Another one bites the dust. A vacant Walmart in Lewiston, Washington. Photo: Flickr/Happy Vampire

These empty husks — yet to be filled by any other retail tenant — are part of the detritus left behind by a paradigm shift in the real estate industry. Signs of the changing times, they tell us what kind of society we were before the bubble burst.

Now, as the commercial real estate industry regroups, evidence is mounting that Walmart and other mega-retailers will take a much different form than they have in the past. The new American shopping experience, according to many industry observers, will be less “suburban big-box” and more “urban destination.”

The demise of several mega-retail chains during the recession, including Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things, helped produce a vast oversupply of retail space, particularly that of the giant, boxy, just-off-the-interstate variety. Last summer, the research arm of giant commercial real estate firm Colliers International reported that there was nearly 300 million square feet of vacant big box retail space on the market — 34 percent of total retail vacancy left behind by a recession that walloped commercial real estate almost as hard as housing.

Since 2008 alone, 120 million square feet of big box retail space has become available. To put such numbers in perspective, that is the equivalent of the total shopping center space in Cincinnati, Kansas City and Baltimore combined, Colliers reported.

This period of retrenchment has humbled even the once-mightiest of retail forces. CNN reported last month that Walmart stores suffered their ninth-straight quarterly drop in sales. Another sign of the times: Walmart is no longer enough of a bargain for U.S. consumers, it appears. The mega-retailer has been losing market share to dollar stores.

The situation has apparently reached the point where the retail monolith is rethinking its whole carbon-gulping model. Walmart is joining other retailers in thinking smaller and more urban, says Ed McMahon, a fellow at the Urban Land Institute.

“What the recession has made completely clear is that we have way too much retail,” McMahon said. “We are going from the era of the big box to the era of the small box.”

Enter the “Walmart Express.”

Generally, the opening of a Walmart store isn’t the kind of occasion that draws national media attention. Yet, in early June, ABC, Bloomberg News, and USA Today lined up in a parking lot in Gentry, Arkansas. This wasn’t a typical Walmart opening. Gentry, Arkansas is home to the first “Walmart Express,” a 18,000-square-foot, drug-store-sized prototype of the old, big-box heavyweight.

WalMart's new micro-sized "Express" stores are about one-tenth the size of its Supercenters. Photo: ABC New

Walmart plans to open 15 to 20 of the small stores — about one-tenth the size of a “Supercenter” — by the end of the year, mostly throughout the southeast but also including three in Chicago. By 2012, they plan to open as many as 350 a year, part of the mega-retailer’s strategy to regain its dominance over dollar retailers.

Walmart isn’t the only retailer turning its sights on the urban market it once eschewed. Increasingly, retailers see urban areas as the one remaining growth market, said Bob Gibbs, a national site selection and planning consultant with Gibbs Planning in Birmingham, Michigan.

“Retailers used to think that if they went to the edge of suburbia, that farmland would turn into housing,” Gibbs said. “They no longer want to do that. They want to be right in the middle of people, even if they’re lower-income than they’re used to.”

Industry observers have long marveled that there are approximately 20 square feet of retail space for every U.S. resident, compared to three to four square feet per capita abroad. In urban areas of the U.S., however, the actual ratio is more like one resident to two square feet.

Cynthia Stewart, a researcher with the International Council of Shopping Centers, says the movement toward urban areas is being slowed by a couple of factors. For one, urban site acquisition is traditionally more time consuming and expensive. And financing isn’t as easy to secure as it once was. Nevertheless, the market is in urban areas, she said.

“That’s where the opportunities are, for sure,” she said.

Another factor shaping the retail landscape has been the growth of online retailers. Again, this trend favors smaller stores in more urban locations, said McMahon.

Where Walmart once reigned supreme, the golden child of the post-recession retail world is Amazon, said McMahon. Fighting traffic, then battling to find a space in an ocean-sized parking lot, is an increasingly difficult sell when online retailers make their products available at the touch of a key.

“If old-school retail outfits like Best Buy want to compete in the bricks-and-mortar world, they’ll need to focus on making shopping less hassle and more pleasure, said McMahon. In order to lengthen trips and boost profits, retailers have been adding “cafes,” and moving toward Main Street-style, walkable settings. “This is known as the place-making dividend,” McMahon said.

Increasingly, small retail locations, like Apple stores, serve as a showcase for the broader selection of items that are available online, retail industry observers say. Photo: MacStories

Some of the strongest retailers, right now, are those that focus on providing a fun and engaging experience for customers, like Apple retailers or the mall-eschewing Urban Outfitters, the Wall Street Journal reported this spring.

Broad trends signal that the retail industry, like housing, is coming back down to earth. That has the potential to be a good thing. After all, stores like Walmart, Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things were always built to the scale of cars, not people. They reinforced and fed off American car-dependency.

Of course, the entry of big-box retailers into urban markets can erode cities too.

Developments like the regrettable Gateway Center in the South Bronx, which impose the suburban-scale big box model on urban areas, only serve to make cities more car-centric.

And a report by the Hunter College Center for Urban Affairs and Planning projected that the entrance of Walmart into New York City would produce a net loss of jobs, by forcing smaller stores out of business. It would also force New Yorkers to pay increased taxes because of Walmart’s famously woeful wages and benefits, the report found.

Developments like the Gateway Center, crammed full of parking, also make cities less walkable, the authors wrote. But there isn’t a whole lot of room for suburban-style Walmarts to enter New York City in a big way, said Tom Angotti, director of Hunter College’s Center for Community Planning. It’s not clear yet whether the retailer intends to splash its trademark happy faces all across the New York City market through small stores, he said. And even if it did, it’s not clear that the results would be as negative as the big stores.

Furthermore, it’s still an open question whether stores like Walmart, which have always made their home in suburban and rural locations, will even work in a different context.

On the other hand, Gibbs said he thinks the increased competition provided by large retailers will ultimately be good for urban consumers, particularly in less-served urban markets like Detroit and Cleveland.

“I think it’s going to make our cities more positive and attractive,” he said.

The civil rights fight for equitable transportation didn't end with Rosa Parks.

So says a report from the Leadership Conference Education Fund, a project of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The coalition wasn’t involved in the transportation reauthorization debate in 2005, when SAFETEA-LU was passed, and they’re determined to be at the table this time.

In March, they quietly published their report, “Where We Need to Go: A Civil Rights Roadmap for Transportation Equity”, and since then they’ve put out three more reports, springboarding off of that first overview. The subsequent reports focus on access to health care [PDF], access to housing [PDF], and access to jobs [PDF].

They never really released these reports to the press, which is why we’re just letting you know about them now. Some media outlets caught wind of it in late July and a small flurry of stories came out in the week or two after the Leadership Conference hosted a “fly-in” lobby day, where nearly 40 constituents from nine target states came to Washington to meet with their representatives’ offices.

According to the Leadership Conference report, racial minorities are four times more likely than whites to lack access to a car and to rely on public transportation for their commute to work. African Americans make up 12 percent of the U.S. population but 20 percent of the pedestrian fatalities. And the problem is far worse for Native Americans on reservations. Pedestrians there have the highest per capita risk of injury and death of any ethnic group in the U.S. While vehicle fatalities are dropping around the country, they’re on the rise on reservations.

All of that explains why the a group focused on civil and human rights would be interested in transportation – it’s an issue of racial justice. It’s also an economic issue, they say: with job sprawl pushing more and more jobs far outside the urban core, access to those jobs can be exclusively by private car. Even three out of five jobs “suitable for welfare-to-work participants” are not accessible by public transit, the report says.

Transportation is also a housing issue, when people of limited means are priced out of even inexpensive housing because transportation costs are too high outside the city, where transit doesn’t reach.

And transportation is a health issue, when people with disabilities who cannot drive skip medical appointments because they have no way to get there. “Imagine being an 80 year-old dialysis patient waiting for the bus for three hours—this happens in today’s America, and it hurts people,” said the National Association of County and City Health Officials. Meanwhile, families in autocentric communities lack convenient access to healthy foods or walkable neighborhoods to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

“Although our laws promise to open doors to opportunity,” the Leadership Conference writes, “this is a hollow promise for people who are physically isolated from jobs, schools, stores that sell healthy food, and health care providers. As our metropolitan areas have expanded and jobs and services have become more diffuse, equal opportunity depends upon equal access to affordable transportation.”

Indeed, the suburbanization of poverty is a large part of the problem. The suburbs were designed to be autocentric. They’ve never made any bones about it. For decades, the suburbs have sucked up a disproportionate amount of transportation dollars and wielded a disproportionate amount of power in decision-making bodies, and they’ve used that money and power primarily to build roads. And those roads have led farther and farther away from the urban center, and the only way to get to any of these places was to drive there.

But now, housing values are crashing in suburbia and, especially, in exurbia – so much so that Section 8 voucher-holders are increasingly residing in pockets of suburbia that used to be out of their reach, while their inner-city neighborhoods are the new urban hotspots, with rising prices forcing them away.

Even in transit-rich areas, affluent people often have cars. One mark of gentrification is the sudden scarcity of street parking. On the flip side, even in the transit-poor world of sprawling subdivisions, some low-income people can’t afford to own a car. We’ve seen the tragic results when people try to walk and bike on roads designed exclusively for the automobile.

