ADC Blog

Previewing Tampa’s “State of the City” address, the Tampa Tribune quotes Mayor Pam Iorio saying, “We’ve got to make some very aggressive investments in the future in order for us to start employing more people.”  And what ”investment” is referenced?  Light rail.

An investment is something that yields a return.  In other words, you put $100 in, and you get $108 back.  That’s an investment.  The mayor’s comments are flatly irresponsible for this simple reason: Light rail transit loses money  and must be subsidized everywhere it operates.  There is not one city in the country where light rail covers its own costs of operation, much less turns a buck.

Unfortunately, those selling light rail transit have put a sheen of progress on this 19th century technology.  For advocates like Mayor Iorio, the future of urban travel means retreating into the past to embrace expensive and inefficient systems … and they sweeten the pot by ignoring growing traffic congestion and making automobile travel more inconvenient, hoping people with give up their cars and opt for the transit alternative.  Despite the Smart Growth rhetoric, the reality is that light rail cannot save our cities.

Forbes magazine, via MSNBC, is out with a list of 10 cities best surviving the recession.  This is similar to the Business Week list from late 2009 that I cited earlier.  The criteria for Forbes consisted of three primary elements:

• The three-year job-growth forecast from Moody’s Economy.com;
• Metros with the highest positive change in median sale price for single-family homes according to the National Association of Realtors; 
• The Metropolitan Gross Domestic Product — the dollar amount of goods and services produced within a metro area — provided for 2008, as measured by Moody’s.

With the  unemployment rate weighing heavily on the Forbes list, it’s not surprising that Washington, D.C. and Austin (Texas’s state capitol) rank high since the government sector is the fastest growing sector in the economy.  (That’s not a good thing, by the way.)

Not surprising is the Texas dominance.  Along with Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio made the list.  Michael Barone writes about Texas’s reputation as a low tax state and how that benefits the regional economy, but there are many other ways in which Texas smokes the competition.

Also making the top 10 were Nashville and Kansas City, both with land-use policies more similar to Texas cities than, say, Smart Growth cities like Portland and Seattle.  Speaking of which, it seems that all of the major Smart Growth cities were absent from the top 10.  Austin has a Smart Growth disposition but sits in the most market-friendly state in the union.  Some high density cities - Boston, Los Angeles, and D.C. - are on the list, but these would more accurately be described as “Old Urbanism” rather than the retrofitting “New Urbanism.”

Slowly, but surely, people are starting to realize that a critical factor in the housing collapse - indeed, the first domino to fall - was the severe impact of land use regulations on housing prices.

In the Big Sky Business Journal, Evelyn Pyburn notes that the housing bubble was not evenly spread across our fifty states but was concentrated in those states with the most restrictive growth management regulations.  “The housing bubble was not caused by artificially low interest rates, by the Community Reinvestment Act, or by poor risk-assessments.”

Quoting Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute, who spoke at a property rights forum in Bozeman, Montana, Pyburn says, “Local factors had to be at play, and the primary factor is land use regulations.”

Others have been commenting on this problem for quite some time, yet the groundless faith in growth management planning persists.  Writing in the Collier Citizen (Florida), Peter Gaddy sings the praises of the Evaluation and Appraisal Report (EAR).  EARs are Florida’s mandated 10-year Comprehensive Plans that cities and counties must adopt.  Comp Plans are heavy on regulations and light on freedom and are often drafted by bureaucrats with an overt hostility to automobiles and suburbs.

Most people intuitively know that we cannot regulate our way into prosperity.  But in Florida - a state hard hit by the housing bubble (first) and recession (second) - 67 counties and more than 400 cities are in the process of doubling-down on regulations.

There are many factors and issues that go into winning a political campaign, and the ones swirling about the Texas Republican Primary were numerous.  Incumbent governor Rick Perry cruised to an easy victory over sitting U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and activist Debra Medina on Tuesday to set up a general election showdown with former Houston mayor Bill White, a Democrat.

It’s worth recalling that last year Perry distinguished himself as the anti-Smart Growth governor, bucking a trend in which political leaders at all levels embrace this command-and-control planning doctrine.  In June 2009, Governor Perry vetoed SB 2169 - a bill relating to “the establishment of a smart growth policy work group and the development of a smart growth policy for this state.”

In his veto message, Governor Perry said:

Senate Bill No. 2169 would create a new governmental body that would centralize the decision-making process in Austin for the planning of communities through an interagency work group on “smart growth” policy…. This legislation would promote a one-size-fits-all approach to land use and planning that would not work across a state as large and diverse as Texas.

I’m not sure if this was on many minds as voters headed to the polls, but there does seem to be a strong sentiment among Texans against top-down centralized planning.  The recent mayor’s race in Houston grabbed national attention because of the winner’s sexual orientation.  But earlier Annise Parker had soundly defeated über-Smart Growth advocate Peter Brown, setting up her run-off with Gene Locke.  Brown had made zoning and central planning a centerpiece of his campaign.

Texas has out-performed most other states in terms of economic vitality, housing affordability and other quality of life indicators, and its cities crowd Business Week’s Top Ten list of metros least touched by the recession.

When it comes to Smart Growth and centralized planning, political leaders at all levels and in all states should embrace the Lone Star attitude: Don’t Mess With Texas!

Wendell Cox makes the astute observation that President Obama’s special program of assistance for home owners in the five states hit hard by the housing crisis are among those with severely prescriptive land use regulations - that is, statewide growth management laws or smart growth policies implemented at the local level.  These states are California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan.

This assistance, of course, is a taxpayer-funded subsidy to pay for Smart Growth run amok.  This is on the land-use side of the ledger.

