Pretending that climate change can be solved by widening roads to keep cars from idling in traffic is dishonest and reprehensible, yet that’s exactly what Portland’s regional government is doing.

A new poll in Portland is promoting the discredited myth that cars idling in traffic congestion are a principal cause of climate change.

Portland’s regional government, Metro, is putting together the outlines of a $3 billion transportation funding measure, and hired a survey research firm to conduct a poll, supposedly to assess public attitudes about transportation. But in reality, the poll isn’t so much about assessing attitudes as it is trying to develop, refine and market a false and misleading message about the causes of climate change and what it will take to solve them. The poll repeatedly makes the claim that reducing traffic congestion will lower carbon emissions by reducing idling.

What this amounts to is publicly funded messaging to support climate change denial. It’s cloaking arguments for more road construction with a big lie about the role of traffic idling on carbon emissions, and a disproved theory that wider roads will reduce congestion.

The debunked idling myth

One of the favorite myths of highway advocates is the notion that an important cause of climate change is the carbon emissions from cars idling in traffic. If we could just widen roads so that cars never had to idle (or ideally,even slow down), we’d clearly lessen greenhouse gas emissions, right?

As we’ve reported at City Observatory, that myth has been repeatedly debunked by careful scientific inquiry. Widening roads causes the well known problem of induced demand–greater road capacity produces even more driving, and higher levels of carbon emissions. Induced demand means that highway widening projects don’t reduce traffic congestion, and therefore the imagined emission reductions from less idling never occur. The definitive evidence on this point comes from Metro’s own backyard, from Alex Bigazzi and Miguel Figliozzi, two transportation researchers at Portland State University. Their research shows that savings in emissions from idling can be more than offset by increased driving prompted by lower levels of congestion.  When you reduce congestion by whatever means, people drive more, and the “more driving” more than cancels out any savings from reduced idling. As they conclude:

Induced or suppressed travel demand . . . are critical considerations when assessing the emissions effects of capacity-based congestion mitigation strategies. Capacity expansions that reduce marginal emissions rates by increasing travel speeds are likely to increase total emissions in the long run through induced demand.

And its a problem that grows steadily worse over time–a more car dependent transportation system induces the additional decentralization of jobs, stores and housing, leading to longer trips. The variation in emissions across US metro areas for example, has everything to do with sprawl and car dependence, and nothing whatsoever to do with variations in time spent idling in traffic.

Its therefore simply dishonest to claim that wider roads and greater traffic carrying capacity will lead to greenhouse gas reductions.  Its hardly surprising that die-hard driving advocates would populate social media with this lie. What’s appalling is when a planning professionals propagate this myth.

Yet that’s exactly what Portland’s regional government, Metro, has done in a new poll it fielded in support of a proposed tax levy to support transportation. While it’s nominally pitched as neutral opinion research, its anything but.  It’s more of  a push poll, which systematically repeats the discredited claim that idling is a big contributor to climate pollution.   This thinly disguised “framing” would be bad enough if it were limited only to those who were surveyed, but its being widely disseminated by Metro as proof of public attitudes, and now its driving media coverage.

Willamette Week summarized the poll results as showing Portland residents don’t care much about climate, and want to widen roads.

Willamette Week’s reporting on the poll results perfectly delivers the message that its marketing mavens crafted:  We want to widen roads as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Here’s the way that the project’s survey research consultants, FM3 summarized their findings in a presentation for Metro.

Do you favor or oppose “improvements”?

The question is based on an utterly false premise that reducing congestion by expanding capacity will result in lower emissions.  In addition, the choice of options is deeply biased:  one option is framed as “balanced” while the other is limited to “only” transit biking and walking.  One alternative is framed as providing improvements “roadway improvements” while the other alternative specifically rules out support for “improvements.”  (Characterizing one alternative as an “improvement” and the other alternative as ruling out an “improvement” is the very definition of a question bias).  As Charles Denison pointed out on twitter, the survey’s wording is an absurdly loaded choice.

Survey respondents were treated to a steady diet of repetition of this phony point in poll questions clearly designed to help fashion just the right rhetorical flourish to persuade voters.  Here are a couple examples of statements that respondents were presented (emphasis added):

In order to address the growing challenge of climate change and reduce carbon pollution, this measure would improve public transit to make it easier for people to choose not to drive; promote more use of zero-emission vehicles for transit; and reduce traffic and gridlock to cut back on carbon pollution from idling cars

A measure that protects clean air and reduces the pollution caused by idling cars and trucks, particularly along routes where people live and children go to school. Investments would help increase the availability of transportation options that preserve air quality and reduce the risk of lung disease and asthma.

It’s plain that what Metro is doing is market-testing the slogans, talking points and 30-second pitches that will be used to sell their bond measure. So what we’re seeing is just an advanced peek at a calculated plan designed to present this message about “widening roads to save the climate” as a way of convincing people to vote for a tax measure. And as Willamette Week’s coverage makes clear, this survey will serve nicely to propagate this myth to a wider audience.

What makes this especially bankrupt is that responsible analysts know that idling is not a major source of pollution or carbon emissions.  Metro’s 530-page Regional Transportation Plan which describes the region’s strategies for transportation and meeting greenhouse gas emission reduction goals contains no estimates of carbon emissions attributable to idling, no strategies for reducing idling as means to lower greenhouse gases, and in fact mentions the word “idling,” only once.

