of details and, depending on the context, can cause enormous hurt.

France’s carbon tax

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been pushing for fairly steep carbon taxes as domestic policy in France over the summer and into the fall. It has not been an easy discussion for Sarkozy, in particular, who has gotten a good deal of flack. There is a nice discussion of this controversy over at Marginal Revolution. Nonetheless, France is going forward with a carbon tax in 2010. The new tax will be 17 euros (£15) per tonne of emitted carbon dioxide (CO2). We’ll see what happens with fuel consumption in particular.

More recently, Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have advocated for a carbon tax on imports–the ever popular Monty Pythonesque concept of taxing foreigners living abroad (and, to varying degrees, French consumers with a taste for high-carbon imports). This could be very interesting, with global warming finally providing a legitimization for international environmental regimes which typically have not had as much influence as their proponents have hoped vis-a-vis international trade agreements.

Marlon Boarnet and Transport Infrastructure

From the American Planning Association website: :

Transportation Infrastructure: The Challenges of Rebuilding America

This report, edited by Marlon G. Boarnet, was compiled with an eye to the urgency and severity of the challenges that we now face. Some of the leading researchers, scholars, and practitioners in transportation planning put forth fresh best practices and visionary ideas. Contributors include Robert Cervero, Ellen Greenberg, Robert Puentes, Daniel Sperling, and Petra Todorovich. Also here is the discussion among three big-city planning directors—William Anderson (San Diego), Barbara Sporlein (Minneapolis), and Harriet Tregoning (Washington, D.C.)—that took place at APA’s 2009 National Planning Conference in Minneapolis.

It’s hard to be a gangster

When the groomer puts girlie bows on you. We have been assiduously rolling in things trying to get rid of the bows and to ditch the sissy shampoo smell.

Death Panels and Tenure

Don’t even let me go there. Too late!

Edward Caswell’s New York

HT to Orange Crate Art.

Edward Caswell’s illustration of a willow tree, shown above, served as illustration for one of my favorite books about the city: Here is New York (1949). Caswell’s sketches of New York appeared in numerous periodicals throughout the 1940s and 1950s before he passed away in 1963. This tree was still standing in 2002.

As Professor Leddy notes, there are a few Edward Caswell illustrations available for sale at Deep Archives.

The Perfect City

As far as planners go, I am a grumpy social scientist. I have little of that winsome visionary and romantic nature that makes my planning colleagues so utterly delightful at times and maddening at others. They dream of cities, while people like me tend to measure and analyze them. We measurers are the Kahn; planners are Marco Polo.*

The other day I was grouchy about David Byrne’s bit on his perfect city in the WSJ, while many of my planning colleagues liked it. I didn’t actually explain my grouchiness, other than to say that his perfect city sounds like pretty standard Bobo-in-Paradise fare to me. The whole WSJ setup led there: as part of their “perfect X” series, cities got lumped in there with pints of beer and books. Now, I am a huge fan of both pints of beer and books, but cities are not merely objects of individual consumption.

So anyway, maybe I can’t do any better than Byrne, but for today I will dream instead of analyze. It’s harder than it looks.

Here goes:

1. The built environment of the perfect city is ubiquitously beautiful and yet diverse, engaging the eyes and minds of the people within and throughout. The materials of the city are lovingly crafted everywhere, not just in penthouses and coffee shops, pleasant as those things are. In the perfect city, beautiful buildings do not contain people working for slave wages in terrible conditions while affluent onlookers stroll by, insulated from the reality of others’ lives through cushions of class and space.

2. The built environment of the perfect city is hospitable, offering comfort to everybody there, not just the ones that can afford to spend $6 on a beer to sit down and not just the ones young enough to sit in those thicker-than-ticks-on-a-coondog-in-downtown LA elevated barstool chairs made (I swear) out of barbed wire. The perfect city is a commodious place; there is time, always always time, for those with walkers and canes or without legs; there are smooth, ample spaces for those with wheelchairs, and good tables for them to sit with their friends like everybody else.

3. The perfect city recognizes the role that low-wage workers play in cities and offers places–good places–for them and their children to live and be a part of the fabric of the city, not relegated to the margins of either long commutes or miserable housing. Work is not invisible or treated as unsightly; work with computers is held to the same standard of sustainability as logging or farming. Play among the affluent–like jetting off from global city to global city–is evaluated as an environmental issue with the same level of scrutiny that planting soybeans is.

4. There aren’t merely eyes on the street; there simply are no strays in the perfect city. No stray children, no stray dogs or cats, no stray seniors with empty days. In the perfect city, nobody suffers violence or exploitation. Nobody is hungry, cold, desperate, dying of heat, uncared for or alone. People and resources are recognized as utterly unique and precious and treated as such. Nobody has to hear the word “fag” on the subway or experience bad treatment because of who they are, how they look, or who they are with. We aren’t needling in each other’s business, but we aren’t robots who turn away when somebody is hassling a teenage girl on the street. We got each other’s backs because it’s the right thing to do.

5. In the perfect city, people are aware of and take responsibility for how what they do affects others, both near and far. They do not shift externalities. If they want pork chops for dinner, they pay for meat that is humanely raised in sustainable settings or they raise it in their own backyards and smell the stench rather expecting somebody else to do so on the cheap. Or they do without. In the perfect city, we know where each object we consume is made and how it is made. People in the perfect city do not enjoy their own environmental comfort and security if it means the diminishment of others’–anywhere, anytime. No compromises. No I-bankers on bicycles in Manhattan giving themselves tennis elbows patting themselves on the back for their sustainable selves if on the job they are destroying retirement savings or demanding layoffs elsewhere. No.

6. In the perfect city, people have access to the resources they need to grow in mind and body, and at a (high) baseline, those resources are not determined by how much money individuals make. Whether you can buy caviar is a matter for the market: whether you can get fresh fruit is a matter of justice.

7. Children have space and time to be kids in the perfect city no matter how much money their parents have; they have a place to lay on their tummies and look at ants; they have a place they can look at the clouds; they have a place to run around and shout their heads off. All of them, no matter what, breathe good air, have good food, and can put their eyes on the stars. Children, all of them, are surrounded by adults who, even if they are not related, will look after them, share their resources with them, be committed to the best for them, sacrifice for them, show them the best in themselves, and help them grow into stewards who will do the same for those who come after.

8. In the perfect city, everybody’s civil rights and liberties are taken seriously. It doesn’t matter who you are: you have the right to due process, equal protection, and property. Even if the city wants that property for a TOD, even if the rest of us think you have done bad things, and even if you are not part of our tribe. We have standards. We do not violate those in the perfect city.

9. In the perfect city, change is recognized as a source of both joy and grief. We understand that change can mean loss, and we treat loss with kindness and respect. We do not slap the NIMBY label on people simply because they make change difficult. Instead we respect them as people speaking up to demand the best they can for the places they cherish. And people never abuse that respect by demanding the exclusion of other people as a matter of policy or design.

10. In the perfect city, we as a collective make and keep promises to each other as a matter of course. If the collective “we” promise a community that a new rail line will offer new jobs to them and mobility to us, there had better damn well be new jobs for them and not just mobility for us by the time we’re done.

11. In the perfect city, we own past injustices and try to make them right. We don’t just move on, expecting people to get over pain, discrimination, and marginalization so that they can play along with our future plans and give us what we want. We take responsibility. If we screw up on #10, we try to fix it in good faith both through apology and restorative acts. We don’t wonder why people in Leimert Park aren’t sold on the Expo Line when we haven’t delivered what we promised with the Blue Line.

12. The perfect city is so wonderful that we who live there are ready to sacrifice our own lives, not the lives of impoverished people we don’t know, to defend the way of life we enjoy in that city. We know what we are willing to die for and why, and as a result we know what we are asking from young women and men in service and abroad and thus we do not ask it of them lightly.**

13. In the perfect city, disorder is viewed as part of the the city rather than as a pathology that requires control.

14. In the perfect city, people recognize, every day, the caring work done around them, both paid and unpaid. Teachers are paid as well as doctors; hospice nurses get medals. Cleaned gutters, changed diapers, oil changes, laundry all take their place as worthy of celebration and thanks in the same way finished book projects or merger negotiations do.

15. The Lakers. The perfect city needs the Lakers. And a 21 choices.

So here’s the deal. I have no real problems with mixed uses or anything else Byrne laid out, save for that inexcusably classist comment about how danger is sexy (boot to the talking head’s head). But the WSJ tossed those things around as measures of perfection. Now, perfect is way different from “nice” in the way San Francisco and Manhattan or London are nice. With perfect, you gotta go big or go home.***

*See Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities for the reference.
**See Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates
***With affection for the big dreamers (and doers) I know like Robert Garcia, Damien Goodmon, Jacky Grimshaw, TH Culhane, and James Rojas. I appreciate your big, beautiful visions and I hope they happen. I’ll go back to my analyst’s shell again and leave dreaming to the ones who are good at it.

Urban fiction: Graceland by Chris Abani

Sometimes a book just plain works despite its many faults, and Chris Abani is a relatively young Nigerian writer who has put together in Graceland a compelling, coming-of-age novel about a young Nigerian boy named Elvis living in Lagos. As you can imagine from the child’s name, a lot of this novel is constructed in terms of political imagery concerning the pervasive effects of the west on African cities and life therein. There is a lot of violence, and there is a lot here that trades on the the noir of the slums rather than the community. Nonetheless, Abani is a first-rate prose stylist, well deserving of the PEN/Hemingway award this novel garnered, and he has an intense vocabulary for visuals. Well worth the time you spend with it.

Great street-Lisbon–and David Byrne’s perfect city

I guess we’re all supposed to care what David Byrne thinks makes a perfect city, but I kind of don’t. Our cities are already playspaces for the affluent elite like Byrne. I just can’t get any enthusiasm together for him. Whoopee. How about a halfway decent job and an affordable place to live and some decent air? Nah.

I think what makes a great city–or a great anything–is craft. Check out the craft here:

Environmental Health at USC’s Keck School

One of my colleagues at USC pointed out in my recent post on environmental resources at USC that I neglected to mention the significant work going on at Keck.

Our colleagues in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Keck are looking at environmental issues from the health side, with their landmark study of the health effects of air pollution on children called the USC Children’s Health Study. Andrea Hricko directs communty outreach efforts on environmental health, including a community-academic collaborative focused on reducing the health impacts from ports and goods movement facilities called THE Impact Project (Trade, Health and Environment) Impact Project. These research projects have been key environmental justice studies for the region.

Have I made the case for USC yet?

Powerful women and becoming one yourself

CNNMoney.com released their list of the 50 most powerful women, and once again, I failed to make the list, just like I didn’t win any Nobel prizes this year.

Sigh. You learn to live with these things.

However, I urge you to go over and take a look at these amazing, beautiful, successful women because we all need role models, brazen capitalists or not.*

Towards that end, the Faculty Women’s Interest Group of the American Collegiate Schools of Planning annually prepares a resume book to post on the ACSP website a compilation of the two-page abbreviated resumes of women seeking tenure-earning teaching positions in planning and related programs in North America. Many Chairs and faculty search committees have found previous editions to be valuable in their faculty searches.

This is call for resumes from those with an earned PhD in Planning or in a related field who are just starting their teaching careers. The deadline for receipt of the two-page c.v.’s is October 16th, 2009. If you have any questions, please ask me or Sandi Rosenbloom (rosenblo@u.arizona.edu).

*Given that many of these CEOs are about my age or younger, I may just spend the rest of the day in bed. With some ice cream. Maybe I’ll just reflect on one of my favorite childhood role models, Endora, who never took any crap off of anybody. At least not without turning them into something vile.

Nudging at the University of Singapore

If you haven’t read Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, you really ought to. There’s nothing too amazing here in terms of the economics, but the applied policy and planning implications and the book’s accessibility make it a real contribution to the conversation about how we have to learn to live together in cities. They also keep a very informative blog about policies and designs that help people make pro-social choices.

They posted the other day about Singapore University’s effort to help people make recycling foolproof. It’s worth a glance–contamination in recycling is a huge issue, and while those of us who spend our lives studying the environment focus on recycling* whenever we have materials in our hands, anybody can have a bad, distracted day and throw the wrong stuff in the wrong bin–which, depending on how it’s handled, can contaminate a much larger amount of recycling than you would expect. (Recyclers make their margin working in volume, and they don’t have time to go sorting for where the food contamination in the paper begins and ends, so one slip-up can screw up a lot of recyclable material simply because it disrupts batches).

*A story from my really early teaching career at Virginia Tech. I had a class full of great students, with two guys I refer to fondly as meatheads–good guys, both of them, but they were burned out on school and alienated by what they felt was the assumed liberalism of their fellow environmental students. One of them got up before class and threw his water bottle in the trash instead of recycling. One of his female peers–one of my all-time favorites students who is both unbelievably gifted and of whom I am embarrassingly fond—said “You can put that in the recycling right there.” He just rolled his eyes and sat down, and so she got up, took the bottle out the trash, and hucked it at the back his head where it THUCK! bounced off and into the air in what I am sure was a most gratifying fashion. It was with great difficulty and through guffaws that I had to do my teacherly duty and say “Now, that wasn’t (hee!) the right (haw!) thing (chortle!) to do, now was it?”

Center for Sustainable Cities and other environmental resources at USC

When I recruit PhD students, I often to have to listen to them lecture me about how USC’s program “isn’t centered on the environment” or “social justice” but is, rather, a “libertarian” school. This is very bad thinking. It’s based, I suspect, on a reaction to some of our luminary senior faculty–Peter Gordon, Harry Richardson, and Jim Moore–and challenges they raised to the dominant thinking in urban planning about urban density. Peter Gordon’s edited volume, the Voluntary City, with David Beito and Alexender Tabarrak, lays out their worldview and ideas nicely.

By contrast, some of our other luminaries–like Tridib Banerjee, Dowell Myers, and David Sloane–have spent years building up a planning program that does draw on collective visions of social life, including the social contract in Myers’ book, Immigrants and Boomers.

Besides the real diversity of thought at USC, it’s just plain bad thinking to assume that libertarians do not value the environment or social justice; there are libertarian greens and libertarian theorists of social justice. Diversity of thought, thinking about problems from many perspectives–these have always been to me the key to opening new avenues for research. Libertarians may not be terribly supportive of government-sponsored planning, but many planning functions and tasks occur in the “third sector”–that of nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations–anyway.

There are lot people studying the environment at USC, and they are doing rather amazing things. The Viterbi School of Engineering has launched a new Megacities research program which promises to be very interesting and transformative. The USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies is housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, focused on both science and policy evaluation of ecosystems, including Catalina Island. The Loker HydroCarbon Research Institute is focused on understanding and transforming human usage of hydrocarbons, including oil, natural gas, and coal. In addition, USC’s Energy Institute has created a large, campus-wide umbrella for the study of cutting-edge energy technologies, issues, and policies. The Metrans Transportation Institute has sponsored a lot of research on the environment and is one of the world leaders in examining the environmental effects of freight transport. The Bedrosian Center has sponsored public events and projects surrounding key environmental issues, including the study of mega-regions.

I’m feeling fortunate in that I am getting to be a part of two new, extremely exciting things happening at USC. First off, the Center for Sustainable Cities–one of the reasons I came to USC–is moving to the School of Policy, Planning and Development where I am faculty. The Center has built up an important presence in both the science and the policy aspects of urban environmentalism. It means that our school will be engaging two new research faculty. Josh Newell studies lifecycle costs associated with a wide variety of industries. Hillary Bradbury studies organizational change and corporate adoption of green policies and practices.

These two will join the many SPPD scholars who do work on urban and regional environments:

Adam Rose
Catie Burke
Richard Callahan, who was just appointed to advise the California Environmental Protection Agency
Liz Falletta
Bill Fulton
Gen Giuliano*, director of the Metrans Transportation Institute;
Eric Heikkila
LaVonna Lewis
Dan Mazmanian , Director of the Bedrosian Center
David Sloane
Mark Pisano
Leonard Mitchell, Director of the Center for Economic Development
Elizabeth Currid
Raphael Bostic, who is currently serving the Obama administration in Housing and Urban Development;
Gary Painter;
Richard Green, Director of the Lusk Center;
Shui Yan Tang;
Chris Redfearn;
David Sloane ;
Tridib Banerjee;
Dowell Myers
and then there’s me.

Did I forget anybody? I hope not

The Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, associated with top-flight researcher Manual Pastor, will move out of the CSC and become a freestanding program in its own right. It’s a neat program, too, and if you are interested in environmental and regional justice, you may want to sign up for their newsletter. There are always really interesting research reports coming from that center.

The second major campus-wide change has been the possibility of contributing to a new, campus-wide multi-disciplinary program on Spatial Science. This is a very promising set of ideas that might allow for those who do spatial work–both computational and conceptual–to come together in one wheelhouse.

Very exciting stuff!

*I can’t for the life of me get rid of this underlining in the HTML code. So while Gen is really really special, she’s not supposed to be underlined.

Dowell Myers on Proposition 13

My colleague Dowell Myers has many gifts, but among those is his uncanny ability to identify issues that really matter and look at their root causes. So while many people (like me) fretted about the budget crisis, Dowell was reflecting on the various issues that drove the state of California to its knees. One of these issues is Proposition 13. Randy Crane’s Urban Planning Research Blog* presents a summary of the report here. The full report can be found at his Population Dynamics Research Group website.

