Jarrett Walker, “Explainer: The Transit Ridership Recipe“, Human Transit. An epic post by Jarrett where he outlines the fundamentals to delivering high ridership public transit.
The most successful transit, in terms of ridership achieved for a fixed operating budget, is called mass transit for a reason. The busiest transit lines — a big city subway system, for example –succeed precisely because they are not designed around the details of anyone’s needs. Riding them you will not get much assurance that planners of the system understand you in particular, or know what trip you’re making now, or care much about your unique point of view. Instead, you’re likely to notice how many different people are finding the same vehicle useful.
The end of minimum parking requirements?
Paul Young, “One dumb regulation is driving up the cost of your house and your flat white“, Gareth’s World.
By wasting valuable land and pushing up construction costs, MPRs make housing and basically everything more expensive. Now of course, there’s nothing wrong with building car parks so long as people are happy to pay for them. The problem is when they aren’t given any choice.
To what extent are MPRs actually causing an oversupply of parking? Estimating this can be difficult and will differ case by case. As an example, removal of MPRs in London resulted in a 40% decrease in the number of car parks provided with new developments. Clearly the regulation was forcing people to build significantly more parks than they wanted to.
Josh Cohen, “Minneapolis Chooses Affordable Housing Over Parking“, Next City.
Minneapolis previously had a one parking space per unit requirement for all development outside of downtown. The new ordinance does away with parking requirements for new developments with 50 or fewer units that are within a quarter mile of high-frequency transit. It reduces requirements for larger developments within a quarter mile of transit to .5 parking spaces per unit…
“There’s a lot of demand for smaller buildings in neighborhoods with underutilized or vacant parcels where you just couldn’t build a project with our previous parking requirements. Either you couldn’t make the numbers work or you literally couldn’t fit a parking garage on the site,” she explains.
Melanie Curry, “Bill to Reform Parking Minimums Passes CA Senate Transportation Committee“, StreetsBlog California. Recently the State of California reformed the counterproductive, sprawl-inducing, Level of Service (LOS) rules. Parking requirements are the next hand brake under the microscope.
The bill, A.B. 744, would reduce parking requirements for affordable housing developments, making it less expensive to build affordable housing and using federal tax credits to build housing rather than unnecessary parking.
The purpose of the bill is to fix existing unintended consequences of current parking requirements. Those consequences include unnecessarily high construction costs that make affordable housing infeasible to build, thus exacerbating an already dire shortage of housing for low-income people.
Julie Hill, “No space for parking?! New solutions for a new generation“, Auckland Design Manual Blog.
Cars, it seems, are becoming uncool. In the United States, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Norway, Japan and Australia, the coveted Y Generation demographic has propelled a downturn in car use. Gen Y likes to get from A to B by riding a bike or hopping on public transport, or just looking up a map online and walking. It marks its entry into adulthood not with a dangerous, polluting, expensive car, but with a fancy new phone.
And this trend may be catching on here. Transportblog challenges the government’s view that the drop in driving is a temporary blip caused by the after-effects of the global financial crisis, and that more roading capacity is necessary and crucial to our economic growth. It argues we are driving less and buying fewer cars due to concerns about health and the environment, high petrol costs, smartphone-assisted carpooling and cheaper flights.
The end of the office park?
Dan Zak, “The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town“, The Washington Post.
The American ghost town has assumed different forms: the abandoned gold-rush towns out West, the silent Floridian subdivisions of underwater McMansions. Now, we have fiefdoms of mid-Atlantic office space, on streets named Research Boulevard and Professional Drive, thinning out in the sprawl. They are hobbled by changing work styles and government shrinkage. People telecommute. People move into the city or into faux-urban areas that are friendlier to pedestrians, that aren’t barnacled on a highway.
Most analyses of the market indicate that office parks simply aren’t as appealing or profitable as they were in the 20th century and that Americans just aren’t as keen to cloister themselves in workspaces that are reachable only by car.
Robert Steuteville, “Firms move downtown and change workforce geography“, Better Cities & Towns.
Last fall, the US commercial real estate association NAIOP reported that 83 percent of office tenants want to locate in walkable, mixed-use places.
By far the most prominent reason companies cited for their move downtown was to help recruit and retain talented workers, notes SGA. “As companies compete for new hires and the best talent, being located in a vibrant neighborhood is considered a crucial selling point. The businesses in our study report that current and potential employees want neighborhoods with restaurants, cafes, cultural institutions, entertainment, and nightlife as well as easy access by public transportation.” This motivation is particularly strong for businesses hiring millennnials—-now 18 to 34 years old.
Henri De Groot, “What led to the revival of the world’s cities?“, Agenda: World Economic Forum.
What explains this unexpected reversal of fortunes? Why have cities emerged as hubs of economic activity in this era in which the internet seems to be the ‘cul-de-sac’ of physical distance? That is the question we ask in our new book ‘Cities and the Urban Land Premium’. ..
The growth of human capital has been key to the economic miracle of the 20th century, but the fruits of this capital could only be harvested when great minds and well educated people clustered together in cities. The rise of the city and the knowledge economy are therefore intimately related…
Knowledge spill-overs imply that cities are a focal point of location-driven externalities. Land rents are the expression of these externalities. A location’s rent is high not because of the characteristics of the location itself, but because of what happens at locations in their direct proximity.
Generation Rent?
Danny Dorling, “‘Generation rent’? We’ve been here before“, The Guardian.
We may never get back to the fantasy of a home-owning majority, where so many of us get up housing ladders to maintain our own property. We may not want to do so again. After all, when house prices finally stop rising, because a younger generation successfully demanded mild rent regulation, what would be the point of speculating and buying at today’s prices?
Hilary Osborne, “Generation rent: the housing ladder starts to collapse for the under-40s“, The Guardian.
House price rises of 5% a year and a shortage of affordable homes are set to swell the ranks of “generation rent” over the next decade, so that by 2025 more than half of those under 40 will be living in properties owned by private landlords.
Courtney Barnett, “Depreston”, Pedestrian at Best.
You said we should look out further, I guess it wouldn’t hurt us
We don’t have to be around all these coffee shops
Now we’ve got that percolator, never made a latte greater
I’m saving twenty three dollars a week
We drive to a house in Preston, we see police arrestin’
A man with his hand in a bag
How’s that for first impressions? This place seems depressing
It’s a Californian bungalow in a cul-de-sac
It’s got a lovely garden, a garage for two cars to park in
Or a lot of room for storage if you’ve just got one
And it’s going pretty cheap you say, well it’s a deceased estate
Aren’t the pressed metal ceilings great?
Then I see the handrail in the shower, a collection of those canisters for coffee tea and flour
And a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam
And I can’t think of floorboards anymore, whether the front room faces south or north
And I wonder what she bought it for
If you’ve got a spare half a million
You could knock it down and start rebuildin’
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Just thought I’d leave a comment that I really like the “Sunday reading” feature. Wouldn’t want the lack of comments on it make people think it isn’t appreciated.
Seconded. The ‘epic’ from Jarrett is certainly worthy of that tag. Not quite an elevator pitch, but a very good pithy guide to getting PT optimised in my view.
Love the cartoon regarding economic evaluation. This comes up all the time at work. The community, politicians, police, etc all want to see a particular safety/connectivity improvement but if we are ever going to get funding from NZTA then it has to have the appropriate BCR still. Local politicians are never very keen to go it alone in the provincial centres. We do joke (somewhat inappropriately) that we need a supply of willing victims to assist with our BCR. Of course the reality is that we shouldn’t need any in the first place.
There are rumours that a much greater weighting will be given to ped and cycle demand in the next update of the EEM.