All in all, the Leadership Conference has determined that “Transportation is back as a major civil rights issue,” in the words of Angela Glover Blackwell, founder and CEO of PolicyLink. “Today’s focus is not on getting a seat at the front of the bus but on making sure the bus takes us where we need to go.”

The Leadership Conference says transportation inequities have further entrenched segregation:

By investing disproportionately in highways that expand metropolitan areas, funding construction far from urban centers, and tipping decision-making power away from urban and inner suburban constituencies, our transit planning has placed inequitable burdens on low-income people, people with disabilities, and people of color by entrenching the segregation of racial minorities and increasing the concentration of poverty.

Post-WWII highway projects plowed through minority urban neighborhoods to shuttle commuters to and from the suburbs. Transportation planning has historically prioritized suburban development over strengthening cities and incentivized geographic expansion rather than improving infrastructure to accommodate larger, more densely populated areas. The result: Geographic segregation, along with unequal investment in transit options for urban, low-income people.

Indeed, the suburban sway over MPOs around the country isn’t likely to mean transit expansion and better walking conditions just because the demographics of the suburbs are shifting. As low-income people move out to the suburbs, they aren’t necessarily becoming part of that suburban power structure, said Lexer Quamie, counsel and transportation expert at the Leadership Conference.

“The individuals that are being pushed out there, not necessarily by choice, may not put themselves at the table,” she said. “If you don’t know there’s process you can be part of, you’re left out.”

That’s why “meaningful representation” of low-income people, people of color, and people with disabilities is a major plank of the Leadership Conference’s platform for change. But most importantly: “Ending the disproportionate investment in car-based transit must be a centerpiece of the transportation equity agenda.”

Once a single-industry steel town, the rust belt poster child has seen its population dwindle from 115,000 residents to barely 67,000 over just three decades. For the better part of the last century, the city was known for its mafia activity, and shaking off the residue of government corruption and violence has been difficult. Its homicide rate — driven upward by a not-yet-recovered economy — puts the city in league with towns three times its size.

Sprawl and deindustrialization have fueled an exodus in Youngstown. But have regional leaders learned anything? Photo: Business Insider

But undergirding all of these ills is the problem that might just be Youngstown’s biggest: its built infrastructure is simply to large for its current population.

The starkest example is its excess housing stock. At last count, demolition crews were slogging through some 3,300 vacant houses. But sewers, streets, even stoplights: all of these former amenities linger at a scale meant for the days when the mills were still turning the skies orange and filling the pockets of workers who, in turn, filled the gambling houses.

Now these physical amenities have become liabilities. A diminished tax base limits the city’s ability to maintain its aging streets and sewers. Signals stop drivers on abandoned streets and force them to burn fuel while waiting for the passing of phantom traffic.

Almost a decade ago, Youngstown made headlines by acknowledging this problem. No longer would the city plan for growth, the way every American city had in the history of urban planning. Youngstown was planning to shrink — but to shrink smart. The plan was known as Youngstown 2010.

The city would start by tearing down the abandoned houses that depressed neighboring property values and acted as magnets for crime. Their hope was that some neighborhoods could be depopulated and that the city might even be able to tear out some underutilized streets, in order to dispense with sending around the plows and the patch crews. This revolutionary “right-sizing” concept has since been embraced by cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan.

The plan was called Youngstown 2010, but now — in 2011 — the city of Youngstown is just getting around to removing its first street. Part of the problem is that the state, regional and national policy framework is still oriented for growth. After all, Youngstown can’t go to the Ohio Department of Transportation and ask for money to tear out roads — yet. ODOT’s money is for building roads, and that fuels a dynamic that threatens what progress has made in Youngstown.

Unlike Detroit and Cleveland, Youngstown’s population loss doesn’t stop at its borders; the overall Youngstown-Warren region lost 6 percent of its population in the last decade alone. As yet, however, there is no regional plan for right-sizing. In fact, the region continues with a campaign of widening roads in the ever-more-distant suburbs, while allowing its urban infrastructure to crumble.

As a result, Youngstown must contend not only with the staggering blow dealt by de-industrialization but also with continued government-subsidized sprawl. Commissioners in Mahoning County will soon begin the widening of the rapidly commercializing Western Reserve Road in the quasi-rural outskirts of Boardman and Canfield. The project will widen the road by two feet on each side and add a shoulder “for safety reasons.”

The timing of all of this is suspect, says Phil Kidd, a community activist who represents the region’s increasingly vocal young professional population. Kidd, who blogs for the website Defend Youngstown and works for the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, says that the safety concerns just mask the real motivation for the widening: encouraging the type of sprawling development that has been drawing residents farther and farther from the city for some time.

You wouldn't think SR 224 in Boardman Township would be the type of development the Youngstown region would be eager to replicate. But observers say, a recent road widening is setting the stage for that. Photo: Boardman Neighbors

“They’re using the argument that it’s more or less a safety issue; they’re not trying to make extra lanes or anything,” he said. “This is how it starts. In another 10 years, it’ll be, ‘let’s add a lane.’”

Observers like Kidd fear that Western Reserve is being set up to become like State Route 224, the region’s most important commercial corridor, just a few miles closer to the city, in suburban Boardman Township.

Western Reserve recently snagged Rulli Brothers Italian Grocery store, a Youngstown institution, from a closer-set location. The store has been slowing migrating outward with the region’s population for decades. A generation ago, it made its home near downtown; now it borders farmland, Kidd said.

State Route 224 in Boardman is not the type of road that planners or sustainability advocates would delight in seeing replicated. Traffic slogs down this commercial corridor at a snail’s pace most times of day. The local paper, The Vindicator, described driving on the street as everything from “exasperating and near impossible to unbelievable and scary.” (It just underwent widening.)

The entire six-mile commercial stretch of SR 244 lacks a foot of sidewalk space. So as much as a headache as it is to drive on, it’s far worse for pedestrians. Furthermore, stormwater runoff from the acres of parking lots along this route have contributed to a persistent and costly flooding problem in Boardman Township.

Meanwhile, proponents of the Western Reserve Road widening have argued it would help protect motorists in the case that they have to dodge a deer or some other unexpected obstacle. But that is hardly the biggest safety concern on the region’s roads. Youngstown, and even some of the inner-ring suburbs like Boardman and Austintown, are notorious for their potholes. The giant chasms cost the city thousands of dollars in reimbursement fees to motorists and have even been blamed for a number of deaths.

So how did Western Reserve rocket up the infrastructure priority list in the Youngstown area? Well, again, that’s a matter of public policy in a state that continues to favor growth. Because Boardman and Canfield Townships are unincorporated, they won’t have to pay a dime to widen Western Reserve. It’s a county road — that means the county picks up the bill. Many suburbs, including Boardman Township (population 37,000) benefit from remaining unincorporated, allowing them to foist many of their infrastructure costs onto the county.

The injustice of this whole arrangement is that the costs of widening the road will be shared by all residents of the county — including the people who live in Youngstown. Youngstown’s roads will go unmaintained, and the county will continue to draw money from central city residents and redistribute it into the suburbs and exurbs.

Meanwhile, back in the city, Youngstown activists struggle mightily against so many challenges. The city is making strides to redevelop its downtown and build a new economy around tech startups.

But without a support structure at the state, regional and federal level, will this promising plan for shrinkage be feasible? Or will Youngstown, and its larger region, continue building their way to decline?

Dead-end streets are deadlier than connected street grids. Photo: TheMuuj/Flickr

If people can’t or don’t walk or bike where they need to go, they’ve also bought themselves carbon emissions from excessive driving. Hours lost in traffic congestion. Growing waistlines from spending time behind a wheel instead of on two wheels, or two feet. Stress and relationship problems. And even worse: The suburb they chose “because it’s safe” ends up being far more dangerous than the city they fled.

William Lucy, a professor at the University of Virginia and former chair of the Charlottesville Planning Commission, says that people’s decision making about where to live has such sweeping ramifications that he’s concentrated his professional work on it. And it’s why he focuses on danger and death: specifically, the danger of leaving home.

At a daylong forum yesterday on intelligent cities at the National Building Museum, Lucy could barely wait to lay into cul-de-sacs, which he says were designed for safety but end up being more dangerous than through-streets.

“They turn what should be a 100-yard walk into a two-mile drive, and they put more people in cars for more reasons than they should,” Lucy said. And because they get lulled into a sense of security, he said, parents don’t teach their kids about street safety and the “difference between street and sidewalk and driveway and yard.”

But the greatest danger to a young child, he said, is being backed over by a motor vehicle – usually driven by their own parents in their own driveway. Indeed, “backovers” account for 34 percent of “non-traffic” fatalities among children under 15 years old. (“Frontovers” account for another 30 percent, meaning that 64 percent of “non-traffic” fatalities still involve children being run over by cars, according to KidsAndCars.org.)

Because these incidents occur on private property, they’re not considered “traffic” accidents and data is not collected by national traffic safety organizations. Meanwhile, Lucy said, squeamishness over openly reporting on the tragedy of a parent killing his or her own child with a car leads newspapers to bury news of backovers – missing a “teachable moment.”

