More lanes in Houston, and longer traffic times

Here's a great example to buttress the point I made earlier today, in "Highways, congestion and a power broker's lessons." Which was this: Since at least the 1930s planners have known that adding highway lanes does not reduce congestion, but rather – counter-intuitively – seems to increase it.

As reported by Thursday by Angie Schmitt in Streetsblog.net,  a Houston Tomorrow analysis of driving time on the I-10 Katy Freeway found it took 51 percent more time to get from downtown to Pin Oak on the newly expanded, 23-lane freeway than it did in 2011 right after the new lanes opened. An expansion project that ended in 2010 cost $2.8 billion-with-a-B – which was $1.17 billion-with-a-B more than its original price tag.

Coincidence: The Federal Highway Administration's 2012 list of projects that details the cost of the Katy Freeway also lists the Monroe Bypass, with a due date of 2016. Better get hopping on that one, guys. Or better yet, don't.

Jay Crossley of Houston Tomorrow concludes: "Traveling out I-10 is now 33% worse - almost 18 more minutes of your time - than it was before we spent $2.8 billion to subsidize land speculation and encourage more driving."

Highways, congestion and a power broker's lessons

Frontispiece of The Power Broker maps Moses' roads, bridges, parks and playgrounds. 

The headline in this morning's newspaper could not have been more appropriate for the day I have to, at long last and reluctantly, return to the UNC Charlotte library my copy of Robert A. Caro's The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

I checked it out in September 2013. It's roughly the size of a cinder block and just as heavy, and the librarians graciously let me keep renewing it, since apparently no one else wanted the tome. Which is sad. Published in 1974, it should be required reading for anyone studying public administration, transportation, planning, urban studies, political science, sociology and journalism. I finally finished it a few months ago but after so long it felt almost like a family pet and I didn't want to part with it.

The headline today: N.C. DOT says Monroe Bypass construction has started. The article by Steve Harrison notes a lawsuit over the project is still active, and it could well be stopped for a second time.

As it happens, one of Robert Moses' faithful techniques for getting money for his projects was to start work on them

N.C. transportation funding: 'If you're not at the table, you're on the menu'

A Charlotte light rail station

If you were at the Charlotte Chamber's 2015 Transportation Infrastructure Summit this morning, you got two pointed lectures. The first, from N.C. Rep. Bill Brawley, R-Mecklenburg, was about dealing effectively with the N.C. General Assembly.

The background: North Carolina's transportation dollars aren't keeping up with needs. This is true whether you'd prefer new light rail and no roads, or new roads and no light rail, or whether you're thinking about ports, aviation and ferries. (Wonkish but important point: North Carolina doesn't have "county roads." Roads are either state- or city-maintained (or private).The state has a larger role in road-building and maintenance than in some other states.)

The gas tax, intended to support state transportation needs, is not keeping up, because people are driving less and driving more fuel-efficient cars, and transportation projects today are more expensive than in decades past.

For cities like Charlotte, growth and congestion mean more voters and businesses want mass transit as well as expanded roads. But the General Assembly today is dominated by Republicans who are more likely to represent rural or suburban districts. Here's Brawley's advice:

"Whenever you do anything to raise money for transportation ... you make people mad," he said. In that atmosphere, it's important to try to build a statewide consensus on funding before you even approach politicians. But when Charlotte comes to Raleigh seeking money for transportation projects, he said, "Charlotte comes with Charlotte-specific projects.They don't talk about the state as a whole. They don't work on building support with the state as a whole." In other words -- and this is my wording here -- act like you care about more than Charlotte.

His final words: "In Raleigh, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."

The second lecture was even stronger. Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (whose successor is former Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx) would have pounded the table if he'd had a table to pound. "Transportation infrastructure is at a crossroads. It's at a standstill," he said. "It's at a crisis."

"The long rich history of our country ... is about being No. 1 in transportation and infrastructure," he said. "We're not No. 1 in infrastructure any more. We're No. 16."

 "America is one big pothole!" he all but shouted. "Because we haven't invested. We haven't fixed up our roads."

As he's done for months -- years, really -- LaHood, a Republican from Peoria, Ill., pushed the idea of raising the federal gas tax 10 cents a gallon, and indexing it to the cost of living. The tax has not been raised since 1993.

"We need to bit the bullet," he said. "Voters are not going to vote you out of office if you fix a big problem"

The Burnham backlash: Make some 'small plans'

You can barely attend any conference of architects, planners or even local town planning boards without seeing, at some spot in the PowerPoint presentation, the famous quote from Chicago architect and town planner, Daniel: “Make no little plans,” he said. “They have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

But, as Alan Ehrenhalt points out in an essay in Governing magazine, “Urban Acupuncture Is Coming to America,” that view of city building helped promote a lot of what went terribly wrong in U.S. cities in the 20th century. Urban renewal is just Exhibit No. 1. So here’s Ehrenhalt’s suggestion:

“For the next century, it might be helpful if someone came along who could offer urban practitioners a dose of Burnham in reverse. Something akin to, 'Be careful about making huge plans, because they take forever, cost too much and generate myriad unintended consequences. Make small changes that improve everyday life for ordinary people; make them right away and build on small successes to try something a little more ambitious.’ ”

Ehrenhalt recounts the work of Jaime Lerner, a Brazilian architect who became mayor of Curitiba, a city of 1.7 million, and later governor of the state of Parana. It’s pegged to the fall 2014 release of an English translation of Lerner's book, Urban Acupuncture: Celebrating Pinpricks of Change That Enrich City Life.  (Disclosure: I’m a board member of the nonprofit Center for the Living City, which found funding for the publication of the English translation.)