One of the things so valuable about the report is that it helps quantify the structural privilege that Prop 13 has created for wealth accumulation among native-born Californians. It’s the upside-down of intergenerational equity in the public sphere: cushioning incomes of established homeowners at the expense of newcomers.

This is particularly egregious given what Prop 13 has done in concert with tax aversion in general: increasing populations and increasing demands for service volumes and qualities (like high speed rail) along with this tax aversion has lead us to an impasse [1, 2, 3]. We want sustainable infrastructure, we want green cities, we want poverty alleviation, but we want somebody else to pay for those things. It took a couple of decades, and (I suspect but can’t prove) produced gobs of economic rent for native Californians, but Prop 13 has always been the apotheosis of unsustainable among a suite of unsustainable public policies which systematically reward individual consumption over collective (read: urban) consumption. The proposition limited the ability of state and local governments to respond to changing service demands and shifted the tax burden to those who can afford to pay (and who are likely to benefit like crazy from things like high speed rail and other infrastructure investments) from those who less able to do so via tax instruments more regressive by virtually every measure than the property tax** [4].

References that informed this post
[1] Steurle E. The Tax Decade: How Taxes Came to Dominate the Public Agenda. New York: The Univeristy Press of America; 1992.

[2] Fischel, W. The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Influence Local Government Taxation,School Finance, and Land-Use Policies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001

[3] J. Yinger. Review of The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Influence Local Government Taxation, School Finance, and Land-Use Policies by William Fischel Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. 45.00cloth; 344pp. Land Economics, 78(4) : 627 − −630, 2002.

[4] Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the tax Systems in All 50 States [Internet]. 2003 ;[cited 2009 Aug 15] Available from: http://www.itepnet.org/whopays.htm

*Horray! Randy’s blog is back up with a new post! I had fretted that Randy Crane’s blog had gone dark, and that would be a shame as it is really a wonderful forum for learning about new research.

**If you ever want to just make me have a stroke, suggest we pay for high speed rail with general retail sales tax or the lottery. We might as well fund school bus programs with cigarette sales on school buses.

Happy Anniversary, Mr. and Mrs. and Miller

Eighteen years ago today, two impossibly young kids went off to the justice of the peace in Iowa City with $30 rings they bought from JC Penney. I look at the pictures of us then, and I can’t believe we are still here and still together. I’d do it all over again–all of it–the student loans, the hideous dumpster couches, the cross-country moves–all of it, but only if Mr. Miller came along.

After all this time, Mr. Miller is still my best friend and a bemused participant in the tsunami—material, intellectual, emotional—that is living with me. He is my Galahad, my Sydney Carton, my Cyrano, and my Mr. Big. The wind beneath my wings? Please–Mr. Miller is the air I breathe, the water I drink, the food I eat, and my conscience. This is not an easy job.

Here’s to forever, old boy.

The best advice–ever–from Jonathan Kozol

I draw on Jonathan Kozol’s work heavily in my writing on reparations and social justice. My friend Sacha, a child welfare scholar who is working in the Obama administration this year as a fellow, introduced me to his ideas several years ago. Recently, he noted he says during his talks with students:

“You won’t believe it at your age, but life goes fast. Use it well.”

Alex Marshall on the Underside of the City

Amongst the pop culture urbanists like Richard Florida and Jane Holtz-Kay, there are some that do good, accessible, interesting work and others that produce self-indulgent jeremiads (not to mention any names cough JamesHowardKuntsler cough …). Alex Marshall belongs in the former category. His book on suburbanization, How Cities Work, is both intelligent, accessible, entertaining, well-written, and delightfully non-histrionic in world full of repetitive screeds about the evils of American suburbs.

His latest book is Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities, and I was reading it for my class on the The Urban Context this past week. Since I am not going to teach the class, I won’t be using it, but I had to talk about it. It’s a wonderful look at 12 cities: New York, Rome, Paris, Moscow, London, San Francisco, Cairo, Syndey, Tokyo, Bejing, Chicago, and Mexico City. Here, he discovers the roots of urban density that go way, way back. He provides a timeline for each city with major events, and the best part: cross-sections of the city by infrastructure era. So for Moscow, you have ascending from the bedrock: the secret subway system, the subway, the secret tunnels, Ivan the Terrible’s secret library and torture chambers, the sewer, water lines, and river culverts.

His thesis is that density doesn’t come through design or through policy. It’s the product of centuries-long urbanization processes. So perhaps my beloved Los Angeles can be forgiven for its settlement pattern given the fact that no planner visiting here in the late 1950s could have foreseen the millions of new people who would arrive, en masse, over the next few decades. Perhaps we should check in after another 100 years and see what LA looks like then.

From Boomburb to Crashtown: Lang and Lefurgy

The Beeb features this story on Bend, Oregon:

The population of Bend quadrupled in under 20 years – from 20,000 to 80,000.

Between 2001 and 2005, the median value of a home in Bend rose by 80%.

By 2005, work was getting underway on 700 new homes each month. Some of the developments are stunning: houses filled with mountain light clinging to craggy hillsides.

Only now:

Downtown Bend looks like a shrine to post-millenial bijou: pricey shoes, scented candles, fancy coffee. There is even a shop specialising in beachwear – despite Bend’s location in the high desert.

But when the US slumped, Bend crashed. The value of a home fell 40% in under two years.

And unemployment nearly quadrupled from around 4% two years ago to 15% in the summer of 2009.

“Everything that Bend produced relied on the credit market”, says Carolyn Eagan, an economist with the Oregon Department of Employment.

My former colleagues at Virginia Tech, Rob Lang and Jennifer Lefurgy, examined the Boomburg phenomenon in their excellent book: Boomburbs: The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities.

And a part of my childhood dies

It’s the end of Reading Rainbow, a victim of the bad economic times and, it sounds, education policy designed to make reading as mechanical as possible, according to John Grant, the show’s producer:

Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading — like phonics and spelling.

“Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read,” Grant says. “You know, the love of reading — [the show] encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read.”

You betcha. Thanks, Bush-era education policy, for reinforcing the notion that something which might be difficult must also be joyless.

LeVar Burton, both as the host of Reading Rainbow and Geordi Laforge, has been one of the great loves of my life.* Along with reading, I should add.

From happier times, Burton singing the Reading Rainbow theme.

Maybe I’ll spend this weekend reading, because I can, and it is joyful.

*Have you ever seen an actor with prettier eyes?

Disaster and social justice philanthropy

It’s way too hot for me to do any of my own thinking today (are you noticing a trend of me not thinking? Don’t tell anybody.) Instead, HT to Angela Eikenberry this morning for tweeting this very interesting blog post on disaster grants-making.

NPR’s series on HSR

I traveled back to LA from DC today, and did a whole bunch of work. So I am tired. I wish you all a safe and happy Labor Day, and leave you with a link to NPR’s series on High Speed Rail, featuring David Levinson, of the Transportationist blog (oh, and he’s a chaired professor of civil engineering and the director of a well-respected research institute at the University of Minnesota with a cv longer than the wait for the Sears Tower elevator, but his blog has much less math than most of his papers, so I’m going with it…*)

*If my dean is reading this and is tempted to draw any specious comparisons between David and me, I should note that the weather is a lot nicer in LA than it is in Minnesota, and David has more reason to stay inside and work than I do. Just saying.

In defense of fuzzy concepts

I spent yesterday at the Transportation Research Board’s symposium on equity in transport, for the most part listening to public officials complain that the word “equity” means too many things to too many people and thus isn’t useful in making decisions.

Oh, bootyhootyhootyhoo. You mean it’s hard to adjudicate equity claims in the public sphere and you have to contend with context and history and values instead of falling back on what feels, to them, as the more objectively quantifiable efficiency claims that derive from economics.

Most of the colleagues that I genuinely respect think that sustainability is the same thing: it’s a fantasy concept that marries the social agendas of the progressive left but doesn’t really function as a real concept. There’s too many internal tradeoffs, they say, that advocates do not recognize, so the term means all things to all people.[1] And some very good sustainability theorists argue that these critics are somewhat right because in practice, people love the environment and work hard for it in the political realm, while social justice–where there is much less consensus–is often “tacked on” to the discussion after the big decisions are made.[2]

I wanted to read the sustainable transportation literature for my PhD comprehensive exams, for example, but the faculty member in charge of the seminar would not let me. It’s a fuzzy concept, she said. I resisted, but I lost of course, and I wound up reading in environmental economics instead. It was good for me, and I learned a lot, but then I had to go back and catch up on the sustainable transportation research because that’s where I wanted to work.

The problem with dismissing fuzzy concepts, it seems to me, is that the cutting edge of anything is made up of fuzzy concepts until people put their brains into it and start working. To Mill, economics was a fuzzy concept. I’ve been hearing sustainability dismissed as a fuzzy concept for at least 10 years now, but it hasn’t gone away–and for good reasons. It hasn’t died off because it contains concepts that really matter to people, and they want to work to a social practice that doesn’t sacrifice social justice at the altar of environmental protection or economic growth or vice versa. The challenge of trying to meet all of these pressing social needs has been fruitful; I think sustainability can be credited with prompting all sorts of green innovations that we really value, even if we never achieve an ideal.

So, in a word, suckitup. The politician’s job is deal with competing equity claims and contestation of rights in the public sphere. We don’t treat everybody’s equity claim as equally important, no matter how much the “haves” and the “have mores” make self-serving claims about it. We don’t have to believe them when they make these claims. We just have to have the thrassos to stand up to them and the intelligence to make a compelling, more rigorously argued basis for why their equity claim is being laid aside in favor of others with more validity. Some arguments are better than others, believe it or not, folks, even if those arguments are philosophical and subjective rather than based on something you can pull out of your economics toolkit. Economics is a powerful discipline in public policy; in the neoliberal world we live in, it’s almost the only language that gets spoken. But it’s partial, for heaven’s sakes. Can’t you see the validity of a concept that doesn’t fall in the bailiwick of one discipline?

Manuscripts that informed this post:

[1] B. Jickling. Why I don’t want my children to be educated in sustainable development: Sustainable belief. Trumpeter, 1994. Journal Article

[2] J. Agyeman, R. Bullard, B. Evans, J. Agyeman, R. Bulllard, and B. Evans. Introduction. In Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003. Book, Section.

Why do parents drive kids to school when they could walk?

UNC’s Noreen MacDonald has a very nice manuscript in the upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association:

From their abstract:

We found that 75% of parents driving their children less than 2 miles to school said they did this for convenience and to save time. Nearly half of parents driving their children less than 2 miles did not allow their child to walk to school without adult supervision. Accompanying a child on a walk to school greatly increases the time the household devotes to such a trip. Few Safe Routes to School programs effectively address issues of parental convenience and time constraints. [1]

So here we have it. The good thing about Noreen and her co-author is that they won’t allow the interpretation here to turn into some working-mom-blame (you think I kid; I have heard public health people say that moms entering the workforce have contributed to childhood obesity because more meals are prepared away from home and the children are outside walking less. This may be, but nobody’s blaming working fathers for this, now are they? Let’s think about how this problem is framed.)

One of the things about the manuscript that makes me wonder: 2 miles is a long way for a young kid to walk–so yeah, it’s going to take some time. I wonder if they were to go finer-scaled–five blocks or so away from school–whether they would get some new insights on why those parents are or are not walking their kids to school.

[1] N. C. McDonald and A. E. Aalborg. Why parents drive children to school: Implications for safe routes to school programs. Journal of the American Planning Association, 75(3):331–342, 2009.

Chevy on Ebay

So what do people think of Chevy’s decision to put cars on Ebay? I am extremely interested in how this works out, in they have both the “Buy it now” options and the “make offer” options. Does this just represent a new model of negotiating? Or is it a dumb move?

Tenure dossier creation is an ungratifying process thus far

Well, last night I sent Andy over to a friend’s house because I am so frantically trying to put together this dossier that I couldn’t take the time away. I missed sushi–LA sushi–for this.

Yes, I know it’s the last minute to be printing things out, thank you for pointing that out.

When I was UCLA, Brian Taylor was going through tenure, and I was one of his graduate students. While I sort of sympathized in my clueless, grad student way, you just don’t understand this until you’re in it. And then I think maybe like childbirth you forget the pain. Anyway, Brian was remarkably gracious and sweet to me, despite the stress and his father’s declining health, and had I been in his position I would have shaken me until I frothed.

Here is my assembled wisdom:

1) Do not assume that the Staples on Fig is going to have a binder big enough for your manuscripts. I would say this is a testimony to my big big productive self, but it’s more to do with the fact that last week was the first week of classes and Staples has nothing left on its shelves.

2) The good news: you can watch tv while you print. Did you know all the Dr. Babes on SyFy got their PhDs, tenure, and breast implants all at the same time? I know: I just saw it on Mega-Shark v. Octopus. Laugh if you will; it was awesome: a shark jumped out of the sky and ate an airplane. I have a new flying phobia now. Then there was Spring Break Shark Attack where the evil date rapist got eaten by sharks, and where they learned nothing from Jaws about not keeping the shark bait attached to the little ship with the put-put engines. Then there was Kraken, Tentacles of the Deep, with the Dr. Babe with fabulous Farrah Fawcett hair.

3) I am lonely and listless without teaching. Don’t tell my dean or I’ll never get another course release.

4) Do not try to assemble your dossier at the last minute in a loft that contains a six month-old kitten. There will be anguish.

5) Printing all this crud and putting it together takes longer than formatting your dissertation.

6) I am less worried about not getting tenure than I am by the deepening feeling that the big challenges seem to be behind me. Making full doesn’t seem relevant or challenging or interesting–I don’t know why. These first years have been without a doubt among the most enjoyable years of my life thus far, eclipsed perhaps by graduate school. Perhaps. I love what I do, and there is a weird part of me that loves the do-or-die performance aspect of it.* My icky competitive nature is the reason why I pursue grant money: I like the race; I like to win and I hate to lose, and all attempts to make me a better sport and more ladylike throughout my childhood failed–thank God.

But I like the race even better than the outcome. Tired as I am–and I am tired–I had fun. I guess now I am supposed to be an expert. Experts travel around, give talks, write “state of the field” papers and whatnot. I don’t really like doing those things. The best hours are the hours alone with the data and the ideas. I’d give any number of invited talks for a fresh dataset at this point. I don’t think I am supposed to feel this way.

6) The Staples in Pasadena by the Gold Line is also near Bev Mo, aka “heaven.”

7) It is remarkably comforting to talk to my Galileo finger puppet. He thinks I’m going to get tenure.

I think I’m proud of my binder. I think.

*Oh it will hurt if the answer is “die” but even if it is, I didn’t take a safe professional route; I did what I wanted, which was to write, think, read, and talk about ideas for a living. I’ve had a blast, and I wouldn’t change a thing. Well, I would have listened to Randy, Gen, and David more and mouthed off less.

Minimal squawking and government capture

We’re behind with real work* here at SC&T Headquarters**, so we’ll talk about papers I wish I had written.

The most recent issue of the American Economic Review has this really interesting manuscript on “minimal squawking.”

Leaver, Clare 2009. “Bureaucratic Minimal Squawk Behavior: Theory and Evidence from Regulatory Agencies.” American Economic Review, 99(3): 572–607.
DOI:10.1257/aer.99.3.572

This paper develops a model in which a desire to avoid criticism prompts otherwise public-spirited bureaucrats to behave inefficiently. Decisions are taken to keep interest groups quiet and to keep mistakes out of the public eye. The policy implications of this “minimal squawk” behavior are at odds with the view that agencies should be structured to minimize the threat of “capture.” An empirical test using data from US State Public Utility Commissions rejects the capture hypothesis and is consistent with the squawk hypothesis: longer PUC terms of office are associated with a higher incidence of rate reviews and lower household electricity bills. (JEL D73, L51, L97, L98)

*Read: my tenure dossier and my fantasy football picks
**Read: an extremely messy loft in downtown Los Angeles

Should option value count in rail benefit valuation?

One of my favorite selections from The Onion:

I am not sure how the Onion puts these things together, and they are often tasteless, but this particular satire so nicely captures the many conundrums for transit policy and planning in the US: everybody loves it, very few people outside of its largest markets actually use it. Let’s take a look:

Now, there are some very good systems in this chart, and yet NYC kicks the cookies out of every body else.

Between 1984 and 2006, transit supply as measured by vehicle miles increased by 35%. Supply of the various rail services increased much more rapidly than bus, with light rail more than tripling. Over the same period transit ridership as measured by unlinked passenger trips increased by 13.5%. This number is often cited as good news for transit. In all cases ridership grew less than service supply, meaning that over the period service productivity declined: unlinked trips per vehicle mile dropped from 2.55 to 2.14, and the share of operating cost covered by fare revenue declined from 39% in 1996 to 33% in 2006. Now some systems, like the DC system, are much higher in fare recoveries, and others lower [1].

