GOP to Obama on infrastructure, tax reform: "Yes, those ideas sound nice. Anyway, no deal."

Minnesota's I-35 bridge, which collapsed in 2007 and killed 13, photo from

CNN

.

President Obama spoke about two of my favorite topics today, transportation and tax reform. And though vague, the proposals are solid. The two pillars, and essentially the "grand bargain" the president is looking for, is

more spending on infrastructure in exchange for lower corporate income taxes

and fewer loopholes. Republicans generally aren't opposed to infrastructure spending in principle (

unless it involves walking, biking

, or

transit

), and they're certainly in favor of lower corporate taxes, but they're still saying things like "[Obama] might call his plan a grand bargain. But I call it a raw deal." What's the deal?

There are a few issues, but as far as I can tell, this really comes down to a desire for "revenue neutral" tax reform*. The president's proposal isn't revenue neutral—it would increase the amount of corporate income tax collected even as it lowered rates. But that's a silly argument in this case. Now is a terrible time to do revenue neutral corporate tax reform. It might be desirable for some types of taxes, including personal income and sales taxes, but not corporate taxes.

Here's why. First, this graph of corporate income taxes as a share of GDP (credit to

Felix Salmon and his 2011 post on the subject

):

Corporate tax as a share of GDP.

As you can see, that share hovered around 4% in the 1960s, 3% in the 1970s, and 2% ever since. Right now it's somewhere around 2.3%. Why we should want to hold the relative contribution of corporate income taxes to its lowest stable level in the past 60+ years isn't clear to me, but I can imagine the case John Boehner might make. Whatever he might come up with, however, completely falls apart in the face of the following graph:

Corporate tax as a share of corporate profit.

This is corporate taxes as a percent of corporate profit, currently at just about it's lowest level ever, and half what it was just 15 years ago. The corporate contribution to the federal budget has remained low not because they've been doing poorly, but because they've been steadily chipping away at the rate they pay—less than a third of what it was 40 years ago.

The White House wants to ensure that

tax cheats like Verizon, Bank of America, and Exxon Mobil

—businesses that dodge their taxes by mostly legal practices, I hasten to add—pay their fair share while smaller businesses (without the lobbying clout of international corporations) pay 20% less. This would indeed increase the total tax burden on US corporations, but almost exclusively on the backs of those exploiting ridiculous and unjustified loopholes. We could put that money to use repairing bridges and roads, building better facilities for pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit, and improving our freight and passenger rail network. Instead, 

those trillions are sitting on the sidelines

.

This is a win/win proposal; unfortunately, many in the GOP are dismissing it out of hand. Their objection, at heart, is that they believe the pinnacle of American corporate tax-dodging is the perfect time to cap the amount raised by corporate taxes. They're willing to hold our nation's infrastructure and its small- and medium-sized businesses hostage to that ideal. I doubt many American citizens would agree with them.

*They also cite concerns that small businesses paying taxes through the individual income tax will be at a competitive disadvantage, but this argument is even more ridiculous. One reason is

how few small-business people actually earn enough to be taxed anywhere near the current corporate tax rate of 35%

(or that we should hold up national reforms on behalf of these few well-off people). The second reason because there is zero chance of the individual tax rates being lowered at top income levels right after Obama raised them less than a year ago. If that's going to be the Republican objection to any fiscal issues the country faces, we might as well pack it all in right now.

News Roundup: July 24, 2013

Lots of great articles to share today! Here we go...

The Value In Mixed-Income Neighborhoods

(Reconnecting America)

A new report examines the connection between spatial segregation between the rich and poor, and how that influences attitudes toward social welfare programs. The work supports the idea that inequality is reinforced by the separation of socioeconomic classes, as policies shift to weaken the financial and social support, as well as economic mobility of lower-income residents.

Why the Land Value Tax is a Critical Tool in the Fight Against Inequality

(Keystone Politics)

Jon Geeting writes more on the land value tax, a proposal for taxing land itself at higher rates than what's built on the land. As inequality has increased over the past several decades, wealth has taken the form of capital to a greater and greater degree, rather than income, and land is one of the most significant forms of capital there is. Land value taxes would also encourage absentee landowners from sitting on their land or leaving it vacant in the face of rising demand; instead of being taxed on economic production, as property currently is, it would be taxed to a greater degree on economic potential. This would encourage owners of derelict buildings and surface parking lots in high-demand areas of the city to either use the land, or sell it off, rather than hold onto it waiting for a sweeter deal at the expense of everyone in the city.

