Portland Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) does nothing to prioritize projects and expenditures that reduce greenhouse gases

Metro falsely asserts that because its overall plan will be on a path to reduce GHGs (it wont), it can simply ignore the greenhouse gas emissions of spending billions to widen freeways

The RTP’s climate policies don’t apply to individual project selection;  projects are prioritized on whether they reduce vehicle delay—a failed metric it uses to rationalize capacity expansions that simply induce additional travel and pollution

The RTP environmental analysis falsely assume that ODOT will impose aggressive state charges on car travel, including carbon taxes, a mileage fee and congestion fees than have not been implemented, and may never be, to reduce VMT

The RTP’s traffic modeling fails to incorporate the effect of expected pricing on the need for additional capacity.  Modeling done by ODOT shows that pricing would eliminate the need for capacity expansion, saving billions, and reducing greenhouse gases.

Transportation is the largest and fastest growing source of greenhouse gases in the Portland Area;  every one of the state, regional and local plans to reduce transportation greenhouse gases is clearly failing.  The proposed 2023 Regional Transportation Plan could be a vital tool for prioritizing actions to reduce transportation GHGs.  It isn’t.  It’s a vehicle for justifying a multi-billion dollar wish list of road projects, and pretending that someone else will solve the climate problem.  The plan does nothing to use climate criteria to prioritize spending decisions, and instead, gives a pass to expensive road expansion projects that will encourage more driving and higher levels of greenhouse gases.

State and regional transportation plans fail to acknowledge the grim reality of increase transportation greenhouse gases (GHGs).  As we’ve documented at City Observatory Metro (and others) have concealed the fact that transportation emissions are increasing by ignoring actual inventory data, and instead, reporting fictional results obtained from their own models, that ignore actual emissions information, and instead make rosy and unsupportable assumptions about future technology, market trends and policy.  In essence, these plans pretend that transportation GHGs are already decreasing, and will decrease even more dramatically in the future.

RTP Priority:  Billions for highway construction and expansion

The Regional Transportation Plan is an official, federally required planning document that spells out how the region will invest in transportation over the next two decades.  This is exactly the time when scientists tell us we must take decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  But the largest projects—and the bulk of the expenditures—in the RTP are highway construction and widening that will facilitate more car travel, and increase greenhouse gas emissions.

The RTP document tries to downplay the emphasis on road building with a misleading graphic that shows dots for each project.  The massive Interstate Bridge Replacement is one tiny dot, the huge Rose Quarter widening one tiny dot, the I-205 Abernethy one tiny dot—even though these represent more than $10 billion in capital spending.

The fine print text acknowledges that this is mostly a few big highway projects, but even then substantially understates their true costs.  The Executive Summary fine print says:

. . . the “big three” projects—the I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement Program, the I-5 Rose Quarter Project, and the I-205 Widening and Toll Project—each cost more than $1B.

In fact, the estimated price tag for the IBR is as much as $7.5 billion, the Rose Quarter project has ballooned to $1.9 billion.  .  The RTP neither reflects the current cost estimates of these projects, nor the likely costs of further cost overruns, which are endemic on major ODOT highway projects.

The RTP spends bulk of its capital on projects that add capacity to freeways—even though a decade old Metro climate plan conceded that these have “low”impact on reducing GHGs.  And in fact, all of the available science on induced demand shows that added capacity increases driving, and increases emissions.

How can Metro square spending billions on highway widening with the climate crisis?  As we pointed out earlier, Metro has ignore the actual inventory data showing increasing transportation greenhouse gas emissions, and substituted its own demonstrably wrong emission modeling to assert we’re on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Then the policies in the RTP use this umbrella assertion that “this is fine” to simply ignore the greenhouse gas emission effects of individual projects.  The result is a “drive and pollute as usual” approach to  the region’s transportation spending plans and policies.  The bureaucrats assert that because their models show that the overall plan will (based on wildly wrong assumptions) make progress toward the 2050 state goal, that there is essentially no need to rank or prioritize investments based on whether they increase or decrease greenhouse gas emissions.  Meeting the greenhouse gas reduction goal is a criteria applied only (and falsely) to the overall regional plan, and not to any specific projects.

This umbrella claim that the RTP as a whole RTP meets the state climate goals, is spelled out in policy:

Vehicle miles traveled (VMT)/capita will be a controlling measure in both system planning and plan amendments to ensure that the planned transportation system and changes to the system support reduced VMT/capita by providing travel options that are complete and connected and that changes to land use reduce the overall need to drive from a regional perspective and are supportive of travel options.

• For system planning, the final planned system must support OAR 660 Division 44 (Metropolitan Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions Reduction rule) and OAR 660 Division 12 VMT reduction targets.

• For plan amendments, VMT/capita will be used to determine whether the proposed plan amendment has a significant impact on regional VMT/capita that needs to be mitigated or not.

System completeness and travel speed reliability on throughways are secondary measures that will be used to identify needs and inform the development of the planned system.

“Controlling measure” sounds imposing, but this is deceptive.  In effect,  the VMT reduction goals apply only to the overall plan, and to amendments to the plan.  Projects included in the plan are given a pass on whether they increase or decrease VMT (and greenhouse gas emissions).  While VMT is labeled as “a controlling measure” and travel speed is described as a “secondary measure,” the language of the RTP conceals the fact that the secondary measure really determines the priority for spending.  The RTP prioritizes project spending based on travel speed, not reducing VMT or greenhouse gases.

The RTP doesn’t prioritize spending money on projects that reduce VMT.  The RTP contains only  a requirement that plan amendments that increase per capita VMT have to be “mitigated.”  That’s problematic for a couple of reasons.  First:  several huge freeway widening projects are included in the plan itself, and aren’t amendments, so they won’t be mitigated at all.  Second, Metro claims that its models can’t actually detect whether projects—even very large ones, like the IBR or Rose Quarter Freeway widening—increase VMT.  Third, ODOT (falsely) claims that highway expansions  don’t increase VMT.  Metro has not adopted any  objective third party method for assessing per capita VMT effects of projects—like the CalTrans adopted induced travel calculator.  ODOT’s own technical manual simply denies the existence of induced travel and bars its inclusion in ODOT modeling).  Finally, the policy doesn’t limit or ban plan amendments that increase per capita GHG emissions—it only requires that increases be mitigated.  (The RTP fails to say where the mitigation will come from, especially if the region is actively implementing other ways to reduce VMT).