There are many potential reasons for productivity decline. We could argue that

a) there is a lot of unproductive transit spending going on;

b) there is a time lag between investment, service quality improvements, and demand responses–otherwise known as a “network effect”–you have to get a critical point in geographic coverage and service quality before demand really solidifies for the system (discussed by Jim Moore, one of my colleagues here [2]);

c) it’s not clear to me that there have been productivity gains in passenger transport in general (highway, airline, or transit); it may be that rising costs throughout the sector (from land acquisition in particular) caused percentage increases in costs to outstrip percentage patronage gains.

Now, part of the reason for increased spending is that regional agencies control more of the planning and programming than they did 30 years ago, and local/regional sources of revenue have also increased. It makes sense that investment in regional systems, like rail transit, goes up under those conditions, even if the spending is less productive than we might hope in terms of overall welfare [3,4].

Nonetheless, the environmental-transit connection has been made convincingly in the democratic imagination if not so much empirically. I suspect that this connection has led, further, to an increase in option value for systems like the HSR and urban rail among those who are unlikely to take it–ever.

Let’s think about what that means in terms of benefits. Let’s compare this from the Onion’s satire:

“Expanding mass transit isn’t just a good idea, it’s a necessity,” Holland said. “My drive to work is unbelievable. I spend more than two hours stuck in 12 lanes of traffic. It’s about time somebody did something to get some of these other cars off the road.”

Ok, now this isn’t option value. This is somebody who would, if other people actually use the transit supplied, enjoy congestion reduction benefits. Those we know how to capture. We have cost estimates for carbon emissions reductions, though they vary widely. But we don’t necessarily have option value, which is trickier, and I think relevant to costing out mega-projects like HSR. So what I am asking here: Is it a legitimate benefit to count people’s willingness to pay for HSR, for example, simply because they want the US to have it “just like Japan and Europe”? It’s a symbolic value rather than a use value.

I should be clear about definitions. Option value concerns individual’s willingness to pay for something they may never use, but they like having the option or they like the fact that whatever it is exists. And option value has been calculated and used in economic analysis for a variety of things: one of the notable uses of option value occurred when assessing damages from the Exxon Valdez spill off the coast of Alaska [5] So one cost occurred through devastated fishing; another through lost tourism revenues; and finally, using contingent valuation, a loss to those of us (like me) who have no intention of going to Alaska but who value intact ecosystems in the abstract.

So for rail there would be the direct user benefits/costs, nontraded benefits/costs (emissions, etc), and value placed on option. What do you think?

[1] Giuliano, G. and L. Schweitzer. 2009. “Her Money or Her Time: A Look at Contemporary Transportation Policy from a Gendered Perspective.” Forthcoming for the National Academies of Science Transportation Research Board.

[2] T. A. Rubin, J. E. Moore, II, and S. Lee. Ten myths about US urban rail systems. Transport Policy,
6(1):57–73, 1999 Doi: doi:10.1016/S0967-070X(98)00032-8.

[3] C. Winston and V. Maheshri. On the social desirability of urban rail transit systems. Journal of Urban Economics, 62(2):362–382, Sept. 2007, doi:10.1016/j.jue.2006.07.002.

[4] P. Nelson, A. Baglino, W. Harrington, E. Safirova, and A. Lipman. Transit in washington, DC: current benefits and optimal level of provision. Journal of Urban Economics, 62(2):231–251, Sept. 2007.

[5] R. T. Carson, R. C. Mitchell, M. Hanemann, R. J. Kopp, S. Presser, and P. A. Ruud. Contingent valuation and lost passive use: Damages from the Exxon valdez oil spill. Environmental and Resource Economics, 25(3):257–286, 07 2003.

Gen Giuliano on Freight for the National Academies of Science

One of the great things about working at USC is that I get to work with Gen Giuliano, who is every bit as nice and generous as an everyday colleague as she is to meet at conferences.* She led the following effort for the Transportation Research Board:

Funding Options for Freight Transportation Projects

From the website:

TRB’s Special Report 297: Funding Options for Freight Transportation Projects explores ways to pay for projects that expand freight capacity or reduce the costs of freight transportation. The committee that produced the report found that present finance arrangements are inadequate for maintaining and improving freight transportation system performance. The report calls for finance reforms that promote productivity gains by targeting investment to projects with the greatest economic benefit and by encouraging efficient use of facilities.

*The only caveat is that she makes me work harder than I want to, which is to say she makes me work, which is more than I generally want to. Also, she’s outlandishly productive and makes the rest of us look bad. Don’t look at me. I do my best to try to distract her, but I am just one woman.

Beautiful people on bicycles

Today The Sartorialist features fashionable people on their bikes or with their bikes. How come I don’t look like this on my bike? I just look lumpen and sweaty!

Service Quality Improvements in Rail

My wonderful colleague, Richard Green, discusses Robert Samuelson and Paul Krugman on whether high speed rail is actually worth what we will pay for it.

Richard Green captures the essence of the problem: he liked the train when he had it, but he is good at math. It is much easier to loudly advocate for high-speed rail if you can’t do math very well. Paul Krugman can, in fact, do math extremely well, and that’s why he cherrypicks the one location in the United States where HSR probably makes sense at this point: the US’s Northeast corridor, which is nothing but pavement from Boston to northern Virginia. It’s possible to look at the numbers, realize they are lousy, and still advocate for the project: we do it all the time. But it hurts your finer feelings if you are an analyst at heart.

One of my favorite colleagues at Berkeley is fond of saying “we don’t evaluate rail merely on cost-benefit analysis.” When pressed, she claims that rail somehow transcends the methodology, that there is no way to quantify how it revolutionizes a metro area. I’m the first to acknowledge that cost-benefit is a limited methodology, but honestly: if I ever hit up against a ready-made excuse for building bad projects, it’s the idea that your mode transcends cost-benefit calculus. Yes, I do think rail can have a powerful effect on urban land and human settlement patterns, but not all of those are positive. Rail makes sense in contexts, and it can set contexts, but it’s not like we can necessarily recreate San Francisco or DC using infrastructure alone. If she argued that we do a bad job costing out cost and benefits? Sure, I’ll buy that. But no; the literal interpretation is that what she wants transcends mere analysis. We’d all like to think that.

It seems to me what advocates are saying is that rail provides service quality improvements, and I do think that these are undercounted in cost-benefit analysis. Note that this does not save bad projects from John Kain [1} or Don Pickerell's [2] infamous critiques: if you are offering service quality improvements and you’re not getting ridership, you don’t get to count the service quality improvement as a benefit (nor your emissions saved, etc etc).**

If it is the case that high speed rail offers service quality improvements, then it should be possible to quantify how much passengers value those service quality improvements by examining the cross elasticities between airfare and trainfare in countries where air and HSR are competitors. I don’t believe the California HSR plan does so, though the business plan suggests fares will be competitive with Southeast.

See? Those of you who can do math are trying to rough out how even a $34 billion project (let alone an $84 billion project) is going to retire its bond debt at $100 a ticket, and you’re getting a dull pain behind your left eyebrow, because even if you value carbon emissions savings at $200/ton, you don’t actually get a revenue stream from saved carbon emissions. This is what I mean. We all like trains–that’s not the issue. It’s that dull pain behind the eye you can’t get rid of.

I think one of the reasons why we haven’t done service quality calculation: we would have to be frank about the fact that HSR is high-end, luxury service way more like air travel than taking the car. People like me who have money are on planes (and HSR in Europe) all the time: people like Joe the Plumber (yeah, I know, I know) are not. And it’s not smart at this point of the HSR debate to be upfront of what we are proposing to build here: an expensive service for people like me rather than people like my mother in Iowa who never go anywhere and who would faint at the $350 ticket price it would take to get them to Chicago, where they would faint at the prices.

**And one of the irritating things about light rail and heavy rail is that ridership past a given point degrades service quality. One of the reasons I love the Gold Line in LA is that I can always get a seat. Great for me. Bad from an operations standpoint.

Manuscripts that informed this post:

[1] J. Kain. Deception in dallas: strategic misrepresentation in rail transit promotion and evaluation. Journal of the American Planning Association, 56:184–196, 1990. Journal Article.

[2] D. H. Pickrell. A desire named streetcar: fantasy and fact in rail transit planning. Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, 19(3):385–482, 1992. Journal Article.

[3] B. Flyvbjerg, N. Bruzelius, and W. Rothengatter. Mega-Projects and Risks: An Anatomy of Ambition. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Book, Whole.

[4] Theodore M. Porter. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. 311 pages

The sort of day I wouldn’t wish on anybody

1. My CAREER proposal was sent back to me without review because of an administrative glitch and the fact I didn’t catch it prior to resubmission. Ouch. This was my second time out of the chute, but since I am going up for tenure this year, I won’t be able to resubmit. Unless I don’t get tenure.

2. I have gotten nothing done besides deal with this particular crisis.

3. I got in trouble for messing up my e-certification, which means the university might not pay my students. I love my students. Don’t pay ME as punishment: I’m the one who messed up and I, at least, have a savings account, but my students depend on their paychecks. Don’t punish them because I can’t figure out your byzantine online system.

4. The frosting fell off my cupcake and onto the floor. The dogs were happy, as I just let them have it because it was vanilla.

Gloom, despair and agony on me

My instructor for a queer theory class 800 years ago told me that Grandpa Jones, of Hee Haw fame and legitimate Nashville talent in his own right, was one of the original activists at the Stonewall? But I have never been able to verify this interesting little factoid.

Slow Food, Julia Child, and James Bond

I am afraid I am not necessarily on board with the locavore food trend. I like farmer’s markets as much as the next person, but you’re taking caviar and champagne out of my cold, dead hands, ya got me? The nice thing about slow food, raw food, local food, or other types of food planning is that you don’t have to go at it with 100 percent zeal to enjoy either the health or the flavor benefits. My favorite new writing on these subjects comes from my former colleagues at Virginia Tech, Heike Mayer and Paul Knox:

Knox, Paul and Heike Mayer. 2009. Small Town Sustainability: Economic, Social, and Environmental Innovation. Birkhäuser Basel.

On another note, I have loved Julia Child since I was a little girl; her free-spirited fun attitude; her unapologetically large frame that would have sent other tv personalities starving-to-a-size-6 syndrome; her long marriage.

In the relentlessly self-improving United States, we have largely taken the fun out of food. It should be feared, controlled, and efficient. Think about it: Ian Fleming’s James Bond loved food, sex, women, gambling, fine things, and risk. Now, James Bond has sex and kills people, with fancy gadgets and explosions. Sean Connery’s and Roger Moore’s Bond knew that you eat fresh figs whenever you can get them, that champagne should be chilled, not freezing, and was fussy about his drink.* You think about the Bonds since then, and the largely joyless way they go about conquering women and bad guys. Shouldn’t all that sex and travel be more fun? In some ways, this change in Bond exemplifies a larger social change: the imperative to consume has made consumption joyless. Bringing that franchise back to Casino Royale was a good idea if you can get past the torture scenes.

Here’s some fun with food on a Monday, brought to you by Julia:

Julia on MacDonald’s French Fries
Julia with a peep of chickens

*There is some debate about the shaken not stirred question on the martini, and some have argued this was a silly affectation, not a sign that Fleming’s Bond was a connoisseur. No. A shaken martini is properly referred to as a “Bradford,” but I suspect that Fleming was a smart enough marketer to know that most of his readers wouldn’t be cocktail-literate enough to recognize a Bradford. Shaken and stirred martinis tend to be pretty different drinks, and unless you are dealing with a good bartender (which are in short supply anymore, like good secretaries), shaken tends to yield a better vodka drink in my opinion. It’s too easy to do a bad mix on a stirred drink with a rushed/careless/palateless bartender.**

**And another thing about local foods: no cocktails, and I’m not giving them up either. Did you ever notice how much people drank on Bewitched? Samantha would make a whole pitcher of martinis for just the two of them–just two people. I mean, it’s not like they were expecting Larry Tate or Uncle Arthur every night. Damn. A whole pitcher is a lot for two people. No wonder Darrin was prone to imagine his wife could do magic.

Wonderful people have rag-arms

At yesterday’s Dodger game, a whole group of cancer researchers and organizers threw out the first pitch. It was wonderful. However, most of them are rag-arms, and so the pitches went every which where, going hither and yon, with long-suffering players chasing the balls down. It looked more like popcorn being popped than first pitches.

Go friars, go Giants. The Rockies are on our heels, and I just hate the Cards on the principle.

Orange County Transit Meltdown: Did people really not see this coming?

My brilliant friend Allison Yoh is quoted in this article from the Los Angeles TImes:

From a budget surplus of $12 million in 2004, the OCTA is now facing a $300-million shortfall over the next five years. Fares rose in January, but that just drove riders away, resulting in even lower revenue. Cuts last year and those planned through March 2010 will reduce bus service by 30%, dropping back to 1998 levels. There were 42 layoffs in April, and additional layoff notices were sent out this month to 51 employees. Officials anticipate another 192 positions will be eliminated in March.

For years, the OCTA and other transit agencies have benefited from a strong economy, which provided sales-tax revenue and state funding. Economists had estimated the sales-tax revenue would continue to grow about 5% per year — one year it actually grew by 11%. That 5% annual increase was projected out into the agency’s comprehensive business plan from 2006 through to 2026.

Ok, I’m actually willing to make an argument for sales taxes specifically spent on public transit, even though sales taxes are in general a volatile tax instrument. Such a tax-and-revenue allocation scheme can, in fact, be progressive even though the out-of-pocket costs are regressive. However, they projected 5 percent annual increase through 2026. Let me repeat this: through 2026. Am I reading that right? That’s a 20 year forecast which suggests in 20 years receipts will approximately double in a built-out county.

There’s part of me that wants to write a paper on how the boom mentality affected policy analysis. Paul Knox and I recently wrote a grouchy piece for Housing Policy Debate about how the real estate boom deluded planners into assuming that metropolitan form was something that they could shape in their hands like clay on potter’s wheel simply because anything that got built got bought and occupied no matter what and developers couldn’t build fast enough. Now what do we do given that we’ve convinced ourselves that re-development is the key to urban and environmental reform if development has slowed to a near standstill? Rejoice when places like Flint decide to make their suburbs ghost-towns? That’s what we got?

This forecast of OCTA’s business folks strikes me as much of the same “business cycle what business cycle?” thinking–and from economists no less. How old are these economists and where were they trained? 2026 is a long time, and the first rule of public sector budgeting is that sales tax receipts are hella volatile. Places that emphasize sales taxes–like Arizona–always look like geniuses during up times (lookit our great services and our low property taxes! Aren’t we swell?) and then overnight they have no revenue cushion against lower consumer activity.

Even if nobody could predict that this particular downturn was going to happen, it was bad forecasting to assume that there would simply be no downtowns in a two-decade time period. I suppose, after the 11 percent increase in one year, that the 5 percent seemed like a reasonable average to use, but…not really. Given that interest rates on basic savings accounts were not much more than that, this was irresponsible forecasting. It’s kind of mean of me to be Monday-morning quarterbacking here, but…this was bad.

The consequences are steep, too, as the story shows. A $0.25 fare increase is a huge percentage increase in transit fares, concomitant with service quality decreases: ridership can’t do anything BUT fall under those circumstances (paired with an soaring unemployment rate, which causes ridership to fall because people don’t have jobs to go to). It’s a sad time for transit.

Calatrava’s stunning bike and pedestrian bridge for the city of Calgary

You can see the design here. I really like the use of color, though when I first heard about the plan I thought it would look kitchy. It doesn’t.

Until we are all safe, there is no justice or sustainability

This story in the LA Times breaks the heart. Two dozen teenage girls, vanished. The logical conclusion, given the location close to major US and Mexico markets and the crap police response, is that they are being sold into prostitution.

I wonder if the people who are doing this would be considered as dangerous as Al Qaeda? A shooting rampage or a bomb that killed two dozen would be spectacular news, but a story of the systematic immiseration of these young women and their families appeared quietly in the LA Times. Kudos to Ken Ellingwood for showing that somebody at the Times still cares about real news instead of what Michael Jackson’s cousin’s dogsitter was doing the day Michael died.

Nice moment

Today we had PhD orientation. I was sitting along a row with Elizabeth Currid (star), David Suarez (star), Jenny Schuetz (star) and Nicole Esparza (star). With me,* that makes the whole collection of junior faculty in my school, save one. Martin Krieger burst out: “It’s so nice seeing you all together! It’s like I’m looking at the future of my department! And it looks…just wonderful!”

You have to use a lot of exclamation points with Martin quotes because he’s from Brooklyn. In addition to being one of my favorite colleagues, he’s right: my fellow junior faculty are pretty darned awesome.

*I’m past my sell-by date as junior faculty.

How much is too much to pay for mobility–Part II

One of the things that makes me wonder about people’s hysteria over congestion charging: why don’t these same people ever argue that it is wrong to charge for public transit?

Now, to be fair: transit enjoys a large out-of-pocket price advantage over owning a car, but in most places in the US, the car provides better service quality and higher mobility. And it’s no use arguing quality because much of that argument comes down to taste preferences. I prefer not driving because I once had a bad car accident and I never want that responsibility again. I’m incompetent. But that means as a transit rider and walker I’m intimately aware of the service quality problems even with good transit systems. And I’ve ridden systems around the world. No, you don’t have to drive with transit, but if it’s no fun sitting in traffic, chances are you’re still sitting, in air conditioning with some privacy if you are in your car. No such luck with congested transit, where you can be sweltering and hanging on a pole next to somebody you’d rather not share a sidewalk with less alone the same 16 cubic feet of air.

