Another model energy-saving project ignores density and location

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has built what it calls a model “net-zero” energy home on its Gaithersburg, Maryland campus.  The house is festooned with arrays of solar cells that generate more electricity that the house consumes, and its extensively insulated, air-tight and high-efficiency windows.

This is great stuff. But still, we have a problem. Calling this house “net zero” leaves out a big part of its energy use–transportation.

The home is a 2,700 square foot single family structure with what looks like a three-car garage.  The home is quite a bit larger than the average home–and heating and cooling a large amount of space requires more energy than a smaller space. Also, because it’s a single family building (and one located on a large lot), it doesn’t share common walls with other homes, which also tends to increase heating and cooling costs. And while the building is technically net-zero, because it generates more energy than it consumes, that energy isn’t free: between the added efficiency features and the solar cells, NIST estimates the structure costs about $120,000 more than a standard home.

It’s a bit misleading to call any structure “net zero” without looking at its impact on transportation, because driving is a major source of energy use (and carbon emissions). And as we’ve pointed out in the case of the 1,800 space parking garage for the the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden Colorado, looking at just the structure’s energy budget, without looking at the transportation costs built in to its location, significantly understates its energy consumption, environmental impact and affordability.

Location matters

NIST has built its Net Zero demonstration home on its campus in Gaithersburg, and as an image from Google Maps makes clear, its a classic large lot suburban home.

Not only that, but Gaithersburg (a suburb of Washington DC) is a very automobile dependent city.  According to Walk Score, Gaithersburg’s overall walkability rates 49 on a scale of 100 points making it “car-dependent.”  The Gaithersburg area has some neighborhoods and apartment complexes that are considerably more walkable, but single family houses (like the net zero house) tend to be isolated from common destinations.

Figuring out how to build homes that use less energy is an important way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But how big those homes are, and where they’re located is in many ways at least as important as what technologies they use. Perhaps NIST’s next demonstration project can be a zero-net energy apartment building located in an urban neighborhood with a Walk Score of 95 or more, and easy access to transit.

The public wealth of cities is substantial, but under-pricing public assets is rampant

There’s an old saw among economists.  Two economists are walking along, and one of them says, “Look, there’s a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk.” The second economist says, “It can’t be a hundred dollar bill; if it was, somebody would have picked it up by now.”

The point is the economists tend to believe that markets work perfectly, and there are few, if any opportunities to get something for nothing. That old adage came to mind when we read a new story about how municipalities apparently have billions of dollars of hidden assets that they’re just not using.

We were drawn to Governing‘s write-up of a new book called “The Public Wealth of Cities.” It argues that cities everywhere are sitting on huge asset bases, and if they could just monetize the value of those assets they’d have the resources the badly need, to maintain civic infrastructure, provide services and pay down pension debts. Philadelphia’s Jeremy Nowak and Brookings’ Bruce Katz have both chimed in with their endorsement of the concept. And Transportation for America is even holding web conference on recycling public assets, that aims to show how to do this.

The authors, Dag Detter and Stefan Folster of Denmark, argue that many public assets are under-valued. Pre-1980 assets in many cities aren’t valued at all; and many assets are carried on the municipal books at their historic cost, not their current value. If you correctly valued these assets (at their market value or replacement cost) they’d be worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. In theory, if you could just earn a very modest rate of return on these assets–as you would from a portfolio of stocks or bonds–they’d generate lots of revenue. Here’s Governing:

If Cleveland put its assets into an urban wealth fund, a modest yield of 3 percent on a fund with a market value in the neighborhood of $30 billion could amount to an income of $900 million a year. That’s nearly double what the city earned in tax revenue in 2014 and is money that could be spent on infrastructure, health care and other critical needs.

Sounds pretty appealing.

But how do you earn a rate of return on a public asset, like a library, convention center or road?  The return has to come from the fees that you charge for its use.  And that’s the problem. For a variety of reasons, some very good and others not so good, we dramatically under-price the use of some assets relative to their market value. Take parks: they occupy huge amounts of very valuable land, but are mostly free to use, and even those parts of park systems that do charge fees typically only partly cover operating costs, and pay nothing in the form of a cash return on the asset. Getting a market rate of return would require charging users not just for operations, but an amount that would return net income to the asset owner.