How Flexible Parking Requirements Spur Economic Development: Lessons from Santa Monica

(Streetsblog LA)

A great natural experiment by UCLA student Carter Rubin looking at the role flexible parking rules play in the economic success of cities. This one looks at the popular Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, where one side of the road has rigid parking regulations and the other allows some leeway when retail space changes uses that normally require different amounts of parking (say, from a cafe to a restaurant). The results are astounding: the flexible side of the road had eight times as much sales tax revenue per square foot and six times as many restaurants. I thought businesses couldn't succeed without parking?

Finally, a Plan to Pay for Public Transit With Highway Tolls

(Atlantic Cities)

This is a really interesting innovation in which center lanes are reserved for buses, but cars willing to pay a fee can use the open space too. The money raised by those tolls are used to fund better bus service, which also enjoys the benefits of avoiding car congestion. They find that a single bus lane with buses running at 10-minute headways (which is far below capacity), can handle twice the traffic of a congested car traffic lane, and up to four times the capacity when bus service is maximized. And for an initial investment of $323 million, it's expected to make about $1.5 billion in revenue over the next 30 years. You don't see that kind of return on investment for highways.

Who parked in my spot?!: Neighbors, cars, and “your” curb space

(Grist)

Another good one from Alan Durning, this one about the negative impact of our obsession with free parking. It explores both the societal impacts, which are vast and often looked over, and the personal. Anecdotes include unscrewed windshield wipers, cars pushed into illegal parking spaces by neighbors, and even a man having his windshield bashed in with a bat by an angry yuppie who wanted "his" spot back.

New Study: More Urban = More Safe

(Planetizen)

Cities have a reputation as being more dangerous than suburbs and rural areas, but it all depends on what you're afraid of. If you don't mind dying in a gruesome car wreck, you might be right. Otherwise... the study found that your chances of dying are almost 50% higher in rural areas than the most urbanized counties, and the difference is due almost entirely to the nearly three-fold difference in vehicle-related deaths in rural regions.

Large Costs Loom for Upgrades to U.S. Water Infrastructure

(Governing)

Water and sewer pipes often gets overlooked in the national discussion about our ailing infrastructure, but the costs associated with replacing and upgrading it are in many ways more significant than that of roads and bridges. Cost estimates range anywhere from $400 billion to $1 trillion to get everything up to speed in a country where many systems are more than 100 years old, and that's before you account for necessary wastewater treatment upgrades.

Burdensome Highways

(Walkable Dallas-Fort Worth)

Some more great analysis from this site, this time on the role of sprawl in Detroit's impending bankruptcy. The case that Detroit overinvested in roads that they couldn't maintain is strong, but what's especially worrying is how several other cities are in an even worse position. Detroit's an older city so its had more time to feel the effects of these poor investments, and more recently-developed cities may start to feel the effects in the coming decades. Kansas City, we're looking at you.

Let's Talk Numbers

(Copenhagenize)

Christine Grant looks at my home city of Seattle, determining the cost to society of every kilometer driven in a car versus the benefits of bicycling. Accounting for both internal costs (gas, maintenance, vehicle, time) and external ones (pollution, city branding and tourism, parking, etc.), she estimates that every kilometer ridden on a bike contributes 46 cents to the city's economy, while every kilometer driven in a car costs it $1.13. But  we already know this: cars represent freedom, and freedom doesn't come cheap.

Yet More Evidence of Peak Car

(Atlantic Cities)

Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan keeps putting together his case that the shift away from cars is real and not just a blip in history, this time looking at absolute miles driven, as well as per-person, per-vehicle, per-household, and per-licensed driver. They're all way down from their peak, and continuing to decline.

Infographic: Does Congestion Pricing Work?

(This Big City)

This is a great visualization of the impact of congestion pricing (charging drivers for driving into the most congested parts of cities) on congestion, transit ridership, and a host of other metrics. They look at four cities who've tried it out, Singapore (which has had congestion pricing for almost forty years!), Milan, Stockholm, and London. You've gotta check it out. Here's just one part:

More Highway Funding Double Standards

View from above of the I-110 ExpressLanes, photo from

LA Times

.