However, I digress. Service qualities aren’t the issue. The issue is why people think it’s unfair to expect people to pay for freeway service when they seldom think it’s unfair to expect people to pay for public transit.

Putting some numbers on the example further illustrates the point. A patron of Orange County’s SR91 HOT lanes pays on average $1600 a year in user fees if they use the facility 8 times a weekduring the very highest morning and afternoon peak charges; if they only use the lane for 6 trips a week and move to an hour off peak in either direction, they can reduce that amount to only about $800 a year . Peak-period, peak-direction freeway commuters are more likely than commuters in general to come from middle- and upper-income households; as such, the lowest income users who regularly commute in the SR91 Express Lanes come from households with average annual incomes of about$40,000.

By contrast, someone who buys a regular monthly pass for Los Angeles County-wide transit service pays $744 a year; a region-widepass costs $881 a year—about the same as the HOT lane charges. And that’s for one adult: two adults put the figure at $1488 because in transit there are no economies for multiple adults (whereas you can stick two adults in a car and drive on the SR91). A monthly pass for the New York MTA costs over $1,000 a year. Local bus and subway services for Boston MTBA patrons are about $720 a year, and commuter rail passes range in price from $720 to $3000 a year. These costs can get higher if a patron is unable to pay out in lump sums for monthly passes; what costs monthly pass riders $744 a year in Los Angeles costs weekly pass purchasers $884. These are not small charges when the poverty line sits at $18,000 for a family of three in the US; the cost of a NY MTA pass runs at 0.06 percent of total income there—much higher than some gas tax and toll schemes

My point here is not that it is cheaper to go by car: you’ve still got payments, maintenance, and insurance, etc. My point is that we worry about low-income motorists having to face charges but nobody seems to think anything of what we charge for transit. Yes, when transit fares go up, there is usually some discussion of what that means for impoverished riders, but charging for transit is routine while charging for freeways is seen as deviant. I find this weird. Of the major metropolitan areas, San Francisco is the only one I know of that has lifeline pricing for passes.

Here’s one of the very few recent studies on the cost incidence of transit fares.

Nuworsoo C, Golub A, Deakin E. Analyzing equity impacts of transit fare changes: Case study ofAlameda-Contra Costa Transit, California [Internet]. Evaluation and Program Planning. In Press, Corrected Proof, Available: here

So how much is too much user charge for mobility?

I’ve subjected you to numerous rants about transport finance–including the fact that I think we over-invest in this sector–along with a question that haunts me…viz: who pays if transport system users don’t?

I sat down and frittered around with some numbers. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy derived some estimates for the out-of-pocket cost burdens for all major US taxes. I entered their data into a spreadsheet and then compared the estimated total burden for low-income households (which includes existing excise taxes) with estimates of a) system-wide HOT lane proposal for Washington, DC and b) a comprehensive, zone-based toll estimated for Paris designed to cut traffic by 25% (a big-ish toll, about $6 per zone). This is the result. The expected increase in total burden from HOT lanes is pretty small; the zone-based toll, however, is pretty large. c) and d) show the estimates of emissions charges compared to total tax burden. Those are really pretty marginal in the larger scheme of things.

Keep in mind these are just out-of-pocket costs. When you add in the benefits of congestion and emissions reductions, some estimates find progressive social welfare gains from pricing, even before you count revenue allocations. London’s cordon toll is pretty high and covers a fairly large swath of the urban environment. But the measured reductions in emissions following the cordon has resulted in sizable and steeply progressive air quality benefits for lower income areas of London.

So if we price the freeway, will the poor suffer? There is no easy answer to this question.

The seasons of the academic year

Academic life is governed by seasons and, I am afraid, goodbyes. August hits, and it’s moving season. My dear friend and arm’s length student is moving away to a wonderful opportunity in Washington DC, and another, very promising student–the most promising student I have ever had–has chosen to leave our PhD program for another.

In a life as full of goodbyes and moves as mine has been, you learn to live with these things, including being the one left behind. But that doesn’t make you any less sad. You have children so that they will leave you someday, and you teach students for the same reasons. These are not rational things to do. You do them out of gratitude for all the teachers who invested in you, recklessly giving you their time, energy, and ideas, and for the random moments when you get to see your students living up to their potential. As Pascal noted, the heart has reasons which reason can not understand.

We go back to classes again this week and start all over again.

Equity Issues in Financing Transportation Symposium

Registration is free, but required for attendance. See the link here.

Equity Issues in Financing Transportation Symposium

Keck Center of the National Academies
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Hosted by Committee on Equity Implications of
Alternative Transportation Finance Mechanisms
Preliminary Agenda

8:30am – 8:45am Welcome and Introduction, Joseph Schofer, committee chair

8:45am – 10:15am Talks by authors of expert papers commissioned by the Committee

•Passing the Buck: Who Gains and Who Loses from Taxes and Other

Fund-raising Ideas? Sarah West, Associate Professor, Macalester

College, St. Paul, Minnesota

• Equity Consequences of Current and Emerging Transportation Finance Schemes, Lisa Schweitzer, Assistant Professor, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

• Remedies for Problems of Transportation Equity, David King, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University, New York, New York

10:15am – 10:45am BREAK

10:45am – 11:15am Transportation Financing Mechanisms, Land Use Patterns, and Equity,
John Douglas Hunt, Professor of Transportation Engineering and
Planning, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada

11:15am – 11:45am International Experience with Equity Issues in Transportation Finance,
Peter Bonsall, Professor of Transport Planning, University of Leeds,England

Noon – 1:00pm LUNCH

1:00pm – 1:30pm How Do Equity Concerns Influence Public Acceptance of Alternative
Financing Mechanisms? Robert Mitchell, committee member

1:30pm – 2:15pm Equity in Surface Transport Finance: A Political Perspective, Alan
Altshuler, Distinguished Service Professor and Stanton Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, Harvard University, Cambridge,Massachusetts

2:15pm – 2:45pm BREAK

2:45pm – 4:15pm Presentation and Discussion of Case Studies
Four guest presenters will each describe and discuss a transportation
project in which they were involved in the decision-making process. To
the extent that equity issues were a factor in the decision-making
process, these issues will be discussed in the talk.
Presenters:
• Mike Krusee, former chair, Transportation Committee,
Texas House of Representatives
• Senator Bruce Starr, Oregon State Senate, District 15
• James Dinegar, President and CEO, Greater Washington
Board of Trade
• Bruce Schaller, Deputy Commissioner for Planning and
Sustainability, New York City Department of Transportation
Discussant:
• Mortimer Downey, President, Mort Downey Consulting, LLC, and
Senior Advisor, Parsons Brinckerhoff

4:15pm – 5:15pm Open Discussion

5:15pm – 6:15pm RECEPTION

One for the “I don’t get it” column

One big trend for this fall is the “boyfriend” blazer. Now, I sat still for the “boyfriend” jean and even the “skinny jeans” which look wretched on anybody who isn’t Mick Jagger circa 1972, but “boyfriend blazer” has me stumped. Blazers have always been menswear in general. Yes, women wear blazers, but it is a clothing item that has been moved over into women’s wear as an adaptation to work clothing, framed as masculine attire.

The fashion industry tends to act like women over a size 4 don’t exist. And while I don’t engage in saying nasty things about women’s bodies at any size, it is a basic fact that women under a size 4 haven’t got much of a reason to require different blazer tailoring, if you understand what I mean. So what this “new” trend is telling me is that we need menswear-inspired menswear. Does this make anybody else’s head swim?

Is cash for clunkers good policy?

After a bout with the stomach flu, I’m actually feeling kind of human this morning, so I thought I might chat a little about cash for clunkers.

Matt Kahn writes about the program here and here. Slate does a simple calculation here. Matt concludes that the cash for clunkers hurts low-income car buyers in both countries, by effectively setting a price floor for used vehicles, and in the second group of calculations, he works through the carbon return from the program.

I don’t know who designed the program as it was implemented. I was an advocate for a much more limited, spatially targeted version of cash for clunkers prior to this, as it would be very nice to get beaters off the road for local air quality benefits. I also supported a much lower buy-out level, with the supposition being that you’d switch to transit rather than simply exchanging one car for another. Instead, the existing program is targeted towards people who purchased SUVs, woke up when gas prices spiked, and are now looking to offload their bigger cars. And this program does nothing to target gross polluters. Improving mpg does address both local and global emissions, but not as much as explicitly targeting gross polluters would. When I advocated for fleet replacement policies years ago, I was told we couldn’t “do this because it would hurt the poor.” It’s kind of interesting that this existing program, which creates a much higher price floor, has been almost entirely uncontested based on equity grounds.

There has always been some concern about what would happen for low-income motorists when the SUVs began to dominate the secondary market for automobiles. The expectation was that gas guzzlers would so increase the operating costs of motoring that low-income motorists would have to scale back usage. We may be changing that calculus with this program somewhat.

Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City

Well, as I am apparently not finishing my revisions with any alacrity, nor am I organizing my work effort, nor am I, apparently, sleeping, I might as well be reading. I’ve been reading Who’s Your City by Richard Florida, and I wish it were good but it is not.

Celebrity Siting

Since I’ve just gotten a boatload of comments on a draft I need to finish, we are once again in light content mode here, but for all the kvetching I do about living in downtown, I have to say:

I SAW ROD STEWART IN FAMIMA!!!

I’m pretty sure. He had his signature highlighted hair, was very trim, gave me a wink, and had a lovely English accent. Gah–no wonder he’s marrying models 40 years younger than he is–man looks GOOD for his age Much better than on screen.

Heartbreaking news from Taiwan and China

The folks from the compact development research argue that high human population settlements make for more resilient cities. However, it is disasters such as these which make me wonder: is it likely that there is a one-size-fits-all urban form for resiliency against disasters. 400 people victim to one mudslide is terrifying, and while I guess we could go into long arguments about how climate change is causing all this, we’ve had typhoons for some time. What we haven’t had in the scope of human history are the population levels and densities in particular locations which heighten the casualties from major events.

As irritating as Los Angeles is to many urbanists, developers’ response adaptation to earthquakes made perfect sense before the technology was available to build upwards. The spread also creates a feedback problem for the wildfire resiliency folks. Yes, it would be better if people weren’t living in the fire ecosystem on the fringes. But given that there are people living in the fire ecosystem, the fewer the better, the easier it is to evacuate them, etc. I’m not suggesting that LA fringe is an optimal urban form, but it does carry some advantages. The spatial spread in LA’s population and economic activities meant that while Northridge and surrounding areas suffered immensely from the earthquake, the rest of the region went on largely as before.

Things that are never listed as urban sprawl

1. Golf courses

2. Horse farms

3. Penthouses (think about it; one family uses space that other families would normally use; no, it’s not as space consumptive as single-family homes, but 3,000 sq ft units are still a great way to keep poor people out)

4. Ponds and parks (I like parks as much as the next person, but when you put them in, they do spread out land uses, even if you control land around them, as in Manhattan, and you could use the land in Central Park for housing a la Singapore or Hong Kong at even residential densities. No, I am not advocating we get rid of Central Park.) That is, unless you think the lack of open space in cities prompts people to suburbanize. Interesting question, that.

5. Tiffany’s, as the nice new set up in Pasadena. Did LA need another Tiffany’s outside of Rodeo Drive? I mean, how many impulse trips to Tiffany’s does one take? It’s hard telling. Now, affluent Tiffany patrons in the outer suburbs can drive shorter distances, saving emissions, right? But Tiffany’s is in a walkable space in Pasadena, served by light rail, so it’s ok, just as long as the patrons are also picking up their locavore packages, right? Oh, but Target or Walmart? Sprawl, sprawl, sprawl: people should be ashamed of themselves for going there, shouldn’t they, tsk, tsk, unlike Banana Republic.

I’m trying to get you to look at the sprawl discourse using social class as lens instead of environmentalism. Yes, the environmental discourse is really important. But we can’t assume that the environmentalism discussion covers the social justice discussion entirely.

Living in North Mexico City and liking it

Last night we went to Dodgers stadium to watch the Dodgers, who lost to Atlanta. Now my friend Casey is a fan of the Braves, having grown up in Atlanta and all, and he is by far one of the most genial, gracious, and decent men I have ever met. However, this woman behind us was a Braves fan, and she was obnoxious. Fine, cheer on your team, but not if God gave you a voice that sounds like a constipated muppet. She was entertaining visitors from out of town, so she was explaining her views on living in Los Angeles. At one point, she said in a loud voice, “LA is ****hole. I can’t imagine staying here because it’s just so…Mexican.”

Hellloooooooo racism!

Now there are million things that I would change about Los Angeles. The rats. The air. The hockey team. We need Trader Joe’s south of the 10 and east of the Harbor. But I wouldn’t change a thing about the people who live here. Not a thing. If I could move wealth around, I would, because I have always been a pinko, but Los Angeles is real cosmopolitanism. We fail at it again and again, but it’s not like we’re a metro area with a few little safe ethnic enclaves mixed in a reassuring way so we can give lip service to cosmopolitanism. It’s a place where people of color outnumber white people but where power is still inverted. LA burns, regularly, both physically and ideologically, and because it burns it requires us to take a hard look at ourselves and how we treat each other. It is a significant place because of these realities.

I, for one, like having my dogs blessed by priests with all my Mexican, south, and central American neighbors and their dogs, some dressed in little sombreros. I like the beautiful girls clacking up Broadway in their heels, all of whom look like they just got done filming something for Univision. I like the handsome old gentlemen in cowboy hats and ostrich-skin cowboy boots who try, with courtly grace, to give me their seat on the subway. I like the little old ladies that sell coconuts and tamales on the street corners.

I can only hope that she will, in fact, go away and grace somewhere else with her retch-inspiring presence. I generally don’t tell people how wonderful Los Angeles/North Mexico City is because I’d rather that people just stay away and indulge whatever biases they have based on whatever Mike Davis book they’ve skimmed or tv show they watch. There are enough people here already; I’m never going to be able to afford a house as it is, and the water situation–egads. But you shouldn’t stay away because it is “too Mexican.” That’s one of the best things about this place, along with it being “too Black” and “too Thai” and “too Korean” and “too Ethiopian” and “too Indian” and “too gay.” Suckitup if you don’t like the Other because the Other is in your face here–and should be.

Latin American and Caribbean players have completely transformed baseball in a magnificent way, btw, and it irks me that she can enjoy that aspect of heterogeniety without recognizing it. Her $#@#! team wouldn’t have won last night without a surprise shot from the slumping Diory Hernandez, brilliant relief from Rafeal Soriano, and good calls from Bobby Cox who had the sense not to give Manny Ramirez a chance to end his slump off his ace reliever (whom Manny has hit reasonably well in the past).

High Heels and Privileged Parking

On the lighter side, Seoul has launched this plan to set aside special parking spots for ladies with high heels.

Speaking as a former West Hollywood resident whose large feets and predilection for the non-sensible shoes often put her in sales competition with cross-dressers, I have to wonder if this is a really good way to be inclusive of women.

Ed Glaezer on HSR again

I have an intellectual crush on Ed Glaezer, and it’s not getting any relief as he looks at high-speed rail. Ed has more papers in the “papers I wish I had written” column than just about anybody else. Here is the line that I wish I could have printed on a button or stamped on my forehead:

This is the cruel arithmetic faced by people, like myself, who would love to be pro-rail.

Of course the comments are the usual, rehashed rail stuff about the environmental costs (read the piece; Glaezer hasn’t gotten there yet) and preaching about sprawl prevention (rail doesn’t prevent sprawl, land use controls do) etc etc etc. It’s not like we who have our doubts are mean and just ‘don’t understand’ our environmental crisis or who don’t see how nice Japan’s high-speed rail is or that it has turned a mighty profit. (If these systems are so great and it’s a no-brainer profit-maker, why aren’t the private companies lined up yet? Are these companies just bad at math? )

My problem is that I look at $10 billion floated in bonds for high speed rail in California just six months before $7 billion is cut from K-12 schools and $1 billion is cut from healthcare for impoverished children and I wonder if–even granted all the wonderful wonderful things HSR promises–yet another round of large-scale, mega-project infrastructure with no tax increases to pay for it is really worth what what we are, apparently, going to pull out of the pockets of other social programs in the name of a ‘balanced budget’ and ‘the environment’ and ’sustainability.’

On the one hand, I’m told we as a society can’t afford anymore to invest in kids’ human capital or even, in the case of Medi-Cal, keep them alive. The state ‘can’t afford’ its premier higher education system anymore, even though those institutions contribute to economic growth. We must make “hard choices”–especially those of us in that bastion of overfunding known as education. On the other hand, we supposedly ‘can’t afford not to invest’ in a luxury train service because people like me can’t be taxed into staying out of cars and airplanes to pollute less (and raise tax revenues which can then retire HSR bonds if we really think the project matters that much.) Why are kids subject to hard choices but the rest of us aren’t?

Instead, I am supposed to believe that HSR is a vital social good. But then it’s not vital enough to pay for out of new assessments? People who advocate for rail are fond of pointing to the fact that the highway people got their interstate system. Yes, they did get their system for both good and ill, but their system was introduced with a set of new revenue sources: state and federal gas taxes. Instead, we seem to be planning to pay for future infrastructure with promises, legerdemain, and a willingness to put the most vulnerable on the chopping block. Some prices are too high. I’m sorry if that makes me mean or ignorant, but right now it’s just kind of making me sick.