RTP travel speed standards prioritize projects to increase capacity

What the RTP does do, however, is create a rigid standard prioritizing travel speeds on throughways and arterials. Throughways need to provide no less than 35MPH at least 20 hours per day; other “signaled” arterials must provide at least 20MPH no fewer than 20 hours per day. These speed standards do apply to the prioritization of project spending.  While they are labeled as “secondary” these are in fact the “controlling” metrics for project selection and prioritization.

 

 

Again, in contrast, the climate standards, calling for a reduction in VMT  effectively only apply to the overall plan, not segments thereof, and only have to “support” possible VMT reductions, not actually result in them.

In sum, individual investments, even ones as large as the multi-billion dollar widenings of I-5 at the Rose Quarter and the Interstate Bridge are effectively exempt from any climate analysis.  Climate simply doesn’t matter for setting regional spending priorities.  The only thing that matters under the terms of the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) is whether investments speed traffic.  The RTP sets a goal of making sure that area “throughways” travel at no less than 35 MPH 20 hours per day, and that area arterials travel at no less than 20 miles per hour for 20 hours per day.

Projects that speed traffic on highways have been proven to increase travel—a widely documented scientific finding called “induced travel” which means that wider roadways generate more vehicle miles of travel and more pollution.

The Metro RTP criteria give no additional weight or priority to projects that reduce transportation greenhouse gas emissions.  Speed, not greenhouse gases or safety, drives the distribution of resources under the plan.

RTP climate compliance depends on imaginary, unadopted policies

A key climate question is whether the region will reduce VMT.  The RTP contains little, if any information, on which of its investments will reduce VMT.  It makes a sweeping and general claim that providing transit (and other alternatives) “create the conditions” that could reduce VMT; but lower VMT has to come from reflecting back to drivers the true costs associated with their decisions.  When it comes to such actual financial incentives, the bottom line is that Metro assumes that as yet unadopted, and highly speculative state policies, not anything in the RTP, will reduce VMT.

The RTP counts on reduced driving as a result of ODOT and other state policies to make driving more expensive.  There’s an old economist joke, about how to solve the problem of opening canned food when one has no means to do so; the economists waves the problem away, saying “Assume we have a can-opener.”  Metro assumes that ODOT will produce a can opener in the form of a plethora of new fees on driving, including an unspecified carbon tax, a per mile fee of 6 to 10 cents per mile on all driving in the state, as well as a 9 to 17 cent per mile congestion fee for using throughways (limited access roads in Portland), plus tolls to finance the Interstate Bridge and I-205 bridges.  The RTP climate analysis assumes that the state will enact all these fees, and this will reduce driving and carbon emissions.

In effect, the RTP is overwhelmingly dependent on the purely hypothetical actions of others to achieve climate goals:  It depends on state and federal fuel economy, vehicle emissions and fuel policies to reduce emissions per mile driven, and depends on state imposed taxes and fees to reduce vehicle miles traveled.

If the state doesn’t take these actions—and while they would be smart policy, there is no guarantee it will do so—then the hoped for (and modeled) changes in VMT and greenhouses gases simply won’t occur.  But there’s nothing in the plan to pick up the slack, and meanwhile these dubious assumptions will have rationalized spending billions of dollars of irreplaceable public capital on projects that increase driving (just as the climate crisis grows worse).

Failure to include pricing in transportation demand modeling and project evaluation

There’s a profound contradiction in the RTP’s treatment of road pricing.  When it comes to climate strategy, and funding adequacy, the RTP assumes that pricing is a done deal.  When it comes to modeling traffic demand, and especially the need for added capacity, it simply ignores the effects of pricing.

The work that has been done on pricing shows that if the state implements any of the proposed pricing mechanisms (Regional Mobility Pricing or RMPP; tolling on the I-205 Abernethy Bridge or the Interstate Bridge), the region will not need to build any new capacity.  A particularly stark analysis was prepared by ODOT consultants showing that highway pricing (the RMPP) alone—and leaving the Rose Quarter in its current configuration—would be more effective in reducing traffic delays, congestion, VMT and greenhouse gases than spending $1.9 billion widening this 1.5 mile stretch of roadway.  Yet Metro has refused to examine the greenhouse gas implications of these project alternatives, and won’t even apply such tools to project evaluation.

The strategy assumes that the state and region institute a stringent per mile pricing of freeways and arterials for purposes of estimating climate compliance, but the transportation modeling used to justify new project and capacity assumes that the roads are unpriced.

New revenue mechanisms in the STS include a road user charge that levies per-mile fees on drivers, carbon taxes, and additional road pricing beyond what is currently included in the 2023 RTP. These changes are not reflected in the RTP because they are not yet adopted in state policies or regulations, but the climate analysis for the RTP is allowed to include them because these state-led pricing actions are identified in STS and were assumed when the state set the region’s climate targets.
(Emphasis added).

The net effect of including the effects of as-yet-unadopted pricing for climate analysis, but not including it in travel demand analysis for capacity expansion projects, is to create a falsely optimistic picture of climate progress, and a falsely exaggerated picture of the need for additional capacity.

The Cop-Out:  We’re following state rules

Metro’s RTP asserts that “this is fine” for climate because they are following LCDC rules for their land use plan which are designed to address climate change.  LCDC has adopted a “Climate Friendly and Equitable Communities” (CFEC) rule that requires Metro to plan to reduce VMT.  The key problem is that the CFEC rule is based on the same flawed ODOT analysis as the Metro RTP:  making wildly unsupportable assumptions about the rapid adoption of clean vehicles.

Complying with the LCDC rule doesn’t put the region on track to reduce driving or transportation greenhouse gases, and doesn’t demonstrate how we will comply with the legally adopted state goal to reduce greenhouse gases to 25 percent of 1990 levels by 2050:

468A.205 Policy; greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals. (1) The Legislative Assembly declares that it is the policy of this state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon pursuant to the following greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals:

     . . . (c) By 2050, achieve greenhouse gas levels that are at least 75 percent below 1990 levels.

Instead, Metro asserts that its RTP conforms to LCDC regulations governing land use plans.  The RTP makes no mention of ORS 468A.205.

