By themselves, however, planners and environmentalists are not powerful enough to persuade anyone to implement the New Urbanism. That's where the other members of the congestion coalition come in. If planners and environmentalists supply the vision, bureaucrats, local officials, downtown businesses, and contractors provide the money and the might to make New Urbanist dreams a reality.
A number of friendly federal agencies directly finance the New Urbanist agenda. For instance, as part of its Transportation Partners program, the EPA gives several hundred nonprofit organizations money to lobby for transit and pedestrian ways and against highways. The avowed goal of the program is to reduce the number of "vehicle miles traveled." (In true New Urbanist fashion, the claims to success are meager at best: The EPA boasts these "partners" reduced annual vehicle travel by 1.25 billion miles in 1997. That's a questionable figure, but even if valid, it represents less than 0.1 percent of all urban driving.)
The U.S. Department of Transportation also supports the New Urbanism. The Federal Transit Administration, the branch of the department charged with promoting transportation planning, strongly influences urban spending because New Urbanists convinced Congress that cities receiving federal transportation funds should be forced to create regional transportation plans. The onerous planning process gives New Urbanists plenty of opportunities to skew the results their way. For example, federal transit officials grade local transportation planners for the effort they make at getting cyclists, pedestrians, and transit riders--but not auto drivers--involved in the planning process. The transportation bill recently passed by Congress provides $20 million a year in local grants similar to the EPA's Transportation Partners program.
New Urbanism is also supported by DOT and Department of Housing and Urban Development requirements that urban areas have metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) representing most or all local governments. Originally conceived as clearinghouses for federal grants, many MPOs function instead as political safety valves. As Brookings Institution economist Anthony Downs notes in Stuck in Traffic (1992), a regional planning agency "can take controversial stands without making its individual members commit themselves to those stands. Each member can claim that `the organization' did it or blame all the other members."
Urban Godsends
That's exactly what has happened in Portland, where Metro has ultimate planning authority over two dozen cities and three counties. Metro requires these cities and counties to rezone existing neighborhoods to meet its population targets. Far from resisting such targets, many cities view them as a way to increase their tax base by packing more residents into their jurisdictions, and some even asked for higher ones. But when neighborhoods object to being rezoned, they are told, "We don't have a choice. Metro is making us do it."
The turn to MPOs is a godsend especially to officials in large cities seeking to consolidate, if not increase, their power, which has been on the wane for most of the postwar period. Since 1950, nearly all urban growth has been outside big cities. That massive population shift toward suburbs and mid-size cities has made it tougher for traditional central cities to generate tax revenue and to qualify for pork-barrel spending tied to population. The MPOs change all that.
Because of its relative size, the strongest player in any MPO is invariably the largest city in the region. The MPO gives such cities an instrument to redirect development dollars their way and to get revenge on the suburbs (tellingly characterized as "godawful trash" by one Portland City Council member). The same holds true for downtown business interests: Like their public-sector counterparts, they resent the shopping malls, office campuses, and modern factories that have grown up in the suburbs. For central city officials and businesses, then, the New Urbanism represents the latest ploy to maintain their way of life.
Of course, it's unlikely it will succeed any more than the billions of federal and local dollars already spent trying to maintain particular urban areas. The problem with most central cities is that they were built in an age when primitive transportation and communications dictated high densities; people had to live near one another. The "decline" of cities that officials worry so much about is due to the fact that cars, telephones, and electricity make it possible for people to live in lower densities--and most choose to do so.
Fretting over urban "decline" is misguided in another sense too. Downtown interests, argues Joel Garreau in the brilliant Edge City (1991), "believe settlement patterns to be a zero-sum game": Any gain in the suburbs represents a loss for downtown. Yet Garreau notes that even as suburbs have boomed, American "downtowns have been going through their most striking revivals of this century. From coast to coast...downtowns are flourishing."
To be sure, most recent downtown growth has been in the areas of arts and entertainment. This fails to impress downtown traditionalists, who still think downtowns should be the main retail and commercial centers of a city. So New Urbanist prescriptions, such as limits on new shopping malls and parking restrictions in existing malls, are appealing to downtown businesses. If new stores can't open in the suburbs, goes this line of thought, they'll have to set up shop downtown.
Such zero-sum thinking undergirds what is perhaps the defining characteristic of the New Urbanism: an undying reverence for light-rail networks. Central city officials and downtown interests know that, if transportation dollars go into highways, they will be spent in the suburbs, where most growth is taking place. But if those funds are spent on a rail transit system, the vast majority will be spent in the central city because most, if not all, rail lines will radiate from a downtown.
Light rail not only restores to downtown some of its former centrality, it represents a huge pork-barrel project for the fifth member of the congestion coalition: the civil construction industry. With the Interstate Highway System effectively completed and strong resistance to new roads in the cities, the construction industry has been looking for work. What better opportunity exists than to rebuild the rail systems that moved urbanites in the pre-automobile age?
New Urbanists spuriously claim that light rail is more efficient than highways. For the construction industry, the attraction of rail systems is that they cost much more to build than highways. A typical urban freeway costs about $5 million to $10 million per lane-mile, or $20 million to $40 million per mile of four-lane road. By comparison, Portland just opened a new light-rail line that cost $55 million per mile--and is planning a new line that will cost a whopping $100 million per mile. (That neither of these lines will carry as many people as a single freeway lane is the sort of consideration that never seems to make it onto the planner's ledger sheet.)
Light rail isn't always as expensive as in Portland, but its costs when finished are almost always far greater than when originally proposed. For the construction industry, then, rail is not only less controversial than highways. Because of typical cost overruns and "gold-plating," rail adds up to huge profits for a wide variety of consulting, engineering, and building firms.
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Wow. What a visionary you are. Nowadays, Portland is widely considered one of the top U.S. cities in terms of quality of life and across many other standards as well. You really nailed that one, huh?
VFA|7.24.11 @ 11:29PM|#
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