This kind of deceptive practice would come as no surprise if we were talking about marketing a fat- or sugar- laden snack as a healthy alternative. But in the face of an existential global crisis, the regional government is propagating a discredited myth to justify what are likely to be counterproductive investments in road widening. The first duty that any official owes the public is to tell the truth:  this polling is a dereliction of that duty and a subversion of the kind of frank and honest discussion we need to have if we’re going to tackle the climate crisis.

Political rationalizations and exceptionalism will always be used to justify giveaway policies

With the possible exception of Greg LeRoy (who tracks state and local incentives for Good Jobs Now) and Amazon’s site location department, there’s no one in the nation who knows more about business incentives and their effectiveness than the Upjohn Institute’s Tim Bartik. Tim has written a bevy of careful academic studies of the impact of a range of tax incentives, most of which are a bit technical for a general audience. Thankfully, he’s distilled the key learnings into a thorough and clearly written non-technical summary of what the research shows. This new book–Making sense of incentives:  Taming Business Incentives to produce prosperity , available in print and also as a (free) downloadable PDF, is must reading for anyone involved in economic development.

Economic incentives are big business. Bartik estimates that state and local governments hand out roughly $50 billion in incentives annually.

While there’s considerable folk wisdom about their efficacy, Bartik’s book takes a hard look at whether they actually work.

The “But For” problem

There are a couple of aphorisms that neatly summarize the problems and challenges of assessing economic development incentives.

“In know that only half of all advertising works, I just don’t know which half.”

“Shoot everything that flies, claim everything that falls.”

The gnarliest question in evaluating economic development incentives is figuring out whether they actually made any difference to where a firm ended up locating or not. Economic development deal-makers will swear up-and-down (and may even believe) that the last dollar of tax incentives that they provided “sealed the deal” and that without them the company would have gone elsewhere. Critics note that the abundance of incentives and the obsequiousness of economic development officials has produced as system of cash prizes for bad corporate behavior which rewards companies for doing exactly what they would have done anyhow, provided that they simply engage in the appropriate corporate kabuki of pretending to look seriously at multiple locations. Here’s where Bartik’s research shines:  he’s used a range of economic techniques to assess whether and how much incentives actually matter to the location of business investment.  His conclusion:  roughly three-quarter of all incentives don’t matter; only about a quarter of the time do they tip the balance. Bartik explains:

For a new facility location or expansion decision, this means that the incentive tipped the location decision toward this state only 25 percent of the time or less. The other 75 percent of the time, the firm would have made the same new facility location decision, or same expansion decision, even if no incentive had been provided.

You’d think that would chasten economic development officials–and their bosses, Mayors and Governors. But it doesn’t. While Bartik is almost certainly right in the aggregate (three-quarters of incentives are wasted), its nearly impossible to tell whether any individual firm’s tax break was the “deal clincher” or simply a giveaway.  Economic development officials seem to always believe (and nearly always say) that their incentive program was essential to the result. Corporate beneficiaries also have strong incentives to play along (to make their government partners feel justified in making the deal).

What this means in practice its rare that anyone ever questions whether a tax break or subsidy was actually the decisive factor in tipping a location decision. Economic development officials and the companies that get the tax break always say that it was a driver in their deal. Confronted with studies like Bartik’s the seasoned economic development practitioner may even concede that other people give away the store, but that our agency (or this deal) is one of those 25 percent where it made a difference.

Two bits of evidence from the field:  Many economic development deals are composed of multiple incentives:  state tax breaks, local tax breaks, subsidies for land development or job training, road or sewer or water line extensions and so on.  It’s common for each of these programs to claim credit for all of the new jobs and investment associated with their particular incentive.  Shoot everything that flies, claim everything that falls.  Some decades ago, when I worked for the State of Oregon, I asked a state manager why her program had extended a subsidy to a firm after it had already announced its investment:  the manager explained that it was a sure-fire win; her program would be able to claim credit for job creation, and that would make its benefits look even larger.

Politics trumps economics

Most of Bartik’s book is informed by careful econometric research that tests whether incentives seem to have any correlation with increases in business investment (they mostly don’t), whether they actually tip business decisions toward particular locations (about three-quarters of the time they’re irrelevant) and whether they generate more benefits that costs (again, usually not).

If Governors and Mayors were cool, fact-driven analysts, Bartik’s work (and that of other scholars) would be game, set and match. But as Bartik acknowledges, a primary motivation for offering incentives is political. Elected leaders want to be perceived as doing something to benefit the local economy, whether it works or not is something that’s only likely to be of interest and accessible to scholars like Bartik. When it comes to economic development, Governors and Mayors are involved in the production of “symbolic goods.” The more drama and publicity (as exemplified by the media coverage of Amazon’s carefully staged “HQ2” competition, the more opportunity for these elected leaders to show they “care” about voter’s economic concerns.  Bartik understands this dynamic:

A political reason for incentives is that they are popular. Targeting the creation of particular identified jobs—which is what incentives do—is rewarded by voters. Voters are more likely to vote for politicians who offer incentives, even if the incentives are unsuccessful. Voters appreciate well-publicized efforts to attract jobs. If a governor or mayor can go after a prominent large corporation with an incentive offer, why not? At least he is trying; he cares. Better yet, the incentives may be long-term, paid for by the next governor or mayor. Political benefits now, budget costs later.

