What City Observatory did this week
1. 20 Reasons to ignore the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report. It’s back. After a four-year hiatus Texas A&M University’s transportation institute trotted out another iteration of its periodic urban mobility report, which predictably claims (as it does every time) that traffic congestion is a horrible problem and is getting worse. We and others have long since debunked the methodology, data and findings of the UMR: it’s core measure, the travel time index, is misleading and penalizes cities with compact development and short commutes; its fixated on car travel and literally regards pedestrians as “inappropriate data”. It treats time lost from being able to exceed legal speed limits as an economic cost to drivers. It values increased travel time in congestion at a rate five-times higher than what people actually pay to avoid congestion. And that’s just the tip of a larger iceberg: We identify 20 reasons why, as in years past, you can and should ignore the Urban Mobility Report. Its discredited propaganda designed to justify more and wider roads, a failed strategy which has never worked and as only made car dependence, sprawl and traffic worse.
2. Round 1 in Portland’s freeway fight goes to the scrappy upstarts. For the past couple of years we’ve been reporting on the Oregon Department of Transportation’s proposal to spend half a billion dollars widening a mile-long stretch of I-5 near downtown Portland. The local press reports a major victory for project opponents: ODOT has given up trying to pursue the short-form environmental assessment, and instead will do a full-scale Environmental Impact Statement. That will add between one and three years to the project development process, and hopefully fix the manifest problems in the ODOT analysis to date create an opportunity to consider some alternatives actually promote safety, reduce driving, and improve the environment.
Must read
1. Do community preference housing policies enshrine segregation? Anti-gentrification efforts often call for neighborhood preference policies affordable housing opportunities (for example, giving local neighborhood residents preferential access to new affordable apartments that become available). Next City explores the potential problem with these policies: they tend to lock-in patterns of segregation, and deny people the opportunity to move to a different neighborhood. Because many city neighborhoods are substantially segregated, these policies tend to keep them that way. Fair housing activists have challenged neighborhood preference rules in New York and San Francisco; Seattle is wrestling with you to avoid reinforcing segregation.
2. Michigan cities need more congestion and gentrification. Never one to shy away from a controversial proposition, Michigan Future’s President Lou Glazer argues that contrary to popular belief, what Detroit and other Michigan cities need is both more congestion and more gentrification. In his view, rising home values and more traffic are closely related to more demand for a city, and its a lack of demand for Michigan cities that is at the root of most of their current problems. None of this is to say that gentrification and congestion aren’t problems themselves, but for economically struggling cities, its a better class of problem to be wrestling with. As always, Glazer is worth a read.
3. India mandates RFID tags for all vehicles. If you think about it, the ubiquitous stamped metal license plate used to identify cars is a 19th century technology. India has mandated that starting next year, all vehicles must have a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag–a windshield-mounted sticker, similar to the fast-pass technology used in many states in the US. The change will enable a shift to all-electronic toll collection.
Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari announced that FASTags will become mandatory for all vehicles from December this year. This means that any vehicle, private or commercial, which has the FASTag will be able to swiftly make contactless payments at toll plazas on national highways and be on their way.
In a related story half a world away, the San Jose Mercury News reports a new California law requiring temporary metal plates instead of unreadable temporary paper licenses has reduced toll evasion 75 percent on Bay Area highways and bridges. Owners of new cars would delay getting (or mounting) new license plates and dodge paying tolls. The one area where “smart” technology makes the most sense is assuring all vehicle operators obey the law.
4. YIMBY gets political. Software engineer Steven Buss is a YIMBY activist in San Francisco. He’s got an essay laying out a clear political strategy for moving the YIMBY agenda forward in San Francisco, starting with running for key positions in the local Democratic Party, and then nominating (and electing) housing-friendly candidates to the city’s board of Supervisors. In Buss’s view, homeowners and landlords now control the city, and are effectively blocking new construction (restricting supply and thereby keeping rents and home values high). It’s as much a hard-edged financial calculation as a political manifesto: Buss has an interesting calculation showing that this rent-seeking has enabled landowners to capture a significant fraction of the value created by the city’s tech economy. Bottom line: Tech folks used to say that software was eating the world — “now landlords are eating everything.”
In the news
The Houston Chronicle’s Dug Begley quotes City Observatory’s Joe Cortright on the methodological flaws in the latest urban mobility report.