Tag Archives: planning

Taking local action

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Minneapolis Skyline

Over at Grist, David Roberts lays down the brutal logic of climate change:

With immediate, concerted action at global scale, we have a slim chance to halt climate change at the extremely dangerous level of 2 degrees C. If we delay even a decade — waiting for better technology or a more amenable political situation or whatever — we will have no chance.

And what’s so special about 2 degrees C?  Well, that may be something like a point of no return.

The thing is, if 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous, 4 degrees C is absolutely catastrophic. In fact, according to the latest science, says Anderson, “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”

Roberts is citing the work of Kevin Anderson, former head of the UK’s leading climate research institution.  Other scientists are making similar predictions.  James Hanson, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says, ”The target of 2C… is a prescription for long-term disaster“.  Increasingly, you don’t have to look far to find words like “apocalyptic” being used to describe the path we’re on.

So we need to reverse course on emissions by 2015, and in dramatic fashion.  But the latest round of international talks seem to be on shaky ground.  All US climate bills have so far failed.  So what’s a local planner or public official to do?  Decry the problem as global in scope and thus unsolvable? Shrug shoulders and pour a stiff drink?  While I have a healthy amount of skepticism about the ability of one jurisdiction or even one state to have a measurable impact on the global trendline, I think we absolutely must be making our best efforts now, for a number of reasons:

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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.

Strong Towns on climate change

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Duluth Minnesota

Strong Towns, which has up until now, primarily focused on efficient use of infrastructure and fiscal sustainability of our cities, is laying out their platform on climate change.

As we all know, however, local innovation continues (accelerates?) even when national leadership is incomplete. Here are three issues that Strong Towns will address as they pursue their own strategies to deal with climate change:

Pressure on credit will continue to increase in communities viewed as particularly vulnerable to natural disaster associated with climate change. Federal and state resources in the future look to be flat, diminishing or encumbered. The costs to insure housing or commercial property deemed vulnerable to disaster are higher, and claims resulting from natural disasters can increase the premiums of all policy holders. The key finding here is that investable public and private capital – able to educate and train Americans and finance new businesses, for example – will be under greatest stress in areas hit hardest by climate events. Strong Towns need to orient toward more density and less infrastructure costs per capita, as one way of managing this stress.

Even presuming that some of the increase is due to improved measurement, the rising incidence of natural disasters means that Strong Towns must anticipate continued volatility in our weather. Public infrastructure planning needs to anticipate the likelihood of damage by natural disasters. Clustering residential and commercial development will reduce risk; it may also allow us to reduce the costs of mitigating ongoing threats. Beyond the fiscal merits of a more compact development pattern, denser places are more protectable places.

The relationship of climate change and public health is an emerging field. While much health policy is formulated at the federal and state levels, counties and cities are the main implementers of place-specific plans and care. While we don’t yet understand the prospective health effects of climate change, it’s apparent that local communities have an opportunity to play a key role. Work on that micro scale may distinguish those cities and towns that invest in addressing climate change.

This first point has been resonating strongly with me lately.  The world’s largest investors (many of the people who hold your retirement funds) and insurance companies are already seeing their businesses to be impacted by climate change.  Physically and economically resilient cities require a different approach in a changing climate, and I’m glad Strong Towns is lending their voice to this message.

Loss aversion, self-knowledge and planning

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The New Yorker has a review of ”Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.  Kahneman explores the concept of “loss aversion“, the idea that losses hurt more than gains feel good.  The review highlights the example of a group of physicians, presented with two scenarios with equal outcomes, with the only difference that the outcomes were stated in terms of “deaths” in one scenario and “survivors” in another.

The two different hypotheticals, of course, examine identical dilemmas: saving one-third of the population is the same as losing two-thirds. And yet, doctors reacted very differently depending on how the question was framed. When the possible outcomes were stated in terms of deaths (and not survivors), physicians were suddenly eager to take chances: seventy-eight per cent chose option D.

