Slumlords

(Please note that this post is the intellectual chassis for some other work.)

Philadelinquency recently ran an excellent piece on how Philadelphia’s very poor school performance holds it back. Setting aside the chicken-and-egg problem of schools and class, let us focus on the final element in this piece, an element that ties back into the blog’s long-standing focus:

Now, about your suburban slumlord who smells the gentrification coming towards his rental property he was renting out for $600/mo and collecting a string of code violations on for a decade who might decide to sell his house to a rehabber and cash out, leaving that rental at the sake of increasing valuations?  Nobody has come up with a solution for that yet.

While this is a tie-in to pieces such as this and this, there is a more fundamental problem it touches on that needs addressing: Our zoning policy has been an abysmal failure at regulating landlords. Worse still, in its zeal to separate out homeowner and renter communities, it has resulted in a nasty unintended consequence: Slumlords are the result of the system.

Consider it for a moment. Time and again, sociological studies have shown that a landlord’s investment in his rental properties is directly tied to his geographical proximity to them. A landlord who lives in the same city is more inclined to invest in his properties than one who does not; in the same neighborhood, even more so; on the same block, ditto; and by far the most likely on premises. Since a slumlord is a landlord who fails to invest in their property, we can extrapolate that they are inversely correlated with distance: that is, the closer to their properties landlords live, the less likely they are to be slumlords. We can thus extrapolate that landlords of city property who live in the exurbs are likely to be slumlords; those who live in a different metro area entirely even more so. And guess what--they are!

It is not by accident that Philadelinquency spends most of its time chasing paper trails on slumlords who live far from the city. And in many cities, “institutional investors” are quite clearly slumlords-in-waiting.

But our claim, that institutional slumlords are an unintended consequence of our land-use policy, goes quite a bit further. To make this argument, let us recall how modern zoning came to be (see here, here, and here); they were implemented precisely because the homeowners of an affluent Cleveland suburb sought to keep renters out. And so it is unsurprising that modern zoning policy disenfranchises renters; what is a bit more surprising is that the jurisprudence required to get around earlier rulings also disenfranchise small landlords. And much as other side effects of “sorting” by use disenfranchised small businesses--to the benefit of larger malls, hypermarkets, and big boxes--so too has it benefited property management firms, and institutional investors.

Property management firms--companies of the type that run garden apartments--have full-time maintenance staff associated with each property. (In the absence of a landlord, a caretaker is the next best thing.) But institutional investors need not; all they need to maintain is the portfolio. Part of this is the--not unreasonable--justification that since they handle smaller properties (i.e. houses) than property managers, a caretaker per property would be excessive. But another part is that these organizations usually have a strong financial focus, often to the detriment to the properties they’re supposed to be managing. And of course, you also have bona fide slumlords who hide behind “institutional investor” masks.

Indeed, the whole system of institutional investing seems set up to encourage financialization and transactions at the expense of property maintenance. Is it any surprise, then, that to many people, “rentals” has become a dogwhistle for “slums”? Or that small rental properties are reflexively opposed, for the same reason development is in general?

One could say that the irony is that the system has come to disadvantage the small landlord, the homeowner who wants to add a granny flat above his garage, the community-minded owner who wants to fix that house up down the street and rent it out to a nice family, in favor of the institutional investor with Wall Street connections and falling-down flats. But that is just one irony buried in a whole system of deeper ironies. Perhaps it’s time to stand up and take notice.

Whelp, We're Boned

From this article: http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/corporate-welfaresubsidiesboeingalcoa.html

The size and range of the subsidies the tool has uncovered helps explain the burdens taxpayers must bear because so many major corporations rely on welfare for much or all of their profits rather than earning them.

Holy fuuuuuuuuuuck...

If we, the taxpayers, are subsidizing their profits, doesn't that imply that we live in a right-wing socialism?

ETA: Thank God we've got a gubernatorial candidate who gets it, and gets that the only way to win this game (thank you Jon Geeting for calling it the "Ripoff Game") is not to play and play the Economic Gardening* game instead:

Tom Wolf’s Fresh Start plan has a different idea that’s not based on blowing a bunch of money on propping up zombie firms. He wants to invest in Ben Franklin Tech Partners and other regional incubators that have a proven track record of creating new Pennsylvania businesses, and commercializing the good ideas coming out of our many universities into working business models.

This is a slower process than the Ripoff Game, but it actually creates new value, and it’s actually sustainable in the long run. This would be the benefit of having a self-funder Governor. Unlike Tom Corbett, he wouldn’t try to bet the horse on stupid get-rich-quick schemes conveniently timed to the election calendar.

(Keystone Politics)
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*Would you believe there is no Wikipedia page for economic gardening? Now that's ridiculous...

Urban Design Must Be Becoming Mainstream...

...because once something becomes mainstream, it's going to be perverted, and Jannie Blackwell's proposal is about as extreme a perversion of urban design as it gets...

...using urban design as a tool to prevent any redevelopment on any property whatsoever without getting a variance.

Urban Design Perversions

Comment on yesterday's Plan Philly post:

There *is* a baby in the bath water here.

While I agree Jannie is introducing this bill on behalf of CCPB, and that in its current form prohibits natural intensification (a better term for what's needed than "density"), the idea of cornice-line preservation is a good urban design rule that does not necessarily imply a more stringent build-to line.

Structures like mansards, for example, preserve the cornice line, without demanding setbacks, while permitting natural intensification. So urban design solutions exist for the CCPB's "problems".

The problem is, of course, that this bill represents a perversion of the intent of urban design; it should not be entertained any more than it has to, to yield a definitive "No" vote.

But I'd urge the Planning Commission to draft a series of recommended urban design overlays, both as examplars of good practice and to aid in an eventual transition to design codes from use-based ones.

Comments Extracted

Part of a discussion between Jon Geeting and I on Next City piece "It's Time to Cap and Trade Parking Permits":

Me: Jon, thanks for the excellent article. Since I'm sure the data I've collected on SWCC's parking supply formed part of its inspiration, I'm happy to offer a few comments:

1. My first gut reaction was that it was going to be a bad idea. The image the policy's name conjured in my mind was of what would be a wholesale privatization of the (already subsidized) onstreet parking spaces. Reading through the plan eased my fears somewhat, but I believe it is important that a permit is not tied to the space itself (again, because that would amount to wholesale privatization of street space).
2. An issue going forward would be maintaining a certain amount of flexibility. For example, if a neighborhood wished to convert a street to a woonerf, that would entail the removal of a certain amount of spaces. The system you propose increases the flexibility to do this somewhat relative to the status quo (by changing the cap), but increasing administrative layers and distance from neighborhood concerns would increase opportunities for vetoes of changes. So you could go to the PPA and say "here's a close estimate of the parking inventory in Neighborhood X, cap permits for the neighborhood at that estimate", but later changes to the inventory (either for net loss or net gain of parking spaces) would not be so easily ascertained at a citywide level.

What I am getting at is that, under a good cap-and-trade system, permit control needs to be devolved to the neighborhoods--or, more accurately, neighborhood investment districts. (Cf. Shoup, and his work on parking spaces in commercial districts.) This way, a neighborhood would have a dedicated funding stream*, control over how many spaces are permitted (so as to remove them as it sees fit), and an ability to assess parking demand of redevelopment projects...

No, I am not just saying this make myself more work ;). I am also saying this because it's the right thing to do--devolve power over a commons to the most local "stakeholders" (much as I detest that term).
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*Assuming permits are periodically reissued...this is an idea that needs a bit more work.

