Moving on...

So, you've probably already noticed that I've more or less given up on this blog...I've had it for years but it never really got much readership. I've been blogging recently at marketurbanism.com, a blog about urban planning and the free market, and I post pretty often, so if you're interested, add it to y'all's feed readers. And, of course, if you've got any job offers for a recent graduate, email me! (smithsj -at- gmail -dot- com)

HSR crowding out local transit projects

Yet another way in which Obama's high-speed rail plans are derailing actual progress in getting Americans out of their cars:

BUENA PARK, Calif. — Mayor Art Brown spent years pushing for a commuter train station combined with nearby housing in his community. But as townhouses are being finished around the $14 million Metrolink station, he's facing the prospect that California's high-speed rail line may plow right through his beloved project.

"The only option they presented to us was either losing the condo units or losing our train station," Brown said of an engineering presentation to city leaders last year.

That a successful effort to get car-dependent Californians to embrace mass transit could be derailed by another transportation project may strike some as ironic. But it's also one of the hidden costs — and a potential harbinger of delay — in the ambitious plan that would enable passengers to speed the 430 miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 2 1/2 hours.

By the way, the projected cost of a one-way ticket on the high-speed rail line from LA to SF has risen from $55 to $105. Despite the fact that intraurban trips account for the vast majority of transportation use in America, the Obama administration and other politicians prefer to focus on expensive boondoggles like high-speed rail, often at the expense of more mundane, but much more important local projects like these.

LA's partial parking privatization

The LA Times reports that Los Angeles is considering "privatizing" ten public parking garages to fill a budget shortfall. The story is, unfortunately, a reminder of how infrastructure "privatization" is often little better than the status quo, and how media reporting of the issue can doom real reform.

Whereas pure privatization would mean selling the buildings and underlying land to anyone for any use, this scheme is actually a 50-year outsourcing of the garages' management (mostly, at least) and profits (again, mostly). The new "owners" could only use the structures to park cars, and using them to house people and businesses that would increase the walkability of the areas where the garages are located is out of the question.

True privatization would also bring in more money for the city, which is the stated goal of the privatization. The garages would be worth more if they were being sold with complete development rights, and the tax revenues from whatever's built on them (not to mention possible increases in adjacent properties' values) would probably exceed the "small negotiated share of future proceeds" that the city "could retain."

The only possible benefit I can see to this plan is that parking rates will move upwards towards the true market price. But even that would be too much for the city to stomach, as the city would "retain authority over parking rates at the garages" – and who wants to guess which way they'll be pressured to push prices?

The potential downfall of this plan, however, is that the public may forever associate privatization with this pseudo-corporatism, as happened in Russia in the early 1990's and Chicago's parking meter privatization scheme last year, which could impede future, more truly libertarian urban reforms.

Amtrak's utter incompetence

There's a lot to be said for Amtrak's mismanagement, but a lot of it is technical and inaccessible to the layman. This, however, is unconscionable: Amtrak still does not offer wireless internet – either free or paid – on any of its trains. Megabus and Bolt Bus (whose tickets between DC and NYC are about $20), however, have had wireless for about two years, and I'm pretty sure some Chinatown buses have had it for longer. Amtrak's normal tickets on the Northeast Corridor are about four times the cost of tickets on Bolt Bus and Megabus. Tickets on the Acela are about eight times the cost of bus tickets, and the service is heavily marketed towards business travelers who put a high price on their time. But no internet. It's apparently coming to Acela in about six months and the rest of the Northeast Corridor by the end of 2010. Had intercity buses and airlines not introduced wireless internet, I seriously doubt Amtrak would have ever had the business sense to do it.

...and flying will likely become ever more hellish

Thanks to the Nigerian man whose legs crackled and popped a bit on Christmas Day aboard a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, your next flight will suck a little more:

Although transportation officials had not announced new security measures yet, Air Canada said the Transportation Security Agency would make significant changes to the way passengers are able to move about on aircraft. During the final hour of flight, customers will have to remain seated, will not be allowed access to carry-on baggage and cannot have personal belongings or other items on their laps, according to a notice on Air Canada’s Web site.

In effect, that means passengers on flights of about 90 minutes or less will not be able to get out of their seats, since they are not allowed to move about while an airplane is climbing to its cruising altitude.

Obama's genius high-speed rail plan

Just in case you were under the impression that Obama's high-speed rail commitment was genuine, the Boston Globe would like to disabuse you of that notion:

The railroad tracks from Boston to Washington - the busiest rail artery in the nation, and one that also carries America’s only high-speed train, the Acela - have been virtually shut out of $8 billion worth of federal stimulus money set aside for high-speed rail projects because of a strict environmental review required by the Obama administration.