Why are doctors so inconsistent? Kahneman and his longtime collaborator, Amos Tversky, explained these contradictory responses in terms of loss aversion, or the fact that losses hurt more than gains feel good. In fact, people hate losses so much that merely framing a choice in terms of a potential loss can shift their preferences. Like those physicians, people are suddenly willing to risk losing everything if there’s a chance they might lose nothing.

What’s more, even knowing that the brain works this way doesn’t seem to allow us to change our ways.

This same theme applies to practically all of our thinking errors: self-knowledge is surprisingly useless. Teaching people about the hazards of multitasking doesn’t lead to less texting in the car; learning about the weakness of the will doesn’t increase the success of diets; knowing that most people are overconfident about the future doesn’t make us more realistic. The problem isn’t that we’re stupid—it’s that we’re so damn stubborn.

Every planner should be aware of this deep human aversion to loss.  Probably most have encountered it when presenting a new development, vision or plan, even if it wasn’t apparent.  The thought of losing something, whether it’s property value, space on the road, homogeneity of community or safety, elicits a much stronger response than what could be gained through changes brought about by the plan or development.

What can planners learn from this? Well, first just be aware of it, know that the prospect of change will likely trigger stronger feelings about potential downsides than it will about potential benefits.

Second, perhaps we should change our processes.  Many planning processes include long and intensive visioning exercises that include numerous stakeholders.  One intent of such exercises, even if it’s not explicitly stated, is to overcome these loss aversion fears and help participants value the “gains” a plan or project might bring.  But perhaps this should change to capitalize on human nature instead of fight it.  Should we stress the potential “losses” that might occur under the status quo versus a new scenario?  Should we present alternative scenarios in terms of which might have the least unfavorable impact instead of which has the best impact?  I’m not sure.  The whole idea seems to go against the traditional visionary spirit of “community planning” which tends to focuses on the positive.  Designing participation processes with a thorough understanding of (or even ability to take advantage of) natural human biases deserves much more attention.  If we want to be effective, we should start by being well versed in the limits of the human mind and trying to adapt as best we can.

Let’s welcome “Rapid Bus”

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Metro Transit is studying 11 corridors for significant upgrades to bus service.  These corridors represent high-ridership, dense locations with high potential for service improvements.  Sharp-eyed readers might recognize these “rapid bus” corridors as something that is called “arterial bus rapid transit” in the 2030 Transportation Policy Plan.

So what designates a rapid bus route? Fewer stops, off-bus fare collection, all-door boarding – all equal faster service.  At the open house last week, project displays showed between 20 and 30% travel time savings, depending on the corridor.  Stops will become stations, with shelters, dynamic signage and possibly raised curbs and bumpouts.  These look like great improvements.

Metro Transit staff told me the next step is to identify first corridors for implementation by looking at what corridors have the most potential for service improvement (and probably which are most politically feasible).  The rapid bus concept will also be used in the alternatives analysis for Nicollet (sometimes called the streetcar study).

Will insurance companies do what planners can’t?

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A major long-term trend that planners should care about is adaptation to climate change.  There are some examples of plans being made, but as with any climate change-related topic, US planners and politicians are slow on the uptake.  Adaptation could mean changing how we build storm sewers to handle more frequent extreme rainfall, or it could mean something as drastic as abandoning large areas of coastline.  Fast Company asks whether insurance companies (and the premiums they set) might just do that for us.

The prospect of billions upon billions of dollars in physical and economic damages from a single storm is enough to make one wonder whether we should stop building on the coasts altogether.

That’s the scenario hedge fund manager and catastrophe bond pioneer John Seo had in mind when he predicted in the current issue of Foreign Policy that “a decade and a half from now, a single hurricane or earthquake will come with a potential price tag of $1 trillion or more. Imagine a world in which economic damage equivalent to that caused by a major war or the detonation of a midsized nuclear weapon in a major city could materialize with a warning of only a few days.”

