Tag Archives: land use

Streets.mn

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In the near future, a group of smart and attractive Twin Cities bloggers will be launching a new site dedicated to Minnesota land use and transportation commentary and analysis called Streets.mn.  We’re hoping to improve the quality and quantity of discussion around city-building issues.

We’re also hoping to build some economies of scale, tapping many great individual blogs to provide content in one location, providing more consistency in post frequency and hopefully increasing readership and impact.

For now, that URL redirects to tcstreetsforpeople.org, a predecessor to Streets.mn.  Much or all of the content you see on that site will continue with a new design and mission.

Watch for greater fanfare after the start of the new year.  For now, click over to Streets.mn for a flavor and be sure to follow us on Facebook.

Linklist – backlog edition

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I don’t frequently do the “link list” post, but blogging has not been at the top of the priority list lately and I didn’t want to deprive all the dear readers of the good stuff I’ve been seeing.   Each deserves longer comment then I’m giving here.

Stillwater Bridge forum on 9/9

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The Sensible Bridge Coalition State and Local Policy Program and the Citizens League are sponsoring a forum hosted by Jim Oberstar to discuss the various plans.

The Stillwater Bridge: What are the Issues?

A forum hosted by Jim Oberstar

Friday, September 9
1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Cowles Auditorium
Humphrey Center
301 19th Avenue S.
Minneapolis, MN 55455

For over 20 years, the replacement of the Stillwater Lift Bridge connecting Wisconsin and Minnesota over the St. Croix River has been a contentious issue. Federal, state, and local agencies and policy leaders have weighed in on whether and how the historic lift bridge should be replaced to accommodate current and future traffic demand.

Jim Oberstar, former congressman and chair of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, will host a forum to discuss issues surrounding the proposed Stillwater Bridge crossing the St. Croix River.  A panel of representatives from the Minnesota Department of Transportation, National Park Service, local interests, and environmental perspectives will discuss current plans for replacing the bridge and the public policy and funding issues surrounding these plans. The forum will include a participant discussion led by Oberstar.

There is no cost to attend this event, but online registration is requested. For more information or to register, please visit the event web page.

This event is sponsored by the State and Local Policy Program at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, with the Citizens League.

On the proposed Stillwater bridge (part 6)

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The New York Times is highlighting the proposed freeway-style Stillwater bridge in their Room for Debate series.  They are calling it “Bachmann’s Bridge”, even though Senator Al Franken and Governor Dayton both support it.  I suppose since she is now a Republican front-runner she gets the cheers/jeers.

Former Senator Mondale sums things up:

At $700 million, this bridge, the largest and most expensive in Minnesota history, would carry about 18,000 vehicles a day. By comparison, the Interstate-35 bridge in Minneapolis carries more than 10 times the number of vehicles and was a fraction of the cost to build. This bridge would consume nearly all of the available financing in Minnesota to build or repair bridges, leaving almost 1,200 structurally deficient bridges wanting for funds. Both states have endorsed this bridge during Minnesota’s well-publicized state budget shutdown, and without investigating less harmful, less expensive and more sensible alternatives that respect the river, address commuters’ needs, and cost hundreds of millions less to the taxpayer.

Congress should employ its common sense.

I realize my Stillwater bridge series is missing a post on the “Sensible Stillwater Bridge” organization that has started up.  Basically, they are advocating for a lower, slower bridge with three lanes instead of four.  It would supposedly save 60% of the cost of the “boondoggle” bridge.  They don’t have a proper website, but you can see renderings of their proposal on their facebook page.  They also have a twitter account.

I asked the Sensible Bridge Partnership about tolling, and for now, they don’t seem to have an opinion.  I think tolling should be part of any “sensible” plan for a new bridge, and could even be a selling point to skeptical Minnesotans.

Study: city dwellers produce as much CO2 as countryside people do (but urban form still matters)

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A new study of two metro areas in Finland proclaims to “illustrate that the influence of urban density on carbon emissions is insignificant”.  This study was published in Environmental Research Letters.  You might remember other studies that seem to indicate the opposite.

The idea that urban form has a significant impact on emissions and therefore should be considered during planning and land use decisions is embraced by many urbanists, environmentalists and scholars.  Others disagree with this position, saying us “sanctimonious urbanites“ may be overplaying our hand.  I don’t think this latest report really does anything to resolve the “GHG blame game” (or, as I prefer to call it, an accurate accounting of externalities).  In fact, if you look at the data, it supports the notion that land use and transportation decisions and patterns have a significant impact on emissions.  While trying to avoid sanctimony, let’s look at the details.

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Mileage fees could strengthen the effect of land use policies on travel

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The Mineta Transportation Institute recently released a report with some fascinating findings on how land use patterns and mileage fees are mutually supportive.  The results aren’t terribly surprising when you think about it, but provide some interesting nuance to the transportation-land use interaction.

The report is based on findings from the Oregon’s exploration of mileage fees, called the Oregon Road User Fee Pilot Program.  In this program, participants paid a per-mile fee rather than the state gas tax.  Half of the participants paid a per-mile fee that increased during rush hour in congested areas, while the other half paid a flat amount per mile at all times.

The Oregon program, along with many other recent forays into alternative funding mechanisms for transportation, is a response to the fact that the gas tax is becoming less and less dependable as a funding source for transportation because it hasn’t risen in decades, VMT has peaked and vehicles are becoming more fuel efficient.  Mileage (or user) fees are one way to bring the costs of building and maintaining the system back in line with revenue from actual users.

More on the results below the break.

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TTI’s Urban Mobility Report Is Still Only About Mobility

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Traffic

Evaluating land use and transportation policies in terms of accessibility rather than mobility is the goal of many planners and advocates, whether they know the terminology or not.  This new focus requires recognizing the interconnectedness of land use and transportation decisions.