Because such a review would take years, states along the Northeast rail corridor are not able to pursue stimulus money for a variety of crucial upgrades.

Instead, the $8 billion is going to be split up to ten ways amongst other regions, such as California, the Gulf Coast, and the "Chicago Hub."

I love the irony of environmental standards stopping the Obama administration from making the one high-speed rail investment that has any chance of getting people out of their cars.

Obama's DOT is out of touch with America

Last night on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood were making fun of New York bank executives' recent excuse for missing a meeting in Washington due to "inclement weather" – i.e., fog at a private airport in Westchester. LaHood mentions that they could have taken Amtrak – the US government runs Amtrak, so this is to be expected – but then he says something that illustrates just how out of touch he really is: Greyhound. Who the hell takes a Greyhound bus from New York to DC as opposed to a Chinatown bus, Megabus, or Bolt Bus? I can understand your average DC legislator who's never ridden a bus in his life, but shouldn't the friggin' Secretary of Transportation realize that the cubside buses are far more popular and efficient?

I think this is symptomatic of a broader problem with the Obama administration's transportation policy: it's naive and neglected. Ray LaHood himself is a token Republican cabinet member who, by his own admission, has no particular interest in transportation. Obama's chief transportation initiative is a showy national high-speed rail system that only the rich will be able afford to ride, and yet he refuses to take even the most timid steps to combat suburban sprawl and the automobile's dominance.

Obama plans to socialize the internet?

Wired.com's headline: Broadband Is This Generation’s Highway System, FCC Chief Says

Scary words, those are. In 1956, when Eisenhower set out to construct a national, socialized network of highways, he was fulfilling the dreams of many progressives since the turn of the century, who believed that a road system designed and funded by the government ought to replace the privately-owned networks of streetcars and other rail-based mass transit that had up until then been the mainstay of urban and suburban transportation. Their plans profoundly transformed America, giving birth to venerable American icons like the road trip, fast food restaurant, and large-lot suburban subdivision.

But it hasn't been all white picket fences and manicured lawns. Suburan and exurban sprawl consume ever-increasing amounts of energy and land, and are at the root of many of America's ecological and foreign policy problems. Our obesity epidemic may even stem from our car-based culture, and while the isolation that suburbs provide can be nice, there's something to be said for the diversity and culture that one finds in cities.

If the Obama administration doesn't back off the internet, it very well may end up as interesting as a suburban subdivision and as fast as a SoCal highway during rush hour.

NYC cabbies talking on phones: government solution vs. free market solution

The NYT discusses the issue of New York cabbies talking on the phone with hands-free devices – a common occurrence, though technically illegal in New York City. The discussion of remedies focuses almost entirely on the government enforcing its rules, with the free market alternative mentioned only in the last two paragraphs:

This being New York, the most effective means of cutting off a conversation may be found not in the offices of city regulators, but in the customer’s wallet.

“When I talk all the time, the passengers get angry,” said Mohammad Forazi, 42, of the Bronx. “They don’t give tips.”

In a totally free market, one could plausibly imagine a cab company that bills itself as a safer alternative, and bans its drivers from talking on the phone. One of the benefits of brands is that they have reputations to uphold, and thus have an incentive to make customers want to come back. New York cabbies, however, are totally indistinguishable. This is supposedly a feature of the cab cartel in New York and many major cities of the world, not a bug.

The trade-off between passenger and freight rail

Normally Robert Poole at the Reason Foundation makes my blood curdle, but his blog post at the Reason Foundation brings up a very good point, if it is indeed true: because of Europe's emphasis on passenger rail, they only ship 10% of freight by rail, compared to a figure of 41% in the United States. I'm not entirely sure of the significance of this when all is said and done, but it's a fascinating fact.

So in fact, what the new federal funding will mostly be used for is upgrades to the existing shared passenger/freight tracks, aiming to get Amtrak trains up to speeds of 90 to 100 mph rather than today’s 60 or 70 mph. But that raises the question of getting the best use out of America’s existing railroad infrastructure. While it’s possible, with lots of passing sidings and expensive signaling systems, to operate both fast passenger trains and slower (and much longer) freight trains on the same trackage, the performance of both is hindered. U.S. freight railroads still have serious difficulties attracting time-sensitive freight, because rail freight takes so long (an intermodal trip from Tacoma to Columbus or Cincinnati takes 7 to 12 days) and is so uncertain (i.e., from 7 to 12 days!). Today’s high-tech, just-in-time logistics system cannot operate with such long times or with large schedule uncertainty, which is why so much freight moves by truck instead of rail.

