#it’s sprawling. it doesn’t have the infrastructure to support the population

[bobthebenevolentpirate]

I NEED everyone in the notes to know that Denver is not cold year round?? They can get up into the 90s and even 100s (fahrenheit) in the summer???

Let's run this Hypothetical Again With 12 new cities

NYC, Boston, DC, Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis,New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia were all in the original polla ND therefore aren't eligible for this poll

[planningpals]

What’s the “best” density for the design of cities today? Why?

Part 2

(Carly) In my opinion, there is not best way to design a city based on every city being unique due to the topography, infrastructure, location, etc. In general, there is too much wasted space in cities because 100 years ago, 100 times more people lived in the same amount of space. What would make the design of a city optimal in general would to create proper public transportation the doesn’t immobilize the young, poor, and elderly people like sprawl does, create a city that encourages natural human interaction with properly planned green spaces and sidewalks, and create a city that is based around people not cars. Jan Gehl says it best that “ The human dimension has been overlooked, neglected, and phased out”. With high density cities comes high congestion with a lot things, like traffic. When creating a high density city it is important to come up with unique and strategic ideas to solve overcorwding, bad traffic congestion, and having enough reosurces for the population, while putting the convenience of people at the center of designing a city. Upon doing further research about population density, I found that a high density city is considered “to be at least 61 people/acre”. When following this principle among a few other it is projected to “promote sustainable diversified, socially equal communities, optimize land use and provide an interconnected network of streets, foster local employment and consumption, and provide a variety of lot sizes and housing types to cater for the diverse housing needs at densities that can ultimately support provision of local services”( Ahlfeldt G. et al). In Cincinnati Central Business District, which covers mainly the downtown area, the population density is around 5,000 people that disperse over 3,000 houses. This is comparable to 1.6 people to a house and a lot of the suburban areas surrounding downtown have a better density than that. (Annika) Overall, I would say there would not be a perfect way to fix Urban density. There are a lot of ways in which help but would not say they are a perfect fix for this. When looking at a city compared to a suburb this would be a totally different answer. Seeing as places like West Chester and Mason this would be very low because there is much more land being taken up by each person instead of a lot of people taking up not that big of space. As for a city this would be different because there are a lot more apartments and less land for as many people. The ideal way in which both of these could be incorporated is if there was a 15 min city in which would allow for green space and walking but also allowing there to be less housing spread out and spraw. 

[mitigatedchaos]

More Thinking on Golf Carts

(1,800 words, ~8 minutes)

The humble golf cart could be the future of American personal transport.

Cities

The most basic nature of the human settlement is formed through its relationships between time, energy, and space. With energy we can control travel time, and thus access to space. We should envision cities as a pool of destinations accessible per unit time. The spacing between these destinations is determined by travel speed.

The number of accessible destinations reachable in a given time in an area can be roughly modeled as...

[network penetration] × [area density] × π × [transit speed]2

Due to the fragile nature of the human body, each increase in speed requires an increase in space. Apparently, the average driver hits the brakes after around 2.3 seconds. At 20 km/h, the vehicle will have moved around 12-13 meters before that happens. At 60 km/h, 38 meters. At 120 km/h, around 77 meters. As a vehicle becomes faster, it requires greater padding both in itself (to protect passengers) and in the environment (to protect others). This can be in the form of rules or procedures, but it can also be in the form of physical buffers, grade separation, signaling equipment, and so on. We can also constrain the freedom of motion of the vehicle, such as putting it on tracks, reducing the amount of information that others have to process to safely avoid it.

The padding takes the form of space, but it also takes the form of time, because it's largely about acceleration. (This suggests a theoretical maximum density of human development.)

But let's set the full discussion of my theory of city network power aside for now.

Density Considerations

Suppose a car travels at 60 km/h (~37 mph, the average US car speed) and has point-to-point access to an American suburb with a density of 700 persons per square kilometer.

In 15 minutes, the car could travel 15 kilometers. During this time it can go anywhere within that radius, for a total accessible area of about 706 km2. Let us imagine that destinations are directly proportional to population, and that the population is uniform. The car can reach about 495,000 destination... units, or 33,000 per minute. (In practice, it won't hit the average of 37 mph unless it reaches the highway, which it won't do in one minute.)

The typical walking speed is about 5 km/h (~3.1 mph). A pedestrian's 15 minute range is around 4.9 km2. As it happens, there are American university campuses of this size, with on-site restaurants, gyms, and other amenities, with parking decks around the edges. If destinations are proportional to population, we'll need to pack around 101,000 people into the area to equal the suburb.

Note that this doesn't include public transit. Even a New York City bus trundling along at 7 mph (~11 km/h) is twice as fast as a pedestrian, for about 21,000 residents / km2 - not far off the density of some parts of New York.

A bicyclist without much training can (apparently) achieve an average of 20 km/h (~12 mph). This is 4 times faster than a pedestrian. If we take that as around 78 km2, we get roughly 6,350 residents / km2.

Golf cart maximum speed is 32 km/h (~20 mph), giving us a range of 201 km2. That makes for a density of around 2,470 residents / km2, which we'll round up to 2,500.

How tall is that?

Assume each resident requires 80 m2 of space, and 35% of land area is dedicated to residential construction (350,000 m2 for each km2). The heights are then:

0.16 stories for cars.

23 stories for pedestrian-only.

4.8 stories for New York buses.

1.45 stories for bikes.

0.56 stories for carts.

Any number below 1.0 means we can (potentially) build a yard on the lot (if it isn't taken up by parking). Multiply by 2 to divide the lot in half by building taller. (If you've noticed European cities with lots of 3-story buildings, well, that makes sense.)

Golf Carts

Both The Villages in Florida and Peachtree City in Georgia are golf-cart-oriented communities. Peachtree City has "multi-use paths" mandated throughout. These paths wind through scenic forest and reach from subdivisions to stores, restaurants, schools, and other locations throughout the town. Look in on the parking lots from Google StreetView and Maps, however - they seem to be dominated by full-size cars, with only a handful of carts in any given lot. The Villages, a retirement community, does better in terms of the number of carts, but still has plenty of sprawling parking lot despite its wide-reaching cart path network. Why?

Simply put, these are largely conventional developments that have been equipped with a thorough, but auxiliary, golf cart network. Peachtree City has a median household income of $93,000, 66% above the statewide median, and The Villages is an extension of the retirement village golf course concept elevated to a new scale.

The parking lots aren't filled with golf carts because the developments aren't dense enough. In order to have the same number of destinations reachable per unit travel time by golf cart, they would have be about four times the density - around that 2,500 number we proposed earlier.

If we do this the carts may start to become a real traffic issue for each other. With the smaller size and slower speed of the carts, however, one lane's width of conventional road supports roughly twice as many golf carts, so road land use can be allocated to 1/3rd "Micro-mobility Path" (to be shared with bikes, e-scooters, etc) and 2/3rds conventional road.

The shorter length makes a difference much more for parking than it does on the road. A Toyota Corolla covers a minimum of ~8.27 m2, while a Yamaha Drive 2 golf cart covers around 2.87 m2, a factor of almost 2.9x smaller.

Is it walkable?

Golf carts move about six times faster than pedestrians. Cars move around 12 (average) to 24 (highway) times faster. A medium speed for a horse is apparently around 10-17 mph (~3-5.5 times faster). Golf cart and bicycle-oriented development is therefore more analogous to the speed of a horse than it is to the speed of a pedestrian or a car, even though everyone becomes a pedestrian at either the beginning or end of their journey.

...but this isn't necessarily the wrong approach. A town in which every resident has their own personal horse, cowboy hat, and six-shooter is very American in scale. It's also a suitable scale for bicycles.

You might have noticed that in some U.S. cities with high housing demand, there's some new construction going on in a more "New Urbanist" style, with townhomes being built with walking access to small stores or a grocery store. Their streets and parking lots are still scaled to automobile traffic, however, and actually reaching that grocery store from the center of the development might require walking one kilometer and crossing four lanes of loud, full-scale traffic. The small amount of groceries that can be carried on foot require more frequent trips. Most Americans would probably choose to take the car, as cargo bikes aren't really a thing in America (though they should be) and don't have much room for kids. Of course, if the grocery store is on the same side of the road, this is all easier.

...but if the New Urbanists are seeking to build old forms from the America that existed before the automobile, they may unintentionally be implicitly building for the power, mass, speed, mobility, and scale... of the horse. (And also the locomotive.)

Since there is a vehicle that roughly matches that description (the golf cart), and the modifications required would be relatively small (widening of sidewalks into multi-use paths, addition of golf cart lanes to roads, or similar measures), they would make an excellent choice to retrofit. And if we're building for golf carts, we're also building for bicycles, electric bikes, pedal quadricycles, electric scooters, and similar very light and comparatively slow vehicles, as long as we're willing to throw in some small bike and electric infrastructure.

Cars

If you've been following so far, then you probably understand why Americans love cars. They have extremely high network penetration. They have extremely high speed. This allows either tremendous utilization of space or enormous compression of destinations per unit time. They're air conditioned, armored, weaponizable, and just highly mobile in general.

They also get stuck in traffic.

Anyhow, with a car of your own you can go almost anywhere you want in a city, without asking other people, having to wait for public transit with public transit schedule and reliability, or needing to share your bubble of space with loud people. It's a lot of freedom, despite the costs that come with it.

Though slower and with a shorter range, golf carts offer similar radical personal powered point-to-point mobility. A cart-based community should also offer pockets of sufficient density for public transit and cart-based park & ride - residential development will be on the interior of blocks, while businesses will be on the exterior, which makes not having a cart or bike at the destination not as big a deal for commuting.

There is one other matter to deal with.

I like this has lockable doors, my biggest issue with bikes is they get stolen all the time.

- YouTube comment on a video for Veemo, an electric-assist cab bike

It might be more common than you think.

"We should make it so people don't need bikes as much to get around so it won't matter as much when they're stolen," or "if people were more secure in their income, they wouldn't feel a need to steal bikes," or "it's your fault for not properly locking up your bicycle" are not going to cut it. If you want the environmental benefits of the biking, the scooting, the golf carting, the accompanying density and decrease in infrastructure volume, and the reduction in fuel usage (and therefore CO2 emissions), you must arrest and prosecute bike thieves, and you must arrest and prosecute cart thieves.

Government programs such as drug clinics to keep addicts off the streets and job assistance for the poor are compatible with this transit mode, but people must be confident that their bicycles, quadricycles, e-scooters, and golf carts will not be stolen. If they are not confident of this, they will mouth all the correct words to you, then either move to some place where the median household income is $93k and the population density is 550/km2, or just use a car.

The ones that won't are the ones that can't, and are those who are the least able to afford losing their vehicle - the poor.

We can make security mechanisms a part of our transit strategy, such as locking bikestands, or custom keys for golf carts, and registration at city hall for all these vehicles, but all of these micromobility options are inherently lower security than cars, and crime within the town must be handled accordingly.

TL;DR

Math regarding density and speed of transit suggests that a town with the density of 2,500 residents / km2, multiple times the density of U.S. suburbs (with numbers like 500 / km2 or 700 / km2) could be economically viable, if it had a second transport network based on golf carts, bicycles, e-scooters, and so on. This level of density would allow each resident to have a yard and maintain the car-like point-to-point mobility, despite lower use of resources and space.

[ebola-kun]

On Volusia: Same Old Story, Same Old Song and Dance

Sometimes, in the quiet of the evening, when I’m sipping aged whiskey and cogitating on the signs and wonders – I question if we’re living in some parallel dimension here on the Fun Coast?

Because, of the hundreds-of-trillions of galaxies out there in the infinite expanse of the universe – you’d be hard pressed to find a more surreal political “reality” than what we experience here on this salty piece of land.

A place where, no matter how utterly dysfunctional things may get, our ‘powers that be’ always muster the hubris to stand before their long-suffering subjects, smile broadly, and paint a rosy picture using a dull palette of half-truths, feint maneuvers and old-fashioned political horseshit.

Once again, when it came time to do the right thing, our doddering fool of a lame duck County Chair, Ed Kelley, couldn’t rise to it.

On Tuesday, Old Ed stood before a fawning coterie of insiders, political benefactors, government contractors, political candidates, a handful of municipal officials (who, given their historic poor treatment by county government, would have preferred to be anywhere else) and a few suspicious citizens – to deliver the annual “State of the County” address.

(I would have been there, but I wash my beard on Tuesdays and can’t do a thing with it. . .)

So, I watched the oddly produced video on the County website afterward – the first ten-minutes of which was a rolling advertisement for the event’s (wink,wink) “sponsors.”

As usual, I was immediately struck by the fact that every elected official and bureaucrat in the room was acknowledged and thanked during the lengthy introduction – not one mention of the hard-working and overtaxed residents of Volusia County who pay the bills and suffer in silence.

After all, it’s not about us.  It never has been.

During the opening segment of the canned video, county employees were shown sampling water quality on the St. John’s River – before a Volusia County environmental specialist took the opportunity to scold residents:

“If people really knew why we did this and rather than just complaining about the water looking so bad or being concerned about whether the fish are edible or not, if they really understood why things get so bad and took more care of what they do we might not have to be out here quite as much.”

So, the fact our water quality is in serious decline – with wild fish showing signs of tumors and lesions – is our fault?

If only we took more care, it would lighten the load on Volusia County Environmental Management and clean-up our increasingly polluted rivers, estuaries and sensitive wetlands. . .

Remember: The state of our environment has nothing to do with the residential and commercial sprawl our elected officials continue to permit – while their political benefactors in the real estate development industry line their groaning pockets – understand?

So, stop your bitching about whether the fish are edible, or why the water looks so bad, and change your heathen ways.  Got it?

That’s when I turned it off.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown weary of being blamed and lectured by the very elected officials and entrenched bureaucrats who got us into this damnable condition in the first place. . .

Whatever.

It was an ostentatious affair – political vanity run amok – complete with a “free lunch” provided by several companies that do business with Volusia County (?) – and held at the county owned Ocean Center, which stands at the epicenter of our crumbling core tourist area.

How appropriate.  How completely appropriate. . .

One would have thought that as he sang his swansong before a roomful of like types, Chairman Kelley would have, for once, told the truth – you know, sail off into the sunset with a clear conscience – while challenging the next iteration of our county council to begin the monumental process of rebuilding the public trust.

Nah.

Instead, Chairman Kelley dutifully recognized the assembled nabobs, then flogged some ridiculous narrative to shore up his heir apparent – the always arrogant Councilwoman Deb Denys – clumsily touting her weird obsession with “space jobs” – while their “colleagues” provided video evidence of their own ill-informed perception of the state of things here on the beleaguered Fun Coast.