Some years back, I wrote an analysis of state and local efforts to attract and build biotechnology industry clusters. One thing that I observed was that, in addition to the chances of success being extremely remote for any city, it was certain that it would take a decade or more for any imaginable biotechnology development strategy to bear fruit. Since that would be well beyond the political lifetime of any incumbent Mayor or Governor, it seemed to me at first glance that biotech would be an unattractive strategy, because you would never be in office to get credit for success. Yet nearly every state and large city was actively pursuing biotech. Then it dawned on me:  if success was at least a decade away, my city or state’s biotech efforts could never be judged a failure while I was in office. The critical takeaway:  it is the political calculus that drives business incentives, not any consideration of whether they actually work in practice or not.

This observation is confirmed by the extraordinary paucity of practitioner-driven evaluation. Few economic development departments anywhere engage in systematic monitoring of the results of their efforts. They’re very good at creating an echo chamber for announcements of new investment, but seldom, if ever talk about whether job creation promises are met. Instead, the only solid, objective evidence on what works, and what doesn’t comes from scholars like Bartik, which is a key reason why this book is so important.

Concrete Advice

We’ll almost certainly continue to have business incentives. Most of them will continue to be ineffective. One of the most valuable pieces of Bartik’s book is four simple points about how to structure incentives to maximize their economic benefits and decrease their costs. They are:

1. Focus incentives on traded sector industries (i.e. businesses that sell goods and services in national and international markets), rather than subsidizing local firms who compete largely against other local firms. Target these incentives for distressed areas.
2. Emphasize services over incentives. Spending money on services that make businesses more competitive, like employee training, do more to produce benefits.
3. Avoid big long-term deals, they’re generally bad deals for local governments, and “out-year” incentives actually have little effect on current business decisions.
4. Pay for incentives by raising overall business taxes rather than cutting public services.

Bartik’s work is as close as definitive answers get to shedding light on the game of business incentives. He gives a coherent analysis of the “but for” problem, and demonstrates that most of what is spent on economic development has little impact on patterns of investment. Unfortunately the compelling political calculus for offering incentives continues to trump analytics.The book clearly delivers on the first half of its title (making sense of incentives). Accomplishing the second half, (taming them) will continue to be a difficult task, even with this good advice.

Timothy J. Bartik, Making sense of incentives: Taming business incentives to promote prosperity, Upjohn Institute, WE Series, October 2019 (https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/258/)

A new study shows a tantalizing connection between more walkable places and intergenerational economic mobility

City Observatory readers will be familiar with the findings of Raj Chetty and his colleagues in the Equality of Opportunity Project. In a revelatory use of big data, they used anonymized tax records to track the lifetime earnings of kids growing up across the United States.  The results show that the neighborhood and metro area one grows up in has a huge impact on your lifetime earning prospects. Strikingly, kids from low income families growing up in some neighborhoods, especially those with mixed incomes and lower levels of racial segregation fare better. The Equality of Opportunity Project’s research casts doubt on some traditional economic development nostrums (having more jobs nearby or faster job growth doesn’t seem to be associated with intergenerational economic mobility), and put more emphasis on a wide range of neighborhood effects (intergenerational mobility is positively correlated with the number of employed adults in a neighborhood and with measures of social capital), suggesting that successful mixed income neighborhoods play a key role in helping kids escape poverty.

To shift gears a bit, if you read City Observatory regularly, you’re also familiar with Walk Score, the ubiquitous easy-to-interpret index of walkability. We and other scholars have used Walk Score to show that walkability commands a premium in real estate markets (more walkable homes, all other factors held constant) tend to be much more valuable than homes that are more car-dependent.  A growing body of public health research also confirms that walkability has significant health benefits:  people who live in more walkable areas walk more and are healthier.

Now, let’s combine these two threads:  the geography of intergenerational economic mobility and walkability.  A new paper from psychologist Shigehero Oishi, Minkyung Koo and Nicholas Buttrick does just that, looking at the correlation between Walk Score and intergenerational economic mobility.

Oishi, Koo and Buttrick aggregate data from the Equality of Opportunity Project’s estimates of integenerational mobility for commuting zones and compare it to the overall level of walkability in the area.  “Commuting Zones” are a geographical unit that usually encompasses an entire metro area and surrounding rural areas.  The US is divided into 377 zones.

The study finds that, after controlling for the “big five” factors that Chetty, et al’s research showed tended to influence intergenerational economic mobility–—percentage of African Americans, degree of income inequality, quality of K–12 education, social capital, and percentage of children with single mothers–that a commuting area’s walk score added a statistically significant and positive effect on intergenerational economic mobility.  Including walkability in a model of intergenerational economic mobility explained an additional 10 percent of the variation in mobility rates among commuting zones. As the authors conclude:

Using tax data from almost nine million Americans born between 1980 and 1982, Study 1 demonstrates that upward social mobility is substantially higher in more walkable areas (r .390). The more walkable an area is (as indexed by Walkscore.com), the more likely Americans whose parents were in the lowest income quintile are to have reached the highest income quintile by their 30s. This relationship holds above and beyond factors previously used to explain upward mobility, factors such as income inequality and social capital, and is robust to various political, economic, and demographic controls; to alternate specifications of upward mobility; and to potentially unspecified third variables.