In contrast with the United States, European countries over the last 50 years have opted to use their railroad networks primarily for passenger service (except for the new, separate HSR lines). If you compare goods-movement in Europe (the 27 EU countries) and the United States, you find that as of 2005, rail carried only 10% of all freight ton-miles in Europe, compared with 41% in the USA. Trucks in Europe handled 45% of ton-miles, compared with 30% here. That different mix of goods transport (other categories include pipeline, inland waterway, air freight, and coastwise shipping) has consequences for GHG emissions. In response to my query, Wendell Cox pulled together preliminary estimates of goods-movement GHGs for Europe and the United States and posted them here. (These are preliminary estimates, and Cox welcomes feedback.) What they show is that the GHG intensity of goods movement in Europe averages 193 grams/ton-mile compared with 155 grams/ton-mile in the United States. In other words, the current U.S. policy of using its railroad network mostly for freight is “greener” than the European policy of using its network primarily for passenger service.

Thus, by putting more 100 mph passenger trains on existing railroads, we risk thwarting the hoped-for shift of more freight from truck to rail.

People catching on to the second-generation biofuel scam

Obama had so much fun getting burned for his misguided support of state subsidies to corn ethanol producers that he's decided to do it again, this time with "next generation" biofuels that use things like prairie grasses to fuel SUVs instead of food. The thinking behind it is that despite the fact that corn-based ethanol caused massive increases in the price of food around the world, these "newer" and "greener" biofuels will use "marginal land" instead of crop land, and so will not be as harmful. This, of course, is bullshit, as I've written about earlier. Others are beginning to come around to this fact, and Counterpunch has a great article on the dangers of biofuels.

So far, Obama's energy plan has featured, as a cornerstone, tons of subsidization of "green" energy – first in corn ethanol, and later in advanced biofuels, wind, solar, geothermal, and some various other technologies. It's only been a few years since Obama's risen to prominence and taken a definitive stand on energy issues, but his record ain't too hot: corn-based ethanol and "advanced" biolfuels are looking like definite failures, wind is looking not too great, and the production of regulated solar panels has the nasty side effect of releasing a chemical which is much better at warming the planet than carbon dioxide.

The American government spends a lot of money making sure that Americans have access to cheap energy, so it's odd Obama wouldn't look into cutting subsidies for un-environmentally friendly suburban sprawl and automobiles rather than trying to play master scientist and build a perpetual motion machine.

The Nation's mass transit hypocrisy

I was heartened to see an article about the need for mass transit in the pages of The Nation, though I was severely disappointed by the magazine's own hypocrisy and historical blindness. The article is in all ways a standard left-liberal screed against the car and for mass transit, which is a topic close to my heart, though I'd prefer a more libertarian approach to returning America to its mass transit roots as opposed to the publicly-funded version that The Nation advocates.

The first bit of historical blindness comes at the end of the second paragraph, when The Nation argues for government investment in mass transit on the grounds that it will "strengthen labor, providing a larger base of unionized construction and maintenance jobs." But don't they realize that the demands of organized labor were one of the straws that broke the privately-owned mass transit camel's back during the first half of the twentieth century? Joseph Ragen wrote an excellent essay about how unions in San Francisco demanded that mass transit companies employ two workers per streetcar instead of one, codifying their wishes through a series of legislative acts and even a referendum. Saddled with these additional costs, the streetcar companies could not make a profit, and eventually the lines were paved over to make way for the automobile. Mass transit companies, whether publicly- or privately-owned, cannot shoulder the burden of paying above-market wages and still hope to pose any serious threat to the automobile's dominance.

The second, and perhaps more egregious error, comes a little later, when The Nation lays the blame on every group but itself for the deteriorating state of mass transit in America:

Nonetheless, smart growth and transportation activists still have high hopes that the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress will revitalize mass transit. But institutional stumbling blocks--including generations of federal policy favoring roads and cars; pressure from fiscal conservatives; and the power of auto, oil and highway construction lobbies--may cause them to miss this opportunity.

Smart growth, though not a libertarian movement, has a distinctly libertarian issue at its core: reversing the mandatory low density zoning and parking regulations that afflict almost every city, town, and village in America. But who started the movement for zoning and low-density planning in the first place? Progressives, a group which The Nation fancies itself a member of.

