Tag Archives: urban planning

coronavirus changes to keep

This article in Axios lists some changes brought about by the coronavirus that we might want to keep after the coronavirus.

  • not just remote work, but remote hiring and onboarding – There are now people working at the local branch of my company who I have never met in person. Conversely, it seems no more weird to work online with people anywhere in the world* who I have never met in person, than it does to work with someone local who I have never met in person. This gets us closer to the economists’ dream of a truly mobile workforce that could iron out some inequities. (* Time zones still exist, and I can tell you from working with U.S. staff while I was living in Asia, working in the middle of the night still sucks. I worked with someone in South America last year though who was only one time zone away from mine, and that worked out great. India – I love you guys but the time zone thing is just too brutal…)
  • new movies streamed – well, okay, if you’re a big movie buff… but I do see the distinction between movies and TV shows with a series of hour-long episodes slowly dissolving, and the shows tend to be higher quality. I suspect 2-hour movies that take a year or more to produce and then release may be on their way out.
  • more seamless delivery of everything – yes, but we still need street and parking design in our cities to catch up
  • telehealth and teletherapy – yes, this seems good. I’d like to see home visits make a comeback basic routine health care – no real sign of that yet, although my life insurance company did recently send a nurse to my house to check my weight and blood pressure, stick me with a needle and collect a cup of my pee. So it can be done. Here’s an idea – let’s do vaccination this way.
  • Maybe some states are realizing the internet needs to be treated like a public utility going forward. We’ll see….
  • better remote education tech – this article mentions smaller class sizes and better parent-teacher-school communication. I agree – some of what the remote model lacks could be offset by more one-on-one and small-group attention where it will do the most good.

I’d like to add timed tickets to this list. I’ve seen a few museums, parks, etc. do this in the past, but it has become much more prevalent to buy a ticket that gets you in within a certain window during the day, and this has a huge crowd control benefit. Things are just much more enjoyable when they are less crowded. I also like restaurants and stores that let you check in online, then text you when your table or customer service person is ready for you. Let’s get rid of standing in line forever!

metropolitan planning organizations

If you live in a decent sized metropolitan area, your metropolitan planning organization forces local officials and other stakeholders to get together across political jurisdictions and make decisions about how to prioritize transportation projects in the context of a long term plan. The results then get sent up to the state, which uses it to allocate funding.

The article has a number of criticisms. MPOs have tended to favor highways over other forms of transportation, and these have often disrupted disadvantaged communities. They have tended to favor suburban areas. They have tended to favor new construction over maintenance of what is already constructed.

I have always thought MPOs are good even if they are imperfect because (1) they force stakeholders to work together at the right geographic and economic scale for infrastructure planning, (2) they force some kind of long term plan to be put down on paper, (3) they force the prioritization of site-level projects to be justified in the context of that long term plan, and (4) they bring in state and federal money to get projects in the ground based on the priorities of local actors that have “skin in the game”. In the absence of this process, either political jurisdictions would plan in isolation, or more efficient but less democratic structures would be created that largely cut out elected officials, voters and taxpayers. Engineers and officials not trained in planning would tend to jump right to analysis of site-level projects without a real plan. State and federal funding either would not happen at all or would be based on political lobbying. Corruption would likely be more common. And systems that are less in public view would tend to be neglected until major, obvious failures occur that affect peoples’ lives.

What I just described covers the state of water infrastructure in the U.S. pretty well. I think we should expand MPOs to cover other kinds of infrastructure rather than just transportation. MPOs are one of the reasons that politicians and the public think infrastructure=transportation and transportation=infrastructure. They do some rational planning and economic analysis at roughly the rate geographic scale and time period, then feed that into a messy political process to rank site-specific, short-term projects, then direct taxpayer money to projects that are likely to benefit the citizenry, while sharing the wealth at least a little bit. Unless you want to go authoritarian, it’s a reasonable approach to get infrastructure done in a democracy. I think it’s better and more equitable than the ratepayer-funded utility model followed in the water, energy, and communication industries.

10% drop in vehicle miles traveled predicted long-term

KPMG says some of the sharp reduction in vehicle miles traveled during the coronavirus crisis is likely to be permanent, with people getting used to working from home and shopping online. The numbers they came up with are a 9-10% reduction in vehicle miles traveled (this factors in both a decrease in personal vehicles and an increase in delivery vehicles, if I understand the article) and a drop in car ownership from 1.97 to 1.87 per household.

Google’s pedestrian foot traffic data

The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article showing foot traffic at various locations around the city during the coronavirus shut down compared to average. As might be expected, foot traffic is down pretty much everywhere except grocery stores, where it is up slightly. This matches my personal observations. It doesn’t match the media accounts of crazy lines at grocery stores and big box stores in the suburbs. Maybe this is because in a dense walkable city, we have many small stores instead of a few large stores, and people tend to spread out their shopping over the entire day and week and to buy just a bag or two at a time that they can carry home. There are odd, sporadic shortages, but I have not observed any extreme shortages of basic goods.

