Transportation, Development, Priorities

March 24, 2011 at 12:05 pm | Architecture & Urban Design, Transit & Infrastructure | Tags: , , ,

“This transit project’s nothing but a handout to developers!”

Words similar to those are often heard in the United States when cities plan transit projects (it was certainly heard during the discussion around Fort Worth’s own streetcar project). The plan to spend ~$80 million, from the Near Southside and TRV TIFs combined with a federal grant, to build a streetcar linking the districts with Downtown, just as other TIFs spend their money on infrastructure, was seen by some as a handout to developers because one of the stated goals of the project was encouraging higher-density transit-and-pedestrian-oriented mixed-use development. “If these developers want it, they can pay for it!”

So, where are the calls for developers like Cassco or the homebuilders in Cleburne to pay for the nearly $1.5 billion Southwest Parkway, which is undeniably a benefit to projects of theirs like Edwards Ranch (there’s a Whole Foods planned there – but not until the Parkway is built)? Where are the calls for developers like Hillwood to foot the bill for the I-35 widening that will undoubtedly benefit developments like Alliance?

To call a transit project a “handout for developers” and a roadway “necessary public infrastructure” is an enormous double-standard. The reality is that every transportation project is also an economic development project – every transportation project has impacts for development.

Transportation and development/land use are deeply, deeply entwined.

This gets to one of the hearts of the sprawl vs. urbanism debate – the reality that sprawl is not the result of the free market simply choosing a totally car-dependent lifestyle. The invisible hand of government has led the way since WWII, resulting in the built environment we have, and are paying for (in more ways than one), now.

Without hugely subsidized roadways and freeways (the reality being that roads don’t even come close to paying for themselves, as even highway-crazed TxDOT has admitted), there wouldn’t be the sort of car-dependent development we have now. Those same roadways mean that when we do have moderately successful urban places, they’re little pockets surrounded by parking (as seen downtown and on 7th) or choked with excessive car trips. Or, put more simply:

You get the development you design your transportation systems for.

Bob Commuter, who votes against transit “handouts” and drives I-30 into work, is enjoying something that was just as much a handout to a developer – it’s the handout that brought him his home.

When, as Fort Worth has done, you only design your transportation system for one thing (moving as many cars as fast as possible), you start to get problems. Build lots of intracity highways, which make it easy to empty out the core and live huge distances away from work (and hiding, or at least delaying, the consequences of that choice), and you encourage more car-dependent development. Which means more traffic. Which means you build more lanes and roads. Which makes it more appealing to build car-dependent development. Which means more traffic. Which means you build more lanes and roads. Etc. etc., ad nauseum.

It’s an arrangement that worked for a while, but is dependent upon having plenty of land and cheap energy. The world is finding out that the “cheap energy” side of things isn’t working out quite how they’d like – oil is a finite resource that has numerous sticky issues related to its extraction and refining (not the least of which is that our country has little of it, and places that have lots of it tend to A) not like us very much or B) be very unstable). “Drill here, drill now, save money” is a false hope – oil’s price is set on the global market, and we don’t have enough to make an impact on prices here at home even if we do drill more. Some hope to switch all our cars and big box stores over to natural gas, but natural gas has its own finite supply and extraction issues and in reality, it’s probably not practical to just switch everything over to it and hope that business-as-usual continues on its merry way. Nor does just switching everything over to natural gas with no other changes address the other problems with business-as-usual development.

Decrying transit as a “handout to developers” while allowing things like the Southwest Parkway and I-35 widening to roll on unopposed (and unmatched by alternatives) only results in business-as-usual. Your commute might even get a little better – temporarily. In the end, however, things don’t work out – because Fort Worth provides few alternatives to the “drive ’til you qualify” and “car trips for every single thing” lifestyles, those new roads will fill up and the cycle repeats. It has happened before, and it will happen again (unless fuel problems stop it cold before it happens too many other times).

A lot of things have happened in the last several years to show cities around the country that business-as-usual is a dead end. Cities are seeing people wanting to move back to the core neighborhoods and have transportation and lifestyle choices beyond “drive, or…drive.” Other cities are tearing down their urban highways and reclaiming that land for development and public space – removing the barriers between the natural energy and economies of the city. Here in Fort Worth, though, not only are we keeping around our urban highways (or spending a billion widening them), we’re literally spending $1.5 billion building a highway from the 1960s – the Southwest Parkway, which dates from that era (though we’re tolling the modern incarnation) – while transit projects struggle and volatile gas prices nudge towards $4/gallon. It makes one wonder how serious Fort Worth is about creating a future for itself. We’re very happy and complacent, since we’ve had a lot of population growth – but what sort of growth? We brag because we’re “not landlocked,” meaning the city’s A-OK with sprawling to the horizons no matter the cost to our air quality and pocketbooks (in the form of exurban transport & development infrastructure, extreme car dependency draining wallets, pollution and health costs from emissions and accidents, etc.) Perhaps in 2011, with the possibility of change brought about by the upcoming mayoral and council elections, we should be making some tough choices as to the city’s priorities and future.