And in fact, a search of The Nation's archives reveals that my suspicions were correct: the magazine was, sure enough, among those who were calling for a de-densification of America, and railing against the inefficiencies of mass transit. From the April 24 issue published in 1920, there's an article entitled "The Lack of Houses: Remedies" in which the author, Arthur Gleason, lays out his policy prescriptions for dealing with what he considered to be a dearth of housing in America. Regarding zoning (which at the time almost always meant separating homes from jobs and decreasing density – anathema to the New Urbanist call for mixed uses and density), Gleason was wholeheartedly in favor of it:

Zoning regulates and limits the height and bulk of buildings, and regulates and determines the area of courts, yards, and other open spaces. It divides the city into districts. It regulates and restricts the location of trades and industries and the location of buildings. It conserves property values, directs building development, is a security against nuissance, a guarantee of stability, and an attraction to capital.

Not only did The Nation circa 1920 abhor density, but it also treated mass transit with disdain, writing that "[s]ubways make a slum out of a suburb." This is typical of Progressives of the era, who saw mass transit as capitalistic and backwards. There was also a tinge of racism to the attitude, as the "slum" was populated largely by Polish, Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, while the "suburb" contained more acceptable non-immigrant Americans.

The Nation pays lip-service to America's mass transit-laden past, writing that "it predates the automobile," but then conveniently forgets the reasons that mass transit in America ceased to exist. And that's convenient, because the reasons – almost all driven by government intervention against streetcars, subways, and density – were once causes that The Nation championed.

Uncomfortable truths about the progressive legacy

Yesterday I was listening to the pre-inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial on the radio, and one of the speakers said something that struck me as emblematic of the challenges that Barack Obama faces, though I doubt she realized the ironic significance. She was praising Theodore Roosevelt's conservationist legacy as a model for Obama, though she only touched on a small sliver of Roosevelt's environmental legacy. He definitely did cherish the environment; a timeline of his life shows that in early April 1903 he "communes with deer while writing letters in Yellowstone, WY." He was indeed a conservationist, as were many progressives at the time.

But the progressives were also something else – something that today's progressives would do well to remember: ardent planners whose plans often had grave unforeseen consequences. Just after his time communing with the deer at Yellowstone, Roosevelt traveled to St. Louis to address the 1903 Good Roads Convention. The "good roads" movement dated back to before the automobile rose to prominence, and was formed to agitate for improved roads for bicyclists and farmers. But around the time of Roosevelt's speech, the movement was hijacked by the automobile industry. Unwilling or unable to compete on their own against mass transit, the automakers sought for the government to clear and pave the roads they needed in order to sell their cars – an advantage the streetcars and railroads did not generally have. Not wanting to appear to be too blatant in their rent seeking, the automobile industry lobbied the government indirectly, giving organizations like the AAA money in exchange for influence and seats on their boards.

The nascent auto industry was not the only booster of subsidized roads – even the private railroads were not immune to the siren song of the great new progressive future. They joined the cause in the 1890s with the idea that improved roads would mean more business for railroads, unaware of the threat that the long-haul trucking industry would come to pose to their business. This new semi-public, semi-private corporatist transportation model suited the progressives as well, who believed in a statist future where "private" enterprise was directed and controlled, though not outright owned, by the government.

In the years since the 1903 Good Roads Convention, the idea that government ought to be providing "good roads" has fundamentally altered the landscape of the country in ways that Theodore Roosevelt never could have imagined. The highway lobby gathered strength throughout the early half of the 20th century, eventually culminating in the Interstate Highway System, the widespread suburbanization of America, and the deterioration of once-great American cities. Urban planners like Robert Moses razed neighborhoods and blighted the remaining barren expanses with highways that have become increasingly congested ever since. In order to stave off this inevitable overuse, planners flattened America with zoning laws and parking regulations that forced America to sprawl ever farther from its city centers, to areas reachable only by cars and trucks. A century later it's hard to imagine it happening any other way, and it's often forgotten that there was a workable free market urbanism before there was unsustainable sprawl.

Theodore Roosevelt might be more commonly remembered for his conservationist work, but it's important for people today to remember the unforeseen consequences of the progressives' other grand plans. The "good roads" path that he helped put America on has shown itself to be an enabler of global climate change and belligerent petrostates, encouraging Americans to live farther apart, travel longer distances each day, have bigger houses, and fill those houses with more things. The common telling of the roading of America is that it greased the wheels of commerce and is an integral part of the "American dream," but it's impossible to know what sort of advances in mass transit technology would have come about and how we'd be living had the government not favored the automobile and the truck over the streetcar and the train. Theodore Roosevelt's conservationist efforts are indeed praiseworthy, but might both the environment and the economy be in better shape today had the progressives not interrupted the rail-based urbanization of turn-of-the-century America and put us on the car-based sprawling sub- and exurbanization that characterizes America today?