According to the agitprop that was provided to attendees:

“Government, business and education leaders also are coordinating like never before to ensure that Volusia County – squarely within the so-called Space Triangle – has the regulatory climate and educated workforce necessary to broadcast its message to the aerospace industry: Volusia County is ready, and Volusia County is right!”

Say what?

The fictitious Space Triangle is “so called” because it doesn’t exist.

And the fact of the matter is, we are nowhere near ready. . .

Just for the record – I didn’t say that.  Dr. Kent Sharples, the Enlightened One of the exalted CEO Business Alliance did.

Remember?

During his flashlight-under-the-chin apocalyptic prognostication at the November 2019 meeting of the Knights of the Roundtable, describing our horrific fate if we don’t increase the sales tax, Sharples said of roads, infrastructure and “shovel-ready” sites to attract aerospace companies:

“Until we get that infrastructure in place, we’re not going to be successful.  If we’re not ready in 12 to 18 months to be able to start construction, we’re not even in the competition anymore.”

My ass.

In my view, this shim-sham of aerospace manufacturing in Volusia County continues to serve as a convenient diversion to the fact we don’t have the infrastructure, workforce or ancillary services to support these industries, and, at present, we simply cannot compete with Brevard County – who continues to recover from the economic disaster resulting from the loss of the shuttle program – not to mention that the vacant infrastructure which pockmarks the Titusville, Cocoa, Melbourne metroplex sits literally on the doorstep of the commercial launch complex.

While Volusia County’s potential role in the space industry remains decades away – if ever – those we have elected to meet our current economic and employment needs continue to feed us this pie-in-the-sky pap as though we’re ready to start launching rockets from the old Home Depot parking lot next month.

Bullshit.

The constant drumbeat from Denys and our shameless “economic development” shills is cruel comfort to some 43% of our county’s population who struggle to meet monthly living expenses – and the thousands more living below the poverty line – who are begging for more opportunities than $32,000 a year storehouse jobs.

In my view, Dr. Sharples was right about one thing – if these half-wits who hold high office don’t put a moratorium on this massive sprawl and begin the process of improving our transportation, water quality and utilities infrastructure in the next 12 to 18 months – we’re all screwed. . .

But wait, there was more “good news” from Old Ed and the Funky Bunch on Tuesday.

According to The Daytona Beach News-Journal:

“Among other things, Kelley touted major upgrades to the Ocean Center and Daytona Beach International Airport, new routes for Votran buses, the hiring of a long-awaited internal auditor and giving County Manager George Recktenwald the permanent job as a few of the year’s highlights, adding that the State of the County video may have shown a lot of progress and accomplishments some residents might not know about.”

Tragically, bus routes and new carpet in an airport terminal are what pass for civic “accomplishments” in Volusia County.

I don’t make this shit up, folks. . .

To take this abject absurdity to the ragged edge – let’s look at a few of the “Goals and Objectives” that, according to the soiree’s glossy program, have been proposed by county government – which, by any metric, remain a figment of our county councils very vivid imagination:

“Maintain and foster productive relationships with public and private partners.”

If maintaining “productive relationships” with “private partners” means funneling public funds to underwrite the private, for-profit projects of their political benefactors – mission accomplished!

“Demonstrate leadership in decisions and actions.”

Does anything about this perpetual shitshow in DeLand resemble strong “leadership”?

“Meet community expectations for quality.”

Please.  The community quit expecting anything from Volusia County government years ago – and we collectively spoke volumes about this continuing “trust issue” during last year’s half-cent sales tax referendum.

Now, let’s hope the long-suffering voters of Volusia County continue that positive momentum and demand servant-leadership that will bring true accomplishments we can all be proud of at the ballot box this fall.

This content was originally published here.

[southeastasianists]

Singapore has long tried to combat its reputation as a cultural desert. An influx of state funding in the past two decades has almost singlehandedly cultivated an art scene from the top down, as the city-state has tried to locate itself as a premier destination for art in Southeast Asia and beyond. But in a bombshell interview with the South China Morning Post in January this year, Lorenzo Rudolf, the founder and president of Art Stage Singapore – long hailed as the flagship Southeast Asian contemporary arts fair – delivered a shockingly sobering assessment of the arts scene in the city-state.

“Strong economic growth has led to many new galleries and private museums opening in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Everywhere, everywhere, the art scene booms. The only place we have stagnation is Singapore,” he told the Hong Kong-based newspaper. “If the market doesn’t grow, then I will have to reflect on what I do. I sure won’t be sitting here until the end.”

And Rudolf echoed those sentiments to Southeast Asia Globe last month.

“Everybody truly thought that Singapore [could] become the centre of this entire region,” he said. “Singapore mainly concentrated on its own art scene, while in the countries around Singapore, art scenes massively grew due to economic growth and, often consequently, social liberalisation. The private sectors and collectors began to take over responsibilities to support and develop the growth of the scenes… As a result, we have this situation today that there is a danger of these art scenes around Singapore becoming more attractive internationally… We see now that it is harder to build up culture than infrastructure.”

Art Stage Singapore brings together industry leaders along with top international talent and galleries in a bid to place the regional art scene on a global stage. Launched in 2011, it became Asia’s answer to Art Basel, also founded by Rudolf and considered by some to be the premier art fair series in the world. In 2013, leveraging the event’s success, state agencies the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) and the Economic Development Board (EDB) built Singapore Art Week around Art Stage, with the latter seen as a centrepiece for the city-state’s art scene.

But with the number of exhibitors at the fair having halved since 2016 – 84 took part this year, compared to 131 in 2017 and 170 in 2016 – coupled with Rudolf’s downbeat outlook, the city-state’s position as a regional arts hub is on rocky ground. Beyond Art Stage, the Singapore Contemporary Art Show was discontinued this year after only two editions, and the Affordable Art Fair was scaled back from two shows per year to only one.

Since the turn of the century, Singapore has tried to position itself as a top cultural destination in Southeast Asia. The Renaissance City Plan of 2000 laid out a long-term scheme for massive development of the arts, with the state pouring millions into public art museums, non-profit art spaces, residency programmes and research centres to try to shape a market in which there is little private investment and where arts appreciation is known to be relatively low. According to the National Arts Council (NAC), the state’s investment was $412.8m in 2016, which equals about 85% of all investment in the arts that year.

Rudolf said that despite Art Stage’s potential back in 2011, the scene’s government-led development has meant that it has grown differently to its neighbours, which poses unique challenges.

“Singapore’s art scene is not organic,” he said. “A successfully sustainable, functioning art scene can only grow from the bottom up. Never in history have you seen an art scene which has been built from the top down functioning.”

Mark Saunderson, co-founder and director of the Singapore Contemporary Art Show, a branch of the Asia Contemporary Art Show based in Hong Kong, agreed. “The National Arts Council cultivates artists in Singapore. But when you look at the depth of art history, skill, craft, technical aspects of art, there’s huge depth in Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia even,” he said. “I think the challenge with the arts in Singapore [is that] this is a process, and you have to involve people in art who are obviously interested, but engage with them and develop that interest over time.”

The city-state’s relative lack of art history is one of the gaps that were intended to be plugged with the opening of the National Gallery Singapore in 2015. A sprawling, $370m state-funded project, the gallery houses the world’s largest collection of modern art from Southeast Asia, and it was hoped it would cement Singapore’s place as an arts hub thanks to its regional focus. “This is the first time this is happening anywhere in the region: a Southeast Asian collection to tell the regional story of art,” said gallery director Eugene Tan.

“This understanding of art history, which was previously absent, is something we are beginning to introduce to the public.”

Saunderson linked the closing of the Singapore Contemporary Art Show and some of Art Stage’s problems to a downturn in the economy, and while he disagreed with Rudolf’s assessment that the art scene was stagnating, he said that the key to a successful art scene in the city-state was to understand the uniqueness of Singapore’s young art market and the nascent tastes of its audience – and to let it evolve naturally over time.

“When you’re an art fair organiser, as we are in Hong Kong, we are very, very conscious in terms of where we select our artwork – [it should] appeal to the maturity, the taste, the diversity [of the audience],” said Saunderson. “The key to nurturing, developing and growing the market is to take stock of where the market is at… It’s a hard thing to do, as Singapore has discovered. It’s a hard thing to jumpstart top down.”

With growing competition from emerging regional markets and events such as Art Fair Philippines and the recently established Art Stage Jakarta, not to mention the powerhouse that is Hong Kong – the largest art market in Asia – some fear that Singapore is becoming increasingly irrelevant on a global stage and that attracting non-local artists and galleries into its borders has become more of a challenge. The sky-high costs of renting studio and gallery space mean that setting up in cheaper alternatives in other countries can be more appealing.

Also, according to Singaporean filmmaker and visual artist Sherman Ong, the Singaporean focus on economics has helped keep art appreciation in its infancy. A 2016 statistic from the NAC showed that only four in ten Singaporeans would say they are interested in the arts. “Singapore has always been a very pragmatic place – it’s a very commercial city,” said Ong. “The population still does not see how arts benefit them materially. Of course, the government is working very hard to change that, and you can see these changes, but it still needs time.”

Ong sees a contradiction between the government’s agenda and the needs of local artists, which can result in a restrictive space for meaningful artistic creation. “What is needed for the arts is different from what the government wants. The government wants to create Singapore as an international hub for Southeast Asian art,” he said. “Sometimes art also has to have its own standing… Because once it’s tied to a certain source of funding then events have to, in a way, support the larger objectives of nation building.”

This is intimately linked to what Ong considers the imperative of combatting a “bland” art scene that comes out of a setting where artists may – at least subconsciously – stay away from controversial or political subjects. “I think that’s kind of a survival mechanism, because the funding always comes from the centre,” he said. “It’s not to say that artists need to do work that criticises the centre – it’s actually to create an environment where the artist is free to think and go beyond… to create work that is not so restricted.”

Jasdeep Sandhu, gallery director of Singapore’s Gajah Gallery, which has exhibited at all eight editions of Art Stage, disagrees with the notion that artistic censorship is still an issue in Singapore. “That’s actually rubbish,” he said. “I had my gallery for about 15 years at the ministry building and I had full homosexual scenes displayed on my walls. For months. And I’m 30 metres from a minister’s chair. No one once told me to take it down. They don’t want to know. This whole censorship thing is ridiculous… It’s a headache for them to fill out all these papers and answer to media and to grumbling artists.”

Despite feeling the strain of low sales, Sandhu is hopeful about Art Stage Singapore’s future and thinks that the shrinking number of exhibitors was inevitable because enormously high costs for galleries mean that the city-state was never going to be able to continue to support a fair of that size. “They’re a bit too premature for their time… At the end of Art Stage 2018 I was actually very optimistic, and I hope that they [learn from] having an 80- to 100-gallery art fair,” he said. “If they’ve spent a few years building it up it’ll be a shame to give away the initiative.”

Sandhu also feels that, despite a growing number of complaints, the city-state’s art scene has come a long way. “I think the government is doing a fantastic job… No country around Southeast Asia has put that much effort into creating museums,” he said. “If you look at 20 years ago, a Singaporean artist would be hard pressed to sell at $2,000. And you have young guys at 30 years old selling at $30,000 right now. That’s a lot. That’s what I call real progress.”

Beyond Singaporean borders, Vietnamese-American artist Richard Streitmatter-Tran, who is based in Ho Chi Minh City, feels that as an artist he has only benefited from Singapore’s plan to position itself as a hub for Southeast Asian culture. “Coming from someone who is not Singaporean, much of my early career was supported by Singapore. And it still continues to be,” he said. “I’m glad to be involved in a lot of the initiatives that Singapore has because I find them interesting. Do I find Singapore itself exciting? I don’t know… I don’t know what it can do to combat its image of being the most boring country in the world.”

It appears that the futures of Art Stage Singapore and of the city-state itself as an arts hub are intrinsically linked. While the winding down of the country’s showcase arts event would be a hammer blow, it seems unlikely that it would sound the death knell for the arts scene in general given the level of investment ploughed into the project thus far. What is more certain, though, is that there is no easy path ahead for Singapore.

“Everybody is actually catching up. So eventually I think we will have to come to another equilibrium. I think it’s now a transition. [It] is not clear how Singapore can navigate the situation,” said Ong.

And while Rudolf was bullish over this year’s Art Stage Singapore, describing it as “surely still the biggest and most important art fair in Southeast Asia”, he is in agreement that the city-state’s neighbours are finding their place on the regional stage.

“The only way for Singapore to be successful in the future is to make all efforts to collaborate among all local players and to seriously focus on the cultural aspects of art,” he said. “Art is not a merchandise.”

[architectnews]

Bjarke Ingels' Masterplanet vision for Earth is "a continuation of the colonialist project" says Liam Young

Developing a masterplan for the planet could entrench existing inequalities and make climate change worse, according to the architect behind the new Planet City movie.

Architect Liam Young described the Masterplanet project by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) as "a continuation of the colonialist project that has already masterplanned the planet in its own image".

Instead, Young has presented an alternative vision of a future planet Earth in Planet City, a short animated movie depicting a dense metropolis for 10 billion people that would free up the rest of the planet for rewilding and the return of ancestral lands.

"It is just worth calling out the differences between these types of works," Young told Dezeen.

"The imposition of singular visions by starchitects just repeats so many of the mistakes that have got us into this situation in the first place."

Top and above: Planet City is a concept for a city for 10 billion people

Both Young and BIG, which is led by architect Bjarke Ingels, propose conceptual solutions for a world with 10 billion people, which is Earth's projected population in 2050.

Young's Planet City proposes a self-sufficient, multicultural city occupying just 0.02 per cent of the planet's surface.

Contrasting visions for a world with 10 billion people

By contrast, BIG's Masterplanet concept involves scaling up existing infrastructure to cover the entire planet, including creating a single global power grid and an international network of recycling plants.

"The typical techno solutionism that Bjarke Ingel's project is an example of is indicative of the general response of the design community to issues such as the pandemic or climate change," said Young.

"Such proposals are a continuation of the colonialist project that has already masterplanned the planet in its own image, he added. "Plans of this scale have historically perpetuated forms of exclusion and reinforced existing systems of power.

"Most of these projects rarely engage with these root causes of climate change and in fact enable them."

Bjarke Ingel's Masterplanet is another vision for Earth

The debate comes as architects and designers turn their attention to designing holistic solutions to global problems such as climate change, pollution and environmental degradation.

