November 16 was a big day for me. I got up early and went downtown to see what was going on at an EPA conference called “Socio-economic Causes and Consequences of Future Environmental Changes Workshop”. It was supposed to be about transportation and land use, but I couldn’t actually find any information on it online. If the title isn’t bad enough, I also couldn’t find information about the individual subjects to be discussed or how to register. The registration lady was no help either “just click the link,” she said, but the link only led to a page to register to be an virtual particpant. (It turned out the real purpose of the conference was for projects that received EPA funding to report back on their findings/progress.) Anyway…
The first session was on “Trends in Housing, Land Use, and Land Coverage Change”, which is code for Landis-style development models. One was of the southern Cumberland Plateau and the other Sonoma County. The speakers gave some context (or at least the first one did) and then led us step by step thru their modeling process. Wouldn’t it have been nice to see some pretty photos of these beautiful natural landscapes that may not exist for much longer? Here’s what I thought was interesting about what they said:
Gottfried, Cumberland Plateau
· Land moves over time to the most highly valued use.
· Locals don’t like pine trees – only outsiders are likely to choose a plot with pine trees on it – it’s naturally a hardwood area.
· 20% of areas managed for hardwoods have moved to other uses.
· People used to prefer to build their homes in grassy areas. Now, it turns out, they have a preference for treed areas.
· … and a preference against paved roads.
· The timber companies have been selling to local people, mostly for farm extensions.
Merenlender, Sonoma County
· In-stream salmon were the measure of water quality.
· Sonoma county is a landscape of estates.
· Low and very low density doesn’t require sewer systems; therefore cities can’t control it with their urban growth boundaries (UGB).
At this point, I snuck out to go home for a while and take care of some pesky business waiting for me there (health insurance, my email, etc.). The mid-morning sessions lacked titles and the early afternoon sessions were about aquaculture, I am sure a very interesting topic, but no one that I know anything about or will help me to know about. The session starting at 2:45 was about Land Use, Transportation and Air Quality. Sounds promising, right?
Steve Raney (Cities21) began with his report on transforming office parks into transit villages:
· The goal is to create a less auto-dominated suburb and reduce SOV trips to less than 50%
· Energy consumed by a typical suburb: 280; energy consumed by a typical urban apartment-dweller: 97 (not sure what the unit is here)
· Energy efficiency is not the issue, lifestyle change is.
· With 50 units per acre, 50% of trips are made without a car, instead people are peds, not public transit riders.
· Suburban office parks are the main cause of sprawl and congestion over the last 30 years.
· Shoup: parking lots are land banks.
· 70% of tech workers want to work in a vital, urban area.
· Change culture to make it cool to be green.
· Personal Rapid Transit (or is it Private) in the form of a pod monorail, electric, no waiting, no stops, runs 24/7, no drivers
o Made in Korea and Sweden
o Similar systems in MN, TX, and Dubai (which is easy bc they have no public review process)
o Propose Silicon Valley style product development
· If workers use transit, then employers need provide fewer parking spaces providing room worker housing on site and a source of real estate revenues
· Access
o First mile: between home and transit station
o Last mile: between destination station and office
· Carpooling is difficult socially to ask people to spend that much time with someone
· So, provide condos on-site for tech workers.
o Discounts to people who work nearby
o Low-income upward mobility – comes with job/job training
o Include grocery carts
Then a gentleman named Hobbs talked about power sector emissions, and I went for a cookie and to call my mom. I bought 2 cookies; I have no self control.
Waddell is studying how to integrate transportation, land use and air quality modeling, because of course they are inter-related. (On the other hand, I sometimes thing we need a whole other planet, a model, in order to assess the results of various scenarios.) Here’s what I wrote down: integrate lifestyle choices with modeling, and urban sim. Hey, I don’t know what it means, but I am sure that I’m a genius.
Back in Cervero’s Transportation and Land Use class at Berkeley, we all read the views of Susan Handy and how they differed from those of our professor. As usual, I figured it all out after the final (on which it was the essay component), but I believe the main point was the she is pro-unconstrained land use (ie, auto-subsidy) and our Lafayette-dwelling professor is pro-constrained, European-style, transit-node land use. Well, her research (on which she was not the lead researcher) was the least complete and is called “Regional Development, Population, Trend, and Technology Change Impacts on Future Air Pollution Emissions in the San Joaquin Valley.” (Someone has got to give these planning academics a lesson in titling.) Here are my notes:
· They did not take into account changes in mode split/choice and found that the “controlled” scenario (where sprawl is controlled and development is focused on the urban core) does not reduce vehicle miles traveled from the baseline much…
· “Uncontrolled congestion is more spread out.”
· I found her agenda clear and her science sloppy (as described earlier). However, the lack of real mode choice consideration is the problem with most transportation models.