What’s at fault here is both public sector book-keeping and public sector management. The public sector generally pays little attention to the balance sheet, and to correctly valuing assets. Public sector budgets are overwhelmingly focused on the income statement: does money coming in equal or exceed money going out? Seldom do public sector books accurately account for assets, make allowance for depreciation, or pay an explicit financial return on invested capital. But this isn’t just a book-keeping issue, it also comes down to management. The public sector almost always under-prices the user fees it charges for the use of its assets, in part because the users (citizens) are also the stockholders.

For some things, it makes little sense to charge users a price. In the case of parks, we generally imagine them to be a public good. We’re more than happy to discount their use as way of providing widely shared benefits that are potentially available to all citizens regardless of income. And because many aspects of park use are “non-rivalrous” there’s a good argument to be made that we don’t want to discourage use by charging fees. And with many such public goods, the transaction cost of collecting revenue would be prohibitive.

But in the case of other public assets underpricing, though politically entrenched, is at the root of bad outcomes. Take parking. The portion of the public right of way dedicated to parking is enormous, and quite valuable.  Its value is seldom reflected in the municipal financial reports, and except in a few places where we install parking meters or have neighborhood parking district, we generally give it away for free. Monetizing this asset would require charging users for its value–which in the case of parking would dramatically improve the efficiency of its use. Parking spaces are “rival” goods, and there’s a strong economic argument for asking users to pay their full costs.

As we all know, that’s the rub:  Many people have become accustomed to having roads and parking spaces be “free” and are loathe to pay for them.  If turning some public assets, like parking spaces over to the private sector would facilitate better pricing, it may be a road to realizing the hidden value of infrastructure. But the trick here is not so much public vs. private management, or whether we classify these things as “public wealth,” but whether we charge the correct price. At the end of the day, what’s required is the steely-eyed determination to charge a market price to customers who’ve become accustomed to getting something free or at a very deep discount.

Congestion is increasing in Portland: But not, apparently, because traffic volumes are increasing

Traffic congestion reports are just as formulaic as bodice-ripping romance novels. They have a predictable narrative form: our region is growing; it has more people and more jobs and more cars. And the number of people and jobs and cars is growing (gasp!) faster than the number of lane miles of freeway and highway in the region.  The inevitable result must be greater congestion–unless we build our way out of the problem.

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) released a report earlier this week describing traffic trends on Portland area freeways. Like all such reports, its profusely illustrated with a combination of statistics and photographs showing cars, lots of cars, usually with photos taken through an extreme telephoto lens.  The report shows speeds have decreased and peak hour travel times have increased on most freeways over the past two years. It makes a big deal of the fact that the region’s employment has increased by 5.5 percent and the region’s population has increased by 3.0 percent while freeway lane-miles have increased by only 1.0 percent.

What the report doesn’t tell us is even more important than what it does say.  It does little to explain why congestion seems to be increasing, even though traffic levels are going down in many locations, and actually says very little about what we can do to reduce congestion.

Slower travel times–but less travel.

The usual story about congestion is that our roads are clogged because of an ever increasing volume of cars using them. But in this report, congestion is getting worse (travel times are increasing) even though on nearly half of the region’s freeway segments, travel is decreasing.  Its also worth noting that travel volumes are down even though the economy and population continue to grow.

The report shows that travel times are increasing on most Portland area freeways.  On Interstate 5, the major north-south route through the region, the average number of miles traveled per day has actually decreased about 6 percent from 2,778,000 in 2013 to 2,709,000 in 2015.  At the same time, afternoon peak hour travel speeds on the roadway have fallen from 36 miles per hour to 31 miles per hour in the more heavily traveled northbound direction. For I-5, the report offers no clear explanation why travel times are increasing even as traffic volumes are decreasing. The same pattern holds for I-405, where speeds are down 3 to 7 percent, even though traffic counts are down 10 to 12 percent.  In the case of of US 26 (which reaches to the region’s western suburbs, traffic counts are up in the Eastbound direction, but down in the Westbound direction.  Six of thirteen major freeway segments carried less traffic in 2015 than they did two years earlier–even though the region’s population and employment had increased noticeably.

For nearly two decades, Portland’s population and economy have grown, and per person travel has decreased. Detailed studies conducted by the regional government show that since the 1990s, average vehicle miles traveled per person have declined 20 percent and average trip lengths have decreased about 14 percent. Driving less and taking shorter trips (due to increased density and better mixing of land use types) means people are less exposed to congestion.

A flawed prescription

While packaged as a “performance report” on the region’s highways, this document is really a sales brochure for upcoming ODOT investments to widen three Portland area freeways.  The report’s press release claims:

Approval of HB 2017, the Oregon Legislature’s 2017 transportation package, provides funding for targeted safety and congestion projects that can help address the issues found in the new report.