Back to the “danger of leaving home”: Lucy compares the rates of homicides by strangers and traffic fatalities. (He studies homicides by strangers because he focuses on the danger of leaving the home: 80 percent of homicides are committed by someone the victim knew.) When people choose “safe” neighborhoods, they are often trying to protect their children (and themselves) from crime. But he finds that the likelihood of dying in a traffic accident is 13 times greater than the likelihood of being killed by a stranger. The most dangerous places, therefore, are those thought to be the safest, Lucy said: the outer suburbs.

He also stressed that “more crashes” doesn’t mean “more danger.” In urban areas, where cars are going slower, there are more crashes — but lots of them are fender-benders that don’t result in injury. Indeed, Lucy said, you’ll find less danger where there are more crashes. But where cars are traveling at high speeds, crashes are far more serious – both for people in cars and people biking or walking along the road.

“Young parents are choosing a location based on schools, but unfortunately, there are not enough parents of young children who are sufficiently aware that young children grow up to be teenagers,” Lucy said. “Nothing is more dangerous than a teenager in a car on a two-lane road at midnight after having had a little too much to drink.”

Perceptions of safety can sabotage actual safety in other surprising ways. Lucy likes to say that it’s the fire department that plans a city. Fire departments argue for wide intersections with gradual corners, even onto tiny cul-de-sac streets, making pedestrian crossings longer and more dangerous. Or the fire department mandates so many expensive fire-code fixes as old buildings get retrofitted for new uses that the project becomes too expensive. And then the outcome is a vacant building, which is far less safe than an occupied one.

Enjoying car-free streets at Redding's first-ever ciclovía-style event, Shasta Living Streets. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Redding, California, with a population of 90,000, is probably best known for its sunshine, breathtaking landscapes and conservative politics. Located 200 miles north of Sacramento in Shasta County, the lush region surrounded by the Trinity and Cascade mountains offers an abundance of recreation, including a growing number of paved multi-use trails that draw large crowds of bicyclists and pedestrians.

The seven-year-old Sundial Bridge, a 700-foot long steel marvel on the Sacramento River designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, has become Redding’s living room.

“It is where everyone hangs out in town, especially when the weather is nice. In a normal community, whatever normal is, you would see that sort of energy in a downtown square, or park, or even a downtown third place, but it happens to be out at the Sundial Bridge,” said Paul Shigley, the senior editor of the California Planning and Development Report (CP&DR), who lives six miles west of Redding near Whiskeytown Lake.

Downtown Redding does not draw a similar convergence of people enjoying public space because like many California cities it was designed for the automobile, and is not a particularly welcoming place for pedestrians and bicyclists.  The city ranks 40th among 103 cities in California “for the number of pedestrian collisions by population,” according to a recent report [pdf]. Just last week, a 16-year-old boy was struck and killed by a driver while walking across a bridge that lacked a sidewalk.

“The town is set up to conduct motorists fast and to allow them to drive up to 50, 60 miles an hour right through the middle of town,” said Scott Mobley, a reporter for the Record Searchlight, the city’s daily newspaper.

“It’s dangerous,” said Anne Wallach Thomas, a former San Francisco resident and bicyclist who helped found the Shasta Cascade Bicycle Coalition. “Some people are lucky and they can go around some little side streets, and if you’re not lucky like me, I can’t ride my bicycle to my sister’s house, I can’t ride to the grocery store.”

In the late 1970s, the city made a poor planning decision to build a mall in the center of town and designed a network of one-way arterial streets. The mall failed not long after it opened, becoming what CP&DR described as “a glum collection of offices, struggling shops and vacant space.”

“Downtown has been pretty much a dead zone for decades. There are areas that have signs of life but the big problem is very few people live downtown,” said Shigley, who a few years ago in CP&DR named Redding one of California’s most disappointing mid-sized cities. But “check back in 10 years,” the report added.

The Sundial Bridge was designed for pedestrians and bicyclists. Photo: Jeff Worthington

The Demand

Judging from the crowds of bicyclists and walkers who show up to enjoy the region’s vast network of scenic trails, there is an increasing demand for bicycle facilities and better conditions for pedestrians. Like the Sundial Bridge, Shigley said weekend crowds pack the one-mile Dana to Downtown bikeway and walking path recently constructed by Caltrans as part of a Highway 44 bridge improvement and widening project.

“It goes from the Dana Drive big box area over to the convention center area, and it’s proven wildly popular that you can get to those two parts of town on foot and on bike,” said Shigley.

“The reason people live up here primarily is because it’s really beautiful. We have access to amazing recreation opportunities. So lots of people have multiple $1500 bikes in their garages. They put them on the car and drive some miles to get on a trail,” said Wallach Thomas.

Driving to one of the region’s popular riverfront trails might be an easy venture, but try walking and bicycling there and the conditions can be treacherous. The region’s bike network lacks good connectivity to major destinations. That doesn’t mean, however, that bicyclists are staying off the streets. Bicycle traffic counts taken last September by Redding’s Bicycle Advisory Committee and Healthy Shasta showed a dramatic 80 percent increase in riders at major intersections.

“I have no trouble being a cyclist here. I’ve been doing it for 10 years,” said Mobley, the newspaper reporter, who is an everyday bicyclist. He thinks many drivers are beginning to adjust to having more bicyclists on the streets.

“It’s been years since someone’s called me an idiot or flipped me off or gunned their engine as they go by just to intimate me. I mean, that’s happened to me but not in a long time,” said Mobley.

Although he finds it easier to bike, Mobley pointed out that a friend, who is also a regular cyclist, got run off the road last year by a driver who “literally came right up behind him and made damn sure he was in a ditch. He hurt himself. Ripped open his knee and was quite debilitated after that.”

Many cyclists are forced onto the shoulders of roads, if there are any, or the sidewalk, where it is legal to ride in Redding.

“On many days while attending Shasta High School I rode my bike several miles a day to and from school. Redding has always offered so many ways to enjoy the outdoors and now has great bike facilities along the river and so much potential for more,” said Jim Brown of the California Bicycle Coalition.

Bicyclists and other vulnerable users are lucky to get a shoulder. Photo: Jefferson Thomas

Changing Hearts and Minds

Advocates say the popularity of Redding’s biking and walking trails, along with a desire to get healthy are indeed causing more people to second guess their traditional mode of transportation. According to the Shasta Coalition for Activity and Nutrition, 66 percent of adults in Shasta County are overweight, along with 27 percent of teens.

“You start off maybe riding your bike for entertainment on the river trail and then you think, ‘wow, maybe I could ride my bike to work,’ ‘maybe I could ride to the store, ‘maybe I could ride my kids to school everyday,’” said Francie Sullivan, a member of the Redding City Council who is a recreational cyclist.

The five-member council recently began working on a Complete Streets policy and decided to make completing it “our number one priority,” said Sullivan, adding that Redding, like other California cities, is grappling with budget woes and 17 percent unemployment. “But the good news about the economy is that more people are walking and riding bikes out of necessity.”

Sullivan, a Democrat who has served in public office for more than 20 years, said Shasta County is a “conservative community” but the issue transcends party lines.

“If you go to the river trail I would venture a guess that a majority of the people who cross you on roller blades and their bikes and who are walking and running are conservative Republicans. Everybody wants to be fit and everybody gets the same mood elevation from being outside,” said Sullivan.

Father and son enjoy Shasta Living Streets. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Challenges

For the first time, Redding has hired a full-time bicycle and pedestrian coordinator who is working on improving the city’s bikeway plan, which until recently had not been updated since 1998. Realizing the increasing demand for bicycle facilities, the Bikeway Action Plan [pdf] envisions increasing the current bikeway network from 124 miles to 162 miles to “improve the connections for cyclists to prime destinations.”

Changing the culture of old-school traffic engineers who are primarily concerned with moving automobile traffic and adhering to Level of Service (LOS) standards remains a difficult challenge in Redding, like a lot of California cities. Road and highway widenings are popular, while road diets are practically unheard of.

“You feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle every time,” said Zachary Bonnin, the city’s new bike/ped coordinator. “It’s a challenge to implement bike stuff.”

Bonnin, who grew up in Phoenix and got an environmental science degree at Northwestern Arizona University, also manages the city’s transportation system, the Redding Area Bus Authority (RABA), which sees anywhere from 2,000 to 2,400 daily passengers.

“They put me on board to challenge the engineers and to look at every project and to say ‘why are we doing it this way’ or ‘why can’t we do it this way’ or ‘what about bike and ped’ access and ‘where’s our bike lane’ and ‘why can’t we add a sidewalk here?’” he said.

The one-way arterials in downtown Redding are like freeways. Photo: City of Redding

The drafting of the city’s Complete Streets policy is also making some of Bonnin’s old-school transportation colleagues rethink the way they’ve designed the streets. The National Association of City Transportation Officials’ recent update of its bikeway design standards is also helping.

“They see these things and say ‘well, it would cost us more money not to do that now, then to have to deal with it later,’” said Bonnin.

The city is also hoping to incorporate improvements to the pedestrian realm in its Complete Streets policy, including strengthening its Safe Routes to Schools program, developing a pedestrian safety program and Pedestrian Master Plan to implement capital and maintenance projects. A pedestrian safety assessment prepared by transportation consultants Fehr & Peers and Oakland-based Dowling Associates recommends road diets on some downtown streets, along with bulbouts and median refuge islands.

