Centerfield

Excellent points, Jon. The other thing to keep in mind is how spread out a city is. Places like New York are highly concentrated, with high densities of both residents and businesses. Mass transit can work in a place like that; commuters all coming in from the suburbs going in one direction in the morning, and the opposite direction in the evening. There are also ample things to do in one's own neighborhood because the residential density is high enough to support them.

In a place like my own home of Baton Rouge, we have S P R A W L. Lots and lots of single family homes, a total of maybe 6 skyscrapers (the tallest being about 28 stories). Any serious shopping needs to be done at one of two malls, which are not within walking distance of anybody.

In order to reach everywhere people needed to go, we'd need hundreds of busses running constantly, and they'd all be well under half full all the time, because people just don't all need to go to anywhere close to the same place in town. In New York, you could have a subway station every 4 blocks, and each station would service several thousand residents living in its 2 block radius. In Baton Rouge, a bus stop every 4 blocks would have each stop serving maybe 100 people.

With the city designed the way it is, mass transit is just not cost effective here.

Excellent point Jon and Pat. On transit speed, I've occasionally thought of having a quasi-public service which would operate like a shared taxi. It would involve vans picking people up in residential neighborhoods, deliver them to a limited number nodes where there are a concentration of destinations where they would get a second van to take them to their final destinations. This is somewhat like many airport limousine services, but with the transfer to a second van instead of direct service to destination because of the multiple destinations.

As for land use, the planners in Ottawa-Carlton are fully aware of that. That's why the regional subdivision code has a requirement for transit provision. They still have only 10% transit usage to destinations on the periphery of the transitway, but that's a lot higher than to comparable locations in other metro areas. Two difficulties implementing such a program here. One, a somewhat laissez-faire attitude towards land use. Two, the lack of regional authorities so that, to use a New York example, if Hackensack adopted such a code, the utility of that action would be limited if Paramus did not.

Here in Dallas, we have a light rail line and a pretty good bus system. But you hit it right on as it takes me 15-20 minutes longer to get anywhere via those methods. I live out in the suburbs and I try to take the bus/train combo every now and then (maybe more now that gas is going back up) but in reality, it's still a pretty big inconvenience. Until the incentives to take public transit outweigh that inconvenience, I'll be driving most of the time. I'm pretty close, incentive-wise because my employer pays for a yearly pass. But it's not quite there yet.

Our system does have the Van pick up idea though I couldn't speak to how well it works.

The problem is that sprawl exists and is allowed to continue unabated, NYC is a product of geography, there was no other place to build for a long time and even after the bridges were built they were still a serious choke point. Most other cities don’t have that problem and you can build as far out as you want to build.

Ironically, one of the things that cause traffic problems is building freeways. Freeways allow people to live farther away from the centers of commerce where they work and as more and more people move to those outlying developments, the traffic builds with it. Then they build another freeway or bypass and the cycle continues. As the metroplex gets more spread out the feasibility of mass transit is reduced.

There is only one way to fix this and that is with drastic zoning that prohibits development outside of a fixed radius, but to propose that brings about howls of anti-free market manipulation and communist plots to destroy our way of life. Of course, the free market solution is to stop subsidizing oil and let the price of gas rise and to stop building the freeways, but that will only make a tiny dent in the problem of sprawl, which is totally private auto dependent.

Sooner or later the free market will rear it’s ugly heard but by that time the cost to transition will be so high (both in terms of $$$ and energy cost), that we will start to see vast McMansion wastelands and very little money available for building higher density living in the major commerce centers.

There's another factor that also affects the use of alternative fuels - cost. If oil prices, or the price of whatever it is that makes your car go, get high enough, driving will start to cost more. If it gets high enough, more people will be in essentially the same economic position as those who cannot now afford to drive, making commute time irrelevent for them. It's just too cheap to drive, even if people are bemoaning the rising cost of gasoline. It's still too cheap for many to seriously consider alternatives. There's always the chance that whatever it is that's driving (no pun intended) the cost of driving up will also drive the cost of mass transit up, but there's also always the chance that it won't.

