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Why Are Americans Driving Less?

May 8, 2009, 8:53PM

Infrastructurist has the details on some great news. Americans are driving less, ending a steady climb in vehicle miles traveled since... well forever.

But it brings up an interesting question. Is this really a change in behavior or just a reaction to increase in unemployment and reduction in discretionary trips. Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight fame, takes a stab at digging into the stats. Even though he was wrong about the Oscars, he's right about everything else. He figures:

There is strong statistical evidence, in fact, that Americans respond rather slowly to changes in fuel prices. The cost of gas twelve months ago, for example, has historically been a much better predictor of driving behavior than the cost of gas today. In the energy crisis of the early 1980s, for instance, the price of gas peaked in March 1981, but driving did not bottom out until a year later.
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The exceptionally sluggish pace of new-vehicle sales, moreover, in the face of extremely attractive incentives being offered by the automakers might imply that Americans are considering making more-permanent adjustments to their lifestyles. And the denigration of the brand of the Big Three automakers in light of their financial difficulties -- about one third of Americans have generally told pollsters they will buy only an American-made car -- might reduce some of the patriotic associations with the activity of driving. Building a light-rail system might not persuade Bubba to get rid of his vehicle -- but forcing him to buy foreign might.

I have a slightly different theory why this might be happening that I've touched on previously. The oil shock didn't just affect consumer behavior. It was also the pin that pricked the subprime bubble. At it's peak, subprime loans accounted for around 20% of the mortgage market. With those buyers disappearing, development into the transit-poor exurbs plummeted. People either had to forgo buying their dream home and continue to rent, or purchase small single family and even multifamily homes, all markets which are found more readily in urban areas.

In this scenario, rather than making a conscious decision to living closer to work and services, people are being forced into this decision by market forces well beyond their control. The unsustainability (spellcheck says this isn't a word but I'm going with it... it's Friday) of exurban growth patterns finally became too much for the market to bear and returned to the more stable model of growth focused in transit/pedestrian friendly urban areas.

Crossposted from here.

Healthy Cities Healthy Economy

May 5, 2009, 3:14PM

The Congress for New Urbanism, commissioned by a group called CEOs for Cities, released the results of a study on how New Urbanist growth strategies pays off economic dividends. If you watch the video, try your best to ignore the awful music, they apparently spent all their money on the research itself.

The study found that the recent push for growth into rural areas has had disastrous results which we've explored here and here. Perhaps most importantly, it finds that returning to development in cities over exurbs, is the key ingredient to solving any number of our nation's most pressing problems. Haven't we all been searching for a silver bullet for climate change, lack of affordable housing, obesity, and excessive personal and public debt?

The study found that:

Metropolitan areas with a strong urban core had more stable home values than suburbs and exurbs.
Reducing vehicle miles traveled per person by just one mile in the 51 largest cities in the US, would save $29 Billion ANNUALLY.
The higher the "Walkscore" the higher the home value demonstrating that people prefer to live close to stuff, not far away from it as planners have been trying to do since the 70's. Walkscore is a complicated algorithm developed by NASA or some other bunch of eggheads that scores how easy it is to walk from one's home to bars, grocery stores, bars, doctors office, bars, restaurants, bars, etc.

So how to get from here to there? Instead of attempting to separate uses, we should be encouraging them to mingle. How crazy is it that half our population has to get into half ton of steel to pick up milk and diapers at the store? Regulating intensity of use is the way to restore some sanity to urban planning.

"Smartcode", an open source municipal code created by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company is an attempt to establish exactly this model. It divides development intensity appropriate for each area into "transects." Transects range from natural zones intended to be preserved, to downtown cores with every imaginable density in between. Ideally, it would create a zoning map that radiates outward from a downtown core much like a dart board. Typically, a city might have one downtown core, but several urban centers where much density would be focused. Planners would then focus transit infrastructure to these areas rather than trying to react strictly to demand.

It can work and there's never been a time more obvious to do it.

Crossposted from here.

How to: Save the News

May 4, 2009, 3:16PM

I've been thinking a lot lately about the future of newspapers. It's not just that I can't imagine how we'll potty train puppies or wrap fish in a world without them; I have a hard time understanding how the news will work without them.

The problem is that the interwebs are full of opinions. Mine included. And there's no shortage of niche material on a wide variety of subjects. Certainly we can all learn to get along without the local rag printing movie reviews and stock quotes. But I have a hard time understanding who will cover local and state government. The wire services and nationals that survive the transition to the web will still cover federal government. But how will you know when the City is about to rezone that property next to you? Who will dig through the state budget when our legislators tell fibs about funding?

The truth is, and real journalists will let you know at great length about how this works, TV and Radio have always relied on newspapers to do the real reporting. Listen to your local news broadcast and note how many times they say "in today's such and such Gazette-Herald." Blogs are just the latest to get their start from ripping content from mainstream media.