HB 2017 provides some initial funding for three freeway projects to widen portions of I-5 in Portland, I-205 in the region’s southern suburbs, and Oregon 217 to the West. All three have been sold as “bottleneck busters.”

But when you read the detail in the report, its apparent that while wider roads and electronic signage may reduce crashes, they won’t reduce regular recurring congestion:

Let’s decipher jargon here.  “Auxiliary lane” is engineer speak for widening the freeway.  “Real Time” projects are electronic signs and modifications to ramp meters. “Improving reliability” means decreasing congestion associated with fender benders; and “safety” means fewer fender benders, not fewer injuries or deaths.  And “improve performance” doesn’t mean less congestion, it means–once again, fewer crashes.  There’s also a clear admission that these lane widenings and signals won’t eliminate congestion. So if we translate this into ordinary English, here’s what ODOT is saying:

Our plan is to widen freeways in a few spots and install more electronic signs which we hope will reduce crashes and the congestion associated with those crashes. These won’t reduce regular, daily rush hour congestion that’s not caused by crashes.  There’s actually nothing we can do about routine congestion.

In effect, ODOT is acknowledging what is now called “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion.”  Increases in roadway capacity in dense urban environments simply induced additional travel, especially at the peak hour, with the result that congestion continues unabated. Spending tens or hundreds of millions to widen freeways in the name of reducing congestion is a futile waste of money.

Even the claim that electronic signs can reduce crashes is questionable.  The sole bit of evidence on the efficacy of the signs comes from a project ODOT implemented on Highway 217 in 2014.

The report also claims that “active transportation management”–a combination of tweaks to ramp metering and electronic traffic information and variable speed signs–added to Highway 217 were associated with a 21 percent reduction in crashes on that roadway. But the evidence for this seems conflicting.

It’s hard to square the headline claim on page 5 about Highway 217 (“TOTAL CRASHES down by 21%”) with the detail contained on the corridor report (page 49). While the Southbound lanes reported a 18 percent reduction in crashes, the Northbound lanes had a 3 percent increase.  If one combines the Northbound and Southbound data, total crashes are down 10 percent from 2013 to 2015, i.e. from 312 crashes in 2013 (121+191), to 281 crashes in 2015 (125+156), a decline of 31 crashes (281-312=31). Moreover, according to the ODOT report, some key data on travel trends in the corridor either isn’t available or is compromised because the corridor was under construction during the reporting period. ODOT’s Traffic Volume Tables data for Highway 217 (which doesn’t distinguish travel directions) reports that average daily traffic (ADT) on the northern segments of Highway 217 declined by about 10 percent between 2013 and 2015 (from 108,700 ADT to 96,400 ADT near the Sunset Highway). Traffic decreased less or increased slightly on segments further south.

If crashes are down about ten percent because traffic volumes are down as much as ten percent on certain segments of Highway 217, that’s hardly a testament to the effectiveness of the information signs.

Time losses are grossly exaggerated

Another key claim of the ODOT report is that highway congestion costs travelers 35,000 hours daily lost time, up from 28,000 hours in lost time in 2013. But, as we’ve shown before, these kinds of estimates are wildly exaggerated. First, its useful to know how ODOT computed “lost time.” According to page 18 of their report, they assumed that the “free flow” speed of Portland’s freeways was 60 miles per hour. They they treated any additional time that people spent traveling at lower speeds as “time lost” due to congestion.  Its worth noting that virtually all Portland area freeways have a 55 mile per hour speed limit, so ODOT is counting as a “cost” the inability of motorists to exceed the legal speed limit on Portland area freeways.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, there’s no feasible set of highway capacity improvement projects that could eliminate peak hour congestion. In effect, the cost of additional road capacity needed to avoid congestion would greatly exceed the value of travel time savings.

Summing up

More congestion is no doubt aggravating, but unfortunately this new ODOT report sheds little light on the problem. Despite the implication that growth is increasing congestion, its actually the case that travel volumes are down on a number of key roadways. Expanding highway capacity won’t reduce regular peak hour congestion, a fact that the report implicitly concedes, and something that has been confirmed by academic studies and real world experience. The evidence that information signs will reduce crashes and associated delay is sketchy. The report exaggerates the time lost to congestion by counting the inability to violate the speed limit as a “cost.”

