Photo: US Department of Agriculture

Just how much will the tax credit mushroom thanks to the deal reached in the Senate? As the New York Times explains, it's time to take the "new" off of the credit's name:

The homebuyers’ credit ... would be extended to cover homes under contract by April 30. Also, it no longer would be limited to first-time buyers; people who have owned a home for at least five years could get a $6,500 credit on a new residence. Income limits for eligibility would be raised, making many more people qualify.

Extending and expanding the credit would cost an estimated $11 billion, on top of the $10 billion spent so far.

As Ryan pointed out earlier this week, the higher rate of home ownership in suburbs tilts the credit's benefits notably away from urban areas. But that's nothing new for the federal government, which has lavished subsidies on home buyers while paying much scanter attention to improving rental affordability.

In the fiscal year that ended October 1, Washington's support for home ownership totaled $230 billion, while parallel support for home renters was $60 billion, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported yesterday. That nearly four-fold gap is visible in the below chart:

Image: CBO

Even as federal lawmakers keep promoting home ownership as the "American dream," rental rates rose to one-third of the country in 2008, in part due to low-income and minority residents who were forced into default on risky mortgages. For many of those residents, as well as city dwellers in general, rentals tend to be the only housing option that offers access to affordable transportation -- but help from Washington has been perilously slow in coming.

And it may not come for a while yet. Legislation updating the Section 8 voucher program for rental housing was approved over the summer by the House Financial Services Committee but has yet to see floor time in the full chamber, let alone the Senate.

Meanwhile, the larger home buyers' credit is currently attached to a long-sought extension of unemployment benefits, making its approval a political fait accompli (though one much-delayed by partisan bickering).

The secret of European eco-friendliness? Maybe not. Photo: romerican/Flickr

Rosenthal attributes much of this difference to behavioral factors relating, it seems, to Europeans' unique tolerance of inconvenience. She writes:

But even as an American, if you go live in a nice apartment in Rome, as I did a few years back, your carbon footprint effortlessly plummets. It’s not that the Italians care more about the environment; I’d say they don’t. But the normal Italian poshy apartment in Rome doesn’t have a clothes dryer or an air conditioner or microwave or limitless hot water. The heat doesn’t turn on each fall until you’ve spent a couple of chilly weeks living in sweaters. The fridge is tiny. The average car is small. The Fiat 500 gets twice as much gas mileage as any hybrid SUV. And it’s not considered suffering. It’s living the dolce vita.

She later adds:

Also, in Europe, the construction of most cities preceded the invention of cars. The centuries-old streets in London or Barcelona or Rome simply can’t accommodate much traffic — it’s really a pain, but you learn to live with it. In contrast, most American cities, think Atlanta and Dallas, were designed for people with wheels.

What makes this particularly remarkable is that she opens the essay by discussing an experience she has in Stockholm, in which she insists on taking a taxi from the airport, which ends up being much slower and more expensive than the train.

Brad Plumer frames the piece as a fascinating read in light of the "lifestyle taboo," writing:

It's not considered the height of political savvy here in the United States to point out that European lifestyles are greener than our own. Don't expect that line in an Obama speech anytime soon. Too many facets of European life—the cramped apartments, the clotheslines for drying laundry—would likely strike suburbanites as inconvenient, burdensome, or even downright primitive...

Rosenthal wonders whether similar measures could fly in the United States: "I believe most people are pretty adaptable and that some of the necessary shifts in lifestyle are about changing habits, not giving up comfort or convenience." Maybe so, but this sort of talk still tends to be taboo in mainstream U.S. green circles. Josh Patashnik wrote a terrific piece for TNR last year on Arnold Schwarzenegger's brand of "pain-free environmentalism" in California—it's all just peachy to talk about swapping out coal-fired plants for solar-thermal stations, but ixnay on trying to rein in suburban growth or coax people into smaller homes.

I see several problems with Rosenthal's essay and with Brad's framing of it. One is that it's not really correct to attribute the huge gap in per capita emissions between America and Western Europe to the charming European habit of drying their clothes on clotheslines.

As Brad notes, power sources play a major role, whether one is talking about greater use of natural gas, the French nuclear industry, or Iceland's geothermal capacity.

Climate is extremely important. Western Europe is fairly temperate relative to much of America (and especially compared to the dirtiest parts of the country). In the same way, Californians are much greener than Texans, thanks to the moderate conditions along the heavily populated Pacific coast, which reduce the number of days on which home heating or cooling is needed.

