Contributor Blog

Last summer, most of the nation was justifiably outraged when Raquel Nelson was convicted of vehicular homicide because her four-year old son stepped off a median into oncoming traffic and was killed. Common sense alone should have kept this case from going to trial, but I believe this case should have raised a bigger and more encompassing issue for planners and a question of social ethics: What is the responsibility we take as individuals for the choices we make living in an urban environment?

In August, I moved into a high density apartment complex just 1.5 miles from my office and a five minute walk to a bus stop. One of the central advantages of the building's location was its access to alternative transportation modes. While I could park my car for "free" (the real cost is built into the lease), I was interested in keeping it parked as much as possible. Now, after nearly three months of experimentation, I'm ready to give up the bus, and the reasons are central to understanding the future of transit in the US.

For a while now, I've wondered if we have been mislabeling the development around well functioning transit stops as transit-oriented developments (TODs). This may seem odd, because numerous studies have shown that property values can increase by 20% to 40% percent around transit stops, particularly rail stations (although the increases are uneven).

As just about everyone in the planning profession now knows, this is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities by urbanist icon Jane Jacobs. While Death and Life was itself iconic, Jane Jacobs was also a great public intellectual who continually built on her ideas in subsequent books and articles. 

Republicans appear set to make significant political inroads in Congress this November, perhaps taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives and knocking on the door of majority control of the U.S. Senate. Their success will be in no small part due to the so-called Tea Parties, a grassroots political movement reacting to the perceived excess of the federal government. Planners should take note. While the Tea Party Movement is largely a national and statewide, its effects may well be felt on the local and regional level as well.

Climate change has become a focal point of urban planning in the U.S. and abroad as cities grapple with so-called sustainability. I’ve been a critic of many attempts to implement sustainability plans, not so much because I disagree with the intent as much as I believe the tools used to achieve sustainability are not particularly effective.

In a previous blog post, my discussion of externalities, public goods and roads spurred an unexpectedly lengthy set of posts and repostes. In this article, I want to address a trickier topic: Whether road users have effectively shifted the burden for paying for roads to non-users and whether the reason we pay for roads out of general taxes is a result of that lobbying effort.

Planners are quick to criticize roads and highway investments for the vast sums spent to build, operate and maintain them, often questioning the value of these subsidies. Recently, on a planning list-serve, these subsidies were labeled an “external cost” of automobiles, but they are not.

I’ve spent much of the last three years working on transportation finance and planning issues in China, and Reason Foundation now has transportation policy projects up and running in the cities of Chongqing, Xi’an, and Beijing.

Planning magazine recently (December 2009) published a story on the benefits of economic impact studies for planners. Most professional planners have run across them at one point or another: they are used to evaluate economic impact and the effectives of various types of programs on job creation. Unfortunately, the article did little to also illuminate the pitfalls and weaknesses of these studies.

Reason.tv has launched a multipart series of videos on how the city of Cleveland can turn itself around using free-market approaches and limited government reforms.

As the housing market collapsed and gasoline prices spiked in 2007, many planners may have read Cornell University law professor Eduardo Penalver’s essay in the Washington Post with more than a little satisfaction.

In an earlier post, I discussed the difference between mobility, accessibility, and transportation technology. In today’s post, I want to discuss what I think is the next step in this taxonomy in terms of the implications for the built environment and urban planning. More specifically, we need to move beyond the idea that certain transportation technologies—whether it is a car, a bus, a train, or our feet—are substitutes.

I’m going to riff off a recent Interchange Blog post by Michael Lewyn on the relationship between mobility and accessibility. Given the positive comments from the planning community to Michael’s post, a little engagement may be necessary for both clarity as well as fully understanding the implications of reading too much into the accessibility versus mobility debate.

Downloading my newest addition to my Kindle library—the digital book service provided by Amazon.com—I remembered the gentle criticism of a planner on a list serve not too long ago. The thread was on sustainability and global warming. I had made the point that market economies were innovative economies, and too much of the planning discussion on sustainability focused on reduced consumption without seriously discussing the ways technology fundamentally changed our choice sets. The planner chastised me for my faith in markets, saying, in a nutshell, we need to focus on what we know we can influence and not hedge are bets on the past. The implication was that markets were too ephemeral and undependable to include in long-term planning.

Watching Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar winning film of 2008 that is being released on DVD today, can be a bracing experience for those accustomed to the conveniences of Western living. The destitute living is accurately and graphically depicted and is all too real for those that have seen it. Yet, the real danger is letting the poverty obscure a larger, perhaps more important lesson about urban places: Many of these urban slums are functioning, productive cities in their own right, and represent an intergenerational path toward economic improvement.

The planning profession’s ambivalence toward Houston has always been a little frustrating. In part, the profession’s attitude is understandable. Houston hasn’t embraced planning’s conventions, so why should the profession embrace Houston?

Fair enough. But the downside is losing the opportunity to look at core issues and problems from a completely different lens. This is especially true when it comes to housing development where Houston performs remarkably better than its peers.

 As the economy continues to lumber through the most protracted period of recession since the early 1980s, the financial sector has received the brunt of the blame. It’s been easy for the planning profession to distance themselves from what seem at first to be macroeconomic trends. That view, however, is becoming increasingly difficult to uphold.

The newest Drew Carey video at Reason.tv—Mexicans and Machines: Why Its Time to Lay Off NAFTA—is (IMHO) brilliant, and triggered more than a couple of thoughts about how technology and progress creates practical challenges for planning.

In my last post, I suggested that transit’s “resurgence” is, ultimately, much ado about nothing. Transit’s increased ridership, while important for transit managers, will do little to change fundamental travel patterns of US urban areas.