In an interview with Dezeen last year, Winy Maas of MVRDV called on architects to design new planets to help understand how to solve problems on Earth.

"It would be wonderful to design more planets and to compare them because there are different dreams," said the Dutch architect.

"It would be very useful in that way to fantasise on that because it would mirror what we should do now."

Architects turning attention to holistic global solutions

Maas added that the planet needed to be managed in the same way that landscapes are managed in countries like the Netherlands, with areas set aside for nature, farming and power generation as well as for human habitation.

"We will be with 11 billion people soon," Maas said. "We have to manage that growth. Some of us will go to the tundras in order to survive."

"We have to deal with that and with the new densities that [will] occur and also to keep enough emptiness for oxygen and water management."

Maas suggested turning cities like Hong Kong into havens for nature

Speaking at a Dezeen talk in 2018, designer Jalila Essaïdi called on designers to propose audacious solutions to global problems.

"I would say yes please, more science fiction," said Essaïdi. "Let's keep dreaming big and doing the impossible."

Essaïdi praised Elon Musk's plan to build colonies on Mars as an example of the big-scale thinking that is required on Earth.

"At first you have to think about the rockets to Mars before you can apply them here," she said. "It's a dream, an escape, but maybe you find aspects you can use here [on Earth]."

Planet City "implausibly extreme"

However, Young said that simply scaling up existing solutions is no longer appropriate for the global problems the world faces.

"What we actually need is an entirely different way of organizing change," he said. "Climate change is a political and ideological problem, not one that can be solved with Bjarke's new global power grid."

"Projects need to engage with the necessary cultural and ideological changes that are needed to support the implementation of these technologies," he added.

"Utopias of the imagination, projected into reality or these speculative fictions that masquerade as real solutions, without this complex engagement with their embedded politics are deeply problematic."

Liam Young

While admitting that his Planet City vision is "implausibly extreme", Young said that his short movie was intended as a provocation to trigger discussion about the failure of existing systems.

"Planet City is a fiction shaped like a city," he said. "It doesn't pretend to be an executable proposal, it is a provocation that engages and celebrates the value of fiction as a product in and of itself."

The Planet City concept is based on a consensus between human cultures, rather than a top-down masterplan.

"Set against the consistent failure of nation-states to act in any meaningful way against climate change, Planet City imagines emerges from a global citizen consensus, a voluntary and multi-generational retreat from the sprawling cities we all inhabit," Young explained.

Planet City is an alternative to "a singular design vision"

While Planet City is a fictional construct, Young said it presented an alternative to "a singular design vision or a central governing body enforcing a decree."

"Instead, network-enabled movements like the global climate strike and climate march, some of the largest gatherings of humans in history, act as a template for the early rumblings and first mobilisations of Planet City," he said.

"It is about allowing space for multiple voices not the PR informed manoeuvres of a singular star architect whose very value is tied up in the systems that have created much of the problems in the first place."

The post Bjarke Ingels' Masterplanet vision for Earth is "a continuation of the colonialist project" says Liam Young appeared first on Dezeen.

[shirlleycoyle]

Why the US Sucks at Building Public Transit

American cities are facing a transportation crisis. There’s terrible traffic. Public transit doesn’t work or go where people need it to. The cities are growing, but newcomers are faced with the prospects of paying high rents for reasonable commutes or lower rents for dreary, frustrating daily treks. Nearly all Americans, including those in cities, face a dire choice: spend thousands of dollars a year owning a car and sitting in traffic, or sacrifice hours every day on ramshackle public transit getting where they need to go. Things are so broken that, increasingly, they do both. Nationwide, three out of every four commuters drive alone. The rate in metro areas is not much different.

“Without an integrated system of transit in our metropolitan areas the great anticipated growth will become a dream that will fail,” predicted Ralph Merritt, general manager of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, “because people cannot move freely, safely, rapidly, and economically from where they live to where they work.”

Although Merritt’s words could just as well apply today, he said them 66 years ago in 1954. This is a crisis facing American cities right now in 2020, but it’s an old crisis. The only thing that has changed is the problem has gotten worse.

Like most crises, there is no single cause. Our cities, and our federal government, have made a lot of mistakes. Some were obvious at the time, others only in hindsight, but most have been a combination of the two. We keep doing things that stopped being good ideas a long time ago.

Many of those mistakes have to do with housing policy, which is inextricably linked to transportation policy. But the most obvious cause of our transportation crisis is a simple one: America sucks at building public transportation.

Why is this? Why does the U.S. suck at building good, useful public transit?

It’s a question that has vexed me for years. Just when I think I’ve figured it out, some other facet I had never previously considered comes to my attention. I have spoken to a dozen transit experts and historians. I have read several histories of American mass transportation policy written by independent scholars as well as government agencies. I've scoured federal archives and interviewed employees of transit agencies planning their own big projects. I’ve analyzed budgets and construction costs and compared them to our international peers. The tangle of American governmental dysfunction is so profound, digging into it can feel like undoing a rubber band ball with your teeth.

But the failure itself is simple and obvious. It’s apparent to anyone who has traveled abroad in the last several decades. Whether it’s traditional subway and commuter rail systems, modern streetcars and light rails, high-speed intercity rail, or even the humble bus with dedicated lanes and train-like stops, the U.S. lags perilously behind. It is a national embarrassment and a major reason our cities are less pleasant, more expensive places to live.

Just to name a few recent accomplishments abroad lacking an American parallel: Paris has the Grand Paris Express, 120 miles and 68 stations of new lines, plus a host of new trams and express bus lines with dedicated lanes. Moscow is building 98 new miles and 79 new stations for its Metro. At two years delayed and three billion pounds over budget, London’s Crossrail qualifies as a scandalous by European standards. But when it opens—perhaps in 2021—it will provide 73 miles of new rapid, frequent trains across greater London, including right through the center of the city. Since the 1990s, Madrid’s Metro has added more than 100 kilometers to its system. There are numerous examples of highly functioning and useful public transit systems in Latin America, which also invented the Bus Rapid Transit, a hybrid system with enclosed stops and dedicated lanes. China, which had basically no rapid transit through 1990, now has 25 cities with comprehensive rail systems, including seven of the world’s 12 largest metro networks by length.

Source: Yonah Freemark. Chart by Cathryn Virginia

Of course, China’s massive central government means it can build what it wants when and where it wants. But it’s hardly just China and other authoritarian regimes embarrassing the U.S. when it comes to transit construction. Consider, for example, high speed rail, or trains between cities capable of going faster than 120 mph. Over the last 30 years, almost two dozen countries have built true high-speed rail networks, according to transportation expert Yonah Freemark. The U.S. has a grand total of 34 miles of high-speed track.

China is not on this graph because they're literally off the charts (sorry). Data source: Yonah Freemark. Chart by Cathryn Virginia

This isn’t to say the U.S. has built nothing in the same time period. Freemark, one of the most thorough chroniclers of American transportation projects, calculated that the U.S. spent more than $47 billion on 1,200 miles of new and expanded transit lines in the decade from 2010 to 2019 (most of that mileage has been on bus routes).

That may sound like a lot, and at first glance it can seem like the U.S. has made some progress. There are now 93 miles of light rail in Dallas, 60 miles in Portland, and 87.5 combined light and commuter rail miles in Denver. Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, San Diego, Sacramento, Phoenix, and others can cite similar improvements. For all their flaws, these are transit systems that didn’t exist 40 years ago.

But these systems, with the possible exception of Portland’s, do have one thing in common: they’re not especially useful because they’re not big enough and don’t go where people need them to. There is no perfect metric to evaluate the usefulness of a transit system, but, the most obvious failure is these systems haven’t changed their cities. Few people rely on them. As a general rule, these light rail systems serve fewer than 30 million passenger trips a year (LA has more, although as a percentage of the metro area population its usage is in line with other new systems). Even in cities of millions of people like Houston and Phoenix, light rail systems serve fewer than half that. Meanwhile, the Grand Paris Express and Crossrail are projecting ridership in the millions per day.

The basic truth is nearly everyone still depends on their cars even in cities with soul-destroying traffic. By any definition, the last half-century of American transportation policy has been a dismal failure.

Ultimately, this is not about trains and buses. This is about a political system uninterested in reform, a system unconcerned with fixing what’s broken.

But the problem isn’t limited just to new systems with growing pains. Older American cities with legacy systems have barely expanded to meet the growing footprint of their metro areas, as London and Paris are. The subway maps of New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia look almost identical as they did in 1950; in some cases, they’ve actually shrunk.

Simply put, the U.S. builds less public transit per urban dweller than its peer countries. Freemark found U.S. cities “added an average of fewer than 2 miles of urban bus improvements per million inhabitants—and fewer than 1 mile of rail improvements.” Meanwhile, France added 10 miles of buses and 3 miles of rail per million inhabitants in that same time period.

There is, of course, no simple answer why our transportation systems are broken, in much the same way there’s no simple answer to why our healthcare system is broken or why our criminal justice system is broken, beyond, as Freemark put it, that our “dysfunctional, irascible political system [is] woefully unprepared to commit to anything particularly significant.”

Ultimately, this is not about trains and buses. This is about a political system uninterested in reform, a system unconcerned with fixing what’s broken. If we can understand how politics failed American transportation systems, perhaps we can make the solution part of broader reform that must occur if American government is to start addressing the needs of the people in all aspects of life, from health care to criminal justice to housing to employment law to digital privacy to climate change.

It’s more important to understand all those causes now than ever. Building lots of public transit fast is, according to the Department of Transportation, a key front in the fight against climate change, because transportation accounts for about 30 percent of U.S. emissions, most of that from private automobiles. Are we up for the task? Can we, as a nation, build the infrastructure we desperately need to create a more sustainable world?

Do you work for the Federal Transit Administration or a local transit agency? What are the challenges you face in getting public transit projects done? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Aaron Gordon at aaron.gordon@vice.com or aaronwgordon@protonmail.com.

The answer to that question depends on understanding why we have failed so miserably up to this point. While researching the question of why our public transit is so bad, I’ve encountered a series of partial but ultimately incomplete explanations. If you don’t feel like descending into the transit nerd tunnel with me, here’s the tl;dr version:

Everything costs too much

We build highways instead

We don't plan well

People don't trust the government to build things so they vote against projects under the assumption they will be executed poorly and waste taxpayer dollars

We don't give transit agencies enough money to run good service which erodes political support to have more of it

There are too many agencies at all levels of government, especially at the local level, and not enough coordination between them

Our newer cities are sprawled out which makes good transit hard, and our older cities are too paralyzed by political dysfunction to expand the systems they have

As a result of generations of privatization efforts by all levels of government, in the rare event we do actually get to build stuff there is not enough expertise within the agencies to do it well

The good news is all of this is fixable. At least, that’s what Freemark believes. “The idea that we can’t build new systems is ridiculous,” he told me in an interview. “We just have to assemble the political interest and excitement to make those things happen.”

“There Was Always A Subsidy Somewhere”

Before we go any further, it’s important to dispel a pernicious myth that has perpetuated in the United States about public transportation. This is the idea that transit ought to pay for itself just like any other business.

This was a popular position in local, state, and federal governments until the mid-20th century. It is also the founding principle of public authorities, like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that oversees much of greater New York’s transit, which are legally required to balance their budgets every year. The concept is that well-run public transit ought to be profitable.

The problem—well, just one of the problems—with this philosophy is it’s based on a totally fictitious belief that the New York City subway once was a good business, or that the Boston subway once was a self-sustaining operation.

This was never true. “There was always a subsidy somewhere,” Jeff Davis, senior fellow at the think tank Eno Transportation Center said. Streetcars and early subways were paid for by wealthy financiers, real estate speculators, and electric companies, among others. The speculators bought cheap land on the outskirts of town and then built transportation that went there before selling the land for a tidy profit. Back in the day when lights were the main use of electricity, electric companies faced a huge surge at night. Streetcars were a convenient use of that excess electric capacity during the day when demand was lower. And, as the 19th century became the 20th, financiers (mistakenly) thought rapid transit would be a great investment, typically as part of an arrangement we now commonly refer to as public-private partnerships that required transit companies to keep fares low, usually at five cents.

Then it all slowly fell apart. Inflation jacked up costs, but transit companies were legally obligated to keep fares the same per their agreements with cities. The Great Depression hit. Real estate speculators sold off all their land and no longer cared about the transit connections. The public utility companies were forced to sell off their streetcar stakes by Congress under an antitrust provision. Long-term maintenance and upkeep rendered short-term profits illusory. Although most commuters still used transit through the 1940s, people tended to use private automobiles for recreational trips. Bills for decades of deferred maintenance came due. Streetcars went bankrupt. Local governments picked up the slack, and as part of the transition, closed the electric streetcars and converted those routes to buses. By the 1960s, most every transit system had either closed down or was under the auspices of some level of local government.

“And then that subsidy became an explicit job of the local government to subsidize and take over management,” Davis said. Private subsidies were replaced by public ones, just at the time when government was deeply, fundamentally uninterested in public transit. Because in the mid-20th century, cars were the future.

The Road to More Roads

From 1950 to 2017, the U.S. constructed 871,496 miles of roads, enough to go to the Moon, come back, return to the Moon again, and then get two-thirds of the way back to Earth. The pace has slowed in the last few decades, but barely. Thirty-seven percent of those miles have been built since 1985.

As traffic increased, it was accepted policy to widen a lot of roads under the mistaken belief this would reduce traffic. The Federal Highway Administration only started tracking lane-miles built in 1980, but in the 37 years between then and 2017 we added 881,918 lane-miles to our some four million lane-miles of road, an 11 percent increase. Urban areas in particular added 30,511 new lane-miles to freeways since 1993, an increase of 42 percent, according to the non-profit Transportation for America, which went on to call this program of building more lanes in a misguided attempt to reduce traffic a “congestion con.”

In the meantime, the U.S. barely built any new rail. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics only started tracking rail miles in 1985, but from that year through 2017 the U.S. constructed 6,247 miles of commuter rail, heavy rail, and light rail combined. That’s only 195 miles a year on average, compared to 10,017 miles of roads per year during that same time. In fact, the pace of building new transit has been so languid, America’s 20 largest metro areas have the same or even fewer miles of transit service (including bus routes) per capita than they did in 2003.

“It’s all about priorities,” said Jeff Brown, an urban planning professor at Florida State University. “What are the spending priorities that we’ve established?”

Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics and Transportation For America. Chart by Cathryn Virginia

Of course, the short term cost of building a mile of road is lower than building a mile of transit, but that can be deceptive. According to Transportation for America, it costs $24,000 per lane-mile per year to maintain a road in good repair, and much more for those in disrepair, as many of America’s roads are. And that’s even before accounting for the strain on public services by encouraging and supporting sprawl where every mile of sewer, water, and power line serves fewer taxpayers.

Nevertheless, we’ve also spent much less money overall on transit compared to roads. These funding mechanisms are extremely confusing and have changed over time, but what has not changed is that roads always get a lot more.

Congress gives states roughly $40 billion a year for roads, according to Transportation For America, which can be spent either on new roads or maintenance at the states' discretion. Meanwhile, public transit agencies have to compete for only $2.3 billion in annual transit funding for big projects such as extending rail lines or building new ones, some $37.7 billion less than what states get for roads (the feds dole out an additional $7.5 billion a year for maintenance and buying new subway cars and buses).

That $40 billion a year in road money is given out to states based on a formula. It’s automatic, and states can spend that money however they wish. Not so with transit money. Transit agencies have to apply for funding for individual projects.

And should the transit agency’s project be deemed worthy of federal funding, the federal government will subsidize a much smaller percentage of the project costs than it will for roads. Transit agencies can get a maximum of 50 percent of the project cost covered by the feds, whereas roads can get up to 80 percent (down from 90 percent during the highway spending spree of the 20th Century).

And this is just at the federal level. The discrepancy between road and transit funding is even wider at the state level, Freemark says, where legislatures are typically dominated by rural interests.

Brown, the Florida State professor, said the numbers don’t lie. “It’s not a sufficient amount of money to support grand project ideas.”

Of course, many people believe it is not the federal government’s role to be paying for mass transportation because it’s a local issue (rarely is a similar argument made about roads). This was very much up for debate when the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (now a part of the Federal Transit Administration) was created in 1964. The upshot was that there’s no clear reason why the federal government should be subsidizing road construction, home mortgages, auto fuel, and any number of other things but not mass transportation. Plus, in light of the local and state government failures to pay for transit, if not the federal government, then who? Tellingly, the UMTA was founded under the Welfare Clause of the Constitution, not the Commerce Clause that authorized highway construction, because it is good for cities to have good transportation.

From nearly any vantage point, this road-heavy, transit-lite approach has been a disaster for American cities. We’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars constructing and maintaining an unsustainable roadway network, and traffic has only gotten worse to boot. In 2015, California’s Department of Transportation, which supervised some of the most fervent highway construction in the nation during the 20th century, came right out and admitted this didn’t work. More roads means more traffic. So, the state is no longer going to keep widening roads to relieve congestion.

Not only is there not enough money to go around, but it has to be shared by all the states. Federal rules require that no single project gets too big a slice.

“You can’t ask for so much money in a single year as to crowd out everyone else,” explained Davis. For example, he said, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) under the Obama administration told Los Angeles that it wouldn’t get all the money it wanted for the Westside Purple Line as one big extension through Beverly Hills and into Westwood. So, LA broke it up into three segments, with construction on Phase I beginning in 2014. Each got its own cost-benefit analysis, planning, and studies, and waited a few years between applications, which drives up costs. In February, LA received its grant for the third and final segment, a $1.3 billion payout that will cover just 36 percent of the cost. It is expected to be completed in 2027, meaning it will take 13 years to build a nine mile extension.

“Usually congressional and even executive branch political realities mean they spread the peanut butter around,” said Sarah Jo Peterson, author of Planning the Home Front, “and, when there isn't much peanut butter, they spread it thinly.”

The Costs Are Too Damn High

Not only does the money get spread too thinly, but once cities do get their money, they waste a lot of it.

“In the cities where rail transit works best,” Davis observed, “costs have just gotten out of control.” This is especially true for megaprojects, huge public works that cost billions of dollars.

I could spend an entire article on this subject alone and not even scratch the surface of just how profoundly screwed American megaproject costs are. Indeed, many writers and researchers have done exactly that, and one researcher in particular, Alon Levy, has more or less made a name for themselves on this subject.

New York City is responsible for the most expensive mile of subway track on Earth, at $3.5 billion per mile, the first segment of the Second Avenue Subway. The second phase is projected to crush that record. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subway and commuter rail system, is also some two decades late and $8 billion over budget on the $11 billion East Side Access project, which will bring Long Island Railroad trains into Grand Central, a 15 minute walk from Penn Station where Long Island Railroad trains currently go.

What is undoubtedly clear is every transit project is first and foremost a political project, and political projects are about consensus-building. This gets us not the projects we need but the projects we deserve.

The problem is hardly limited to New York. California’s high speed rail project has given new definition to the term “boondoggle.” And, as Levy has documented, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and D.C., among others, all build subways and light rail lines at much higher costs than European cities.

“Nearly all American urban rail projects cost much more than their European counterparts do,” Levy wrote in Citylab. “The cheaper ones cost twice as much, and the more expensive ones about seven times as much.” This includes both heavy rail (subways) and light rail. “Only a handful of American [light rail] lines come in cheaper than $100 million per mile, the upper limit for French light rail.”

There are a lot of reasons for this, including:

Over-engineered stations

Arcane labor rules that inhibit productivity such as requiring more employees to work at a machine than is necessary

A lack of cooperation between agencies

But cost overruns are not a new problem for American transit.

“Cost escalation has been going on for some time,” Davis of Eno Center said. The D.C. Metro was initially slated to cost $2.5 billion but ended up with a $10 billion bill. Dating back to the Ford administration, the federal government started changing grant rules so the feds wouldn’t be on the hook for the inevitable cost overruns, leaving any eventualities to the transit agency building it and the local government overseeing it.

Do you work for a public transit agency or a contractor and have any experience with how projects end up costing so much? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Aaron Gordon at aaron.gordon@vice.com or aaronwgordon@protonmail.com.

Some cost overruns are attributable to unforeseen circumstances, but across the board, we are very bad at estimating how much these projects will cost to begin with. Sometimes, agencies give low estimates in order to make projects more politically palatable, knowing a realistic assessment will get shot down. D.C.’s initial estimate of $2.5 billion, according to George Mason University historian and author of The Great Society Subway: A history of the Washington Metro Zachary Schrag, was “never terribly realistic.”

Depressingly, it seems we gave up on ever building necessary infrastructure for the same price as other countries decades ago. Schrag also quoted Jim Caywood, head of the engineering firm that helped design Metro, as saying “there’s no way in this world that you can build a mammoth public works project such as Metro within a reasonable budget with all the outside influences. They won’t let you do it.”

The Biggest Outside Influence of All

What are those “outside influences” Caywood referenced? The big one is politics.

“Transportation planning is not just a matter of letting the engineers find the best solution to a technical problem,” Schrag wrote, “but a political process in which competing priorities must be resolved by negotiation among interest groups.”

If there’s one point on which all the experts I spoke to agree the most, it is that transportation is politics. A 1988 deep dive into the construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system by Portland State University professor Sy Adler found any vague proposal for a transit project, whether it be highway or rail, produces competing coalitions with their own self-interests. Maybe they want to spur development in their own downtown area or make it easy for commuters to live in their suburb. These factions then weaponize the options on the table for their preferred ends. The protracted debates result in entire regions losing focus over why they wanted to build a new transit system in the first place. Over time, it becomes a battle not of which option solves a given problem, but re-defining what the problem is.

Meanwhile, another cohort of interest groups form to stop projects they don’t want. Typically, these are neighborhood associations that don’t want a transit line coming through their block, either out of fear of construction impacts or racist concerns that it’ll disrupt the segregation of their urban area. Sometimes, they are not just neighborhood groups but entire regions.

In the 1970s, in what was later called “referendums on race,” Atlanta’s suburban and overwhelmingly white Cobb, Clayton, and Gwinnett counties voted out of the region’s MARTA system before it was even built. In 1988, five years after voting in favor of a 200-mile light rail system with local financing, Dallas voters refused to approve bonds to pay for construction, growing skittish on the whole prospect due to the oil crisis which hurt the local economy, according to Indiana University professor George Smerk’s history of the government’s mass transportation policy. Seattle, Detroit, and scores of other cities either voted against major transportation projects or approved watered down versions of original plans thanks to local opposition.

What is undoubtedly clear is every transit project is first and foremost a political project, and political projects are about consensus-building. This gets us not the projects we need but the projects we deserve.

To take just one of scores of possible examples because it affected me personally: back in the 1970s the University of Maryland rejected plans to have the D.C. Metro’s Green Line stop on campus, again for predominantly racist reasons. This forced “a complicated redesign” that “later caused commotion in College Park,” Schrag wrote. Today, anyone looking to take public transportation to the university, with 41,000 students and 14,000 faculty and staff, must either take a shuttle bus from campus or walk at least 20 minutes each way. Repeat these fights dozens of times per project and it’s no longer so difficult to envision how they end up getting relegated to land the public already owns regardless of how useful it is like freeway medians or don’t get built at all.

Meanwhile, a great political shift occurred in the United States that made transit’s prospects even worse. First was the Reagan-era movement away from services provided by the government and towards private enterprise.

Transit was not spared. When Miami’s Metrorail opened, Reagan derided the “$1 billion federal subsidy” that “serves less than 10,000 daily riders” as a prime example of government waste. Better for the government to have bought everyone a limousine, Reagan quipped.

Nevermind that all of those numbers were incorrect and deeply misleading because the project hadn’t even been completed yet, according to the Sun-Sentinel. But factual errors aside, there was a larger ideological one. “Even if Metrorail doesn't turn a profit,” the paper said, “it will be performing a valuable service. Without it, thousands of new commuters would be forced back into their cars, making the roads even more overcrowded.”

Ironically, some of the blame for the wastefulness of federal transit money belongs to Reagan himself. He spent considerable effort trying to kill the main transit grant program, according to Davis, but Congress wouldn’t let him because these projects were often popular.

In order to keep the funding going, Congress had to resort to doling out the money through annual appropriations—in other words, the 435 members of the House of Representatives, with all its byzantine committees and rules, deciding for itself which projects to fund rather than career experts in the Federal Transit Administration—through a process called earmarking. In this way, transit projects became just another horse to trade.

“The nature of earmarking is that since there are 435 House districts and 50 states, and only so much money to go around, things get split more widely than they would if the Administration just got to pick a few.” Davis continued: “Ted Stevens [longtime Alaska Senator and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 1997 to 2005] used to put a million dollar grants to little towns all over Alaska. I don't know what the hell they were for.”

Not only did it become fashionable to slash funds for big transit projects, but so too was it the sign of the times to slash agency budgets as well. Expertise then migrated to the private sector, in many cases to the very consultants and engineering firms hired to execute the few projects that got done. As a result, agencies were—and remain—ill-equipped to make big decisions on big projects, who hire those aforementioned consultants, who in turn charge a pretty penny for their services.

Do you work for a local transit agency and struggle with a lack of resources or funding? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Aaron Gordon at aaron.gordon@vice.com or aaronwgordon@protonmail.com.

“We often don't have really expert public staff making decisions, making some key decisions at least,” said Eric Eidlin, a former FTA planner. “We've given over that responsibility to consultants that have a profit motive. I don't mean to say that the consultants have this desire to subvert the public interest or anything, it's just not their job, right?”

Karen Trapenberg Frick, an urban planner at UC Berkeley who used to work for the Bay Area’s planning commission, echoed Eidlin’s point and said it had a real impact on what agencies were able to do, only further undermining the public’s willingness to give them money for big projects.

“There are certain cities where when I was a planner a long time ago and now, it's the same complaint: we give the city money but they can't move the project through because they don't have the staff to do it,” she explained. “And we don't have the staff to do it because there's been this whole neoliberal mind shift that the public sector can't do a good job.”

There’s a very sad irony here. The Reagan era cuts were ostensibly designed to make the public sector more efficient by harnessing the power of the market, but instead it made public agencies reliant on for-profit contractors that jack up costs, only making government less efficient and more wasteful.

“When there's no in-house public sector expertise, the ability to deliver projects quickly or efficiently is compromised,” Eidlin said. “And time is money, too.”

Who Decides?

So far, I’ve focused on the federal side of things because it has a lot of money and power. But what level of government is the right one to make decisions about massive transportation projects? Although there is no obvious right answer, it feels like the U.S. has discovered an awful lot of wrong ones.

As a nation, local authority is our founding principle. We fought a revolution to achieve it, wrote a (bad) set of rules to maintain it, scrapped those, then wrote a new set of rules we have been arguing about ever since. Most of those arguments have been about whether the federal or state governments should determine how we live.

But unprecedented depressions and world wars have a funny way of harnessing big government power, and the feds continued to flex those newly-discovered muscles as American cities deteriorated in the years afterward. From New York to Los Angeles and in dozens of cities in between, so-called “urban renewal” programs used federal dollars to quite literally tear down and rebuild massive sections of cities from scratch, sometimes in order to build a highway through the demolished portion. One of the many legacies of this program, which destroyed entire neighborhoods, was a growing distrust in the government to sensitively execute centrally planned projects. The preferred remedy was to have more local control, neighborhood by neighborhood.

This approach has its merits, but for transportation it has serious drawbacks. Whether they be subways, light rail, bus routes, or even the humble bike lane, any transportation worth using is a network that allows people to get from one side of a city to another quickly and efficiently. Giving substantial input or even veto power to individual communities along that network undermines the entire concept.

“Transit is fundamentally regional,” Eidlin said, “And I really feel like our general population and our decision makers don't universally agree with that or even had that epiphany yet.”

Just as too much hyperlocal control can stymie useful transit, putting transit under the auspices of entire states can have downsides, too. Several of the country’s biggest transit systems including New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. are controlled not by local authorities but state (or in D.C.’s case, quasi-federal) bodies. This means taxpayers who don’t obviously benefit from the system pay into it, a constant source of political tension. And when proposed projects cross state lines, it opens up a prolonged debate about who pays for what share, a fight that often takes years or decades to resolve.

Put the lack of funds for transit together with our country’s general desire to give local control as close to the individual citizen level as possible, and we’re left with a contradictory system where every limb and appendage fights the others. The lack of funds dedicated to transit means higher and higher levels of government—the ones with more and more money—often have control over transit, either by law or by practice. But those same agencies must seek local consensus for what are not local projects, a time-consuming and expensive proposition at best and a poison pill at worst.

This desire for local control yields bizarre outcomes. For example, Eidlin is working on a transportation hub project in San Jose, CA. Four different public agencies are involved, each for a different jurisdiction that will meet at the hub (this is indicative of the Bay Area, which has 27 transit operators and 151—yes, 151—transit agencies). As a result, Eidlin says much of the project’s work at this stage is not on the project itself, but administrative tasks to keep all the agencies up to speed.