Over on the transportation side, Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning is taking a lot of heat for blocking a bill that is billed as an unemployment aid package.  The bill also extends “government funding of highway and transit programs” with payments to the states coming from the Federal Highway Trust Fund.  This fund receives money from highway users - that is, truckers and motorists - through gas taxes, tolls and other fees.  But transit receives a significant piece of the action.

This transit assistance, of course, is a motorist-funded subsidy.  Although transit is not in-and-of-itself a Smart Growth initiative, it’s fair to say that many politicians have vastly expanded the scope of public transit to accomplish Smart Growth goals.  Part of the reason public transportation is so expensive and unsustainable is because it has grown beyond its mission of serving just those who cannot or should not drive.  Instead, it’s seen as a catalyst for transformative change in our cities.

Whether it’s land-use or transportation, Smart Growth must be subsidized and is therefore unsustainable.

As our country pulls through a recession and begins to regain its footing, more and more people are taking to the road.  According to USA Today, “driving increased by 0.3% in September, 0.2% in October, 0.3% in November and 0.2% in December over the same periods a year earlier.”

That may not sound like much, but it represents a reversal of a downward trend.  A lot of Smart Growth advocates argued that the decline in driving the last few years showed that people were coming to terms with this expensive and unsustainable mode of commuting and were opting for the future-friendly alternative of mass transit.

Instead, it turns out people were just unemployed and had no place to go.  Unemployment is still high, which is why the driving increase is small.  But our prosperity correlates with our mobility, and mobility is both a cause and a consequence of our pursuit of happiness.

More driving, of course, will lead to more traffic congestion since policymakers continue to buy into the myth that transit can relieve congestion.  Far too many dollars are diverted to public transportation at the expense of expanding roadway capacity.

INRIX, a firm that provides real-time traffic and navigation data, has released its latest report of the nation’s most congested cities as well as the nation’s most congested bottlenecks.  Surprise, surprise!  The list is crowded with the cities that have the most extensive transit systems in the country.  This should put to bed the myth that cities can transit their way out of congestion.

The Washington Post reports that Washington, D.C.’s transporation director, Gabe Klein, is angering motorists and receiving praise from anti-automobile enthusiasts for basically ignoring the needs of the vast majority of D.C. commuters.  Rather than promoting driving, as he did previously as an executive for Zipcar, the car-sharing pioneer, Klein has been working to get vehicles off the road.

Klein is selling an urban lifestyle that depends less than ever on cars and more on trains, buses, bicycles and walking. He is following the credo of like-minded transportation planners in Portland, Seattle and New York that public transit can revive ailing cities.

This is what happens when you put in power theory-driven Smart Growthers who are detached from reality.  Smart Growth is a policy that plays off of widely held assumptions and clever rhetoric but is not based on results.  For example, a national survey by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities (released February 16) shows:

• 76 percent of people randomly surveyed say it is important to walk or bike instead of drive, but only 15 percent “often” or “always” do; and
• 72 percent of Americans say it is important to use public transportation or carpool, but only 10 percent say they “often” or “always” do.

Regardless of what we think is the best thing to do, the vast majority of people still drive cars.  Therefore, transportation policy should not be based on expectations, but on the real conditions of the day.  Unfortunately, the D.C. transportation director is following in the same path as Smart Growthers elsewhere who have gained power … and it’s the rest of us who will have to suffer.

Neil Williamson of the Free Enterprise Forum has a good summary - The Siren Song of Light Rail - over on his blog, pulling together several different sources to cover all the bases of what light rail doesn’t do despite what its advocates claim.

In Tampa, Florida, advocates are pushing light rail as a solution to the region’s horrible traffic congestion.  The reality is that light rail never relieves congestion and often makes it worse by constraining the existing roadways to make room for grade-level trains and creating unnecessary hazards for drivers and pedestrians and even buses.  It also diverts resources from productive uses to less productive ones, thus making it more difficult for metropolitan areas to allocate money to things that would relieve congestion - like capacity enhancements and traffic signalization.  Light rail always comes in overbudget and becomes under-utilized when in operation.

But light rail is a public monument that elected officials can point to and say, “See, I’m out there trying to do something about congestion.” Our current political climate rewards intentions over results, so the politicians and planners will be well regarded for their efforts even in the outcomes worsen.

Tampa voters would do well to turn down a light rail proposal.

Over on Planetizen, Tony Recsei ventures into hostile territory to defend suburbia and, more importantly, challenge an essential assumption of Smart Growth - that low density development is worse for the environment than high density development.  Recsei is head of Save Our Suburbs and wrote the preface to this year’s Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.

To take one example, Recsei points to evidence showing that ”greenhouse gas emissions of those living in high-density areas are greater than for those living in low-density areas.”  Well, this is heresy to the Smart Growth faithful, and their responses are predictible … and shallow.

Defeating Smart Growth, which is necessary to defending freedom at the local level, means not just winning the rhetorical game.  It means overturning the assumptions of Smart Growth.  Recsei’s off to a good start.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Governor Ed Rendell wants to raise $470 million in revenue from tolling Interstate 80, which will require federal approval.  Combined with another act to draw revenues from the Pennsylvania turnpike, the state hopes “to allocate $410 million to its 36 public transit agencies and $512 million for roads and bridges in the next fiscal year.”

But as I’ve written elsewhere, unsustainable transit is auto-dependent everywhere.  The good news is that not every political leader seeks to gouge motorists to keep propping it up.  Up the road in New Jersey, newly installed Governor Chris Christie announced plans to withhold $32.7 million from the agency’s $296 million subsidy for the current fiscal year.  What this means - when the rubber hits the road (literally) - is that “train and bus riders could face a 20 percent to 30 percent fare hike and service cuts.”

Sure, $32 million is but a dent in NJ’s massive transit subsidy … but it’s a start!