 

 

How tax policy subsidizes homeownership, mostly for the wealthiest Americans

OK.  Imagine that someone offers you this investment deal.  We want you to buy some stock; in fact, we want you to buy about $150,000 or $200,000 in stock.  In a single company.  Sounds a bit risky, doesn’t it?  But keep listening, we have some special terms that make this a very attractive deal.

First, we’ll help you buy the stock “on margin”–you only need to come up with 10 or 20 percent of the purchase price of the stock.  We’ll lend you 80 or 90 percent of the cost of buying the stock. (And it will be a guaranteed, long term, low interest rate loan, with a fixed rate).  So right away, you’ve got leverage on your investment of five- or ten-fold, meaning that any increase in price of the stock multiplies your profits by a factor of five or ten.

Second, this is a special preferred stock that pays annual dividends of about 5 percent.  So your $200,000 investment pays about $10,000 per year in dividends.  And thanks to a special deal we’ve cut with the government, and unlike any other preferred stock, you get to take these dividends tax-free.

Third, of course, you had to borrow a bunch of money to buy this stock, but good news:  you can deduct the interest you pay on your loan from your taxable income.

Fourth, someday, when you sell your stock, you’ll have a capital gain, but again, we have yet another special deal with the government, so that you can exclude any capital gain you make on this stock from your taxable income.

It’s a great deal isn’t it?

So what is this fantasy stock?  It isn’t a stock, but it isn’t a fantasy either:  It’s owner-occupied housing in the US.

In fact, the higher the income, and the bigger the home you buy, the more you stand to profit from all of these special deals. The value of the mortgage interest deduction, exclusions of imputed rent, and deductibility of state and local taxes are all worth more to you if you are in a higher tax bracket. The mortgage interest deduction only has value if you earn enough to itemize deductions, meaning few low income homeowners can take advantage. It’s estimated that 90 percent of the value of the mortgage interest deduction goes to households with incomes of $100,000 or more. The higher the income and the more you spend on housing, the more your leveraged investment is worth, the more imputed rental income you shelter from taxes, the larger a capital gain you stand to earn.

One of the most important–and usually overlooked provisions of the tax code is the exclusion from taxation on imputed rental income. Here’s how this works.  If you rent your home from someone else, they have to pay income tax on the net income they get from renting. If you rent your home from yourself (i.e. you are a homeowner), you don’t have to pay income tax on that “income.” Your $200,000 home might rent for $1,500 a month, and if you are the owner and live there, you’re effectively getting a that amount of income (net of upkeep), tax free. That makes housing different from virtually every other investment because the dividends from housing (the ability to live rent free in a home you own) doesn’t get counted as taxable income.

You can even buy a second home and get the same deal.

Collectively, the value of these tax breaks for owner occupied housing constitute a subsidy of more than $250 billion per year from the federal government.

The irony here is that there’s almost no evidence that these tax provisions have actually increased homeownership. A new research paper by Jonathan Gruber and two colleagues shows that the deductibility of mortgage interest tends to increase the size of home that people purchase, but doesn’t influence whether they choose to be homeowners. Little wonder we have a nation of huge houses with tons of empty bedrooms.

Oh, and if you’re a renter, you’re probably asking, what kind of deal do we have for you? In short, no deal. Our advice is that you really ought to be a homeowner. But for lower income people, the path to homeownership is difficult and risky. As we’ve explained, low income buyers tend to buy at the wrong time (when the market is near a peak), pay more for credit, buy in more volatile neighborhoods and are more vulnerable in downturns. Its also the case that the the value of all of these tax code subsidies is smallest for low income households.

What we’ve done is to make homeownership a great deal . . . but only if you’ve got enough income to benefit from all the provisions the tax code offers.

What City Observatory did this week

1. How luxury housing becomes affordable. It’s always been the case that developers build new housing for those at the top end of the market. It’s true today, and it was true 50 and 100 years ago. We look back at “luxury” apartments built in Portland in 1910 and in the 1960s to see have they’ve gradually filtered their way down market and are now part of the region’s less expensive housing.

2. Can a net zero house have a three-car garage? We take a close look at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Gaithersburg Maryland Net Zero Model home, which, in addition to an array of solar panels, sports three garage doors. What the account for this house leaves out is the substantial energy consumption associated with its suburban location. If a house is located where its occupants need to drive for nearly all daily errands, auto related energy use is going to be much higher than if the same household lived in an apartment in a walkable neighborhood.