This is encouraging evidence:  It suggests that regions that are more walkable tend to have better opportunities for kids from low income families to make connections.  (It may also be that walkability is correlated with other factors, like social capital, that maximize opportunities). Oishi, Koo and Buttrick explore these possible explanations by looking at other data on commuting and car ownership and on walkability and a self-reported sense of belonging.  Their data show that in more walkable areas, economic success is less correlated with car ownership (suggesting one way that economic mobility is enhanced by greater walkability). The findings on a sense of belonging and intergenerational mobility are less clear; the relationship, if anything is indirect:

 . . . although the direct association between walkability and upward social mobility was not significant, those living in a walkable neighborhood and those who walked more in their everyday lives felt a greater sense of belonging, which was in turn associated with upward social mobility

The data support the notion that walkability is correlated with intergenerational economic mobility. One limitation of the headline analysis of the Chetty et al data is that they are aggregated at the level of commuting zones. We know that that both walkability and intergenerational economic mobility vary substantially within metropolitan areas; different neighborhoods within a metro area can either be car-dependent or highly walkable.  It seems like the next logical step in this research is to look to see whether this same correlation holds for smaller areas. 

Oishi, S., Koo, M., & Buttrick, N. R. (2018, December 17). The Socioecological Psychology of Upward Social Mobility. American Psychologist. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000422.  Full text available at:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/58104496/Oishi__Koo__Buttrick_2018_American_Psychologist.pdf

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution‘s Tyler Cowen for flagging this research.

Note:  This post has been updated to correct editing errors. (October 22)

We have urban traffic congestion because we heavily subsidize people driving in cities.

Reducing subsidies and lowering road capacity reduces traffic and congestion.

Why are we building highway capacity for users who won’t pay its costs at 90 percent discount?

By now, we all know about “induced demand” the idea that when we build more road capacity (ostensibly to reduce congestion) we simply prompt more and more people to drive. Well, it turns out the reverse is also true:  If we price or take away capacity, by closing streets to some vehicles or imposing tolls, we actually reduce the level of traffic in an area. Time and again, real world experience shows slashing or pricing capacity reduces urban congestion.

New York’s  Miracle on 14th Street

Case in point:  The Miracle on 14th Street. A week ago, New York City effectively banned through-car traffic on 14th Street in Manhattan between Third and Eighth Avenues. This miracle comes in two parts: Part one is the much improved bus speeds on 14th Avenue; once the city’s slowest bus line, the M14 is now racing ahead of schedule, with the added benefit that freed from cars, 14th Street is now a far more pleasant place for people.

But the second, and in many ways less obvious part of this miracle is on the adjacent 13th and 15th Streets. If you assume that traffic is a kind of incompressible liquid, you’d expect that banning cars on one street would automatically produce gridlock on adjacent streets.  That actually hasn’t turned out to be the case. The adjacent streets are, if anything, less trafficked than before, as reported by the West 13th Street Alliance:

Seattle’s Alaskan Way: Carmaggedon Avoided

City Observatory readers will remember the predictions of “Carmageggdon” made for downtown Seattle when the City finally closed the since-demolished Alaskan Way Viaduct. Part of the viaduct had to be removed before traffic could use the new tunnel, with the result being for a period of weeks, a roadway that had carried about 90,000 cars a day through downtown Seattle was removed, with no replacement.

Instead of gridlock, traffic levels throughout downtown Seattle were reduced. The Seattle Times reported, with a note of incredulity and amazement, that “the cars just disappeared.” By shutting down the flow of traffic from the viaduct to Seattle streets, the closure reduced the demand on those streets and enabled traffic to flow more smoothly.

Things quickly went back to “normal” once the City opened the new SR 99 tunnel to replace the viaduct’s highway lanes.

Here’s the point:  road capacity doesn’t so much relieve traffic as it creates it.  When we reduce the capacity of a system to introduce cars into a city center, we get fewer cars.

But after months of getting a free ride, tunnel users will finally be asked in early November to make a modest contribution to the cost of the project.  The $1 to $2.25 toll that tunnel users will be asked to pay will cover less than 10 percent of the cost of the $3.3 billion in tunnel construction and related costs.

The toll, not surprisingly, is going to discourage some people from using the tunnel.  The Washington State Department of Transportation reportedly expects tunnel traffic to drop by 30 to 50 percent.

Why spend public money on capacity users don’t want?

Reflect for a moment what that means:  Today, as long as the trip is free, about 80,000 vehicles use the new multi-billion dollar tunnel.  When asked to pay less than 10 percent of what it cost to build the tunnel, something like a third to a half of all current users say “it’s not worth it to me.”  In effect, they’re saying, I’ll only use the tunnel if somebody else pays for it. And just for the record, that $2.25 tunnel toll is less than the $2.75 bus fare that King County Metro charges its bus and light rail riders.  That, in a nutshell, is the perverse value proposition that guides so much urban transportation investment in the US: we spend billions on highway capacity that is un- or under-priced, and that people only use because its heavily subsidized, and charge higher prices to those who use more socially and environmentally responsible options.