The city’s efforts are also being bolstered by a burgeoning group of living streets advocates with ties to San Francisco’s bicycle and transit advocacy community who are working to help transform Redding into a more bikeable, walkable community.

Wallach Thomas and some longtime members of the Norcal Bicycle Partnership, Shasta Wheelmen, the Redding Mountain Biking club and some other bicyclists recently formed the Shasta Cascade Bicycle Coalition to lobby for better conditions and help educate city planners and the public. The group meets once a month.

“The safe and inviting part is important,” Wallach Thomas told the Record Searchlight. “We have world-class facilities for mountain bikes and incredible park trails. What we can’t do is leave the house and safely get anywhere.”

The reaction to Shasta Living Streets was overwhelmingly positive and even skeptics praised it. "One mother said to me, 'Anne, I want to thank you. My kids are in heaven. They're having so much fun,'" said Wallach Thomas. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Shasta Living Streets

Last weekend, after months of planning, discussion and wading through city bureaucracy, Redding held its first ciclovía-style event, Shasta Living Streets, converting a two-mile stretch of Park Marina Drive near the Sacramento River into car-free space for people. It was the first open streets event in Northern California outside of the Bay Area.

“It was a success,” said Wallach Thomas, who was the main organizer. While some city bureaucrats had doubts that anyone would show up, Wallach said well over 500 people turned out on a rainy day. It helped that the event was timed with the popular Whole Earth Festival.

“I think it’s really going to make a big difference up here changing hearts and minds,” said Wallach Thomas. “It has implications and leverage far beyond the five hours of the actual event.”

Wallach Thomas got advice from her friend Cheryl Brinkman, a member of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Board of Directors who has been involved with San Francisco’s Sunday Streets since its inception. Brinkman and her husband Rich Coffin took a trip to Redding to speak to a group of advocates interested in launching Shasta Living Streets.

“Gil Peñalosa, the father of ciclovías, always said that it’s not a competition among cities or towns.  Every city or town which starts a car-free streets program helps the next city or town start their program.  I’m thrilled that Redding had its first car-free event,” said Brinkman.

The organizers of the event actually received an email from Peñalosa offering his congratulations, and encouraging them to carry on their work.

“I hope this event will be a means to many great initiatives,” Peñalosa wrote. “Living Streets will show residents that streets can be used for more than just moving cars; streets are our largest and most valuable assets, the space the belongs to all, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, social or economic background.”

“As other programs inspired you, now you are inspiring others.”

Group exercise was part of the program for Shasta Living Streets. Photo: Jeff Worthington

"This is so cool," was the reaction of many kids to Shasta Living Streets, said Wallach Thomas. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Daniel Malloy, Democratic mayor of Stamford, CT (Photo: Bridgeport City Council)

Harry Moroz of the Drum Major Institute attempts to answer the question this week in a new article for The Atlantic. Talking with mayors from around the country, Moroz heard deeply felt frustration from mayors in both parties about the decision to route stimulus money -- particularly for transportation -- through state capitals rather than cities:

During the bill’s conception, mayors stressed that a state-focused stimulus would bring slow, inefficient results, and that more jobs could be created if money were funneled directly to urban areas. In a report issued last winter, the U.S. Conference of Mayors listed more than 15,000 “ready-to-go” projects that could provide 1.2 million new jobs in just two years.

So what happened, exactly? “I think we were listened to,” says Stamford, Connecticut, Mayor Daniel Malloy, who will run for governor of his state as a Democrat in 2010. “I just think we were then ignored. And I don’t think we were necessarily ignored by the president. I think we were ignored by the Congress.”

Congress' move to "ignore" city leaders, as Malloy put it, is all the more surprising considering how many senior Democrats hail from urbanized regions: think San Francisco, New York City, and the Washington D.C. area.

Sign of the times? Sde-by-side foreclosures in Massachusetts. (Photo: Yovani via Flickr)

Irresponsible
behavior by banks led them to the brink of collapse — a collapse which
would have sent the global economy into a terrifying period of decline
– and so the government stepped in to prevent bank failures (after
learning a lesson from the dreadful experiment with Lehman). But these
interventions have put banks in a situation where they stand to gain
enormously from taking large and dangerous financial bets.

Similarly, government policies such as low gas tax rates and
import protections on light trucks encouraged the development of a
bloated domestic auto industry focused on the production of inefficient
SUVs.

When high oil prices and deep recession then
threatened to push General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy, leading
to hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, the government felt it had no
choice but to step in to keep the companies afloat.

Now the
government owns large stakes in companies that will only profit if the
American public goes car-buying crazy over the next few years.

The
list goes on. The economic crisis that currently afflicts us has made
it clearer than ever that we need to change the way we do many things,
but because the economy is in such difficult shape, it is hard to
pursue anything other than policies designed to keep the economic
engine from stalling out completely. Big transitions must wait for
later.

Can the same be said for sprawling urban development?
Have government interventions essentially bailed out the very places
that proved most vulnerable amid oil shocks and housing busts?

Chris Leinberger argued that very point in a recent blog post at The New Republic’s Avenue:

While there is no federal or private … dataset that
identifies where exactly in metropolitan areas the most mortgage
defaults are, local analyses and some news reports indicate the bulk of
the problem is on the fringe…Thus,
some of the biggest beneficiaries of federal efforts to stem
foreclosures and keep families in their homes are those located in
exurbia.

He
has a point. Foreclosures have been concentrated on urban fringes, so
federal efforts to modify mortgages and otherwise reduce defaults have
tended to direct more aid to exurbs than inner suburbs and city
centers. In addition, rates of home ownership and car ownership are
higher in the suburbs than in city centers, so federal housing
subsidies (including the new home-buyer tax credit and low interest
rates generally) and automobile subsidies ("Cash for Clunkers") have
had a geographic bias toward suburbanites.

To a certain
extent, this has been unavoidable. Most Americans live in auto-oriented
areas in suburban places, and a large share of those Americans are
facing financial difficulty. Any measure that helped stressed
households, including checks of equal value cut to all workers, would
tend to benefit suburbanites more than urban dwellers.

One
should also be careful not to oversell the value of the interventions.
Efforts to reduce foreclosures have actually had pretty depressing results.

But
certainly the government might have done things differently — and
pursued policies designed to help households as much as possible –
rather than those aimed at keeping households in homes they couldn’t
afford, or moving families into homes in unsustainably sprawling
locations. So it’s important to ask: What can we expect for exurban
areas and how will the government’s policy choices affect them?

First,
it’s important to understand the dynamics of the bubble. For a number
of reasons, among them low interest rates and innovations in mortgage
finance, the residential real estate market began to experience a boom
at the beginning of this decade. This energy in housing markets
manifested itself in different ways in different places.

In
areas where housing supply was tight — where it was not easy to
respond to increased demand by building more — prices rose sharply. In
areas where housing supply was more elastic, prices rose some, but
construction exploded. In general, it’s tough to build in dense center
cities, and easy to build on the low-density fringe.

As a
result, rising housing demand led to construction on the urban fringe.
It also led to higher prices in center cities, which pushed many low-
and middle-income families to move to places with cheaper housing
markets, which increased demand for homes on the fringe and led to even
more construction. Rising demand for exurban living led to construction
of exurban housing, and rising demand for urban living led to construction of exurban housing.

When
the crash came, it quickly became apparent that housing inventory on
the fringe had grown out of all proportion to the actual demand for
such housing. Meanwhile, there continued to be excess demand for homes
in center cities.

So while the bust ended up being painful
for everyone, it was far less painful for urban centers. In those
places, price declines brought in buyers, helping to keep inventory
down and price declines orderly.

In exurbs, by contrast,
falling prices went hand in hand with huge numbers of vacancies. Prices
fell chaotically and dramatically as inventory overhang led to falling
home values, which contributed to foreclosures, which added to
inventory, which further depressed home values and led to still more
defaults and foreclosures.

Another way to say this is that
center-city housing markets experienced a correction, while exurban
housing markets entered a vicious cycle leading to wrenching housing
price declines that will likely push prices below replacement costs in
some areas.

This is a dangerous place for neighborhoods to
be. Vacant homes will begin to deteriorate, and occupied homes unlikely
to sell for more than replacement costs (or more than the value of the
owner’s mortgage) will suffer from disinvestment. The housing stock
will become second-rate.

As neighborhoods fall apart,
wealthier and more mobile homeowners will move away, while excess
inventory and rock bottom prices will attract
low-income households. The tax base will fall and so services will
decline, and the general desirability of such areas will drop. Some,
and perhaps many, of these neighborhoods will become slums.

How
do we know? Well, this is a storyline we’ve seen before, both in center
cities during the decades of urban decline and in depopulating Rust
Belt cities for much of the past half century. It is a process that is
very difficult to reverse.

And in some ways, suburban slums
may be far worse for the poor than the previous urban version. In
center cities, density and public transit provide a basic level of
mobility for the working poor; in suburbs, by contrast, lower income
families cannot survive without an automobile. And even with massive
suburbanization, inner-city decline could never entirely escape public
attention, thanks to lingering employment concentrations in center
cities, as well as historical and cultural attractions there. As a
result, there was always some pressure for renewed investment in center
cities.

But suburban neighborhoods are relatively remote; the
very idea of the places is that residential neighborhoods remain well
away from employment concentrations and other destinations. Remoteness
may well allow suburban slums to decline in obscurity.

