Cascadia Scorecard Weblog

Bashing Bus Rapid Transit

The Stranger takes a crack at Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)--an alternative to fixed-rail technologies like light rail and monorail--and finds it wanting. Severely wanting. And while the short article isn't the paragon of balanced issue analysis, it raises some compelling objections. Among them: BRT tends to have lower ridership, longer travel times, and fails to create incentives for land-use changes. There may even be reason to think that BRT's oft-touted cost-effectiveness may be illusory. 

The debate between BRT and fixed-rail is extensive and even somewhat acrimonious. Personally, I'm undecided (and, in truth, I'm unacquainted with the quantitative claims of BRT proponents) but I have a hard time believing that BRT is preferable.

Fixed-rail transit is not only good for transportation (where it probably out-competes BRT), but it can also catalyze and focus development strategically, just as streetcars once did. BRT, on the other hand, cannot act as an agent of smart-growth development because it lacks the permanence of a rail stop. To get that permanence, BRT must assume its most extreme form: grade-separated, exclusive right-of-way lanes, with large well-designed stops. But then BRT has sacrificed its main selling points and become expensive and inflexible, just like fixed rail. And it's slower and less attractive to new riders too. So where's the beef?

Up With Poverty

New state-level income and poverty data just released today by the US Census Bureau. I've just begun playing with the numbers. But before I get too immersed in the spreadsheets, here's a look at how Cascadian states have fared over the last years for which data is available.

The skinny is that incomes are up, but poverty is up too. (As far as I can tell, the income figures are not adjusted for inflation, so they may not represent real gains.) Of course, these figures are just stats-based estimates, so it's wise not to draw too many conclusions.

Nevertheless, it is telling that all 5 states mimicked the national trend: rising incomes and rising poverty.

Median household incomes

	2002	2003
California	$            47,323	$        48,440
Idaho	$            38,242	$        39,859
Montana	$            34,105	$        34,449
Oregon	$            41,796	$        42,593
Washington	$            46,399	$        48,185
United States	$            42,409	$        43,318

Poverty rates

	2002	2003
California	13.3	13.8
Idaho	11.7	11.8
Montana	14.0	14.2
Oregon	11.3	12.0
Washington	10.3	11.0
United States	12.1	12.5

Manifold Sins

They say that confession is good for the soul.  Here's mine: I'm entering into my sixth winter in my current house, but I only got around to insulating my furnace and ductwork over the last few weeks. I hadn't even insulated my furnace manifold -- the place where all the hot air collects before being blown through the ducts to the rest of the house -- which I understand is the most cost-effective place to insulate.

So much for my "green" credentials.  I can't even hold a candle to this guy.

You see, I kept putting off the insulation job, thinking that we'd replace our clunky old gas furnace and oddly-placed ductwork with a new, super-efficient system before even a modest investment in insulation would pay for itself.  That was, quite clearly, nuts:  by now, the money I would have saved on heating bills would have paid for a nice downpayment towards an efficient furnace. 

Surprisingly -- to me at least -- the payback has been immediate, and not just to my peace of mind.  Even if I don't save a penny overall, the house is more comfortable now.  We don't set the thermostat any higher, but our home seems warmer, with less temperature variation between the overly-toasty rooms and the chilly ones.  (And we had a lot of variation for such a modest house.)

Two lessons for me here.  First: when it comes to saving energy, do the cheap and easy stuff now. Don't weigh the options, don't calculate whether it will be in place long enough to justify the cost. Just do it.  I kept putting off a simple, short-term fix, believing that it would be obviated by a more comprehensive solution down the road.  But as a result of my delays, I wound up wasting a lot of money, and spewing a lot of climate-warming emissions into the air for no good reason. 

And second: even people who think of themselves as greenies (like me) are motivated as much by price as by principles.  What convinced me to finally go to the hardware store was, more than anything, the specter of a huge heating bill.  Rising natural gas prices made the payback from insulating my furnace that much quicker; and, being honest with myself, it was the economic reasons, more than the environmental ones, that actually got me moving.  If my own example is any guide, it seems as though self-interest will often trump ethics -- which is something everyone who is working towards a more sustainable future should keep in mind.

A River Runs Free

A spot of good news from Montana: the Bonner Dam on the Blackfoot River was removed with a minimum of problems. For the first time since at least 1884, that river of literary and cinematic fame is unfettered.

Other dam-removal projects in the Northwest are certainly more ecologically important, but there's something poetically fitting about the Blackfoot running free again. As Norman Maclean explained, "the river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time." And now it does once more.

Proposal to Legalize Granny Flats in SE Seattle

Good news on the smart-growth front: Seattle's mayor is working on a pilot program to legalize granny flats in southeast Seattle.

Currently residents of single-family neighborhoods can't rent out extra space they may have in "detached accessory dwelling units", such as an apartment above their garage, although basement apartments are legal.

Granny flats provide a variety of benefits. They increase density, supporting better transit and more services for the neighborhood. They increase the housing supply and create affordable housing in the city. They can give homeowners a source of income to help with the mortgage. And, with kids returning to the nest post-college and aging parents needing more care, they provide extra space with a degree of privacy.

The program would limit the impact on neighbors by requiring one off-street parking space per unit and restricting the size of the new units. Reactions to a demonstration project in Magnolia, in which a wheelchair-bound resident added an apartment for a future live-in nurse, were very positive: 65 percent of surveyed neighbors rated the project "good". While some are worried that allowing rental granny flats will turn neighborhoods into "ghettos," (huh!?) that doesn't seem to be the case in cities that already allow them, such as Mercer Island, Kirkland, and Redmond.