Jon: I completely agree that the permit should not be tied to the space itself, and should be free to migrate to the areas of the city where there is more parking demand, and cut car ownership in areas where there is less.

For example, I imagine that some of the most central neighborhoods would tip to a lower car ownership equilibrium under this plan, since many of these folks probably use their cars infrequently, and could get several years' worth of Zipcar membership paid for by selling the permit.

I am torn on the issue of whether we should use the Planning Districts as new permit zones, to make sure they don't all migrate to the more auto-oriented areas of the city, or if I think that would actually be a feature of the plan.

Not sure I agree with your assessment of the political economy of the parking removal example. Suppose that under the cap and trade policy, some group pushes to enact my somewhat radical plan for the Bainbridge Green, which would take away about 175 parking spaces.

On one side, you'd have a lot of people who would not want those spaces to go away. But on the other side, you'd have a group of people whose permits stand to get more valuable if 175 spaces go away, since a tighter market would make the permits more valuable. You might have some people showing up to support the new park just to increase the value of their assets.

Could you also elaborate a bit on what you have in mind for neighborhood control over "how many spaces are permitted" and "assess parking demand of redevelopment projects?" My preference would be to stop printing permits altogether, starting ASAP, and let people work these things out on an informal market. I'd like to get the city out of the business of assessing parking demand altogether, and leave it to housing and parking garage developers to gauge how much parking demand there is, and how much people are willing to pay for it.

I see it as an opportunity to reorient the political economy of development around a much lower car ownership equilibrium. I would expect to see a cycle of more infill development in the high-demand areas, followed by growth in transit ridership, and a subsequent sell-off of permits, with permits filtering outward through the successive neighborhood rings over the years.

Me: 1. I agree with your last paragraph.

2. As you may recall, I found that there is a very physical maximum of possible parking spaces in a neighborhood. Beyond this limit, any further permit you issue devalues the parking space.

3. What I have in mind is for a neighborhood to have local control over its parking. Among other things, this means that I would devolve (onstreet) parking permits from the PPA and into the hands of formally-recognized NIDs (there would be certain basic conditions tied to demonstrations of competency, like paid staff, the ability to maintain space inventory, and a certain amount of liquidity *necessary to hire a certain reasonably-priced consultant, heh*). Because parking permits are thus controlled and managed at the neighborhood level, parking policy--and hence transportation policy--comes to be managed at this level, too.
(This is not to downplay the need for a citywide transportation policy, but rather is meant to reflect that most transportation needs are best locally determined; I imagine we could build the system such that the City can exert its natural claim to street space if they wish to put e.g. a protected cycle track or bus bumpout in.)
This limits "migration" more than your proposal, but I don't see that as a bad thing in and of itself, as neighborhoods like Mayfair and Oxford Circle don't have remotely close to the same kinds of supply/demand issues neighborhoods like SWCC, Fairmount, or Bella Vista do. Heck, even Whitman doesn't have the same level of parking issues.

4. Note that I said that one of the measures of competency a neighborhood organization (usually an NID, although other high-compentency organizations such as SOSNA or NLNA should also qualify) has to show to control its parking is an inventory. This is because (a) a strong, well-maintained local inventory will be able to capture minute changes in parking supply, and (b) the group controlling that inventory can use it to further their own goals.

For example, say that a group wished to make Bainbridge Green green. They could then either (a) organize in a bid to control Bainbridge Green's parking inventory in order to reduce/eliminate it, or (b) work with another group, such as the QVNA or a QVNID, which would have a parking inventory (~2000 spaces as a first-order estimation) including the 170-odd spaces on the "green"...

...At this point I find a particular difficulty between your idea and my work: My work is based on the idea (a long-term policy goal, actually) that parking should be treated as a neighborhood "commons" and thus come under the control of that neighborhood. While this is not directly in opposition to your idea, significant difficulties exist in co-implementation. My hunch is that both of our ideas ultimately result in the same end-state: they just come to it differently. (An NID that derives most of its income from parking permits has a significant incentive to optimally price those permits i.e. make them a scarcer commodity i.e. reduce inventory. This is in agreement with Shoupian devolution of Main Street metered spaces to BIDs; they're the ones with the most incentive to get things right.)

No Girder Rail Is Made In America Whatsoever

Yep, this is a problem for light-rail and especially streetcar projects.

(Girder rail is the best kind of rail for street running.)

In fact, there's only one producer of it in the world--in Austria.

But look on the bright side: Build enough streetcar track and you can catalyze domestic girder rail orders.

But Buy America is a major block between A and B.

Oh look--protectionism run amok undermining the development of domestic industry. Again.

Not a Guaranteed Income, But Income Guaranteed to Cover Certain Costs

A comment I made on an Atlantic Cities article:

A minimum wage indexed to (a) local CoL and (b) inflation would (should) yield a minimum wage with equivalent local buying power, which I would argue constitutes the key "equal protection" here.

That is to say: a standard minimum wage of $10/hr buys a lot more in Alabama than California. But an indexed minimum wage should be designed such that the same amount of work-hours would be needed to buy, for example, a month of rent in Alabama as in California (and furthermore, that the amount of work-hours needed to buy a month of rent in either would be the same at any given time). That would be the equal protection a minimum wage provides.

One way of implementing this idea would be for the federal government to not set any minimum wage, but rather set a standard buying power for a minimum wage. States would have a legal obligation (mandate) so set a minimum wage equivalent to this buying power; other entities (like cities, counties, and municipalities) can augment this as they see fit, based on local buying power.

 A few comments:

1. This standard buying power would be an assertion of certain economic rights extended to all Americans. (At a certain level, this is actually a stronger assertion than a basic income, as the latter only states you have the right to make x, whereas the former states you have the right to make enough to cover the cost of x. This harks to the x-f(x) distinction in Taleb's work; it is easier to find f(x) in a system defined {x|f(x)} than x itself--that is, in very complex systems, it is often easier to to isolate a function of a variable than the variable itself. Combine this with a couple of other provisions and you have the framework for a guaranteed minimum income.) 
2. Such economic rights could be informally stated as:
1. The right to shelter
2. The right to transportation
3. The right to healthcare
4. The right to adequate nutrition
5. The right to adequate clothing
6. The right to save
3. A better formalization for (2) would be that the minimum wage standard would be such that a person making the minimum wage would be guaranteed to make enough to cover:
1. one month's studio apartment rent + basic utilities*;
2. one monthly bus pass**;
3. one month of health insurance;
4. 60,000-90,000 Calories/month***;
5. 1/36 the cost of a standard 10-day wardrobe, monthly^;
6. Σ(i=1, n=5)a(i), that is, the summation of the other costs^^.
4. The state's responsibility, then, would be to index these requirements to prevailing local costs. Once those costs are ascertained, the minimum hourly wage becomes 1/160 this cost^^^. Cost-indexing it also has the nice side effect of inflation-indexing it; the state's cost index would be required to be updated annually; a state found to be using a cost index more than three years out of date would be subject to the withholding of federal funds (and class-action suits).
5. These economic guarantees also allow for a shrinkage in the welfare-state bureaucracy, as the 90k Cal/mth guaranteed obviates the need for food stamps for any employed person, and the health insurance purchase guarantee likewise obviates the need for Medicaid for any employed person. These two programs, in particular, form one of the most insidious forms of corporate welfare: corporations paying workers below the CoL, thereby forcing them into public programs to make up for the shortfall, such that the financial benefits from such programs accrues from the government to corporations. (The housing guarantee likewise obviates the need for public housing.)
6. These guarantees are extended on the condition of employment (as is implied by their structure as a minimum wage cost index). To have truly universal economic freedoms, however, one needs to find some way of extending certain of these guarantees to the unemployed. This, then becomes the next challenge.