For the record, the same thing has happened elsewhere when highway users are asked to pay even a modest fraction of the cost of adding road capacity. As we’ve documented, in Louisville, Kentucky, tolls of just $1 each way for a new interstate bridge reduced traffic by almost 40 percent.

The big concern in Seattle again is that the cars that avoid the tolls will clog up other streets. Heather Marx of the city’s transportation department told local television station KOMO:

“During the peak time, there’s nowhere really to go, but we do expect to see more traffic on downtown streets”

But as the miracle on 14th Street in Manhattan, and Seattle’s own experience earlier this year shows is that traffic isn’t so much diverted as it is reduced.

Maybe we should think of highways and major arterials in cities as causes of traffic rather than their solution.  What an urban freeway does, in effect, is point a firehose of car traffic at a city street system. When we reduce the flow of traffic on the freeways in and near cities, we reduce the number of cars traveling to and on city streets.

One other point:  We’re often told that we can’t do anything to reduce car traffic until we dramatically beef up alternative ways of getting around, especially transit. But the lesson here is that car traffic can change quickly, and that reducing car traffic is the fastest and most effective way to improve transit service. Getting cars out of the way makes buses move faster, making them more attractive, and reducing their cost (drivers is more productive, and move more people, more miles if the bus can go faster). No transportation policy is more equitable than one that gets buses moving faster.

Many states subject housing approval to environmental reporting requirements; what if we extended this same principle to car registrations.

Back in the early days of the environmental movement–the late sixties and early seventies, one lawyerly idea that was in vogue was the notion of requiring government policy decisions to be undertaken only after fair consideration of the environmental impacts they might have. The idea was that a lot of pollution and environmental degradation was the product of a failure to consider impacts and alternatives in advance, and that by requiring disclosure, governments would make better, greener decisions. The principle is codified in the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires Environmental Impact Statements for major federal decisions likely to influence the environment.

States like California and Washington are famous for their state-level environmental impact statement requirements, which are routinely applied to city and state development approvals for everything from new apartments to the construction of bike- and bus-lanes.

The essence of these requirements is that before undertaking a policy decision, the state and local governments should evaluate the environmental consequences of their actions. California’s CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act), has been used to block  housing developments around the state. Critics say that CEQA has become “the tool of choice for preventing cities from approving high-density housing . . .. with a quarter of lawsuits against CEQA-reviewed projects targeting housing.” Similarly, in Washington State, the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) has routinely been used to challenge higher density housing. The act was even used to object to an environmental foundation’s zero net energy building, because it didn’t include parking spaces. And while actual court victories under these laws are rare, the threat of a CEQA or SEPA lawsuit is often a powerful bargaining chip in negotiations to force developer concessions.

The premise for these environmental disclosure laws is, for the most part, a good one: government decisions ought to be undertaken with a clear understanding and careful weighing of the environmental consequences. So, if we’re going to have such policies, maybe we should consider applying them to particularly environmentally damaging activities licensed by the government.

That got us thinking:  Why not apply these same policies at the Department of Motor Vehicles?  Before the DMV issues a license for a new vehicle, it really ought to be required to consider the environmental impact of doing so. Each additional car on the road will add to road congestion, air pollution, and greenhouse gases, and will likely pose a safety risk for other road users, especially persons on foot and bicycle.  For example, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the average car generates 4.6 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, so each 2-year car registration should acknowledge the impact of 9 tons of CO2 emissions.  Just as cities now limit the construction of new housing when they think neighborhoods are getting overcrowded, maybe cities could set numerical limits on the issuance of new car licenses:  that would certainly attack the problem of congestion and pollution more directly than is done now.

A DMV granting a vehicle license is functionally no different than a city planning department granting a building permit, so in theory it seems like the environmental review laws could apply.

Setting tough requirements for vehicle registration to protect the environment isn’t unusual. Other countries take an entirely different approach to vehicle registration. In Japan, car owners are required to show that they have their own private off-street parking space in order to register a motor vehicle.

It seems to us like a modest proposal:  if impact statements make sense for houses, why not apply them to cars–which seem to be a much more serious environmental threat, in light of recent evidence about the growth in greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that we haven’t done this already in the decades of experience with environmental impact statement requirements speaks volumes about the built-in pro-automobile bias in our current legal structure (which has been cataloged in detail in a superb article by Greg Shill).

You can add this to our earlier modest proposal that we extend the Americans with Disabilities Act to freeways, and insist that state highway departments provide accessible bus service on limited access roadways–places that are now effectively unavailable to those who are too young, too infirm or too old to drive. It’s another example of how we might take some fundamental and established provision of law and apply it in a way that is more supportive of our stated social and environmental values.

In the end, it may well be outlandish to require such individual impact statements for car registrations. Alternatively, we might just do the reverse: make getting a apartment building permit as easy and automatic as getting a car registration? Just a thought.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Our 5th Anniversary.  October 17 marked 5 years since we started publishing our research and commentary at City Observatory. We reflect back on five years of work, and thank all those who made it possible, and especially you, our readers.