Both the LCDC rules and the Metro RTP are based on badly flawed modeling of greenhouse gas levels.  The modeling makes a series of incorrect and unsupported assumptions about vehicle fuel efficiency and emissions reduction technology.  As a result, the modeling wildly understates the actual level of greenhouse gases produced by transportation, and wildly overstates the current and future reductions in greenhouse gases due to greater efficiency.

The 2022 LCDC “Climate Friendly and Equitable Communities” Rule relies on 2016 modeling prepared by former ODOT employee Brian Gregor.  These figures have not been updated, despite a legal requirement that they do so.

Metro claims to have done additional modeling with its “Vision Eval” model.  That modeling assumes that average vehicle ages fall to less than seven years, and that passenger cars make up more than 70 percent of household vehicles.  As we’ve demonstrated both these assumptions are not only wrong, market trends are moving in the opposite direction of Metro’s forecast:  cars are getting older and larger, not smaller and newer (and cleaner) as assumed.

Metro is counting on improved vehicles and fuels for more than 90 percent of greenhouse gas emission reductions.  Appendix J of the RTP projects that the plan (which relies on pricing which is still speculative) will result in an 88 percent reduction in transportation GHG, with 81 percent reduction from fuels and vehicles, and 7 percent reduction from reduced VMT.  That means that 92 percent (81/88) of the reduction in greenhouse gases comes from policies other than those in Metro’s RTP.

These heroic and wildly exaggerated assumptions about improved vehicle fuel efficiency enable Metro to plan for only an extremely modest reduction in VMT.

The RTP is climate denial

Metro leaders talk a good game about climate.  They point to their nearly ten-year old Climate Smart Strategy.  They acknowledge the reality of climate change, and the general need to reduce greenhouse gases.  They’ve listened to national experts who point out the problems with traditional planning approaches.

In spite of all this, the RTP remains what it has always been, a highway-centric spending wish list.  All this version does, is add on an additional layer of rationalization to insist that the region continue building roads on the elaborate and plainly false assumptions that cars will become vastly cleaner, and ODOT will aggressively price roads and carbon.  The plan is still replete with billions of dollars of spending to increase highway capacity, including the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project and the Rose Quarter.  These highway expansions facilitate continued car dependence and increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Like Metro’s so-called Climate Smart Strategy, the climate provisions in the RTP are a at best an afterthought, and a performative fig-leaf, meant to provide rhetorical cover to a vast investment strategy that is fundamentally at odds with reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Metro has promised to update its “Climate Smart Strategy” from 2014, but in fact it hasn’t.

Clicking on the “climate smart strategy” link and it takes you to a nine-year old document that hasn’t been updated.  This is what still appears on the Metro website.

Metro’s real climate strategy is “Don’t look up.”

Metro’s RTP needs to examine the travel impacts of tolling and new capacity expansion

Metro claims that its travel modeling can’t really discern the effects of tolling on regional travel patterns, and instead of specific quantitative outputs it simply offers a series of descriptive, generalized statements—”qualitative findings”— about the impact of tolling.

The large-scale, aggregate nature of Metro’s travel model makes it challenging to detail the regional impacts of any single project, even one as potentially significant as tolling. Instead of attempting to isolate the impacts of tolling, Metro staff identified several qualitative findings about tolling’s impacts based on the modeling results for the constrained RTP scenario and on Metro’s experience supporting tolling analyses in the region

System Analysis Public Review Draft 2023 Regional Transportation Plan | July 10, 2023(Chapter 7, p. 7-7-28).

It is, in fact, possible and proven to estimate the effect of new highway capacity on travel patterns and greenhouse gas emission.sIn contrast, California and CalTrans have developed and created tools specifically to analyze the carbon impacts of individual projects:  The Induced Travel Calculator.  This calculator has been adapted to Oregon by the Rocky Mountain Institute.  Metro could use this calculator to estimate the carbon associated with highway expansion projects.  But ODOT, in a bit of science-denial, the Oregon Department of Transportation has specifically banned the used of induced travel analysis in state highway modeling.

 

Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan rationalizes spending billions on freeway expansion by publishing false estimates and projections of greenhouse gas emissions

Transportation is the number one source of greenhouse gases in Portland.  For nearly a decade, our regional government, Metro, has said it is planning to meet a state law calling for  reducing greenhouse gas emissions 75 percent by 2050.

But the latest Metro Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) has simply stopped counting actual greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.

Inventories compiled by the state, the city of Portland and the federal government all show the region’s transportation emissions are going up, not down as called for in our plan.

In place of actual data, Metro and other agencies are substituting fictitious estimates from models; these estimates incorrectly assume that we are driving smaller cars and fewer trucks and SUVs, and rapidly replacing older cars.  None of those assumptions are true.

As a result greenhouse gases are going up; our plans are failing, and Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan, the blueprint for spending billions over the next several decades will only make our climate problems worse

This may be our last, best chance to do something to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the largest and fastest growing source of such pollution in the state and region. Metro’s federally required Regional Transportation Plan is supposed to reconcile our transportation investments with our social and environmental goals.  Instead the draft RTP simply lies to the public about worsening greenhouse gas emissions, the failure of current efforts, and the inadequate and counterproductive aspects of the proposed RTP.

Portland and Oregon leaders proudly celebrate our acknowledgement of the gravity of the climate crisis and our oft-professed commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  For the mass and social media, there’s soaring rhetoric.

In the bureaucratic backrooms though, it’s pollution as usual.  No where is this more clear than when it comes to roadbuilding.  Oregon is embarking on the largest and most expensive highway expansion effort in 50 years, proposing to spend more than $10 billion in the Portland area on highways. All of those billion dollar plus highway expansion projects are contained in Metro’s proposed 2023 Regional Transportation Plan.

This, in spite of the fact that transportation is the largest and fastest growing source of greenhouse gases are higher now that they were in 1990, and every one of the state, regional and local plans to reduce transportation greenhouse gases is clearly failing.

State and regional transportation plans fail to acknowledge the grim reality of increase transportation greenhouse gases (GHGs).  Instead, they conceal the fact that our transportation emissions are increasing by ignoring actual inventory data, and instead, reporting fictional results obtained from their own models, and instead make rosy and unsupportable assumptions about future technology, market trends and policy.  In essence, these plans pretend that transportation GHGs are already decreasing, and will decrease even more dramatically in the future.

