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Mobility's diminishing returns


04 Apr 2011

By Charles Marohn

Read More: http://newurbannetwork.com/news-opinion/blogs/charles-marohn/14427/mobilitys-diminishing-returns


We like to believe that the United States is the land of opportunity. We also believe, for good reason, that increasing mobility increases opportunity. But when does this correlation break down? When do we go too far, to the point where the cost of improving and maintaining mobility actually stifles opportunity?

- Our friend of past online debates, Randal O'Toole, is a champion of both the auto-based transportation system and mobility in general. His argument is essential that there is a correlation between mobility and prosperity, that the more mobile a society is, the more at liberty people are to follow endeavors that enhance life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Greater mobility increases job opportunities, shopping selection, service competitiveness, school choices and even the gene pool people have a chance to select from when seeking a mate. There is no question that, in a broad sense, he is correct.

- The first chapter in his book, Gridlock: Why we're stuck in traffic and what to do about it, is called "Land of Mobility" and it makes the case that increasing mobility increases prosperity. In it he says,

Economists estimate that construction of new highways contributed to nearly one-third of the rapid economic growth the United States enjoyed in the 1950's and a quarter of the growth in the 1960's. The growth wasn't generated by construction jobs; it came from the increased mobility offered by new roads. It may be no coincidence that our economic growth slowed as highway construction tapered off in the 1970's and 1980's.

I'll note that the slowing of economic growth also correlates to the end of the first life cycle of the new roads. This is the time that the long-term cost of maintenance started to kick in.

- If you live in City A, you work in City A. In 1945, it is not likely that the frequency or the timing of the trains made commuting to City B possible. The poor condition of the trails likewise probably made trips between the two infrequent. Someone living in between these two towns -- likely a farmer, logger, hunter/trapper or a hermit -- would travel some type of slow, winding trail in order to get to town.

- When World War II ended and we started building highways, we changed the mobility equation significantly, alla O'Toole's analysis. The railroad, with infrequent service between City A and City B, was augmented by a highway. Now, any time of day, one could take a 15 minute drive between towns. The advances in prosperity had to be immense. Business owners now had access to double the number of customers as well as twice as many employees to choose from.

- In our final "advancement," we take our lust for increasing mobility to its extreme and start connecting everything. The house in the middle of the country can now get to town taking a high-speed local street to a high-speed collector road to the highway. Because everyone drives everywhere, even for trips that used to be very local, and because we use a hierarchical road system that funnels all traffic to collector roads, the highway has to be widened.

- It is easy to see how the costs of this system are so astronomically beyond our ability to pay. This is an immense amount of infrastructure to serve a population that is not proportionately greater than it was fifty years prior. Yes, we've grown as a country, but our cities have hollowed out while at the same time we've expanded into previously undeveloped areas (see Phoenix and Las Vegas as examples of the latter). Were this theoretical model attached to a real city, it is more than likely that the city would have dramatically more infrastructure today (and all the costs associated with it) while actually having less population.

- Now here's where I get back to the mobility question. The costs are clear to see, but where is the corresponding increment of mobility enhancement? I don't see it. Yes, by opening up land along the highway to development we've given Wal-Mart a home and produced some short-term construction jobs in the process. Sure, by putting the country home in quick commuting range of City A and City B, we've made the owner rich by allowing him to sell to a developer who will make others rich by building them a sheetrock palace that will appreciate by 15 percent or more each year (until the market changes and they go underwater because thir home is dropping in value 25 percent each year), creating many construction jobs in the process. But how has this increase in mobility made us appreciably better off?

- I don't quibble with O'Toole's numbers, and the arguments of mobility advocates in general, regarding the return on investment from mobility enhancements brought about by investments in the 1950s and 1960s. But since then, we have spent an untold fortune on incremental gains in the first and last mile of each trip without any obvious additional value to the macro economy.

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[M II A II R II K]

Transit: Economic development for the 21st Century


05 Apr 2011

By Robert Steuteville

Read More: http://newurbannetwork.com/news-opi...424/transit-economic-development-21st-century


A study of development around three recent light rail transit lines in Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Charlotte found 24 million square feet of residential and commercial construction. That’s a tremendous burst of transit-oriented development (TOD), especially given that much of it occurred after the US housing market began to collapse. The development was largely focused near downtowns and other employment areas of the three cities. Factors besides transit contributed to this construction, but transit was a major impetus to growth. If the construction industry throughout much of the US had behaved as it did within a half-mile of these new transit stations, we would have had no recession in real estate.

Therein lies a way out of our economic malaise. The US building industry is currently on pace to add a quarter-million new houses this year, the lowest since records have been kept for nearly 50 years. That figure will rise substantially only with the right kind of transportation investments, which have historically spurred new housing and commercial development. Since World War II, new infrastructure has consisted mainly of highways. The massive highway construction fueled growth through the first half of the last decade, but that approach won’t work anymore.

When highways were built through countryside close to compact cities, they spurred huge amounts of construction. That, however, was when gas was cheap and the room to spread out was plentiful in rapidly growing metropolitan areas. Highway-oriented development tends to be low-density development, because nobody wants to live in a compact place close to a highway. So a buffer is built, and, beyond that, what Christopher Leinberger has called “drivable suburbia.â€

In America’s already sprawled-out metro areas, the drivable suburbia has long since been built — in fact, we are looking at a long-term oversupply of large-lot housing. In this context, there is little room for new highways. On the outer edges of a few metro areas, such as Charlotte, some officials still dream of new beltways, but most are long shots. Now that the federal government is no longer paying 90 percent of the cost, local officials will think hard before paying billions for these behemoths.

If an outer beltway did go forward, the best-case scenario is that it would promote a new round of sprawl, compounding our greenhouse gas emissions problem and adding to our dependence on uncertain oil supplies. The worst-case scenario is that the highway would end up as a road to nowhere — because the “drive ‘til you qualify†approach to real estate is dead and gas prices are on a long-term upward trend.

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