Last year LA Metro received $210 million to institute high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes on interstates 10 and 110; the idea was that they could reduce traffic without widening highways by making better use of carpool lanes. Carpoolers can still use the lanes for free, but now single-occupancy vehicles have access to them too, for a price. Performance on the two sets of ExpressLanes has been mixed but

steadily improving

, and it looks like the end the lanes will ultimately lead to faster commutes for both HOT-lane users and for general traffic on both freeways.

Compared to the cost of widening the interstates, $210 million for improved traffic flow is a great deal, especially when you take into account the fact that a sizable chunk of that money went to expanding Silver Line bus service (which travels in the ExpressLanes on the 110). And it's important that this innovative approach to traffic management be successful, because as 

CurbedLA

 reports:

If the ExpressLanes toll lanes on the 10 and 110 freeways don't deliver on their traffic-reducing promises, the federal government could take back the $210 million in funding they provided, so Metro and Caltrans are keeping a close eye on the pilot program.

Now, I'm all for effective public programs and holding public agencies responsible for the way they spend their money, but do you think a widened freeway has ever been held to this same standard (except when the additional lanes are tolled, perhaps)? In light of the Buy America requirements that severely delayed Houston's light rail and killed the XpressWest high-speed rail project in Vegas, but were

quickly exempted in the case of a $1.3 billion highway widening in the Inland Empire

, somehow I think not. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that highways

rarely improve traffic in the long run

--if they

were

measured by the same metric as LA's ExpressLanes, we might never see another publicly-financed highway built in this country.

Can Longer Leases Protect You From Gentrification?

Over the past several years there's been a lot written about the

benefits of renting

. Compared to homeowners, renters spend much less on maintenance and insurance, and, though their lifetime costs may be higher, monthly rents tend to run lower than mortgage costs. But for many, the big sell is mobility—if a new opportunity presents itself on the other side of the city or the other side of the country, or if you just get sick of your current locale, as a renter it's easy to pull up stakes and find a new place. 

The flipside is instability—when an area grows in popularity it's liable to grow in cost too. Renters, unlike homeowners, may find themselves with much higher rents, or without an apartment altogether as property owners tear down old buildings to put up taller, nicer, more economically productive ones. What if you could cash in some of that mobility for a little extra stability? Would you take that deal?

From

##

.

The reason this matters is gentrification, of course. Any time a neighborhood gains enough popularity to start renovating apartment buildings and using land more intensively (i.e., building taller and/or denser), rents increase and concerns about displacement of lower-income residents arise. These legitimate concerns tend to degenerate into misguided anti-density developer-bashing, which confuses the cause and effect of gentrification—

developers don't cause higher rents

, they respond to higher demand by providing more, higher-quality homes—and the very development that can soak up much of that demand may be stifled.

The question these people, and perhaps all of us need to ask is whether we'd be willing to make a greater commitment to our homes in exchange for some assurance against being priced or kicked out of them. For example, if you could sign a three-year lease instead of the typical one-year term, would you do it? A longer lease would offer some protection against year-to-year concerns about keeping your home, but if your circumstances changed and you wanted to leave, you'd be stuck.

Many people in my age range, I think, wouldn't go for that. But under-30s tend not to be the demographic that people are concerned about when they discuss the ills of gentrification, so it's better to ask whether people in their 40s, 50s, or older, as well as families, would be interested in long-term leases. I tend to move every 12-18 months on average, partly because I like change and partly because shifting goals have led me in different directions; older folks tend to stay put longer (I admit I'm speculating here), so mobility is presumably of lesser value to them. It seems likely that many of them would sign onto a longer lease given the option, since it would ensure that any positive changes to their neighborhood would not immediately be felt in the form of increased costs or potential displacement. It wouldn't keep them in place forever, but it would provide a buffer.

Here's how it might work:

Renters could opt for a one-, two-, or three-year lease (or more), and because this would ensure that the property owner wouldn't have to renovate, clean, and re-lease the unit for the duration, longer leases might enjoy some small discount (say, 5%). Depending on market conditions, owners could write a yearly increase in rent into the lease so that rental costs in year two might be 3% higher than in year one. Or they could just keep it the same price for the length of the lease, because even three years isn't very long.

The upside here for the renter is confidence in a) future costs, rather than worrying about whether rent might increase 3%, 10%, or not at all next year; and b) continued tenancy, because they can't be kicked out by new owners who want to tear down or renovate the building until the end of their lease. They aren't as mobile, but if gentrification is a greater concern to them than mobility, then they are able to express that value financially—an option renters don't generally have today. They could put their money where their mouth is, in other words.