Transit fares and impoverished urban residents

I’m still writing furiously on a manuscript and trying not to sound deranged, so here’s another in the “papers I wish I had written” category, there is forthcoming in Evaluation and Planning:

Nuworsoo, Cornelius, Golub, Aaron and Elizabeth Deakin, Analyzing equity impacts of transit fare changes: Case study of Alameda-Contra Costa Transit, California,Evaluation and Program Planning, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 26 June 2009, ISSN 0149-7189, DOI: 10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2009.06.009.

From the abstract:

Many public transit agencies consider increasing fares when faced with budget shortfalls. This paper analyzes the Alameda–Contra Costa (AC) Transit District’s five alternative fare proposals introduced for public discussion in March 2005. The proposals combined fare hikes, base fare reductions, eliminations of free transfers, and discontinuation of periodic passes. Using the agency’s 2002 on-board survey data, the study assessed the impacts of individual fare proposals on different subsets of riders and evaluated if they were equitable; and estimated potential fare revenues, using alternative price elasticities to estimate changes in ridership due to changes in price. The analysis revealed that proposals that increased the cost of transfers or eliminated unlimited-use passes produced dramatically unequal impacts on certain riders. Proposals for flat fares per ride were found to be least equitable, even when the base fare was lowered, because lower income riders, youth, and minorities made more trips and transferred more frequently than their more affluent counterparts. Proposals that maintained existing pass instruments and allowed transfers for small fees were the most favorable. The paper demonstrates the utility of on-board surveys and details an approach that could be widely used for evaluation of equity in public transit and other areas.

Ho boy–Suing a college for not getting you a job

This story came via Facebook this morning. Good heavens. It’s interesting, isn’t it?

The ex-student, who received her degree in April, says the college’s Office of Career Advancement did not provide her with the leads and career advice it had promised.

Since April? All of three months! In the worst economy since the early 1980s? Huh? It makes me wonder what Monroe College’s materials actually state about their networking and job linkages, but ho boy. If she gets her way here, I totally am going to go back and sue my prom date, any number of hair removal product companies, and all of those tempting machines that have stuffed animals you drop an entirely ineffectual hook on.

Note: I don’t think I actually had a prom date, btw. Nerdy even then.

Environmental justice (?) in Bhopal

On Thursday, a judge in Bhopal, 25 years after the fact, issued an arrest warrant for the former boss of Union Carbide.

The Union Carbide disaster was one of the most significant moments in the history of both enviromentalism and environmental justice. I’ve written extensively about the need for reparative justice for Bhopal, but even I was unprepared for crowds beating an effigy of an 90 year-old man, no matter what he symbolizes, at this event. There is no forgiveness, however, without reparation; there may never be forgiveness regardless of reparative acts. Forgiveness is a gift, not an entitlement, and if you are going to make the CEO salary, you had probably better be ready to take on the big consequences of what your organization does.

There are so many questions in the Bhopal case remaining. Is it even reparative to pay $500 million to a national government when the effects were localized? Given the scope of human misery, $500 million seems very little. in comparison to the billions paid out for bailouts.

I wish I had something profound to say here, but I do not. This is a situation that simply defies justice.

Youth culture as throwaway culture

Ok, you’re not getting any real content today because I’m still trying to write a paper that doesn’t sound deranged (I’m failing) and so I haven’t any juice for higher thought.

HOWEVER.

I was in having my hair done yesterday (shut up) and I was looking at Star magazine (shut up; I was under the dryer and I’d finished my book) at their “Best and Worst Beach Bodies” issue. My God. If there is anything that will convince one that the US has become a decadent and decaying empire along the lines of ancient Rome circa Gratian, it’s Star magazine and this issue in particular. YUCK. Next time I am bringing the Journal of Urban Economics.

However, it’s the obvious, at least to me, connection between youth-obsessed celebrity culture and throwaway culture that got me. I mean, all the “best” bodies were sixteen year-old girls with Terry Hatcher thrown in, and the “worst” were any woman over the age of 25 with Richard Gere thrown in because he has a little bit of a tummy. WHAT? That guy looks better than just about everybody on the earth on their best day. And all of the supposed worst LOOKED FINE. If you have to take Photoshop and circle the supposed “fat” in white and then use an arrow to point at it, then maybe it’s not as obviously hideous as you want to make out. A bigger mix of misogyny and age-hate you couldn’t create if you tried.

Rowr.

4th International Symposium on Transportation Network Reliability

July 22-23, 2010

University of Minnesota

The aim of the International Symposium on Transportation Network Reliability (INSTR) is to bring together researchers and professionals interested in transportation network reliability, to discuss both recent research and future directions in this increasingly important field of research. The scope of the symposium includes all aspects of analysis and design to improve network reliability, including:

Location

This event will be held on campus at the University of Minnesota. More details will be available as the date approaches.

This conference is being sponsored by CTS at the University of Minnesota.

You can find the conference website here.

Ian Parry and policies to reduce climate change emissions from vehicles

In the “papers I wish I had written” department, there’s:

Parry, I. 2007. “Are the Costs of Reducing Greenhouse Gases from Passenger Vehicles Negative?” Journal of Urban Economics. 62: (2): 273-293.

You can find it here.

From the abstract:

Energy models suggest that the costs of reducing carbon emissions from transportation are high relative to those for other sectors. This paper discusses why taxes (or equivalent permit systems) to reduce passenger vehicle emissions produce large net benefits, rather than costs, when account is taken of (a) their impact on reducing other highway externalities besides carbon and (b) interactions with the broader fiscal system. Both of these considerations also strengthen the case for a tax-based approach over fuel economy regulation, while fiscal considerations strengthen the case for taxes over grandfathered emissions permits. The paper also comments on the practical relevance of automobile fuel taxes, or their policy equivalents, to broader legislation intended to mitigate climate change.

Ed Glaeser on high-speed rail

You know those “Most Interesting Man in the World” commercials that end with “Stay thirsty, my friend.” Whenever I see them, I think of Ed Glaeser.

He IS pretty interesting. And he was wrong once.

Anyway, he takes up high speed rail here. And he’s dead right about one thing, for sure: John Kain is sorely missed.

HT to David Levinson, the Transportationist.

Supersmart colleague alert!

Richard Green is will be on AirTalk this morning at 10:05 Pacific. Listen if you can.

Graphic on gas price variance

From Good Graphics.

High Speed Rail on the Freakonomics Blog

Eric Morris on the Freakonomics blog takes up the issue of high-speed rail and offers a reasoned, and unique to the public debate, focus on the limitations of the mode’s promised environmental benefits.

There are so many things to think about here, it’s hard to know where to begin. First, the very fact that we have consultants even doing lifeline environmental analysis of rail is a step forward for the discourse around rail. Yes, it has environmental costs, too, especially something like high-speed rail which fragments habitats, for instance. Back in the day, this is something that was never raised surrounding rail, much to my irritation.

What’s my expert opinion on high-speed rail? From my perspective, changing intra-regional travel to lower impact modes, like walking, is a much more pressing and cost-effective climate change strategy.

While I do not deny the very real evidence of climate change, I am terrified when I look at the data for actually intervening in climate change. It is the elephant in the room for those worried about climate change: if we admit it looks futile, then nothing will get done and it will, in fact, be futile. But all our hoping for best and advising for the best does not mean that changing things still won’t be futile. The power of positive thinking here has to meet reality. Maybe the economic downtown will dampen population growth a bit, but still. Given population figures, I tend to favor strategies that have high potential co-benefits and lower costs. HSR has some of the former and just way too much for the latter.

David Levinson’s estimate for HSR comes in at $80 million. Last year, I had my students cost out the HSR, and the estimates ran from $110 billion to $81 billion. That’s more than Obama has set aside for foster kids for the entire country. Do you know what we could do for foster kids with $80 billion? Bus riders? Schools? No, these are not separate issues no matter how various sector advocates and institutions would have us think of them. Fiscal capacity is finite.

If we are really talking about saving car trips, the bigger potential markets are likely to be intra-regional, not inter-regional, like HSR. To be metaphorical for a second, HSR is a gold-plated response to climate change when we should perhaps be thinking about stainless steel. It’s like insisting that we have a $2K tiara when we can’t afford pants.

HSR is being sold on environmental benefits, as usual with rail, but the reasons why its backers love it so much because they see dollar signs. Federal capital subsidies, right now, and more subsequent growth in inter-regional tourism and economic activity, particularly for Central Valley communities. All good things. But worth the money not spent on other things, like schools or inter-city transit? Ehhhhh. The assumption among its environmental proponents is that HSR will cut out air travel and auto trips. It may do so, in the short term, but in the end it will, like most new supply, provide capacity for additional travel between SF and southern California. These additional trips will be in a mode that has fewer emissions than the other two, great, but the other two are not going to reduce appreciably in the long term with growth in overall demand. There is a difference between disciplining demand for dirtier modes entirely and simply providing extra capacity in a cleaner (and jollier) mode. The first is a stick; the second is a carrot with no stick. In transport policy, we are addicted to the latter.

If we are worried about carbon emissions and we want HSR because we want the travel option, the way to get this system built is to apply a carbon tax to fuel consumption across all modes and then use the money to juice up transit provision in general, as quickly as possible. But instead, we continue to do what we have always done: throw money at big systems up front, taking the money from everywhere else to pay off bond obligations rather than presenting travelers with the real prices of their travel consumption choices. Then we ply them with carrot after carrot. This strategy means politicians get to stand in front of big projects and say they have Struck A Blow for the environment, environmental NGOs get to to do the same, and the cost is carried by socially devalued services (like education–3.1 billion in cuts, any one?) and unpopular minorities (like poor people who rely on public education.)

We can talk about whether fuel taxes “tax the poor off the road” another day. As for predictions, this is going to be California’s Big Dig. It will set records for costs and over-runs. It will be a beautiful and wonderful service when it is done. And I (and a whole bunch of other people) will get a book out of it.

USC’s Loss, Berkeley’s Gain

Jennifer Wolch, one of my very favorite colleagues and a good mentor here at USC, has gone to become a Dean at Berkeley. Here’s the announcement.

Dang it.

US Foreclosure Map at ForeclosurePulse

See it here. Very interesting, and nice, clean thematic map work.

New manuscript on evacuation

Murray-Tuite, P., L. Schweitzer, S. Liu. 2009. “Impacts of Family Responsibilities and Car Availability on Household No-Notice Evacuation Time.” 14 p.

Available for download here.

The family gathering phenomenon is a critical evacuation consideration. Recently, researchers have placed greater emphasis on capturing household member interactions for emergencies, but most of these efforts have not specifically addressed associated gender issues. This paper examines the impact of gender-based family gathering responsibilities on family evacuation delay from the optimal conditions for a hypothetical no notice event during school hours. This study uses initial results of an original interview data collection effort addressing home and work locations, pre-evacuation actions, and family gathering responsibilities, among other considerations. Many of the women with appropriately aged children indicated responsibility for collecting them. The impact of assigning gathering responsibilities to a single parent on household evacuation time is determined using a nonlinear integer program that assigns activity chains, meeting locations, and final destinations so as to minimize household evacuation time in a multimodal transportation network. The effects of car availability are also examined for a sample household in Chicago Heights. The number of and locations of dependents were also varied as well as whether one parent stayed at home or both parents worked. If only one vehicle was available and with the parent further from the dependents, household evacuation time could substantially increase (e.g. double), especially if the family did not unite prior to arriving at the final destination. Consideration of gathering behavior, household responsibilities, and persons dependent on transit will lead to more accurate evacuation models that help emergency agencies make better decisions and potentially save lives.

Matt Kahn and Eric Morris on Green Travel Behavior

Mat Kahn and Eric Morris, two of the very smart peoples at UCLA, have published a very cool paper on the coherence between attitudes and behavior among environmentalists. He discusses the paper and provides a link on his blog.

Kahn, Matt and E. Morris. 2009. Walking the Walk: The Association Between Community Environmentalism and Green Travel Behavior.

Forthcoming in the Journal of the American Planning Association.

Every time Matt publishes a paper, it’s a paper I wish I’d written. I have written about a group that is suspected to be indifferent to the environment–truckers–along with CJ Brodrick and Sue Spivey at James Madison University. You can find that manuscript here. The bottom line is that truckers have two major groups–employee truckers and owner-operators, and the employee truckers do have pro-environmental attitudes. Owner-operators are, unsurprisingly, more driven by costs, which in the case of idle reduction technology, aligns with environmental interests. But capital markets are imperfect and it takes some time for the technology in the owner operator fleet to change over.

Schweitzer,L., Brodrick, C-J, , and S.Spivey. 2008. “Truck Driver Environmental Attitudes and Behaviors: An Exploratory Analysis.” Transportation Research Part D. 13 (3): Available online at: doi:10.1016/j.trd.2007.11.001.

It’s official

We have a budget, with no tax increases but lots of service cuts. The cuts to K-12 are…pretty staggering. The Republicans outwaited the Democrats and clearly won this one in a lesson in minority statehouse brinkmanship.

Oh, I won, too, actually. Childless and affluent, here I go. Now I afford these because I won’t be changing the amount of withholding. Who needs services anyway? Not me! I can pay for them. I wonder who might need public services? Hmm. Gee. I can’t think of anybody who is a visible, important part of society, you know, people like me, who might need public services. Guess this worked out ducky then. Where did Dr. Schweitzer put her $4.90 caramel macchiato?

When Transit Works in the Southland

After my moan from yesterday I decided that lest I leave people with their comfortable belief that “transit in LA is terrible, not like Portland or San Francisco or Boston or New York or (insert urbanists’ dreamland utopia here)”, I should also add some posts talking about where transit works in Los Angeles. And it does work: the LA MTA serves over 1.6 million boardings a day. That’s a lot of people, every day, and more than the aforementioned transit utopias save for New York.

So here’s one of my favorite transit spots in LA, or more specificly, Long Beach. I have a fondness for Long Beach anyway, but here I think we have a nice example of a bus-train interface at the termination of the Blue Line in downtown Long Beach. There’s some high-end development going on, but it’s not the hyper-expensive, hyper-pretentious downtown LA sort. This is a relatively affordable place for people to live, it’s a pleasant place to walk, and you have plenty of bus and walking information when you get off the train. You move from one mode to another without having to eat car exhaust, dingy freeway undersides, or an ocean of car parking. It’s not ostentatious, it just does what it is supposed to do: provide a decent place for people to walk around, do some stuff, make a transfer if they have to, or buy/rent a condo.

They could use some more street trees and landscaping, but that’s a pretty easy fix.

And that little Asian kid is just too danged cute for words.

Rosa Parks Station, the bad bus stop of the century

This bad bus stop of the week is in Rosa Parks Station, which I think is so bad it deserves a lifetime achievement award for poor treatment of pedestrians and bus riders. This station is where the Blue Line and the Green Line come together, along with many bus lines. Bus riders and Blue Line riders get on and off underneath the freeway, enter a sea of parking, with little art installations designed, I guess, to cheer the place up. Some sunshine and sidewalks might have worked a wee bit better.

This station serves primarily south-central residents of Los Angeles, so I guess it shouldn’t surprise us that amidst the comprehensive ocean of lousy bus stops in LA, the very worst can be found serving Metro Transit’s most loyal and consistent customer base. If that doesn’t make you think twice about customer service in transit, you aren’t paying attention.

No hoping for the environment

I happened upon this article rather late, as they ran the feature in February, but here is an synopsis:

“Is hope a placebo, a distraction, merely sowing the seeds of disillusionment?” they ask, in an opinion piece titled “Abandon Hope.” The authors, co-founders and directors of the Conservation Ethics Group, an of environmental ethics consultancy, examine the proper role of hope in environmentalism. They suggest that hope’s alternative is not hopelessness or despair, but rather the inherent virtue of “doing the right thing.”

John Vucetich and Michael Nelson. Abandon Hope. The Ecologist, March 2009

I wonder about this. Much of the environmental discussion is conducted in terms of apocalypse: we’re doomed, we must save ourselves. Then when somebody like Bjorn Lomberg comes along and refutes that message, the reaction is histrionic, like the guy is a Holocaust denier or something, when all he is doing is shaking up the discussion and looking at the data. So there’s already a heavy moral component to the environment–for some people, it ties into longstanding western ethics associated with efficiency and frugality, for others it ties into obligations regarding stewardship and responsibility towards other life or for resources over which humans have control, and for yet another group it emanates from obligations towards other people, either their cohort, the next generation, or both. Anne Coulter–somebody so relentlessly self-promotional that she hardly needs me to link—maintains that environmentalism is the “religion of the left.”

So it’s not as though environmental values are not already bandied in terms of “right” and “wrong” already. When I say that I study sustainable transport, people get a pained look on their faces and say “I know I should take transit, but it just takes so long and it’s so hard to get anywhere and it’s…etc., etc., etc.” It’s not like people don’t know what they probably should be doing or should not be doing here. They don’t do “right” by the environment because they have other priorities, not because they don’t care and don’t see it as a matter of right and wrong, and you probably need better ethical imperatives to help them set their priorities than “the environment is more important than your other priorities because the environment is my priority.”

