Meanwhile, a growing chorus of intellectual leaders says the country is experiencing something different than a normal cyclical fluctuation: the end of an epoch.

Leading urban thinkers, from Richard Florida to James Howard Kunstler, believe we have reached the limits of our fossil-fueled, double-mortgaged, McMansion-based economy. Relief won’t come, they say, until America begins confronting the systemic problems that produced the meltdown, including inefficient and unsustainable public infrastructure investments and housing development.

“What were seeing right now is an inability to look at how we live and how it relates to our problems, and financial problems,” said Kunstler Tuesday during a speaking engagement with the Congress for the New Urbanism. “Production homebuilders, mortgage lenders, real estate agents, they are all sitting back now waiting for the, quote, bottom of the housing market to come with the expectation that things will go back to the way they were in 2005.”

But despite massive government expenditures to restart the old economic engine driven by suburban homebuilding, recovery is elusive, Kunstler said. The author of “The Geography of Nowhere” and “The Long Emergency” argues that suburbanization has been a multi-decade American experiment, and a failed one.

Kunstler is joined in that perspective by Charles Marohn, the director of non-profit group Strong Towns. A new report from Strong Towns places blame for the lagging economy directly on policies that favor low-density housing, fossil-fuel dependence and publicly-subsidized overbuilt infrastructure.

In its new booklet Curbside Chat, Strong Towns asserts that since the 1970s, the suburban growth that powered America’s economy operated much like a Ponzi scheme. In towns across the country, politicians traded the short-term payoffs of sprawling development — namely increased taxes — for long-term maintenance obligations that are just now coming due. And they’re coming up short.

Another one bites the dust. A vacant Walmart in Lewiston, Washington. Photo: Flickr/Happy Vampire

These empty husks — yet to be filled by any other retail tenant — are part of the detritus left behind by a paradigm shift in the real estate industry. Signs of the changing times, they tell us what kind of society we were before the bubble burst.

Now, as the commercial real estate industry regroups, evidence is mounting that Walmart and other mega-retailers will take a much different form than they have in the past. The new American shopping experience, according to many industry observers, will be less “suburban big-box” and more “urban destination.”

The demise of several mega-retail chains during the recession, including Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things, helped produce a vast oversupply of retail space, particularly that of the giant, boxy, just-off-the-interstate variety. Last summer, the research arm of giant commercial real estate firm Colliers International reported that there was nearly 300 million square feet of vacant big box retail space on the market — 34 percent of total retail vacancy left behind by a recession that walloped commercial real estate almost as hard as housing.

Since 2008 alone, 120 million square feet of big box retail space has become available. To put such numbers in perspective, that is the equivalent of the total shopping center space in Cincinnati, Kansas City and Baltimore combined, Colliers reported.

This period of retrenchment has humbled even the once-mightiest of retail forces. CNN reported last month that Walmart stores suffered their ninth-straight quarterly drop in sales. Another sign of the times: Walmart is no longer enough of a bargain for U.S. consumers, it appears. The mega-retailer has been losing market share to dollar stores.

The situation has apparently reached the point where the retail monolith is rethinking its whole carbon-gulping model. Walmart is joining other retailers in thinking smaller and more urban, says Ed McMahon, a fellow at the Urban Land Institute.

“What the recession has made completely clear is that we have way too much retail,” McMahon said. “We are going from the era of the big box to the era of the small box.”

Enter the “Walmart Express.”

The Chamber of Commerce report states that American transportation performance has been through the roof lately, a finding that should lead the Chamber to question some of its assumptions. Source: U.S. Chamber TPI 2011 Update

The Chamber of Commerce released its annual Transportation Performance Index (TPI) last week [PDF], and you can tell it’s due for a total overhaul, because according to the Index, recession-battered 2009 was a banner year for transportation performance.

Using 2009 data, the Chamber, a powerful lobbying group that represents millions of American businesses, determined that the performance of the nation’s transportation infrastructure is improving. However, even the Chamber dismisses the significance of its own results, saying the “improvement” is illusory — due to the decline in driving, and thus congestion, during the recession. But there’s another good reason to dismiss the results: The Chamber is measuring the wrong things.

The Chamber uses the TPI “to track the performance of transportation infrastructure over time… and demonstrate the connection between infrastructure performance, rather than spending, and the economy.” It claims to be the first organization to ever measure the correlation between the quality of transportation systems and economic growth.

But the Chamber’s metrics produce some truly baffling results. During the economic torpor of 2009, the index experienced its greatest improvement in a single year since 1990. Despite the nonsensical figures, the Chamber uses the report release as an opportunity to call for renewed infrastructure investment.

“By all accounts, the nation’s transportation networks continue to languish.” said Janet Kavinoky, head lobbyist for the Chamber’s infrastructure program. “The improvement of the TPI is not sustainable and does not represent a long-term trend… It is due to the economic downturn, rather than strategic policy and regulatory reforms or new investment.”

That’s all true, but that’s not the only reason to question the results of the TPI.

Of the 21 indicators the Chamber uses in its complex formulas, none deal with emissions. Of all of the ways the Chamber chooses to evaluate the U.S. transportation system, none investigates the effect on air and water quality. They certainly don’t take public health into account, ignoring the effect of our transportation choices on our waistlines or our lungs. In fact, the Chamber completely glosses over non-motorized transportation. Pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure doesn’t count as one of the “fixed facilities” the Chamber examines.