Hold-out against new development in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, photo from

MyBallard

.

There are a ton of kinks to work out here, and I haven't even thought them all out, much less come up with potential solutions. This is much more a thought experiment than a solid proposal at this point, so

I invite readers to discuss the pros and cons

here. One obvious problem with long-term leases is that sometimes it's a massive waste of valuable land to keep tenants in an existing building—a two-story apartment complex surrounded by fully-leased eight-story buildings, for example. Or the photo above, which while charming in this case would on a larger scale just be a huge waste of space.

In these cases I think a buyout structure would be fitting: owners would be required to pay out up to six months rent (e.g.) or the duration of the lease, whichever is lower, as a lump sum to remaining tenants if they wanted to kick them out and renovate or build something new before their leases had expired. A months-long waiting period between notification and eviction would also be sensible. This wouldn't solve the problem of displacement (I don't think anything can solve it 100%), but it would give displaced tenants a healthy financial and temporal buffer to find new accommodations. This structured buyout plan would then, in turn, somewhat raise development costs as they'd have to account for the additional cost of removing long-term lease tenants, so it's far from perfect.

What do you think?

News Roundup: July 19, 2013

Lots of links today, so I'm gonna limit the descriptions this time:

This shouldn't be illegal. Photo from

Seattle Times

.

Legalizing Inexpensive Housing

(Sightline)

This series is getting a lot of well-deserved recognition, including

a good summary over at Atlantic Cities

. Alan Durning has three not-so-big ideas (in a good way) that can make a big difference: 1) legalizing rooming houses, 2) decriminalizing roommates, and 3) welcoming in-law apartments and backyard cottages. A ton of work went into this and it shows—check it out, and consider supporting Sightline by

picking up the e-book

as well.

As the House aims to slash, tell the Senate to protect money for rail, transit & TIGER in next week’s budget vote

(Transportation for America)

Republicans are trying to cut money for transit, bicycling, walking, and rail. No surprise here. Contact your Representatives and your Senators: they need to know that these programs are important to their constituents, and if they don't care they need to be made extremely uncomfortable.

"Running transit like a business": Digging under the slogan

(Human Transit)

A few recent articles on transit manager Mark Aesch's success reforming the Buffalo bus system, improving service and lowering fares, is making the rounds, and Jarrett Walker has a few words of caution. While what Aesch accomplished is laudable, it was dependent on cutting the low ridership "coverage" aspect of transit service. Not every city is going to go for that, and we need to be clearer about the trade-offs when balancing ridership goals with coverage goals.

The Curse of Nonprofit Property Tax Exemptions

(Moneybox)

So with complete awareness that some people will hate me for even linking to this, there are serious costs and perverse incentives associated with granting non-profits exemption from property taxes. We'd be better off giving them the exact same amount of money through a different tax incentive, or even a straight-up grant. The answer may not be to completely abolish the exemption (at least not yet), but something needs to change.

"You know what this needs? More roads." Photo from

Discuss America

.

Road advocate says car dependence is an argument for more

(Greater Greater Washington)

A local road lobbyist is making the case that roads deserve more funding because "that's the way things have always been," and the argument is about as persuasive as it's ever been. (Not at all.) 

New Brunswick Improves Pedestrian Safety by Daylighting Intersections

(Together North Jersey)

This is a clever, simple way to improve sight-lines and increase safety for drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians, yes. But I actually really appreciate that it also makes clear where you can park and where you can't—no more wondering if you're three feet too close to the stop sign and might come back to an impounded vehicle.

Extreme Temperatures Are Affecting Every Mode of Transportation

Extreme temperatures are

on the rise

. We're seeing record-high temperatures across the country, and we're seeing them more often. Two years ago, Dallas-Fort Worth saw

over 70 days at 100+ degrees

; Wichita Falls, also in Texas, over 100 days. When these heat waves occur, the focus tends to be public health and drought, which is entirely warranted. But the impacts on our transportation system are serious as well, and they affect every conceivable mode of travel.

Cars and Buses:

When high temperatures are sustained for long enough, concrete expands and can buckle, crack, or shatter. This isn't just harmful to the cars, buses, and other vehicles bumping over these holes and cracks; it can be downright dangerous. Besides the potential for irregular roads to cause veering or loss of control, concrete has been known to "

explode

," lifting chunks of concrete and putting those nearby at serious risk.