3. What a congestion report doesn’t tell us about congestion. We review a new report from Oregon’s Department of Transportation which catalogs increased congestion on Portland area freeways. Surprisingly, congestion has increased on many road segments, even though traffic counts are down. Like other congestion reports, the methodology used greatly exaggerates the time “lost” to congestion: in this case, it treats any time spent traveling at less than sixty miles an hour as time “lost”–even though the speed limit on nearly all Portland area freeways is 55 miles per hour. And importantly, the report concedes that proposed highway widening projects will do little if anything to reduce daily peak hour congestion, except that associated with fender-bender crashes; and even the evidence for that claim is speculative.

4. Dying to widen highways. In part 2 of our review of the recent Oregon Department of Transportation freeway performance report, we call out the “safety-washing” of proposed freeway widening projects. While the report uses the word crash almost 200 times, it omits the salient detail that Portland area freeways are, on average 5 times safer than the region’s arterial streets. Its actually the case that congested freeways, where cars have to slow down, have fewer serious accidents than ones with lower levels of congestion. As with most metro areas, safety won’t be improved by making cars go faster, but by lessening speeds especially where cars conflict with other, more vulnerable road users. Expensive freeway widening projects have little to do with saving lives or reducing serious injuries.

Must read

1. How paying for parking works: Now in easy-to-read comic strip form. You probably haven’t waded through all 900-odd pages of Don Shoup’s magisterial “High Price of Free Parking.” And now you don’t have to: It’s essential lessons have been boiled down to a short comic strip called “The Particular Parable of the Lyft Lot,” published by Bloomberg Business Week.  It tells a story–which we related some months back–about how at it’s San Francisco headquarters, the ride-hailing company Lyft implemented a plan to charge employees who parked in on of the firm’s few parking spots and use the proceeds to subsidize trips taken by those who didn’t use parking. The comic strip shows how this worked, and assured parking for those who needed it, and helped underwrite the cost of alternatives for everyone else.

2. In other parking news, The Seattle Times tells us about one weird trick that makes parking pricing work even better: daily rates. The Gates Foundation has nearly 1,200 employees in downtown Seattle. Rather than charging a monthly price for parking, it charges a daily price (that has a monthly maximum). Employees who don’t use the foundation parking lot get a $3 day payment. If you pay monthly, you are paying for parking whether you use it or not; daily payment gives employees the flexibility to car pool, bus or bike when they can, but assures that on days when its more convenient or worthwhile they can park. As with the Lyft experiment in San Francisco, charging daily rates rather than monthly ones has dramatically reduced daily driving by office workers.

 

What City Observatory did this week

1. Such a deal.  Suppose someone offered you this investment deal: You can get $200,000 in preferred stock, that pays a 5% annual dividend tax free, and when it comes time to sell this investment, all of your capital gains will be tax free, too. Can’t afford $200K? No problem, put down $20K, and we’ll loan you the balance–you’ve got 10X leverage, so if the price goes up at all, you’ll reap a ten-fold reward on your investment. Sounds to good to be true? It’s real: real estate. These are the key features of the housing finance system for owner-occupied homes in the US, and explain why we have such huge houses, and such widespread homeownership (at least among those with enough income to take advantage of the features of the tax system which give the greatest subsidy to those with the highest income).  And for renters we’ve got . . . nothing (save for the admonition that it would be better if they were high income homeowners).

2. Why freeway widening is still a bad idea in 2017. We look at recent experiences in Houston, Dallas, Louisville and Rochester, all of which are thinking (or rethinking) the desirability of wider freeways. Houston’s Katy Freeway amply demonstrates the fundamental law of road congestion (wider roads induce more driving, and worse congestion). Dallas is cancelling a major new road project through the center of the city. Louisville’s experience shows that tolling actually reduces traffic, and can obviate the need for new capacity. And Rochester is doing what some cities–like Portland–used to do: tearing out a freeway to rebuild urban neighborhoods.

Must read

1. Here’s how to measure changes in rent. Streeteasy, a New York based real estate marketplace, has published a new report looking at changes in rents and incomes in New York City. Not surprisingly, rent increases since 2010 have generally outpaced incomes in the city. What’s really great about this report is the care with which the rental price indices have been assembled. While it’s common practice simply to report the median value of current listings (a technique that is easy, but can be biased by selection effects), Streeteasy has gone the extra mile and computed a repeat sales index that looks at changes in the prices of the same apartment at different points in time to estimate a quality-adjusted rate of change in rents. In addition, their estimates also incorporate the value of landlord concessions. Their methodology is clearly spelled out as well. This is a model for how to tackle the important task of measuring rent levels.