Unfortunately, one of the most influential voices in transportation research and policy has not yet made these changes.  From Greater Greater Washington (via Market Urbanism):

The Texas Transportation Institute today released the final version of their report on congestion, which ranks the DC area tied for first with Chicago in hours wasted in traffic. Unfortunately, the report’s methodology completely misleads as to the seriousness of traffic, and TTI is pushing the wrong policy solutions.

The TTI report narrowly looks at only one factor: how fast traffic moves. Consider two hypothetical cities. In Denseopolis, people live within 2 miles of work on average, but the roads are fairly clogged and drivers can only go about 20 miles per hour. However, it only takes an average of 6 minutes to get to work, which isn’t bad.

On the other hand, in Sprawlville, people live about 30 miles from work on average, but there are lots and lots of fast-moving freeways, so people can drive 60 mph. That means it takes 30 minutes to get to work.

Which city is more congested? By TTI’s methods, it’s Denseopolis. But it’s the people of Sprawlville who spend more time commuting, and thus have less time to be with their families and for recreation.

Sadly, despite CEOs for Cities pointing out these methodological problems last year, TTI went ahead and finalized its report without fixing them (PDFs). TTI ranks Portland as worse than Nashville, with a Travel Time Index (TTI) of 1.23 1.15 for Nashville and 1.151.23 for Portland. However, because of greater sprawl, Nashville commuters spend an average of 268 hours per year commuting, while the average Portland commuter spends 193 hours per year.

What does this mean for public policy and the Washington region? TTI’s data is often used to justify spending money on new freeway capacity, since congestion sounds bad. TTI even promotes this approach. Tim Lomax, a co-author of the report, told the Post’s Ashley Halsey III, “You can do little things like stagger work hours, fix traffic-light timing and clear wrecks faster, but in the end, there’s a need for more capacity.”

In some sense, we shouldn’t be surprised, since the report is titled the Urban Mobility Report.  However, the goal of commentators and the CEOs For Cities report is to call attention to the fact that mobility (or level of congestion) alone is not an adequate means of measuring the performance of our land use and transportation systems.

The Rest Of The Story On Robot Cars

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The City Fix scooped me on using the Johnny Cab image, but tribute must be paid to such a forward-looking film.

The internet seemed to resound with almost unmitigated delight when Google announced their progress on driverless cars last week.  German scientists see a “golden future” for their driverless vehicles.  There are, however, some key implications that are being missed about what it means if our cars are driven by robots.  I’ll preface the rest of this post by saying that I think the benefits of robot cars probably outweigh the drawbacks.  However, robot cars are not a panacea, and we shouldn’t overlook unintended consequences.

David Levinson at The Transportationist does an excellent job summarizing why robot cars matter, but in my opinion doesn’t go far enough explaining the potential downsides.  Here are some of my thoughts on why we should adopt robot cars carefully, even with their myriad advantages.   Continue reading →

What locations in the Twin Cities are eligible for LEED ND: Part 3

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Traditional Neighborhood Design - Minneapolis 1892

In an ongoing series, I’ve been trying to define areas of the Twin Cities metro that are “location efficient” using the USGBC’s LEED ND rating system.  The previous posts focused on those requirements of LEED ND that cannot be met through the design of the project itself: features of the built and natural environment that determine a minimum eligibility for LEED ND based on location.  This resulted in a map of areas in the region that met this basic level of “location efficiency”.

However, there are a few other requirements of LEED ND that can technically be met through the project design, but may not be able to be met in reality based on the existing built environment, or the current planning or zoning rules in a particular location.  For example, LEED ND requires a minimum density for both residential and non-residential uses.  Technically the density of the project is controllable by the project designer, however, if a city has land use regulations in place that only permit densities lower than what is required by LEED ND, plan and zoning amendments or variances would need to be granted before the project could go forward, all of which are not certain.  Many communities are averse to the levels of density required by LEED ND, and therefore elected officials would be unlikely to grant such changes to land use regulations. Continue reading →

What locations in the Twin Cities are eligible for LEED ND: Part 1

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In a previous post, I talked about the news that HUD will begin scoring grant applications based on location efficiency, and using the LEED ND rating system to do so.  While it is not yet clear what exactly HUD means by this, we can do our own exercise to look at the ND system, compare it to the existing built environment and see what locations in the Twin Cities might be eligible.

This isn’t just about HUD and their projects, it is a way of determining what the best locations are for new development that would ensure compact, contiguous development that makes the most efficient use of infrastructure and has multiple transportation options.  Or in other words, it’s a method to begin planning a more sustainable region.

Before the analysis, a little background on LEED ND is appropriate:

The rating system is divided into five topic areas:

  • Smart Location and Linkage
  • Neighborhood Pattern and Design
  • Green Infrastructure and Buildings
  • Innovation and Design Process
  • Regional Priority Credit

The first three topic areas have prerequisites, or requirements that a project must meet in order to be eligible.  All the topic areas have credits, from which a project proposer can choose to achieve to meet the various certification levels (Certified: 40, Silver: 50, Gold: 60, Platinum: 80).

While the LEED ND system is long and complex, there is really one topic area of the five in the rating system that deals with location and what land is off-limits versus eligible: Smart Location and Linkage (SLL).  In this topic, there are five prerequisites and nine credits.  For the purposes of this exercise, we’re going to be looking at just the prerequisites for LEED ND SLL, because once you get into credits, you have to start making lots of assumptions about how the project will be designed and what features it will contain.  In addition, the other four topic areas deal primarily with the design of the project, or what is inside the project boundary, something we can’t know until a project is proposed.  We want to know just what locations are at minimum eligible, and that means focusing on prerequisites in SLL.

Read on for the details of Smart Location and Linkage and the results.

Continue reading →