But there are lifestyle issues involved, particularly where transportation and land use are concerned. And contrary to Rosenthal, it isn't that Europeans have opted for inconvenience. Rather, they have chosen different conveniences, as her Stockholm air train anecdote makes clear.

It is incorrect to say that an overabundance of land drove America to sprawl, and to drive. The Netherlands is dense of necessity, of course, but in Britain and France and Germany there is ample countryside, which might easily be home to sprawling subdivisions.

But Western Europeans have largely chosen not to encourage such growth, opting instead to tax gas at high rates, invest in transit, and protect center cities from the threat of urban freeways.

I think it is very difficult, objectively, to demonstrate that their choices have produced ways of life that are clearly less convenient than American lives. It is clear that Europeans tend to have better health outcomes than us, and they die in car accidents at much lower rates, and of course they're enjoying levels of wealth similar to our own while producing half as much carbon.

The obvious retort to this line of thinking is that perhaps that's all true, but like it or not America is now sprawling, and any effort to make the country greener by pursuing European land use and transportation options would be very difficult. In a similar vein, it is argued that attempts to push Americans into such a life via gas taxes or carbon prices would wind up being very painful.

But this is not quite right. As I have pointed out before, America will more or less need to build itself all over again by 2050 in order to accommodate population growth. Just because most of America is currently sprawling doesn't mean that most of the America built between now and mid-century has to look the same.

It's also not clear that increasing the push factor on households has to be especially painful. Taxes on drivers can be levied in a progressive fashion, if some revenues are used to fund transit options while others are refunded to lower and middle income households to help offset the added cost of driving.

Congestion tolling would mean higher government revenues and reduced driving, but it would benefit rich and poor alike. As with tax revenues, tolls could be used to provide a cushion against the increased cost for lower income families and increased investment in transit. Higher income households (which will tend to place a greater value on work hours lost to congestion) would enjoy a speedy ride into the office.

If the federal government worked to address limits on urban growth in green cities like New York and San Francisco -- limits which also serve to make housing in such places extremely expensive -- then America could grow denser and greener by improving access for middle-income households to some of the most dynamic metropolitan economies in the country.

Perhaps not all of the policy changes needed to reduce America's carbon footprint will be a walk in the park, but efforts to improve land use and transportation decisions are likely to be some of the most benefit-rich aspects of the climate change fight (as you'd think most people would realize, given the obvious pain of congestion, high gas prices, driving fatalities, and isolation among those unable to drive, among other things).

This storyline -- that changing lifestyles to enhance walkability will be painful -- makes it harder to pass good metropolitan policies and easier for politicans to fall back on the lame argument that Americans simply won't tolerate anything other than the sprawling suburban patterns which have dominated new development in recent decades.

And by reinforcing the idea that some of the most promising and least painful policy changes that can be made are unlikely to "work" here in America, writers and politicians alike ensure that more of the hard job of cutting emissions will fall to the parts of the economy where there are no good alternative options, and where change will be painful for households.

Rosenthal's essay is odd yet revealing. She instinctually attributes European greenness to practices Americans would dub backward, while pretending that the very convenient and green transport options she finds are built, and presumably used, by Europeans based on some peculiarity in their culture that we lack.

But we could build trains! In any given legislative sessions bills are introduced that would move the country toward the level of convenience Rosenthal enjoyed in her train ride to the Stockholm airport. It's just that they don't pass, because "it's not considered the height of political savvy" to embrace those policies, because Americans seem to think that their American-ness will render such conveniences inconvenient.

"Trains won't work here," because "Americans love their cars," and so high quality rail lines aren't built, and so Americans continue to drive. And then we sit around wondering what it is about the European character that makes them enjoy using clotheslines so much.

The details didn't go very deep, but now we know that DOT has $100 million to spend on planning grants next year to foster more sustainable development. They've received 1,400 applications for so-called TIGER grants, a $1.5 billion pool of stimulus money set aside for "innovative" transportation projects. (For a full recap that gives you a flavor for the Obama DOT's priorities, read this blog post by Gary Toth of Project for Public Spaces, which organized the event.)

