Over the weekend that silly pinko rag the Wall Street Journal ran a long article looking at suburban “retrofitting”– the process of going back a trying to figure out how to make the ‘burbs look and act less like ‘burbs and more like those places where people ride bikes to work and hang out in coffee shops.

It tends to involve creating better non-automotive infrastructure (useful sidewalks, quality transit, etc.), and finding ways to cluster retail, housing, and workplaces together with places where you can chill out and have fun. Towns across the country are getting serious about this not out of some irrational and treasonous love of European lifestyles, but rather because of what the market is saying. It turns out that old people especially care about living less car-dependent lives and that the demographic growth of old people in the coming decades will be epochal.

But the olds are just part of a broader shift. Over the weekend we looked at a new report from the Victoria Tranport Policy Institute called “Where We Want To Be.” The report starts from the same premise of market demand:

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There’s more good news on the roads front, as congestion continues to decline–albeit slowly–in US cities. A new report from the Texas Transportation Institute finds that in 2007 Americans wasted an average of 36.1 hours stuck in traffic, down from the 2005 peak of 37.4 hours.

Collectively, the numbers are still large, of course. TTI figures congestion cost the economy $87 billion and was responsible for our squandering 3 billion gallons of gas and 4 billion hours of our time. The latter figure works out to 500,000 years.

Los Angeles came out worst among cities, with congestion costing drivers there an average of 72 hours a year. Washington DC was second (62 hours), followed by Atlanta (57), Houston (56) and San Francisco (55).

Wichita, Kansas, ranked best (but who lives in Wichita?).

Of course, this all feels a bit dated as the study year of 2007 only takes us to the cusp of the recession and a sharp and unprecedented reduction in how much we drive. The authors note this, but they frame it as a “lull” before the coming shitstorm of congestion when the economy recovers. You know, when everything starts ticking along like it was in 2005.

It’s our humble opinion, however, that the “recovery”–whenever and however that might occur–is not going to resemble what came before. Right now, “recovery” feels inevitable to all of us, because that’s how we’re wired to think. If you’d asked a Japanese economist in 1992 when that country’s economy would recover, he certainly would have given you a date prior to 2009. But things have never quite recovered there.

Many measures of American life have probably topped forever–vehicle miles traveled being an obvious one, but also things like retail space and car sales.

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Transportation funds from the stimulus bill are being spent stupidly, it seems. The $35 billion dedicated to roads, bridges and transit could be creating many more jobs and doing a lot more to improve the country’s infrastructure.

Smart Growth America came to this conclusion in a new report looking at the first 120 days of stimulus spending. The document highlights the fact that *repairing* roads and bridges is substantially more effective at creating jobs than *building* roads and bridges. Plus a lot of our roads are in crappy shape anyway (about a third might fall into this informal category), so more than just the jobs angle, it’s like mama taught you: take care of the things you got before you start buying new ones. Yet $6.6 billion, or about a third of the stimulus roads money allocated so far, is going toward new highways.

Another transportation priority should be building out a more serviceable transit network. But SGA finds that only a tiny percentage of stimulus funds–$185 million–has been allocated to public transportation. This in a country where 50 percent of people have no access to it at all and many of those who do find the existing service next to useless.

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When the New York Times does something big and ambitious you’re kind of required to mention it or you seem like you live under a rock. It would be like ignoring Carlos Slim at cocktail party or something. So: This week in the Times Magazine there is a generally-quite-good package on the theme of infrastructure. To save you the energy of skimming the table of contents and then feeling guilty for not reading anything, here is a summary:

• America has six times more retail space per capita than any European country. In his Consumed column, Rob Walker speaks with two experts we’ve done Q&A’s with on this site–Julia Christensen about re-using empty big box stores and Ellen Dunham Jones about reclaiming dead malls — who both support a building ban on new retail space. (Fat chance, kids.)
• Ray LaHood thinks of America as “one big pothole.” He thinks families will still have cars in the future, but one or two instead of two or three. And he’s not coordinated enough to skateboard.
• An excellent and rather comprehensive article about the California High Speed Rail project looks at the miserable condition of the Golden State’s passenger rail system today, the immense logistical challenges in a building a dedicated rail link (it makes fighting a war seem easy) and compares California’s efforts to the famous TGV in France, which got its start in 1971 and these days always runs on time.
• Whatever you do on the internet–play first-person shooter games, hang out on a Karl Marx discussion board, etc.–the information is going to pass through a data center. Where are these data centers? How many are there? Nobody is too keen to discuss specifics. But today they’re big ugly air-conditioned warehouses full of servers and generators. Tomorrow they’ll probably be more like electrical substations.
• The way we build bridges in this country often yields unattractive structures that aren’t all that durable. An example of a project done right though is the rebuilt I-35W bridge in Minneapolis. It’s fetching to look at and smartly integrates a new generation of electronic monitoring technology.
• Lovely pics by Jamey Stillings of a $190 million bridge being built over the Colorado River to connect Las Vegas and Phoenix without having to drive over the Hoover Dam. (Sample above)
• A video presentation of some radical proposals to remake Paris for the 3rd millennium. One scheme would create a Parisian knockoff of Central Park. Another has “a 1000 kilometer-long farmer’s market and garden.”
• Futuristic design ideas: an airport off on its own island like Lost, a second deck on NYC roadways for eco-style golf carts, and clean green waterwheel generators installed along the city’s waterfront so you always feel like you’re on a riverboat.
• Some famous hippie architect in Austria thinks that prisons shouldn’t be the most horrible buildings ever imagined. Plenty of Americans disagree though, so we keep building them that way. Here’s a slideshow of Austria’s fancy experimental “penitentiary.”