These
changes will not be universal, just as previous decline in urban
centers was far from universal. Rich suburbs will likely stay rich, and
denser suburban areas may well experience great success by shifting to
greater walkability and density. But many suburban neighborhoods may
find themselves in circumstances that once characterized urban slums –
poverty, deteriorating services, failing schools, and rising crime.

Given all of that, how do the federal government’s assistance programs measure up? Not particularly well, unfortunately.

The
mortgage modification programs have primarily been oriented around
keeping people in their homes (and loans). These have generally not
been that successful; a surprisingly large number of modified mortgages
still wind up in default. Keeping families who cannot afford their
loans in their homes is likely to be bad for the families themselves
and may lead to disinvestment, as those homeowners will continue to be
cash-strapped and may suspect that they’ll be unable to sell the home
for more than the value of their mortgage.

Meanwhile, the
housing tax credit is tailor-made to get relatively low-income buyers
– and first-time buyers — into suburban homes. That’s the intent; the
thinking is that bringing buyers into the market will support prices
and end the cycle of decline.

But this effort may well fail.
Housing inventory in hard-hit neighborhoods is too substantial to be
much reduced by an $8,000 credit (particularly one put in place when
one-fifth of the population is under- or unemployed). And by
encouraging lower income families to move to these neighborhoods, the
government may actually be accelerating the process of decline. Higher
income families already in those areas may not be willing to stay alongside the newcomers, and their departure will reduce the tax base.

In short, the government isn’t just subsidizing sprawl. It’s subsidizing the deterioration of sprawling areas.

What
should the government be doing? Well, for starters, it should recognize
that the housing crash has meant an increase in the relative price of
center city homes, which were already unaffordable for many families
before the bust. It is important to provide opportunities for
affordable center city housing (for its own sake, and to reduce the
rush of lower-income families to the fringe), and that means
encouraging construction in center cities.

In particular,
since it is clear that safe, walkable neighborhoods are in very high
demand and are therefore holding their value well, it is important to
build more such places.

Next, the government needs to stop
subsidizing home ownership and focus on increasing mobility. Home
ownership in an area where prices are declining is an anchor on a
household. It can trap families in declining neighborhoods or in
metropolitan areas where jobs are scarce. If keeping struggling owners
in their homes is a priority, then policy should focus on getting them
out of their loans and keeping them there as rent-paying tenants.

Third,
government officials should learn the lessons of urban decline –
particularly that allowing the decline of the tax base to lead to an
erosion in service quality will create negative social outcomes that
will be very difficult and costly to address in the future. Once poor
schools and high crime levels become the norm, it will take years and
overwhelming investments to turn things around. It will be better for
all involved to step in and continue to support services in
deteriorating neighborhoods.

And finally, policy should focus
on improving physical mobility and urban design in these places, for
two reasons. First, greater mobility — including walkability and
transit access — will be of great use to poorer families which may
have irregular or no access to an automobile. And second, efforts to
improve the design and connectivity of these communities will make them
more attractive and less likely to suffer from complete collapse.

The
problem is that these represent substantial changes — a transition
away from the prior way of doing business — and it is difficult to do
anything other than keep fingers in the dam at this point. This is
understandable.

But with our approach to the housing crisis
(and to the crisis of home and transportation affordability generally)
as with the banking crisis and the crisis of consumer spending, and so
on, the problem is clear — putting out the fire is not enough. Absent
real reform in banking, another crisis will hit us, and soon. Absent an
increase in savings rates, over-indebted households will paralyze the
American economy.

Without addressing the serious imbalances
in the way we plan and build our communities, we can expect a serious,
long-term crisis in exurban neighborhoods. It took us 40 years to begin
to get declining urban centers back on the right track. Do we really
want to repeat that experience?

A map of a neighborhood in Tigard, Oregon. Some of the proposed new trails are marked in blue.

The demand for walkable neighborhoods is up,
but in order to fill that demand, we’re going to have to transform our
suburbs. How that might be accomplished was one of the most vexing
issues discussed at last week’s Walk21 Conference.

Suburban
layouts aren’t about connectivity; they’re about space, with lots of
separated roads and cul-de-sacs, and few direct routes from one place
to another. But the folks at Kittelson & Associates, a transportation planning firm, have one suggestion: bypass roads entirely. That’s what they’re doing in Tigard, Oregon.

Tigard
is a pretty typical Oregon suburb: It’s about 10 miles from downtown
Portland, it’s 11.5 square miles, and about 47,000 people live there.
That low density gave Kittelson and officials from the Oregon DOT the
chance to connect areas of town by building trails that bypass
roundabout suburban street design, allowing residents to easily walk or
bike around their city, and get direct access to their neighbors, local
businesses, and city parks. The idea came organically: For years,
residents had carved out their own informal "desire paths"
to get around. The Tigard Neighborhood Trails Project is meant to make
existing trails safer, and to build new ones to form a better overall
network.

On top of gathering community input at formal town meetings, Kittelson and ODOT also put together a website
where residents could draw and comment on new trails on a Google Map,
as well as point out existing informal ones. Jamie Parks, a planner on
the project, said that the web interactivity made it so that far more
members of the community had input into the project and, hopefully,
will use the trails when they are completed.

The plan is
done, and Tigard has begun implementing each trail, so it’ll take some
time to see how well this idea works out. Still, this could be a great
way make disconnected suburban street networks much more walkable. It’s
a relatively cheap way too — a network of 42 trails is set to cost
approximately $1 million.

Weeds spring up near a foreclosed home in Illinois. (Photo: Getty Images)

The beginnings of an answer, surprising as it is, lie in an MSN report with a scary headline: "Is Your Suburb the Next Slum?" In stark terms, the piece outlines the consequences of a housing (and energy consumption) boom gone bust:

The one-two punch of a crippling recession and higher gas prices have quelled demand for many of the nation's fringe communities from Charlotte, N.C., to Sacramento, Calif., while at the same time demographic trends have begun pushing an aging population back to the nation's urban cores.

That's prompting some planners to predict a huge surplus of large-lot suburban properties in the years ahead — as many as 25 million homes by 2030, according to Arthur C. Nelson, presidential professor of city and metropolitan planning at the University of Utah and director of its Metropolitan Research Center.

Not all of these homes will sit vacant, Nelson says. Many of them will be divided up into multifamily rental properties.

"You will have two or three households living in these large mansions in the suburbs," Nelson says, adding that this will bring property values down and put extra strain on public services.

It's true that an influx of new residents into suburban areas will place new burdens on local governments. But that's exactly why the office of sustainable communities that Poticha was appointed to lead and the $4 billion in new development grants now pending in Congress are worthwhile -- even for suburbanites who still crave more space than they need.

As demographics shift and the recession forces Americans to start living within their means, mixed-use development like the sort that has kept Arlington, Virginia, booming -- will be what helps communities remake themselves. And though that remaking will mostly occur on the local level, Congress and the administration can lend a helping hand to those who want it.

Instead of "transit-oriented development," could it be called "saving the suburbs"?

At the time Sarah Goodyear summarized some of the findings:

The report cites real estate projections showing that two-thirds of development expected to be on the ground in 2050 is not yet built, meaning that the potential for change is profound. The authors calculate that shifting 60 percent of new growth to compact patterns would save 85 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2030. The savings over that period equate to a 28 percent increase in federal vehicle efficiency standards by 2020 (to 32 mpg), comparable to proposals now being debated in Congress...

Less of this, please... (Photo: SkilliShots/Flickr)

Then about a month ago, the National Academies' Transportation Research Board released its own report on the effects of compact development. In many ways it supported the conclusions of the Growing Cooler report. Increased density can produce significant reductions in VMT. And there's this:

The TRB report suggests that if 75 percent of this new construction is of a more compact variety, that emissions could be reduced 10 percent or more from the baseline scenario (and that is not taking into consideration the deployment of cleaner electricity generation and other potential sources of savings).

Of course, as some commenters noted at the time, the TRB report also quoted figures for a future, a "moderate" scenario, in which a far smaller share of new development was built compactly. On the whole, the authors were a bit more conservative in their view of the effects of increased density, and a good bit more conservative in their assessment of how much density might actually be increased.

The difference in conclusions is largely about the assumptions used to build models. Yesterday, Reid Ewing, Arthur C. Nelson, and Keith Bartholomew offered some comments on the TRB report's findings, focusing on ways in which their assumptions differ.

For instance, with respect to the 75% conclusion quoted above, they write:

Their “moderate” scenario assumes that 25 percent of residential development between now and 2050 will be compact, defined as twice the density of trend development.  Their “upper-bound” scenario assumes that 75 percent of residential development will be compact.  We, on the other hand, assume that between 60 and 90 percent of all new development through 2050 will be compact...

The NRC committee’s “moderate” assumption translates into as much as 80 percent of the built environment continuing to be sprawled, despite the forces described above moving us toward more compact development.  For instance, between 2010 and 2050, more single-person households will be added than households with children. Moreover, roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the net gain in households between 2010 and 2050 will be among households without children. Housing demand functions of households without children and single-person households are different from households with children.

In other words, much of the growth in low-density suburban development was driven by an increase in the share of households with children (and with multiple children). From the 1970s to the 1990s, the massive baby boom generation was busy having and raising kids, and they overwhelmingly opted to do their child-rearing in suburbs.