Here’s all you need to know to be convinced that the Chamber’s measurements of transportation performance don’t add up: Though it didn’t name the top states for transportation performance this year (that listing only comes out every other year), these were the top winners last year:

Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce TPI 2010

Maybe that’s what you get when you evaluate performance on congestion based on “route-miles per 10,000 population” — the higher the better. That’s right. The Chamber judges congestion using a simple formula: asphalt divided by people.

The Dakotas don’t have a congestion problem because they have about 10 residents per square mile. If you want to see how a state deals with congestion, check out New Jersey (1,196 inhabitants per square mile). Trying to solve their congestion problem by building more “route-miles per 10,000 population” would be an exercise in futility.

Notably, the Chamber uses the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report as its gold standard for measuring congestion, saying that methodological revisions in the TTI are a “game changer.” Report authors like that the TTI now measures off-peak travel times and includes San Juan, among other changes.

But those changes don’t address the major defects with the Urban Mobility Report. Real, significant changes would have included a move away from highway traffic speeds as the main measure of urban mobility. CEOs for Cities has produced a detailed review of the report [PDF] that should give the Chamber pause when using it as a primary data source. Among their findings: The UMR rewards longer commute times as long as average driving speeds stay high, and it fails to recognize regions that have actually succeeded in making commutes shorter.

The Chamber’s performance index does take into consideration the availability of transit and rail, as well as safety indicators on all modes. But even the measurements of rail and transit availability only measure route-miles and capacity — not frequency, reliability, ridership, or whether the route miles go to the right places, adequately connecting people with jobs and destinations.

So what are we left with? A transportation ranking that tells us that the wide-open states of the American West have wide-open highways, and that’s good for business. And as soon as those highways fill up with enough vehicles to justify their existence, better build more.

Clearly, as a representative of business interests, the Chamber believes it is looking out for the best thing for economic growth. But the assumptions it’s using are out-of-date. Building a transportation system that produces economic growth in the 21st century does not entail creating the conditions for vehicle miles traveled to rise continually. A recent report from the Center for Clean Air Policy documented how GDP is increasingly disconnected from VMT. Even the Chamber has recognized this trend, stating that “the importance of travel as a component of the U.S. economy has been declining since the early 1990s.”

For next year’s Transportation Performance Index, instead of more metrics praising empty highways, how about a smart growth indicator?

President Obama speaking at a Chrysler assembly plant in Toledo last month. Photo: Paul Sancya/AP

To this day, Americans remain unconvinced of the bailout’s wisdom, and fewer than half of likely voters are optimistic that we will be repaid the total $80 billion we coughed up. And if Americans were more familiar with one underreported aspect of the bailout — the rescues of the automotive financial firms — they’d feel even less enthusiastic about joining the party in Detroit and Washington.

Between 2008 and 2009, we taxpayers forked over $17 billion to GMAC (now Ally Financial) and $1.5 billion to Chrysler Financial under the vague theory that they formed an essential part of the auto industry. In doing so, we preserved two entities that, like the banks and mortgage companies, were making subprime loans to consumers: high-interest loans made to high-risk borrowers. Chrysler Financial has paid us back, but despite making more auto loans than any other company last year, Ally just delayed its planned IPO because it is not doing well enough to enable the government to reduce its majority stake.

To repay taxpayers and be profitable going forward, these institutions have concluded that they must expand their portfolio of subprime loans, and they are doing so with gusto. Last month, the credit scores of those buying new cars hit a five-year low. Overall, lending to buyers with credit scores under 680 has been rising quarter after quarter so that four out of 10 auto loans today are subprime. That’s right: 42 percent of Americans — including many economically vulnerable people — are taking on auto debt at high rates of interest, making purchases set to become albatrosses dragging down their tissue-thin household budgets.

Although these lenders assert that subprime auto loans do not pose a risk to the financial system similar to that presented by subprime home loans, this is distinctly disingenuous. Yes, the auto loan market is smaller than the mortgage market, and yes, lenders can quickly repossess cars against which loans are made. But this by no means ensures that these companies won’t fail or find themselves in need of another bailout. Subprime auto lenders might not be the principal driver of a financial crisis, but they absolutely contributed to and suffered from the last one. Like the mortgage lenders, they bundled, securitized, and sold off car loans into a market that collapsed, and GMAC actually diversified into home loans at the bubble’s peak. Obviously, these firms can feed into — and falter from — the next crisis as well.

Aside from potentially causing major damage to the economic system, subprime loans also end up hurting their supposed beneficiaries. Subprime lenders enjoy playing the hero, trumpeting that they provide struggling Americans the opportunity to buy a car. This might have some merit, if subprime loans were being made solely on modestly and fairly priced economy cars. Instead, lenders are taking the opportunity to maximize profit; people with lower credit scores tend to be sold cars at inflated prices and are subject to higher dealer interest rate markups.

The rationale for rescuing the two financial arms remains murky. In Overhaul, a memoir of his stint as so-called car czar, the best that Steven Rattner offers is that the “fincos” were part of the auto industry and that the collapse of the financial markets had “created havoc for the automakers.” From where we sit today, it is hard to know exactly what would have been the outcome of allowing them to fail.

Many car buyers, ironically, would have been better off. These companies provide most of their loans through dealerships, and car buyers usually benefit when they borrow instead from a neighborhood bank or credit union. Buyers who head into the showroom already financed are less likely to buy a pricier car than they need, are more assured of getting the best rate, and are less susceptible to sales or lending fraud.