Inelasticity? It's a Stretch

It may come as a bit of a surprise:  despite rising gas prices over the past few years, total consumption of highway fuels in the US has actually increased, rather than fallen.  Some have seized on this phenomenon -- prices and consumption rising in tandem -- to suggest that changes in gas prices have no discernible effect on how much gas we actually use. 

The idea that gas prices have no effect on consumption doesn't accord with economic theory, to put it mildly.  And this Excel spreadsheet (courtesy of Charles Komanoff and the ever-informative Todd Litman) sheds some light on what's really going on.  Apparently, even as US gas prices have risen, so have population and GDP.  And GDP growth tends to push consumption levels up -- in fact, over the short term, gas consumption seems to be more responsive to changes in GDP than to changes in prices.

The spreadsheet tries to tease apart the two competing forces, and finds that -- all else being equal -- each 10 percent rise in gas prices is, in fact, accompanied by a 1 percent decline in gasoline sales within a year. Which suggests that, had gas prices remained stable over the past few years, consumption would have risen even faster than it did.

It should come as little surprise that, over short time horizons, substantial gas price hikes only reduce sales a small amount.  People have only so much flexibility to reduce their gas consumption over the short term -- a fact that economists have understood for years. 

But what remains to be seen is whether a sustained increase in gas prices will be accompanied by deeper declines in sales, as people begin to change houses, jobs, or cars to account for higher transportation costs.  That's what economists predict will happen; but  we'll just have to wait to see how well reality matches up with theory.

November 19 and the Hell's Kitchen of Sustainability

Editor's note: Guest contributor Hans Peter Meyer writes on community development issues from Courtenay, British Columbia.

Saturday, November 19, is local government election day in British Columbia.

It's too late to nominate anyone, and it's too late to really organize. By the time British Columbians read this, there won't be much left to do but vote for whoever you think has the vision and the energy to put the pieces in place for a more 'livable,' more 'sustainable' future.

Why does local government matter? Joy Leach once said of her experience as Mayor of Naniamo, one of Vancouver Island's biggest municipalities, "Local government is the Hell's Kitchen of sustainability." It's at local council tables and regional board meetings that so many of the big issues become real. Garbage. Sewage. Town design for cars, bikes, pedestrians, and buses. Development applications to spread expensive infrastructure, or 'intensify' populations and reduce the ecological footprint. These are the nuts and bolts of community sustainability.

Some changes seem to take place overnight: All of a sudden there's a $1M highway connector between two small towns. Or a huge box store in the middle of prime agricultural land. But in fact, these land use decisions were made years, even decades before anything happens on the ground. Someone put the pieces in place so that when the time was ripe, the plan and the action unfolded.

We need people in local government willing to put the pieces in place for healthier communities and neighbourhoods in 10, 25, and 50 years.

I live in Courtenay on Vancouver Island. At about 20,000 people, it’s still a small city, blessed with its own set of beauties and eyesores. But it’s growing rapidly. The tsunami of growth in BC won’t reach its full peak until after the 2010 Olympics. By then, the world will know that this place--from Vancouver to Whistler and all of Vancouver Island--is a wonderful place to call ‘home.’ Before that big wave bears down on us, we need an elected team willing to tackle this list:

- implement a workable a growth management strategy.

- do some bona fide community economic development planning.

- strategize on a regional basis on emerging youth issues, drug and crime issues, housing & poverty issues.

The list of issues are piling up faster than the condos and single-family dwellings are being built. And it’s growing. Another reason to consider carefully who you'll pick to represent you in your local 'Hell's Kitchen of sustainability.'

Streetcars Are History

An interesting bit of local history in the Seattle P-I.

By 1892 Seattle was crisscrossed with 48 miles of electric railway and 22 miles of cable railway, stretching from Georgetown to Ballard. According to state historian Walter Crowley, the construction of the streetcar routes segued into smart new development:

...developers platted new neighborhoods clustered around compact business districts at street railway intersections, built broad avenues such as Westlake, Madison and 15th Northwest, and opened attractive parks at Golden Gardens, Alki Beach and Guy Phinney's former Woodland Estate to lure residents and riders.

Unfortunately, the streetcar city was not long for this world. After losing money for years the city bought the lines--under circumstances so suspicious that a grand jury authorized an investigation. The city eventually ceded authority to the state and by 1941 Seattle was without streetcars, ushering in an era of auto-dominated transportation, with a small emphasis on buses.

And in that short history are a number of explanations for our current transportation problems.

It's probably no coincidence that in the post-WWII era Seattle's neighborhoods spread far and wide. And with ever less emphasis on density and integrating commercial centers into residential settings.

But the most interesting feature of streetcar history may be the reminder of how mutable our transportation infrastructure is. The car is by far the dominant mode nowadays, but it wasn't always and it may not always be so. New plans for streetcars, light rail, bus rapid transit, pedestrian-oriented streets, and even the now-dead monorail may signal a coming seismic shift in transportation planning. And while people may complain about a profusion of transit agencies today, we should remember that Seattle once had no fewer than 22 competing streetcar lines.

The other interesting facet of streetcar history is how quickly they were surplused for not making a profit. That is, the trolley lines suffered the same fate of our lately departed monorail. What an odd double-standard that is: transit must pay its way, but the car should be feted with tax dollars.

When was the last time that I-405 or the Alaska Way Viaduct made a profit?

Oh that's right. Never.