In calling for the government to fund mass transit and urban projects, Barack Obama has shown that he recognizes the problems of America's land use configuration. But in doing so, he shows himself to be ignorant of the root causes of the crisis: government meddling in the transportation and land use industries. Just as the progressives and futurists failed to use the government to direct a more efficient transportation scheme, Obama will likely fail in using the government to fix America's energy problems. Unless he renounces the legacy of the progressives and admits to America that it needs to return to its market-based roots – at least with respect to transportation and land use policy – his campaign promises of reversing our unsustainable ways will go unfulfilled.

Anti-protectionist street protests in the Russian Far East

Not something you see every day – crowds clamoring for free trade. Via Cathy Young, the Moscow Times reports that inhabitants of Russia's far eastern territory have taken to the streets to protest a new tax that I presume would fall mostly on cheap used Asian cars imported via China (in Eastern Europe and its colonies in the far east, used cars are a big deal).

In a rare example of grassroots political power, angry protests by drivers prompted lawmakers in the far eastern Primorye region on Monday to ask the country's two leaders to delay raising import duties on foreign cars. [...]

Thousands of drivers took to the streets in several far eastern cities and towns Sunday to protest the tariffs, blocking traffic, clashing with police, openly insulting Putin and Medvedev and even calling on Putin to resign.

Putin's decree would increase the prices for imported cars by between 10 and 20 percent, a move the government has defended as a way of protecting domestic auto makers during the growing financial crisis.

The Primorye region's representative in the Federation Council, hockey legend Vyacheslav Fetisov, met with regional car dealers in Vladivostok on Monday and promised to pass on their request to the government to call off the tariffs, which they say would ravage their business.

Then again, I don't know if clamoring for reduced tariffs on cars really counts as libertarian activism when you think about it...

Are foreign automakers in the South subsidized?

With Detroit getting criticism from free-market types for seeking government money, pundits on the left are pointing to the subsidies and incentives that foreign car manufacturers in the American South get. Jane Hamsher at the Huffington Post talks about her appearance on Fox Business where she said that subsidies to foreign automakers give them a "tremendous advantage" in the South – but is that really true? Surely the subsidies are real – Daniel Gross at Slate chronicled the rise of the non-union foreign auto plants in states like Alabama and South Carolina and notes the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives that state governments bid to attract foreign automakers. But as for whether or not the special incentives are actually the reason the manufacturers locate there – that is, is it actually a "tremendous advantage" or just an unnecessary perk? – that's a different story.

As Rondinelli and Burpitt tell it in a 2000 paper on the impact of government incentives on FDI in North Carolina, the academic consensus is that these programs are largely just politicians trying to prove their usefulness to voters, and that special incentives rank very low on the list of reasons why foreign manufacturers actually set up shop in the South. The lack of unions and fewer labor regulations rank highest, followed by general business climate and access to transportation infrastructure (itself often a subsidy, but Michigan and the Rust Belt are just as well connected to rail and road networks). Marketing efforts by states, specific incentives such as state-sponsored job training, and tax breaks figure lowest in the decision-making calculus.

But there is one more subsidy that I've heard of – in the aforelinked Slate article, Gross mentions that "federally subsidized power from the Tennessee Valley Authority" is one reason why foreign automakers began building plants in the southeastern US in the 1980s. It is definitely true that TVA power – which accounts for a quarter of total American electricity generation – is heavily subsidized: Richard Munson notes that despite its terrible financial shape, the TVA has an AAA bond rating – a surefire sign that investors see it, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as essentially having the backing of the US Treasury, regardless of what the TVA's leadership would have taxpayers believe. Jane Jacobs, over twenty years ago, got into a NYRB-mediated spat with the TVA's chief economist, and said that "abundant and relatively cheap electric power [underpins] the TVA region's entire economy and standard of living." But this sounds like an exaggeration when applied to automakers. While buidling cars definitely relies more on electricity as an input than your average American service sector job, I doubt that the subsidy that industrial electricity buyers receive is enough to lead foreign car makers to choose the region over Michigan (as the TVA's Allan Pulsipher noted, the TVA's subsidies are given mostly to residential users).

So if Detroit's backers want to argue for the bailout plan, they ought to stop using foreign automakers' subsidies as an excuse for their own. It's becoming increasingly clear to me that it's the unions that have led American automakers down their present path, and it's the lack of restrictive labor laws that allows the South's car industry to thrive.

Is Houston really unplanned?

It seems to be an article of faith among many land use commentators – both coming from the pro- and anti-planning positions – that Houston is a fundamentally unplanned city, and that whatever's built there is the manifest destiny of the free market in action. But is this true? Did Houston really escape the planning spree that resulted from Progressive Era obsessions with local planning and the subsequent grander plans of the post-WWII age of the automobile? Michael Lewyn, in a paper published in 2005, argues that commentators often overlook Houston's subtler land use strictures, and recent developments in the city's urban core reaffirm this.