“We value local control so much and we fund so many things locally that we never stop and ask,” Eidlin said, “what's the right level of government at which to be addressing a public issue?”

How To Fix This

As dire as the American transit landscape is, there are specs of hope. Federal funds are no longer given out through earmarks; that stopped in 2010. Now, the FTA grades projects based on merit. And some metro areas have big plans. Los Angeles and Seattle voters have opted to raise their sales taxes slightly to fund tens of billions of dollars in transit upgrades that could significantly improve their region.

But we need much bigger solutions, not only to build transit systems faster and more efficiently, but to run them better, too. In the vicious cycle of transit funding, agencies that are perceived as wasteful or bad at providing services have a harder time getting money from politicians, which then makes it harder to run a good transit service. This cycle must be broken.

Public transit…ought to be as natural a government service as trash collection.

More money for transit would obviously help. Bernie Sanders has proposed $300 billion for public transit by 2030 and $607 billion for a high speed rail network (Joe Biden, in an excellent distillation of the failures of American transportation policy to date, does not commit any dollar amounts to these issues in his platform, but does commit $50 billion in his first year to repair roads, highways, and bridges). That would be a lot more money where it’s desperately needed, and polling suggests it’s a popular platform with majority support.

The most noteworthy part of Sanders' platform, however, is not the money. It’s the framework under which it is proposed: the Green New Deal.

This, says Florida State University’s Jeff Brown, fits with the history of how big transit projects are proposed. “Transit, in most places, has very much been an afterthought or a reaction to some other perceived crisis,” he said. Traditionally, that crisis has been traffic. For periods in the 1970s and 1980s, it was the oil crises. Sanders, however, clearly puts better public transportation within the framework of the climate crisis.

But the very concept of tying transit construction to a crisis misses the point. Transit does address those issues, but it is more than that. We will never build good transit until we jettison the century-old misconception that it is a business the government happens to run out of necessity. Rather, public transportation is a public good on its own merits, good times and bad. Allowing people to move about their cities cheaply, efficiently, and quickly makes cities more productive and better places to live and has numerous knock-on public health, environmental, social, and economic effects. Public transit funding ought not to be a response to any crisis. It ought to be as natural a government service as trash collection.

On the other hand, framing transit as a fight against traffic is a losing battle, because it doesn’t take very many cars to create traffic. It is, as transit planner Jarrett Walker argues, a matter of geometry. It will always appear to a certain type of person that money was wasted. But positing that transit is a way for city dwellers to live better, more pleasant lives is a winning platform, as politicians across Europe can attest.

We also have to work out what the right level of government is to make transit decisions. New York, D.C., and San Francisco in particular have complicated and bizarre governance structures for their transit agencies. Most of these structures were created in mid-century when good governance types replicated the corporate boardroom as the ideal of good governance. History has proven this approach hopelessly naive. Transit is politics. It’s time to, as Freemark has argued, put transit squarely within the responsibility of one elected official who is clearly accountable.

None of this solves what may be the biggest impediment to good American public transit: costs. The solutions here are not easy. Hell, as Josh Barro of New York has pointed out, and I've also learned, we don’t even fully understand the problem. At the very least, fixing it requires cultivating long-term expertise on the local level so agencies aren’t reinventing the wheel the rare occasions they’re given enough money to undertake megaprojects. It also might require, as Laura Tolkoff of the San Francisco-based non-profit SPUR suggested, establishing governmental entities with in-house megaproject expertise, weaning the transit world off relying on expensive contractors and consultants and onto agencies looking out for the taxpayers’ interest, not the stock market’s.

These are just a handful of the high-level suggestions I learned while reporting this story. I will keep reporting on this and learning more, and you should contact me if you work in a transit-related industry and know anything I ought to know. But one thing we must always keep in mind is the answers are out there.

“[The U.S.] needs to learn what works in Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Singapore, Belgium, Norway, Taiwan, Finland, Austria,” Levy wrote. “It needs to learn how to plan around cooperation between different agencies and operators, how to integrate infrastructure and technology, how to use 21st-century engineering.”

To that end, Levy and fellow researcher Eric Goldwyn just received a two-year grant from the John Arnold Foundation via New York University to study why U.S. construction costs are so high. And they’re looking to hire a research associate, preferably one with language skills other than English. “We are particularly looking to extend our coverage outside countries where information is readily available in English,” their job posting for the project says.

“Imitate,” Levy advises. “Don’t innovate.”

Why the US Sucks at Building Public Transit syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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blog 2

Urban or suburban sprawl is when there is uncontrol expansion of urban or suburban areas which is being seen in Florida as we speak. 7 cities show up on the Sierra Club’s list which is not a good thing at all. This list saying that there has to be better development control. If there isn’t better development control, then parts of Florida can look like a megalopolis like the one from New York to Washington D.C. The way the state of Florida dealing with sprawl is buying land so it can protect land that is environmentally sensitive from developers trying to make more sprawl. Sprawl is become a major issue in Orange county that developers are getting close to nearby counties showing how bad the sprawl has gotten which has caused the county to discuss charging fees which are basically taxes. In the city of Fort Lauderdale sprawl has caused the development to reach the edge of the highly sensitive ecosystem of the Everglades that has a water supply. Here in Southwest Florida the population has exploded between 2010 and 2020 in that from what I’ve seen they are clearing away nature in the Golden Gate Estates and making new homes and that will get to the point of creating problems because it’s getting closer to the Everglades itself.

Sprawl has a lot more negative consequences but there is another side of the coin when it comes to this argument. One of them will be that since the land is less expensive people are able to afford bigger homes with a lot more land than the people near the city. Another good consequence of sprawl will be that with having more space for the family and that the population is less densely populated people can feel more that they belong in the area they live in.  Those benefits to having a house and having more room has its own sense of consequences.  The environment suffers in this because of the city gets more spread out there will be a loss of undeveloped land due the construction of roads and buildings. The positive of being in a city like New York is that you are encouraged to walk or take the train to work while the negative of sprawl in the suburban and rural areas will be more cars are being used which is causing more Co2 pollution to go up in the air due to the distances they have to travel for school, work , church, and parks in the city.

We unfortunately can’t stop from growing or expanding our cities, but there are other ways we can make urban sprawl a positive for the neighborhood or a town near you. Starting with being educated on what sprawl is. People have to be educated on how and why urban sprawl affects them. Without education on how it affects them and their community, no one will ever know.  With the education of this knowledge it would prevent thoughtless development. Next you will have to get the community in which urban sprawl can or will take place involved. With the communities support you can make a difference, by voicing concerns that development of sprawl has, the saying “it takes a village,” really applies here. If sprawl was to happen in your community, finding ways that the new development can make living there sustainable that benefit not only the owner but also the society. Community and family owned business can be replaced with those new expansions being made. Also, with expansion the developers can take in the concerns of the community and plan according to these concerns. 

One of the most recommended ways to make sprawl a positive, is to make the buildings that are being developed into mixed-use buildings. Mixed-use is a building that you would commonly see in major cities like New York, Atlanta, etc., with these buildings you will be able to have a business which the people in the area can go to such as a doctors office. Also a place where they would be able to live, then a store in which food can be purchased. With a mixed-use building you will be able to condense the surplus of unnecessary buildings. Lastly, finding ways in which the buildings you are developing can also be used for sustainable living. Such as implementing solar panels to the buildings where sprawl is occurring so there is a reduction in the use of electricity in that area. Making sure the area in which development is being made is growth friendly. Which means you can add plants, fruits, etc, for a more eco-friendly community. Sprawl can have a negative affect to the community but if there are policies, community involvement, and education on what sprawl is then it wouldn’t have to have a negative effect.

Urban sprawl not only affects us here in Florida, but it also affects other countries as well. In certain countries such as Australia where there is a lot of land and a need for a car to get around emits more air pollution then what is necessary. In such countries as Australia urban sprawl is even worse due to the habitats in which construction is destroying. This doesn’t have just an effect on humans, but the living conditions of the animals. As Urban sprawl continues to grow, it runs the risk of affecting climate change, health and infrastructure. We as the people of not only our community but of the world, need to take a more affect approach and get involved in our communities, make people aware what urban sprawl is. It doesn’t have to be something that happens overnight, but major changes have to take place, to help out our planet. Never stop making it a concern, because it doesn’t just concern you, it concerns everyone. I would like to continue to have this planet thriving even as I get older, also for my future grandkids, and to do that it takes you to help.Don’t wait to be the change.

[biofunmy]

A New $6 Billion Subway? Great, as Long as Rents Don’t Rise.

Maribel Burgos barely has time to change into her uniform before she has to clock in at the McDonald’s in Lower Manhattan where she works, even though she gives herself 90 minutes to commute from her home in East Harlem.

After walking several blocks to reach the nearest subway line, Ms. Burgos often has to deal with trains that are too crowded to board or hobbled by delays.

“Something always happens,” Ms. Burgos said.

Now, East Harlem may get an infrastructure boost that has been a rarity in New York City in recent decades — new subway service.

The Second Avenue Subway, which runs through the Upper East Side of Manhattan, will finally be extended north to East Harlem, and three new stations will be built as part of a sprawling $54 billion spending plan to modernize the region’s transportation network, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced last month.

For East Harlem, the news has been a long time coming — a subway along Second Avenue in the neighborhood was first proposed nearly a century ago.

Many people who live and work in the area said they would welcome the new service, though some raised concerns that it could accelerate development in the largely Latino and black neighborhood where gentrification has already taken hold.

“We’re always worried about that,” said Robert Rodriguez, a state assemblyman who represents the neighborhood. Still, he added, “I don’t think that’s a reason to not provide essential amenities.’’

The neighborhood now relies on the Lexington Avenue subway, which can be a long walk for some residents and where trains can be so packed that riders sometimes have to let a train go by before they can get on.

“There are working people that rely on public transportation to get around and we don’t have a fail-safe if anything happens” with the Lexington Avenue line, Mr. Rodriguez said. “There is no backup. There is no other line for East Siders.”

The stations are not expected to open until 2029 and come with a hefty price tag — the overall cost of the extension is about $6 billion. It will likely require major financing from several sources, including the federal, state and New York City governments — none of which has been secured yet.

But transportation officials are “determined to make good on the longstanding commitment to the people of East and Central Harlem to provide mass transit and access to jobs, education and opportunity,” said Shams Tarek, a spokesman for the M.T.A., which operates the subway.

Even President Trump unexpectedly weighed in with his support though it is unclear if that will result in tangible financial backing.

The Upper East Side portion of the subway line took 10 years to become reality from the time construction began in 2007.

Xianix Barrera, a flamenco dancer who lives in East Harlem, recalled babysitting a 10-year-old girl on the Upper East Side when stations were being built there. “When she graduated college is when they finished,” she said.

East Harlem is already undergoing a significant transformation as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s rezoning plan, which is opening neighborhoods across the city to developers in an effort to address the city’s shortage of low-cost housing.

Pushing the Second Avenue Subway into the area will likely accelerate the development that is already taking place in the neighborhood and will make East Harlem more appealing to developers and new residents, said Grant Long, senior economist at Street Easy, an online database of residential property listings.

“Rezoning is happening with the Second Avenue Subway expansion in mind,” he said.

The first phase of the Second Avenue Subway at 72nd, 86th and 96th Streets has already brought changes to parts of the Upper East Side that were already a blend of relatively well-off and more middle-income residents.

Many mom-and-pop shops closed when the subway stations opened in 2017, leaving in their wake more chain stores and luxury high-rises. The median residential rent in buildings surrounding Second Avenue rose by 27 percent from 2011 to 2016, according to Street Easy.

Tamika Mapp, a county committeewoman in East Harlem, worries that extending the Second Avenue subway will produce similar changes.

“It’s a double-edged sword, because sure, there’s reliable transport, but my neighbors may not be able to afford rent anymore,” Ms. Mapp said.

Opening up more subway service does change the travel patterns in neighborhoods. On the Upper East Side the number of people riding taxis dropped by 20 percent after the subway line opened, said Sarah Kaufman, an adjunct assistant professor of urban planning at New York University.

“For the population of East Harlem that doesn’t have great access to transit right now, it will be a great advantage because they will have a much more affordable way to get around,” she said.

The M.T.A. said building the subway into East Harlem would require moving some utilities under Second Avenue — water, sewage and electrical lines — away from the construction zone. It would also involve excavating for the new tunnel and stations, and constructing station entrances.

The agency said it would probably need to buy up to 39 properties to accommodate the new stations and ancillary facilities, which would involve displacing 170 residents and up to 505 employees. Some of the properties include four-story residential apartments with stores on the ground floor, according to the M.T.A.

But plans for the acquisition, including the use of eminent domain and where residents would be moved to if they are displaced, have not been finalized, agency officials said.

When the first part of the Second Avenue Subway was built, many businesses complained that construction equipment blocked access to their storefronts and led to financial hardships.

To mollify concerns in East Harlem, the M.T.A. has invested in a brightly lit information center on 125th Street where detailed explanations of the phases of construction, in English and Spanish, are offered on video screens on the walls or on iPads.

Visitors can even try their hand steering a subway train on simulator.

Santos Negron, a community activist and a lifelong resident of East Harlem, said a new subway line would not only make life more convenient but could make the neighborhood safer.

“It saves me a lot of walking,’’ he said. “I take 10 minutes to get home, but when it’s late at night, those 10 minutes seem longer.”

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FL: Study for New Gainesville, Ocala Airport Takes Off

Nov. 17–Heading into one of the year’s busiest weeks for travel, the chief benefit of flying out of Gainesville Regional Airport is clear — no lines, no waiting — while the biggest drawback is also obvious — few options for cheap flights.

Despite millions spent to improve parking and expand the terminal and the addition of twice-daily American Airlines routes to Dallas that begin in March, Gainesville Regional’s scanty schedule is seen by some business leaders as a threat to attracting and retaining high-tech companies and a talented workforce.

Greg Schultz, general manger of Mindtree, a national information technology company with a base in Innovation Square, said Gainesville’s lack of direct flights and carrier choices and high airfares presents a "huge problem" for the company that ushers in clients in banking and insurance services from around the nation.

"Those are the there biggest challenges I see with Gainesville’s current airport. About 70 percent of our clients come to us from outside of Gainesville, and it becomes very problematic because a lot of the flights are booked two-to-three weeks out. Finding a flight to Gainesville at that point means tickets are $700 to $900 a pop. It becomes very expensive. And so often, flights are booked to Jacksonville, Tampa, or Orlando.