Downtown Rising

Brookings scholar Eugenie Birch has an interesting paper on trends in downtown living in 44 major US cities between 1970 and 2000 -- finding that, on average, downtown homeownership, educational levels, and racial and ethnic diversity all increased over the period.  Also -- and unsurprisingly -- downtown residents tend to be younger than they used to be.  City living apparently developed a cachet among the 25-to-34 age demographic that it didn't have 30 years before. 

The worst news -- but also unsurprising -- is that downtowns are economically stratified, with some downtown census tracts having particularly high incomes, and others with particularly low incomes.

But most relevant to the Northwest is this:  in percentage terms, Seattle ranked second of all 44 cities in downtown population growth.  As a whole, the city of Seattle grew 7 percent total in 3 decades -- a fairly slow pace of growth.  But the downtown population grew by 86 percent.  Similarly, Portland ranks sixth on the list for downtown growth, with a population increase of 56 percent since 1970.  Meanwhile, Boise's downtown population fell by a quarter -- which is a bit of a surprise, given how quickly the city is growing. Overall, only 15 of the 44 cities saw their downtown populations increase between 1970 and 2000 -- this despite a fairly widespread increase in downtown populations in the 1990s.

Of course, these figures may be misleading in some respects.  Some cities, particularly in the industrial midwest and along the eastern seaboard, started out with comparatively dense and populous downtowns in the 1970s, but have seen substantial declines since then; Detroit, St. Louis, and Baltimore fall into that camp.  Still, even if those downtowns lost population in absolute terms, they may still be far denser & more populous than the downtowns in many of the newer cities in the US west.  Just so, Seattle's downtown started the 1970s with a fairly small population base -- so an 86 percent increase, as big a deal as it is in relative terms, is small potatoes in absolute terms.

So:  relative to where they started in 1970, the downtowns of Seattle and Portland Northwest are growing quickly. But there's still a long way to go before they're as lively as, say, San Francisco, Boston, or Manhattan.

Plan D for Plan B

NARAL Pro Choice America is supporting a bill in Congress to force FDA off the fence on Plan B. (Via TomPaine.com)

The bill is dubbed "Plan B for Plan B."

(Oh, and about the title, we've already used  "Plan B for Plan B" and "Plan C for Plan B," which left us with "Plan D . . . ")

Plan B: Ignore Science, Destroy Evidence

The saga of malfeasance at the Food and Drug Administration over the emergency contraceptive Plan B just keeps getting worse, as detailed in today's New York Times. (Find earlier episodes here.)

The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigatory arm of Congress, has released its report on how FDA has handled Barr Pharmaceuticals' application to sell Plan B over the counter.

The findings are damning. Among them:

• Well before FDA scientists had evaluated Plan B, according to GAO, four senior FDA officials were told by their superiors that Plan B would be rejected.
• Top FDA officials intervened in agency decisionmaking, overriding the recommendations of expert review panels and agency scientists, in ways that were "very, very rare."
• The rationale given for overruling those scientists was "unprecedented."
• All of former agency administrator Dr. Mark B. McClellan's emails and other correspondence about Plan B were destroyed, in apparent violation of federal rules.

GAO is notoriously careful in its wording. So it wouldn't be unreasonable at this point to read into these carefully modulated terms official confirmation of our worst suspicions: the Bush Administration's appointees at the FDA ignored the science and ran roughshod over one the most respected and impartial federal agencies to placate its political base. Then it launched a cover up.

Are we getting close to the territory reserved for special prosecutors?

I make these strong charges without partisan rancor. The intensity of my indignation is fired by the knowledge that ready access to emergency contraception reduces both the abortion rate and the teen birth rate. Every month that passes without over-the-counter emergency contraception means more unwanted pregnancies. Unwanted pregnancies lead overwhelmingly to abortions, which--no matter how strongly you support the right to choose--are no one's idea of a public good. To a lesser degree, they lead to births--births of babies who tend to be poorly cared for and at great risk for all manner of ills. And these unwanted pregnancies all could have been prevented with emergency contraception.

As if that tragic waste weren't enough, there is the horrifying prospect of a thoroughly politicized FDA. Let your imagination extend this precedent from emergency contraception to all manner of other pharmaceuticals and, I suspect, you'll share my deep concern.

All Eyes Turn To . . . Yakima

In February of this year, in Cascadia Scorecard 2005, we argued for an innovation in state utility rules called “decoupling.” The idea has since made impressive strides; and the next great advance may come in, of all places, Yakima, Washington. (More on that in a moment.)

In a nutshell, decoupling is a way to allow electric and gas utilities to prosper by helping their customers to save money. Utilities are not like other companies. Their profits are dictated by state utility regulators, based on complicated formulas. Since profits rise with sales, investments in improving efficiency can drain away profits. By decoupling sales from earnings, however, utility regulators can write Cascadia’s long-term energy efficiency into utilities’ bottom lines and turn utilities--precisely the organizations that have the requisite know-how and capital-- into vanguards of clean energy.

For example, when Puget Sound Power and Light (now Puget Sound Energy) operated under a decoupling rule from 1991 to 1996, it turned itself from a laggard to a leader in energy efficiency. In its first decoupled year, the company’s efficiency programs saved almost as much electricity as they had saved during the three previous years combined. In its second year, it boosted savings another 60 percent and single-handedly accounted for 40 percent of all electricity savings in the Northwest states—outdoing even the regionwide federal Bonneville Power Administration, at half the cost.

(You can read more of the case for decoupling in Cascadia Scorecard 2005 (pdf, Page 56) and in this post from last November.)