It is definitely true that Houston lacks one of the oldest and most well-known planning tools: Euclidean single-use zoning. This means that residential, commercial, and industrial zones are not legally separated, though as I will explain later, Houston remains as segregated in its land uses as any other American city. But single-use zoning is not the only type of planning law that Houston's government can use to hamper development.

As Lewyn lays out in his paper, minimum lot sizes and minimum parking regulations abound in this supposedly unplanned City upon a Floodplain. He discusses a recently-amended law that all but precludes the building of row houses, a stalwart of dense urban areas (the paper is heavily cited and poorly formatted, so I've removed the citations):

Until 1998, Houston's city code provided that the minimum lot size for detached single-family dwellings was 5000 square feet. And until 1998, Houston's government made it virtually impossible for developers to build large numbers of non-detached single-family homes such as townhouses, by requiring townhouses to sit on at least 2250 square feet of land. As Siegan admits, this law "tend[ed] to preclude the erection of lower cost townhouses" and thus effectively meant that townhouses "cannot be built for the lower and lower middle income groups." Houston's townhouse regulations, unlike its regulations governing detached houses, were significantly more restrictive than those of other North American cities. For example, town houses may be as small as 647 square feet of land in Dallas, 560 square feet in Phoenix, and 390 square feet in Toronto, Canada.

Though this law was eventually changed to allow denser homes within Houston's ring road (though not nearly as dense as some American cities allow), this change only affected a quarter of Houston's homeowners, leaving the rest still as regulated as ever. Not to mention the fact that even for those within the ring road, the rules only matter to new construction, leaving the vast majority of the building stock in compliance with the old rules.

Not to be outdone by minimum lot restrictions, the parking planners are also hard at work in Houston. As Donald Shoup explains in his magnum opus on parking regulations and the free market, minimum parking regulations are an oft-used and under-appreciated way for city planners to decrease density, push development farther from the city's core, increase an area's auto dependency, and decrease walkability and the viability of mass transit. Houston's planning code mandates that developers, regardless of what they perceive as the actual demand, build 1.25 parking spaces per apartment bedroom, and 1.33 spaces per efficiency apartment. Retail stores are also saddled with these parking minimums, and even bars as Lewyn notes are required to build "10 parking spaces per 1000 feet of gross area," flying in the face of common sense. To add insult to injury, the city requires that structures on major roads have a significant setback from the street, and the only rational thing to do with this unbuildable space is to put the mandated parking there, meaning that Houston actual codifies the hideous and inconvenient parking lot-out-front model of sprawl that is so typical across the US.

Another form of planning that Houston has, which is celebrated by the self-titled Antiplanner, is the institution of supposedly voluntary deed restrictions, or private land use covenants agreed upon by the owners of the property under restriction. I'm personally torn over the "libertarianness" of such schemes – are they truly voluntary? Can an individual owner of a property opt out of them once they've been signed? What's the statute of limitations? One thing that makes me suspect that they perhaps aren't as "free market" as they seem is that though the contracts are between individuals, Houston's city code allows the city attorney to prosecute these lawsuits at no cost to the supposed victims – fellow property-owners. In this way, as Lewyn explains, Houston's land uses are just as "Euclidean" as in other American cities:

But in Houston, restrictive covenants are so heavily facilitated by government involvement that they resemble zoning regulation almost as much as they resemble traditional contracts. Houston's city code, unlike that of most American cities, allows the city attorney to sue to enforce restrictive covenants. The city may seek civil penalties of up to $1,000.00 per day for violation of a covenant. Thus, Houston forces its taxpayers to subsidize enforcement of restrictive covenants even when litigation is too costly for individuals to pursue. In its covenant litigation, the city focuses on enforcement of use restrictions (that is, covenant provisions requiring separation of uses), as opposed to enforcement of other restrictions such as aesthetic rules. By subsidizing enforcement of use restrictions, Houston's city government subsidizes segregation of land uses--and in fact, land uses in Houston are only slightly less segregated than in most cities with zoning codes.

More recently, Houston's supposedly laissez-faire attitudes towards planning have again been tested by the proposed 23-story tower at 1717 Bissonnet Street. The tower would have been in a low-rise residential neighborhood, within walking distance of Rice University. After years of wrangling, the project was finally denied by the city, on grounds that the developers failed to prove that the project would not adversely affect traffic flow (a pretty arbitrary and un-libertarian requirement considering Houston's legendary congestion and the fact that developers have little say over where the city places its roads). And this, despite the fact that many of the tower's prospective residents – Rice students and staff – could have either walked or biked to school/work.