The overall point, of Lerner’s book and Ehrenhalt's essay, is simple but too often overlooked by urban planners, city administrators and elected officials: Sometimes a small change is better than a huge project. 

The mayor's view: Transit funding (the dilemma), a more diverse city, and more

Local dignitaries at a 2012 ceremony for the Blue Line Extension. Then-Mayor Anthony Foxx, now U.S. Transportation Secretary, is at right. (Photo: Mary Newsom)

Charlotte Magazine's Greg Lacour has posted a meaty Q-and-A interview with Charlotte Mayor Dan Clodfelter, in which the mayor discusses the city's dilemma on transit funding, what's different about being mayor vs. being in the N.C. Senate (where Clodfelter served 1998-2014) and what's different about Charlotte compared to when he was on City Council (1987-93).

The questions hit heavily on the problem the city and county face in funding any expansion of the Charlotte Area Transit System. (For more background, see this PlanCharlotte.org article about remarks Clodfelter made in  September, "Mayor: Transit sales tax funding may be at risk.")

Among his other remarks to Lacour, Clodfelter had an interesting analysis of state transit funding -- or the lack thereof. He suggested that the state would be disinclined to pay any more for mass transit projects (for the first two legs of Charlotte's light rail, the state paid 25 percent of the cost) regardless of which party is controlling state government. Why? Because statewide transportation needs are great, and gas tax revenue is lagging. Add that up and it's difficult to fund anything, he said.

On a more political note, although Clodfelter isn't saying for sure he's running for mayor, he also recently gave an interview to Qcitymetro.com. Here's that interview. 

(At-large Charlotte City Council member Michael Barnes this week hopped into the mayor's race, joining Democrats Jennifer Watson Roberts and fellow at-large City Council member David Howard. To date, no Republican has emerged as a likely candidate. But filing isn't until this summer, with the primary in September.)

Why slow-growing light rail ridership should not surprise anyone

A bus in uptown Charlotte, where most bus routes begin and end. Photo: Claire Apaliski

Today's Charlotte Observer brings an article from Steve Harrison noting that ridership on Charlotte's light rail line, the LYNX Blue Line, has finally rebounded to its pre-recession levels but has not increased dramatically despite rapid growth in apartments along part of its route. See "Lynx light rail ridership back to 2008 levels."

Some background: Charlotte's first and only light rail line opened in late 2007, just in time for the massive 2008-09 recession that had Charlotte unemployment lingering in double-digits or near it for months. The northern couple of miles of the 9-mile route, closest to uptown, have seen massive apartment development in the past several years. The southern part of the route? Nada.

But the South End neighborhood – an area of old industrial buildings dating from the 1960s back to the late 1800s – is popping with hundreds of new apartments, and hopping with new microbreweries and trendy restaurants.

Car-free in Charlotte? It isn't easy by Carolyn Reid, published last June at the PlanCharlotte.org website I run, helps explain why ridership may not be growing as quickly as you'd think.

Even in South End there's little easy or walkable access to routine shopping needs like grocery and drug stores, no easily accessed, widely connected network of bike routes, nor robust bus service with headways under 10 minutes that spreads cross town. Because of lack of funding, the city's bus service – while much improved over 1990s levels – still focuses on  delivering workers to uptown rather than building a widely connected network.

South End remains a place with better transit, bike and pedestrian connections than almost any other Charlotte neighborhood. But it's still not a place where living without a car is going to be easy. Unless you're trying to go uptown, the light rail can't deliver you where you want to go.

My prediction: Ridership will zoom when the Blue Line Extension opens in 2017, taking riders to the 27,000-student UNC Charlotte campus about 10 miles northeast of uptown. 

Tax code uber alles

A recent piece in Smithsonian magazine, The Death and Rebirth of the Mall, points to a 1996 article by Tom Hanchett, staff historian at the Levine Museum of the New South, that I read almost 20 years ago. As always, Hanchett's thinking and research were impressive. But this article opened my eyes to a reality: Our cities and our neighborhoods are shaped less by city planners or the wishes of the people than by intricacies in tax laws and financing strategies.

It's like the time I realized (because David Walters told me) that the reason suburban sprawl didn't happen in Britain and Europe the way it does in the U.S. is because the laws there don't allow developers to build outside of the urban growth boundary. Until then I thought it was because Europeans were somehow more in tune with the beauties of nature and the importance of farms. Nope. It's what their laws say.

Hanchett's 1996 article, "U.S. Tax Policy and the Shopping-Center Boom," in the American Historical Review, describes how a small change in the U.S. tax code in 1954 – creating something called accelerated depreciation – "fundamentally altered the economics of real-estate development in the United States."

If you read the whole article you'll get a clear explanation of things like 200 percent declining balance and sum-of-the-years'-digits accelerated depreciation. If you're a real estate finance expert, you already know that stuff.  But here's the key information: This tax incentive applied fully only to new construction, not to renovating existing buildings.

"Suddenly, all over the United States, shopping plazas sprouted like well-fertilized weeds," Hanchett wrote. The