2. Why school segregation is like zoning. Mike Lewyn has a short but trenchant post that emphasizes an important dynamic that is at work when we rely on “local control.” Whether we’re talking about housing or schools (and the two are hardly separate), it’s to every neighborhood’s advantage to draw boundaries in a way that includes richer people and excludes poorer ones (and that’s true regardless of whether we’re talking about school attendance boundaries or zoning boundaries). When every neighborhood tries to pursue this strategy, it results in the systematic exclusion of the poor, and contributes to greater segregation (and higher housing costs) for everyone.

3. The minimum wage and automation. In a new paper, Economist David Neumark argues that one effect of a higher minimum wage will be to encourage employers to automate more tasks, displacing some low wage workers. Are we just hastening the rise of the robots by giving low wage workers raises? Bloomberg  View’s Noah Smith argues that this effect is a feature, not a bug, of minimum wage laws. Higher wages serve as an inducement to devise and deploy new labor saving technologies. That’s not a new phenomenon: The high price of labor in England was one of the reasons for the industrial revolution. And with good macroeconomic policies, its possible to grow the economy while getting rid of many of the most dirty, menial and physically demanding jobs.

 

 

 

What City Observatory did this week

1. Hundred dollar bills on the municipal sidewalk? There’s a lot of interest in tapping the hidden value of municipal assets to address city financial problems. The typical city owns billions of dollars of assets, particularly valuable urban land, and at least in theory, if it could earn even a modest financial return on these assets, the city could raise substantial revenue. The problem is that getting more revenue ultimately hinges on charging users, often the citizen-beneficiaries of public services, something closer to the market price for the resources or services they receive. This raises political and policy problems.

2. Why we’re talking about Portland’s freeways. Long a leader in progressive transportation policy, having torn out one freeway and cancelled several others, Portland is now considering a billion dollar package of freeway-widening projects. We explain why the debate over these projects is of more than local interest, and why we’ll be following this debate in the weeks ahead at City Observatory.

3. Driven Apart:  How sprawl is lengthening American commutes. Our path-breaking 2010 report on the misleading nature of indices usually used to measure traffic congestion has been unavailable for some time.  We’re republishing it at City Observatory. It shows that the widely used travel time index conceals the additional time that sprawl adds to commuting trips. It turns out that more compact cities have shorter total travel times even though they may get poor grades according to the travel time index.

Must read

1. Mapping metro travel times. The Washington Post‘s Sahil Chinoy has a superb piece of data journalism showing the peak and off peak hour travel distances in US metro areas. Using data from Here.com’s archive of cell-phone based travel data, he estimates how far you can travel in one hour by car from the city center of each of the nation’s largest metro areas at 4pm, 7pm and 10pm on a given Friday afternoon. The results are all mapped on same scale, 75-mile radius maps, so you can easily compare metro areas. The following maps shows the areas reachable in New York (left) and Philadelphia (right) within one hour at 4pm (red), 7pm (yellow) and 10 pm (green) on a typical Friday evening.

2. Private bike share flourishing in Seattle.  Writing at Market Urbanism, Asher Meyers describes the initial success of two privately run bike sharing systems in Seattle, both of which use the newer “dockless” model, that relies on smart GPS equipped bikes. Limebike and Spin have each set up 1,000 bike fleets in the city, entering after the much publicized demise of the city-sponsored Pronto system. While there’s been some backlash about so-called “rogue” operators, and the illegal parking of some bikes, the entry of these privately funded systems seems likely to lead to even greater use of bikes as part of the urban transportation system.

3. America’s bus ridership is declining.  The Wall Street Journal reports that over the past decade, bus ridership in the US has declined by about 10 percent. There are many causes: chief among them, cutbacks in numbers of routes and hours of service. Strapped for funds, bus operators cut back, which further reduces the utility of the system and leads to lower ridership, creating a “transit death spiral.” Service reductions have disproportionate effects on the poor and carless households, who face longer, slower journeys and less access to jobs and services.

In the News

City Observatory’s Joe Cortright is quoted in last week’s Washington Post article on highway congestion.

So what’s behind nightmarish traffic? According to Cortright, it’s about zoning and segregation. The model of the modern American city with separate sections for living, working, shopping and eating, spurs congestion.

Willamette Week synopsizes our analysis of the “safety-washing” of proposed freeway expansion projects by the Oregon Department of Transportation.

But the focus of the transportation package is on big highway projects, which aren’t a leading cause of fatal crashes. Instead, state figures show,  a disproportionate number of deaths occur on secondary roads and city streets.