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*Gas, water, electric, (mobile, not home) phone, Internet. Yes, this implies a right to Internet access. I think it's essential for doing much of anything nowadays, don't you?
**Why? Well, (a) regardless of what zoning enforces, at this level of income, car ownership is a very expensive luxury, and we don't want to encode low cost/benefit ratio things (like car ownership giving access to jobs), and (b) our nation's bike system and bike culture are not yet developed to the point where universal bike access would be a fair formal statement of the right to transportation.
***60k Cal = 2k Cal/day * 30 days; 90k Cal = 3k Cal/day * 30 days; that is, the daily caloric intake generally needed to maintain weight for women and (slightly greater than) men, respectively.
^TBH, I have no idea how to calculate this cost, although what I have in mind is the cost of completely replacing a "professional" wardrobe, at outlet prices, every three years--hence 1/3 the cost/year, 1/12 that cost/month, 1/3*1/12=1/36.
^^Based on the budgeting principle that half of one's income should go to the aforementioned outlays; that is, the minimum wage should be tailored to the lowest feasible rate which one can keep a balanced budget.
^^^The costs being computed monthly: four weeks in a month, so 1/4 the cost weekly; 40 hours in a full-time workweek, so 1/40 the weekly cost hourly; 1/4*1/40=1/160, i.e. one works 90 hrs/mth to make ends meet, and 160 hrs/mth to make a living wage.

The Forgiving Design Hierarchy

While this post started as a fork from Compromises on North Broad, it is really a topic unto itself, and a core post of my thinking on how design affects safety. I am calling it (in draft) the forgiving design hierarchy concept of street design workflow. I hope that, as you read, the reasons will become clear.

Hierarchy

The key is attaining a tradeoff--a balance of priorities. To do this we need some sort of hierarchical modal evaluation criteria. This could be easily abused and turned into a checklist by the same kinds of numbnuts who eviscerated any pretense of urbanism in Syracuse, but having such a checklist exist, and be public knowledge, would be an invaluable tool in project evaluation and project criticism. For a street--a value-creation platform--modal consideration would progress

• Pedestrians
• Cyclists
• Dedicated Mass Transit (if applicable)
• Motorized Transport

in that order. This is tied to an underlying principle that design consideration scales with modal vulnerability--that is, the more vulnerable a given user is, the greater the design consideration for them should be. This, of course, does not preclude high-quality facilities for the dominant (and in road situations, usually the only) mode of travel; rather, it merely states that first attention should be given to a facility's most vulnerable users. This does not really affect the layout of true roads at all; indeed, it subtly enforces the road/street division in transport hierarchy.

The Role of Forgiving Design

What we call "forgiving design" is the set of auto-oriented transportation engineering design guidelines that first emerged with the initial construction of the Interstates. It is an extension of rural design standards, applied with the idea that such standards would improve speed and flow in urban areas. That it is should surprise no one: as I have just pointed out, even in my revised system, most rural byways would stand unaltered. Unfortunately, urban areas, busier and more congested (both good and bad), are hence more incident-prone. The problem is, of course, that current forgiving design principles have proven to be a failure at increasing safety in urban areas--and, even worse, have proven to be a disaster from a safety standpoint in suburban areas (cf. Dumbaugh and Li).

Subjective Safety

Key to the performance of the Dutch cycling network is a concept called subjective safety, the realization that, when it comes to driving usership, the perception of safety is just as important as what is, statistically, "safe". So the optimal approach to generating the prioritization hierarchy above would seem to be to implement subjective safety principles across the more vulnerable modes, fitting forgiving design for automobiles in where it can fit (precisely the opposite of our current approach, which fits in infrastructure where it can fit after the cars are designed in). But--at least in London--subjective safety and forgiving design appear locked in battle, with TfL's flow needs trumping subjective safety needs, despite the lobbying of numerous cycling-advocacy organizations.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

But the principles of subjective safety are the principles of forgiving design--just applied to a different mode. The whole point of subjective safety, the perception of safety, is achieved by creating an environment forgiving of error; the whole point of forgiving design is an environment forgiving of driver error. This intermodal mesh drives the British conflict: on London's limited road space, who gets the space allocation they need for their approach? Who "wins"? Are they the drivers, accommodated by forgiving design, or the cyclists, accommodated by subjective safety? But it doesn't have to be this way: understanding that they are one and the same allows us to integrate the two elements--forgiving design and prioritization hierarchy--into a single model.

Upshot

Subjective safety and forgiving design, now revealed to be one and the same thing, merely tell us how to design safe* infrastructure for a particular mode. But our world is multimodal. To answer the question of which mode gets priority, the hierarchy, increasing attention for increasing vulnerability, yields the answer. Hence the framework which I am proposing, and wish to investigate further, is one where we

1. Consider a given route. Consider factors such as existing usership(s), current population density, planned population density, distance/mode optimization, origin/destination proximity, etc., to model usership. For roads, none of this matters. But roads also cannot have curb cuts.
2. Design for each user in turn of vulnerability.
3. For each mode, apply forgiving design concepts. For places with low pedestrian volume, but increasing bike volume, for example, a multi-use trail will work.
4. Evaluate whether or not the tax base can support the design. If not, reduce until within this "solvency envelope".

which is, of course, largely alien to current transportation engineering workflows.

Further Questions

This is just a framework. Many unanswered questions within this framework remain, such as what minimum adequate forgiving design for each mode would be, what optimal infrastructure in several contexts would look like, and even the whole question of designing for enduring financial solvency. In fact, this framework is the core of the research I wish to pursue, largely because I find myself convinced this is the right approach and would like to see it applied and further refined--but as it stands, it is hardly ready-to-go as a framework, and is rather much more conceptual.
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* With certain exceptions, e.g. suburban arterials, where forgiving design appears powerless against an even more foundational foe, the curb cut.

Building A Political Coalition

Everything is politics. To do anything, a strong enough coalition must be assembled to counteract the opposition. These kinds of coalitions can take long times to assemble, or coalesce quickly, depending on the scale of the problem.

Let us take, as an example, the road coalition. It took a half a century from the invention of the automobile before a strong road coalition came into existence--a half a century during which the car had to go through an image shift from rolling death machine to tool for freedom--and the development of movements and companies providing improved auto infrastructure (e.g. tire companies, gas companies, Better Roads, etc.) It took fundamentally proscriptive and ultimately myopic urban movements (Garden Cities, public housing) as well as a tapping into Americans' escapist tendencies. And it had to do it all fighting the rail lobby, then one of the most powerful in the country. It ultimately gained the upper hand not due to itself, but rather because the ICC insisted on draconian rail policy, undermining shippers' profitability, while states saw them as rolling banks and incurred high taxation on them, all the while absolutely subsidizing their competition.

Ultimately the rail lobby failed, the roads movement succeeded beyond its wildest expectations, and American railroading began its long half-century collapse from the cream of American pride and culture to a peripheral transportation solution focused on moving bulk goods. Alongside our railroads' collapse has been our manufacturing sector's, to a state where it, too, is now economically peripheral.

The road-based system then established itself as culturally central. Interstates replaced the great rail networks as our country's crown jewels. But it's a system that is internally unsustainable, starting to grind toward its own collapse; a generational shift has begun to reject it; and it's time to build a coalition toward a major transportation shift.