But most are not so lucky. We spoke with a Rhode Island factory worker, Greg, who was convinced to take on more than $20,000 in debt for a sensational new pickup he bought under the Cash for Clunkers program. To keep up with his payments and avoid repossession, he had to take a second job driving a taxi.

Taxpayers would surely have been better off without the bailouts of the auto financial firms. Even if fully repaid, we will find we have enabled the re-bloating of our national auto debt.

It is easy to imagine how $18.5 billion could have gone instead to reducing the deficit or to sustaining or building our transportation system in more efficient and equitable ways. Preventing transit fare hikes, maintaining eroding infrastructure, keeping traffic and transit police on payrolls, funding investment in green transportation and complete streets, and working on creating jobs closer to the people who really can’t afford cars: The alternatives were a beautiful and bountiful lot.

Catherine Lutz, a Brown University anthropologist, and Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former marketer and banker, are the authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan).

About a quarter of those cuts were to transportation. But it’s not as bad as it sounds.

The biggest chunk is $650 million of general fund spending for transportation. But remember, the baseline budget that this money is being cut from is the FY2010 budget. No allocation from the general fund was ever requested for 2011, so this isn’t a real cut since it wouldn’t have been in the 2011 budget in any case. As the Appropriations Committee puts it, “Removing these funds will have no impact on the authorized, mandatory side of the highway program and its limitation of obligations.”

The two-week cuts also targeted unspent earmarks from 2010, including $22 million for HUD Neighborhood Initiatives, $173 million for HUD Economic Development Initiative, $293 million for surface transportation “priorities” and $25 million for rail line relocation.

That all adds up to $1.16 billion in cuts to transportation and urban development. But really, it’s a lesson that when members of Congress advertise to their fiscally-conservative constituencies that they’re cutting money from the budget, sometimes the money they’re “cutting” was never really there in the first place.

Compact urbanism can work in the suburbs, like Bethesda, Maryland. Image: Maryland Sierra Club

“Growing Wealthier: Smart Growth, Climate Change, and Prosperity” starts with the simple assertion that accessibility – “bringing origins and destinations closer together” – is, after all, “the very reason that cities exist.”

“You want to have your choices nearby so you can meet your daily needs as efficiently as possible,” said report author Steve Winkelman.

By separating residential areas, commercial services, and places of employment, suburban planning requires that people travel long distances to meet their needs. All those miles used to be viewed as a measure of economic progress.

“[Vehicle Miles Traveled] and GDP have grown concurrently since World War II and in lock step for much of that time,” the report states. But around 1996, GDP began growing faster than VMT, and, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “the importance of travel as a component of the U.S. economy has been declining since the early 1990s.”

Indeed, CCAP’s research shows that states with lower VMT per capita tend to have higher GDP per capita.

Excessive travel is more likely to be an economic detriment than a benefit. Ironically, GDP counts as economic productivity many of the counterproductive aspects of motorized travel, such as fuel consumed waiting in traffic jams, oil spills, vehicle repairs and medical treatment resulting from collisions, costs of air pollution, and defense operations to protect U.S. petroleum interests around the world. In fact, many costs of sprawling land use patterns (particularly increased infrastructure) themselves boost GDP figures.

The authors also urge us to distinguish between economically productive travel and what they call “empty miles.” It’s like differentiating between empty calories and nutrition.

“A lot of driving that most people are doing nowadays is not helping them economically,” said report author Chuck Kooshian. “Although the VMT has been going up per capita, as we’re making trips to the grocery store five miles to get some milk, and we’re taking the kids out driving to go trick-or-treating, and driving to the park to walk our dog, this is not helping the average household economically. It might be helping the Saudis.”

From the Center for Housing Policy's 2006 report, “A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Families.” Is the strangulation of the suburbs by rising transportation costs really contributing to GDP?

Economic benefits from walkable, bikable neighborhoods aren’t calculated by GDP alone. They’re also calculated in the drop in health care costs when people get more exercise. The authors cite a study in Seattle, where researchers found that with every five percent increase in the overall level of walkability, there was a 32 percent increase in walking or biking, and Body Mass Index was reduced.

Not to mention the economic impact of the real estate boom in compact urban areas, relative to the suburbs. The authors say that in Denver, homes within a half-mile of stations on the Southeast light rail line rose in value an average of 17.6 percent between 2006 and 2008, while home values in the rest of Denver declined by an average 7.5 percent.

Will driving 2.93 trillion miles again next year help us become healthier and wealthier? Not likely.

The CCAP report focuses largely on economic benefits of compact development, but it also addresses climate change – and comes to the opposite conclusions that Pew came to in its report touting clean car technology as the only viable avenue toward carbon reduction.

If the U.S. is to meet the goal of reducing emissions by 80 percent by 2050, CCAP says clean car technologies like those lauded in the Pew report won’t be sufficient. Public transportation can help: mass transit produces, according to a study by APTA, about 45 percent less carbon dioxide per passenger mile than travel by private vehicles. But in the end, we have to give people the option to drive less. And not even that much less: “The actual drop in miles driven per person that is required is relatively modest: We calculate that a 9 percent reduction in per capita VMT (roughly equivalent to each person driving 2.5 miles less per day) will be sufficient.”