But that same generation is now making the transition from suburban parents to empty-nesters to retirees. At the same time, their children are not getting married and having kids at nearly the same rate as they did.

Now, the decline in the share of households with children will eventually be offset by increases in the overall population, and so demand for traditional suburban development will hold steady and eventually increase. But since so much of the current built environment is low density, these demographic shifts mean that most of the new housing built in the coming half century will need to be more compact to satisfy household demand.

That is, household types that tend to prefer more compact development constitute a growing share of a growing population in a world where existing housing supply is not oriented toward such demand. It would be very strange indeed if only 25% of new development were of a more compact sort.

So why did the TRB report conclude, unrealistically, that levels of compact development might be so low? Well, because the process of modeling the future is hard, and scientists tend to be pretty conservative about it. In particular, they're often reluctant or unable to incorporate into their models things that will probably happen, but which are "exogenous" in nature -- that is, outside the scope of the model.

Take the above question. Just how compact new development can be will depend in part on how successful cities are at changing land-use rules that support low-density, car-oriented development. Given increasing demand pressure for more compact housing in walkable areas (and the developer money to be made building it) it stands to reason that local governments will increasingly change their zoning rules to accommodate denser building.

But there is basically no way to incorporate this assumption into a model. It involves the potential for action among thousands of disparate local government organizations, the sitting members of which have yet to be chosen.

A cautious modeler will be reluctant to go out on a limb on this point, and his results will be conservative as a result. That's part of the way reports like this are written, but it doesn't mean that we, as readers, have to dumbly accept that what the report's authors were forced to assume is what the real world will actually be like.

When talking about development forms, there are many such assumptions biasing results toward conservatism.

For instance, it has been very easy in recent decades for developers of suburban tract housing or strip malls to obtain financing for their projects. So common were such development types that Wall Street firms developed standardized financing terms for builders, which served to reduce financing costs.

Denser projects or in-fill projects, by contrast, were less common and more complex. As a result, financing for them required a certain amount of customization. Not only did this frequently increase borrowing costs, it also led many finance firms to abandon the business for less cumbersome opportunities.

Growth in the share of development that is of a compact form will increase the incentive to develop cheaper and more standardized financing options for compact projects, thereby making the construction of additional compact developments easier and more affordable.

But this process is essentially unmodelable. Things will likely work this way, but careful researchers simply can't guess how financial products will evolve in future decades and plug that guess into their models.

The moral of the story is this: whether the topic is the effect of climate change regulations, or high-speed rail system construction, or compact development, experts will produce analyses that try to predict likely outcomes and which will be widely circulated and quoted by policymakers and journalists.

Airbia: The PRT of the future? I mean, of the future future?

From their announcement:

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? What would a McMansion become if it weren’t a single-family dwelling? How could a vacant big box store be retrofitted for agriculture? What sort of design solutions can you come up with to facilitate car-free mobility, ‘burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation?

While there are some very interesting proposals--like turning old big-box stores into residential units and converting freeway signs into horizontal windmills to generate electricity from the movement of cars--there are some other proposals that make personal rapid transit (PRT) look anachronistic.

Actually, it's the blimp transport proposal that currently has the most votes, so maybe you want to go over to the site and vote for something more practical?

Parasite Catalyst: Converting freeway signs into wind turbines.

Livablox: Turning big box stores into container homes.

Greg Dewar of N-Judah Chronicles, BART GM Dorothy Dugger, BART Spokesperson Linton Johnson.  Photo: Matthew Roth

Johnson prefaced the meeting with some stats the agency is proud to publicize, such as the average salary of BART employees, which is $123,145 (40 percent of the total is benefits). BART station agents make 45 percent more than the national transit agency average, 3.8 percent higher than MTA; BART train operators make 37 percent above the national average, 25 percent above Bay Area average; Bart mechanics make 38 percent above national average, 13 percent above Bay Area average.  BART's lowest paid employees, entry level BART police, make nearly $59,000 annually without overtime (not including benefits). BART police managers are the highest paid employees on average, making $146,468 with overtime (not including benefits).  Senior staff make considerably more, with Dugger the highest paid employee with over $300,000 annually.

Dugger said a lot of the right things, though some of her opinions will not make the regular transit advocates who read this blog happy.  Here's a snippet:

For a state that is as urbanized as California, that has the policy objectives that the state has established for climate change, for environmental objectives, where transportation sources contribute--more than the national average--50 percent of the climate change problem, reducing vehicle miles traveled has got to be part of the solution.  Our economy can't afford for that to happen simply by people stopping traveling.  We're going to have to find smarter and cleaner ways for them to make the trips that they need to make. 

Continue reading excerpts from the meeting after the jump.

• About the elimination of the State Transit Assistance (STA) fund.
  

• State of Good Repair.
  

• Oakland Airport Connector.
  

In that instance, in my mind, it's not a choice of directing money toward operations or re-investment on the core system versus new capacity, because the money that we are essentially borrowing against only exists if we build the extension.

"Do you think that's realistic?"

I think it is because of the nature of the service and the pricing that we're proposing.

"Even with the new ridership numbers, down from 12,000 to 4,000?"

Yes, that was the purpose of the constrained ridership forecast that we did--that was less of a ridership forecast and more of a financial model that said 'what is the least amount of riders that we need to achieve in order to meet these financial objectives.  So it was more a financial modeling exercise than an environmental impact/ridership forecast.  So I think we're going to do better than the numbers that we are basing the financing on.

• Fundamental operating issues.
  

• Parking at BART stations, specifically the charge that BART subsidizes parking for cars, which are driven by higher income riders.
  

I think the biggest constraint to growth on our system is access and unfortunately in some of the less densely populated portions of our service area there aren't great public transit options.  If we're providing a transit alternative that is taking discretionary travelers, most of them reporting they could make the trip in a car if they chose to, if part of our mission in terms of congestion, mobility, environmental impacts, is to get people out of their cars and onto BART for the bulk of their trip and the primary way they can get to BART conveniently is by automobile, I think that is a reality of development and patterns which we don't control, but we're increasingly tyring to be a partner in influencing to support more walkable and bikeable development around our stations and to maximize the benefit of the public investment that is the BART system, we're going to do that.

Automobile access to BART stations in certain geographic areas of our system is a reality that helps us fulfill our bigger mission.

Market pricing: I think we've taken--and you described parking charges as 'toxic' to some directors--we've made a first step toward charging for parking, which was grounded in a policy objective that  had some elements, but we're certainly not there in terms of market rate [parking].

When do we take a next step toward more market based parking? Again, part of it is going to be demand and access constraints and also the total value proposition that we're offering the public when we're in such a competitive market.  I don't think we've tested that as aggressively as advocates of a true market-based parking system would advocate, but I think we need to move incrementally, be mindful of some of those areas with a distance-based fare that are paying the highest fares for their trip on BART and the parking charge is another aspect of making that trip on BART.  So I think we need to look at the pricing of the whole trip and be mindful of what options customers have and not get too ideological about segmenting out the different aspects of the service.

I think there is something more than just trial and error, but some of it is just trial and error.  Our current parking policies in the West Bay require us to go out and look every six months at the fill rates and the notion is that when the station is filling then you raise the parking fee.  Is that driving customers away, are you sitting there with empty spaces, then you know you're pricing beyond the market.

A conceptual rendering the interior of a new BART car with lean bars, courtesy BART

The first new BART cars won't come online until 2014, but BART's Board of Directors, in a special meeting yesterday, reviewed staff's proposals (PDF) for procuring 700 new cars (there are currently 669 cars system-wide) and the possibility of upgrading them with new technology for customer communication, new interior fabrics and colors, and new modular seat configurations.  After months of somber meetings full of protests, arrests, and budget doomsday scenarios, directors were visibly excited to discuss details for improving cars that hearken to the 1970s era, when most were built, and by the possibility of experimenting with innovation and best practices from other major transit systems the world over.

Staff presented the time line for procurement, which begins with the board workshop and public outreach meetings over the next year and ends in 2024, when the last of the cars is expected to go into service.  The first 200 cars will be paid for with $1 billion in pledged funds from the MTC in their 2035 regional plan.  The $2.4 billion needed to pay for the remaining 500 cars will need to be secured at some point in the future. Of the many particular details available to BART, staff reminded directors that they sought to strike a balance between the capacity needs of the system and comfort for customers.

"This is one of the most exciting things we get to do as a board, plan for our future cars," said Director Gail Murray, who represents primarily suburban riders from Concord, Lafayette, and Orinda.

In choosing details about the interiors on new BART cars, Director Murray underscored the dichotomy between the demographics of BART riders, some who use the system as commuter rail from distant suburban ends, and those who live in urban areas and view the system as a metro subway. She asked staff to consider two kinds of material sets or modular interiors that would serve long-haul riders in a different way than short-distance riders.

It's very important to me and my constituents that we have a lot of seats.  So I was trying to find a way of making everyone happy, having the downtown people have lots of room for standing to get on and off quickly, but not sacrificing the seats out in the ends and the suburbs.  Those [riders] are our bread and butter because they provide two-thirds of the revenue.  I think we can't make them stand that long. It's just not good customer comfort.  That's my bottom line.

Staff said they would consider different sets of train interiors, but they were striving to keep the system as uniform as possible to enable any train to run anywhere along the network. 