2. Rites of Way. A complex set of laws and customs, some legislated and enforced, but many unwritten, govern the way we use public space. For a century, we’ve progressively warped these rules to favor car movement. But there’s a lot we can do to redefine the priorities and informal rules that govern public spaces, notably urban roads. Simply erasing the center lines on urban streets, for example, effectively forces drivers to negotiate the use of space with other road users, rather than assuming they have unfettered rights on their side of a line. Experience in other countries shows that there are many possible regimes to guide how we make use of shared spaces; putting greater responsibility on individuals to look out for others, rather than commandeer the “right of way” could make the urban realm safer and more pleasant.

3. More capacity just creates more traffic. The engineering profession proffers the naive belief that car traffic is like a kind of incompressible liquid:  If you constrain it in one place, it will flow out elsewhere. That incorrect analogy is regularly used to argue against projects that reduce car capacity. But time and again, when we reduce the road space dedicated to cars, traffic mostly goes away. That’s happened again in New York where the “Miracle on 14th Street” (eliminating through car movements has sped buses, without any impact on adjacent streets), and is likely to happen again when Seattle finally starts charging tolls on its new $3 billion deep bore tunnel under downtown. It’s time we thought of urban freeways and arterials as creating congestion, rather than relieving it.

Must read

Travel monitoring firm Inrix checked its records before and after implementation of the “bus only policy” on 14th Street and found trivially small changes in traffic speeds, with declines ranging from 0.1 to 0.4 miles per hour, which Inrix regards as statistically insignificant. They conclude:

. . . initial congestion fears appear misplaced. According to INRIX data, the 14^th St busway had no discernible performance changes to neighboring roads.

Can we just say what a big deal this is?  One of America’s leading traffic monitoring firms (one which we’ve occasionally excoriated for exaggerating congestion costs) says that closing a major urban thoroughfare to private car traffic had no negative effect on traffic congestion.  If you want less congestion in cities, you should be restricting car capacity, not building more.

“Speed cameras work. Period. They change driver behavior and cause people to slow down, protecting New Yorkers from injury and death in traffic collisions.”

The new bill “acknowledges” climate change in the same way that sending a pallet of bottled water to Flint, Michigan, “acknowledges the lead crisis.”

New Knowledge

Redlining’s fading relevance.  In the 1930s, the federal government codified the existing widespread racialized attitudes about local housing markets when the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation  published maps delineating desirable and undesirable neighborhoods.  (While the Feds appropriately get the rap for this, its important to note that the maps were largely compiled by local real estate professionals hired under the New Deal, and reflected established local biases). The legacy of redlining cast a long shadow over those neighborhoods, and led to systematic disinvestment for decades.  But today, eight decades later, are these redlined areas relevant to policy.  Several presidential candidates have proposed targeting federal investment into areas redlined in the 1930s.

Brookings Institution’s Andre Perry and David Harshberger question the relevance of 1930s redlining to 2020 policy-making. They analyze the location and demographics of these redlined areas today, using the most recent available Census data. When they were drawn, redlined areas closely mirrored neighborhoods with high levels of black residents.  But that’s no longer true today, as Perry and Harsberger’s analysis shows:

More generally, the redlined areas are no longer a good match with the hardest hit neighborhoods in US metro areas. Many formerly redlined areas have changed so dramatically–either been depopulated, or revitalized, and no longer hold many poor families. Conversely, areas that weren’t poor in the 1930s (think the first-tier suburbs developed in the 1940s and 1950s) hold a significant number of low income households. As a result, using old-timey redlining maps to define today’s target areas doesn’t make much sense.  And there are other issues as well: American population was very differently distributed across metro areas eight decades ago; while rustbelt cities have large redlined areas, Western and Sunbelt cities have very few.  While redlining was a real factor contributing to urban disinvestment then, those old maps are a poor guide to where we need to invest now.

Andre Perry and David Harshberger, America’s formerly redlined neighborhoods have changed, and so must solutions to rectify them, Brookings Institution, Metropolitan Policy Program, October 14, 2019.

In the news

Treehugger highlighted our critique of the Transportation Research Board’s report calling for even more spending on highway widening, which will lead to more driving and increased greenhouse gas emissions.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Transportation for America won’t be fooled again..  After years of getting rolled by the freeway lobby, it appears that T4America has finally said “Enough.”  Transit and active transportation activists have been roped into an unholy alliance with highway advocates, pressing the federal government for more money for “multi-modal” transportation, with the vain hope that if more money goes to transportation, some additional crumbs will come their way.  In practice that’s meant tons of money for new freeways, and mostly token amounts for “alternative” modes of transportation.  Last week, Transportation for America finally pulled the plug on this strategy, they write:

We’ve been going down the wrong road on transportation long enough:  Transportation needs a change in priorities and policies, not just more funding for the same failed approaches of the past.

To its credit, T4America has laid out three guiding principles that can set us on the right course:  Fix it first, Safety before speed, and Accessibility not mobility. These are a solid foundation, to which we might append:  No free ride–getting serious about pricing road transportation is the key to getting value for our expensive investments in infrastructure.