Mass transit economics is, more than anything, driven by population density. Demographics and density drive the economics of mass transit, but they also drive urban sprawl. Restricting sprawl chokes off municipal growth, and the political divisions of city/county actively lean against "intensity zoning" solutions, though mixed-use zoning is well-accepted. Sprawl is auto-facilitated, but not auto-dependent. As metros move outward, businesses do as well, and mass transit is heavily reliant on urban core employment.

Manhattan, for an extreme example, has good mass transit and is the most densely populated urban unit in the US. It also has a lot more jobs than it has residents, which is a good bit of what makes that mass transit so well utilized. But the same density that makes Manhattan mass transit so well utilized also makes it damn tough to afford to live there AND makes it a less-than-desirable place to raise children. Crime rises with density. Density raises housing costs and living costs and lowers living conditions to the point where commuting by mass transit is seen as the only viable option.

Which in turn leads to the "white flight" syndrome. Those with children who can afford to live elsewhere and commute, do.

Tully et all.

Restricting sprawl chokes off municipal growth...

This is the kind of thing that is both true and not true at the same time.

Sure if you restrict development by zoning then developers can’t simply buy cornfields and build housing developments. Their “growth is clearly restricted, additionally the strip malls and other trappings of suburban development is restricted. Developers who are frustrated by strict zoning will naturally find greener pastures (literally) to ply their trade.

As metros move outward, businesses do as well, and mass transit is heavily reliant on urban core employment.

Sure but that is precisely the issue, the more spread out job destinations are the less mass transit works. I don’t dispute your points about the negative impact of higher density; I concede those points, but right now living in the sub and ex-burbs is still within the budget of middle class people. But it is conceivable that there will come a time, perhaps soon, when that will not be the case, and that is what I’m talking about. Our economy is based on cheap oil, while I also concede that we are constantly developing new energy sources I fail to see how energy will ever be as cheap as it has been over the last 80 years and this will have an effect on the decision to buy a home 45 miles from where one works when there is no cheap transportation to get them to work and back.

And please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not necessarily advocating extremely restrictive zoning because if you buy the point I’m making (and you may not), the “market” will make the sub and exburbs a thing of the past anyway.

Which in turn leads to the "white flight" syndrome. Those with children who can afford to live elsewhere and commute, do.

Agreed and my point is that the pool of people who can afford it will start to dwindle to the point where concerns about “choking off growth” will be a non-issue.

Instead of making living in the suburbs impossible, I think the market will more likely move the jobs to the people. Technological advances will make this easier. I also believe that most people don't want to be packed into a high density situation and that the desire for space and privacy will also push the market to move jobs to where people choose to live.

People who say that sprawl is an inherently bad thing almost always make the argument that people will always have to commute the farther they move out. I don't see this as being at all the case and I find it actually to be implausible.

Not to mention the market forces in play on housing in an urban development. The price of oil and gas have a long way to go before they ever begin to approach the 20-30% difference in housing costs. I can drive a lot of miles on the extra $300 a month I saved by buying a house 15 miles outside the loop, even if gas goes to some unheard of prices.

Exactly, SD. In any decent neighborhood in Denver, a 4 BR 2 BA 1920's house runs half a mill nowadays. For that same half a mill you can have a brand-new 5 BR 4 BA house an hour out of town--with lower property taxes, better schools, and MUCH lower crime rates.

"White flight" is really a poor description. It's a sensationalist media term. It's class and income flight, with kids being a major factor. Urban planners call it the "doughnut effect." People flee the center cities, the jobs follow the people, the city core declines.

The truly dense urban populations that make mass transit feasible are usually the result of geography. I don't know that fuel prices will change that much.

"I concede those points, but right now living in the sub and ex-burbs is still within the budget of middle class people. But it is conceivable that there will come a time, perhaps soon, when that will not be the case, and that is what I’m talking about. Our economy is based on cheap oil, while I also concede that we are constantly developing new energy sources I fail to see how energy will ever be as cheap as it has been over the last 80 years and this will have an effect on the decision to buy a home 45 miles from where one works when there is no cheap transportation to get them to work and back."