Staff also presented options to the Board that would encourage better distribution of passengers throughout each train car, particularly at rush hours. BART directors will have to decide whether new cars should have three doors or two, with staff clearly leaning toward the extra door.  Directors will also decide if the new seats will be transverse (i.e. seats facing toward the front and back of the train) or longitudinal (i.e. facing away from the windows).

Current rider clustering with two-door cars. Orange is more crowded, yellow less so

Given BART's analysis of rider behavior, staff determined that more riders would fill the length of the cars with three doors, rather than clustering around doors and leaving pockets of space in the middle, as currently happens.  Capacity difference between transverse and longitudinal seating was marginal.

3-door car with rider clusters

BART seat widths compared with other subway and commuter rail operators

BART directors and staff have committed to extensive public outreach over the course of the design phase, which they hope to finish by July, 2009.  The design and manufacture of 10 pilot cars will take four years, after which they will be integrated into the current system for a trial period.

While most directors were happy with the staff time line, Director Tom Radulovich urged staff to try experimenting with the interiors of existing cars and test rider reaction in real time before they commit to spending billions on conceptual details. "It might be worth mocking up some of our cars. We could, on two or three cars, take out all the transverse seats and put a long bench there and say that this is what looks like, get people's rolling reaction to this thing." 

Radulovich also urged staff to look at the most innovative technologies available for customer interface, such as the flat screen and plasma panels with full graphic capabilities on Barcelona's system, not just the LED line schematic with dots to show current location. "I hope that by 2017 or whenever we order these, LED dot displays will not be 'state-of-the-art,'" he said.

Newsom extolling the glories of EVs, from mayorgavinnewsom via Flickr

For his transportation platform, he leads with the right foot, making a strong link between transit improvements and climate change, job growth, and energy independence.

We must leave the era of the car behind and refocus our investment and energy on building smart, environmentally sustainable transit options

Creating robust mass transportation systems will connect our local and regional economies, create jobs, give Californians better affordable transit options and ease traffic congestion.

Amen, brother.  I couldn't have said it better and I hope all environmental and transportation advocates will hammer on those points this election cycle, namely that any candidate who claims green cred must embrace transit and that public transportation equals jobs. No governor serious about addressing climate change can stand by idly (or sit by in a hydrogen Hummer) as all state funding for transit is zeroed out and environmental review for highway projects is thwarted.  Any candidate for governor that wants my vote will immediately reverse the trend away from funding transit operations and widening highways.

So I'm sure the very first platform point will be a solution for restoring desperately needed transit operating money?  Hmm, not so much.  He leads with "innovative technology," claiming that he's modernized Muni with NextMuni and Translink. While it's important to give riders information and make their transfers more fluid, we learned in the kerfuffle over 311 work orders to MTA that more than 60 percent of total call volume to service were questions about bus and train schedules, which NextMuni provides for much less money.

Gav acted on this matter and came up with a cost-cutting solution, but only after Supervisor Bevan Dufty made it a priority.  In fact, if it weren't for Dufty, the matter of various agencies milking MTA for more than $83 million in work orders by 2010 would have slid by the wayside.  Gav didn't seem to have a problem with SFPD and 311 draining the monetary gains that Prop A afforded the MTA until the press picked up on it. 

Putting out fires is not my idea of visionary leadership. 

What Gav doesn't understand or doesn't want to admit is that Muni has a credibility problem that no amount of expensive efficiency plans and innovative technologies will fix.  It's terribly important to be sure that redundant and unnecessary service is eliminated and that Muni focuses its energy on the 80 percent of its ridership on the 15 most used lines, but when the agency faces $129 million in annual budget deficits, it can't even pay to implement its Transit Effectiveness Project, whenever that clears environmental review.  Muni needs money, plain and simple.  Every transit operator in the state needs money, so until you address this issue, I'm not taking your transit platform seriously.

Although he uses the good rhetoric quoted above, Gav offers no solutions for dealing with concerns of building  housing near transit, nor reducing driving to fight climate change. The state has two excellent bills on the books, AB 32 and SB 375, which in principle chart a course toward situating new homes near transit, toward reducing driving, and preventing sprawl.  As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said, reducing the amount Americans drive is one of the biggest challenges facing our nation.  US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood and HUD Secretary recently announced a joint effort to improve regional planning, reduce sprawl, and encourage transit-oriented development. 

California governors like to think of themselves as cutting edge nationally, so why is Newsom so far behind on one of the most fundamental environmental, transportation, and energy concerns facing this state?  Mobile sources are responsible for more that 40 percent of all the state's CO2.  This might not be so obvious when you're driving around in your 18 mpg hybrid truck here in San Francisco, but the smog downwind in Sacramento is unmistakable.  

As for pedestrian safety and amenities, quality public realm, bicycling, traffic calming, speeding, and a whole host of other issues we livable streets urbanists consider important: nada.  What instead is the solution to our problems meriting inclusion in two platforms?  Of course, it's electric vehicles!

Not to harp on an issue I've written about in more detail already, but I will steal a quotation from a commenter on the Carfreeliving listserv: "Yay, electric traffic jams!"

As livable streets advocates work to make headway in breaking the cycle of American auto dependence, the folks at Planetizen have put together a video narrative that explains how we got here. "The Story of Sprawl," a double DVD set produced by Managing Editor Tim Halbur, is a compilation of historical films dating from 1939 to 1965, documenting the confluence of factors that fostered the quintessential land use motif of the 20th century: far-flung, low-density, driving-intensive residential and commercial development. The discs include commentary from planning notables including Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, John Norquist, Neal Peirce, James Howard Kunstler and Robert Cervero, featured in the clip above.

"The Story of Sprawl" is available now. Check the Planetizen promo page for more clips and ordering info.

A revolutionary personal mobility device. Hint: it's NOT the couple in the foreground

I thought billions in taxpayer money and Wagoner's presidential dismissal were supposed to mark the end of General Motors' bad plans, and I naively hoped the company would replace Dummers with innovative thinking, dynamic product design, maybe even switch some of its production to light rail.  Silly me.

GM's solution for the future of transportation is, hold your breath, a Segway built for two.  I don't know about you, but I want my money back. 

Unfortunately for those of us who already utilize a personal mobility device with more than 100 years proven utility and health benefits, Dave Rand, GM's Executive Director of Global Design, said on Brian Lehrer today that he thought PUMAs should be able to use bike lanes.  Lehrer was skeptical of the device, saying that the last time he heard of a transportation "revolution" was when Segways were introduced, and he noted how small a market share they currently have. 

When Rand was challenged by Lehrer on how they would fit in already dense urban areas, where carving out room for a bike lane is as difficult as it gets, Rand suggested that they would start using PUMAs on college campuses and other areas that look nothing like cities.

Given that Segways cost around $6,000, the new PUMA would likely be more expensive.  There are also concerns about safety and visibility, which GM claims they'll solve with technology links to existing OnStar systems so that the PUMAs will sense another vehicle and slow automatically, at least other vehicles with OnStar.

Rand said on Lehrer's show that users could charge the vehicle at home overnight or where it is parked during the day, the implication being that people have an easy place to plug in at night, as in, a garage.  Has Rand spent any time in a dense urban setting, where most people don't have garages?  Has he seen all those plugs coming out of the parking meters? 

So which is it?  An urban mobility device or the butt of another Kevin James joke?  (Best use of a Segway has to be Weird Al's White and Nerdy)

GM's announcement comes a day after Ohio State released a study that found 20 percent of preschoolers are obese.  I know the mega-corporation lampooned in Disney's Wall-E was meant to be Walmart, but GM seems to be moving us a step closer to the Axiom Hover Chairs that make physical activity quaint. 

I seem to recall from a class in high school something about us evolving to walk upright?  It's funny then that we're finding physical exercise will keep us alive longer.  Rather than figuring out the vagaries of how to incorporate an impractical new Segway into the urban realm, cities should be making more room for walking and cycling.  The good ones already have.

Speaking of that, officer can you remove that thing from our nice new pedestrian plaza?

Photo from NY Times

I really don't know what to say to commenter JournalRhythm below, but I have to put your rap in this post.  Wow.

Similar to the premise behind Tax Freedom Day, on March 1st, the San Francisco Bay Area celebrated (did it?) Transportation Freedom Day, the day when an average household has worked enough to pay off its yearly transportation costs, according to data compiled by the non-profit Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT).  The analysis was completed for the Brookings Institute, as part of a project to develop the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index.

The San Francisco Bay Area is the first among metropolitan regions nationally to work off its transportation costs, followed by New York City on March 7th, and Washinton DC, Minneapolis, and Denver on March 10th (complete list, PDF).  Not surprisingly, regions with higher densities tend to pay off their costs sooner than less dense cities, though the correlation is not perfect, in part because the metric takes into account the quality of transit connectivity, job density, households per residential acre, household income and size, etc.  A complete methodology can be found here. 

CNT and Brookings have developed an interactive map that allows users to show housing and transportation costs relative to annual incomes accross a region.  While it does make sense that most of the urban areas along the BART spine would see transportation costs at 0 to 48 percent of income, I'm surprised Marin is so expensive, in part because I assumed higher incomes.