Local activists have made Williamsburg's New Domino a little less auto-centric. Image: The New Domino

How few parking spaces should be attached to new developments to make New York a more sustainable city?

That's the big question for developments like Brooklyn's New Domino, the huge project slated for the Williamsburg waterfront where developers originally proposed 1,694 parking spaces for about 2,400 residences. Neighborhood activists recently won a 266-space reduction in the amount of parking but still face an onslaught of new automobiles.

Last week, the City Planning Commission approved the New Domino in a unanimous vote. One of the only changes the commission demanded from the project's developers was to eliminate one parking lot, reducing the number of parking spaces from 1,694 to 1,428. The 266-space reduction was not based on studies or research. It came straight from a request by Borough President Marty Markowitz.

While the reduction was a victory for livable streets, the fact that more than 1,400 parking spaces remain highlights the immense disconnect between the developer's initial proposal and goals like reducing traffic or encouraging sustainable transportation. To make the Williamsburg waterfront a real beacon of sustainable planning, it's clear that the New Domino would have to include substantially fewer than 1,428 spaces.

"It's still going to be an auto-oriented development," said David King, a professor of planning at Columbia University who specializes in parking. "1,400 is just a lot of parking spaces, however you cut it."

"In the Department of City Planning, there's a group that thinks New York City will collapse on itself if you stop attracting families with cars."

The local community board and Council Member Stephen Levin had asked for even larger reductions in parking. When Community Board 1 requested fewer parking spaces, their resolution called for "a level significantly less than the maximum allowed under zoning," or 1,541 spaces, according to land use committee chair Ward Dennis. Dennis wouldn't speak for the board as to whether 1,428 was "significantly" less than 1,541.

So how, at New Domino or in any big project down the line, would you figure out the right amount of parking? 

"That's a community decision," argued Rachel Weinberger, UPenn professor and parking policy expert. "It's a vision thing." According to Weinberger, the transportation effects of off-street parking are fairly well-documented, so setting parking levels is a matter of deciding which outcomes you want.

Attaching guaranteed parking spaces to housing is one of the fastest ways to ensure that residents drive, she said, pointing to "Guaranteed Parking, Guaranteed Driving," a report she co-authored for Transportation Alternatives in 2008, as well as more intensive research she is currently conducting. Accordingly, asking how much parking to include is another way of asking how much congestion, environmental damage and danger to pedestrians a community is willing to tolerate in return for making driving more convenient. 

Exactly how many car trips are generated by each off-street space is "an impossible to answer question," said Weinberger, because "it's such a dynamic system." But it's perfectly clear that every space eliminated leads to fewer trips by car. 

King agreed, saying that at a parking-laden site like New Domino, "people may not be likely to drive into Midtown Manhattan, but they'll keep a car and drive for all their other trips." That residential parking leads to more driving, he said, is increasingly well-established. If your only goal is to reduce the number of cars on the road, he added, "there shouldn't be any parking built whatsoever."

While the effect of building less parking on traffic is fairly clear, the effect on the real estate market is less so. That's where things get interesting. Would enough people buy or rent parking-free apartments to make them commercially viable? Or would less parking squelch growth in green, transit-rich NYC?

Both King and Weinberger argued that to really understand how to set off-street parking levels, we need market research about the demand for car-free housing in New York. "We have no idea what would happen if there was no parking" at New Domino, said King, "because no one has built anything on that scale recently." If you really couldn't sell parking-free housing, the right amount of parking for new developments would necessarily be higher than zero.

Of course, looking at neighborhoods with scarce parking just across the river, like Alphabet City, added King, "I suspect it would work out just fine" at a site like New Domino. Older Brooklyn neighborhoods have very low off-street parking levels and very high real estate prices. In Park Slope, only five percent of car owners store their cars at home.

But the institutions pushing more off-street parking on New York City, King and Weinberger argued, do so because they assume that successful development requires more parking. In the Department of City Planning, said Weinberger, "there's a group of people that think that New York City will collapse on itself if you stop attracting families with cars." If you could show that big projects like New Domino would fill up even without parking, though, they might be less interested in off-street parking.

King speculated that another group might be the best target for market research: Banks. "There's no bank that's going to finance an experiment," he said, "so if the banks won't finance them, the developers won't build them." At privately financed projects like New Domino, the bank's influence is direct, but the financial sector could also influence how much parking a public agency like the city's Economic Development Corporation decides to include in its projects, said King. 

Market research -- or better still, demonstration projects -- would help determine how the New York market would respond to large developments with parking levels in line with the city's older neighborhoods. That's an answer you need to know to figure out the "right" amount of parking in a place like New Domino. 

Second Avenue shoppers are far more likely to arrive via bus, bike, or foot than private car. Photo: akuban/Flickr

Wherever parking spaces are replaced with infrastructure for sustainable transportation, you can usually find a local merchant yelling about how it will destroy his livelihood. With the redesign of First and Second Avenue bringing safer biking and faster buses to their neighborhood, five NYU undergrads set out to measure what local merchants stand to lose or gain. Their findings suggest that protected bike lanes and Select Bus Service are going to be good for business in the East Village.

The overwhelming majority of shoppers along Second Avenue walk, bike, or take transit to get there, according to the NYU students' research, which you can look over here. Overall, shoppers who don't arrive by private car spend more than 26 times as much as motorists at East Village businesses every week. 