By steadfastly ignoring increasing emissions, Metro and the State of Oregon have simply ignored pledges made in their original climate planning to regularly measure progress, not in terms of checklists, but in terms of actual, measured reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Transportation and Climate:  Plans ignore reality

It’s been a decade since Metro’s first Climate Smart Plan in 2014, which promised to put the region on track to meet state greenhouse gas reduction goal—reducing emissions 75 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.

Since then, the urgency the of the climate crisis has grown manifestly worse, locally epitomized by weeks of suffocating smoke from climate-caused fires; record 116 degree heat that killed dozens (and likely more), and steadily warming oceans and melting glaciers and icecaps.

The clock is ticking; we’ve used up a quarter of the time we have to achieve our 2050 goal.  Now would be a good time to consider whether what we’re doing is working.  This question is especially salient given Metro’s consideration of the 2023 Regional Transportation Plan, which will spell out the course of transportation investment for the next five years (and following decades).  Since transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the city, region and state, this transportation will be crucial to achieving our goals.

All evidence shows that Metro’s “Climate Smart Plan” has failed completely to reduce greenhouse gases.  Every independent inventory of transportation GHGs shows that emissions have increased since the plan was adopted.  The region already emits more transportation GHGs than it did in 1990; and the authoritative DARTE database found that regional transportation emissions are up 20 percent in the past five years.  And bafflingly, Metro’s RTP climate monitoring doesn’t even bother to report on emission trends.

Instead, the plan relies on its own optimistic modeling of future trends.  The problem here is that  the plan itself is founded on wildly unrealistic and already disproven assumptions about the rapid adoption of cleaner vehicles.  State and local transportation officials confidently predicted a decade ago that we’d rapidly replace older, larger, dirtier vehicles with cleaner newer ones.  In fact, the opposite has happened:  The average age of vehicles in Oregon is now up to 14 years, and heavier, dirtier trucks and SUVs make up nearly 80 percent of new vehicles old.  We’re no where near on track to achieve our greenhouse gas reduction goals.

But the plan assumes, falsely, that the average age of cars is about six years, and that two-thirds of vehicles are smaller, cleaner passenger cars.  It uses these assumptions to predict that greenhouse gas emissions will fall rapidly.  And even though reality has shown these assumptions to be wrong, modelers have doubled down on them, and now assume, for example, that cars will be replaced even faster than they thought a decade ago, even as the fleet gets older and older.

We’re failing to achieve our goal:  Transportation GHGs are increasing

Transportation emissions are the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Portland and in Oregon.  Transportation emissions account for 41 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Multnomah County, and 32 percent of emissions statewide.

It’s good to have ambitious plans.  But ultimately, those plans have to work in the real world.  Locally, we have three different real world estimates of transportation greenhouse gases:  The federally sponsored DARTE database, a geographically detailed nationwide estimate of greenhouse gases broken down to 1 kilometer squares cover the entire nation, the Department of Environmental Quality’s annual statewide estimates of Oregon greenhouse gas emissions by source (residential, commercial, industrial, electricity generation and transportation), and Multnomah County’s annual accounting of local greenhouse gas emissions.  Every one of these estimates shows we are failing to reduce transportation greenhouse gases.

When it comes to transportation, we’re not making any progress in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions; in fact, greenhouse gas emissions are higher than in 1990 in Multnomah County (up 3 percent), the Portland Metro area (up 27 percent) and statewide (19 percent).  We’re going in the wrong direction.

 State, regional and local climate plans are failing

And since we adopted city, regional and state plans to reduce transportation emissions (the Portland Climate Action Plan in 2015, the Metro Climate Smart Strategy in 2014, and the State Transportation Strategy in 2013), transportation emissions have increased, not decreased.  From 2013 (the year before these climate plans took effect through 2019 (the last full year prior to the pandemic), greenhouse gas emissions form transportation have risen.

Oregon transportation GHG emissions are up 2.7 percent per year since 2013, Portland regional emissions are up 4.9 percent per year  and Multnomah County emissions are up 1.4 percent year.  Transportation emissions are going up when our plans call for them to be going down.  The result is a yawning and unacknowledged gap between our plans and reality.  The DARTE data show the region going rapidly in the wrong direction.

All of the available independent inventory data for the state, city and region make it clear that our transportation emission reduction plans are failing in monumental fashion to achieve their goals.

Climate plans haven’t been adjusted to reflect reality

Increased transportation greenhouse gases should be triggering stronger efforts to fight climate change. Metro committed to monitor the progress and implementation of its Climate Smart Strategy, and to take additional measures as needed.  This commitment appears in the Climate Smart Plan and is reiterated in the latest draft of the 2023 Regional Transportation Plan.  (RTP 2023 Draft, Appendix J, page 21)

Metro’s RTP fails to report increasing transportation greenhouse gas emissions

Despite these commitments, Metro’s RTP does not accurately report on regional greenhouse gas emission trends. It does not acknowledge that, contrary to the 2014 CSS and the 2018 RTP, transportation greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, not decreasing. The 2023 RTP contains no graph or time series information on transportation greenhouse gases in Portland; in contains only a single reference to the per capita level of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 and 2045; both of these figures are obtained from Metro’s model, not from actual inventories of greenhouse gas emissions prepared by independent agencies.

We are “deviating significantly” from our earlier projections and plans, but we haven’t acknowledged it, and therefore, aren’t proposing to change our plan.

The RTP substitutes inaccurate models for actual data

ODOT, Metro, and LCDC are substituting flawed and biased models for actual data about carbon emissions.  Transportation greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, yet all these agencies pretend, based on inaccurate models, that they’re making progress toward reducing greenhouse gases.  The actual data show that vehicles on the road today (and tomorrow) are vastly older and dirtier than assumed in the models these agencies use to falsely portray their climate progress.

Both the LCDC rules and the Metro RTP are based on flawed modeling of greenhouse gas levels.  The modeling makes a series of incorrect and unsupported assumptions about vehicle fuel efficiency and emissions reduction technology.  As a result, the modeling significantly understates the actual level of greenhouse gases produced by transportation, and overstates the current and future reductions in greenhouse gases due to greater efficiency.

The 2022 LCDC “Climate Friendly and Equitable Communities” Rule relies on 2016 modeling prepared by former ODOT employee Brian Gregor.  These figures have not been updated, despite a legal requirement that they do so.