In his Sunday Train blog, Bruce McF began feeling the way toward such a coalition. But a coalition that would ultimately be successful would have to unite a majority of Americans, a majority of American politicians, and (ironically enough) couple into the dominant economic hegemony of the era*. So the question isn't just what vested interests would be interested in his Steel Interstate proposal--it's also what compromises are needed to win over otherwise unaligned interests.

Right now our politics are dominated by a neoliberal/neoconservative ascendency which has been in power, regardless of party alignment, since 1980; these politics are linked to Austrian School neoclassical economics, which favor "free-market" solutions and dogmatically believe in the idea that markets can and always will self-correct--but this hegemony is opposed by those both on the right and the left, by populist movements both progressive and regressive (Occupy v. the Tea Party), by ideologies by both right and left.

The two largest ideologies opposed to the current status quo are the progressives and the libertarians**.

In order for the Steel Interstates to be politically viable in any form, it must be as a coalition between these two ideologies. To do that, a compromise must be reached.

This is not a difficult compromise. Steel Interstates mark a realization that our current transportation paradigm is unbalanced, structured to support ecologically self-destructive means, and that only massive investment or economic/ecologic ruin can rectify this imbalance--just as Better Roads did in its day. Libertarians, too, recognize this imbalance, and (what is today) the radical proposal*** to privatize the Interstates would likewise begin to rectify it.

Granted, the Steel Interstates, as a populist proposal, grew out of a plan opposing a road privatization. We must remember here that that so-called "privatization" was really just a government handout, a boondoggle where the government had all the capex risk, but the private entity all the reward. In a true privatization, the private entity must assume both risk and reward. Leasing the Interstates as-is would do so.

The compromise I offer is that we convert the embodied capital in the Interstates into a financial asset, which we then use to improve our railroads to a like condition (i.e. subsidize the railroads to develop their core mainlines to Steel Interstate standards). In this manner, both major forms of higher-level ground transportation are handled by equivalent enterprise, that is, private enterprise. The alternative is nationalization of the railroads--politically untenable in our day and age.

At this point, the coalition can court interested vested interests, such as what Mr. McF mentioned.

Bring the progressives and the libertarians to the same playing table, and real opposition to the status quo begins to cook--and I would not be surprised if there are many more grounds for progressive-libertarian compromise. If a coalition can assemble a powerful enough policy package, one (this is dominated by Millennial policy concerns) concerned with improving mass and non-motorized transportation, the changeover from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources, and social policies like some form of universalized^ healthcare, a separation of church and state in the field of marriage, empowering (rather than disempowering) labor policy, and so on.

It is clear that, even in its infancy, Millennial political policy is radically distinctive from the post-Progressive status quo. The work involved in bringing Millennial policy to reality will be fascinating to watch and work for.
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* One could say the current road-based transportation paradigm has been running on its own inertia since 1980, when the economic hegemony that built it (Progressivism 1.0) failed and was replaced by "neo"
-ism and its economic policy, Austrian School neoclassicism. Railroads 1.0 where the product of an era of laissez-faire libertarianism. Our road coalition arose alongside the Progressive ascendency.
** I'm not talking about the status quo that masquerades as libertarianism, I'm talking about that particular branch Republican Party elite enjoy ostracizing.
*** Just like the Steel Interstates are a radical proposal...
^ Note term.

Bureaucracy and Subsidy

Last fall, Steven Smith noted that European mass transit is subsidized the same amount as its American counterpart. Yet Europe has extensive mass transit offerings just about everywhere, to the point where it is difficult to find anyplace that has mediocre access relative to density or none at all, whereas in the U.S. the picture is the obverse. What gives?

Most complaints fall against ill-structured subsidization packages: roads in the U.S. have substantially higher subsidies relative to their European counterparts; driving standards here are rather more lax; exclusionary land use promotes driver culture at the expense of transit culture; etc. Part of this is of course true. Road standards are excessive and promote speeding which in turn promotes lax enforcement; land use is not planned in a way to support transit nodes; and road subsidies are hidden while transit subsidies are often paraded front and center. DOTs want to do nothing but build roads, and politicians insist on micromanaging transit while at the same time ignoring the multitude of excessive standards (and entailed ballooned costs) in the road planning arena. It's as if they have a monocle on one eye and a log in the other.

But that isn't the key problem. Smith, in his article, points out that the Bay Area receives an equivalent amount of transit funding for an equivalent population as Switzerland--but Switzerland has incontestably excellent transit while the Bay Area's, while good by U.S. standards, is, ahem, lacking. As Elizabeth Alexis notes, in Smith's quote, "The problem is more of how we spend money, not the amount of money."

How is this money spent? In the Bay Area, it is allocated to a number of transit agencies, each with its own agenda:

BART
Caltrain
Muni
Amtrak California (Capitol Corridor)
ACE
VTA
AC Transit
Golden Gate Transit
etc.

Even when you take out the bus operators, that still leaves

BART
Caltrain
Muni
Amtrak California
ACE, and the
VTA.

By contrast, the vast majority of passenger rail in Switzerland is handled by the

SBB:

this includes all national-level passenger rail, the R-Bahn networks, and the S-Bahns. Some Swiss cities also have metros (Lausanne is the smallest) which are owned and handled by independent organizations. The Swiss

SBB

handles thus all the functions of

BART
Caltrain
Amtrak California, and
ACE.

And therein lies the problem. The Bay Area suffers from a bad case of bureaucratic redundancy, which means that multiple overlapping bureaucracies are handling things where only a single bureaucracy is really needed. So the basic problem is that, where in Switzerland,

1 bureaucrat

is needed to perform any necessary office job, in the Bay Area,

4 bureaucrats

are.

And you wonder where all the money goes!

That's not the worst of it, though. American transit agencies are incredibly territorial, and jealously guard their turf to the point of undermining the common need for improved transit access. How else can you defend Millbrae, which seems to have been spitefully designed to inhibit Bay Area high-speed travel via the Caltrain ROW as expensively as possible? Or spending money to reduce interlocking redundancy, which in its turn undercuts on-time performance?

Elizabeth Alexis is dead right. And in the U.S., we spend money on bloated redundant bureaucracy, on entrenching petty squabbles in concrete, and at the end of the day we find we have no money to actually run transit, let alone well.

Organization before electronics before concrete, the Germans say. But here we take concrete uber alles, and even use concrete to entrench organizational inefficiencies.

A House Divided

In the news today, SEPTA's head, Joe Casey, is blasting the House Transportation bill. The problems with this bill are well known.

Now, the bill is in one sense obvious political posturing. It is impassable in every sense of the word--no Democrat in their right mind would possible vote in favor of it. It is a transportation bill as the ultra-regressive Tea Partiers would see it. It completely ignores major changes in transportation demands occurring among younger Americans. It would benefit one constituency and one constituency only--the Tea Party's core constituency--to the exclusion of all others.

But, in another sense, it is denial. Active denial. A willing ignorance, a nostalgia that we can return to the 1950s.

The reality? We can't. The United States passed peak oil availability in 2005. Vehicle miles traveled, unsurprisingly, peaked at the same time. We just lived through one oil price shock--in 2007-8--and are ramping up to another one. This is something the new generation gets, in a very visceral sense, and whenever possible they're choosing to live where there's no need for a car to get through the day.

This is our voice, a voice missing from the Tea Party and this boondoggle bill: we want, and demand--to the point that many cities now have powerful lobbies for them--bike lanes. We prefer taking mass transit. We usually have more than one thing going on at a time, job-wise, and time is precious. Too precious to be spent driving an hour or more every day.