Employing a method recommended by Transportation Alternatives, the students conducted 500 random interviews along Second Avenue between 14th Street and Houston Street, asking people on the sidewalk how they got to the neighborhood, how often they visit, how much they normally spend in the East Village, and other questions to gauge their shopping behavior. 

Their findings were striking, if unsurprising. Of the people they interviewed, 45 percent had come to the East Village by transit and another 43 percent on foot or a bike. Another five percent had taken a taxi, leaving only seven percent who took private cars. 

Drivers spent much less money in the East Village than non-drivers. Interviewees who had arrived in a private car spent an average of $82.20 in the neighborhood each week. Everyone else spent an average of $154.13 a week, almost twice as much. Altogether, drivers spent only $2,712 of the $74,690 that the interview subjects spent in the neighborhood weekly, making them a rather small fraction of merchants' bottom line.

The students' findings echo those of a 2006 study of SoHo shoppers by Bruce Schaller. That study, also based on sidewalk interviews, found that almost no SoHo shoppers were arriving by car and that transit riders, pedestrians and cyclists tended to be the big spenders.

The NYU report did find that, per trip, drivers spent more money in the East Village than shoppers who arrived by other means. That might help explain why some local merchants believe that parking is so important, even while the overwhelming majority of their business comes from people who take transit, walk, and bike. However, this argues for implementing performance parking measures in conjunction with Select Bus Service and street safety enhancements. Together those changes would generate more foot traffic from sustainable modes and increase parking turnover while reducing congestion caused by shoppers cruising for spots.

The students certainly see the conclusion of their research as unambiguously pro-transit. "We recommend that businesses support the [East Side] project," they write, "and we recommend that Community Board 3 specifically, and community board 6, 8, and 11 more broadly, vote in favor of the project."

Graphic: CEOs for Cities.

As Pete Donohue reported in the Daily News, the report also shows how New York City simply doesn't have the space for car-dependency. To match the car-ownership rates of the average American urban area -- not even the worst of the worst -- New York would require room for 4.5 million more cars. If each car was given only one very small parking space -- and cars demand more than one parking space each -- we would have to construct 25 square miles of new parking. That's the size of Manhattan. 

CEOs for Cities is broadcasting the benefits of sustainable transportation to public and private sector executives in order to bring the message to a new audience. "Janette [Sadik-Khan]'s office has made large strides in a quick amount of time, but congestion pricing didn't get through the state and there are other initiatives they're now pushing," said Julia Klaiber, the director of external affairs for CEOs for Cities. "Getting the economic development folks behind these policy arguments" would greatly strengthen the green transportation coalition, she added. That would certainly help in New York City, where the economic development corporation is a leading promoter of car-centric growth and our state representatives block transit improvements that pay for themselves. 

After CEOs for Cities produced similar reports for Portland and Chicago, Sadik-Khan requested one for New York, said Carol Coletta, the organization's president. Both Sadik-Khan and Mayor Bloomberg "intend to use it," she added.

At CEOs for Cities' national conference yesterday, the NYCDOT commissioner told the crowd that the $19 billion in annual savings are a reminder of why we need to keep up our investment in non-automotive modes of transportation. 

The $19 billion number is a quick, conservative estimate that almost surely understates the savings New Yorkers reap by not driving. The study estimates that, per capita, New Yorkers drive nine miles per day. It then multiplies that figure by the national average cost of operating a vehicle, 40 cents per mile. Compare that total -- how much New Yorkers spend on driving, per capita -- to the national average, and you get $19 billion in savings.

Here's why that's a conservative estimate. The study calculated average VMT rates in New York City by distributing the average daily distance driven in the entire metropolitan region according to the city's vehicle ownership rates. If New York City car owners drive less often than their Suffolk County counterparts, or drive shorter distances when they do -- both reasonable assumptions -- then nine miles per day overshoots the mark. Moreover, the cost of driving is almost certainly higher in New York than it is nationally, due to elevated costs for parking, insurance, and gasoline. In other words, it's likely that New Yorkers save much more than $19 billion.

Whatever the number may be, New York's transportation choices make living here more affordable and provide a boon to the local economy. As the report notes, spending on cars and gas ends up in Detroit or Dallas; the money saved gets reinvested in Dumbo or Ditmas Park. In Coletta's words, "continued investment in alternative transportation makes great economic sense for the city of New York."

Rep. Pete DeFazio (D-OR), at left, joined Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) to introduce a Wall Street transaction tax in December. (Photo: AP/Oregonian)

But the tax proposal has since lost steam in Washington transportation debate, getting little notice from lawmakers who strongly support taking up a new six-year infrastructure bill in 2010 even as it remains a magnet for progressives looking to rein in financial industry excesses.

What happened to the idea of using an oil futures transaction fee -- set at 0.02 percent in a December bill offered by Rep. Pete DeFazio (D-OR) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) -- to fund long-term federal transportation projects?

Jim Berard, spokesman for the House infrastructure panel, explained in an interview late last week that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had conducted a preliminary analysis that found the transaction tax would raise less money than lawmakers had initially hoped. The reason for the lower-than-expected revenue, Berard said, was the rationale hinted at by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in November: a tax levied only on domestic futures would end up pushing trades overseas.

"What sounded like a really good solution six months ago turned out to be not as good as we thought, and just not as viable," Berard told Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

That leaves federal transportation policymakers essentially where they were at this time last year, searching for a politically feasible stand-in for a gas tax increase that the White House and congressional Democratic leaders have both ruled out for now.