The numbers back him up. According to a 2008 study of the world’s largest port cities by the OECD, 40 million people are at risk of flooding, and total economic exposure is $3 trillion, about 5% of global GDP. By 2070 those numbers are expected to rise to 150 million people and $35 trillion, or 9% of GDP. Most of that growth will occur in Asia, where a major typhoon rolled through the Philippines and shut down Hong Kong’s financial markets this week before making landfall on China’s Hainan Island.

The prospect of a single storm practically bankrupting their industry has not been lost on insurers or their odds-makers. In June, Risk Management Solutions received permission from Florida regulators to update the risk models insurers use to set policy prices. The new models increased Florida’s potential hurricane losses by 6.5%, with damages in inland areas soaring as high as 90%. As Reuters dryly noted, “analysts say that the U.S. model changes could give insurers a strong incentive to raise prices.”

But raise them to what? Because not only is the potential for destruction increasing, but so are the frequency and intensity of storms as well. A study released earlier this month by Ceres, a consortium of public interest groups, found that by and large insurers believe in climate change–and believe it will increase their losses. Allstate CEO Thomas J. Wilson recently told analysts the company is saying goodbye to the “good old days” and is now “running our business as if this change [in extreme weather] is permanent.”

I wonder whether having insurance companies speak up about climate change will change the debate.  I kind of doubt it.  It might be better to think ahead about vulnerable areas and start planning ahead, but I can only imagine the backlash that would create.  Of course, insurance companies slowing price people out is also a form of central planning, but one that doesn’t need to take into account equity or other public goods.

Not-so-smart cities

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First, I want to say I totally agree with the last half of the last sentence in Greg Lindsay’s opinion piece in the New York Times:

…the smartest cities are the ones that embrace openness, randomness and serendipity — everything that makes a city great.

The rest of the piece I don’t quite get.  Lindsay objects to the new city being built in New Mexico which will have no residents, but be used solely for testing “smart city” technology like “smart power grids, cyber security and intelligent traffic and surveillance systems”.  He objects because he feels computer simulations are not robust enough to capture human’s inherent “randomness”.  To support his case, he uses an example of a RAND corporation study, from 1968 (!), that failed to “smartly” reconfigure fire service.

Take the 1968 decision by New York Mayor John V. Lindsay to hire the RAND Corporation to streamline city management through computer models. It built models for the Fire Department to predict where fires were likely to break out, and to decrease response times when they did. But, as the author Joe Flood details in his book “The Fires,” thanks to faulty data and flawed assumptions — not a lack of processing power — the models recommended replacing busy fire companies across Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx with much smaller ones.

What RAND could not predict was that, as a result, roughly 600,000 people in the poorest sections of the city would lose their homes to fire over the next decade. Given the amount of money and faith the city had put into its models, it’s no surprise that instead of admitting their flaws, city planners bent reality to fit their models — ignoring traffic conditions, fire companies’ battling multiple blazes and any outliers in their data.

The final straw was politics, the very thing the project was meant to avoid. RAND’s analysts recognized that wealthy neighborhoods would never stand for a loss of service, so they were placed off limits, forcing poor ones to compete among themselves for scarce resources. What was sold as a model of efficiency and a mirror to reality was crippled by the biases of its creators, and no supercomputer could correct for that.

First, any good planner or engineer will tell you that models and software should be a starting point, not a finishing point.  I have no doubt that any new technology that comes out of the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation (that is the new city’s name) will be refined in the real world as it’s performance among us mammals is tested.  If the RAND corporation couldn’t (or wouldn’t) adjust in 1968, they were bad planners.

Second, we shouldn’t use technology because politics could get in the way?  Don’t fault technology, fault bad process and implementation.  Also, where does this line of reasoning lead us?

Third and finally, this is the only example Lindsay gives of a failure of “smart” systems in the real world (except for a reference to something Jane Jacobs said), and it occurred in 1968.  Lindsay omits the myriad “smart city” technologies that are already commonplace and are generally deemed to have net positive impacts.  Here is a partial list (and I’m no expert):

And coming soon:
None of the second list, and I’m pretty sure none of the first list (at least computerized versions thereof) even existed in 1968.  The fact that many of these systems currently exist, and regularly operate without massive failure, seems to refute Lindsay’s assertion that we shouldn’t continue to develop them.