Heat-buckled freeway segment in North Carolina, from

New York Times

.

Asphalt is also at risk of cracking (though usually less severely), but it has its own unique vulnerabilities . It's less stiff than concrete so it deforms more easily in the heat, and can cause roads to end up extremely uneven, unpleasant and sometimes dangerous to drive. In the most extreme heat, asphalt can even

come right off the road and stick to tires

. 

Perhaps the biggest problem with heat-related damage is that it's impossible to predict where the cracks, splits, twists, or explosions will occur. This goes for basically every mode of travel. All you can do is patch them as they happen, try not to shut things down for too long, and hope that no one's injured in the mean time. 

Aside from the obvious danger posed by these infrastructure failings, the cost of these constant repairs is high, especially for roads since we have so many. We're already doing a terrible job of keeping our roads in a good state of repair; extreme heat damage is going to absorb more and more of our already-limited routine maintenance budget as the effects of climate change worsen.

Trains and Streetcars:

Photo from

PBS

.

Just as with asphalt and concrete, steel rails are at risk of overheating and warping. Part of the motivation for this post is today's news that

Amtrak is slowing trains

in the Northeast Corridor in response to the oppressive heat in the region. Consistently high temperatures can cause "

heat kinks

," (or, more euphemistically, a "thermal misalignment") which at their worst can lead to

train derailments

, and forces operators to slow trains where rail kinks and warping are known to have occurred, or be likely. There are tens of thousands of frequent Amtrak users in the Northeast that are currently having their trips delayed by 10-20 minutes due to the extreme heat. It's good that they're putting safety above speed, but they're going to have to make that trade-off more and more often as temperatures continue to increase. In extreme heat, you can't have both.

Airplanes:

Airplanes lose lift at higher temperatures, and

Phoenix airport has had to cancel flights

on multiple occasions due to extreme heat. As more regions of the country begin to approach Phoenix-level highs, we may need to expect more cancellations. Also, this:

At Reagan International Airport, photo by

Phillip Dugaw

.

Walking and Bicycling:

This is the saddest of the lot, all the more so because it affects youth and the elderly most severely. We're already seeing it across the country: cities are

telling their residents to stay indoors

during times of extreme heat, discouraging them from getting around on foot or bike. You can't blame the cities, either. Heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and various illnesses made worse by overheating—all are serious concerns and lead to hundreds of deaths and thousands of hospitalizations across the country every year. In California alone, a two-week heat wave in 2006

claimed the lives of 655 people

. According to the Chicago Tribune, "[s]earing temperatures kill more people in the U.S. than hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes combined."

From the

Chicago Tribune

.

This is especially tragic for its timing. Just as we're finally seeing success in turning the tide back toward healthier, more sustainable lifestyles, tens of millions of people are being instructed to stay indoors and rely on air conditioning to get them through half the year or more. Two of the major causes of climate change—personal vehicles and the energy- and carbon-intensive homes that characterize suburban sprawl—have become our only refuge from the environmental disaster we've engineered. We're spending more time in our homes and cars because our homes and cars have made the climate inhospitable to actual humans.

So what can be done? Not much in the short term, unfortunately. Things are going to get worse before they get better, and as they get worse it will become harder to make the changes we know we need to make. Temperatures will increase, and they'll be high more often, so active transportation will be more of a challenge. Damage to our infrastructure from both extreme heat and extreme storms will sap money away from mitigation and prevention efforts. The obvious response is to invest heavily and rapidly in cleaner energy, and to use that energy more efficiently in our homes, businesses, and transportation systems. I'm not yet hopeful though. In a country where we haven't even come to a political consensus on the theory of climate change, much less the role we play in it, we still have a long way to go.

Claiming space for buses on corridors where transit users outnumber drivers

Photo from

Streetsblog NYC

.

Short of

congestion pricing

, there's really nothing you can do to make driving a more pleasant experience in dense city centers. There's not enough space to accommodate the incredible demand there, and there's no way to expand supply short of paving over the sidewalks and buildings, which would defeat the whole purpose of having a city in the first place.

What you

can

do is make transit better

—buses, in this case—by turning over certain high-traffic lanes to bus-only use.