And those of us who have decided to learn about how our transportation system works, who want to work for it, also know that our roads far, far overbuilt relative to how much we can spend maintaining it, while everything else is utterly opposite.

We know that the only way to reduce driving is to make driving less necessary and less convenient. And so the House transportation bill is utterly antithetical to our needs.

Why Land Use Zoning Is a Problem

Archive trawling Nathaniel Hood's blog, I found this post with this interesting argument:

To really understand the problem in 2011, you need to rewind to 2003 / 2004. St. Thomas had just spent a decade expanding its student population to around 4,500 plus, and despite new on-campus residential buildings, student populations started to creep further and further into the neighborhood.
Well-intentioned members of the City Council decided to increase restrictions on rental properties and limiting each rental home to include only up to four (4) unrelated people per household. Meaning, large 5, 6 or 7 bedroom houses could only house 4 students.
St. Paul tried to defy the laws of supply and demand. Now, this is where the law of unintended consequences kicks in. They restricted the supply of student housing while the demand remained the same. The market reacted and two things happened as a result:

• 1. Property owners did what was reasonable and responded by splitting large homes into duplexes so they could fill up the empty space. The market had an increase in duplexes, and often times, landlords took the time to add extra attic studio apartments. This lead to the situation to actually become worse. Now, instead of 5 people in a 5 bedroom house, you now have 6 or 7 people in a recently split duplex or triplex.
• 2. By limiting supply, the ordinance increased overall rents; thus making it more appealing to convert a single-family home into a rental unit. In a way, the 2003/2004 zoning restrictions actually motivated more homeowners to convert smaller homes into rental properties.

Now, the City Council’s next step is …

The latest moratorium would prohibit conversion of one-family homes into two- or three-family homes and two-family homes into three-family homes. The resolution also would bar one-, two- and three-family homes that are owner-occupied from being exclusively occupied by students unless a student owns the home [Link].

The problem isn’t zoning. The problem is demand.

...Except , um, your conclusion's not what your argument's telling you, bub. The natural conclusion of this argument is the problem is (land use) zoning because zoning artificially constricts supply relative to demand. (Remember that we do have to separate out zoning classification: land use and form-based zoning are two different things.) To put it another way, land use zoning is an attempt to manipulate the market--and market manipulation has some rather nasty unintended consequences. For one thing, demand doesn't go away. When supply is constricted--particularly artificially constricted--this forces the price per unit product (in this case, a student apartment) up. Which, in turn, forces a roundabout way of meeting demand. In the St. Paul case, this involved subdividing the structures in a particular way to meet demand: a particular way that actually increased the student population in the neighborhood--which has, again, become a problem, forcing more draconian supply controls. Which, in their turn, will also force developers into increasingly roundabout and circuitous ways of meeting demand. (By the way the law is worded, boarding houses  or "extended-stay hotels" are possible next steps.)

This is similar to how land-use zoning was first used to enforce segregation (by both race and class), as Charlie Gardner has shown. The difference being that then zoning restricted supply to the point that the price per unit of supply cost more than the customers' willingness to pay (no wonder poorer households flooded into the urban cores where land use was a lot less restrictive! You've gotta live somewhere.) whereas here we're dealing with a relatively monied population--or, more accurately, a population whose parents are well-monied--which, in turn, induces developers to circumvent the increasingly draconian attempts at limiting supply, which in its turn is simply making things more problematic for the surrounding neighborhood.

This St. Paul example is also an example of the natural tendency for politicians to favor (usually organized, wealthier, voting) homeowners over (usually disorganized, poorer, nonvoting) renters. It's playing a constituency game, but such games are almost never what's best for the neighborhood as a whole, since the attempt at promulgation of the status quo leads to serious market imbalances, which in turn produce deeply adverse consequences. In the hands of very competent planners, land use zoning can be made to work to promote a better city (but relatively few planners are competent enough to make it work); in the hands of politicians, it becomes akin to playing with fire: you'll get burned.

The bottom line is: Land use zoning is the problem. It's clunky, inefficient, and oftentimes subverts its own goals (unless your goal is disurbanization). Form-based zoning is much more flexible (keeping in mind Paris' zoning is essentially form-based).

There is also a jurisprudence angle to this. Our land use zoning was legally rooted in nuisance law (in essence, land use zoning is nuisance law on steroids, an attempt to zone away anything that might become a nuisance). It has deep court precedent. Because of this, the need to come up with an effective legal argument against this type of land use abuse is pressing: this zoning is an over-distortion of the market that has become its own nuisance. I would suggest that Friedrich Hayek's key observation--that the government only has access to the same amount of information as the market--would be a place to start*. But I'm not a lawyer...
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* Whatever else one may think of Hayek, and the Austrian school he was the grand doyen of. I'm a fan of neither: Hayek mainly winds up arguing that something is complex because it is complex (...uhhh duh?), which misses the point of complexity theory entirely, which is that complexity is a mode of explanation--a place you have to get through from here to there. In this regard, Hayek, like Smith and Keynes, is great precisely because he had one good idea, which is a lot more than most economists can claim. (In case you haven't noticed, I think economics as a discipline has gone completely off the rails. My forays into economics journals, like Urban Economics, don't help things much either. Like sociology, it has devolved to being basically formalist philosophy with kinky numbers attached.)

Fixing the FRA

Although there are a handful of trolls who believe otherwise, the consensus opinion that the regulatory body of the Federal Railroad Administration is largely, if not wholly, broken and that, as such, a radical reformation of the body--such as from a regulatory body to a booster body, or perhaps a planning body--if not its outright elimination, is needed. This opinion is shared among people with substantive transportation expertise, from hobbyists and prospective entrants (e.g. moi) into the field, to practitioners, and on up to the very freight railroads the current FRA regulations are most forgiving to. The FRA question of a decade ago may have been does it work?, but now that the answer no, it does not has been widely agreed, the question has to become how to change it?, or, more brusquely, how to fix it?

The first problem in this question is how many people even know it is a problem, outside of the community that has to deal with it regularly? Not many. The FRA is one of several sub-silos in the highly disciplinary decadent U.S. Department of Transportation; it reports to the Secretary of Transportation and displays little cross-departmental communication with its kin, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)*. As such, it is part of the Cabinet and thus the Presidency. But compared to the EPA, which is a huge fish, and constantly bounding across the line of what constitutes 'good' and 'bad' regulation, it is insignificant unto nothing. Very few people would even realize that stripping the FRA of its regulatory power would have done something. But since the body politic the FRA puts into practice is, compared to peer agencies, such as the relevant agency in Australia (whatever it is), or the international standard of the UIC, which governs everything from the light, speedy trains of Western Europe and Japan to the massive and heavy trains of Russia and China, archaic at best and plain old atavistic at worst, the FRA is a major impediment to badly-needed change in American railroads--both in the arenas of passenger and freight.

Thus the first issue we have to deal with is outreach. And not just one type of outreach. The FRA is so broken for so many reasons--and appears to exist now merely to perpetuate itself rather than being in thrall to a corporate or labor interest--that a case for why the FRA should be stripped of its regulatory power, if not outright done away with can most likely be made to cater to every political ideology imaginable. Very few regulatory agencies get to be such total failures as to manage that. Let us now concentrate on some of the more general ones.