Boosters of Houston's land use policy – those who believe that Houston's land use patterns are the free market, revealed – never mention the restrictive minimum lot size and minimum parking requirements. They mention deed restrictions as free market innovations but fail to see how the city's prosecutors turn private concerns into public budget drains. And though the Antiplanner in his aforelinked comments on Houston recognizes the anti-density movement that reared its ugly head after the 1717 Bissonnet proposal, he evidently doesn't see this as seriously detracting from Houston's anything-goes land use policy.

Matt Yglesias fails to make the right case against highways

Matt Yglesias is one of the best mainstream bloggers on land use/transportation that I know of, and, as one blogger who I don't recall right now once said, his urban planning and transportation posts could be blogs in their own right. However, it's puzzling that in an article for Cato Unbound, he comes up with such a pathetic rejoinder to the O'Toole/Cox/Poole vulgar libertarian transportation cabal, who don't seem to have ever met a road they didn't like:

Or consider the fact that Randall [sic] O’Toole is indignant about the prospect of public expenditures on mass transit systems, but appears to have little to say about public funding of highways. This, too, looks more like a case of narrow business interests than sterling free market principles.

While Yglesias' instincts are right – current transportation markets in America are highly distorted – the reason they're distorted has little to do with the ways highways are financed. Based on some basic figures, Randal O'Toole concludes that the vast majority of road funding – over 80% – comes out of user fees. Now, of course there're still some subsidies there, but it's really nothing compared to the subsidies that mass transit systems receive, which in America never even come close to covering operating costs, nevermind capital expenditures. Now, there are some problems with the 80% number, such as the government's favorable access to bond markets and the legacy of infrastructure that wasn't paid for with user fees, but all in all, it's hard to argue that roads have a subsidy advantage over mass transit.

However, that's not to say that Yglesias doesn't have a point when he says that libertarians and conservatives have blind spots when it comes to how they see transportation. But the real government benefit that the road/car system has over mass transit is density: there are innumerable regulations at every level of government in the United States which favor low-density, single-family detached housing over the denser forms that dominated non-rural areas before the 20th century. Successful roads as we have in America require this low density to remain (almost) financially solvent – it would be very difficult to cope with people's road needs if they were allowed to build as densely as they would without maximum density zoning rules and minimum parking regulations.

As a thought experiment, imagine your local town/neighborhood with twice the density. Chances are, the roads would quickly become very congested. They would have to be widened, which would require money, and even more money than normal, because the government would have to purchase valuable land next to existing roads. (That is, assuming that eminent domain is not used.) The gas tax would have to be raised, and soon the costs would get out of hand. On the other hand, mass transit would become more profitable rather than less, because much less track needs to be laid to satisfy the same demand, and mass transit systems have much more excess capacity than roads. If densities are limited, though, then this alleviates both stress on roads that go through valuable urban property (which are expensive and difficult to widen) and forces people to drive farther, thus paying more in user fees.

There's a legitimate case to be made against American transportation and land use policy, but condemning highway subsidies ain't it.

Reason's commenters put Reason contributers to shame

Reason Magazine, the Reason Foundation, and Cato are generally pretty okay libertarian standard-bearers, but they lose serious libertarian cred when it comes to land use. In those areas, they've been completely coopted by hacks like Randal O'Toole, Wendell Cox, and Robert Poole, who take every opportunity to bash the budding New Urbanist movement over its support of anti-sprawl land use regulations, without recognizing that the biggest part of the New Urbanist agenda is to repeal the highly restrictive minimum density zoning laws, minimum parking requirements, and other regulations that limit the sort of unregulated, organic growth that we see in the oldest and most desired parts of American and European cities today.

So anyway, it was totally unsurprising to see this article by Cox referenced in reason.com's blog, where he blames the recent subprime meltdown on New Urbanism. But what I was surprised to see is the incredible outpour of knowledge in the comments section, where various commenters methodically rip Cox's argument to shreds. Reason ought to look into its land use and transportation coverage, and instead of relying on these tired one-trick ponies, perhaps hire some of the commentators. They, at least, recognize that New Urbanism is nothing compared to the already-entrenched pro-sprawl regulations that have been in place since the advent of the automobile.

The subsidized roads/zoning feedback loop

I've been reading this fascinating article by William Fischel at Dartmouth about the history of zoning in America. The ultimate conclusion is that zoning is a political manifestation of home value insurance and that such insurance might be valuable in lessening the exclusionary impacts of zoning, but the history that the author gives is much more interesting.