For the current RTP, Metro claims to have done new modeling with its “Vision Eval” model.  That modeling assumes that average vehicle ages fall to less than seven years, and that passenger cars make up more than 70 percent of household vehicles.

Both Gregor’s and Metro’s climate modeling assumes we will quickly replace the existing fleet of large, dirty fossil fueled vehicles, with newer, smaller, more efficient vehicles powered by electricity and/or clean fuels.  The modeling asserted that the amount of carbon pollution generated by each mile of vehicle traveled would be 80 percent less than it is today.  Unfortunately, we’re nowhere close to being on this trend.

The key assumptions are average vehicle age and mix of trucks/SUVs Metro and LCDC rely on projections of these emissions that have already been proven wrong.  Metro and LCDC assumed, critically and incorrectly, that the vehicle fleet would turnover more rapidly (dirty, older cars would be replaced more frequently by newer, cleaner ones) and that consumer preferences would shift from larger, dirtier trucks and SUVs to smaller and cleaner passenger vehicles.  Not only are both of these assumptions wrong, exactly the opposite has happened over the past decade:  the average age of automobiles has increased significantly, and the share of light trucks and SUVs has grown to almost 80 percent of new car sales.  The following RTP table summarizes Metro’s assumptions:

Metro’s assumptions are simply wrong:   the average car on the road today is vastly dirtier than assumed in Metro and LCDC modeling.  In essence, the climate modeling assumes that the typical car in today’s fleet is a relatively clean six-year-old Honda Civic, that emits about 257 grams per mile.  In reality, the typical vehicle in today’s fleet is a twelve-year-old quarter-ton pickup truck, that emits about twice as much greenhouse gases—555 grams per mile.

2023 Model assumption:  Typical car is a 2017 Honda Civic; 2023 Reality:  Typical vehicle is a 2010 Ford F-150.

These two mistakes in the Metro/LCDC modeling lead them to understate greenhouse gas emissions from the current fleet by 50 percent.

And these errors also affect future years.  The growing longevity of the vehicle fleet means that the future fleet will be less efficient (and much dirtier) than assumed in Metro’s modeling.  If the average age of vehicles stabilizes at the current 12 years, the median vehicle in 2035 will be a 2023 model year vehicle (eighty percent of which were larger, more polluting SUVs).  Fleet turnover will happen much more slowly, and emission rates will decline more slowly still.

Metro and LCDC projections assume that average emissions of GHGs will fall from about 450 grams per mile to about 100 grams per mile in 2045.  In reality, GHG emissions per mile are falling far more slowly.  In 2021, the average vehicle emitted about 390 grams per mile rather than the roughly 300 grams per mile assumed in Metro and state climate modeling.

The RTP should be based on actual, honest data about greenhouse as emissions

The first step is to accurately report our progress—actually backsliding—in terms of reducing transportation GHGs.  Instead of reporting claims based on models with false and now discredited assumptions, it needs to show that actual GHG emissions are rising, and present a clear case showing why this has happened.  It’s been because we’re keeping cars longer, buying bigger, dirtier vehicles, driving more, and not improving fuel efficiency as fast as excessively optimistic assumptions made a decade ago.  We have to “mark to market” our forecasts:  replace decade old guesses about what our transportation emissions would be with actual data on what we’ve really accomplished.

Once we’ve done that, we’ll see that we need to do much more, and do it far more quickly than we thought.  It’s been nine years since Metro adopted its Climate Smart Strategy in 2014.  Those nine years represent fully one-fourth of the time available to get the region on track to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gases by 75 percent by 2050.  During those nine years, regional transportation greenhouse gas emissions have actually risen (by more than 20 percent, according to the DARTE inventory).  That means we have a bigger task, and a shorter period of time to accomplish it.  This simply isn’t reflected in the Regional Transportation Plan, in  state land use regulations, or the Oregon Department of Transportation’s “State Transportation Strategy (STS).

Appendix:  Vehicles are older, larger and dirtier than assumed in Metro climate models

The strategy assumes trends in vehicle type, fuel efficiency and fleet replacement that are the opposite of what we’ve experienced.  All of these errors lead to understating GHG emissions.

REALITY:  Average Vehicle Age is Increasing

Slower fleet turnover means that the vehicles on the road are on average, older and dirtier.  State modeling assumes that older vehicles are being replaced quickly; with the average age of a vehicle being 6 or 7 years.  In reality, the average vehicle is more than 12 years old.  The Oregon Department of Transportation reports that the average age of vehicles in Oregon is higher than the national average (14 years) and is increasing.  The climate modeling is wildly off:  the fleet is getting older, and the models assumed it would be getting younger.

The slow rate of fleet replacement is a particularly large problem for the modeling.  With an average age of 12 years, the median vehicle in 2035 will be a 2023 model.  Those vehicles average about 330 grams per mile.  That’s about 80 percent higher than the 180 grams per mile that state modeling assumes for the fleet in 2035.  The increasingly long life of vehicles locks in a high carbon emission rate.

The average age of vehicles on the road has increased to more than 12 years according to IHS Automotive.

REALITY:  Trucks and SUVs make up nearly 80 percent of new car sales. 

Fewer passenger cars, more light trucks and sport utility vehicles.  State modeling assumed that the share of trucks and SUVs would decline steadily, and that 60 percent or more of all private vehicles would be passenger cars, which use less fuel and emit less greenhouse gases.  In reality, nearly 80 percent of new vehicles sold today are light trucks and sport utility vehicles. The climate modeling is off by a factor of three, with passenger cars accounting for 20% of the fleet, not 60 percent.

What City Observatory did this week

Rose Quarter:  Death throes of a bungled boondoggle.  For years, we’ve been following the tortured Oregon Department of Transportation Plans to widen a 1.5 mile stretch of I-5 near downtown Portland.  The past few months show this project is in serious trouble.  Here’s a summary of our reporting of key issues.

• Costs have quadrupled to $1.9 billion, from an 2017 estimate of $450 million
• ODOT has diverted the funding earmarked for Rose Quarter to other freeway expansion projects
• The Rose Quarter is so expensive because it’s too damn wide:  ODOT has designed a road to accommodate a 10 lane freeway, while falsely claiming its only six lanes wide
• ODOT sold the freeway widening as restorative justice for the Albina community devastated by multiple ODOT highway projects, but then diverted funds to a suburban freeway

The truth is that the Rose Quarter is a bungled boondoggle.  Its cost has grown to the point where it’s now more than a billion dollars a mile for this roadway.  That’s money that ODOT simply doesn’t have, and would be crazy to squander on this, even if they did have it.  Rather than concede reality, the agency will play “extend and pretend” for several more years, and waste tens of millions more on consultants.