Sometimes the media is just really annoying. That’s a common observation, and I’m a member of the tribe, but still.

Case in point: If you happened to see a headline this morning about a new study that examines the climate impact of various transportation modes, it likely read something like, “Train Can Be Worse For Climate Than Plane” or “Airliners Can Be More Eco-Friendly Than Trains.” If you are an appropriately cynical reader of headlines, that word “can” probably tipped you off that something weird was afoot.

After all, in the realm of pure possibilities, of course planes can be greener than trains. So can an SUV with 7 passengers. The real question is not about exceptional cases, but about averages.

And, in spite of a lot of overheated prose suggesting the study has “seriously undermined a major piece of received wisdom regarding transport: namely, the belief that railways are more eco-friendly than airliners” — that’s not really the case at all. This selfsame study shows that, in general, trains are substantially more climate-friendly than planes and vastly moreso than cars and light trucks. (Click on the link and see Fig 1)

What the headline writers did was cherry pick the trains with the highest calculated c02 emissions–the Green Line in Boston–were a bit higher than the emissions for some aircraft. And therefore planes can be greener.

For the sake of argument let’s accept all the assumptions made by the authors, who calculate that when you include infrastructure in the carbon footprint of rail, it’s bigger than most people think. There’s nothing new in that.

What’s totally missing in their “complete” estimates for these various transportation modes are the virtuous effects of rail: creating denser communities where people tend to walk more, own fewer cars, live in smaller abodes, and spend less time stuck in traffic jams. And planes create no such positive effects–which isn’t an anti-aviation argument, it’s just a fact.

The New Scientist–generally an excellent publication–goes with this very stupid lede: “True or false: taking the commuter train across Boston results in lower greenhouse gas emissions than travelling the same distance in a jumbo jet. Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is false.”

So, next time you want to travel ten miles? Consider doing it by jumbo jet. Just don’t drive to the airport, ’cause that’ll mess up the numbers.

UPDATE: I was catching up on some Bellows reading last night and saw that Ryan Avent makes some of the same points here. I swear I wasn’t cribbing

It’s amazing how little public discussion there’s been of making the US Midwest–but especially Michigan–an international center of railcar making. Politicians have no problem trying to start a mini Silicon Valley in every state of the union (which is only a very, very slight exaggeration). But through all this slow motion carnage in the automobile industry, our political class been remarkable reticent about stepping up and saying: “Hey, let’s convert this capacity, so we can make train and transit equipment, as that industry looks very positioned for the next few decades at least.”

As of yesterday, the idea got a nice boost though. Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm has apparently been pushing a plan along these lines to Obama. At yesterday’s rail summit at the White House with Joe Biden, Ray LaHood and several other governors, Granholm was making the case that it’s time to start making railcars if we’re going to be building a passenger rail network. “We have lots of capacity in Michigan and workers who know how to make things,” she said.

After all, with companies like Siemens reaping billion dollar deals from the Chinese, and European companies expecting the US to be a $150 billion market for train equipment, what’s the excuse for not trying capture some of the action?

Of course, Michael Dukakis has been saying all this for a while. But it’s good to hear serving politicians chiming in.

With a little vision, those closed GM and Chrysler plants might have life in them yet.

[Via]  [Photo]

Ray LaHood is over in Spain, snooping around their high speed train system for ideas. Today he took a jaunt on the AVE from Madrid to Zaragosa and then hung around in a railway control center with the transport minister for a while. Tomorrow he’s meeting with prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the guy who’s has really been the force behind Spain’s recent investment. Maybe Zapatero will whisper some secret clue in his ear about how to get things in the US moving on the, um, right track.

The NY Times has seized the news peg of this visit and posted a story highlighting the successes of the Spanish rail program. Even for those of us who have already read several dozen stories about the successes of Spanish rail, it’s still worth reading. A few choice passages:

“Spaniards have rediscovered the train,” said Iñaki Barrón de Angoiti, director of high-speed rail at the International Union of Railways in Paris. “The AVE has changed the way people live, the way they do business. Spaniards don’t move around a lot, but the AVE is even changing that.” [...]

Here in Lleida, a town of 125,000 in northeastern Spain surrounded by plains that produce half of the country’s apples and pears, the inauguration of a high-speed route to Madrid in 2003 cut the journey to the capital to two hours from five and a half, and the extension of the line to Barcelona last year halved that trip to one hour.