The most interesting conclusion he has is that zoning was a direct response to the freedom of the automobile, bus, and freight truck. Whereas previously the rich (always the most fervent advocates of zoning, both then and now) were secluded from the city and inner-suburb riff-raff by higher subway fares and the expense of owning and operating a car, the author argues that the coming of trucks and buses in the 1910's is what really did in unregulated land use. Apartment blocks were the bane of every wealthy single-family homeowner's existence, and they were seen as lowering housing prices and destroying the character of a neighborhood.

All well and good – an explanation that rings true even today – but there's something that I find lacking in it. Namely, the car, bus, and truck weren't the only ingredients in this whole shift: there was also the not insignificant matter of the roads they ran on. The capital costs of laying streetcar tracks were financed by sale of houses and real estate around the streetcars, and the operating costs were financed through user fees.* The roads, on the other hand, were, at this point in time, both constructed and maintained by various levels of government. Though "libertarian" writers from the Cato Institute would have you believe otherwise, the government spending binge on roads preceded the nation's first state fuel tax (passed in Oregon in 1919) by at least half a decade. As early as 1913, the costs of building roads were already weighing on state and local budgets, who didn't fund those projects out of dedicated fuel taxes. The federal government didn't start collecting user fees in the form of fuel taxes until 1932, despite passing its first highway bill in 1916, and really getting into the highway funding game with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1921.

If the increased mobility afforded by buses and trucks is seen as a direct result of subsidized roads, then zoning is as well. Sadly, not only was zoning driven by the subsidized roads, but now zoning begets even more roads. Populations grow but legislated densities rarely do, so the natural tendency is to build outwards rather than upwards to accommodate the change. Though our current road system may be more-or-less pay-as-you-go, looking somewhat like a self-sustaining independent free market creation, the truth is that the current patterns are only sustainable because of the zoning regulations that spread people far enough out that everyone's driveway doesn't have to open into a six-lane highway. Were the government forced to provide roads for any density that required it, it would be overwhelmed with the costs of constantly widening streets.

* The land use situation wasn't completely laissez-faire. Real estate developers (i.e., streetcar magnates) often used their political connections to get the government to grand monopolies on streetcar lines, creating a sort of de fact exclusionary zoning code.

Suburbs become the city that DC never had

The Washington Post, which is pretty good at covering urban planning, has a great two-part series on possible redevelopment of Rockville Pike, a commercial road in Montgomery County, a Maryland suburb of DC. Like Reston and Tysons Corner – communities in Northern Virginia, the south suburbs of DC – the towns along Rockville Pike have been hit with New Urbanism fever, and are eager to redevelop their commercial streets into a denser urban form. Though they don't probably don't realize it, this is actually a more market-oriented approach, with developers building more dense structures than we have today if it weren't more widespread restrictions on density outside of the inner core of American cities.

But unlike Reston and Tysons Corner, Rockville Pike has the advantage of the Washington Metro's Red Line, which runs directly underneath (or something like it) the street for the length of four station stops. The line goes directly into the center of Washington, DC, and is a huge asset.

The towns, however, don't quite seem to have the ideas down. They still appear to be operating in the minimum parking mindset, enforcing rules that developers have to build more parking than they otherwise would, so as to avoid residents and customers using free city-maintained parking. They essentially offer the developers the right to build as the market demands in exchange for payments to the local coffers:

Floreen, who formerly served on the Planning Board, said there might be a way to reduce the amount of parking developers are required to provide if they are willing to pay more for greater density.

Floreen would do well to read a previous Washington Post story about minimum parking regulations in the NoVa communities that Rockville Pike seeks to emulate.

Unlike DC, these Maryland and Virginia suburbs do not always have the District's stifling height restrictions, and it is possible that a buildings 28 stories or higher could be built along Rockville Pike. The Post has a slideshow in the second article with some mock-ups of what planners want the boulevard to look like. And though the drawings always look better than reality, the only way reality will come close to the drawings is if local planners give developers the freedom to build urban buildings, without the weight of minimum parking requirements or county bribes in order to rise above the traditional suburban skyline. With all the talk of favorable tax zones and other things that amount to handouts to developers, you'd think that the planners would realize that it's their restrictions that are forcing them to have to bribe developers into building more densely.

But the potential for DC suburbs is quite good when you think about it, considering that they don't have as much competition in urban living from DC itself. Though there are areas of Washington that have distinctive urban traits, it's difficult to get over the fact that none of the buildings seem to rise much above ten stories. It isn't surprising that so many DC suburbs are adopting New Urbanism as planning guides, though it would be nice if they would recognize that recreating urbanism requires nothing more than doing away with the old Euclidean and suburban scriptures – no need to replace them with anything else!