Of course, it's never that simple. The reallocation of road space can be a rancorous process, and proposals to convert any road space to a specialized use (bus, bike, pedestrian plaza) are inevitably met with cries of "War on Cars!," complaints about "moochers" who "don't pay their fair share," etc. The shift toward multi-modal travel is still a relatively recent phenomenon in many parts of the country, and there's a great deal of convincing left to be done. We should start where the job is easiest: corridors on which transit users already outnumber drivers.

Two examples that come to mind are Fanshawe Street, in Auckland, New Zealand, and Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles.

From the

New Zealand Herald

.

Auckland's Fanshawe Street is a pretty dramatic success story. I don't know the date the bus lane was installed (though there's

evidence it's over ten years old

), but today

it carries two-thirds of all peak traffic

 on the road. That's a number any transit service would be proud of, and it's all the more impressive for the fact that the bus lane only accounts for one of three total lanes—cars, despite having twice as much space, only make up about 17% of total commuters per lane. The efficiency of buses really shines here, and if the image to the right is any indication, the heavily-used bus lane still manages to stay less congested than the lower capacity car lanes.

Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles is a much more recent case. It carries 53,000 bus riders a day, and

they just finished the first 1.8 mile segment

of 7.7 miles of bus-only lanes planned between downtown LA to Santa Monica. The actual length of this corridor is 12.5 miles, but Beverly Hills and Westwood in their infinite wisdom opted out, so transit users will still be mired in car congestion through this stretch of Wilshire. Despite this shortcoming, the 7.7 mile conversion is expected to reduce travel times by 12-15 minutes for bus riders, and has the added benefit of providing a safe route for bicyclists. Importantly, more people travel by bus than by car on Wilshire Boulevard during peak hours. And just like on Fanshawe, this rechannelization still leaves two lanes in each direction for cars.

This bus lane will carry more people than both car lanes combined, photo from

CurbedLA

.

Projects like these, besides improving service for transit users and safety for all road users, can build support for further expansions of transit infrastructure and service as well as increase ridership. They elevate the standing of local residents relative to residents of other cities and suburbs, or at least put them on equal footing—a worthy goal for any municipality. I know there are hundreds of other corridors around the country that are ready for the same treatment as Fanshawe and Wilshire; unless local and regional transit organizations prioritize studies to identify them, progress will be unnecessarily slow. We need data. Nothing in the world of transportation reform is ever easy, but this should be a no-brainer.

News Roundup: July 15, 2013

Guerrilla lanes installed by Reasonably Polite Seattleites, before SDOT removal and replacement.

Why Cyclists Get Hit (Bike Delaware)

In one of the best, most concise posts on bike safety in recent memory, Drew Knox sums up the reasons drivers hit cyclists, often even when the cyclist is very visible. Relating the story of the Invisible Gorilla, he notes that people can easily miss things when they don't expect to see them. “When people devote their attention to a particular area or aspect of their visual world, they tend not to notice unexpected objects, even when those unexpected objects are salient, potentially important, and appear right where they are looking.” The major message here is two-fold: one, that additional attention-draining things like phones (hands-free or not) can further narrow the focus of drivers and make them less likely to notice a bicyclist nearby, and two, that our built environment and the culture of cycling that we build in our cities can increase safety by turning bicycles from unusual, unexpected objects into common, everyday, predictable road users.

Defining Clear Standards for Transit-Oriented Development (Transport Politic)

The ever-thorough Yonah Freemark tackles the subject of how we quantify the various qualities of TOD, looking at a new tool created by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). Similar to the LEED scoring system, these new TOD standards seek to standardize our evaluation of new developments around transit, and whether they're achieving their goals of increased transit ridership and reduced car use, safe pedestrian and bicycle access, mixture of uses, density, etc. It's a welcome new tool, and Freemark's application of the scoring system to existing proposals seems to provide some valuable feedback on where projects are likely to succeed or fail, and in what ways.

An Effort to Gather the Best New Urban Policy Innovations in One Place (Atlantic Cities)

NYU's Wagner School of Public Service and the Center for an Urban Future have teamed up to put together a list of some of the most promising urban innovations taking place in cities around the world. As one of the report's lead authors notes, many of these urban innovations are multi-faceted, dependent upon coordination between municipal departments and/or non-profits. "The policies pair immigrant assistance with economic development or senior services with zoning and housing policy. What's plain to see is that innovation must happen across silos, it cannot be confined to traditional policy areas or approaches." In related news, Microsoft is joining the smart cities movement in a pretty big way, with the launch of a new initiative called CityNext. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with.