Must Read

Science has a well-known YIMBY bias.  A growing body of scientific research confirms a fundamental fact about housing markets:  Increased supply is associated with lower rents.  Writing at Forbes, Adam Millsap has a succinct summary four recent papers published in Cityscape that examine various experiences.  The research ratifies the YIMBY policy agenda:

These studies show that zoning changes and other land-use reforms can increase the supply of housing, help control prices, and boost local tax bases. Several states passed housing reforms in 2023, including Washington, Montana, Texas, and Vermont. I expect the supply of housing to increase in these states and for their housing prices to moderate over the coming years. State and local officials who are concerned about housing affordability should follow the science and reform their land-use policies.

The idea that new construction raises housing prices and rents is a cherished NIMBY myth.  The growing weight of scientific evidence is shifting public perceptions.

LA needs more density to promote affordability and make transit work.  UCLA professor Michael Lens speaks to the need for more density in Los Angeles.  The strict single family zoning that dominates most of the city is driving up home prices (now approaching a million dollars city wide) and rents.  And the limits on apartment construction undercut the region’s investment in transit.  He argues that housing would be more affordable, and transit more successful, if we allowed more density:

[Zoning limitations] mean too few people can live close enough to generate the ridership necessary to justify the immense investment it took to build the E Line. Further, the neighborhood’s single-family housing is so astronomically expensive — a million dollars will get you … nothing — that the people most likely to rely on the E Line cannot afford to live there. There are several reasons why ridership is down on L.A. Metro’s trains and buses, and too little density near transit is a major reason.

Lens adds that Los Angeles because the city is so spread out all ready–with multiple job centers, and robust neighborhoods–it needn’t concentrate density in one place, but rather it should look to add density, particularly where transit service is readily available.

Why ODOT should fund the billion bollards club.  Strong Towns has a provocative infrastructure idea:  Americans would be far safer if we invested a billion or so bollards to protect pedestrians and cyclists from cars leaving the roadway.  Chuck Marohn wrote:

America needs a billion bollards. There is no coherent argument against lining every street in America with them. This is the minimum level of protection needed to keep people safe from violence. It is the least we can do to correct the massive asymmetry of risk experienced on our nation’s streets by people outside of a vehicle.

A local Portland group has taken up the challenge and is beginning by mapping locations that would be logical locations for bollards.  To date, Portland, like most cities, primarily seems to be interested in using bollards to protect signal boxes and other inanimate objects, rather than vulnerable road users.

Tragically, the Oregon Department of Transportation’s response to safety is closing crosswalks, not building bollards.

What City Observatory did this week

Metro’s Climate-Denial Regional Transportation Plan.  Portland’s regional governtment, Metro, has published a draft Regional Transportation Plan, outlining priorities for transportation investments for the next two decades, and ostensibly, aiming to deal with transportation greenhouse gas emissions, the largest source of climate pollution in the region.  But unfortunately, the RTP, does nothing to prioritize projects and expenditures that reduce greenhouse gases, and instead creates a fictional case for more road widening.

Metro falsely asserts that because its overall plan will be on a path to reduce GHGs (it wont), it can simply ignore the greenhouse gas emissions of spending billions to widen freeways

The RTP’s climate policies don’t apply to individual project selection;  projects are prioritized on whether they reduce vehicle delay—a failed metric it uses to rationalize capacity expansions that simply induce additional travel and pollution

The RTP environmental analysis falsely assume that ODOT will impose aggressive state charges on car travel, including carbon taxes, a mileage fee and congestion fees than have not been implemented—and may never be—to reduce vehicle miles traveled.

The RTP’s traffic modeling fails to incorporate the effect of expected pricing on the need for additional capacity.  Modeling done by ODOT shows that pricing would eliminate the need for capacity expansion, saving billions, and reducing greenhouse gases.

Must Read

TXDOT marches ahead with I-35 Freeway widening.  The Texas Department of Transportation has published its final environmental. report and record of decision for its multi-billion dollar I-35 widening project in Central Austin.

Kevin DeGood of the Center for American Progress has a devastating analysis of the project’s absurd environmental claims, which assert that adding multiple lanes the the roadway will have essentially a trivial impact on vehicle miles traveled and greenhouse gas emissions.

The TXDOT model essentially predicts that traffic on I-35 will increase by the same amount whether or not the roadway is widened—notwithstanding that the existing roadway is essentially at capacity much of the day.  (We’ve unrolled DeGood’s social media thread for easy reading).  The underlying reason for this is that TXDOT lives in a fictional world where traffic increases 1.5 percent per year, regardless of roadway capacity.  TXDOT is simply in denial about the induced travel effects of building additional road capacity.  The induced travel effect means that widening I-35 will increase driving and greenhouse gas emissions, and won’t solve congestion.  It’s a great way to squander billions of dollars and further blight the middle of Austin.

Why speed enforcement cameras are equitable.  Writing at CalMatters, Darnell Grigsby challenges the claim that automated traffic enforcement will unfairly affect low income households and persons of color.

As a Black man who has worked at the intersection of transportation and social justice for years, I know firsthand that calls for enforcement are complicated. High-profile police brutality cases stemming from traffic stops that spread on social media are not only a tragedy, but a reminder of the disparate impact and fear Black and brown drivers experience every day.

Grigbsby points out that unlike discretionary police enforcement, automated cameras are color-blind, and perhaps more importantly, low income and communities of color are much more affected by the traffic violence and quality of life impacts of speeding vehicles.

. . . communities of color bear the brunt of the pain from the increase in lawlessness on our roads. In fact, in California, Black pedestrians are 62% more likely to die than white Californians. Latinos are 31% more likely.

A transportation system designed by “a cabal of sentient cement-mixers.”  Bella Chu (@bellachu10) is one of the most incisive and clear voices on transportation on social media.  This week, the American Society of Civil Engineers dispensed its awards for highway construction and deemed the massive Jane Byrne freeway interchange in Chicago “an outstanding engineering achievement and improvement to the community!”