Consider the following chart, which my friend Patrick Kennedy, professional planner/designer and author of WALKABLE Dallas/Fort Worth put together:

It helps visualize the difference in transportation modes between lively, active cities (places like New York, Paris, Amsterdam, etc.) and the empty, homogenous anti-places we’ve built so much of in the US (like, frankly, most of the metroplex – the freeway frontage/parking lot/big box/garage door world that forces everybody into a single mode).

Also in the chart is a “contextual impact” axis. See, every transportation method has inputs and outputs – inputs are things like cost and infrastructure, outputs are things like noise and pollution. These outputs are, obviously, dramatically larger with car infrastructure compared to things like walking, biking, and transit. Build a lot of it, and you reduce the quality of space, making it less safe and less desirable – which reduces the appeal of being a pedestrian, cyclist, or transit rider further. Which then results in people saying things like “why are we building transit/bike lanes/sidewalks? Nobody rides buses/rides streetcars/rides bike/walks!” And the cycle strengthens itself. As Patrick has said:

We lose. We lose: Our wallets. Our sanity. Our quality of life. Talent looking for a place to live and work. Businesses looking for places for their employees to live. Major events looking for a venue.

This is an unsustainable cycle – and I’m not talking “sustainable” in the hippy-dippy granola & Birkenstocks sense. I’m talking in economic and livability senses as well as environmental.

Our city has talked some good talk on occasion about making a more livable and attractive central city (to be clear, this means a larger place than Sundance Square). We’ve done some good things – Bike Fort Worth, the Urban Villages program, etc. – but we still have a “have our cake and eat it, too” mindset. Trouble is, the cake we’re eating spoiled years ago.

If we are to position Fort Worth in a competitive place for a future without cheap oil and with more people demanding livable neighborhoods and transportation choice, let’s not keep building the infrastructure that encourages the bad kind of development while waffling on the kind that encourages the good.

(Instead of building things like Southwest Parkway and the I-35 widening, why not consider the opposite – tearing down the urban highways? Remove them all, incrementally replacing them with urban boulevards for a fraction of the cost of widening/maintaining/creating new ones. It’s important to link regional economies – like Fort Worth to Austin or Houston – via every possible method (car, plane, high speed rail), but these urban highways are harmful to the local economy in ways many don’t think about. They block local connections, one of the foundations of the urban economy. Reduce regional connectivity a bit in the interest of dramatically improving local connectivity – replacing the urban highways with boulevards and street grids unlocks some of the most potentially valuable land in Fort Worth for development and investment, and improves desireability and livability.)

As Patrick points out about the similarly costly “Project Pegasus” highway project in Dallas:

Hmmm. Could Project Pegasus be the corpse of the 20th century mindlessness? What is the Return on Investment of that $2.5 billion. The certain answer would be “less traffic, more commerce, less waste, and RAINBOWS!”

Of course, we all know that the only real by-product will be the rainbows caused by all the more particulate matter in the air. Making driving “easy” only brings more traffic which will then clog the roads further.

And if this is to just appease the mess created by the current population and we like to tout that Dallas will double in population in 20-30 years, as if the “alivability” of highway culture won’t act like a flatline to the desirability necessary for growth, what happens if/when we do double in size? Do we again double all of these roads to accommodate the new people? Will there even be a city left? Or how about one worth caring about?

Welcome to Dallas. You must now spend 40% of your income on transportation.

We were discussing this sort of thing recently, and Patrick added something I can’t help but want to quote in full:

Last I checked DFW had second most lane miles per capita of any major American city behind Kansas City. It probably isn’t too far of a stretch to suggest they rank quite highly in the world then.

As per physicist Geoffrey West’s work, a highly functional city gets superlinear outputs as it grows, ie bigger it gets the more wealth it generates but also bad outputs like crime & waste go up too.

On the flipside, the bigger a functional city gets the less and less inputs it needs. The inputs in the economic equation of cities are energy & infrastructure. As a city gets bigger and bigger, it should need less and less of these to function.

Therefore, a functional city has low cost inputs, more profit (but also more problems, as stated). Needless to say sun belt cities rank very poorly by these metrics.

The sublinear input/superlinear output is the efficiency equation of cities and the very reason they exist. We’re building anti-cities, and my guess is, if we don’t change our ways, we’re busy building the next Detroit or catastrophic failure.

In the 20s, Detroit was considered the “Paris of the West” as in western Hemisphere. Nobody would have ever dreamed it would become the bombed out wasteland it is today. It was an economic monoculture. We’re now in the post-industrial age where PLACE matters most and what defines a city rather than industry. Dallas and Fort Worth suffer from a homogeny of PLACE and will similarly fade away in fifty years.

Monocultures are not resilient. Our cities and economies are dependent entirely on cheap gasoline. With the volatility in oil prices, the equation is right for some certain gas price to act as a sort of tipping/freeze point where the entire city siezes up and can no longer function.

Invariably, this sort of talk brings about cries of “if you don’t like it, LEAVE,” which is a incredibly shortsighted mindset. There are a lot of skeletal urban structures in Fort Worth and Dallas, like our downtowns and our near-downtown neighborhoods. They need the proper seasoning and catalysts to take off and give the city an alternative to business-as-usual – with the right smart investments, we can get enormous benefits to our economy and our quality of life and place.

So, both transit and highways are development incentives – toward different ends. One creates development that is sustainable economically, socially, and environmentally, and one does not. Choose wisely.