2. Trouble in Ecotopia. The upper left hand corner of North America has long regarded itself as the bastion of ecological passion; Ernest Callenbach coined the moniker “Ecotopia” to describe the region in the 1970s. And to be sure, the region, stretching from San Francisco north to British Columbia is the home of many innovative pro-environmental policies. And the region’s leader uniformly talk a good game about their concern for global warming and their fealty to the Paris Climate Accords.

But as we take a close look at their greenhouse gas inventories, every part of Ecotopia is chalking up big increases in carbon emissions, in spite of adopted commitments to bring them down. The main reason: people are driving more in the region, not because of a growing economy but because of cheap gas. And here’s where action falls short of rhetoric: Ecotopian political leaders, including for example, Governor Jay Inslee, are supporting major freeway construction projects and other efforts that subsidize more driving, and more greenhouse gas emissions. If Ecotopia is ever going to live up to its stated values, its got a lot of work to do.

Must read

1. Cars are death machines, whether automated or not.  Alison Arieff challenges the idea that autonomous vehicles will do anything to address the inherent dangers of cities full of cars.  Autonomous vehicles seem to have a blind spot when it comes to, some things, specifically cyclists and pedestrians.  That’s led the industry, unsurprisingly to propose to equip people with technology so that they can be “seen” by machines.  As Arieff argues, this is perverse:

Among the safety measures proposed by car companies are encouraging pedestrians and bicyclists to use R.F.I.D. tags, which emit signals that cars can detect. This means it’s becoming the pedestrian’s responsibility to avoid getting hit. But if keeping people safe means putting the responsibility on them (or worse, criminalizing walking and biking), we need to think twice about the technology we’re developing.  This may be the worst outcome of the automobile-centered 20th century: the assumption that it’s people who need to get out of the way of these lethal machines, instead of the other way around.

If we want to reduce the growing number of road deaths, the best solution is to encourage fewer people to drive.  Traffic deaths are directly related to the number of cars on the road and the number of miles they are driven.  Reducing car travel is a key to achieving many important objectives, with pedestrian safety, promoting livable urban spaces and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

2. Want affordable housing? End parking requirements.  Sightline Institute’s Michael Andersen has an insightful look at the economic implications of Portland’s Residential Infill Policy, which is part of city’s implementation of Oregon’s new “missing middle” legalization of duplex, triplex and four-plex housing in single family zones. A critical feature, as Andersen points out, is whether the city code requires the provision of off-street parking.  If parking is required, the economics of development suggest that the city will see fewer and more expensive housing built; with parking requirements relaxed, a similar site is more likely to be developed with more housing units at lower price points.  As Andersen says:

More broadly, there’s an issue of principle here that could apply in any city: Mandating off-street parking, even when we’re fully aware that it makes more and cheaper homes impossible, requires a judgment that housing cars is more important than housing people.

Nowhere in Portland—nowhere on the planet—is that true.

3. The racial divide between baseball and soccer in Atlanta.  Comedian George Carlin has a classic monologue contrasting the pastoral character of baseball with the militaristic vibe of football–in baseball, the object is to get home; in football, its to reach the “end zone.”  Sports Illustrated has a fascinating essay exploring a somewhat different schism in Atlanta.  The baseball Braves have moved out of their central city location into taxpayer subsidized stadium in suburban (and still, relative to Atlanta, disproportionately white) Cobb County.  Meanwhile the city’s new Major League Soccer franchise, Atlanta United, has set up shop in the downtown Mercedes Benz stadium.  As Sports Illustrated points out, the differences between the locations and the teams respective fan bases is striking. With baseball in the suburbs and soccer in the city, there’s a huge missed opportunity for these different groups to interact:

Had the Braves not left downtown, supporters in red-and-black United jerseys might have been packed in tight on nights like this with baseball fans in navy Braves T-shirts, at bustling bars and on sweaty train rides home. They might have traded smiles and congratulations. Maybe raised glasses. Maybe shared a fleeting moment of commonality with someone who looked different or believed in something else.

While Atlanta United’s location is more urban and its supporters more diverse, the franchise is still not fully a model of inclusion. As we’ve reported at City Observatory, the teams practice field was built on a site where the suburban city of Marietta used tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to acquire and demolish low income housing, mostly occupied by people of color.

New Knowledge

A decline in international immigration. The Trump Administration has vilified immigrants and erected barriers to people moving to the US, and now immigration to the US has fallen to its lowest level in a decade, according to Census data compiled by the Brookings Institution’s Bill Frey.  In just the past year, data from the latest American Community Survey suggest that the number of foreign born residents of the US increased by just over 200,000, down almost 75 percent from the level of the previous year.

The irony is that the biggest declines in immigration have been in blue states, while the number of foreign-born persons living in red states continues to increase. As Frey observes:

 . . . over the last year, Clinton states, as a group, registered declines in their foreign-born populations—including substantial declines in New York and Illinois—and more modest declines in California, New Jersey, and Maryland, among other states. Meanwhile, Florida and Texas exhibited significant gains, as did other Trump states including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

Foreign immigration has been an important driver of the US economy; many of those who work for, and who start the nation’s most innovative companies have chosen to move to the US; a decline in immigration is a potential threat to future economic prosperity.