Bella’s take is spot-on:

OMG. It’s the @aashtospeaks “QoL & Community” awards all over again. If a cabal of sentient cement mixers whose only goal was to eliminate the human population via blunt force trauma, asthma and climate change had taken over the planet, they could not come up with a better plan.

 

New Knowledge

A profile of work from home.  The Covid-19 pandemic greatly accelerated the adoption of work-at-home in the US economy, and though the pandemic has faded, work-from-home is far more common now that prior to the pandemic.  A new paper from Barrero, Bloom and Davis describes the evolution of work from home.

While work from home is common for many professional service and information occupations, it’s still the case that 60 percent of US workers perform their jobs only at their workplace.  About 11 percent of all workers work exclusively from home and the remaining 30 percent of workers are “hybrid”, splitting their working hours between workplaces and home.

Industry, occupation, and geography all influence whether and how much people work at home. Some industries (retailing, food services and manufacturing) require all or nearly all of their employees to be in the workplace; other industries (software, information) have much more remote work.

Remote work also varies by geography.  Work from home is more common in denser locations than in more rural locations.  In part, this reflects the mix of industries and occupations in different places.  But it also reflects the advantages urban locations provide in terms of amenities near worker’s homes.

 

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, “The Evolution of Working from Home,” https://wfhresearch.com, July 2023

In the news

The Portland Oregonian published Joe Cortright’s opinion piece on the Interstate Bridge:  “Oregon’s funding plan for the Interstate Bridge is a generational crime.”

Thanks to Streetsblog California for pointing its reader’s to City Observatory’s analysis of climate fraud in the Portland Metro Regional Transportation Plan.

What City Observatory did this week

Climate fraud in the Portland Metro RTP.  Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan rationalizes spending billions on freeway expansion by publishing false estimates and projections of greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation is the number one source of greenhouse gases in Portland. For nearly a decade, our regional government, Metro, has said it is planning to meet a state law calling for reducing greenhouse gas emissions 75 percent by 2050. But the latest Metro Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) has simply stopped counting actual greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.

Inventories compiled by the state, the city of Portland and the federal government all show the region’s transportation emissions are going up, not down as called for in our plan.  In place of actual data, Metro and other agencies are substituting fictitious estimates from models; these estimates incorrectly assume that we are driving smaller cars and fewer trucks and SUVs, and rapidly replacing older cars. None of those assumptions are true.

As a result greenhouse gases are going up; our plans are failing, and Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan, the blueprint for spending billions over the next several decades will only make our climate problems worse

Must Read

 

The futility of freeway expansion, in three pictures. Darren Givens (@atlurbanist) has a succinct and powerful social media post visually demonstrating Atlanta’s futile efforts to reduce congestion by widening freeways through the city.  To paraphrase Don Shoup, wider freeways have been a fertility drug for traffic.

How freeways destroy urban housing wealth. Bloomberg’s CityLab reports on a new study from Transportation for America documenting the destruction of housing wealth by freeway construction in US cities.  Taking a close look at the housing demolished to provide space for freeways in Washington, DC, and Atlanta, the author’s conclude that freeway construction destroyed billions of dollar in home value, based on today’s value of urban housing.

In DC, those two [the Southeast and Southwest Freeways] interstate sections eliminated at least $1.4 billion in home value based on today’s market.  They also cost the city at least $7.6 million in annual property taxes (based on the 2023 residential property tax rate of 0.54%).

Other research has shown that the direct demolition of houses in the highway right of way is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  Neighborhoods divided by urban freeways and inundated by traffic tend to go into terminal decline.  Researchers at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank found that the urban neighborhoods closest to freeways suffered the biggest declines in population of any urban neighborhoods.  Continued spending on highway capacity in urban areas is a value destroying activity.

New Knowledge

Zoning and educational inequality.  The geography of American cities both typifies and reinforces economic inequality.  Higher and lower income people live apart from one another in most metropolitan areas, and the balkanization of locally provided services, especially education, amplifies these inequalities.  People who live in low income communities get worse public services, and have fewer opportunities to get the education or jobs that would allow them to advance.

A new paper from Richard Kahlenberg draws a direct line between exclusionary single family zoning and the geography of inequality.  Requiring large lot, single family housing, and mostly (or entirely) banning apartments in many suburban jurisdictions both precludes many lower and moderate income families from living in such places, and enables the residents of those places to enjoy a higher level of public services, especially schools, while restricting the access of lower income households to amenities jobs and education.

Kahlenberg looks closely at Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, and compares the zoning, schools and demographics of two of its cities, Scarsdale and Port Chester.   Scarsdale is wealthier, whiter and more expensive; Port Chester is poorer, less white and less expensive.  Scarsdale has little multi-family land, and large minimum lot sizes, as much as two acres, even near commuter rail stations.  Little wonder that fewer than 10 percent of Scarsdale residents are renters, while a majority of Port Chester residents rent.  Statistically, the contrast is striking:

Its little surprise, then that places like Scarsdale are bastions of NIMBY opposition, both to denser housing, and to statewide efforts to reform zoning, like Governor Kathy Hochul’s recently defeated housing plan.  While their arguments are cloaked in an ostensible desire to protect unique local character, its clear than zoning serves as a tool of exclusion and opportunity hoarding.

As xxxx points out, Brown v. Board of Education outlawed the use of race as a basis for segregation, but since then local policies have enshrined economic status in its place.

In the news

The Oregonian published an Op-Ed—”Oregon’s funding plan for the I-5 bridge is a generational crime”—by City Observatory Director Joe Cortright, about the state’s plan to subsidize the I-5 Bridge Replacement Project with $1 billion of general obligation bonds.

KGW-TV featured City Observatory Director Joe Cortright in its reporting about the reasons for the $6 billion cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement project (really a 12-lane wide, 5 mile long freeway, that involves rebuilding seven different interchanges).

Must Read

Some Texas-sized greenwashing for highway widening in Austin.  TXDOT is aiming to spend close to $5 billion to widen I-35 through downtown Austin, and to sweeten the deal, they’re producing project renderings showing lengthy caps over portions of the widened freeway.  One hitch though:  while TXDOT will pay to build the highway, it isn’t going to contribute a dime to building the caps, which are expected to cost a cool billion.