Evacuation and Resilience Manuscript

Relocation of Household Dependents For a Daytime No-Notice Evacuation in a Multimodal Transportation System

Sirui Liu, Pamela Murray-Tuite and Lisa Schweitzer

Under no-notice conditions with family members collecting dependents, the locations of these pickup points becomes a crucial factor to efficient evacuation. This paper presents a mathematical program for facilities to relocate, optimally, dependents that need to be picked up. The program, solved using Lingo, is iterated with a traffic simulation model to obtain an optimal set of locations based on anticipated travel times with dependents relocated to those sites. The entire methodology is applied to a case study based on Chicago Heights with three safety thresholds. In two of the three cases, relocation improved evacuation conditions.

You can download the draft here.

Data and information presentation

Amanda Fox, graphics editor for the NYT, gave a presentation that is well worth reading and downloading.

Cheap Commercial Land in Manhattan

I started off this morning reading through the new material sent me by Wiley Interscience journals. I subscribe to email alerts for new papers from a bunch of journals–one of the few ways that email has actually improved my life–and a paper in Real Estate Economics caught my eye for a couple reasons:

Wheaton, W. C., M. S. Baranski and C. A. Templeton. 2009. “100 Years of Commercial Real Estate Prices in Manhattan.” Real Estate Economics. 37 (1): 69 – 83.DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6229.2009.00235

I always pick up stuff from William Wheaton because he’s my academic grandfather–my advisor’s advisor–though we’ve never met. He’s also somebody whose work I’ve followed since before I went back for my PhD.

This is a particularly interesting manuscript. The abstract is short enough to include:

This article is able to put together a database of 86 repeat-sales transactions for office properties in lower and midtown Manhattan spanning the years from 1899 to 1999. Using this very limited database, decade-interval changes in real property prices are estimated—with varying degrees of precision. Our conclusions are two fold. First, adjusting for inflation, commercial office property values were 30% lower in 1999 than they were in 1899. Second, within any decade values often rise and fall by 20–50% in real terms. With these results, the long-term historic return to New York commercial property must mostly comprise yield with capital gains limited to general inflation. Other historical studies consistent with this conclusion are reviewed.

A perfect paper for an intro to urban economics or a class on urban sprawl, for it would be very counterintuitive for students, particularly planning students, who think New York is the poster child for a metro area that has not decentralized.

Those MIT peoples are smart.

More on the stimulus

Richard Green, director of the Lusk Center and, as I said yesterday, one of my favorite colleagues (I seriously do have fantastic colleagues–I really enjoy being in a policy school) tries to help me understand why the stimulus is going do what we hope it will via this very useful discussion paper. I recommend highly.

I will maybe take up further arguments tomorrow, depending on how far I get on this manuscript I’m working on.

WSJ on no more stimulus

The Wall Street Journal surveys 54 economists throughout the year. The latest results show that most economists in their survey suggest waiting. I can’t imagine this is a particularly random sample of economists, given the WSJ. Make sure you click through the charts because somebody in information presentation did some beautiful work here.

My super-smart economist colleague, Richard Green, disagrees, and then goes on to explain why the plan to help out distressed mortgage holders is also too timid.

Caveat: The following are mostly my impressions–I don’t have research that backs me on these ideas.

I’ve always maintained that the stimulus would disappear like a stone into water–and I think a second would do the same– and I am less sanguine about the rebound effects than the wait-and-see guys polled by the WSJ. I’m not sure where this “mother of all joblessness recoveries” is coming from. The transportation sector is, of course, happy to suck up as much money as we throw at it. I wonder about this sector as a source of growth anyway. Public transit advocates widely claim multiplier effects of investing in public transit, but in terms of construction, I bet the sector has become even more capital-intensive over the past three decades than just about any other. And if travel is ubiquitous, as it is in many places, the idea that you will open new markets with infrastructure investment doesn’t hold water–not that the way it did back in 1930. If that’s the case, the money goes to the contractors and, to a much more limited degree, to skilled workers. I don’t see contractors really doing anything besides sitting on those gains for awhile, which might provide some cash for other sectors. Maybe. But getting that money into the hands labor through job creation? I don’t see it happening. What I see instead coming are massive government layoffs, adding to joblessness rolls.

Chefs and Downtown Pretensions

It is no secret that I live in downtown Los Angeles, which, like every downtown with boosters, has Pretensions with a capital P. It is a truism in the world of politics (and in markets) that perceptions are more important than reality. But so far in real estate, pretension has worked out for downtown Los Angeles. For example, last night on our way back from a dinner party in Venice, Homey elected to drive up Main Street. South Main Street in Los Angeles at 10 o’clock at night on a Saturday is utterly, utterly devoid of human life, full of litter—a craphole to be vulgar. A mere block away in my building, somebody is offering their 1,800 square-foot loft for sale for $900,000.

Nine. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. For 1,800 square feet that places you in without a doubt one of the lousiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Say what you want about Compton, at least there are people on the street during the evening, other than the ones looking for a discreet storefront they can use for a urinal.

Somebody needs to explain this to me. Explain to me why you would spend nearly a million for a small place in a crappy neighborhood when for the same money you could live on the lavish and truly lovely westside of Los Angeles. Class envy on my part notwithstanding, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Brentwood–these are amazing, amenity-filled locations, including proximity to the beach. My part of downtown has only just gotten a restaurant or two that stays open past lunchtime and it is an hour drive to the ocean, and a two-hour bus ride.

Nine. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars.

We are engaging in the pretense that Los Angeles is the next New York, with our sky-high downtown real estate prices, even though Los Angeles is not New York for good reasons.

I am ranting about this today because of the cupcake incident yesterday. My mild-mannered husband and I went to Bottega Louie, one of downtown LA’s newest pretense-laden places. In general, it’s quite good, and the renovation is lovely. However, poor Andy sat, ignored, in front of their service counter for about five minutes while one of their staff arranged their cupcakes so that she could take a picture of them with her iPhone. She caught his eye, and then purposely ignored him, going back to her cupcake arrangement, saying nothing.

Later, one of their stellar, friendly wait staff did actually come to take Andy’s order, and this person explained that the other staff was a chef and therefore did not wait on patrons.

Can we just get over ourselves for a fracking second here? You’re a chef–a chef in charge of cupcakes, for heaven’s sakes, one of your easier baked goods to master–and you are willing to potentially lose a customer for your team because you are too good to stop fiddling with your cupcakes to say “I”ll find somebody to help you here–just give me a sec.” Making pie dough? Stretching strudel dough? Sure, I’ll let you concentrate. Taking poor-quality digital images of your cupcakes? I think this is a task that one maybe might be safe to interrupt for the sake of acknowledging your fellow man’s existence and putting a good face on the business that employs you. I’m not one of those people who thinks that wait staff need to be hyper-friendly, but yo.

Oh, and by the way….the cupcakes aren’t that good, so boo boo nyah.

Friends in High Places

Raphael Bostic, one of my favorite colleagues at USC, was confirmed yesterday as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Raphael is one of the reasons why I always laugh at the evil/petty/egotistical professor characters that inevitably show up on tv. Raphael is the whole package: he’s brilliant, hard-working, funny, and generous. I hope they appreciate him at HUD because we miss him around these parts.

Animals and dogfighting in the sustainable society

“The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), History of England

One wonders if in this regard the Puritans weren’t right. To delight in cruelty, especially when the cruelty is enacted over those with less power than you, and who are dependent upon you, portends a degradation of the human spirit that transcends the Puritan’s godly distrust of ungodly pursuits . You wish to prove your mettle and courage? Go join a cage fight your own self, don’t send your charges into one for you. You can try all the “this is my culture” excuses you want: finding entertainment or profit in another’s pain is sociopathy, no matter how dressed up.

One of my favorite books on the subject of animal-nature ethics was edited by my former colleague Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel:

Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands. Published in 1998 by Verso.

Cities and the Stimulus

One of my fantastic students from Virginia Tech, Eric Howard, posted this piece from today’s New York Times on Facebook. The NYT author argues that:

Two-thirds of the country lives in large metropolitan areas, home to the nation’s worst traffic jams and some of its oldest roads and bridges. But cities and their surrounding regions are getting far less than two-thirds of federal transportation stimulus money.

The reporter goes on to quote outrage from mayors. They also get information from one of my favorite experts, Rob Puentes at Brookings. As usual, Rob has a very good point here: this package isn’t just about business as usual revenue allocation–which has always had a strong rural bias due to the structure of the Federal representative system (as Owen D. Gutfreund points out). This rural strength made way more sense 150 years ago than it does now.

So, of course all of these smart people are right in that cities aren’t treated very well in the stimulus, as they aren’t treated very well in Federal politics in general.

However, we have to ask ourselves: would it really be sensible to hand out this money on a per capita basis either? The main argument for cities and against suburbs and small towns is an economy of scale argument. Those arguments underpin the “costs of sprawl” research. Urbanization and density of human settlement lower the cost of providing infrastructure because of all the sharing we city folk do: the same sidewalk can serve thousands per day instead of a handful of people per day, as in a low-density settlement.

Thus, cities should somewhat expect to receive less per person than other places. The key point is just how much less per person should we expect urban infrastructure to cost, given all this sharing. The problem with sharing, of course, is that sharing leads to congestion after a certain point in population growth, thereby raising costs for everybody and requiring either dispersal of population or additional infrastructure.

While planning and planners are hard-wired to think in terms of increasing density, building duplicate systems (ie increasing capacity) in congested areas is only one means of cost sharing: the other, more macro-scale approach is to direct more growth to areas with excess capacity or price congested facilities and shift more of the revenue generation burden back onto users instead of looking for Federal funds.

This latter approach is, I think, where we are ultimately heading with infrastructure finance in the new urban world. Do we have compelling arguments for why the Federal government should be involved in urban infrastructure if all they going to do is return revenues to source (the per capita/population distribution argument). Anti-federalists can and do make strong arguments for local funding of intracity systems, like metro rail systems, while Federal dollars should go to intercity and interstate projects.

So while the NYT and urban mayors are probably right in that this distribution of funding is skewed, they haven’t really told us what the right distribution would look like, other than to say that cities are important and they need more money. Of course they are and they do, but it isn’t as though some of the poorest places in this country aren’t places like the Central Valley rather than places like Los Angeles, and it’s not as though Boston doesn’t depend on connectivity between rural Florida and Boston for all parts of the freight and US food system.

A New Green Transport Blog

Alexene Farol, one of the extremely gifted students in PPD at USC, has started up her own blog on transportation, “Lex Rail.” The young are so adventurous! She’s already posted about high-speed rail, which I haven’t worked up to.

Alexene is wonderful for a bunch of reasons, and the fact that she might might be becoming one of us—the transport crowd–is doubly thrilling to me for selfish reasons. I taught her in a class that is basically an intro to the city, and you have to accept in teaching that class that you will get students from real estate only marginally interested in the city and students in management who are adamantly (proudly) a-spatial and think urban planning is simply a derivative of their much more lofty aspirations to “manage.” Let’s just put it this way: Alexene opted to read Milton Friedman for the class, and she really read it and worked at it.

With that class, I always want my brightest students–and Alexene is one of the brightest I’ve ever had–to become planners, largely because I worry that my field is clogged with ideologues and solutions advocates and not thinkers. This is a problem she hints at with this post. Planners are well-intended, and some are very gifted thinkers indeed. These are the best of us, these philosopher-kings. Other of us are merely king wannabes, who think that if planners shape cities we will change human behavior and human society like clay in the hands of potter, and they follow various city “recipes” like they can create utopia through sidewalks.

To some degree, they are right: the material life of the city, just like the material environment of your home, is important to how you use and enjoy the space. So sure, let’s put in some sidewalks, that would be lovely, but we probably shouldn’t conclude based on this that we’ve taken millions of car trips off the road or prompted somebody to lose 100 pounds. Providing a place to walk, while not as heroic-sounding as “saving the planet” or “fighting the war against obesity,” is actually probably accomplishment enough. Sidewalks are good.

But social and environmental change is complicated. It requires not just a vision of an artful streetscape and colored pencils but an understanding of science, managing money, social change and sometimes adversarial human interaction, and all of these require leadership. So yah, for bright people in planning, among whom Alexene is one.

If Alexene actually stays focused on transport, though, that’s even better. It’s not like there aren’t bright people in transport. This particular part of planning has not suffered from a wont of analytical capacity–if anything, it has sometimes suffered from the unity of its vision. Having bright, analytical, creative people like Alexene join the field is just wonderful when it happens because she has the whole enchilada: she’s a good and creative thinker, a good writer, a strong sense of social commitment, and leadership charisma. And, as her grappling with Milton Friedman suggests, she’s not afraid to work.

So I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Delinquencies

Despite the various and asundry assertions that “it’s all getting much better now”, delinquencies on payments of home equity loans hit a record today along with bank card delinquencies. Both of these are signs of overextended families and, notably, job loss.

Car-Free Downtowns: Green-ness and/or Economics or Both?

Kat Martindale sent me a link to this story about Sydney’s bid to take cars out of the CBD. Like the Times Square plan, this makes perfect sense from an economics standpoint: the land is too valuable to have space taken up through space-intensive modes like cars. Other very large, very congested cities who don’t regulate often go the same way through individual market sorting, with people taking to foot, bicycle, and scooter to slither through the cars sitting in gridlock.

Oddly, we may not know ultimately the environmental effect of these car-free zones. WHAT? ARE YOU STUPID, Dr. Schweitzer??? Anything that gets rid of cars is good, right? Well, we don’t know that these types of car-free zones actually get rid of cars and trucks, or whether the zones simply divert vehicles elsewhere, re-routing them and thus adding to VMT, idling, or just slower speeds–all of which can add emissions as easily as they can subtract them. Eliminating car trips isn’t as simple as disallowing them in various parts of the city. There will be local benefits to air quality and a bunch of other things, but we don’t know what happens for global or regional emissions.

There’s a nice manuscript, by researchers I respect immensely, on how Paris’ car suppression strategies have had mixed results for air quality:

Bouf, Dominique and David A. Hensher, The dark side of making transit irresistible: The example of France, Transport Policy, Volume 14, Issue 6, November 2007, Pages 523-532, ISSN 0967-070X, DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2007.09.002.

Link in ScienceDirect.

Marketing Fast Food in the US

I’m home with Andy finally, watching the Dodgers go into extra innings (due to a very bad 9th inning performance from Broxton, yoikes). This allows me to watch lots of commercials, and it occurs to me: Carl’s Jr. seems to have given up entirely on marketing to anybody that isn’t a 12 to 22 year-old male, given the unabashed misogyny of their commercials. It makes me wonder if the strategy has worked out for them in terms of market share. Other fast food retailers have responded to the public health exposes of the fast food industry by offering salads and the like. But Carl’s seems to be going for a niche of risk-takers instead.

I’ll have more real stuff to share soon, as I am unfortunately handling a number of deadlines the same way that Broxton handled the 9th inning.

There’s no crying in national politics

Sarah Palin’s resignation is getting an odd amount of attention here in the land of sausage and pastry. While I don’t study national politics, that doesn’t stop me from holding Very Important Opinions on the subject. It’s hard to buy the pundit’s line that she is quitting mid-term for a presidential run–there’s nothing about quitting which might give her a leg up unless she also stars in several successful barbarian movies in the interim. Leaving office marginalizes her from a platform, which you need in a campaign.

Instead, I suspect she’s tired of it; she had a mawkish start on the national stage (compared to that Barack Obama back in 2004), and she’s done a lot of hinting and complaining about how “mean” people and “the media” (like Fox News?) are to her because of her positions–an attitude you don’t get indulge in high-level public office.

Roundtable on the Stimulus

A Roundtable Discussion on Social and Economic Impacts of Federal Economic Stimulus and Transportation Legislation Reauthorization: Identifying Research Needs

Location: Sheraton Seattle Hotel
Date: Monday July 20, 2009
Time: 10:00‐11:45am (immediately following the ADD20 Committee Meeting)

Participants:
Thera Black, Chair, ADA20 (Metropolitan Policy, Planning and Processes Committee)
Marc Brenman, former‐Executive Director, Washington State Human Rights Commission
Richard Marcantonio, Managing Attorney, Public Advocates, Inc. (San Francisco)
Tom Sanchez, Chair ADD20 (Social and Economic Factors of Transportation)

“States are receiving federal funding for infrastructure projects to stimulate economic recovery. These projects were identified as those being “shovel ready”, meaning that they can commence construction immediately and provide much needed jobs and economic activity.

The White House believes that expediting this process is critical to the U.S. economy and well‐being of workers and their families. The Federal Transportation Bill will be another opportunity to make much needed infrastructure investments with stimulus effects.

One issue of concern is that in the haste to stimulate the economy, the projects being selecteddo not necessarily consider wider socio‐economic consequences and needs, including equity measures. For example, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 directed billions to transit capital (primarily road) projects, but left out critical funding needed to operate and extend transit systems upon which millions of low‐income people depend for daily mobility. Others point to stimulus funding availability for costly rail expansion projects at the expense of funds to maintain existing bus service. Has the focus on creating construction jobs job creation been at the expense of fundamental system needs and broader social objectives?