Rick,

That makes the assumption that the jobs for those people stay within the urban centers. That is not neccesarly a safe assumption. We already see a alot of business emmigrating to the suburbs and exburbs and the development of "satilite mini-urban zones". You see alot of this in the suburbs/exburbs outside NYC for instance. There are many attractive reasons for business to do this.

Frankly, the downsides of high density urban zones are huge for some people and they aren't going to go away. People are willing to sacrifice alot in order to avoid them.... and as long as that is the case businesses will follow those people out (don't forget that alot of the people who who want to live in the ex-burbs/suburbs include business owners & execs).

If energy prices do start to jump (or zoning reg's get alot more restrictive) rather then seeing commuters get pulled back into the urban areas.... I suspect you'll start to see business emmigrating out. This is especialy true considering Job mobility today.... if people can't afford to commute anymore.... a fair number of people rather then choosing to change where they live... will simply choose to change where they work. I know that's a choice I'd have to look real hard at....and I really like where I work (and I already work in a satelite suburb).

Another option is that work becomes more decentralized. With the transition to more service industry jobs, technology can allow for the workplace interactions to be done electronically. If fuel becomes a bigger issue, more employers will probably start to consider telecommuting as ways of keeping their better employees, as long as the job market remains tight.

The next generation of managers are already use to doing so many things over the computer. What may actually increase is suburban telecommuter offices. Virtual office companies are already growing. I could see suburban developments in the next five to ten years that start including these facilities in them as selling points.

Jim,
Any job where you can successfully telecommute will be outsourced to cheaper labor overseas in five years.

Cen,

That is not neccesarly a safe assumption. We already see a alot of business emmigrating to the suburbs and exburbs and the development of "satilite mini-urban zones".

Sure but in the process they bing the downsides of high density you mentioned with them. Big companies need large numbers of employees, if eveyone moves to be closer to worke then you simply shift the population balance abd the sub and exburbs become high density right off the bat it becomes too expensive for most people because the too amny people are bidding for too few homes in the lower density areas.

Meet the new boos, same as the old boss,

Two other issues are suburb to suburb commuting and two earner families.

As people move from one job to another, they usually do not limit their job hunt to what they easily commute to using public transporation or to what is near transportation hubs. Even in Boston or NYC, the public transportation system does not support suburb to suburb commuting. Also, most people do not move within the same metropolitan area just to lessen their commutes. This in the long run causes "frictional" commuting times that are longer than would be is it was orginized rationally.

Also, since a large number of families are now two income families, it is much harder for both members of the family to find jobs that are convient to public transportation.

Any job where you can successfully telecommute will be outsourced to cheaper labor overseas in five years.

Any job? What does "successfully telecommute" mean?

Any job where you can successfully telecommute will be outsourced to cheaper labor overseas in five years.
That's just a silly thing to say. Outsourcing makes up a tiny percentage of lost jobs and we're not going to suddenly ship all our technology jobs to India. Read Drezner for more information on why outsourcing isn't nearly as worrisome as you might think.

Also, the big companies already trend towards outlying areas where the tax benefits are greater and the land is cheaper. It's not like all the companies in downtown Dallas are going to suddenly up and move to downtown Irving. Some will go to Irving, some to Desoto, some to Arlington, etc. thus lowering density. Some people will follow, some people won't. And as it turns out, most people don't live in downtown Dallas anyway (probably because an 831 sq ft condo goes for 210K but whatever) so the only thing moving is the company which hardly increases the population density.

Rick,

Not exactly, pay attention to what Scotch said, it's right on the money. Population density will increase somewhat in these sateilite areas....but it won't approach what it was in the origional urban center. Why? Because the satelites are spread out over ALOT bigger area.... that's the whole point. Same Population x Larger Area = Lower Density. You'll have little mini-hubs of high density, surrounded by concentric circles of increasingly lower density.
Not so different from alot of the smaller cities out in the Midwest right now, I'd guess.