The language is encouraging and there are some new pots of money being put to good use. We have quite recent evidence from the stimulus saga, however, that once federal highway funding goes out the door to state DOTs, sprawl projects will follow. So I want to focus on one key moment yesterday, when a participant asked how the feds plan to get state DOTs on board with a livability agenda. Here's how Osborne answered:

The DOTs are wide-varied. Some states are well ahead of the federal government, and some states are not sure that these are the priorities they want to set for themselves. The program we have now is not self-funding anymore. In addressing it at the federal level, there is an expectation within the administration that money that is spent from the federal government is going to have to be spent in a way that allows us to be accountable to our taxpayers. That’s going to realign the program to some extent. The more people learn about livability and sustainability priorities, they see it aligns with their priorities more than they realized (economic growth, development, housing affordability). When you show people the choice between the priorities we have laid out and what they have laid out, it's amazing the headway you can make. We have some training to do, we have some challenges to meet, but we feel confident we can meet them.

Deciphering an answer this cryptic is a bit like reading tea leaves.

My take is that the people at USDOT get the transportation-land use connection, and they see the insolvency of the Highway Trust Fund as a sort of opening. They seem to anticipate that some portion of federal transportation spending will no longer come from the Highway Trust Fund (which is "not self-funding anymore"), and they appear to believe they can influence how that portion is spent ("to realign the program to some extent"). To me this sounds like an indirect reference to a national infrastructure bank, which would have the discretion to lend money to projects that foster compact development.

Which still leaves many billions in the hands of state DOTs, and the feds are basically relying on the power of persuasion to rein in their bad habits ("We have some training to do"). Re-training state transportation planners is sorely need, no doubt about it, but will it be enough to kick the sprawl habit?

Photo: Penn State.

But there's not as much in the way of hard studies of the effects of land use as we might like -- mainly because it's been a non-issue, so far as most of the country is concerned, for much of recent history.

Aiming to address this (and acting under a congressional mandate), the Transportation Research Board recently completed a study that has now resulted in a very large report: "Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO Emissions."

The report is actually five mini-papers, and at nearly 200 pages long it makes for a lot of reading. But the findings reported in the introduction give an idea of what it's all about.

The authors conclude that compact development is likely to reduce VMT: "The effects of compact, mixed-use development on VMT are likely to be enhanced when this strategy is combined with other policy measures that make alternatives to driving relatively more convenient and affordable." No surprises there.

Finding No. 2 is: "The literature suggests that doubling residential density across a metropolitan area might lower household VMT by about 5 to 12 percent, and perhaps by as much as 25 percent, if coupled with higher employment concentrations, significant public transit improvements, mixed uses, and other supportive demand management measures."

They note that were you to move the residents of Atlanta to an area built like Boston, you'd lower the Atlantans' VMT per household by perhaps 25 percent.

Better land use results in reductions in energy use and carbon emissions, the authors report, from both direct and indirect causes. (Direct causes would be a reduction in VMT; indirect include things like longer vehicle lifetimes from reduced use and the greater efficiency of smaller or multi-family housing units.)

But one of the crucial pieces of data included in the report is this:

As many as 57 million new housing units are projected to accommodate population growth and replacement housing needs by 2030, growing to between 62 and 105 million units by 2050 - a substantial net addition to the housing stock of 105.2 million in 2000.

Critics of smart growth efforts or rail and transit investments often wave off the potential gains from building differently by noting that so much of the current housing stock is of the sprawling, single-family home, auto-oriented sort. Convincing the people who currently live in such places to give that up for something different, they say, is sure to be an extremely difficult sell.

But that's not the issue. No one is suggesting we rip down all of suburbia. Rather we, or at least I, am pointing out that between now and mid-century, the country will very nearly have to build itself all over again to accommodate population growth. In addition to the 100 million homes now in America, somewhere between 62 and 105 million more will be built.

The critical question is what the balance of that new construction will look like. The TRB report suggests that if 75 percent of this new construction is of a more compact variety, that emissions could be reduced 10 percent or more from the baseline scenario (and that is not taking into consideration the deployment of cleaner electricity generation and other potential sources of savings).

Ed Glaeser argued -- and this is kind of hard to believe -- that land use shifts from building high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston would not provide much in the way of benefits, since, he guessed, only 100,000 or so people in each city would move from the suburbs to the central city. But this entirely misses the point.

Houston and Dallas may each double their current housing stock between now and 2050. Where are those homes going to go, with what climate impacts? That's the critical question.

Demographic shifts and changes in energy prices are sure to encourage some households that are currently living at low densities to move to more compact developments, and that's a good thing. But that's not the main reason to begin focusing on the significant available savings from smarter land use decisions.