Clearly, the potential benefits of decoupling revenues from sales, and thereby aligning the interests of consumers with the interests of producers, are enormous. There may not be any reform in energy  policy that matters as much while being equally unknown.

What’s the latest on decoupling? Recently, I asked Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the energy program at Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco (and perhaps the world’s leading expert on decoupling). He gave an encouraging rundown.

For starters, the state of California has completely decoupled rates for all its investor-owned utilities (that is, private as opposed to government-owned utilities) for both natural gas and electricity. This sweeping victory, finalized early this year, led to the launch on September 22 of what Ralph says he believes to be the most aggressive program in the history of the utility industry to help customers save energy, lower their bills, and reduce pollution emissions.

Since 2002, Oregon’s gas utility NW Natural has operated under decoupled rates on a trial basis. After a formal evaluation of the program’s effects, the Oregon Public Utility Commission simplified NW Natural’s decoupled rates in August and approved them for the next four years.

Idaho Power is preparing to bring a decoupling proposal before the Idaho Public Utilities Commission and may submit it by the end of this year.

Later this month, the Washington Utility and Transportation Commission (WUTC) will consider a proposal to decouple rates for Portland-based PacifiCorp’s Washington service area, which includes and surrounds Yakima. Decoupling would make a huge difference to PacifiCorp’s behavior. Ralph argues, in testimony prepared to support the proposal, “a reasonably aggressive five-year energy efficiency investment program in its Washington service territory would automatically inflict almost $21 million in losses on PacifiCorp’s shareholders, regardless of the cost-effectiveness of the electricity savings.” Without decoupling, PacifiCorp, like most utilities, has been halfhearted about efficiency, even if it is legally obligated to encourage it.

WUTC will hold hearings on decoupling PacifiCorp’s rates in Yakima on Thursday, December 1, at 6:00 pm, in hearing room B33 in the Yakima County Courthouse. If you live in the area and have PacifiCorp as your power company, please consider attending and speaking in favor of the NRDC proposal. Public voices can be influential at such hearings, because so few citizens take an interest and speak. (Let me know if you’re interested in speaking and we’ll provide you with background information.)

It's Official: Orcas Are Endangered

This just in: the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) just announced that it will list as endangered the southern resident orcas--the whales most commonly seen in Puget Sound. The NMFS decision came as something of a surprise because the agency had first declined to protect the orcas under the law. Then, following a court order to reconsider that decision, they proposed listing the whales as "threatened," a weaker standard under the law.

Today's listing--which affirms that the orcas are indeed at risk of extinction--is nothing short of a huge victory for conservationists. Though orca populations have been on the rebound lately, there is still much cause for concern because of the daunting array of threats that they face, everything from anemic salmon runs to marine vessel traffic to toxic contamination.

The effects of the listing remain to be seen, but orca restoration will finally get the attention that it deserves. No doubt preserving the southern resident orcas will require changes to the way that we northwesterners act on our native ecology. But I suspect those changes will be good not only for the orcas--they'll be good for us too. Or as my favorite author once wrote:

Restoring [Puget] Sound is good for whales, but it is also quite clearly good for those other inhabitants of the Puget Sound region -- people. As the top predators of a diverse food web, the orcas embody the fate of the entire Sound. Their growing numbers are a promising sign that we can successfully improve ecological conditions, not only for the orcas but for us too. Cleansing the Sound of toxics and bringing back its abundance of salmon will take work but there is plenty of evidence that we can do it.

Read the NMFS press release (pdf). Media coverage here and here.

Sloth: Perhaps not a sin, but still deadly

Today's Seattle Times summarizes the findings of a long-term study of how exercise improves health:

People who engaged in moderate activity — the equivalent of walking for 30 minutes a day for five days a week — lived about 1.3 to 1.5 years longer than those who were less active. Those who took on more intense exercise — the equivalent of running half an hour a day for five days every week — extended their lives by about 3.5 to 3.7 years, the researchers found.

In other words, sloth kills, and even moderate exercise can lead to a longer, healthier life.  Which is something to keep in mind next time you're in the market for a place to live -- choosing a home where it's as convenient to walk to the store as to drive could actually save your life.

Electrifying Transportation

Editor's note: This is one of a series of posts from guest contributor Richard Feldman, regional organizer for the Washington arm of the Apollo Alliance; and executive director of the Worker Center, the economic and workforce development division of the King County Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

Every 20 minutes outside my home in Seattle, a vehicle quietly swishes by that uses not one drop of foreign oil for fuel and emits zero greenhouse gases. What is this wondrous vehicle? It’s a King County Metro electric trolley bus, powered by electrical fuel from Seattle City Light, now the first major utility in the U.S. to achieve no “net emissions” of greenhouse gases.

Electricity for transportation? In Seattle, we take it for granted--almost to the point of not thinking about it as an alternative fuel. But electricity could play a much greater role in moving the Northwest to energy independence and reducing tailpipe pollutants. Unlike a hydrogen future, which will require massive investments in fueling infrastructure, electrical infrastructure is pervasive and in place right now.

For example, we could expand the electric bus trolley system. Or make any of the proposed bus rapid transit corridors electric. We could electrify our ports. Oregon's Climate Trust has paid for truckstop electrification; substituting electric grid power for diesel idling. RailPower is making hybrid switcher locomotives powered off a large bank of batteries (it's currently recharged by a small diesel, but in the future perhaps it could be plugged into the grid for recharging).