This roundtable will bring together a range of perspectives including representatives from the US DOT, state DOTs, Metropolitan Planning Organizations and advocacy groups to discuss economic stimulus in terms of social equity, job generation, accountability, inclusiveness, and implementation. In particular, the discussion is intended to identify future research needs to evaluate these transportation investments in the larger socio‐economic context. The product of the roundtable will be a research needs statement outlining questions specific to outcomes at the metropolitan, state, and federal levels.”

Environmental Justice Imaginaries

Max Stephenson, Marcy Schnitzer and I just completed a new paper theorizing about how different groups use different rhetoric to describe states of justice concerning the environment, which we will be presenting at the International Symposium on Society and Resource Management.

Bad Bus Stop of the Week

This is a view from across the street where I get on the 81 bus when I leave USC. Nice and sunbaked, you get to sit here and suck in particulates from the four lanes on Figueroa and the four lanes on Exposition AND you have a lovely view of the Chevron. What an amenity-filled life I lead.

Pretty soon we will have a light rail station on Exposition, just down the way from here. However, it’s a pretty long walk for me from my building to the Expo station downtown (it’s doable, it’s just not as easy as the walk to the 81 stop.)

Shrinking cities

I’m a bit late on commenting here, as the shrinking cities stuff was all over the news about a week ago. First off, some links:

Richard Florida on NPR
Ed Glaeser in the NYT

I get to save myself some work today, as I don’t have much to add that Glaeser doesn’t cover here. Park space for current residents is a better use the land.

What strikes me as interesting about the discussion comes from the original reporting in the UK Telegraph. It is the way in which Kildee conflates his idea with “fighting sprawl.” It’s almost like “fighting sprawl” is a magic legitimization of anything planners wish to do. Flint is hardly in the position of “fighting” to avoid excess land consumption. But, as Glaeser suggests, there’s nothing much interesting here, and Kildee’s self-promotion via changing land uses isn’t particularly sinister. Overall, it’s a sensible enough thing to do where land for housing is virtually worthless.

Suing Pleasanton Over Sprawl

One of my unbelievably smart undergraduates, Alexene Farol, noted via Facebook the other day that the state of California (Jerry Brown, AG) is suing the city of Pleasanton over a 13 year-old rule that caps housing units at 29,000 for the city. It currently has 27,000.

As I said to Alexene when she raised the point, I have no idea how Pleasanton got away with this in the first place–it strikes me as both a clumsy and obvious attempt at exclusionary zoning. But I’m not an attorney, so we consulted Jesse Richardson at Virginia Tech.

Sprawl is not a housing-unit problem, per se, or a “too many people” problem. It’s a land consumption problem. Regulating the first, as Pleasanton has done, simply disallows housing unit growth in the city and thus (because as Jesse says: “growth control is not birth control”), residential growth occurs elsewhere, increasing commutes.

I don’t generally echo the New Urbanist party line that Jerry Brown does. There is plenty within their vision that doesn’t hold up, either empirically or theoretically, such as the notion that rail investment and compact development increases land values near stations (true, via more amenities) and we get more affordable housing, too (probably not, except for a short-term increase in housing unit supply, which even at “dense” US densities (i.e., not particularly dense, even when we call it density) evaporates vis-a-vis metropolitan growth). Householders aren’t in the habit of considering affordability when they know they have one of a restricted number of units while demand is increasing.

However, in this case…I can’t imagine Pleasanton getting away with doing this.

The climate change bill and low income families

The climate change bill is, like most Federal legislation, an amalgam of good and lousy policy. For the most part, it’s
a decent attempt, except for the part where we are supposed to prompt consumers to save energy without raising their energy costs appreciably.

However, there are protections for low-income energy users. Double however, from the limited research on current usage of lifeline pricing mechanisms, it looks like only a fraction of the households eligible for coupons based on income actually use them. Given how little we are willing to raise costs, this perhaps shouldn’t surprise me. In climate change policy, we should get a lot more aggressive here and suck up a carbon tax and provide lifeline options–and keep our distributional focus on the fact that impoverished Americans, while we want to protect them, have obligations as well to the much more dangerously impoverished and imperiled groups internationally. People need to be sent a price signal, even if that price signal is discounted, to help them understand the costs of their choices.

Raised cancer incidence–EPA Air Toxics Report

Quite all over the news, as we would expect, are the EPA’s new raised cancer incidence maps from the National Air Toxics Assessment. Keep in mind these are modeled levels, not measurements.

The economic value of whales

A report from Australia was released in time for the International Whaling Conference in Portugal. The report argues that whale-watching, as a tourist industry, outstrips the economic value of dead whales sold for food and other products.

While I haven’t looked at the report, it strikes me that this is a pretty obvious result on the valuation, for a variety of reasons. We have with whales the resource-city conflict that comes from years of traditional resource use bumping up against a newly urbanized and rapidly urbanizing global population. The former means a dwindling group of people for whom the direct slaughter of animals is a common practice and necessity, and a growing population for whom resource extraction and use is removed from their daily lives. This leads to governance conflicts in which neither one really recognizes the validity of the others’ claims. The one group decries the destruction of important natural resources, significant for their aesthetic and ecological value. The other group denigrates the former’s valuation as so much yuppified playspace creation.

I’ve never found either of these arguments to be particularly compelling as a means for constructing a rule about just practices in resource use. Justice here, like in many governance contexts, depends on a lot of factors. We need to know a lot more about the particular history of the people and the places engaged in the debate. Inuit claims of cultural importance and subsistence use? Those pass a believability test. The clubbing of baby seals to clothe your own kids? While I don’t like it and I don’t want to watch it, yeah, fine, it seems to hold together for somebody living life on an ice sheet. However, if you are clubbing seals to sell to a global fur trade so you can pay for your internet service provider and power boat?

This gets us into the muddy water of authenticity, but I think the debate belongs there. If you are going engage in global trade, then it seems unlikely that you will be able to reject–nor should you be able to reject–the cosmopolitan mores which that engagement suggests. Which means, in turn, the eyes of the world are on, with some level of regulatory judgment in turn.

And this means the Japanese and Norwegians can not equate their claims about culture and whaling with those of indigenous people. These are modernized economies–wealthy economies–where whalers use modern equipment. At some point, their claims that it’s unfair for the US to lobby for access to a small take of whales for its indigenous groups in Alaska have to fall on deaf ears in the global discussion.

Here’s a more articulate discussion from BBC News.

Rethinking passenger rail safety

Rail advocates have been quick to come forward both after last year’s Metrolink tragedy and yesterday’s DC Metro accident that commuting by rail is far safer than commuting by car.

These kinds of statistics aren’t very useful, as Lee Clarke points out in Worst Cases. He shows that while it is safer to travel by car when you measure per mile, it’s safer to travel by plane when you measure in per hour of exposure. I suspect that it is true rail commuting is measurably safer regardless what person-level measure of exposure you use.

What concerns me, however, isn’t the comparison: it’s what the Metro crash suggests about rail congestion (yes, there is such a thing, and DC is looking at it) and what that rail congestion means objectively for rail safety. I suspect that it is getting worse, and that that is itself a problem regardless of whatever risks are associated with cars.

Ethanol explosion

One of the topics I study is hazardous materials transport, so this accident on Sunday caught my eye. Deaths to nonemployees are extremely rare in the hazmat world–engineering has done an amazing job with hazmat containers. Nonetheless, these types of evacuations are more common than we think. I have a new study coming out (I hope soon) describing the spatial distribution of severe hazmat events, like evacuations. Stay tuned.

One of my favorite environmental writers

William Langewiesche appears regularly in the Atlantic, and I think his work is just fantastic–right up there with John McPhee. Here is a collection of my favorites:

Eden: A Gated Community: After making a fortune as founder of North Face and Esprit, Douglas Tompkins embraced the principles of deep ecology. Then, forsaking civilization, he bought a Yosemite-sized piece of wilderness in Chile, where only he and a like-minded few would live. They intended to show the world how an eco-community could flourish even as the ancient forest was kept pristine. Tompkins ran into one big problem: other people.

Profits of Doom: One of the most polluted cities in America learns to capitalize on its contamination.

The Ship Breakers: At Alang, in India, on a six-mile stretch of oily, smoky beach, 40,000 men tear apart half of the world’s discarded ships, each one a sump of toxic waste. Environmentalists in the West are outraged. The shipbreakers, of course, want to be left alone — and maybe they should be.

Langewiesche has a book out that I am going to go buy when I get a chance to walk over to the book store: The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom of Chaos, and Crime.

Interviews with Paul Samuelson

Richard Green pointed me to these interviews, Part 1 and Part 1, with economist Paul Samuelson, in The Atlantic. I enjoyed them very much so I thought I would post them.

I’m sorry there’s not more original thought going here at the moment, but I am swamped with actually putting some original thought into research. (Quite a stretch for the old girl….)

Lakers parade

It is unsustainable, this partying, parading, and confetti-ing, and yet I have an abiding sense that we Angelinos all needed a party around here.

Auto recycling, Africa Style

The LA Times yesterday ran an interesting story on auto recycling in Ghana. When there is a crash, no matter how badly the cars are damaged, these workers bring the cars back to life. There are occupational and environmental health issues with the workshop, but it serves as compelling contrast to the scrappage program announced for the UK in the past week to save the auto industry. David Levinson over at the Transportationist discusses the latter scheme.

And another colleague weighs in on congestion pricing in LA

Peter Gordon also weighs in on the question of congestion pricing on the 710 in Los Angeles.

Actually, we should be precise, as this is a research blog. This is a value-pricing, not a congestion pricing scheme. Congestion pricing generally reflects an scheme that prices the whole facility. Travelers must chose between using the facility and paying, or not using the facility at all.

Value pricing concerns a subset of lanes that travelers may opt into. They can stay in the free lane and deal with congestion (or no), or they can pay into lanes that have been priced.

Nickel and Dimed Author in the NYT on being “Too Poor to Be Visible”

Good stuff, found here.

Marlon Boarnet on equity and toll roads

Marlon Boarnet has been one of my intellectual role models since before I went to graduate school. In today’s LA Times, he does a nice job of pointing out how superficial assertions about the equity of toll roads do not hold up. Bottom line: on public goods that are subject to congestion, there are only two things that discipline or ration use: out-of-pocket money costs and/or time costs. We can’t assume that favoring one or the other necessarily leads us to one conclusion about social equity. We can be pretty sure that impoverished families do pay proportionally higher out-of-pocket costs. We also can be sure that time burdens are also disproportionate, and we should never assume that less affluent individuals’ time is “free.”

In addition to Marlon, one of my colleagues from Industrial Engineering, Jim Moore, also weighs in intelligently, as does Kathryn Phillips–who is UCLA grad, like me–with Environmental Defense Fund also writes well here.

The French President and Paris

The sustainability and urban design world is all abuzz about the results of a design competition sponsored by the French president. The charge to architects: remake Paris. You can see some of the entries here in a slideslow.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, from a scholarly point of view. This reminds me of the early days of model cities, where designers behave as though cities are as malleable as clay on a potters’ wheel. I’ve actually written about model cities: in particular, the Futurama and the Democracity from the 1939 World’s Fair, though it’s pretty far from what I work on now. The trouble for all of us with our models is in implementation–the difficulty associated with trying to manage incremental change into cohesive whole. It’s much easier to dispense with what’s here and start over. That would be keen. In my own efforts at self-reform, I would start over at age 24 and make myself a size 4. And then there’s the autocracy. There’s nothing wrong with making models, per se, but how many places are there where we could even think about cities entirely remaking themselves, or cropping up as a cohesive whole? There’s Paolo Solieri’s Arcosanti–which is out in the middle of the desert because he couldn’t derive it in the middle of a functioning metropolitan region. Then there are the cities of the UAE, like the carbon neutral city, driven via rigid power hierarchies and volumes of liquid cash.

Which brings me to the point about governance. Can you imagine President Obama sponsoring such an event for an American city? No. The fact that the French president is acting like the mayor of Paris in some regards here is an interesting note on the centrality of cities to federal politics elsewhere in the world. In some respects, this president has been very smart: in highlighting one of the jewels among world cities, he’s basically used the same strategy as leaders in Dubai–he’s trying to sponsor the eco-city of delight–and in so doing, he’s gotten himself a lot of international ink. He’d never get such ink pursuing new federal health care reforms in France.

Sad news for travel behavior research

This is very sad news for the world of travel behavior research.

Invitation to Symposium Celebrating the Life and Work of Ryuichi Kitamura

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

We were all grieved at the untimely passing of Ryuichi Kitamura in February, and continue to mourn the loss, not only of a brilliant and creative scholar, but a generous mentor and treasured friend. The University of California at Davis (where he spent the first 15 years of his professorial career) and Kyoto University (where he spent the second 15+ years) are joining together to sponsor a symposium in Ryuichi’s honor, aptly titled “The Joy of the Journey: Celebrating the Life and Work of Ryuichi Kitamura”. The planning committee hopes you can join the symposium gathering on this poignant occasion.

This symposium will be held June 29-30, 2009, on the UC Davis campus. There will be a reception the evening of June 28, and an optional excursion is planned to Napa Valley on July 1. The symposium itself will fill both days of June 29-30, with a banquet on the night of June 30 at which Ryuichi’s family will be present. The banquet will feature an “open microphone” period during which attendees will have an opportunity to share stories of Ryuichi, recount memories, offer condolences to the family, and speak of his influence on their work and the profession at large.

Complete details about the symposium, including the program/agenda, online registration procedures, and hotel accommodation information, are now available at the website that UC Davis has established for this symposium and to commemorate Ryuichi. Please check the website frequently for updates and further information.

Thank you very much and we look forward to seeing you in Davis to celebrate the life and work of Ryuichi Kitamura.

Sincerely,
Planning Committee:
Patricia Mokhtarian, UC Davis, Chair,
Cynthia Chen, City College of New York,
Satoshi Fujii, Kyoto University,
Kostas Goulias, University of California, Santa Barbara,
Akira Kikuchi, Kyoto University,
Hani Mahmassani, Northwestern University,
Ram Pendyala, Arizona State University,
Owen Waygood, Kyoto University,
Toshiyuki Yamamoto, Nagoya University,
Toshio Yoshii, Kyoto University,

Hydrogen cars driving through California

This is a bit dated by now, but it’s a slow news and thought day today. The 2009 Hydrogen Road Rally is taking 12 vehicles from Chula Vista (why there, one wonders?) to Vancouver, BC. These are hydrogen-electric vehicles, and what’s nice is that people along the roadway can actually go for a little spin the new vehicles. Much more interesting than simply looking at them in car shows.

Moral hazard and stopping single-family foreclosures

One of the things I like about being at USC is that I am in the same school as real estate economists. In looking at the various plans to bailout homeowners, I have differed consistently from my one of my favorite colleagues, Richard Green, on whether we should be preventing foreclosures. Green is a well-respected real estate economist, and so his is the better informed opinion here. The dueling issues: moral hazards versus externality effects.

On the one hand, homeowners, especially those who over-invested in real estate, speculated with their homes. This is a terribly cold thing to say, but markets discipline that type of behavior, and we could perhaps argue that the entire bubble induced its own weird form of moral hazard. People who knew little about the actual market believed that they were guaranteed speculative returns in real estate with virtually no research or knowledge about the transactions they undertook. That’s a kind of moral hazard in way, where you engage in risk-taking behavior believing that the costs associated with losses won’t accrue to you. As Daniel Friedman says in Morals and Markets: “Why not sit at the blackjack table if you are gambling with somebody else’s money?” It’s pretty clear, at least to me, that this type of home-buying behavior has been bad for just about everybody: the consumer, urban form, and in the end credit markets. The consumer overconsumes housing and housing credit, with predictable effects on urban form in many regions (not all), and with the obvious consequences for credit markets we’re in now.

On the other hand (there’s always another hand), foreclosures are not occurring randomly across metropolitan geographies. They are clustering in particular neighborhoods, which has led some economists to argue that there are externalities for other home owners–that is, there is a price effect on their home over and above market-induced price decreases. Because of those externalities, there is a public policy rationale for foreclosure assistance.

While I don’t mean to be hard-hearted, I wonder about this externality effect. I work predominantly in externality theory, and the more I work there, the more stubborn I get about not accepting externalities as an a priori rationale for public policy intervention. In cities, just about everything has externalities; we’re in the same geographic container, and what we do to the built environment affects us all, both as individuals and groups. So unless we’re prepared for a lot of intervention, we need to think about degrees of externality rather than the mere existence of them.

In addition, I also wonder why we can’t prevent the perceptions that areas are in decline–what I presume is the externality associated with clustered foreclosures. Why can’t we just control information? For example, when Oak Park, IL, decided to combat white flight in response to black homeownership, they prohibited “for sale” signs in front of houses. So rather than having “for sale” signs crop up around houses newly purchased by black residents, the city of course allowed people to dispense with their private property as they saw fit, but the city didn’t allow these homeowners to geographically “out” the new black residents. You still can’t put “for sale” signs up in Oak Park. Disallowing for sale signs strikes me as much easier to do now than back when Oak Park originally did it–internet real estate listings are ubiquitous.