The main reason is the growth that America will continue to face. It's difficult to imagine that the nation can double its housing stock while building in a sprawling fashion without facing major environmental costs and economic difficulties. Land use patterns will need to change. And as this report documents, there will be considerable advantages to facilitating that change.

As livable streets advocates work to make headway in breaking the cycle of American auto dependence, the folks at Planetizen have put together a video narrative that explains how we got here. "The Story of Sprawl," a double DVD set produced by Managing Editor Tim Halbur, is a compilation of historical films dating from 1939 to 1965, documenting the confluence of factors that fostered the quintessential land use motif of the 20th century: far-flung, low-density, driving-intensive residential and commercial development. The discs include commentary from planning notables including Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, John Norquist, Neal Peirce, James Howard Kunstler and Robert Cervero, featured in the clip above.

"The Story of Sprawl" is available now. Check the Planetizen promo page for more clips and ordering info.

The first thing they found is that even in dark times, Americans are still looking over the next horizon. Nearly half of those surveyed said they would rather live in a different type of community from the one they are living in at present.

Second, Americans still want to move outward. City dwellers are least happy with where they live, and cities are one of the least popular places to live. Only 52 percent of urbanites rate their communities “excellent” or “very good,” compared with 68 percent of suburbanites and 71 percent of the people who live in rural America.

That's a pretty thin reed to lean on, but Brooks tries to support a whole schadenfreude-filled column with it, mocking efforts to curb sprawl and give people better transportation choices:

The time has finally come, some writers are predicting, when Americans will finally repent. They'll move back to the urban core. They will ride more bicycles, have smaller homes and tinier fridges and rediscover the joys of dense community -- and maybe even superior beer.

America will, in short, finally begin to look a little more like Amsterdam.

Well, Amsterdam is a wonderful city, but Americans never seem to want to live there. And even now, in this moment of chastening pain, they don’t seem to want the Dutch option.

Where to begin? Brooks draws conclusions that the Pew study just doesn't support. He gleefully notes the absence of older, Eastern metro areas from Pew's list of the most desirable American cities, while neglecting to mention that highly-ranked places like Denver, San Francisco, and Portland are all taking significant steps to become more walkable, bikeable, or transit-oriented -- in other words, more urban.

Likewise, he sees the relative dissatisfaction of city residents as a judgment against urban form, but why not pin it on poor urban air quality, or perceptions of public education, or unsafe city streets that concede too much to the automobile? One could just as easily spin cherry-picked Pew data to argue against the Brooks point of view:

• Americans are all over the map in their views about their ideal community type: 30% say they would most like to live in a small town, 25% in a suburb, 23% in a city and 21% in a rural area.

See, most Americans would prefer to live in a city or small town. I could say that they hunger for walkability and "dense community," but I won't, because the Pew study is not a useful barometer of American preferences for urban form and transportation options.

Which won't stop Brooks and his ilk from advancing a favorite straw man argument at every opportunity: that planners want to take away everyone's cars and force people to adopt a different lifestyle. As if tens of thousands of Portlanders have no choice but to commute by bike every morning. Or a shadowy cabal put a premium on house values near Denver light rail. Or jackbooted thugs marched Americans to polls at gunpoint last November and ordered them to vote for $75 billion worth of transit-related ballot initiatives. 

The sprawl dead-enders can deride "planners" and scream "Amsterdam!" all they want. It's easy to see why they protest so much: If they ever acknowledged the fact that ending car-dependency is about giving people choices, it might lead to some self-incriminating conclusions about who's trying to put restrictions on whom.

Obama in Ft. Myers

It's imagining new transportation systems. I'd like to see high speed rail where it can be constructed. I would like for us to invest in mass transit because potentially that's energy efficient. And I think people are a lot more open now to thinking regionally…

The days where we're just building sprawl forever, those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody… recognizes that’s not a smart way to design communities. So we should be using this money to help spur this sort of innovative thinking when it comes to transportation.

That will make a big difference.

Before you get too carried away, though, head over to Salon for a recap of Obama's pitch yesterday in Elkhart, Indiana, which included this sop to highway enthusiasts:

He promised his plan would create or save 80,000 jobs in Indiana, and that infrastructure funding would improve "roads like US 31 here in Indiana that Hoosiers count on ... and I know that a new overpass downtown would make a big difference for businesses and families right here in Elkhart."