In the news

An editorial–“Back to basics: Walkability in Chapel Hill”–in the the Daily Tar Heel quoted our research on the value premium commanded walkable homes.

What City Observatory did this week

1. We debunk the Wall Street Journal’s claim of an exodus of young adults from cities.  Last week, the Wall Street Journal trumpeted an “exodus” of 25 to 39 year old adults from cities. Upon closer inspection, the data cited by the Journal simply don’t support this conclusion.  When your survey-based estimates don’t reach a threshold level of statistical significance, when they’re contradicted by other, more straightforward ways of making a similar calculation (ones with a lower margin of error), when even by your own calculations at least eight major cities are recording increases in the young adult population, and when the trend you claim to have spotted has declined by 50 percent in the past year, it’s probably not valid evidence for claiming that there’s an exodus of young adults from the nation’s cities. We understand the journalistic temptation to want to be the first (or among the first) to make a provocative contrarian call about some well-known trend, but in this case the evidence is just too thin to be believable.

2. A modest proposal:  EIS for DMV. Many states have environmental impact review requirements which apply to government regulatory decisions.  In California and Washington State, anti-housing activists have used these state EIS-requirements to delay or block apartment development, ostensibly because of the negative environmental consequences associated with new buildings. That gave us a thought: if we’re worried about the negative environmental effect of government granting permission for something, why shouldn’t we be applying this standard to the biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions: cars.  Suppose that in order to get a new car registered, you had to file an environmental impact statement disclosing its effects on air pollution and traffic congestion. It’s not so far-fetched–in Japan, in order to register your car, you must show that you have a private-off-street parking spot for it. If the EIS for new housing is a good idea, we really ought to be applying it to cars as well.

Must read

1. Your definitive guide to road safety. David Levinson, aka The Transportist, is an invaluable resource for those interested in transportation policy. Levinson writes with the scholarly knowledge (and careful footnoting) of an academic, but with a clear and accessible voice.  He has a new explainer on road safety that lays out in a balanced way all of the various strategies for reducing the carnage on the world’s roadways. Levinson catalogs, explains and quickly appraises 21 different strategies for reducing road crashes and associated injuries and deaths, ranging from roundabouts and road maintenance, to vehicle automation and urban density. It’s a quick tour of the horizon, but serves as a useful and balanced framing for thinking about safety. In the end. Levinson regards the continued (and growing) death toll on roads as an indication that we lack resolve, more than we lack knowledge:

Like congestion and global warming, the road death toll can be significantly reduced, but there is little evidence that the United States, in particular, is collectively interested in solving it. While there are obviously advocates, they do not have the upper hand, otherwise deaths would not be rising in recent years off its 2014 lows.

2. America’s most vegan/vegetarian cities. A growing proportion of the American population is either reducing or eliminating meat in their diets. Going vegan is easier in some cities than others. WalletHub has compiled an array of data about the presence and cost of vegan and vegetarian options to create a ranked list of cities nationally. By their reckoning–which is based on a complex weighted formula involving 17 different variables ranging from the number of farmer’s markets to the proportion of restaurants with vegan options–Portland is the most vegan friendly city in the nation.  Here’s their list of the top 10:

At the other end of the spectrum, among the 50 largest metro areas, Memphis, Tennessee has the lowest ranking for vegetarian options–apparently barbecue still dominates. There’s inherent subjectivity in choosing which weights to use for the ranking; if we ignore the affordability measures, for example, then San Francisco would edge out Portland as the #1 city for vegan and vegetarian living.

3. The biggest contributor to microplastic pollution of the oceans?  Car tires. There’s been something of a fetish lately to ban the use of plastic straws as a way to reduce the amount of plastic that ends up in ocean ecosystems. While straws and six-pack rings make for gut-wrenching photos of affected wildlife, the more serious and insidious threat may be microplastics–tiny beads of plastic that are washed into rivers and streams and end up in the oceans–and their sensitive ecosystems. A new study reported in the Los Angeles Times indicates that the vast bulk of these microplastics come from car tires. Every mile you drive, a small portion of the tire is worn away in the form of tiny particles, which rain then washes into the streams and rivers. The particles get distributed throughout the food chain, and are ultimately ingested by humans. The study suggests that the volume of microplastics from tires is an amount 300 times greater than what comes from microfibers washing off polyester clothes, microbeads from beauty products and the many other plastics washing down our sinks and sewers.

4. Hacking electronic road signs.  Just this, from @sugarpond on Twitter:

Apparently, if you don’t reset the default password, its relatively easy for anyone to reprogram the message on these electronic road signs. This particular warning deserves a broader audience.

New Knowledge

Household size is increasing for the first time more than a century and a half.  One of the most persistent trends in US housing, the steady decline in average household sizes, has reversed since 2010, according to Census data compiled the the Pew Research Center. In this decade, the average size of a household has blipped upward, from 2.58 persons per home to 2.63 persons per home.

For as long as anyone can remember, we’ve been building more housing faster than population has been increasing, and the combined effect of lower fertility, longer lifespans, and social preferences for living alone have pushed down the average number of persons living in a house or apartment. One of the ways to ameliorate the housing shortage is to fit more people into each dwelling unit.  This reversal of the historic downward trend in household sizes suggest thats starting to happen.