And on the passenger vehicle front, we could promote plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEVs) until the automakers start producing them. PHEVs are like some current hybrids but with larger batteries and the ability to re-charge conveniently, so local travel of 20 to 60 miles is electric, yet the vehicle has unlimited range. PHEVs drop gasoline consumption by 60 to 80 percent relative to conventional vehicles across all classes from compacts to full-size SUVs. (See chart below, from ET Currents.)

   

Felix Kramer of the nonprofit CalCars describes a PHEV as "like having a second small fuel tank that you always use first. You get to fill this one at home with electricity at an equivalent cost of under $1 a gallon. You refill from an ordinary 120-volt socket, with energy that's much cleaner, cheaper and not imported." He should know. Felix and his crew have built the world's first PHEV Prius prototype. (And they're coming to the Northwest this week. See bottom of post for details.)

Furthermore, PHEVs charged at night take advantage of idle generating capacity (forty percent of the generating capacity in the U.S. sits idle or operates at reduced load overnight). In addition, wind-generated electricity tends to increase at night. Various models by EPRI (pdf), Argonne Labs and others show that PHEVs using nighttime power would result in large reductions in emissions even with the average national grid providing power (50-60 percent coal).

Sure, batteries can be improved. But in real-world driving situations NiMH batteries used to power Toyota’s RAV 4 Electric Vehicles traveled over 100,000 miles with no appreciable degradation in battery performance or vehicle range. Improving and mass-producing PHEV batteries seems much more achievable than figuring out how to make a hydrogen fuel cell provide locomotion.

And if a PHEV is also a flexible fuel vehicle, you can get 200-400 miles per gallon of petroleum. (A flex fuel vehicle is a standard gasoline car with a stainless steel gas tank, Teflon hoses, and a computer adjustment that allows it to run a mixture of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline as well as 100 percent gasoline. These vehicles are being manufactured now.) This is an energy-independent future that combines the development of biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel with the convergence of the electrical and transportation sector. It builds off of existing infrastructure and systems combined with American (and Japanese) ingenuity to guarantee our energy security. And it is a vision that is shared by a wide spectrum of supporters, from the Commissioners of the Port of Chelan County (pdf), to neo-con James Woosley to environmentalist Lester Brown.

Several cities, including Seattle, are looking at signing on to the City-of-Austin-led Plug-in National Campaign to demonstrate to automakers that a market exists for flexible fuel PHEVs.

By coincidence, Felix Kramer and Ron Gremban of CalCars will be driving their 100MPG Prius+ PHEV prototype through the Northwest this week. Today, they were at a press conference hosted by the Mayor’s Office, Seattle City Light, the Apollo Alliance and the Mayor’s Green Ribbon Taskforce on Climate Protection. At 2pm today, they’re at South Seattle Community College West Seattle Campus Auto Bldg room 134. Tomorrow, they join the leading lights of the PHEV world in Wenatchee for the Advanced Vehicle Initiative Summit.

Dreaming of Curitiba

This Bill McKibben piece on Curitiba, Brazil--which has been held up for years as an international model of people-friendly urban design--may seem like old news to those who are in planning or transportation circles. But I still found it inspiring. If Curitiba--with a per capita income of $2500 a person, 300 percent population growth since 1970, and no lush beaches or obvious tourist attractions--can make its city a model of human-scale sustainable design, why can't Northwest cities come closer to the mark?

Some of the city's accomplishments:

- A jewel of a highly integrated bus rapid transit system that's often cited as one of the best in the world, and passenger terminals have sparked local urban development and commercial activity.

- Planning policies that prioritize transit over cars, curb sprawl, and make the downtown extremely friendly to foot traffic. This includes a pedestrian mall--Brazil's first, and a 20-block area downtown where vehicular use is almost wholly prohibited.

- The result? Three-quarters of residents commute by transit (from this source); and Curitibans use 25 percent less fuel per capita than other Brazilians. And--perhaps most important--the downtown is packed with people.

- Parks that do double duty as flood control: City officials took federal flood-control money and--instead of spending on "channelizing" rivers in concrete viaducts--they developed parks with small lakes that served the same flood control purpose. In the process, Curitiba went from two square feet of green area per inhabitant to more than 150 square feet per inhabitant. 

- A housing program that helps lower-income residents build their own homes, which even gives them an hour with a city architect for design advice. And an overall emphasis on social and economic integration throughout the city.

And so on. The theme here is that Curitiba has become expert at implementing innovative and economical solutions that fix a bunch of problems at once.

When I read an article like this, I do wonder if Curitiba residents would agree with such a glowing assessment; and I'm reminded that friends of mine from Vancouver, BC, often lament their city's "most livable" reputation, which they feel makes it easier for the city ignore the many challenges that it faces. And you don't have to go far to find criticisms of Curitiba as a model for US communities (see here, for example).

Regardless, there are lessons. Several years ago, I attended a workshop on the city; the detail that sticks in my mind is the level of pride residents had in their bus system. And it wasn't just the result of good marketing. It was the fact that planners had paid as much attention to the details of the system--from how fares are collected to the look of the bus stops--as is usually paid to rail (or monorail).

Maybe the humble bus--if we give it the treatment it deserves--will serve our needs after all.

Don't Steal This Book

This Slate book review (found via Brad Plumer) covering the history of sprawl is so infuriatingly silly, it's hard to know where to begin.

In a nutshell:  Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski reviews a book by University of Illinois at Chicago professor Robert Bruegmann arguing -- quite correctly -- that suburbs have been part of urban life for millenia.  In ancient Rome, wealthy patricians escaped to exurban villas.  Just so, the walled cities of medieval Europe were surrounded by noxious industries such as slaughterhouses, as well as many of the people who worked there.  Since cities have always had low-density outskirts, Bruegmann argues, it's simply inaccurate to characterize "suburban sprawl" as entirely an invention of 20th century American car culture.