For Republicans. The vast majority of modern rail technology is developed overseas, in UIC-compliant situations. If you want to privatize passenger rail service, you'll need to ensure that the American rail regulatory body is equipped to handle the maximal amount of rail technologies current available. As it stands, the FRA's sacred cows guarantee it can only handle a relatively minimal amount, and little--if not none--of which can be readily used for profitable private passenger rail. To pursue a viable privatization agenda, thus, the regulatory power of the FRA must be stripped. (This should be particularly effective on Mica.)
For Democrats. Regulation needs to be revisited from time to time to test its effectiveness. Ineffective regulation is detrimental to the needs of a country as a whole (just as a lack of regulation in situations where safety is legitimately needed). By this standard, our railroad safety regulation is outdated and ineffective. The U.S. has the worst--by a long shot--per capita railroad crash fatality rate in the developed world, despite a regulatory agenda supposedly engineered to ensure safety. Furthermore, the entire field of railroad technology in the U.S. is relatively outdated and falling behind, with offerings by Bombardier, Alstom, Siemens, and Kawasaki outstripping what even the GE GEVO is capable of, much less EMD. Passenger rail technology, as an industry in the U.S., is nonexistent: we have to import all real expertise in the field. It would appear that, in the direction the FRA is currently heading, passenger rail safety will be attained only by virtue of its nonexistence. Do we want that? Elimination of passenger rail would force all intercity transportation onto highways and through airports, which are already strained enough as it is. By contrast, the haunting ruins of an era when rail was the normative mode of intercity transportation lie all around us. Shuttered stations, grand stations ill used. Given where we expect our intercity transportation to go in the next few years, this is an entire infrastructure lay slack that can be picked up again--but again--our regulatory body ensures that this infrastructure lays slack, by forcing us to use obsolescent technology which has not been able to be profitably provided native to the U.S. for over a generation--since the end of the Budd Company. The only way to be able to pick up this slack, and bring fallow infrastructure back to active use--is to eliminate the bad regulation forcing its slackness. Worse, the FRA has gone rogue, refusing to listen or study any regulatory solutions used anywhere else in the world. Why should we trust a rogue organization with vital safety regulation? Bring the FRA under heel, strip it of its current policy, and impose a UIC-compliant regulatory standard so that we can have equipment as up-to-date and as safe as the rest of the developed world enjoys.

This two cases are fundamentally different, and resonate different strands, but outreach campaigns to both parties would ideally allow the vast majority--if not entirety--of the House and Senate transportation committees to come to common conclusion and common cause--namely, the stripping of FRA regulatory powers and their replacement with UIC-compliant regulation.

The question now becomes how to make the most powerful special interest impacted by the FRA--the Association of American Railroads, or AAR--interested in implementing UIC regulation; the AAR's members (that is, the major American Class I and Class II freight railroads) would need to restructure equipment standards for this new regulation--although, as the Russian and Chinese examples show, UIC regulations do also cover heavier-standard networks in addition to lighter ones. The Australian mean as an implementation midphase may be the best way to go about things.
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*Not that the FRA has that much reason to talk to the FHWA. But the FTA, especially, whose purview overlaps with the two others, should be the "glue" binding all three. That they don't is clear evidence of a highly disciplinary decadent corporate culture.

What Does It Cost?

I spent some time the past couple of weeks researching fares for commuter rails in the U.S. What I was after was a way to compare these fares, so I decided to use the rather arbitrary benchmark of a one-way 20-mile (as the bird flies) peak-hour trip as the basis of my fare comparison.

Of course, it's impossible to expect a regional rail network to have a station exactly 20 miles away from the CBD--although some come darn close. In one extreme example, I had to use a station 25 miles away as there were none closer to the 20-mile mark, despite a town along the railroad being approximately 20 miles from the city center and in another, the line wasn't 20 miles long. Finally I excluded rail lines operating non-FRA-compliant equipment, as part of what I'm getting at is how much a fare costs for equipment that mixes--or, more accurately, can mix (at a regulatory level)--with freight rail in this country.

Agency	Trip	Fare (One-way station peak)
LIRR (New York)	NY Penn-Hempstead	$10.00
MNRR (New York)	NY GC-White Plains	$10.50
NJT (New Jersey)	NY Penn-Woodbridge (NJ)	$10.00
MBTA (Boston)	Boston South-Framingham	$6.25
SEPTA (Philadelphia)	30th Street-Lansdale	$6.25
MARC (Maryland)	D.C. Union-Gaithersburg	$5.00
VRE (D.C.)	D.C. Union-Woodbridge (VA)	$7.85
Metra (Chicago)	Ogilvie-Glen Ellyn	$4.50
South Shore Line (Chicago)	Millennium-Hammond	$4.75
Northstar (Minneapolis)	Target Field-Elk River*	$5.50
Music City Star (Nashville)	Riverfront-Martha	$5.00
Tri-Rail (Miami)	Central-Hollywood Airport	$3.75
Trinity Railway Express (Dallas)	Union Station-Hurst/Bell	$5.00
Rail Runner (Albuquerque)	Albuquerque-Los Lunas	$2.00
FrontRunner (Salt Lake City)	Central-Layton	$3.75
Sounder (Seattle)	King Street-Mutilkeo	$4.00
WES (Portland)	Beaverton-Wilsonville**	$2.35
Caltrain (San Francisco)	4th & King-Redwood City	$4.75
ACE (San José)	Diridon-Pleasanton	$7.75
Metrolink (Los Angeles)	L.A. Union-Sylmar	$7.25
Coaster (San Diego)	S.D. Union-Solana Beach	$4.00

* Closest station to 20 miles is 25 miles (or greater).

** Line extends for less than 15 miles. Assume at least one zone increase were line lengthened.

Observations about this table:

1. The cheapest fares in the country are in the Southeast and Desert Southwest, with Albuquerque's Rail Runner being, by far, the cheapest fare of all. (I was shocked by how cheap it said it was on their website.)
2. The most expensive fares in the country are in the Northeast and in California. The three most expensive fares, overall, were all concentrated in the New York Area, while the next two most expensive were in L.A. and Northern Virginia.
3. It's more expensive to commute to downtown D.C. from Virginia than Maryland. Additionally, it's substantially cheaper to commute to San José from the Peninsula than from Altamont Pass.
4. Of the five largest cities in this country with commuter rail (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Diego), the cheapest fare is San Diego's (at $4.00).
5. Three of the ten largest cities in the U.S. by population have no commuter rail whatsoever (Houston, Phoenix, and San Antonio).
6. Two of the ten densest metropolitan areas in the U.S. have no commuter rail whatsoever (Pittsburgh and Louisville). *Pittsburgh is especially surprising, given how much rail infrastructure exists in and around the city.

This list, of course, brings up further questions. According to Metrolink's website, AAA calculates the cost of driving at $0.541/mile, which means that every commuter rail network in the country offers a cheaper fare than the $10.82 it would cost to drive the 20 miles...even the Metro-North to White Plains, the most expensive fare on the table. So why is ridership depressed despite the cost savings?

Secondly--and this applies more for the cheaper fares--what is the farebox recovery ratio? With commuter rail (or any sort of mass transit, really), a farebox recovery ratio of 50% or better is preferable; some systems have it 75% or better; NJ Transit usually operates at a profit. Granted, networks that use a proof-of-payment system have lower labor costs, but the majority of commuter rail systems in this country use F59PHIs or MPI MPXpresses and gallery cars, and there's considerable cost disparity between these systems. It is impossible to believe that Rail Runner, for example, realizes a farebox recovery ratio better than 50%, based on this cost figure.