Even as raising the gas tax to pay for transport legislation remains unpopular, senators are preparing to release a new climate change bill later this month that would impose a new "linked fee" on motor fuel. Such a fee could be used in part to fund new infrastructure projects, but Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of the architects of the new climate measure, told The Hill last month that most of the resulting revenue would be sent back to drivers in the form of rebates.

The infrastructure panel's highways and transit subcommittee, chaired by DeFazio, plans a hearing next week on "innovative financing" strategies, and Berard said panel chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) continues to search for a revenue plan that can unify the capital's disparate transportation players -- House and Senate leaders, the U.S. DOT, the White House, state DOTs, reform groups, and transit advocates.

[A] cordon-pricing plan … which doesn't charge center-city residents could result in an increase in those residents' automobile use. If the streets are free of outer-borough traffic, more of my Manhattan neighbors might drive to work, or simply make extra automobile trips within the cordon that without CP [congestion pricing], they would have made by subway or taxi.

Jonathan's right: Any Manhattan cordon-pricing scheme will lead to an uptick in car trips that start and end within the charging zone. It's one of those "rebound effects" that congestion-price modeling needs to account for, and which I've taken pains to incorporate in my Balanced Transportation Analyzer pricing model.

Indeed, I daresay that the BTA handles just about every issue ever raised on this blog about congestion pricing. How many transit users will switch to cabs? Will variable tolls really flatten rush-hour peaks? Won't faster roads lure back the trips killed off by the toll (Owen's conundrum)? And many more.

Technically, the BTA is a spreadsheet. But I think of it as a vast mansion, whose 46 interlinked "rooms" (worksheets) are stocked with precious data and ingenious algorithms for cracking open questions like these:

• How does congestion on weekends compare with weekdays?
• How sharply do traffic speeds rise as volumes fall?
• Which boroughs and counties stand to pay the most with congestion pricing?
• Will a cordon toll lead to more bicycling, and will that improve public health?
• Can decommissioning vehicle lanes increase congestion pricing's benefits?
• Which will boost transit use more: lower fares or better service?
• How many fares does a cabbie get in a ten-hour taxi shift, with and without pricing?

Multiply that list a hundredfold and you get a sense of the BTA's hidden treasures.

I say "hidden" because, except for a few mavens like "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, who calls it "the best [modeling] tool that I have seen in my nearly 40 years," the Balanced Transportation Analyzer remains largely untapped by advocates. To me, it's as if we're all starving while this rich storehouse next door goes to waste.

Which prompts me to ask: Why is the BTA so underused? Is our community missing out on a valuable tool? What should we do about it?

Let's make this an open thread, with emphasis on what can we do together to make the BTA more accessible and useful to New York's livable streets community. (The model is adaptable to other cities, so those of you not from NYC are also invited.)

As for Jonathan's question: the BTA shows that over the course of a typical weekday, 72 percent of all vehicle miles traveled inside the Manhattan Central Business District are by cars, trucks and buses that have crossed into the CBD, either at 60th Street or across the Hudson or East Rivers, and thus would pay the congestion toll. The remaining 28 percent of VMT is mostly by medallion taxicabs (22 percent). Cars and trucks that stayed within the cordon zone and couldn't be tolled accounted for just 6 percent of all CBD traffic. (All this is derived and shown in the table at the bottom of the BTA's "Cordon" worksheet.)

This tells us that: 1) Even if "intrazonal" traffic rises sharply, as Jonathan fears, it will add relatively little VMT because it's such a small share of overall cordon traffic to begin with; and 2) rather than fret over the free pass for intrazonal trips (which are impractical to toll with current technology), congestion pricing needs a strategy to stop a surge in taxicab use from filling the newly freed road space.

The plan currently advocated by Ted Kheel and myself does just that. It combines a 33 percent surcharge on all three taxi-fare components -- mileage, waiting time, and the "drop" -- with time-variable car tolls of $3/$6/$9 on weekdays and $2/$3/$4 on weekends (trucks pay double, reflecting their greater bulk, while medallion cabs are exempt from the toll but pay the surcharge). Under this Kheel-Komanoff Plan, intrazonal VMT is predicted to rise by approximately 120,000 miles a day -- 40,000 by cars and trucks, 80,000 by taxicabs. But cordon VMT by vehicles coming from outside, and thus tolled, falls far more, by 450,000. This yields a net drop in cordon travel of 330,000 VMT, an 8 percent decline that, the model predicts, will boost average travel speeds within the CBD by around 20 percent.

The point of this post isn't to advocate for a particular plan, however. It's to show that rebound effects and other asserted congestion-toll pitfalls can be modeled and, with the right plan, accommodated.

The figures are based on 2007 traffic levels. Current volumes are probably slightly less. While a decrease in "baseline" traffic cuts into the benefits of congestion pricing, both the saved time and new transit revenue predicted for Kheel-Komanoff are still striking. And, yes, if you want to test our pricing plan (or your own) with reduced baseline traffic, the BTA even has a switch to adjust the volume.

Data: IBM's CPI

When asked what value they would place on every 15 minutes sliced from their daily commute, 36.5 percent of CPI respondents said between $10 and $20. That's about five times the recent trading price of a ton of carbon emissions on the nation's climate-change exchanges.

And the price of a shorter commute was higher in more congested cities. In Los Angeles, 22 percent of residents said every 15 minutes not spent en route to work would be worth between $31 and $40 -- or more than $100 per hour.