Ángel Ros, the Socialist mayor of Lleida, said the AVE had transformed the town. The number of tourist visitors has increased by about 15 percent, he said. Demand for business conventions has risen 20 percent each year, and the city is building a 50 million euro ($70.5 million) convention center. The 13th-century town hall is in the midst of a 100 million euro public works project to transform the area around the railway station with gardens, bridges, a shopping center and parking lot.

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It’s difficult to be someone who spends much time thinking about transportation policy in the country and not nurse some level of fascination with Ray LaHood. The guy is just so damn… well, let’s review the evidence.

The New York Times ran a profile of him today that expanded our knowledge base a bit and might safely be characterized as “gently mocking.”  From the story, several factoids about the Secretary:

> He doesn’t really know anything about transportation.

> He doesn’t pretend otherwise.

> If he’d been named Secretary of Agriculture, that would have been a-okay with him.

> By his own estimation the reasons he got the job are that he was a House Republican and that he’s chummy with Rahm Emanuel.

> When things get hairy he asks Emanuel to crack skulls for him.

> He is something of a social coach for twitchy, smart, high strung guys in the cabinet like Steven Chu and Tim Geithner. His advice to them is: Just sit still for the long boring ceremonial stuff.

> With regard to transportation or anything else, he admits he’s “never been passionate about any particular issue.”

> He used to be a junior high school social studies teacher.

All of this would seem to stand as confirmation of the abyssmal feelings of disappointment many transportationally minded people had four months ago when his nomination was announced.

But the weird thing is–he’s actually done a very solid job. His priorities have thus far been good. He seems to have handled the political and administrative demands of stimulus bill rather well. The partnership he announced with Shaun Donovan for more livable communities with integrated planning for housing and transportation was forward looking and sane.  He’s been respectfully engaged with the advocacy community. He writes a snappy little blog.

The whole situation is strange but also rather hopeful. LaHood seems like a go-with-the-flow kind of guy, and in this position in this administration, perhaps that is not at all a bad quality.

A lot of people seem to be thinking about the unintended consequences of laws designed to make us safer on the roads, whether as cyclists or drivers.

Today Good magazine asks, “Do bike helmet laws do more harm than good?” The question is inspired by a new study arguing that mandatory helmet laws may actually lead to increased health care costs. The rationale is that they’ve been shown to reduce total bicycle ridership by as much as 40 percent. Author Piet de Jong, a mathematician at Macquarie University in Australia, maintains that since cycling is healthy activity, if people do it less, general public health suffers. He predicts health care expenses would rise by $5 billion in the United States if we enacted a nationwide helmet law.

Popular Mechanics was entertaining a thematically similar question a few weeks ago under the headline “Does high tech highway design make us less safe?” In this case “high tech” refers to wide roads with lots of high-visibility paint and guard rails and absolutely no sharp curves.  The piece is inspired by a passage in Tom Vanderbilt’s excellent book Traffic:

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For some environmentally minded folks, Earth Day is an occasion to fret over like how much recycled material is in our socks or whether to run our dishwashers at 3 a.m. or 3 p.m. But, as probably even the fretters know, debating that stuff is mostly a waste of time. When tackling a big problem, the first order of business is to figure out what efforts will yield the biggest overall improvements. And the biggest environmental challenge we face–and the thing that could go the furthest in “greening” the country–is configuring our cities and towns right. In large part, this means getting our transportation networks right, as Brookings expert Rob Puentes argues very effectively in this article today:

Transportation is the single largest contributor to the nation’s carbon footprint, causing more damage than industry, homes or commercial buildings. More than four-fifths of transportation emissions come from the tailpipes of our cars, trucks and buses.

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Today, President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood <a rhef=”http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/A-Vision-for-High-Speed-Rail/“>released a vision</a> for high-speed rail in the United States, the first such administration-endorsed rail strategy in American history. The plan attempts to outline a strategy to follow in undertaking the development of rail corridors with the $8 billion included for the effort in the stimulus bill passed earlier this year. The administration has specifically endorsed providing more money in the near future to state and federal rail projects, though those funds have yet to be approved.
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Felix Rohatyn, the financier who helped save New York City from going broke in the 1970s and the author of a new book about public spending, did a turn on CNBC this morning to discuss Obama’s stimulus program.

The $800 billion bill, he said, “was necessary” but he “would have preferred a bigger percentage going to infrastructure.” In fact, he was a bit surprised at the result: “I was under the impression infrastructure would have [a] broader” role in the bill. “Then, lo and behold, it disappeared” after congressional committees began rewriting things.

A truly key point: “We treat infrastructure from an accounting point of view as if it was an expense” instead of an investment.

Maybe we should call it something else?, he mused. “Infrastructure” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. It’s “an awful word.” But, as a matter of substance, spending on infrastructure is one of the best things we can do: “it is such a creator of employment, wealth [...] and productivity. [...] I get tired of hearing that the government can only do bad things.” If you look back through history, “the results of government investment are spectacular.”

(We’ll post the video if/when it become available.)