Transit as a Development Tool, but in Whose Interest?
Yonah Freemark, Next American City
If dense, inner-city communities are regaining the popularity they held decades ago thanks to demographic trends favoring smaller households and shorter commutes, private developers need to respond by providing more housing in walkable urban neighborhoods, rather than the same old suburban sprawl we’ve become used to. In order to do that, they’ve got to fund transit improvements through special assessment districts that would coordinate the construction of new buildings with the implementation of better public transportation systems such as new streetcar lines.

At least that’s the gist of Christopher Leinberger’s provocative piece in June’s Atlantic Monthly.

Leinberger’s thoughts on how to advance this sort of transit-centric urbanism are inspired by the example of housing developers from the beginning of the 20th century, who subsidized money-losing streetcar lines into new neighborhoods (“streetcar suburbs”) to encourage people to buy or rent. Without the rail service, it was assumed, the value of housing plots would decline substantially...

...But Leinberger’s solution—that developers could benefit by spending their own money to build transit—is problematic. For one, it fails to account for the fact that most land speculators move on to new work once they’ve sold off their projects to home buyers. Who would continue to subsidize the operations costs of the new transit systems once the land has been sold? Is it fair to expect municipal transit operators to take over the servicing of privately developed systems?...

...With limited funds for new infrastructure investment, the government must guarantee that its money is being used in the most effective way possible, and it’s hard to imagine how linking up with speculative land development fits within that framework.

All that said, Leinberger’s fundamental argument—that transit can serve as a useful tool in spurring dense urban growth—is sound...
(17 May 2010)

Better Bikeways: Guerrilla Improvements and DIY Signage
Joseph Prichard, Good.is
If you've driven through Los Angeles in recent months, there's a good chance that you've seen some unusual bike signage. Black and white posters with a bike lane icon and the phrase “Caution! Please Pass With Care” (or sometimes "Precaución! Por Favor Pase con Cuidado”) have been springing up all over the city, wheat-pasted to electrical boxes and other roadside furniture. In the span of a few weeks, these signs have become near ubiquitous in certain parts of the city. Where did they come come from and who put them there? Reports on the signs origin may be somewhat mysterious, but one thing seems clear: They are part of a growing trend of DIY bicycle signage...

Image credit: Joe Linton / LA Eco-Village

This is the third entry in our miniseries "Better Bikeways." Read the first and second entries
(May 14 2010)

What's not to like about high-speed rail? The case simply hasn't been made
George Monbiot, The Guardian
Hallelujah. Heathrow's third runway is history, the biggest victory for the environment movement since the scrapping of the last Tory government's road-building programme. Gone, too, is the planned expansion of Gatwick and Stansted (though the government has so far said nothing about airport expansion elsewhere). Instead we'll have a high-speed railway connecting London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. All hail to the new age of the train. Perhaps.

I don't dispute the problem. Both roads and railways are close to gridlock. New motorways, government figures show, scarcely improve journey times between city centres. Upgrading old railways snarls up the system even more, costs a fortune and adds little to their capacity.

New lines, by contrast, free up the old tracks for freight and local trains. They allow companies to run longer trains and additional services. High-speed rail cuts journey times almost twice as much as new conventional tracks while costing scarcely any more. The greenhouse gases it produces will be cancelled out by people switching from planes to trains. What's not to like?

What's not to like is that the case has not been made. The background data on which these claims are based isn't just sparse – in some cases it's non-existent. Where it does exist, it starkly contradicts other government figures. I wanted to be convinced, perhaps I still could be. But the Department for Transport's argument currently consists of several thousand pages of wishful thinking.
(17 May 2010)