Zoning and Transportation

A common criticism of zoning is its often-asinine parking requirements. Why, for example, should every new rowhome on an urban block have to have space for a vehicle--which in practice always means a garage? This emotional question is one which commonly initiates zoning reforms--yet, by the end of the process, community input from organizations who are continually worried about their neighborhoods' parking conditions--how hard it is to find a spot--will always ask for the re-inclusion of those exact same parking requirements, thereby frustrating the goals of transit activists, conservationists, New Urbanist planners, and others trying to shift the transportation mode share away from cars and more towards more sustainable modes, such as walking, biking, and mass transit.

To that end, the bonusing system of highest-density zones in many cities involves cutting parking requirements when alternative transportation access is included. This often comes in the forms of bike parking and/or access to local mass transit stations and concourses. In initial rezoning, these bonuses are structured such that they can potentially eliminate parking requirements altogether; yet after the community review process they come out so mangled they barely reduce parking, and hence promote alternative mode shares, at all.

Cap'n Transit today suggests a new approach: creation of zoning mirrors that either (a) eliminate parking or (b) promotes transit, by requiring a direct contribution to the local mass transit agency of roughly the amount it costs to add a garage. The full set of mirrors he suggests increases the number of possible zones, however, which would undermine another goal of zoning reform--reducing the number, and complexity, of zones to make the system more legible to both developers and community organizations.

When the use of mirrors is seen in light of this counter-demand, however, a new idea comes to mind: why not just rethink what we mean by parking requirements? For the provisioning of parking requirements is nothing more--and nothing less--than a policy meant to ensure transportation access to and from the site by the resident, patron, employee, whatever. It is thus intended to ensure economic access through the means of zoning. But the high autocentrism of the language--the way the requirements have been warped, either accidentally or deliberately--undercuts the aspiration behind providing this requirement in the first place. Parking requirements--instead of transportation access requirements--are an ossified remnant of the grand 1950s ideal that driving would be truly liberating.

The simpler way to offer what Cap'n Transit is suggesting is, thus, to simply offer a menu of different classes of transportation access instead of simply requiring parking. A developer could offer (a) parking to every unit or (b) a bike parking facility or (c) insurance of transit access via a grant to the local mass transportation agency to ensure a continuance of service, of roughly the per-unit cost of a garage or carport, or (d) a mix-and-match of the above options. Any options, by themselves, would be by right; mixing and matching would trigger a minor variance (to ensure that the percentages being allotted to each mode is in line with city mode-share desires). Transportation access requirements would then be built on the framework parking minimums offer, while superseding the detrimental effects, when scaled, those minimums create. It is also far simple to insert, and interpret, a transportation access table with different expectations and requirements pertaining to access of each mode at the beginning (or end) of the code, than it is to overstuff the code with reams of variant zones whose only purpose is to delineate different classes of transportation access.

Paying for Infrastructure: At the National Level

So, since the Democrats dawdled their way out of a supermajority that could have easily allowed them to pass a good urban-oriented national transportation bill, the now Republican-controlled House has (finally!) produced a new national transportation bill*. This bill controls Federal expenditure on transportation for the amount of time it takes until the bill expires; historically it's been treated as a sort of Five-Year Plan for the Interstates.

While others have done a better job pointing out the bill's many obvious shortcomings, I'd like to focus on how we need to reorient and refocus our transportation bill. Since Mica's orientation paradigm is entirely reactionary--stripping out all of the most important features the bill has and retaining precisely what needs to be stripped out--understanding this new orientation is absolutely necessary, especially in terms of a public transportation policy shifting along with the changing transportation demands of the public.

What is happening is the beginning of a generational modal shift away from cars to walking, bikes, and mass transit. This shift is currently happening as a choice, as recent college graduates, more aware than ever of problems with the status quo, deliberately eschew the freedoms offered by the automobile (the ability to go anywhere, anytime) in favor of the freedoms offered by other modes (the ability to do your work, or snooze, or read while commuting). Hence, since the popular zeitgeist is a refutation of autocentrism, it should be expected public policy is shaped by it.

Mica's policy is reactionary in that it follows a caricature of 1950s transportation policy--namely, the stereotype of the era as being highway-centric--and thus seems like an attempt to force perception to bend to the will of policy, rather than the other way around. Instead, passage of this bill would just further pen up demand for alternative, walkable, urban, urbane places and lifestyles. It would grossly subsidize status quo exurban construction, even as demand for those types of places collapsed in the wake of the Great Recession--and not subsidize enough to artificially create any demand, either. In other words, it would be a boondoggle on a truly colossal scale, a scale at the same level as the 1950s' urban renewal. And unlike the 1950s, we don't have the liquidity to invest poorly anymore. We need to force a high ROI out of any investment we make...in making this claim, the conservatives are ideologically correct, regardless of how when it plays out in practice, conservatives seem attracted, like mosquitoes, to projects with the lowest public ROI (but the highest subsidies, visible or otherwise, for corporatist interests).

This logic of forcing the highest ROI out of transportation leads to me calling for a tripod scheme of Federal-level transportation investment. This scheme calls for:

• Leveraging current public transportation assets to provide new liquidity into the system;
• Leveraging new liquidity to (a) maintain public assets and (b) provide a national-level network in what is currently the most undercapitalized section of the transportation sector; and
• Providing planning and implementation monies to ensure transportation security at the national, state, and metropolitan levels.

Translated into plain(er) language, this means:

• Leasing and/or selling limited-access divided highways, particularly the Interstates;
• Investing capital gained in aforesaid process into endowing an infrastructure bank (focused on road maintenance and new rail infrastructure); and
• Ensuring that monies disbursed from aforesaid infrastructure bank are equitably divided between (a) national-level freight and passenger rail, (b) state-level freight and passenger rail, and (c) mass transit for interconnecting cities and urbanizing suburbs.

This is the broad framework the bill needs to operate in. Notice how diametrically different this framework is from the current framework, which focuses on highways and strips away all other funding--blindingly stupid when highways currently have the lowest ROI of any public infrastructure investment. Since we are overcapitalized on highway investment, with a handful of exceptions, and undercapitalized on rail investment, with almost no exception, eliminating excess capital from the highway network and plowing it into rail--as the only network able to operate with the same efficiency as highways--makes eminent sense.

This proposal would provide for, in general terms:

1. Decreased overall road spending. Road spending focus on repair. Sale or leasing of limited-access highways (primarily Interstates) to private transportation providers to provide capital for funding most of the rest of the bill, primarily through national- and state-level infrastructure banks.
2. Massively increased rail spending. Freight rail mainline electrification mandate; passenger rail mandate to provide daily service to all cities of 50,000 people or more; high-speed rail mandate to provide high-speed service to all metropolitan areas of 500,000 people or more, with 600 overland miles or less to the nearest similarly-sized metropolitan area. Reform of FRA and FTA to meet European and Japanese standards. Elimination of Buy America on small orders. Tax breaks for domestic railroad equipment manufacture and for shipping by rail.
3. Massively increased mass transportation spending. Mandates to provide transit access to 80% of all addresses in metropolitan areas and potential capacity enough to move half of the metropolitan area's population; mandate to provide a comprehensive implementation plan to that effect by the end of the decade. Increase of Small Starts and New Starts funding; enaction of America Fast Forward proposals.
4. Provision for planning of port and maritime facilities on a national scale. Ensurance that all large metropolitan areas (500,000+) with maritime access has national-level port. Planning and implementation of Maritime Interstates, following the coastlines, Great Lakes, and major navigable rivers.
5. Monies to maintain airports. Effort to reduce short- and medium-haul flights to increase long-haul capacity. Make airports profitable, and do not publicly fund profitable ones. Privatize airports in the same manner as the Interstates.
6. Pedestrians, bicyclists, and streets (as opposed to roads). Maintain a complete streets/shared space policy. Provide sidewalk access on all streets that are not to be shared space. Provide separate bicycle access parallel to arterial traffic roads, usually via a complete street. Finally, create national-, state-, and metropolitan-level "bicycle highway" multi-use trails, to be funded in cooperation between transportation and parks departments.
7. The infrastructure bank. Privatization of limited-access highways (primarily Interstates) and airports offers an excellent opportunity to fund an infrastructure bank. Land value of these holdings is in the many hundreds of billions, and transportation value in the trillions. Getting fair value for these holdings consequently offers enough liquidity to fund new public infrastructure projects for a decade or more. By providing infrastructure banks at the Federal and state levels, this liquidity is managed, and with a strong vetting infrastructure, poured into projects offering the biggest bang for the buck.