A screen shot of the housing and transportation costs as a percent of income in the Bay Area

I propose a toast to celebrate our Transportation Freedom, San Francisco.  And sorry about the delay.  If you're really anxious to have the party you should have had on March 1st, we could join Stockton and Lodi.  They don't celebrate their freedom until this Friday.

Flickr photo: Kid Pinkers

Several states, including Oregon, Washington, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Texas are studying the feasibility of the transition and what infrastructure and technology would be needed to plan for a VMT tax.  In 2001, Oregon DOT (ODOT) launched a study called the the Oregon Mileage Fee Concept (PDF), and in April of 2006, ODOT tested GPS systems in vehicles belonging to several hundred volunteers.  Based on those findings, Oregon governor Theodore R. Kulongoski this year called for outfitting every Oregon vehicle with a GPS device that would assess a tax at the pump based on how many miles had been driven, regardless of the fuel efficiency of the vehicle.

In California last month, Assembly member Nancy Skinner of Alameda and Contra Costa counties introduced AB 1135, which would require every motorist to report their odometer reading when they register or renew their vehicle.  The state DMV would provide overall VMT data publicly. It would theoretically be available through fairly specific tracts to aid planning, though whether it would be by block face, census tract, voter district, or county has yet to be determined.

As the bill points out, accurate VMT data is essential not only for immediate compliance with the greenhouse gas reductions mandated in AB 32, but also for smarter regional planning and the reduction of sprawl mandated in SB 375: 

More accurate data about vehicle-miles-traveled--the mileage driven annually by Californians--would provide essential information to guide local transportation and land use planning. Location of transit corridor improvements, light rail, bicycle paths, and high-occupancy freeway lanes now depend on the estimates done by various state agencies, but all of these projects would benefit from more accurate data. Better data would also provide more consistent local and statewide estimates for transportation planning, city planning, and air quality planning efforts. The data would be essential in establishing long-term, historical trends in vehicle use, traffic congestion, energy consumption, and air quality measures, including ozone precursor pollutants and greenhouse gases.

This ABAG graph from a Joint Policy Committee presentation shows steady rise of VMT

One criticism of moving to a VMT tax from a gas tax is that the person who purchased a more fuel efficient vehicle shouldn't have to pay the same as the person who still drives a big SUV.  By that logic, if a consumer wants to drive a vehicle that pollutes more, they need to pay more at the pump.

Carli Paine, TransForm's Transportation Program Director, said that line of reasoning was flawed. "Even people who drive highly economical vehicles have an impact on the roadways and ought to pay their share for upkeep. A Prius contributes to traffic congestion just like a Mustang, but is paying less into the account that addresses congestion and roadway wear and tear."

Paine argued that odometer reporting would likely not be the final method used for monitoring VMT, but that the bill would allow planners to set targets to promote transit-oriented development (TOD) and smart growth.  She said that living in close proximity to one's place of work cuts down on emissions and fuel consumption better than any vehicle technology can.

"It's hard to see how we can be serious about setting regional targets for reducing driving, without knowing how much driving is really taking place.  This bill would provide a significant boost to our efforts to curb global warming pollution associated with driving and land use."

Paine suggested that a Hummer driver living within a short distance of work would use less gas than a Prius driver who commuted 120 miles each way, as illustrated in this graph:

ABAG graph showing the difference in gas consumption by commute distance and vehicle type

Another criticism of altering the gas tax to a VMT tax centers on the concern that government would know too much about individual driving patterns if every vehicle had GPS or other tracking technology.  Those critics have complained that placing GPS in vehicles to collect VMT data, or even self-reporting of odometer information, would violate privacy rights, though AB 1135 explicitly states that personal information would not be public record.

In a recent Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) meeting, several commissioners brought up privacy concerns.  MTC Executive Director Steve Heminger explained that a good deal of information is already collected through routine smog checks, self-reporting to insurance companies, and Fast Trak and Translink monitoring, etc.

MTC spokesperson Randy Rentschler said at the same meeting that "to some extent, this is an imposition on motorists, but we have to get a good sense of how many vehicle miles traveled we have... as [transportation] is the biggest source of CO2 in the state.  FasTrak and Translink have privacy issues, but those databases exist.  When we are given subpoenas by the police, that's the only time that we will release private data."

MTC Commissioner and Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates said: "The privacy issue is important, but the information is necessary and needed to plan and make future decisions.  I think this is an important bill because we need to get VMT and the methods that we use now are so complicated and arcane.  We make assumptions about the impacts of TOD; now we could actually start verifying these things."

The MTC Commission endorsed the legislation at their March meeting. Commissioners Spring and Worth were the only two members who voted against it, citing privacy concerns.  Scuttlebut in the hall suggested they understood this was the first step toward a VMT tax and they were positioning themselves against the bill to please their suburban driving constituents. 

Sacramento sprawl swallowing farm land

The New York Times Wheels blog today has posted a piece that tries to quantify the costs of car ownership and it is garnering spirited feedback.  As we've reported here in a story about the merits of car-sharing, transportation costs as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are the second largest spending block behind home ownership, at nearly $9,000 annually.  

From the post:

American “consumer units” (similar to a household) spent an average of $8,758 on all forms of transportation in 2007 (up 2.9 percent from 2006).  In 2007, a statistically average household, with an annual pre-tax family income of $63,091 and 1.9 vehicles, spent more on transportation than it did on clothing, health care and entertainment combined ($7,432).

While we understand that health care reform is going to dominate much of President Obama's first term, given transportation costs, swelling VMT, and the need to address climate change, we hope he will give considerable support to USDOT Sectretary Ray LaHood's good initiatives, like the one he just announced with HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan to marry transportation and land use funding for support of transit-oriented development and environmentally sustainable and affordable housing under the aegis of strong regional planning.

The DOT and HUD will form a task force to "enhance integrated regional housing, transportation, and land use planning and investment. The task force will set a goal to have every major metropolitan area in the country conduct integrated housing, transportation, and land use planning and investment in the next four years."  The DOT will encourage regional MPOs to conduct integrated planning in their long-term transportation plans.

MTC spokesperson Randy Rentschler said the initiative wouldn't add a burden to their existing work and that they already have a HUD representative on the commission.  "I'm very confident that we're way ahead of the rest of the nation," he said.  "When you're a Californian and you go tell others that they should do like we do in California, it turns people off.  I think we as Californians can be tone-deaf to that.  In this case they are really listening.  This is the federal government doing something like we do in California and applying it nationwide."

LaHood and Donovan will face resistance from lawmakers in states where density has never been a priority and private automobiles are the primary transportation option.  If the comments of one congressman at today's Livable Communities and Transit Oriented Development hearing of the House Appropriations Committee (sorry, listening online and missed his name) are any indication, the road will be long and winding. 

A self-identified former farmer from the heartland, he suggested that Secretaries Donovan and LaHood speak to farmers about how their program could deprive them of the funding needed to keep those roads paved, or "we'll end up a third-world country riding around on our bicycles."

Flickr photo: Uncle Kick Kack

Eisenhower signing the 1956 Highway Act

Far be it from us to take political sides on Livable Streets issues--you don't have to be a donkey or an elephant to appreciate pedestrian safety, traffic calming, and quality public space--but why is it that two of the best columns connecting transportation policy reform, land use, and energy independence have come from conservative pundits? 

First was David Brooks' This Old House piece in The New York Times, which posed serious questions about how we should change transportation patterns and build dense, mixed-use residences that facilitate community.

Then Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell wrote a very good critique of the 1956 Eisenhower Highway Act last week in the Financial Times, even citing William Holly Whyte.  Although you have to read around the knee-jerk politicking that book-ends the article, Caldwell dissects the negative impacts that automobility and sprawl have had on the economy, the environment, and the demographic makeup of America.

From Caldwell's column:

The Highway Act probably has more defenders than detractors. But Mr Obama should be among the latter. The act, which budgeted $25bn in federal money to build 41,000 miles of motorway, exacerbated the very problems Mr Obama has been most eager to solve – spoliation of the environment, dependence on foreign oil, overburdening of state and local budgets, abandonment of the inner-city poor and reckless speculation in real-estate development, to name a few....

The infrastructure network that came out of the Highway Act had higher overheads than the one it replaced. It became a bottomless pit of spending.

The largest building project in Mr Obama’s Recovery Act is $27bn for roads, and there have been no complaints that the government will have a hard time finding things to spend it on. The US has big economic problems. But they have been made worse, and harder to resolve, by a half-century in which, at federal urging, the country was misbuilt.

Wouldn't it be nice if Obama had come out with a bolder stance on building a national rail network?  While his last minute infusion of $8 billion for high speed rail is a good start, that sum is less than a quarter of what is needed to build California's high speed rail line, let alone the many other proposed corridors around the nation. 

The U.S. is far behind other countries that are dedicated to a first-class high-speed rail network, such as Spain and China.  The Millenium Institute estimates that the U.S. would need to spend $250-500 billion annually for non-oil transportation to supplant inter-city truck freight and transform passenger mode share.  They call for another $60 billion annually ($1.2 trillion over 20 years) to increase urban rail ridership while reducing greenhouse gases, dependence on oil, and improving GDP (PDF).

Anyone think Caldwell and Brooks can convince Washington that the re-authorization of the Transportation Act this fall should put more of AASHTO's proposal for $375 billion in highway spending into rail?