The data supposedly come from Google. I tried to find out more about how, where and when Google is collecting this data, and came up short after 15 minutes or so of looking.

Now, I admit that clearly dense cities with a lot of social interaction have their down side right now. The big dense cities are also where the most international arrivals happen, and this factor along with density might be why they are the worst places to be right now. Hopefully they also have the largest medical facilities with the most experienced medical staff, but whatever we have is clearly not going to be enough to help everyone who needs help in the next month or so.

solving the delivery problem

Wired has an article on solutions to the “last mile” delivery problem. A couple interesting stats are that 5% of deliveries don’t reach their destination on the first try (that sounds pretty good to me) and that this costs retailers about $18 each time. Most of the proposed solutions just have to do with better data on locations and delivery preferences.

This article repeats the claim that deliveries increase traffic congestion, although it admits this is “difficult to measure”. I am still a bit skeptical of this. I am willing to follow the evidence wherever it leaves, but logically I feel like these claims leave out all the trips individuals are not taking to the store. If a delivery truck brings 100 packages to 100 homes, that could mean 100 car trips that were not taken. And that was just one truck, although it is kind of a big obvious smelly one and it might be blocking the street, a crosswalk, or a fire hydrant for a few minutes. Those trucks might also be competing for city and suburban streets at times when people are coming and going from work trips, which could increase peak traffic congestion.

minimum parking requirements – just get rid of them!

This Vice article makes a pretty strong case that minimum parking requirements should just be gotten rid of. There are so many complicated problems cities are grappling with. This one isn’t all that complicated. Seriously, just get rid of them. This isn’t banning parking, it is just letting the market decide. Free parking is not free, it is expensive and the cost is shared between car owners and non-car owners, but car owners have come to feel entitled to these subsidies and take them for granted. If you want to pay for a car and pay for parking, go ahead and do so. If you don’t, you can spend your money on other things.

best urban planning books of 2019

Planetizen blog puts this out every year. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • Better Buses, Better Cities. I ride buses a lot. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about best practices in running a bus authority. I would miss them if they went away in my city, but I also know they could be a lot better. I’m talking to you, Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority.
  • Cities, the First 6,000 Years. It sounds like this book goes into ancient cities and how they functioned on the ground.
  • Choked: Life and Death in the Age of Air Pollution. Because it’s possible that if we tackled only one environmental issue in cities, this should be it. Solving air pollution would be a huge gain for public health in itself and would force us to make progress on a lot of other problems.
  • Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life. Because the pictures look really cool, and coming back from a European city and telling your friends in words how much better it is than our cities just doesn’t cut it. They just need to go there. But a book with really cool cartoons of European cities might be an affordable start.
  • Vancouverism. It’s about Vancouver. Actually, I don’t know that I am likely to read this. But I have heard good things, have never been, and would like to go. I’ve also heard that housing prices are a problem there. But I’m going to state the inconvenient truth: most U.S. cities are not that great. Cities that are great are in very short supply, and thus the wealthy bid up prices there until only they are able to live there. So let’s build more cities that are at least good.

June 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!

Most hopeful story:

  • There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.

 

urban planning trends to watch in 2019

This one is from Planetizen. One interesting point is the role that (lack of) land use regulation has played in bringing the climate crisis about, and how that is not really part of the conversation at the federal level, but maybe could be.

The Green New Deal also provides the latest example of the lack of understanding about the role of land use regulations in housing affordability and climate change. So far, the Green New Deal lacks any specific land use regulation suggestions. Planners realize land use regulations can be a key tool in mitigating climate change, achieving environmental sustainability, and encouraging shared economic prosperity. Getting land use wrong, however, is how we ended up in the current crisis…

After programs like the interstate highway system, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, and the federal Property Tax Exemption created some of the most egregious environmental and social justice mistakes of the 20th century, taking the federal government out of the equation now threatens to cement the legacy of these errors for perpetuity…

In 2019, climate change action, and questions about the effectiveness of future climate change action, must be measured in urban growth boundaries, flood insurance maps, and reduced Vehicles Miles Traveled (VMT). Big talk and subsequent capitulation won’t suffice. (I’m reminded of the implementation of VMT as the legal metric of environmental impact in California, which buckled under pressure from the Southern California Association of Governments.) The built environment will eventually render the failures of compromise.

I do in fact remember Al Gore talking about suburban sprawl. And that is the last I remember a prominent politician talking about it. I don’t think anyone would want to see zoning regulation coming from the federal government. That is not how we do it. But the idea of tying federal funding to a comprehensive infrastructure plan at the metropolitan area sounds to me like it could work. We could think big and make it a lot of funding through an infrastructure bank that served a counter-cyclical function in the macroeconomy, and we could think even bigger by considering all forms of infrastructure from water to the food system to green infrastructure.