No transportation bill option currently on the table offers the value, stability, liquidity, and security of an infrastructure bank system financed via the privatization of currently-public infrastructure.
 
If you want to read the more specific proposals:

Roads: Leasing or sale of Interstate or Interstate-grade highways (privatization) will enable user fees to be bought to bear on an overutilized socialist commons; as a mature technology, the time is ripe to undertake this endeavor.

Public road maintenance will be funded through the infrastructure bank.

Roads will be maintained according to how much access they offer; rural (primarily access) roads will be funded at an appropriate level, as will urban roads.

Since funding transportation also entails eliminating overcapacity, funds will also be disbursed for the elimination of excessive roadway capacity implemented two or three generations ago (i.e. removal of urban freeways) in favor of the higher ROI generated via land development.

Preferentially fund roadway projects which (a) do not increase capacity (that is: repairs first) and (b) have strong state and local financial support. No project with less than 25% state financial support and 10% local financial support should be Federally funded (in essence, this caps Federal funding at 65%).

Rail: Current funding for Amtrak would stay intact. Future funding for Amtrak improvements would be folded into the infrastructure bank.

High-speed network proposals and funding would be folded into the infrastructure bank.

A new mandate for electrification of all freight mainlines by 2040. National standard would be 25kV 50 Hz catenary able to handle double-stack container trains. Funding for this mandate would be accomplished through infrastructure bank disbursals to freight line owners.

Special committee for the total rewriting of FRA and FTA regulation to make them internationally-compliant. Repeal of Buy America for smaller orders (sub-100 units) balanced with a rail manufacture-and-utilization tax break to better balance transportation modal shares and promote a domestic rail manufacturing industry.

Mandate daily passenger rail to all cities with a population greater than 50,000 and high-speed rail between all metropolitan areas with a population greater than 500,000, 600 overland miles or less from the nearest equivalent population center, both by 2050. Passenger rail is an Amtrak mandate, funded through the infrastructure bank, while HSR would likely utilize PPPs. Note also that the HSR mandate just applies to linking individual cities into a network. Note also that 600 miles is just a tad longer than optimal corridor viability, but connects nearly every middle-to-large city in the U.S. to one another via multiple transportation modes. Assume that HSR will utilize new rights-of-way while slower-speed trains will utilize existing rights-of-way outside of urban centers.

Mass Transit: Match Federal and state funding for all mass transit systems, nationwide.

Establish and fund planning-and-implementation programs for mass transit systems to eliminate gaps and optimize service, nationwide. Different local mandates will of course create different conditions, but when oil is expensive the need for greater mass transit service will be more pressing. All metros of 500,000+ must be capable of reaching 80% and moving 50% of their population via mass transit by 2060.

Plans to reach this mandate must be complete by 2020.

Implement funding strategies as suggested in America Fast Forward (L.A. 30/10).

Tie reception of all federal urban development monies (for 500,000+ cities) to the successful planning and implementation of mass transit. Mass transit is the key competitive advantage of the 21st century; cities which understand this are those best poised for long-term growth. Cities which choose not to implement mass transit are thus those least able to maximize returns on Federal investment.

Increase New Starts and Small Starts funding by at least 100%. Fund projects with maximal people-movement potential first, maximal non-people-movement-based environmental impact potential second, and maximal developmental potential third. Vet and penalize projects with inefficient expenditures (for example, overdesigned stations relative to service levels, overpriced equipment, new equipment when used equipment can suffice) and projects with low returns on investment viz. station-side development (reward TODs and penalize the overuse of park-and-rides). Preferentially fund projects with strong state and local financial support.

Provide Federal matching monies to rail agencies which sell, lease, or develop upon excessive park-and-ride capacity.

Preferentially fund projects with strong state and local financial support. No project should be funded with less than 25% state and 10% local financial support. (That, in essence, implies a 65% Federal spending cap.)

Maritime: Establish a ports policy at a national level. Port capacity should be greatest where port needs are greatest. Plan and implement a policy of national-level alpha, beta, and gamma ports, and fund repairs and improvements at those ports in kind.

Plan and implement a network of maritime Interstates following major waterways. Interstate maritime traffic is relatively underrepresented in the United States, and much more freight can, and should, be moved along the coasts and Gulf, on the Great Lakes, and down the major navigable river systems (Mississippi, Columbia, Hudson, etc.) than current levels. Traffic along these maritime routes would run between ports of four classifications: alpha, beta, gamma, and delta (non-nationally-important ports, particularly along the rivers). Most of the physical infrastructure for this network is already built-out; repair and expand were needed, and promote maritime freight operations with a minor tax break.

Ensure that all large metropolitan areas (500,000+) with maritime access (along a coast or navigable river) have access to a national-level port.

Airports: Maintain funding for airport repair.

Work to shift short- and medium-length trips from the air network into other modes in order to free up greater long-haul capacity without physical airport expansion.

Work to make airport facilities independently profitable for sale or lease (à la the Interstates).

Pedestrians/Bicyclists/Streets: Fund and improve pedestrian links.

Mandate that all non-local road projects have pedestrian infrastructure. This would be absorbed into larger-scale road funding.

Plan and implement national-, state-, and metropolitan-level bike highways (multi-use trails). Funding for this network would come from a combination of DOT and Parks Department monies.

Prioritize funding for complete streets and shared spaces projects.

Infrastructure Bank: The financing centerpiece of this policy is the establishment of a Federal-level and state-level infrastructure bank. This bank will be initially funded by the sale or lease of limited-access divided highways, Interstates and otherwise, as well as the sale or lease of airports. Money from this sale (land value of these properties is likely in excess of $500 billion, and transportation value greater still) will be divided 60-40 between Federal-level and state-level infrastructure banks.

The infrastructure bank will assess, vet, and disburse for projects which maximizes ROI in the following areas: (1) maximal transportation access, across all modes; (2) increased land values and human-scale development patterns nearest transportation access nodes; (3) has high degree of patronization (for rail projects, for example, 100 persons per mile or above); and (4) is economically efficient (a commuter rail example: it uses existing equipment wherever possible, has station engineering in line with ridership projections, places stations in established centers preferentially or else has a land-use plan in place to develop a town center around the station, uses park-and-rides only sparingly, and in places where park-and-ride patronage will be highest, etc.) Highest-impact projects are those with relatively minimized costs, calculated in metrics appropriate to mode, and maximized returns on cost, in terms of the triple bottom line. The national infrastructure bank will contribute between 50% and 65% to public projects, and the state infrastructure bank between 25% and 35%. Remainders--usually in the 10% to 15% range--are to be contributed via local and/or private matching funds.

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* Yes, I'm deliberately shying away from calling it a "highway bill" for reasons explained further along in the post.