All that's fair enough -- the suburbs have always been with us, in one form or another.  And for good reasons:  some folks prefer not to live in the city, and some cities prefer to locate public nuisances outside of town.

But from this, the article (I'm not sure whether it's Rybczynski or Bruegmann who's responsible) draws conclusions about sprawl that are hard to fathom -- and even harder to square with reality.

Consider this quote:

It appears that all cities—at least all cities in the industrialized Western world—have experienced a dispersal of population from the center to a lower-density periphery. In other words, sprawl is universal.

OK.  Granted, pretty much all cities have suburbs.  To that extent, sprawl is universal.  But also, quite clearly, different cities sprawl in different ways, and to vastly different degrees.  Even within the Pacific Northwest -- an area with a comparatively uniform culture and politics -- the major cities display surprisingly different patterns of urban density, walkability, and car dependence.  To that extent, sprawl is highly malleable, and manifests itself very differently in different places; it's not universal at all.

And quite clearly, the patterns of sprawl are affected by policy differences among the cities. Vancouver promotes downtown development and compact regional centers, restricts the development of farmland at the urban fringe, and has built few lane miles of urban freeways.  Consequently, it sprawls least among all Northwest cities.  Oregon's growth management laws have limited rural sprawl in greater Portland, in a way that neighboring counties in Washington State have not.  And so on.  Clearly, policy matters -- quite a lot -- in determining the shape of cities, and how they grow over time.

Extending that sort of study to other cities in the US and the world, it's clear that there are both far more sprawling cities than those of the Pacific Northwest, and far more compact ones as well.  Some of the differences in urban design and layout have to do with geography, climate, and cultural preference; others to wealth, history, and technology.  But some, quite clearly, are related to policy choices.  Places that choose to build lots of miles of freeway through the city core, and ring roads around the periphery; that require minimum lot sizes for homes; that mandate street patterns that are branching rather than gridded; that strictly separate housing, jobs, and services; that fail to protect open space and farmland at the urban fringe; that allow taxes from central cities and inner suburbs to be used to pay for infrastracture at the urban fringe -- the places that pursue these sorts of policies tend to have more of their residents living in low-density, sprawling suburbs than places that don't.

But the book (or perhaps just the review -- I don't know who's at fault) draws the opposite conclusions:

What this iconoclastic little book demonstrates is that sprawl is not the anomalous result of American zoning laws, or mortgage interest tax deduction, or cheap gas, or subsidized highway construction, or cultural antipathy toward cities. Nor is it an aberration... Sprawl is and always has been inherent to urbanization. It is driven less by the regulations of legislators, the actions of developers, and the theories of city planners, than by the decisions of millions of individuals—Adam Smith's "invisible hand."

How's that again?  It's one thing to claim that the impulse to spread out is both common and understandable.  It's quite another to say that policies that quite clearly encourage and subsidize sprawl are irrelevant to how cities grow.  The former is defensible; the latter is laughable; and how you move from one to the other is beyond me.

I wish I were inclined to read the book to see whether Bruegmann backs up his arguments with facts, or if Slate's reviewer mischaracterizes the book.  But life's just too short.  If anyone wants to read and review the book themselves, please, by all means, enlighten me.

Big Business Versus the Car

NYC may be leading the next wave of driving-reduction initiatives as it considers congestion pricing for parts of Manhattan. According to the NY Times:

"The idea is to charge drivers for entering the most heavily trafficked parts of Manhattan at the busiest times of the day. By creating a financial incentive to carpool or use mass transit, congestion pricing could smooth the flow of traffic, reduce delays, improve air quality and raise the speed of crawling buses."

Congestion pricing, charging variable tolls based on predicted or actual congestion, was first tried on a large scale by London, which charges drives $14 to enter the financial district during weekday work hours. (New York would probably charge between $4 and $7 per car.) In the US, San Diego, Minneapolis, and a number of other cities have toyed with the idea, but New York's would be the most aggressive and comprehensive program.

Obviously, there are a welter of environmental benefits from crimping driving--it reduces air pollution, carbon emissions, and sprawl just to name a few--but I wonder if the big lesson from the big apple is not what congestion pricing accomplishes, but who's supporting it.

In the past, environmental advocates have had only limited success in winning policy changes that diminish driving. But in NYC the champion of congestion pricing is the city's major business assocation, Partnership for New York City. I wonder if there's an object lesson here about figuring out ways for environmental advocates to leverage the huge power of the business lobby to green ends.

Taxation Without Privation

This is days old now, but the blogosphere was all a-twitter earlier in the week about this paper by economist Jayanta Sen, arguing that a stiff tax on crude oil, far from bankrupting the US economy, would actually transfer more than $100 billion a year from foreign governments to US consumers. 

Yes, consumers would pay steeper prices for gasoline. But since all of the oil tax revenue stays within the US, that money continues to stimulate the economy.  Meanwhile, we'd import less oil -- and, as a consequence, we'd export less money to pay for it.  I'll let Sen explain things:

[T]he wealth transfer savings for the United States ... should be in the range of $108 to $152 billion a year. The new tax revenues ... can be returned to the US consumers as a lump sum, thus providing the economic stimulus. The reduction in crude oil consumption ranges from 7.13% to 10.30% while providing a stimulus (defined as additional purchasing power to consumers) to the economy of $95 billion to $133 billion a year.