Somebody else will have to come up with the money:  but that doesn’t stop TXDOT from shamelessly greenwashing the project with illustrations that show great swaths of green and a barely legible notation that “surface level enhancements to be provided by others.

Rhetorical blame-shifting and denial in face of automobile carnage.  Highway deaths, which have been rising for the past several years, are spiking this summer, with a number of particularly painful losses.  A driver killed Seventeen year old aspiring professional cyclist with their car; the sports national body described his death as a “training accident.”  That produced a visceral reaction from many, including Bella Chu who has some practical advice for spotting the blame-shifting and denial built into standard auto-centric accounts of this ongoing epidemic of traffic violence:

Clip out and save this list and see how many of these misleading messages you can find in press accounts of traffic violence in your city.

The outlook for cities, post-Covid.  Rani Molla has an excellent survey article looking at the future of cities in a post-covid, more work-from-home world.  Molla touches base with a wide range of experts, getting their views on everything from the decline in office employment due to remote work, to the opportunities for cities to emphasize livability and amenities as economic advantages.  Molla writes:

To compete with each other and truly thrive, cities must work on becoming more attractive places to live.  Just because big cities are probably going to be fine doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot of challenges or that they couldn’t be a lot better. They do and they can. That means maintaining what already makes cities good and adding things that could make their constituents’ lives better — that’s something that will keep people there and make others come.

As our friend Mary Rowe points out in the article, cities are dynamic and adaptive:  they’ve dealt with plenty of changes over the centuries, and the best will change and evolve to succeed in this new environment.

New Knowledge

Migration by income after the pandemic.  The Economic Innovation Group has a new analysis, based on county level tax return data showing the difference in incomes of in-migrants and out-migrants.

EIG has a terrific nationwide map that easily lets you drill down to county level data and see changes in income levels, as well as changes in the the number of tax returns filed in each year. The data compares tax year 2021 to tax year 2020.  On this map, blue areas saw higher incomes for in-migrants than out-migrants; orange areas had higher incomes for out-migrants than in-migrants.

 

While the report emphasizes that these are “post-pandemic” changes, there’s a missing baseline here:  Specifically, what were the patterns of migration prior to the pandemic and how did they change?  Much of what we observe in intra-metropolitan and inter-state moves is a well-established historical pattern:  Higher income households (often older people) move from urban center to their suburbs, while central cities tend to attract younger (and lower income households) just starting out.  To some extent, this is influenced by marriage:  Two single people moving into a city file separate tax returns; a married couple leaving the city files a joint return with a higher income.  Similarly, many patterns of interstate migration reflect long established trends (like high income movers leaving New York for Florida, or migrating out of San Francisco).  The real question is whether the pandemic accelerated these trends from their historic pattern, and whether this is a temporary blip or a sustained change.  As tantalizing as these data are, they don’t answer this question.

Conor O’Brien, “Tax Data Reveals Large Flight of High Earners from Major Cities During the Pandemic,” Economic Innovation Group, August 8, 2023

In the news

The Washington Post cited City Observatory’s study of the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty in their article “Income Ladder is Difficult to Climb in US Metros.”

What City Observatory did this week

Eating local:  Why independent, local restaurants are a key indicator of city vitality.  Jane Jacobs noted decades ago that“The greatest asset a city can have is something that is different from every other place.”  While much of our food scene is dominated by national chains, some cities have many, many more locally owned independent restaurants than the the norm.  And independent restaurants get overwhelmingly higher ratings than chains.  We’ve used Yelp data to estimate the share of independent, local restaurants in large US metro areas, and come up with this ranking.

Unsurprisingly, New York and San Francisco have the highest fraction of local independent businesses.  You can scan this list to see which cities have a strong local food scene, and which are mostly driven by the national chains.

Must Read

Are we against traffic congestion or more traffic?  There’s a provocative essay on substack that questions some basic assumptions about transportation advocacy.  The author argues that while its tempting for transit and activte transportation advocates to make common cause with other road users over the supposed scourge of traffic congestion, its ultimately self-defeating.

For those who are concerned about reducing impacts on climate and improving public health in the US, we need to understand that more traffic is bad and congestion is not our problem, and is really our ally. This is sensible only if we distinguish traffic from traffic congestion. If we care about climate and public health, we need to reduce traffic. Traffic congestion might frustrate drivers enough to consider other options.

The underlying problem is our old friend induced travel:  steps we take to reduce congestion and improve car travel times inevitably lead to more and longer car trips.  And it’s the volume of traffic, not its sometimes slow speed, that is the source of the real negative externalities, including crashes and pollution.

States siphoned millions of dollars in climate money into road building projects.  One of the headline features of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was a modest allocation of transportation funds to reduce greenhouse gases and mitigate effects of climate change.  But the Washington Post reports that thanks to the “flexibility” in federal funding, state highways departments have reallocated millions of this money to other projects, including highway expansions and road-building.

New Knowledge

Working remotely lowers productivity.  The Covid pandemic produced a sea-change in the adoption of work-from-home, and workers, businesses (and housing and office markets) are still digesting the implications.  One of the big and largely unsettled questions is whether people working at home are as productive as those working in office settings.

As a practical matter, its difficult to accurately measure worker productivity, and there are many confounding factors that are likely to reach reliable conclusions.  One key issue is selection bias:  it may be that those who are more productive working at home tend to self-select for these opportunities, so while some workers are as productive, or more productive remotely, that isn’t necessarily true on average, for for everyone.

A new study from India uses a sophisticated random assignment design to overcome this selection bias issue.  It studied workers handling a series of easily measured, routine functions which are done similarly in office and remote work settings.

The key finding:  On average, those working remotely were 18 percent less productive than their in-office peers.  About two-thirds of this difference in productivity manifested itself from the outset of assignment; the remaining increase in productivity was attributed to better/faster learning of skills in an office environment.

While overall in-office workers were more productive, the study noted that selection effects tended to worsen the home/office productivity gap:  workers who prefer to work at home, as opposed to those who preferred office locations tended to be less productive at home.

David Atkin, Antoinette Schoar & Sumit Shinde, Working from Home, Worker Sorting and Development, NBER WORKING PAPER 31515, July 2023, DOI 10.3386/w31515

In the news

City Observatory Director Joe Cortright was named one of Planetizen’s 100 most influential contemporary urbanists, clocking in at #56!