"But then, it takes an hour and half drive to come to our Gainesville offices. You lose a lot of time traveling. Time is money and everyone wants to make their trips as short as possible. Logistically, it just becomes a nightmare," Schultz said.

A group of community and business leaders, including Schultz, have started a task force to explore feasibility for a new commerical airport closer to the Alachua-Marion county line.

The idea to move the Gainesville Regional Airport south isn’t a new idea. It was brought up in the 1990s, studied and then shot down.

Mitch Glaeser, CEO of Gainesville-based Emory Group of Companies, is spearheading the new initiative and directing the task force. Glaeser believes now is a better time than ever to take the potential move seriously.

The task force, which is not sanctioned by any government body but whose members were appointed by local chambers of commerce, is lobbying for support of a new airport. They have commissioned a $65,000 data study from aviation consulting company Alieveon Pacific to identify how many new passengers might be attracted by an airport between Gainesville and Ocala.

A new location for a combined Ocala-Gainesville airport has not been selected by the group, but the general idea is it would be closer to the Alachua and Marion County line to draw more travelers from the southern portion of Marion County, where sprawling retirement communities hold the majority of the county’s population. But the land between Gainesville and Ocala is also known high-value horse farms and ecologically fragile prairies.

Alachua County’s members on the task force, along with Glaeser and Schultz, include Charlie Lane, University of Florida senior vice president and chief operating officer; Bob Page, a local CenterState bank executive; and real estate agent Diyonne McGraw, the chair of the African American Accountability Alliance (4As) political action committee. They were appointed by the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce.

In Marion County, task for members include Navroz Saju, president and CEO for HDG Hotels; Lynette Vermillion, a member of the Chamber & Economic Partnership; Thad Boyd, of Boyd Real Estate Group; Dan Peters, CEO of REV Fire Group; and Joe Donnelly, general manager of Golden Ocala Golf and and Equestrian Group. They were appointed by the Ocala-Marion CEP.

"Every business looks at their customer base, and airports are no different … We wanted to see if we looked at a regional partnership and collectively worked together on a combined airport, what would (the catchment area) model out to be?" Glaeser said. "From the study, we’re going to take those data points and make some decisions that way."

A decision to move the airport would not come from task force. It wouldn’t have authority to make one. It would require approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, Florida Division of Aeronautics, and the Gainesville/Alachua County Airport Authority Board.

And then there’s the hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure funding required.

It’d take years of work, Glaeser said, but he believes it’s necessary.

Proponents say a new airport is needed to keep a local airport and business community thriving, while making air travel in the area more friendly and cheaper for families with children. The airport is losing or "leaking" too many customers to more bustling airports in south Florida, Glaeser said, which offer more direct and cheaper flights to travelers in tourism-driven areas like Orlando.

Gainesville’s airport ranks 19th out of 20 Florida airports for yearly air passenger traffic, according to statistics from 2017.

Allan Penksa, who has been CEO of the Gainesville Regional Airport for more than a decade, said comparing Gainesville’s airport to other airports is like comparing apples to oranges. And it’s naive to compare Gainesville’s airport to other Florida cities with an airport, he said.

Gainesville clearly does not have the tourism market found in other Florida cities like Orlando, Miami, Tampa, Pensacola, Daytona, or even the similarly-sized Tallahassee, which has air traffic from politicians traveling in and out of the city and more state capital-related tourism, Penksa said. Tallahassee’s airport is ranked 15th out of 20 Florida airports in air passenger traffic.

And though not generally seen as a family-fun tourist attraction, Tallahassee’s airport still had 100,000 more people who flew out of the state capital than Gainesville in 2017.

"I’m not against (moving) it. There’s pros and cons to this," he said. "But it’s most important to remember if you look at one community, you’re looking at one community."

Penksa said additionally, carriers that offer cheap flights, like Allegiant and Spirit, don’t come into markets like Gainesville because it doesn’t fit their business model. Penksa said they offer flights from colder cities to tourist cities, like Orlando. But the tourism industry in Gainesville, even combined with Ocala, isn’t big enough to draw those carriers to north central Florida.

Southwest Airlines, a major U.S. carrier, won’t enter markets with a metropolitan statistical area with a population less than 1 million people, Penksa said.

Ocala International Airport does not have passenger service but gets its global bragging rights because chartered aircraft carry thoroughbreds and other high-priced horses from auctions and training facilities. The airport was served by Eastern Airlines for about 25 years before the airline shifted its flights to Gainesville. Work recently began on a new $6 million terminal for general aviation.

Even if Marion and Alachua County combined airports, Penksa doubts it would lure Southwest, which already serves eight Florida cities including Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa.

Despite the lack of tourism or a huge population, a new airport located near the Marion and Alachua County line, Glaeser said, could attract travelers from areas like The Villages who don’t want to deal with the traffic around Tampa and Orlando.

And this region is expected to grow. The area within a 75-mile radius of where a new airport might be located is expected to be home to 1.2 million people by 2020, according to NASA’s Earth Data project.

"We need more direct flights," Glaeser said. "We need to focus on our customer service, businesses and families."

Kevin Sheilley, president and CEO of the Ocala CEP, said he first heard of the idea of a Ocala-Gainesville airport from former Gainesville Chamber President and CEO Susan Davenport, who proposed the idea to him in the summer of 2017. He said he thought it was a good idea.

"This can make sense," Sheilley thought.

Sheilley said he views the new airport as an economic opportunity to grow the Marion County’s footprint for office space and corporate headquarters.

"There would be a lot more air travel if it was more convenient," he said. "I think knowing that when you get off a plane that you’d only have 25 minutes to get to your home instead of an hour and a half drive would be an advantage and open up opportunities."

Sheilley said he’s excited to study the data and then worry about cost.

"The cost is something you definitely have to look at but we have to take this one step a time," he said. "We see what the data (from the catchment study) tells us and then take the next step."

Though a major challenge, Glaeser said studying the data, looking for funding, gathering support and moving forward with the new-airport initiative is imperative to Gainesville and the business community, which he believes has been hurt about the airport’s lack of direct flights around the country.

Schultz, at Mindtree, said he believes a new airport would help solve a problem that’s holding back his job, which is to grow Mindtree in Gainesville. He said he doesn’t think Gainesville’s airport could get enough direct flights to solve the problems at hand.

"The airport is tucked away in this northeastern corner of town," he said. "It’s just not accessible enough to stand up to more carrier choice, given its location."

Schultz was hesitant to say definitively if Mindtree would move away from Gainesville if airport service wasn’t improved.

Joshua Javaheri, art director at Gainesville gaming company Trendy Entertainment, said not flights to say, New York, creates problems when setting up meetings with venture capitalists interested in investing in the company.

"A flight to New York would be incredible. It’s more of a convenience thing. I’d like to be able to fly to New York at 8 a.m. and be back by 4 p.m.," Javaheri said. "Now, it’s sometimes a two-day trip."

Javaheri said he believes Gainesville leaders need to incentivize technology companies to stay in Gainesville. Improved air service would be a good start, he said.

"I don’t believe the city or chamber focuses enough on retaining talent they cultivate here," he said.

Though the airport authority board and its leadership haven’t taken a stance on the potential airport move, Penksa said he sees the benefits. But the main issues with building the new airport, which he said would be hard to get past, are costs and timing.

"It’s going to take at least two professional air industry consultants to take a real hard look at this, taking a look at the demographics and the population to see if it’s worth the cost and when is the best time to do this," Penksa said.

"At what point and what cost? Is the potential increase in enplanements worth the cost? They’re looking to do what’s best by the community but does it add value to the commuter experience? These are all things that need to be looked at."

Even if the money was there, Penksa said, moving the airport isn’t so simple. It would be a major challenge with several moving parts.

Land vast enough for an airport in rural Alachua or Marion County would be a tough find, he said. Penksa reckoned current residents in the area enjoyed simple living and not hearing jet engines at their dinner tables or while trying to sleep.

County Commissioner Mike Byerly said he hasn’t been contacted by the task force as of Tuesday, but what he’s heard so far about the idea to move the airport south hasn’t impressed him. The plan, as it sits, he said, could create more problems than it solves.

"I say the (proposed) location, along the southern edge of Alachua and the northern of Marion, could have catastrophic effects on the quality of life of the community that lives there," Byerly said. "I’m hard-pressed to make sense of it. These are not nothing areas. They’re rural, but they’re not unpopulated.

"Who wants to live near a runway at a presumably larger airport?"

Byerly, whose District 1 runs through, southern Alachua County, said he didn’t know if he was qualified to make a judgment on whether the current airport satisfies county residents’ needs.

"All I know is that sometimes I fly out of Gainesville, sometimes I fly out of Jacksonville, and sometimes I fly out of Orlando," he said.

Potentially the biggest issue, Penksa said, would be funding for the airport. The cost, based on comparable projects, could be between $400 and $500 million.

Even if the airport sold its property off Waldo Road to a developer — something Glaeser has mentioned as possibility to offset the cost of a new airport, while also helping to revitalize a new-development-neglected east Gainesville — Penksa said the money earned from the sale wouldn’t even cut the cost of a new airport in half.

In other cities, like Denver and Austin, Texas, Glaeser said, developers have turned former airport sites into mixed-use, retail and and housing development projects, providing economic activity and jobs.

Penksa isn’t convinced that’s a possibility with the Gainesville airport site.

"There isn’t anyone who is going to pay over $100 million for this property," he said.

A statement issued by the FAA says that airport officials have not notified the administration of any proposal to move the Gainesville Regional Airport.

The statement said relocating an airport requires years of planning and coordination with the state and local governments and the FAA. The FAA needs to be notified early on in the process, according to the statement, especially if a project would require federal funding assistance.

The FAA would require the need to move the airport be justified with data. Additionally, it’d require an FAA airspace study to determine the effects of existing airport facilities and flights.

Another potential issue, the FAA said, is the airport’s current grant obligations.

The airport has made millions of dollars’ worth of renovations over the last several years funded by city-co-sponsored grants from the Federal Aviation Administration. If the airport closes, those grants would have to be paid back, adding to the cost of moving the airport, Penksa said.

"(The idea of moving the airport) is a real distraction from making improvements here," he said.

Glaeser said over the next few months, the task force will continue working to gain support for the new airport.

It will look at the data once the study is completed in a few months to see if a new airport would be worth the cost.

He said he hopes, despite opposition or skeptics, people can see the benefits of a new airport.

"This is an opportunity in time that if we don’t have a real serious, meaningful and deliberative look at quality air service for our region, we probably will not have this opportunity again for a long time and maybe ever," he said. "Probably not ever."

___ (c)2018 The Gainesville Sun, Fla. Visit The Gainesville Sun, Fla. at www.gainesville.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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[kim26chiu]

The Cost of Sprawl Without Growth

Jason Segedy doesn’t often post articles, but when he does they are always worth reading. Earlier this year, Strong Towns reposted one of his pieces, which is about sprawl without growth.  Jason takes a look at some of the implications of Northeast Ohio’s current development pattern.

Issues of perception aside, we in Northeast Ohio are dealing with some hellishly difficult issues today.  Our 12-county region has lost seven percent of its population since 1970, falling from 4.1 million to 3.8 million people.  But instead of shrinking our footprint, we’ve done the exact opposite.  The region developed an additional 250 square miles of land (over three times the land area of the City of Cleveland) between 1979 and 2006 – a 21% expansion.

Meanwhile, our four core cities continue to deteriorate and hollow-out.

People know that our core cities are losing population, but not many people understand the sheer magnitude of the decline.  Collectively, since their peak, Akron, Canton, Cleveland, and Youngstown have lost more people than they have today.

These four cities, which, in 1950, all ranked among the 100 largest in America, are today, added together, smaller than Cleveland was in 1950.  Cleveland, the 7th largest American city in 1950, ranks 45th (and dropping) today.  Akron, Canton, and Youngstown have all dropped out of the top 100.

It doesn’t take an expert in finance or public administration to imagine what collectively losing 750,000 people has done to these cities’ tax base, housing stock, public utilities, and transportation infrastructure.  We have a core city infrastructure built to support 1.5 million people that, today, serves less than half of that amount.

…

The effect on the most vulnerable neighborhoods located within the core cities themselves has been nothing short of catastrophic.  Thousands of houses have been torn down, leaving gaping holes in the urban fabric, while tens of thousands more are sitting vacant and abandoned today.

Short of intentional action to do otherwise, the future of our core cities looks even worse.  According to the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium (NEOSCC), the region can expect to abandon an additional 175,000 houses between now and 2040.  That’s a staggering 18 houses per day, day-in and day-out, for the next 27 years.  If current trends continue, very few of them will be rebuilt in place.

The cost of removing all of those abandoned houses is estimated to be around $1.75 billion dollars.  Federal, state, regional, or private funding to address the problem is unlikely to materialize.

…

If you are skeptical about this future projection, the future is already here.  Today, over 15,000 houses in Cleveland sit abandoned.  In Akron, the number is around 2,300.  And in Youngstown, a city of 65,000, that used to have 170,000 residents, an estimated 5,000 abandoned houses and 20,000 vacant lots pose a problem almost too overwhelming to comprehend.

…

So taxpayers at the federal, state, and local level already paid once to build all of the infrastructure that was in place prior to 1960.  Now, they are in the process of paying a second time to build a largely redundant duplicate infrastructure in many of the areas that have been developed since 1960.

The end result, with the region’s population aging, and predicted to grow by less than 100,000 people over the next three decades, is a lot more infrastructure with the same amount of people to pay for it.  This means more public debt, higher taxes, and probably both.

In the coming decades, many of the areas developed since 1960 will face a similar dilemma to the one that the core cities are facing today: spend money that you don’t have to maintain infrastructure in an effort to stave off abandonment, or slowly watch previous hard-won investments in housing, economic development, and public infrastructure wither and die.

…

The 21st Century will mark the first time the United States has ever had to replace a modern public infrastructure.  We’ve never had to comprehensively rebuild a modern water and sewer system, transportation network, or electrical grid.  The staggering expenditure associated with doing this is going to be an unpleasant wake-up call for a notoriously short-sighted culture.

Did I mention that our country is $17 trillion in debt?  This wasn’t the case when we modernized our much less extravagant 19th century infrastructure in older cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.

But it is not the maintenance and replacement costs that will be our ultimate undoing.  It is the fact that we are doubling, tripling, and quadrupling-down on this unfunded liability, by continuing to build outward.  No one in human history has ever attempted to do what we are doing.  That is, to build a modern, urban infrastructure at what is, in-effect, a semi-rural scale.