The title of Sen's paper:  "A Tax to Save the US $100 billion a Year and Solve Global Warming?"  Sounds like a plan to me.  Any takers?

Portland, Rethunk

Interesting stuff in today's "Rethinking Portland" issue of the Portland Tribune. The Trib explains the rationale for the special series thus:

For decades, Portland has been viewed across the nation as an icon of livability and progressiveness, a community that introduced the nation to regional planning and prevention of big city sprawl, a steward of the environment and a proponent of diverse transportation systems, including light rail.

But as we take stock of Portland today, and look forward, we are compelled to say there is much that we urgently need to improve upon.

Seems about right to me -- there's always room for improvement, no matter how good your national reputation.  Indeed (as we discussed in this book) despite Portland's reputation for preventing sprawl, it's trailing far, far behind its northern neighber, Vancouver, BC.

Two articles in the series stood out for me.  First, Jim Redden reminds us that, as assiduously as our government measures economic indicators like GDP, city officials still flying blind when it comes to understanding how middle-income Portland residents are faring.  The US Census bureau estimated that median income for a family of four in Portland was $40,783; the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that it was $67,900.  Part of the difference can be explained by differing geographies; the HUD figure seems to cover the Portland suburbs, while the Census seems to cover just Portland proper.  Still, it seems odd that, given all the resources devoted to measuring aggregate economic output, Portland city officials need to convene blue ribbon panels of economists just to figure out how much the middle class earns.

Second, Todd Murphy agonizes about the decision to raise his kids in Portland, or to head to the suburbs.  Obviously, it's not an easy choice; even for someone who's spent his life in the city, there are plenty of reasons to find the suburbs an attractive place for a family. But one of Murphy's biggest concerns is safety -- particularly, that there's violent crime in a city that you just don't find in the suburbs. 

But what Murphy doesn't consider in the article is the risk of car crashes:  the risk of a fatal traffic accident is roughly proportional to the number of miles you drive.  So people who live in compact neighborhoods are generally at lower risk of dying in a car crash, whether as driver, passenger, or pedestrian, than people who live in car-dependent suburbs. I don't know about Portland in particular, but this study suggests that, when you combine the risk of dying in a car crash with the risk of being killed by a stranger, central cities tend to be safer than far-flung exurbs.

Public lands: Mine, All Mine

In an ominous new development, Congress may soon authorize private "patents" of public land, a wildly outdated and abused provision of an 1872 mining law. The patents are functionally equivalent to fee-simple purchases of the land, which raises the distinct possibility that private individuals and corporations could stake mining claims--and then buy the land--in national forests, wilderness areas, and even national parks.

Mining, as it is currently practiced, is so ecologically disastrous that there are too many examples of environmental degradation to mention here. But the new Congressional legislation would actually worsen matters. Not only would it make it easy for mining corporations to snatch up public land at bargain-basement prices--and never pay royalties on their profits--but there's nothing preventing the buyer from dropping plans to mine and then re-selling the land as real estate. If mining doesn't pencil out, there's always the possibility of ski areas, amusement parks, condos...

At risk are roughly 20 million acres of public lands. Already, nearly 900 patents have been staked inside national parks and that number is almost certain to rise under the new legislation. It's hard to imagine a worse deal for the American public, not to mention our ever more fragile natural heritage that public lands safeguard.

Read the coverage in the Christian Science Monitor and the Seattle Times.

UPDATE 11/14/05: Excellent coverage of this issue in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

My Bad

Whoops: it looks like I got much of this post simply wrong. 

To recap, Brookings Institution scholar Margy Waller wrote an article in the Washington Monthly promoting car ownership for the working poor (which strikes me as reasonable, on balance), and also proposing a $100 billion annual federal tax credit to subsidize commuting costs (which stuck me as wrong-headed).

But one of the reasons I so strongly disliked Waller's commuting subsidy was that I assumed -- apparently wrongly -- that she was proposing that more expensive commutes be given bigger subsidies.  That, in my view, would create all kinds of perverse incentives, the worst of which would be to subsidize sprawl, by giving people who live in the most inaccessible locations, with the longest, highest-cost commutes, the biggest payouts.

But Ms. Waller herself now informs me that, while it wasn't spelled out in her Washington Monthly article that floated the idea, it was never her intent to link the amount of the tax credit to the cost of commuting.  Rather, people with any commuting costs would be eligible for the exact same credit.  So, if you have a choice between a cheaper commute on transit, and a more expensive one in a car, you can choose the cheap commute and pocket the rest of the tax credit as a bonus.

That seems a lot more reasonable than I first thought, as it doesn't exclusively favor longer and more expensive commutes.  So even though I'm still quite cool to the idea, I take back what I said about it being nutty.  Sorry, Margy!

There are still plenty of reasons to be skeptical about a commuting tax credit, though.

First, it clearly favors motorized vs. nonmotorized commutes -- that is, you'd have to spend money on your commute in order to qualify for the credit.  So folks who are lucky enough to be able to walk to work get nothing; folks who bus or drive get a credit.  This is essentially begging people to rack up commuting costs, even if they don't need them.  It's also asking them not to walk for transportation -- which studies now suggest is a contributing factor in the twin epidemics of obesity and physical inactivity.

Second, it still seems strange to me to focus on subsidizing commuting costs, rather than raising income generally.  That is, if I had to choose between a generalized earned income tax credit (one that helps all low-income workers, not just those with commuting costs) and a tax credit focused specificially on commuting costs, I'd prefer the former.  As to the argument that folks with young children really need a car -- well, not all low-income folks have kids.  And some of those who do might prefer to use a tax credit for child care and a short commute, or on a home near convenient transit, rather than spending (or wasting) some of the tax credit on a car.  I'd prefer to let them decide what to do with their money.