I hung out downtown for a while longer and then headed to the TALC regional meeting. But I’ll tell you about that in a different post. That is, assuming I find the time.
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4 comments:
Lilia,
One of my pals searches blogs and found this post.
Cervero was my thesis advisor, by the way. So he’s contributed to the Cities21 suburban vision.
Do you know of Cervero’s 1989 book, America’s Suburban Centers? This was possibly the first serious look at edge cities, and Cervero served as a key reference for Garreau’s later book.
Also, Cervero is a real leader in quantifying the impact of suburban TOD policies. His paper on land value premiums for Silicon Valley Caltrain TODs is very important, as are many of his other suburban studies.
I think Cervero is more a fan of importing European, South American, and Asian transit and land use policies to the U.S., both for urban and suburban areas. He likes hierarchies of transit with dense nodes around stations, like in Karlrusche, no matter if the station is in the CBD or in suburbia.
Here’s a famous Cervero suburban quote: "Parking lot laden office parks are one of our biggest blights, but they also represent our largest opportunity for in-fill development because of their inefficient use of land."
OK, so Robert lives in suburban Lafayette. I think his kids are about 8 and 9 years old. School quality matters in location decisions. Many of SF public schools are dodgy, or you can send your kids to the same school as Danielle Steele’s kids, but that’s about Stanford tuition $, and that’s not trivial to pull off as a professor. Also, if he’s like me, wives often call the shots in residential location decisions. Just because he’s a famous researcher doesn’t mean he’s the master of his house.
Now Susan Handy, I think she’s a pretty solid researcher too. Some of her contributions are in:
“Her research focuses on the relationships between transportation and land use, including the impact of land use on travel behavior and the impact of transportation investments on land development patterns. In addition, her work is directed toward strategies for enhancing accessibility and reducing automobile dependence, including land use policies and telecommunications services. She is known internationally for her work on the link between urban form and travel behavior, particularly the link between neighborhood design and the choice to walk, and has published numerous papers on this topic.”
I think it’s a good thing that she’s part of the grant to study the central valley of CA, which is a very strange place that’s supposed to be rural, but holds 3 or 4 of the nation’s 50 largest cities. But she’s not the lead researcher on the study, most of her effort is focused elsewhere.
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280 MBtu per household per year. This is from Calthorpe’s presentation at CNU this year:
A small urban, green housing unit consumes 97Mbtus per year, a suburban house consumes 280Mbtu. Part of this is household energy consumption, and part of this is VMT. Average suburban HH VMT is 32K/year, average urban VMT is 8K/year. From Jonathan Rose & Companies LLC report: http://www.rose-network.com/
Here’s notes on Cervero’s presentation at the CA at 50M series last year:
Berkeley's Robert Cervero
• Imagine CA with 12M additional cars.
• Caltrans is wrong, we can't build sufficient transportation capacity to accommodate large population growth.
• We can impact the demand side and become less auto-dependent.
• Bus service doesn't work very well for our current human settlement patterns. We need richer alternatives. Private sector jitneys show great promise.
• Point to point rail extensions are bad investments. Bus is generally a smarter way to go.
• We should densify around transit. We get 4X transit mode share in transit villages.
• We need smarter zoning.
• Tom Bates was a good soldier in this cause. Now California Senator Torlikson is trying to push redevelopment around transit villages.
• We need entrepreneurial government agencies that bank land that is to become transit villages. Washington DC area is good at this.
• About 2% of Bay Area housing is within transit villages.
• We should develop Scandinavian transit village corridors, not just transit villages.
• We need more effective regional planning. The 9 county Bay Area region that MTC "owns" is too small. Many folks commute from the central valley.
• We need to price out driving. Such pricing is working in Singapore & London. But, in conjunction with road pricing, we need to improve travel alternatives. SF is thinking about road pricing.
• We can become Tokyo. We can accommodate our huge projected growth. Tokyo was built on private sector transit driven by real-estate speculation.
Rude Audience Question
• Hey Professor Cervero, wouldn't your best case be 4% of population served by transit villages? IE your transit village dream won't have much of an impact. Cervero: Wrong! Look at Zurich. There is exceptionally high transit ridership. Parking is expensive. There are many layers of diverse mobility.
- Steve R, Cities21
Thanks for that, Steve. I'm a fan of Cervero too, but I do think it bear pointing out that he's not consistent in his own life. Both members of a couple influence on the location-decision, and none of us is perfect. But when Jimmy Carter sent his daughter to public schools in DC, well, I never admired anyone more than him at that moment.
PS, Note that I made some edits in response to your comment. In my defense, if we don't criticize each other, how are we ever going to get better?
Agreed that criticism and critical thinking are really, really important. What you're doing is important. I also sometimes find that when I take the trouble to take notes, then transcribe them, new insights pop out. There's a layer of fog out there that takes alot of scrutiny to cut through.
- Steve R
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