…

So where are we in Northeast Ohio today?

Our core cities have collectively lost 750,000 people since 1950.

Hundreds of thousands of residents currently lack access to social and economic opportunities that people like me (and likely, you) take for granted

Tens of thousands of houses in our core cities and inner-ring suburbs currently sit vacant and abandoned.

An additional 175,000 houses (18 per day, for the next 27 years) are projected to be abandoned, and it would cost close to $2 billion to remove them.

Suburban areas are building more infrastructure than they will be able to afford to maintain, especially in the long-term.

Absent a will to change this unhealthy dynamic, we will repeat this cycle in community after community, until we are broke.

Click through to read the whole thing.

from Aaron M. Renn http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/04/03/the-cost-of-sprawl-without-growth/

[barb31clem]

The Cost of Sprawl Without Growth

Jason Segedy doesn’t often post articles, but when he does they are always worth reading. Earlier this year, Strong Towns reposted one of his pieces, which is about sprawl without growth.  Jason takes a look at some of the implications of Northeast Ohio’s current development pattern.

Issues of perception aside, we in Northeast Ohio are dealing with some hellishly difficult issues today.  Our 12-county region has lost seven percent of its population since 1970, falling from 4.1 million to 3.8 million people.  But instead of shrinking our footprint, we’ve done the exact opposite.  The region developed an additional 250 square miles of land (over three times the land area of the City of Cleveland) between 1979 and 2006 – a 21% expansion.

Meanwhile, our four core cities continue to deteriorate and hollow-out.

People know that our core cities are losing population, but not many people understand the sheer magnitude of the decline.  Collectively, since their peak, Akron, Canton, Cleveland, and Youngstown have lost more people than they have today.

These four cities, which, in 1950, all ranked among the 100 largest in America, are today, added together, smaller than Cleveland was in 1950.  Cleveland, the 7th largest American city in 1950, ranks 45th (and dropping) today.  Akron, Canton, and Youngstown have all dropped out of the top 100.

It doesn’t take an expert in finance or public administration to imagine what collectively losing 750,000 people has done to these cities’ tax base, housing stock, public utilities, and transportation infrastructure.  We have a core city infrastructure built to support 1.5 million people that, today, serves less than half of that amount.

…

The effect on the most vulnerable neighborhoods located within the core cities themselves has been nothing short of catastrophic.  Thousands of houses have been torn down, leaving gaping holes in the urban fabric, while tens of thousands more are sitting vacant and abandoned today.

Short of intentional action to do otherwise, the future of our core cities looks even worse.  According to the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium (NEOSCC), the region can expect to abandon an additional 175,000 houses between now and 2040.  That’s a staggering 18 houses per day, day-in and day-out, for the next 27 years.  If current trends continue, very few of them will be rebuilt in place.

The cost of removing all of those abandoned houses is estimated to be around $1.75 billion dollars.  Federal, state, regional, or private funding to address the problem is unlikely to materialize.

…

If you are skeptical about this future projection, the future is already here.  Today, over 15,000 houses in Cleveland sit abandoned.  In Akron, the number is around 2,300.  And in Youngstown, a city of 65,000, that used to have 170,000 residents, an estimated 5,000 abandoned houses and 20,000 vacant lots pose a problem almost too overwhelming to comprehend.

…

So taxpayers at the federal, state, and local level already paid once to build all of the infrastructure that was in place prior to 1960.  Now, they are in the process of paying a second time to build a largely redundant duplicate infrastructure in many of the areas that have been developed since 1960.

The end result, with the region’s population aging, and predicted to grow by less than 100,000 people over the next three decades, is a lot more infrastructure with the same amount of people to pay for it.  This means more public debt, higher taxes, and probably both.

In the coming decades, many of the areas developed since 1960 will face a similar dilemma to the one that the core cities are facing today: spend money that you don’t have to maintain infrastructure in an effort to stave off abandonment, or slowly watch previous hard-won investments in housing, economic development, and public infrastructure wither and die.

…

The 21st Century will mark the first time the United States has ever had to replace a modern public infrastructure.  We’ve never had to comprehensively rebuild a modern water and sewer system, transportation network, or electrical grid.  The staggering expenditure associated with doing this is going to be an unpleasant wake-up call for a notoriously short-sighted culture.

Did I mention that our country is $17 trillion in debt?  This wasn’t the case when we modernized our much less extravagant 19th century infrastructure in older cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.

But it is not the maintenance and replacement costs that will be our ultimate undoing.  It is the fact that we are doubling, tripling, and quadrupling-down on this unfunded liability, by continuing to build outward.  No one in human history has ever attempted to do what we are doing.  That is, to build a modern, urban infrastructure at what is, in-effect, a semi-rural scale.

…

So where are we in Northeast Ohio today?

Our core cities have collectively lost 750,000 people since 1950.

Hundreds of thousands of residents currently lack access to social and economic opportunities that people like me (and likely, you) take for granted

Tens of thousands of houses in our core cities and inner-ring suburbs currently sit vacant and abandoned.

An additional 175,000 houses (18 per day, for the next 27 years) are projected to be abandoned, and it would cost close to $2 billion to remove them.

Suburban areas are building more infrastructure than they will be able to afford to maintain, especially in the long-term.

Absent a will to change this unhealthy dynamic, we will repeat this cycle in community after community, until we are broke.

Click through to read the whole thing.

from Aaron M. Renn http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/04/03/the-cost-of-sprawl-without-growth/

[architectnews]

Bjarke Ingels' Masterplanet vision for Earth is "a continuation of the colonialist project" says Liam Young

Developing a masterplan for the planet could entrench existing inequalities and make climate change worse, according to the architect behind the new Planet City movie.

Architect Liam Young described the Masterplanet project by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) as "a continuation of the colonialist project that has already masterplanned the planet in its own image".

Instead, Young has presented an alternative vision of a future planet Earth in Planet City, a short animated movie depicting a dense metropolis for 10 billion people that would free up the rest of the planet for rewilding and the return of ancestral lands.

"It is just worth calling out the differences between these types of works," Young told Dezeen.

"The imposition of singular visions by starchitects just repeats so many of the mistakes that have got us into this situation in the first place."

Top and above: Planet City is a concept for a city for 10 billion people

Both Young and BIG, which is led by architect Bjarke Ingels, propose conceptual solutions for a world with 10 billion people, which is Earth's projected population in 2050.

Young's Planet City proposes a self-sufficient, multicultural city occupying just 0.02 per cent of the planet's surface.

Contrasting visions for a world with 10 billion people

By contrast, BIG's Masterplanet concept involves scaling up existing infrastructure to cover the entire planet, including creating a single global power grid and an international network of recycling plants.

"The typical techno solutionism that Bjarke Ingel's project is an example of is indicative of the general response of the design community to issues such as the pandemic or climate change," said Young.

"Such proposals are a continuation of the colonialist project that has already masterplanned the planet in its own image, he added. "Plans of this scale have historically perpetuated forms of exclusion and reinforced existing systems of power.

"Most of these projects rarely engage with these root causes of climate change and in fact enable them."

Bjarke Ingel's Masterplanet is another vision for Earth

The debate comes as architects and designers turn their attention to designing holistic solutions to global problems such as climate change, pollution and environmental degradation.

In an interview with Dezeen last year, Winy Maas of MVRDV called on architects to design new planets to help understand how to solve problems on Earth.

"It would be wonderful to design more planets and to compare them because there are different dreams," said the Dutch architect.

"It would be very useful in that way to fantasise on that because it would mirror what we should do now."

Architects turning attention to holistic global solutions

Maas added that the planet needed to be managed in the same way that landscapes are managed in countries like the Netherlands, with areas set aside for nature, farming and power generation as well as for human habitation.

"We will be with 11 billion people soon," Maas said. "We have to manage that growth. Some of us will go to the tundras in order to survive."

"We have to deal with that and with the new densities that [will] occur and also to keep enough emptiness for oxygen and water management."

Maas suggested turning cities like Hong Kong into havens for nature

Speaking at a Dezeen talk in 2018, designer Jalila Essaïdi called on designers to propose audacious solutions to global problems.

"I would say yes please, more science fiction," said Essaïdi. "Let's keep dreaming big and doing the impossible."

Essaïdi praised Elon Musk's plan to build colonies on Mars as an example of the big-scale thinking that is required on Earth.

"At first you have to think about the rockets to Mars before you can apply them here," she said. "It's a dream, an escape, but maybe you find aspects you can use here [on Earth]."

Planet City "implausibly extreme"

However, Young said that simply scaling up existing solutions is no longer appropriate for the global problems the world faces.

"What we actually need is an entirely different way of organizing change," he said. "Climate change is a political and ideological problem, not one that can be solved with Bjarke's new global power grid."

"Projects need to engage with the necessary cultural and ideological changes that are needed to support the implementation of these technologies," he added.

"Utopias of the imagination, projected into reality or these speculative fictions that masquerade as real solutions, without this complex engagement with their embedded politics are deeply problematic."

Liam Young

While admitting that his Planet City vision is "implausibly extreme", Young said that his short movie was intended as a provocation to trigger discussion about the failure of existing systems.

"Planet City is a fiction shaped like a city," he said. "It doesn't pretend to be an executable proposal, it is a provocation that engages and celebrates the value of fiction as a product in and of itself."

The Planet City concept is based on a consensus between human cultures, rather than a top-down masterplan.

"Set against the consistent failure of nation-states to act in any meaningful way against climate change, Planet City imagines emerges from a global citizen consensus, a voluntary and multi-generational retreat from the sprawling cities we all inhabit," Young explained.

Planet City is an alternative to "a singular design vision"

While Planet City is a fictional construct, Young said it presented an alternative to "a singular design vision or a central governing body enforcing a decree."

"Instead, network-enabled movements like the global climate strike and climate march, some of the largest gatherings of humans in history, act as a template for the early rumblings and first mobilisations of Planet City," he said.

"It is about allowing space for multiple voices not the PR informed manoeuvres of a singular star architect whose very value is tied up in the systems that have created much of the problems in the first place."

The post Bjarke Ingels' Masterplanet vision for Earth is "a continuation of the colonialist project" says Liam Young appeared first on Dezeen.

[bestdallasapartments]

Researchers: Dallas DART Is Failing Those Who Need it Most

(Photo by Richard “Gaberlunzi” Murphy)

Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) is unaffordable, inaccessible and helping to contribute to regional poverty and downward mobility, new research concludes.

The most alarming figure from the briefing conducted by professor Shima Hamidi from the University of Texas at Arlington and the city’s Chief of Resilience Theresa O’Donnell earlier this week has to do with affordability: Transportation is unaffordable to 97 percent of Dallas’ population. Beyond that, the system doesn’t do a very good job of matching people up with jobs — upwards of 65 percent of transit-dependent residents have access to less than 4 percent of regional jobs — and the city’s characteristic sprawl makes transit difficult to access. Only about 20 percent of the population has access to high-frequency transit during morning and afternoon peak hours, and during off-peak hours, that number drops to about 9 percent.

Overall the research paints a picture of a system that has tried to keep up with sprawl (and, impressively, boasts the nation’s longest light-rail network) and failed. According to Dallas Magazine:

All of it reflects the end result of a city policy over the past few decades to support a brand of regional growth that has seen employment centers migrate northward. But by linking DART’s development to that regional growth — investing in a sprawling light-rail network as opposed to a functioning transit system — DART has only exacerbated the disconnect.

According to the magazine, DART has become more construction agency than transit agency, prioritizing building over strategic planning. To the credit of the Dallas City Council, however, it appointed an urban planner and transit advocate to the DART board last year, as Next City covered at the time — a move that could signal shifting priorities.

Another positive about the DART system, according to the report: Its fares are relatively affordable. The system’s lack of affordability has more to do with access than ticket prices — and the report concludes that “fare affordability may not be a key contributor to the relatively low transit ridership rate.”

But factoring transit access into the cost of living in Dallas does make the city less affordable overall, especially in the southern part of the metro region, where incomes tend to be lower. According to the report, around 73 percent of Section 8 Multifamily Affordable Housing properties in Dallas are not affordable when considering transportation costs. And transit isn’t solely to blame — only about 34 percent of jobs can be reached in 30 minutes of driving for Dallas residents.

(Credit: University of Texas at Arlington and the City of Dallas)

What’s more, since 2000, the poverty rate within the city of Dallas has increased roughly 22 percent. Meanwhile, the city’s population has increased only by about 10 percent.

Dallas Magazine calls the report a “bombshell” but none of it is particularly surprising given the metro region’s history of prioritizing parks, sports arenas and police services over transit, and growing ever outward. Hopefully it will help inspire change. As Dallas Magazine puts it: “Now it is time for our elected public officials and the representatives on the DART board to hold the public transit agency’s staff’s feet to the fire.”

Rachel Dovey is an award-winning freelance writer and former USC Annenberg fellow living at the northern tip of California’s Bay Area. She writes about infrastructure, water and climate change and has been published by Bust, Wired, Paste, SF Weekly, the East Bay Express and the North Bay Bohemian.

Source Article

The post Researchers: Dallas DART Is Failing Those Who Need it Most appeared first on The Best Dallas Apartments Information & News.

from The Best Dallas Apartments Information & News https://www.dallasapartments.cc/researchers-dallas-dart-is-failing-those-who-need-it-most/

[jerrymcguireau]

Is Canberra the Nation's Best-Kept Investment Secret? The Urban Developer

That it’s cheaper to rent a home in Melbourne than in Canberra speaks volumes about the need for new thinking on housing in the national capital.

High-rise, high-density living spaces that build communities, offer affordable housing options to both renters and buyers and support the infrastructure and amenity you expect to see in any world city is imperative if the ACT is to continue to prosper.

Current tight housing vacancy rates coupled with the highest annual increase in house rents in the nation has made Canberra a virtual no-go zone for those seeking affordable, well-located rental digs. And with the ACT population having grown 11.4 per cent since 2011 – with every sign of continued strong increases – it’s only going to get worse.

Who wants to pay a median weekly rent for a house of $505 a week (up 6.3 per cent year on year), particularly when a lack of city and town-centre accommodation means you’ll likely be banished to the outer suburbs to find it?

From an environmental perspective alone, a geographic spread of low-rise, low-density housing represents poor long-term planning. A family needs at least two cars to be able to access work, entertainment and shopping options, placing pressures on infrastructure and the environment.

Long-term proliferation of the urban sprawl means opportunities to create vibrant community hubs near transport options, workplaces and public amenities, catering to the wants and needs of a modern, changing society, will be lost.