SDOT makes guerrilla-installed protected bike lane permanent (Seattle Bike Blog)

In local news, the "Reasonably Polite Seattleites" are vindicated in their guerrilla installation of some simple pylons, turning a bike lane into a protected bike lane: the city removed them shortly after their installation in April, but just announced that they'd gone back and made the change permanent. This is a model for municipal responsiveness and much more than many cities get. For that I grant them a non-refundable, non-redeemable Good Guy SDOT award. Congrats, guys!

Silver lining for the impending King County Metro service cuts

RapidRide and Standard Metro buses, photo from westseattleblog.com.

Thanks to Washington State Senate Republicans unwillingness to allow King county to tax itself and only itself in order to maintain our current level of transit service, we're facing a 17% service reduction in the fall of 2014. Seventeen percent is worse than it sounds (and it sounds bad), as it means about a third of our bus routes will be going away entirely, and another 40 percent will have to be run less frequently. Terrible news.

But hey, if this is what it takes to convince the city and county to turn over a few miles of lanes to bus-only use, in a city with over 1,500 arterial lane-miles, maybe it wouldn't be so bad*. Service cuts are going to hurt, and if we want our transit system to run even more efficiently we're going to have to stop letting our buses sit for hours every day in car traffic doing absolutely nothing productive (I'm looking at you, D-Line). By converting a very small total number of lanes to bus-only on high-frequency transit routes we can at least partially compensate for the service-hour reductions that non-Seattle politicians are forcing upon us.

*This whole post is basically facetious, though it is clearly wasteful to allow many of the hundreds of thousands of King County transit users to spend so much time in traffic that they barely contribute to. The fact that this is a good idea, or that service cuts might make it more politically palatable (which I sincerely doubt), doesn't excuse the fact that this is an embarrassing and offensive power grab by city-hating state Republicans who only care about "local control" when they control the locals. There's no actual upside here.

New Roundup: July 10, 2013

Comparison of the road networks in LA and Paris using the new tool "Urban Observatory." 

Out, Damned Spot (Slate)

In a feature piece, Matt Yglesias brings together many of the points he's made across various short blog posts to make a cohesive argument against minimum parking regulations. Parking spaces are an amenity like granite countertops or fitness centers, he says, and should reflect that by allowing the market to decide what the appropriate amount of parking should be. More importantly, parking minimums lead to a subsidy and clear preference for those who commute long distances by car, at the expense of those who walk and bike, much like downtown highways.

Curb parking and garage parking aren't the same (Greater Greater Washington)

A great complement to Yglesias' article, by David Alpert, on the separate markets for off-street and on-street parking. He notes that, despite the arguments of some, it's not hard to park; it's hard to park on the street. Even in D.C. there remain parking spaces open for daily use and rent, they're just in garages rather than on the side of the road. At the same time, people are buying $35/year permits for street parking in their neighborhoods and renting out the parking at their homes or apartments for $100-200 a month--preserving on-street parking and keeping it cheap does nothing to solve this problem.

In Cargo Delivery, the Three-Wheelers That Could (New York Times)

I've been a huge fan of the freight-bike movement that's developed in recent years and it's great to see it getting more press. The idea is simple: in cities where distances between homes and businesses are relatively short, a human riding an electric-assist cargo bike can move large amounts of goods pretty easily, and with much more maneuverability and speed, and far less pollution than delivery vans and large semitrailers. Here's to hoping this idea continues to spread and grows large enough to be a more commercialize-able business model.

Be Brave Child, Open the Closet, Look Under the Bed (Walkable Dallas-Fort Worth)

I posted this on Twitter with the title "The bold TxDOT plan to fight congestion by spending $60 billion on encouraging more driving," and I think that sums it up pretty well. Lots of really great analysis into the numbers of what TxDOT is actually proposing when they request an extra $2 billion a year to build more and bigger highways as the answer to a growing congestion problem. In the end all they're going to accomplish is increasing the number of drivers in the area, losing tens of billions of dollars, and ending up with even more congestion than before--particularly on local roads.

Prepare to Waste Your Day With This Fascinating City Comparison Tool (Atlantic Cities)

This title is dead on. I'm definitely looking forward to wasting a bunch of time playing with this comparison tool, and I bet you are too.