As far as outsourcing, your dead wrong. I work in high tech, I know what I'm talking about. Some projects it makes sense to farm out to India or elsewhere. The simple fact is that you just don't get the same quality work (or cultural understanding) when you farm it out... for some things that doesn't matter enough to make up for the price difference.... for others it really does. For instance, you'll notice for alot of big tech companies when you initialy contact them for Level 1 tech support you tend to get a call center in India ....but when you need to escalate to Level 2 you get switched right back to the USA.
Despite the fact that India is really making a push for Tech, that's not going to change anytime soon..... cause the U.S. is also pushing Tech at the same time......and the fact of the matter is that you can only do so much with that.... churning out Tech workers isn't like churning widgets..... you can train skills but you can't train talent....that has to grow organicly....and the two aren't equivalent.

This gets into a sort of general pet peeve of mine--policymakers who view an issue from a POV that's drastically different from the self-inerest viewpoint of everyday people.

The people who make the commutes most certainly pay attention to the actual door-to-desk time, that's the only one that matters. Here in MA, we're regularly treated to goofy rhetoric by management about making the MBTA better, but it invariably ignores the one or two or three things commuters care about. I always laugh when I see yet another story about how the T is trying expand ridership, and is spending money on cleaning up stations and an advertising campaign to advertise how swell the T is. What a joke. People who take the train from the suburbs care that they have a place to park, that the trains run relatively on time, and that they have a seat for the 30-45 minute drive. Everything else is barely on the radar screen.

I agree with most of the others here on various points. Public transportation has limited appeal...to those people that it works well for, and to those who have no other feasible options.

I find the more liberal anti-sprawl viewpoints a bit amusing...like saying that freeways are the problem. Oh well, sometimes a solution creates new problems, that's just the way it is. Cluster zoning seeks to re-create the very urban environments that a lot of people fled to the suburbs to escape. Thatr's the irony...liberal academics from the city telling the suburbs that their towns would work better if they were designed more like cities. Many or even most people who moved to the suburbs did so because they wanted a yard, some privacy, and less traffic. And yet here are egghead designers telling people what they should want instead,

Even in our relatively dense area, public transportation is a limited solution, although its certainly an essential part of things. We'd suffocate without it.

For the rest of people who drive, I see several big problems. One is bottlenecks caused by overcapacity in areas not equipped to handle the volume they now experience. One of the most common is interstate exit/onramps that were not created as double cloverleafs becuase when they were built no one lived nearby.

The other big problem is that many many towns in this area are experiencing population growth in developments that add population to the towns but do not add through-traffic road capacity. Self-contained development and cul-de-sacs give the people who move in a quieter safer environment, but the existing through roads become ever more burdened, resulting in far too many secondary throughways becoming traffic light gauntlets.

Through-traffic capacity is a planning problem. Seriously. While I certainly can't speak for anywhere but here, urban federal highway funding is highly dependent on long-term urban planning. The roads may not spring up until the development begins, but they're generally on the planning and CIP documents long before the houses are. That can give the impression that the highways are causing the development.

It's usually the other way around. The municipality knows pretty well which directions development and population growth will go. They incorporate that into their 10, 20, and 30 year plans, start plotting their annexations, and start figuring traffic loads. The developers read those plans (they're public records, after all) and try to beat the other developers to optioning block-acreage purchases in projected growth areas near freeway access. Then they sit on the options until the financing and sales environment is right--which is generally when those roads that have been on the books for XX years are coming onto the contruction horizon and have actual start dates and funding, and when the area's just been or is about to be annexed. Once the property is in municipal boundaries, the infrastructure tax-free muni-bond funding can be easily obtained for sewers and roads and utilities in the planned subdivision. That shows up not in the purchase price of the real estate, but as "specials" taxes in the property tax bill designated for paying off the bonds. Cities are much happier to provide that bond structure than counties--it's an automatic tax base boost, and counties are usually lower in the credit rating schemes than municipalities.