The US 31 expansion is what you might call a sprawl project. Obama's transportation platform may still amount to a Rorschach blot, but his comments in Fort Myers can't be retracted. With the stimulus bill about to enter conference committee, having POTUS on the record opposing sprawl should bolster efforts to maximize transit funding and limit the use of highway funds to expand road capacity. Time to keep the pressure on.

“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars…”
-- Barack Obama's inaugural address.

“The last thing this nation needs now is a stimulus plan aimed at the development of non-gasoline-powered automobiles married with extensive rehabilitation of the highway system.”
-- James Howard Kunstler

A section of Tysons Corner slated for infill development. Image: Fairfax County/PB PlaceMaking [PDF]

Four of the line's stations are planned for Tysons Corner, a collection of malls and offices so unwalkable that traffic clogs streets when employees break for lunch. Only 17,000 people live there, but it provides 167,000 parking spaces for the hordes of commuters and shoppers who drive in on a daily basis. In this excellent NPR segment (listening to the audio is well worth the time), Robert Siegel looks at how Fairfax County officials are attempting to transform Tysons Corner into a more urban setting:

...a central part of the plan is to build residential housing, and plan for 100,000 people. But that means more than build apartment houses -- Tysons is also utterly inhospitable to pedestrians.

Clark Tyler, who chairs the Tysons Corner Land Use Task Force, says there are nine lanes of traffic near Tysons Corner Center, but the street lights give pedestrians only 40 seconds to cross them. Sidewalks mysteriously end.

So, what will the new Tysons be like? 

"Hopefully it will have sidewalks that aren't hyphenated," Tyler says. "It will have a grid of streets, shorter blocks, it will have a circulation system, so the other thing that would be radical is what they call LEED certified -- or green buildings that are energy efficient -- and all the rest because that's what we've recommended."

Buses to get you from the rail stations to these stores -- right now, that sounds like science fiction. It also sounds like a city.

Siegel's guide, Chris Leinberger of the Brookings Institution, sees Tysons Corner as a watershed of sorts, a model that other sprawling edge cities might follow. As the story makes clear, however, there are still plenty of misconceptions to dispel about density and smart growth:

Mayor Jane Seemans of the neighboring town of Vienna has some concerns about the Tysons plan. Will it increase her town's traffic, which is already congested? Will Vienna's schools and parks become overcrowded? "It's the impact that it will have on our quality of life in Vienna... We just want to make sure that we have a voice in the continuing development."

No EIS necessary. Photo: tlindenbaum/Flickr

AYR recounts a talk given by progressive developer Jonathan Rose, who says that NEPA -- favored by a real estate industry that did not want to subject itself to an alternative law based on land use planning -- was flawed from the start:

"So the effect was that we turned our back on national planning, and we turned our back on a national infrastructure policy," Rose said. "And, at the same time, here’s what happens: 1000 individuals choose to subdivide a parcel in the suburbs, or the exurbs, and it falls under the screen of an environmental impact statement, each one is one individual act."

"One person chooses to build a 1000-unit urban project in a city and they get held up for five years in an environmental impact statement," he concluded. "And so the unintended consequence of NEPA actually was one more of the many things that made it easier for suburban sprawl to proceed from 1970 to 2000 instead of urban redevelopment."

The ribbon cutting for the $2.8 billion project was attended by Congressman John Culberson and Governor Rick Perry. The Houston Chronicle was there and got some choice quotes.

"This project, for all intents and purposes, is complete," announced Delvin Dennis, interim director of the Texas Department of Transportation's Houston District. "Tomorrow morning the (high occupancy-toll) lanes open. If you're not doing anything, take a ride on them."

Perry noted the roar of traffic below, above and around the crowd, which was gathered on a frontage road overpass.

"This is the sound of freedom we hear," he said. "These people need roads to get to work, to church and to school."

One kind of freedom Texans don't need, according to the state and Rep. Culberson, is freedom of choice.

Despite its size, the widened freeway adds "just one new 'free' lane, a pair of toll lanes and no significant transit improvement," said Robin Holzer, chair of the grass-roots Citizens Transportation Coalition.

"Too bad it does not have a space for a commuter rail like our design did," said environmental attorney Jim Blackburn, who tried unsuccessfully to force the state to revise its plans, add mass transit and lessen the project's impact on neighborhoods.

