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It’s a rite of passage for a blogger to encounter his first populist attack-link. The widely-read Portland blogger Jack Bogdanski had this to say about my post wondering if all-day parking in downtown Portland might be too cheap:
Let’s kill off downtown Portland once and for all
Jack up the cost of parking down there even higher. Jarrett, old buddy — a lot of us ain’t gonna ride your goofy streetcar, no matter how much you charge for a parking space.
Longtime Human Transit readers will find that streetcar reference pretty funny, considering this.
If you want to live in a city with fewer cars, how do you get there? What do low-car cities have in common? Anything? Or are there in fact different ways to reach low car-dependence, demonstrated by very different cities achieving the same high scores?
All these questions came to mind as I perused Wikipedia’s helpful list of the US cities over 100,000 population with the most zero-car households (thanks to commenter Alon Levy). I find the list so interesting that I’m just going to copy all of it here, then add some thoughts at the end. The figure given for each city is the percentage of households that do not own a car. Continue Reading →
Updated Jan 16
The next round of San Francisco service cuts have been announced, or as commenter Ted King puts it, “the fuse has been lit.” For local coverage see the SF Chronicle and Streetsblog SF.
Here are some of the most interesting points from the budget summary (via Streetsblog, not the Chronicle):
Although the budget hole to be closed is $16.9m, the service cuts are only $4.8m. That’s impressive. They achieve so much non-service savings by a whole pile of cuts to other things, designed to have wide but manageable impacts. Labor takes a ping: not just 0.7m in “concessions,” but also charges for parking at the workplace. (Since a huge share of the drivers report to work around 4:30 in the morning, many don’t have good transit options.) Continue Reading →
Very interesting and civil comment threads have grown on the last several posts. Comment threads, of course, have a tendency to start with the post’s topic but then turn into conversations among the commenters, often leading far from the source. As long as everyone’s civil, I don’t worry about that much. I’ve learned not to treat the comment count as a measure of my relevance.
But I do want to note the efforts of commenter Watson, who lucidly argued for parking subsidies, sprawl land use patterns, etc. on the this recent post. The resulting comment thread is worth a read. On the subject of whether downtown Portland all-day parking rates should be higher, he began:
Be careful what you wish for. In the short-term, a sharp increase in central city parking prices might induce a significant shift from autos to transit. But over the long-term, the primary effect may be to drive businesses and people out of the city and into the suburbs where land is cheaper and parking can be provided at lower cost.
Federal funding for transit projects will now consider their impacts on overall urban livability and sustainability, not just the cost-per-unit of time savings.
In a dramatic change from existing policy, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today proposed that new funding guidelines for major transit projects be based on livability issues such as economic development opportunities and environmental benefits, in addition to cost and time saved, which are currently the primary criteria.
In remarks at the Transportation Research Board annual meeting, the Secretary announced the Obama Administration’s plans to change how projects are selected to receive federal financial assistance in the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) New Starts and Small Starts programs. As part of this initiative, the FTA will immediately rescind budget restrictions issued by the Bush Administration in March of 2005 that focused primarily on how much a project shortened commute times in comparison to its cost.
Great news, perhaps, but I look forward to seeing how FTA is going to turn something as subjective as livability into a quantifiable measure that can be used to score projects, particularly since the payoffs lie in development that a proposed transit line might be expected to trigger, but that usually isn’t a sure thing at the point when you’re deciding to fund the line. And of course, travel time does still matter.
Read the complete statement from Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood below.
My New Zealand colleagues Julie Ann Genter and Stuart Donovan have built a great practice doing research on transport and land use policy issues for national and local government. They are both especially strong on parking policy. They’ve put together a little video explaining the problems with hidden parking subsidies in an urban context, also featuring Auckland University’s Tim Hazeldine.
The video is based on Donald Shoup’s definitive book, The High Cost of Free Parking. It obviously talks mostly about Auckland, but the issues it presents are the same in almost any New World city.
Julie Anne Genter also has a paper on the topic here.
Thanks to Joshua Arbury of the Auckland Transport Blog for reminding me about this.
In the last post I pointed to a set of data out of the City of Portland showing that in a 12-year period when the city added four new rail transit lines, including the globally marketed Portland Streetcar, the percentage of Portland residents who take transit to work (called transit’s “journey-to-work mode share”) seems not to have changed at all.
Commenter Pantheon dug into Canadian statistics and found that in the period 1996-2006, when Portland’s transit journey-to-work mode share was idling in the 12-15% range, Canadian cities posted these gains: Continue Reading →
Portland is supposed to be one of the US’s great transit success stories. Is it still? Do we know what it’s achieving? Do we know how to measure it?
A couple of months ago, Portland reader Adrian Lawson pointed me to an Oregon Catalyst article ridiculing the Portland Metro goal of tripling non-auto mode share by 2035. The author, John Charles, Jr., is the CEO of the Cascade Policy Institute, a conservative Oregon think tank that opposes Oregon’s land use planning system and generally favors roads over transit, so this is not a surprising view. Continue Reading →
In posts here and here (with leftovers here), I praised the way San Francisco MTA crafted the budget-driven service cuts that went into effect last month. By deleting whole lines and line segments that had alternative services nearby, they managed to reduce service without reducing many people’s abundant access. So the implementation went fairly well.
Unfortunately, it looks like more cuts will be needed in 2010, made worse by Governor Schwarzenegger’s raids on state transit funding. So it’s understandable but distressing to hear the MTA Board’s conversation going along these lines: Continue Reading →