I have been troubled by the fact that nobody seems to be thinking about this as newspapers shut down or make clumbsy transitions to the web. Urbanophile to the rescrue.

I won't try to add to what he's said (even if you're not interested in the content, check it out if only to appreciate impressive analysis from a citizen journolist.)

One thing that particularly struck me was this:

"News organizations will be more overtly partisan. While some might bristle at this notion, the idea of neutrality and objectivity in news has always been problematic. If it totally went away, that would only be a reversion to the status quo ante. There's probably a longer tradition of overtly partisan journalism than objective. When you read what they used to say about each other in the papers in the 18th and 19th centuries, arguably a golden age for newspapers, it might be more vicious than today, but it was also certainly more entertaining. This also lends itself to a publishing model based on marketing expenditures and support from people with a stake in the message. This seems emminently more sustainable than a model based on a "wall of separation" between advertising and editorial."

The notion that the press should pretend to be completely unbiased, as though they were some sort of angelic superhumans capable of complete detachment from all stories, is a relatively new and uniquely American phenomenon. When you travel abroad and pick up a paper you immediately know which faction it represents. The advantage to this is that you don't have to decipher the reporter's intentions. It's out in the open. In addition, it ensures that there is always a loyal watchdog no matter who is in power. We've been slowly headed in that direction for a while now, but it's time to be up front about it.

Crossposted from here.

The Conservative Case for Transit

April 29, 2009, 12:25AM

All too often support for transit is seen as a liberal weenie tree-hugger phenomenon. While I share the view that protecting the world we live in is a moral imperative, It makes it too easy for conservatives to dismiss it in favor of their SUVs. However, there's actually a very compelling argument for public transportation rooted in conservative principles. David Schaengold of Plumb Lines makes a nice case for transit and neourbanism that I've made previously here and here.

Consider how small businesses are affected by Americans' dependency on cars. Since businesses are obliged by zoning restrictions to locate far away from residential areas, most Americans drive to every store they visit. This means that store visits are often discrete trips that must be undertaken consciously and planned out ahead of time. As a consequence, shoppers will want to visit stores that carry the most diverse inventory--Wal-Mart, Costco, et al.--and avoid shops that specialize in one particular kind of good--the local paint store or flower shop, for instance.

Isn't it ironic that small towns, my own included, that fight so hard to preserve small business and against big box chain stores are in fact actively promoting conditions that favor the corporate invaders? We often fight to preserve the "character" of our community by sanitizing our residential neighborhoods of all things commercial destroying the character of that community in the process. Cul-de-sac's do more to hurt our communities than corner stores. Which do you find more of these days?

David goes on to note that these conditions make entrepreneurship a remote possibility, in effect killing the "ownership society" conservatives would prefer to create.

Does this mean we should trash our zoning codes to help transit and small business? No. Unfortunately our society is so set up to favor the automobile and in turn, strip malls... we'd simply see their impacts become more offensive. But we do have to change the way we think about zoning. Euclidean zoning (that's planner geekspeak for separating uses from each other) has to be limited to rural areas. We should allow different uses and instead regulate intensity of use. We have a tendency in local government to project our own tastes and desires on land use policy. If we don't think that people would want to live in a noisy industrial area or in business districts, our policies reflect that. In fact many people would be more than happy to live in such places if they could. The decline of affordable housing is a direct result of this misguided attempt to "protect" our homes from the hum of our communties.

In short, we're loving our cities to death.

Crossposted from here

The Tea Party/Libertarian Connection

April 26, 2009, 11:16PM

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has done some interesting statistical analysis indicating that the April 15th tax day "Tea Parties" may have been more about (small "L") libertarian backlash than a broader Republican based movement.

Nate draws the connection between per capita contributions to libertarian Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul and attendance at Tea Party events. Campaign contributions are a strong indicator of not only support, but of enthusiasm.

To account for uneven attendance reporting, Nate measured per capita attendance by region dividing the US into 11 regions.

The result seems fairly clear:
What we seem to have is an audience that was about two parts Ron Paul/libertarian conservative (with its strength out West and in New Hampshire) and one part Sarah Palin/red-meat conservative (with its strength in rural areas, particularly in the South). This is perhaps not an accident, since Paul and Palin are just about the only Republicans to have generated some real grassroots enthusiasm over the past few years.
What's the significance? That Obama probably doesn't have to worry about this movement... yet. The Republicans would have a hard time capitalizing on this small segment of the population other than within their own primary fights. In fact that may cause them more problems in general elections as the base pulls the party further and further to the right.

With all the attention to these protests how do Americans really feel about the amount of taxes they pay? A Gallup poll released just days before the tax day protests found more people felt the amount of taxes they pay are fair than at any time since 1956.

Crossposted http://www.newamericanparadigm.com/2009/04/the-tea-partylibertarian-connection.html

Why Are Americans Driving Less?

Healthy Cities Healthy Economy

How to: Save the News

The Conservative Case for Transit

The Tea Party/Libertarian Connection

Derek Young

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