And third, this kind of proposal seems to be just the sort of thing that could get mangled in the political process.  Sure, the original proposal wouldn't favor longer commutes.  But after it gets through the rural-dominated US Senate -- not to mention the auto-industry and oil lobbies -- perhaps it would.

In the end, if I had to spend $100 billion a year on a program to lift the prospects of low- and middle-income Americans, I'm not sure that this is the way I'd do it.  But it's probably not as terrible an idea as I thought at first.

The Urban Jungle

I'm a day late on this, but the Seattle P-I had an interesting series on Seattle's ailing urban forests. The principal threat is the rapid spread of invasive species, which essentially throttle standing trees and smother healthy new growth:

"At first glance, the most prolific tree-killers seem pleasant enough, aesthetically speaking -- a splash of green on a bare tree trunk, a burst of pretty flowers on the ground. But tendrils of ivy, morning glory and clematis quickly spread up into the tree canopies, starving the trees by cloaking their leaves and blocking photosynthesis. Their weight breaks branches and bends tree tops, stunting growth. Blackberry thickets smother ferns and saplings."

Folks at the Seattle Urban Nature Project, along with scores of other groups, are in the frontlines of the battle against the aliens. Without their dedication, the city's forests and parks would likely succumb to the greedy monoculture of ivy and blackberry that is already in evidence nearly everywhere. So as a nature-loving city-dweller I'm happy about the much-needed efforts to restore the ecology closest to us.

But the more I read, the more the series also raised some interesting questions--for me, anyway--about how we treat conservation priorities. How do we sort out competing environmental goods, such as increasing urban density and preserving an urban forest canopy? Is urban ecology really the best use of our resources?

Now obviously, it's a good thing to restore the forests and natural areas within our cities. And it's also a good thing to protect and restore natural areas on the urban fringe as well as in more remote locations. But given the sad fact that we have scarce resources to devote to conservation, is urban ecological restoration really our best option?

The analytical part of me says no. I'd argue that we can get more ecosystem bang for our buck by investing in natural areas that are in less dire need of assistance--areas that are capable of supporting a more diverse array of biota. It's futile to pour money into the heavily degraded Duwamish River, for example, when we can protect and repair less-damaged waterways like the Cedar or the Snohomish. Similarly, I wonder whether the price tag of saving Seattle's city park forests--an estimated $48 million over 20 years--couldn't be better spent saving and restoring forests in, say, east King County that are threatened by sprawl. Those forests, while not pristine, could be treated to replicate old-forest conditions that can support a variety of species, including some endangered ones.

But the rest of me says yes. City nature matters.

Urban ecology may not be the best possible investment for regional biodiversity, but that doesn't make it a waste of resources. While Seattle's urban forests will likely never support spotted owls, they can and do support people. Hospitalized patients recover faster when they can see trees. In inner-city neighborhoods, academic studies show that children learn better and are less likely to become involved in crime if they are exposed to plants and trees. Nature in the city may even foster social capital.

Most people experience nature primarily in city parks and public beaches, not on backcountry trails in national parks and forests. That's especially true for children, the elderly, lower-income folks, and people without cars. And that experience of nature has a powerful psychological, even spiritual, effect on people. It's so powerful, I'd argue, that it's very difficult to put a price tag on it.

If you don't believe me, and you live in Seattle, I've got a challenge for you: Later this November see if you can find the chum salmon running up Piper's Creek in Carkeek Park. When I visited twice last year, the natural phenomena of the salmon run, even in a tiny urban creek, was clearly transformative for us fish-watchers, and we were legion. An astonishing array of people stood for hours in the rain, cheering on the fish--literally cheering for them--as they struggled up over the stream's little barriers. There's no doubt that the Northwest's salmon constituency swelled greatly that day. And equally, I don't doubt that we watchers were immeasurably better off for it.

And the benefits of urban ecology are not all anthropocentric. Even if urban ecological restoration is not the best non-human biodiversity investment available, it still winds up being a plus in nature's scales. Native bird, fish, and plant diversity all flourish when we remove invasive species.

Finally, there are also plenty of economic arguments in favor of urban forests. These are not my main reasons for wanting to restore city forests, but they are instrumentally useful for convincing skeptics that there's value in city ecology.

Trees may be good for business by increasing worker productivity and boosting retail profits. Plus, there are tangible services that urban forests and trees provide--services that we can quantify in dollars and cents. As the P-I article describes it:

When it rains, trees capture some of the water and help it soak into the ground slowly, controlling erosion and stemming the flow of dirty stormwater rushing off driveways and roads into Puget Sound.

If the city were to lose its urban forests, it would cost more than $220 million in new stormwater-treatment facilities and drainage systems, according to an environmental group's analysis.

City officials say the costs would be higher, possibly topping $1 billion.

Three years ago, researchers with the University of California-Davis and the U.S. Forest Service released a study that put a price tag on the benefits of urban trees in the Northwest.

Considering all of the good that trees provide -- such as reduced energy costs because of shade and protection from wind, less pollution and higher property values -- a small residential tree netted a $12 annual benefit, while a large tree was worth $53.

So, while $48 million to restore Seattle's park forests is certainly more than I can scrounge up in loose change from my couch, it seems like a darn good investment in the health of the city. And when you consider the benefits, both tangible and intangible, that urban nature brings to our lives, it's a steal.