Poorly thought-through numbers

Peter Gordon notes this statement, from Secretary Ray LaHood’s blog, the Fast Lane:

In fact, each 1% of regional travel shifted from automobile to public transit increases regional income about $2.9 million, resulting in 226 additional regional jobs. Other economic benefits include increased productivity, employment, business activity, investment and redevelopment.

I wish he’d give a citation so that I could see where this came from, but let’s just think about this for a second. The yield of moving 1 percent of mode share to public transit is $2.9 million in personal income, which is probably more a reflection that transit mode shares are higher in metropolitan regions where incomes and regional products are also higher (as in, mode share isn’t a cause, it’s an effect). But even so…let’s think. So in Los Angeles, it cost us $875 million to build the Blue Line; it takes $65 million a year to operate it. That’s one line. Our subway costs us $92 million a year in operating costs; the other two light rail lines cost us over $40 million per year. We currently run about 2 percent transit mode share. Benefit numbers without cost numbers don’t mean anything, and vice versa. And this random number that LaHood relates doesn’t make transit look particularly good.

If we want to make the case that transit is good for cities, we can make those arguments. I am sympathetic to the idea that many of those benefits are not readily quantifiable. But….dang.

No ideas on sustainability today, just Lakers’ stats

For sports fans, there is the actual beauty of athletic achievement, there are the many strategies which can be intellectually gratifying, and then, for nerds like me, there are the numbers. The Wages of Wins is an excellent blog; they have tallied the numbers for the Lakers players since 1977. That’s how I plan to spend Sunday.

Meanwhile, I think my colleague Dowell Myers and I bet 1,000 gold doubloons on the Lakers tonight. However, I think both of us are betting on the Lakers. And again, however, I’m pretty sure neither of us has 1,000 gold doubloons. This is kind of how you can tell this joint is run by planners, not economists. And I think it’s his turn to buy lunch anyhoo.

Large Eco-Village approved in the UK

The Architect’s Journal features a 195-unit Eco-Village, designed by Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) for the South Gloucester market. The development has everything, including a cafe and a creche (a bit too BF Skinner for me, but whatever) and a set of carbon neutral homes.

The part of this that makes me a bit sad is that while it’s a great idea, of course, the actual building designs are unattractive. Now, maybe it’s just me, and maybe I don’t understand the light and the context of the area (I’ve never been there), but I really wish architects would apply a vision to the available technology. Everybody thinks these innovations are a good idea; why can’t they be beautiful as well?

New electric car unveiled for California 2010

CODA, a new car start-up, announced yesterday that it will be rolling 200 electric cars for purchase in California in 2010. The mix of backers for the car are a solid group of companies with proven experience in the battery game. This is a 220-volt plug-in with a projected six-hour charge time with a range of 90 to 120 miles. You can see a photo here. Definitely not for assistant proffies given that it carries a $45K price tag.

As a follow-up, the autosphere has been abuzz about what the GM bankruptcy means for the Chevy Volt. As I groused the other day, the car companie’s struggles give it a number of reasons for why it might delay or kill off the line. However, government ownership of GM under the Obama presidency might give them them a reason to hang tough with the $40K Volt even as it takes awhile to materialize. Keith Johnson at the Wall Street Blog takes up the issue as does Katherine Harmon with Scientific American. The latter link includes GM’s departing Bob Lusk’s appearance on David Letterman, with the production model and requisite blondes in dresses of dubious taste.

Bad bus stop of the week

Gee, this is just swell.

Podcast on social equity and mobility

Matt Kaplan with CSLB makes me sound much smarter than I really am with all his good editing. You can listen to the podcast here.

Nifty solar-powered bus shelters

How cool would these be in LA? Unlike the Bay area, we actually have sunshine!

GM Bankruptcy

I opened my Facebook this morning to see a few environmentalists crowing about GM’s bankruptcy. If nothing else, this is uncharitable, as the company plans to lay off 21,000 more people. Way to combat the idea that environmentalists are a bunch of Birkenstock-wearing privileged bobos who don’t care about working class people, folks. At least there was some protection for workers’ retirement benefits in the restructuring.

But more to the point, crowing is also inaccurate. The car company will retain its four signature lines–Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet. It is cutting its Saturn and Hummer lines, or more accurately, selling them. It isn’t as though its cars on the road will vanish magically simply because of its economic hardship. If anything, this is probably bad news for the environment because these kinds of economic hardships give companies more evidence to argue against new, potentially capital-intensive changes needed to implement technology standards like the ones environmentalists were celebrating a few days ago or new engine technologies.

If this stuff were as easy as striking a strident normative stance , the planet would be sustainable already.

Randolph and Masters on Energy Sustainability

My former colleague at Virginia Tech, John Randolph, has published a very good book with Gil Masters of Standford University:

Randolph, John and Gil Masters. 2008. Energy for Sustainability: Technology, Planning, Policy. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Solar and Coal in the LA Times

One of my excellent students from USC, David Hale Feinberg, brought this story from the LA Times to my attention. The story concerns a partnership between SolarReserve and Rocketdyne–shuttle engine manufacturers. The technology uses heliostat mirrors to heat up molten salt. I’m still learning about energy technologies, so this is pretty interesting stuff.

Contrast this with the lead story in this morning’s LA Times on mountain top removal. The contrast helps us understand three major lessons about energy and renewables.

First, if the history of the energy industry is any lesson, the Barstow plant is where the future resides: high capital requirements favor existing corporate actors over small-scale, local producers, no matter how much some environmental advocates believe that local businesses are the key to sustainability. If you want faster implementation of petroleum substitutes, energy creation won’t be small-scale production.

Second–again from history–the renewables coming online will be substituted for future energy demand, not replacements for existing energy sources, at least in the short term. New energy supply is not a conservation strategy in the same way that unplugging your electronics is. New supply means that new demand is met via cleaner sources, not that old sources necessarily diminish in productivity.

Third, the mountaintop removal story brings home, at least to me, how our failures in social policy contribute to environmental loss. At a time when everybody is lecturing me on the importance of ‘green jobs’ we don’t have the policy language to talk about transitioning miners from their current livelihood to different employment. This is very sticky problem; these areas of West Virginia are both gloriously beautiful and deeply impoverished, and there are few ready substitute employers. Think about the losses that accrued to tobacco farmers as Americans moved away from smoking in the mainstream.

Americans don’t have the cultural capacity to think about that type of assistance as anything other than “welfare”–a shaming word. And yet, Coase applies here: to those of us who want to stop mountaintop removal, financially supporting their transition to new work can be both efficient and socially desirable even if it takes some time. Moreover, it isn’t as though the activity isn’t valuable: we would need to think about ways to change feedstocks for electricity generation to reduce the demand for coal. In other words, it’s not enough to just want an activity to stop because it is unsightly or environmentally bad.

Star Trek

Bear in mind, I have a life-sized standup poster of Mr. Spock in my office, so watching this movie and commenting on it was inevitable.

JJ Abrams, the director, along with his art directors have an interesting if not particularly hopeful view of future cities. Previous movies have established that Starfleet HQ is in San Francisco–which is interesting, as I can think of no other major US public institution headquartered west of the Mississippi. Starfleet is meant to be global and intergalatic body, so moving it from the traditional geographies of political power makes sense.

While the earth is still populated by the time our young, brash captain Kirk comes along, there are large, unmarked and unexplained crevices running through Iowa (what looks like west Texas in reality), the unnamed capitol city of Vulcan looks like a terrible place (particulate matter) and San Francisco doesn’t look so hot either, although the iconic Golden Gate and Bay bridges are retained.

Overall, a nice movie in the spirit of the Star Trek franchise. They did something here I’m glad they did, if I can chat about human and cultural symbolism for a bit here. For years, I have always grated against the way in which Spock’s mother, Amanda, happily trailed after Sarek, Spock’s father, to a ghastly hot planet full of condescending Vulcans constantly asserting their cultural superiority. This cultural superiority doesn’t go away in this movie: nasty little Vulcan bullies start a dustup with young Spock, and then later the head of the Vulcan Science Academy ostentatiously comments on Spock’s disadvantage (which brings the matter of cultural superiority home to basic racism; logic isn’t a matter of training; it’s a matter of breeding.) Honestly, if the benefits of logic are so apparent and the disadvantage is so real, then none of it needs comment, does it?

The question always raised throughout the series and subsequent films is why Sarek married a human. Here, he answers, and it’s a logical enough answer at the beginning. The question I always had coming up and watching TOS was rather the opposite: why did the beautiful, warm, generous and intelligent Amanda marry Sarek? I suppose it makes sense in the logic of the patriarchy: he’s a good catch financially, and he can provide her with a social mobility she didn’t have as a schoolteacher on earth. But in previous films Sarek is a hard and cold man, unworthy of either her loyalty or her son’s. In this film, he’s a better man even if he’s not human, and Ben Cross (one of my longtime actor-crushes) brings real complexity if not humanity to his character.

Congestion and the walking city

Paul Krugman notes on his blog that while he is favor of NYC’s move to turn Times Square into a walking only area, he’s not sure who the move is for, as “nobody goes there-it’s too crowded.”

Krugman references my favorite quote about congestion from Yogi Berra. As Brian Taylor pointed out in a very good paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Berra captured an essential conundrum from urban economics for urban planning newfound efforts to “contain sprawl.” That contradiction comes down to a) congestion is a sign of a successful place within cities (the “it’s too crowded” part), at the same time b) that same congestion and place intensity provides the demand for decentralization–the “nobody goes there” part.

This contradiction makes it difficult to deliver on the “congestion relief” promises that many people make on behalf of compact urbanization— one of the key elements of sustainable city ideas. Los Angeles may be everybody’s favorite whipping boy for auto congestion, but DC, New York, Boston and Chicago all have congestion both on the road and elsewhere: there’s never a seat any Starbuck’s off DuPont Circle, for example, and the sidewalks are uncomfortably crowded in New York at certain times of day. The Mexico City subway or the trains in Japan–or in most global cities other than LA—are simply jammed.

I’m not saying that auto congestion is the same for the environment as these other forms of congestion–it’s not–but as Taylor points out, places that we sustainable urbanists love–like New York–have pretty bad traffic congestion, and that traffic congestion is part of the place’s vibrancy and a measure of its success–not its failure.

Thus our sustainable cities of the future are likely to be crowded–very crowded if population growth continues. Most Americans, even those who live in New York, have no idea what real megacity crowding is like. The the demand for decentralization will grow stronger as we densify, even as we try to pack a whole bunch of amenities into our compact, walkable new developments, so long as there is income and wealth to support purchasing more space in a crowded world.

Taylor, Brian D. 2006. “Putting a Price on Mobility: Cars and Contradictions in Planning,” Longer View, Journal of the American Planning Association, 72(3): 279-284.

Matt Kahn on bad water pricing

Matt Kahn at UCLA is one of those economists whose work I cite quite a bit. His blog is smart and funny and edgy, and he has up a very good post comparing how the LA Department of Water and Power’s pricing regime makes no sense from a sustainability perspective. To wit–he compares the pricing schedule he faces with that of Candy Spelling, TV producer** Aaron Spelling’s very wealthy widow.

The water pricing story in southern California is larger than life with movies like Chinatown out there (great movie), but the DWP’s past attempts at implementing marginal cost pricing should be a case study in implementation for young environmental economists everywhere. To make a long story short, marginal cost pricing was on the table until Valley constituencies–all predominately single-family houses with yards–got out their calculators. The resulting outcry prompted deal-making that, while perhaps reassuring to us lovers of citizen participation, landed us with the pricing mechanism we have now. The basis for the changes revolved around an equity concern–as it so often does–not about people who are actually impoverished, but over the costs to people who are solidly middle class but not affluent per se. In order to protect these folks from what seemed prohibitively high water prices, we struck the deal that Matt discusses, considering usage as a function of lot size and occupancy. The end result bears little resemblance to marginal cost pricing or pricing based on social equity goals.

For people like me who study social equity and justice, the political discourse surrounding most pricing schemes tends to be entirely about equity and yet entirely miss the point about equity. We tend to protect the wrong groups–as in those with some discretionary income if not a lot– from the consequences of their consumption choices because we worry about affordability rather than the proper pricing signals and affordability.

**Aaron was the purveyor of such time-wasting, high-camp glory as “Dynasty” and the original “90210.” O the cat fights! O the shoulder pads! O the gigantically big hair!

Hari Sankaran on financing sustainable projects in India

Sankaran is the managing director of Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Ltd, an organization that has implemented some fairly successful public-private partnerships. He spoke at the London School of Economics on tapping into capital markets, which you can find at the UC Channel here.

Bad bus stop of the week

On Figueroa by the LA Live/Staples Center

Hospitable bus stops are among the most important aspects of social inclusion, public space and the sustainability of the built environment. While the area outside of the new LA Live contains copious plantings–oversized, in fact–they have the look and feel of landscape designed to be viewed from a passing car. Moreover, they create a barrier to getting on the bus although there is a space to step through them. What really undermines the stop, though, is no bench. Scanty shade. Little transit information other than labeling the routes that stop here, which are not plentiful.

Keep in mind that this is not some random suburban bus stop. LA Live is supposed to be a major regional destination–the “Times Square of the West.”

Megaregions and Infrastructure

The University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development is hosting an event in June on Infrastructure in the Southwest Megaregion–meaning Los Angeles and San Diego (or, as I refer to us, North Mexico City).

A number of our faculty at USC are interested in megaregions, or just regions more generally. We have well-respected regional scientist Harry Richardson, and in our policy and public administration groups, Dan Mazmanian and Yan Tang come from an environmental governance and sustainability perspective. We have urban planning faculty who overlap as well, most notably Dowell Myers, whose work on demography and immigration informs so many metropolitan growth questions. Eric Heikkila studies urbanization in Asia, with an obvious overlap here.

The mega-cities and mega-regions discussion in the social science and planning research tends to leave me wishing there were more tangible ways we could theorize and measure the effects of the ‘mega’ part of the equation for sustainability. It is quite apparent that we can ratchet up the numbers of any given urban effect here because we are aggregating large groups into the same geographic container–everything is very big, you know, but it has not always been clear to me what new insights we gain here for regional science and sustainability research, other than a pragmatic exploration of the potential size of the congestion and environmental externalities (which, given population growth numbers, are enough to justify the research). But the research in this field is emerging, so I’m going to listen and learn and see where it goes. To wit, I’ve learned a tremendous amount from the mega-project literature on infrastructure and development as a form reflexive modernism. Some of my favorite reading thus far:

Altshuler, Alan A. and David E. Luberoff. Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment Brookings Institution Press and Lincoln Institute Of Land Policy 2003

Flyvbjerg,B., N. Bruzelius and W. Rothengatter, Megaprojects and Risk — An Anatomy of Ambition, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Olds, K. Globalization and Urban Change: Capital, Culture, and Pacific Rim Mega-Projects. Oxford University Press, 2002 .

Speaking at the Lewis Center of Regional Studies May 26

I will be discussing community development, social inclusion and the Blue Line LRT in Los Angeles.

On Chicago Public Radio tomorrow

Memorial Day, 7 a.m. sharp (5 a.m. my time–should be interesting), my research partner at the Center for Neighborhood Technology, Henry Sullivan, will be interviewed by Tom Herman for The Infrastructure Show on Chicago Public Radio, discussing our evacuation research in the Chicago region.

New fuel economy standards

Keith Hennessey (former economic advisor) has some economic analysis of the costs and benefits of the fuel economy policy change, in between all his grumbling about how the EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency) is ‘in charge’ rather that the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHSTA).

This last comment–about who is in charge–is designed to generate comment. He’s been around long enough to know that NHTSA and the EPA are coming out of the Bush Era positioned differently and that the EPA has some strategic agenda-setting to do early on in the new administration. That said, EPA is a cabinet-level agency and these proposed rule changes have been in circulation for a bit. For public policy, we engage both agencies because we are trying to optimize across goals here, ones that are, like many, in tension with each other. Nonetheless, environmental rationales have a lot of currency, and perhaps more than they should here. Given the dominant discourse about sustainability and green-ness–i.e., that we are not supposed to be in our cars anyway–it should not surprise us that crash safety is an undeservedly low visibility issue relative to climate change or that NHTSA is a low-visibility agency, despite the considerable public service it provides.

The tension here–between fuel economy and crash safety–has been in dispute since the original 1975 law that provided for CAFE. The late Charles Lave and his brother, Lester, really helped to clarify the issues. One of their most accessible discussions appears in:

Lave, Charles and Lester Lave, “Fuel Economy and Auto Safety Regulation: Is the Cure Worse than the Disease?” Pages 257-290 in Essays in Transportation Economics and Policy: A Handbook in Honor of John R. Meyer, edited by Jose Gomez-Ibanez, William B. Tye, and Cliffor Winston, Brookings Institution Press, Washington D.C., 1999

There’s always just raising the gas tax, which over time might induce changes in fuel economy similar to the standards, but it allows consumers some flexibility in that they can still opt simply to drive less with their bigger, safer car if that is what they prefer–and driving less would have expected crash safety gains, too. Or what about raising the driving age–something that would lower crash costs considerably–at the same time we encourage fuel efficiency through differentiated vehicle registration fees? There are options here that address both the environment/safety trades. I haven’t looked at any data, so I don’t have any real conclusions here.

One last link: NHTSA’s CAFE page .