Node clustering and mixed-use zoning is just good sense. It reduces the impact of economic swings on the tax base, reduces traffic density and chokes and pollution, and keeps commercial property costs and tax levels down, which in turn helps boost employment and business investment.

As I said, high urban density is almost always a matter of geography. The market for "downtown" residential is mostly restricted to the childless professionals, the "young" retired, and low-income service workers. High-density is a PAIN for the casual shopper or commuter. Parking costs, or that walk to the bus stop, or from the train station to work, etc.

As I said, high urban density is almost always a matter of geography.

Thank God that geography is there. What a dull world we'd live in without densely populated city centers.

Tully I don't doubt what you say, and I agree that it is in VERY large part a planning issue. Around here, though, we don't have all that many super wide open spaces and so most of the throughways are the existing ones. I get the impression that very few municipalities have the will and foresight to make big new developments include reasonable through-traffic capacity. Invariably, if a large development includes such capacity, developers are careful to make the throughway a very meandering path so that it's not an attractive option for people outside the development to use, but alllows the people living in the development itself to have exit choices in various directions.

Where would we get our bleakly nihilistic music fixes without densely populated urban centers?

Yeah, I know what you mean. That Gospel festival in Philly was something else.

WHQ, I was actually thinking of this....

See, Brian? You're talkin' geography there. Y'all are already crowded in, closing on saturation densities. Too late to retro-plan, all you can do is carve out the buildings along the right-of-way and expand what you already have. Or get more intimate with mass transit. We've got space out here, so we can still plan for future loads. Not MY fault y'all already screwed up your planning! :-)

This seems the right place for a Simpsons reference. After all, as Butters can tell you, whatever it is the Simpsons have already covered it.

Off topic here, but do you think General Disarray is a critic or supporter of Rumsfeld?

I'm not sure about General Disarray, but I'm pretty sure that General Lee Disgruntled is a critic.

Great point, this is one reason it's useless in Atlanta.

And to be a bit more serious and on-topic, Brian, I have no doubt that things are different elsewhere than here. All areas are different. What I described is what happens out here in red states with room. Developers are very adaptive beasties. My experience is that they'd rather build commercial than residential. Better margins, less selling, better chance of subsidies from local government.

My least favorite are generally in-fill developers. Some are community saviors, actively re-habbing low-income areas with affordable housing, and those I love. Others, however, are bottom-feeding scum grabbing at federal and local subsidies meant for low-income housing to build upscale high-profit stuff on the public teat, getting richer with little or nothing out of pocket. I killed one of those attempts here just a couple o' months ago. Never did nail down the "food chain" of political fixin' on that one. I mean, I know the food chain, but I can't prove it.

They were trying to get low-income subsidies to do "re-hab" apartments just a few blocks from the where the new arena is going. The developer woulda walked with 20+% equity on a $4 mil property for some design work and under $10K in out-of-pocket, with various levels of government backing the financing. Uh uh. Not on my watch.

Agree completely with the transit time argument however the new complicating factor: multi-tasking. Hard to text message, work on the computer or watch a video in the car. I think you'll see this as a new advantage to "letting someone else drive"

That's if you think we'll still be allowed to drive. In the future, when vehicles enter areas that are above a certain traffic density threshold, you'll have to relinquish control to the traffic safety grid.

Of course, it will be "optional" at first. You won't HAVE to relinquish control, only if you want much lower insurance premiums. Then after a couple of wealthy a-holes cream virtuous grid users, those crazy loons who want to drive theri own cars will gradually be accorded pariah status.

BK,

I can only see one fortunate stumbling block to that development - liability. Right now if you or I screw up behind the wheel, we're on the hook. If the traffic saftey grid does - and believe me it will - guess who suddenly becomes a favorite of the trial lawyers?

"JANE! How do you stop this crazy thing?"

Forget the robot cars. I want my robot maid.

Almost there, Tully.