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.

Cities as the environmental solution, not the problem

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Kaid Benfield, writing I assume for “environmentalists”, has a nice reflection on the environmental consequences of city-building.

For a long time, America’s environmental community celebrated wilderness and the rural landscape while disdaining cities and towns. Thoreau’s Walden Pond and John Muir’s Yosemite Valley were seen as the ideal, while cities were seen as sources of dirt and pollution, something to get away from. If environmentalists were involved with cities at all, it was likely to be in efforts to oppose development, with the effect of making our built environment more spread out, and less urban.

We’ve come a long way since then, if still not far enough. We were and remain right to uphold nature, wildlife, and the rural landscape as places critical to celebrate and preserve. But what we realize now, many of us anyway, is that cities and towns — the communities where for millennia people have aggregated in search of more efficient commerce and sharing of resources and social networks — are really the environmental solution, not the problem: The best way to save wilderness is through strong, compact, beautiful communities that are more, not less, urban and do not encroach on places of significant natural value. As my friend who works long and hard for a wildlife advocacy organization puts it, to save wildlife habitat we need people to stay in “people habitat.”

Using LEED ND to strengthen existing neighborhoods

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pride at loring park

I’ve written a lot about LEED ND, the rating system built to define sustainable neighborhoods, including how to use it as a framework for sustainable regional planning.  Typically, the rating system is applied to new development or redevelopment: when new streets, buildings and infrastructure systems are being built.  Rarely has it been applied to an existing neighborhood, where development or redevelopment is occurring at a slow pace and changes to major infrastructure systems are unlikely or occurring incrementally.  That application was simply not the original purpose of LEED ND.  I’ve always viewed LEED ND as providing an alternative to a model of traditional suburban development that has low connectivity, low density and poor location efficiency.  In its current form, it is best suited as a guide to help us plan and build new development more sustainably.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t many valuable lessons for existing neighborhoods within the LEED ND system.  While we know that the greenest development is almost always the one that is already built, existing neighborhoods can often lack connectivity, walkability, density or other design features, which if retrofitted over time, could make them more livable and sustainable.

Neighborhoods and cities concerned about maintaining and improving livability, sustainability and financial viability are using LEED ND in just this way.  The Loring Park neighborhood in Minneapolis is in the process of creating a neighborhood master plan to shape their community for the next twenty years.  The neighborhood partnered with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs to assess the neighborhood’s sustainability using the LEED ND system.  Loring Park would also like to become officially certified as a LEED ND “project”, either under the current system or under a pilot existing neighborhoods program an alternative path for neighborhood and small areas plans that USGBC is developing.  A volunteer group, including yours truly, is working to help the neighborhood meet this goal.

The purpose of pursuing certification is to make this already green neighborhood even greener.  If Loring Park falls short in certain parts of the rating system, these shortcomings can be turned directly into goals for the master plan.  The Loring Park Draft Concept Plan includes a goal related to sustainable buildings and infrastructure and includes these goals for the use of LEED ND:

Further utilize the LEED-ND rating framework to:

  • periodically gauge neighborhood wide performance and progress toward sustainability goals
  • set in place (or augment) design guidelines or to set parameters for private project review and approval, or to gauge the merits of specific capital improvement projects
  • structure performance criteria for various incentives
  • preparation for government grants or other support from agencies that are familiar with LEED-ND rating system or that directly utilize LEED- ND standards as performance criteria

Our volunteer group, organized by the USGBC Minnesota Chapter and Loring Park residents, has just begun the certification process for the neighborhood.  This process will be a great opportunity to document the challenges of applying LEED ND to an existing neighborhood and review the rating system’s usefulness for a community planning process.  Stay tuned.