The latest Domain State of the Market report revealed some interesting statistics about the housing market in Canberra – supporting the view we’ve long held at Geocon that high-rise, precinct-style apartment living is the way forward.

With Canberra showing the highest annual rental yield in the nation at six per cent (an increase of 3.7 per cent year on year), and rental vacancy levels under one per cent – half the national average – centrally located, high-rise apartment precincts near amenities and transport options makes perfect sense in terms of a good buy-to-let investment for those wanting to build wealth.

And given it can be cheaper to service a mortgage than to pay rent in Canberra, apartment living provides a lifeline for first-home buyers and other owner-occupiers, too. Record-low mortgage rates mean it’s easier to pay off a mortgage than it has been in decades, and a new Bureau of Statistics report shows that of all Australian cities, Canberra is the easiest in which to do so, with 15 per cent of monthly household income devoted to repayments, as opposed to a national average of 16 per cent.

Nearly half of our purchasers are first home-buyers, and 87 per cent of our buyers are aged 50 and under. With an entry level apartment price of $282,900, we’re providing viable options for a segment of society that is increasingly being priced out of the market. Eighteen to 35-year-olds – those most demanding of vibrant, dynamic communities with ease of access to work and lifestyle opportunities – account for 60 per cent of all our purchasers, most of whom are from the ACT. Seventy per cent of our buyers are owner-occupiers.

Scare-mongering about an oversupply of apartments belies what we are seeing at the coalface. The reality is that 70 per cent of apartments must be sold before commencement, as per APRA regulation of lenders. Media often delivers the news that with, say, five new buildings under construction, each comprising about 300 units, there must be an oversupply. But DA approval and supply of these apartments to the market could be up to four years away. There is a gross under-supply of “turnkey” apartments in a city that people are moving to in droves because we have the lowest unemployment rate in the country.

There is a very real demand for affordable, mixed-use precincts in vibrant town centres, as our buyer demographics demonstrate.

Geocon is delivering a 35 per cent share of the apartment market in Canberra – with an expected sale of 1000 apartments this year alone – and we are seeing consistent 3-5 per cent growth, with our units selling out quickly.

Canberra, Australia’s only “emerging” city, is changing. We have a world-class new airport, with international flights opening up great opportunities for investment and tourism; the ACT Government is committed to investing in important infrastructure such as the new light rail system, we have the lowest unemployment rates in the nation and the highest wages. Population, meanwhile, is booming. Over the past five years, the city has grown 11 per cent, and that doesn’t count transient populations such as students attending the universities here.

As a business born and bred in Canberra, we are able to make accurate market predictions, and have an expanding portfolio of land holdings so we can quickly adapt to demand. In recent weeks we have purchased sites in the Woden Town Centre, the Parliamentary Triangle and two in the city centre because we have the utmost confidence in Canberra, and the continued demand for affordable yet high-quality accommodation in central locations.

We will transform the new Woden site into a $380 million mixed-use development that will be the catalyst for the revitalisation of the run-down Woden Town Centre, creating new jobs and public amenities. The ACT Government’s announcement that Stage 2 of the Light Rail service would extend from the city to Woden made the purchase a no-brainer for us, with our strategic aim of creating vibrant precincts with easy access to public transport.

Equally, our ambitious Kingston Arts Precinct will breathe new life into this inner suburb through a combination of sleek, contemporary apartments and a thriving cultural centre comprising commercial spaces and an Arts Hub.

Canberra has long flown under the radar against Sydney and Melbourne but all signs point to the fact that increasing numbers are realising the national capital is Australia’s best-kept secret when it comes to opportunity, growth, superior quality of life and long-term capital gains.

Currently, there is an undersupply of turnkey apartments available to move into immediately, to service an ever-increasing demand. Arguments against progress and development — in particular the concept of high-rise living — are myopic. If we fail to do as other world cities have done – grown and adapted, had the foresight and courage to introduce new ways of living – we risk being lumbered with the unpopular mantle of bush capital indefinitely. And that would be a tragedy for a city on the cusp of taking its place on the world stage. Geocon Acquires Canberra Retail Centre For $13.35 Million

[Related reading: Geocon Acquires Canberra Retail Centre For $13.35 Million; Geocon To Develop 500 Apartments At Newly-Acquired Site In Canberra; Geocon’s $250 Million Canberra Development Given Green Light]

Geocon Group

Geocon is a highly successful integrated property development, construction and hotel management group operating in Canberra. The group has completed more than 1500 residential dwellings since it was created 10 years ago, and expects to deliver 1000 apartments to the market this calendar year. Operating an owner-builder-developer model, there is no like-for-like competitor in Canberra.

Projects:

Republic: Conceived by Fender Katsalidis Architects, the award-winning team behind Hobart’s Mona and Canberra’s NewActon precinct, Republic will be Canberra’s hottest new lifestyle destination with apartments, commercial and retail spaces and expansive public amenities. Staged development, five-year delivery timeframe from 2017.

Kingston Arts Precinct: Residential apartments, commercial spaces, an Arts Hub and hotel will make this the heart and soul of the Kingston Foreshore redevelopment. Estimated completion date 2021.

Southport: A 12-storey residential apartment building with ground-floor commercial and retail tenancies in the new Southquay Precinct of Tuggeranong. Completed September 2017.

Infinity: Twenty and 22-storey residential buildings in Gungahlin Town Centre, comprising apartments, luxury penthouses and terraces, plus commercial spaces occupying the ground floors. Estimated completion date February 2018.

Midnight: 236 residential apartments plus a 185-room hotel and commercial space with Braddon’s vibrant lifestyle precinct and light rail links on the doorstep. Estimated completion date 2019.

Wayfarer: 27-storey residential development in Belconnen Town Centre, with commercial space at ground level. Completed December, 2016.

Wova: A new residential and commercial precinct that is set to revitalise the run-down Woden Town Centre. Stage 1 estimated completion 2020.

Metropol: Opposite the bustling Canberra Centre shopping district and the tranquillity of Glebe Park, this residential and commercial development will raise the bar for inner-city living in Canberra. Estimated completion date 2020.

Hotels

Geocon owns and manages four Abode apartment hotels, in Woden, Tuggeranong, Narrabundah and Gungahlin. New Abode hotels are being built in Braddon, Kingston and Murrumbateman, NSW. A new five-star hotel brand is currently in development, with the first two properties planned for the Parliamentary Triangle and Canberra City Centre.

For more visit the Geocon or Abode Hotels websites.

Contributed by Nick Georgalis, Managing Director of Geocon.

The Urban Developer is proud to partner with Geocon to deliver this article to you. In doing so, we can continue to publish our free daily news, information, insights and opinion to you, our valued readers.

from https://highpowerclean.com.au/is-canberra-the-nations-best-kept-investment-secret-the-urban-developer/

from High Power Cleaning Melbourne - Blog http://highpowercleanau.weebly.com/blog/is-canberra-the-nations-best-kept-investment-secret-the-urban-developer

[nancydpolardau]

Is Canberra the Nation's Best-Kept Investment Secret? – The Urban Developer

That it’s cheaper to rent a home in Melbourne than in Canberra speaks volumes about the need for new thinking on housing in the national capital.

High-rise, high-density living spaces that build communities, offer affordable housing options to both renters and buyers and support the infrastructure and amenity you expect to see in any world city is imperative if the ACT is to continue to prosper.

Current tight housing vacancy rates coupled with the highest annual increase in house rents in the nation has made Canberra a virtual no-go zone for those seeking affordable, well-located rental digs. And with the ACT population having grown 11.4 per cent since 2011 – with every sign of continued strong increases – it’s only going to get worse.

Who wants to pay a median weekly rent for a house of $505 a week (up 6.3 per cent year on year), particularly when a lack of city and town-centre accommodation means you’ll likely be banished to the outer suburbs to find it?

From an environmental perspective alone, a geographic spread of low-rise, low-density housing represents poor long-term planning. A family needs at least two cars to be able to access work, entertainment and shopping options, placing pressures on infrastructure and the environment.

Long-term proliferation of the urban sprawl means opportunities to create vibrant community hubs near transport options, workplaces and public amenities, catering to the wants and needs of a modern, changing society, will be lost.

The latest Domain State of the Market report revealed some interesting statistics about the housing market in Canberra – supporting the view we’ve long held at Geocon that high-rise, precinct-style apartment living is the way forward.

With Canberra showing the highest annual rental yield in the nation at six per cent (an increase of 3.7 per cent year on year), and rental vacancy levels under one per cent – half the national average – centrally located, high-rise apartment precincts near amenities and transport options makes perfect sense in terms of a good buy-to-let investment for those wanting to build wealth.

And given it can be cheaper to service a mortgage than to pay rent in Canberra, apartment living provides a lifeline for first-home buyers and other owner-occupiers, too. Record-low mortgage rates mean it’s easier to pay off a mortgage than it has been in decades, and a new Bureau of Statistics report shows that of all Australian cities, Canberra is the easiest in which to do so, with 15 per cent of monthly household income devoted to repayments, as opposed to a national average of 16 per cent.

Nearly half of our purchasers are first home-buyers, and 87 per cent of our buyers are aged 50 and under. With an entry level apartment price of $282,900, we’re providing viable options for a segment of society that is increasingly being priced out of the market. Eighteen to 35-year-olds – those most demanding of vibrant, dynamic communities with ease of access to work and lifestyle opportunities – account for 60 per cent of all our purchasers, most of whom are from the ACT. Seventy per cent of our buyers are owner-occupiers.

Scare-mongering about an oversupply of apartments belies what we are seeing at the coalface. The reality is that 70 per cent of apartments must be sold before commencement, as per APRA regulation of lenders. Media often delivers the news that with, say, five new buildings under construction, each comprising about 300 units, there must be an oversupply. But DA approval and supply of these apartments to the market could be up to four years away. There is a gross under-supply of “turnkey” apartments in a city that people are moving to in droves because we have the lowest unemployment rate in the country.

There is a very real demand for affordable, mixed-use precincts in vibrant town centres, as our buyer demographics demonstrate.

Geocon is delivering a 35 per cent share of the apartment market in Canberra – with an expected sale of 1000 apartments this year alone – and we are seeing consistent 3-5 per cent growth, with our units selling out quickly.

Canberra, Australia’s only “emerging” city, is changing. We have a world-class new airport, with international flights opening up great opportunities for investment and tourism; the ACT Government is committed to investing in important infrastructure such as the new light rail system, we have the lowest unemployment rates in the nation and the highest wages. Population, meanwhile, is booming. Over the past five years, the city has grown 11 per cent, and that doesn’t count transient populations such as students attending the universities here.

As a business born and bred in Canberra, we are able to make accurate market predictions, and have an expanding portfolio of land holdings so we can quickly adapt to demand. In recent weeks we have purchased sites in the Woden Town Centre, the Parliamentary Triangle and two in the city centre because we have the utmost confidence in Canberra, and the continued demand for affordable yet high-quality accommodation in central locations.

We will transform the new Woden site into a $380 million mixed-use development that will be the catalyst for the revitalisation of the run-down Woden Town Centre, creating new jobs and public amenities. The ACT Government’s announcement that Stage 2 of the Light Rail service would extend from the city to Woden made the purchase a no-brainer for us, with our strategic aim of creating vibrant precincts with easy access to public transport.

Equally, our ambitious Kingston Arts Precinct will breathe new life into this inner suburb through a combination of sleek, contemporary apartments and a thriving cultural centre comprising commercial spaces and an Arts Hub.

Canberra has long flown under the radar against Sydney and Melbourne but all signs point to the fact that increasing numbers are realising the national capital is Australia’s best-kept secret when it comes to opportunity, growth, superior quality of life and long-term capital gains.

Currently, there is an undersupply of turnkey apartments available to move into immediately, to service an ever-increasing demand. Arguments against progress and development — in particular the concept of high-rise living — are myopic. If we fail to do as other world cities have done – grown and adapted, had the foresight and courage to introduce new ways of living – we risk being lumbered with the unpopular mantle of bush capital indefinitely. And that would be a tragedy for a city on the cusp of taking its place on the world stage. Geocon Acquires Canberra Retail Centre For $13.35 Million

[Related reading: Geocon Acquires Canberra Retail Centre For $13.35 Million; Geocon To Develop 500 Apartments At Newly-Acquired Site In Canberra; Geocon’s $250 Million Canberra Development Given Green Light]

Geocon Group

Geocon is a highly successful integrated property development, construction and hotel management group operating in Canberra. The group has completed more than 1500 residential dwellings since it was created 10 years ago, and expects to deliver 1000 apartments to the market this calendar year. Operating an owner-builder-developer model, there is no like-for-like competitor in Canberra.

Projects:

Republic: Conceived by Fender Katsalidis Architects, the award-winning team behind Hobart’s Mona and Canberra’s NewActon precinct, Republic will be Canberra’s hottest new lifestyle destination with apartments, commercial and retail spaces and expansive public amenities. Staged development, five-year delivery timeframe from 2017.

Kingston Arts Precinct: Residential apartments, commercial spaces, an Arts Hub and hotel will make this the heart and soul of the Kingston Foreshore redevelopment. Estimated completion date 2021.

Southport: A 12-storey residential apartment building with ground-floor commercial and retail tenancies in the new Southquay Precinct of Tuggeranong. Completed September 2017.

Infinity: Twenty and 22-storey residential buildings in Gungahlin Town Centre, comprising apartments, luxury penthouses and terraces, plus commercial spaces occupying the ground floors. Estimated completion date February 2018.

Midnight: 236 residential apartments plus a 185-room hotel and commercial space with Braddon’s vibrant lifestyle precinct and light rail links on the doorstep. Estimated completion date 2019.

Wayfarer: 27-storey residential development in Belconnen Town Centre, with commercial space at ground level. Completed December, 2016.

Wova: A new residential and commercial precinct that is set to revitalise the run-down Woden Town Centre. Stage 1 estimated completion 2020.

Metropol: Opposite the bustling Canberra Centre shopping district and the tranquillity of Glebe Park, this residential and commercial development will raise the bar for inner-city living in Canberra. Estimated completion date 2020.

Hotels

Geocon owns and manages four Abode apartment hotels, in Woden, Tuggeranong, Narrabundah and Gungahlin. New Abode hotels are being built in Braddon, Kingston and Murrumbateman, NSW. A new five-star hotel brand is currently in development, with the first two properties planned for the Parliamentary Triangle and Canberra City Centre.

For more visit the Geocon or Abode Hotels websites.

Contributed by Nick Georgalis, Managing Director of Geocon.

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