What does the data mean? For one thing, those who fear that voters would revolt if asked to pay more for a more efficient, less congested transport network shouldn't let that stop policy-making. As every successful politician knows (and the president is re-learning on health care), messaging is the key to winning over the public.

In other words, Democrats who feign unwillingness to subject voters to higher gas taxes are ignoring their ability to control the message. When a greater contribution to transportation is pitched as a way to shorten commutes and give workers more free time, the prospect becomes more desirable.

And it's not that lawmakers don't know how to decrease congestion, particularly in the urban areas that were polled to produce the CPI. Reducing the number of car trips and lowering demand during peak travel times are proven to be a cheaper and more effective method of battling congestion than expanding highway capacity.

Is it time to nickname the White House's Sustainable Communities Initiative the "Shorter Commutes Initiative"?

At this point, it's difficult to know exactly what the government's "cash for clunkers" program is supposed to accomplish.

To add to Elana's post yesterday on the "myths" circulating about the program, let me offer a few thoughts on how best to think about whether the program has provided actual net benefits.

The first thing to consider is what would have happened in the absence of the program. Vehicle sales rose fairly strongly in July, and this will no doubt be attributed to the "clunkers" rebates.

But during the recession, sales hit historic lows. Replacement rates for vehicles sank to unsustainable levels, suggesting quite a bit of pent up demand in the economy.

With economic recovery and continued improvement in credit markets, sales were sure to begin rising, with or without a government subsidy.

"Cash for clunkers" may have altered the timing of purchases, but in all likelihood most of these buyers were going to be in the market soon anyway.

What about the efficiency savings generated by the program? To generate its 0.5 percent of oil consumption savings estimate, the study Elana cites used the following assumptions:

The projection assumes some 250,000 "clunkers" with an average 15 miles per gallon efficiency are traded in for vehicles rated at an average 25 mpg, and travel an average 10,000 miles per year.

Given that far less than a 10 mile per gallon improvement is required to get a $3,500 voucher for a car or any voucher on an SUV or truck, it's not clear that this is an appropriate number to use. And even when efficiencies do improve significantly, the increase in mileage can't be solely attributed to the program.

Moreover, most of the clunkers being traded in this summer will have been purchased at a time when oil prices were lower than they are at present. Real oil prices in 2003 were half their current level; those in 1998 were one-fifth of prices now.

So in all likelihood, efficiencies for new vehicle purchases would be, on average, higher than those of trade-ins even without the program.

Where the program has succeeded in creating new sales, the environmental benefits are even sketchier than Elana relates. Once the energy emissions from producing a new automobile to replace a functioning old one are taken into account, the meager savings from the program may vanish entirely.

In assessing "cash for clunkers," we should also compare it with potential alternative policies. Money for the program might instead have been used to close budget holes at transit agencies, limiting service cuts, or to fund other green measures like weatherization programs.

As economic stimulus, the plan likely performed poorly relative to alternatives. As mentioned above, it is questionable whether the program generated many new sales.

Those currently in the market for a new car are probably not among the hardest hit by the recession and will be less likely to use a marginal dollar. That means that the subsidy provided by "cash for clunkers" may simply be replacing private spending rather than facilitating spending that wouldn't otherwise take place.

Unemployment benefits, on the other hand, overwhelmingly add to consumption; recipients would be spending less, in absolute terms, without the benefit.

Perhaps with more stringent efficiency requirements -- particularly for truck purchases -- the policy would have performed better. As it stands, "cash for clunkers" primarily served to give people who didn't need the help money to buy cars they were going to buy anyway.

"The federal government can promote better jobs, protect taxpayers, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by simply taking some lessons from states and cities," said Greg LeRoy, Executive Director of Good Jobs First. "These well-established safeguards are consistent with President-elect Obama’s stated goal of reforming programs to make them more transparent and cost-effective."

The study deals with five federal programs: the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant program; the Department of Labor’s Workforce Investment Act; the Department of Commerce’s Public Works and Economic Development Program; Industrial Revenue Bonds as allowed under the Internal Revenue Code; and the Department of Agriculture’s Business and Industry Guaranteed Loans Program.

The report, which could hardly be more relevant than it is today, may be downloaded here.

Photo: Michael Hinton/Flickr

Mr. Obama is coordinating with Congressional Democrats behind the scenes on the stimulus plans, which would include more jobless benefits, food stamps, aid to financially strapped states and cities, and spending for infrastructure projects that keep people at work. His chief liaison has been Mr. Emanuel.

"You don't ever want a crisis to go to waste; it's an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid," Mr. Emanuel said in an interview. "In 1974 and 1978 we never dealt with it, and our dependence on foreign oil never changed."

Good stuff, except for that "foreign" part.

The National Infrastructure Bank will assemble a portfolio of projects for investment by the public and private sector. I will follow the formula developed by the renowned economist Felix Rohatyn so that any project seeking over $75 million in federal support would be required to submit a proposal to the bank. The submission would include the contribution to be made by the state and local governments, user fees and a plan for maintenance. The bank would then decide to fund the project outright, or through credit guarantees for state bonds or loans against future revenues from user fees and other sound financial strategies.

The federal government will favor cities that introduce congestion pricing. A recent study by the Brookings Institute found that more than $100 billion could be raised annually by road pricing in the 98 largest metropolitan areas. We will adopt the previous administration’s call for a dedicated Metro Mobility (MM) Program (pdf) for metropolitan areas with populations greater than 500,000. These are the battle grounds for congestion, fuel inefficiencies and production of greenhouse gases.

The gas tax is a dinosaur (pun intended). As long as it remains a flat tax at 18.4 cents per gallon and gas consumption decreases (a goal of my administration) it will be a dwindling source of revenue. I propose that the tax, like most other taxes, be indexed against the sale price. This way, when foreign influences raise the price of gas, some revenue will be returned to the taxpayers in public works projects. I propose a 5 cent/gallon increase over present levels, the first increase since 1993, to generate about $10 billion annually. But, if the price of gas goes down, and I hope it does, the tax will go down accordingly.

Following yesterday's Build for America launch and last night's presidential debate, the Regional Plan Association released a major report today recommending an array of public transportation improvements for New York City and northern New Jersey, adding its name to the ever-growing list of orgs and officials calling for federal investment to spur and sustain economic growth in the coming decades.

Over a dense 53 pages, "Tomorrow’s Transit: New Mobility for the Region’s Urban Core" [PDF] lays out dozens of projects, large and small, that would improve transit access and performance, with a focus on underserved and, in many cases, high poverty areas. The report, as breathtaking in scope as the $29 billion five-year capital plan unveiled by MTA head Lee Sander last March, also proposes augmentations to long-planned mega-projects like the Second Avenue Subway, and stresses links between modes to maximize coverage and efficiency.

Proposals are categorized by cost and level of need, as determined by existing transit service, income levels, and rates of auto ownership.

Follow the jump for highlights.

• Bronx: Extend the Second Avenue Subway to the Third Avenue corridor and Co-op City; provide added service on Metro-North at six Bronx station stops on the Harlem and Hudson River lines; offer peak express service on the Dyre Avenue line; and establish ferry service from Soundview.
  
• Brooklyn: Convert the Atlantic Branch of the LIRR to subway service and connect it to the Second Avenue Subway; build a Utica Avenue branch off the converted Atlantic Branch of the LIRR; extend the Nostrand Avenue 2 and 5 lines to Kings Highway; extend the Canarsie L line to Spring Creek Towers/Starrett City; and establish high speed ferry service from Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bay Ridge.
  
• Manhattan: Implement no-fare rides on the 34th Street, 42nd Street and 50th Street cross-town bus routes; extend the Second Avenue Subway west along 125th Street; construct a station entrance on the east end of the First Avenue L station; and establish a midtown Bus Rapid Transit or light rail route loop.
  
• Queens: Convert the LIRR Atlantic Branch to subway service; connect Queensboro Plaza and Queens Plaza and the E, F, G and V at Court Square; and begin Bus Rapid Transit on Queens Boulevard.
• Staten Island: Proceed with Hylan Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit; establish ferry service from southern Staten Island; and establish a bus lane along the full length of the Staten Island Expressway.
• New Jersey (Hudson County and Newark): Extend currently planned Bus Rapid Transit routes in Newark to include cross-town and Sumner/Mt. Prospect Avenue corridors; construct a new Hudson Bergen Light Rail Station at Grand Street and 17th Street in Hoboken; and extend the Hudson Bergen Light Rail to Route 440.
  

In addition, the RPA recommends a number of complementary measures, including parking and land use reforms, transit-oriented development, and congestion pricing.

"Tomorrow's Transit" was composed over the course of a year in conjunction with area transportation experts, NJ TRANSIT, the MTA and New York City DOT.

What the mainstream is truly missing here en masse is that another tsunami is building right behind the finance fiasco, and that it will render moot the whole reeking cargo of schemes and wishes that comprises the Great Bail-out. I am speaking of the global oil problem. In fact, the problems in banking and money currently roaring in the center ring of the world circus, can be described categorically as a product of the oil problem -- since oil is the primary resource of industrial economies and therefore the motive force behind our ability to generate "wealth." Without reliable and ever-growing supplies of oil, there is no industrial growth, and without industrial growth things like capital investment instruments lose their legitimacy. That is why the Frankenstein family of Ponzi securities was invented in the first place -- to compensate for the demise of industrial growth by creating wealth out of... nothing!

While press coverage of Summer Streets has been generally positive, tales of the miffed muffler shop owner and complaining cabinet maker are bound to continue, as reporters hunt for naysayers to "balance" out their stories. But what will be the economic reality of Summer Streets? Here, Streetsblog Publisher Mark Gorton gives his account of Saturday lunch with the family at an outdoor café on Park Avenue and 51st Street.

The host told us that he could seat us, but that they couldn't put our order in for at least a half hour because the kitchen was so backed up. He said on a normal Saturday they would have had three or four tables occupied, but there were about 30 tables filled. He pointed and said, "Look, even the manager is taking tables." We were happy to wait, so we sat and ate. As I looked around the café, only a couple tables looked to be filled by bikers. My guess is that lots of people who would never have bothered to walk along Park Ave. on a Saturday suddenly found it an interesting place to be.

Most of the stories we've seen reflect Mark's experience: In general, businesses which rely on foot traffic expected and/or received a boost from Summer Streets. Streetsblogger Larry Littlefield has suggested altering the route to exclude more car-dependent enterprises, like furniture stores. What else could, or should, the city do -- if anything -- to take such businesses into account? And how did (or will) Summer Streets affect your spending habits?

Photo: Ben Fried