Some still hold out hope for the addition of light rail -- the transit authority chipped in to have overpasses reinforced for train traffic. But the Chronicle reports that Culberson, "whose ability to get federal dollars was crucial to the widening project, pledged not to give up a single freeway lane for Metro rail."

Culberson may not have much of a say after January, though, depending on the outcome of his tightening race for re-election. As it happens, Culberson challenger Michael Skelly made his fortune in wind energy.

Photo: Federal Highway Administration

NOW host David Brancaccio does an interview on the LA Metro. Click through for the full video.

The latest episode of NOW is surely the most effective takedown of car-dependent planning ever broadcast in news magazine format. Adhering to the familiar contours of pocketbook journalism, "Driven to Despair" starts with a sympathetic portrayal of the Schleighs, a family who moved to a southern California exurb seven years ago. With their adjustable rate mortgage about to reset and gas prices already busting the family budget, they need a way out.

What follows can be fairly described as a 25-minute ode to the time- and money-saving benefits of transit, complete with a brief history of the Los Angeles streetcar system and a rueful suggestion that the Presidential candidates should address transportation more forcefully.

Watching the Schleighs and their neighbors react to the idea of riding a train to work -- sneering, in one case -- it's all too apparent why someone running for national office would skirt the issue. But you also realize that if a national pol were to finally go out on that limb, he or she may find voters more receptive to the idea of better trains and buses than feared.

"Driven to Despair" will be broadcast on PBS affiliates tonight (check local listings). It's the first part in a NOW series on infrastructure called "Blueprint America."

Enjoy the weekend, Streetsbloggers. We'll be back on Tuesday.

In his storied career at New Jersey DOT, Gary Toth played an indispensable role changing the culture of the agency, promoting a place-based ethic instead of the auto-centric transportation planning dogma. Today Toth heads transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces, where he has written "A Citizen's Guide to Better Streets." The book, which will be published by AARP, serves as a how-to for working constructively with your local transportation and planning agencies. (It is not yet available for purchase.)

Streetsblog Editor-in-Chief Aaron Naparstek sat down with Toth last week for this interview. Anyone interested in how the American landscape has become so dominated by cars should watch. Toth's insights about the compound effects of transportation and land use policies are invaluable.

Policies in favor of dense development shouldn't be viewed on a left-right spectrum and certainly needn't be filtered through culture-war rhetoric, the panelists said. In fact, one doesn't have to be concerned about climate change at all in order to support such policies; values of fiscal conservatism and localism, both key to Republican ideology, can be better realized through population-dense development than through sprawl.

Tom Darden, a developer of urban and close-in suburban properties, said Wednesday, "I'm a Republican and have been my whole life. I consider myself a very conservative person. But it never made sense to me why we would tax ordinary people in order to subsidize this form of development, sprawl." Darden told the story of a road-paving project approved by North Carolina when he served on the state's transportation board. A dirt road that handled just five trips per day was paved at taxpayer expense, with money that could have gone toward mass transit benefiting millions of people.

"Those were driveways, in my view, not roads," Darden said.

Now that U.S. taxpayers will probably have to bail out the Highway Trust Fund to the tune of $8 billion, how much longer can the free-spending road-building industry masquerade as an enabler of personal freedom?

Personal sidenote: Stories like this remind me of my high school calculus teacher, Mr. Hall, who was conservative through and through, and didn't shy away from sharing his views in class. When he was a kid, his family's farm ceased to be viable when it got split down the middle to make way for I-91. Much of his distaste for government seemed to spring from this fact. Not that eminent domain doesn't have its uses, but here was a guy whose conservatism was rooted in opposition to highway building.

Until recently, VMT had been rising steeply in the U.S.

In the second installment of our serialized tour through StreetsWiki, we turn to DianaD's entry on Vehicle-Miles Traveled:

Vehicle-Miles Traveled (VMT) is the total number of miles driven by all residential vehicles within a given time period and geographic area.

We're seeing more about VMT in the national media as rising gas prices cause people to drive less. Largely absent from the coverage -- so far -- is a discussion about intentionally reducing VMT through policy. Will that change soon? It should: A built environment where people don't rely on a car for every trip is also one where expensive gas won't put such a crimp in household budgets. Diana's wiki entry highlights one avenue to explore in particular:

Land use -- namely sprawl development -- is the main culprit. Americans are living farther from work, school, shopping and basic services. Even in higher density areas, where amenities may be closer to home, the road framework can be punishing for pedestrians. It is nearly impossible to walk in areas that cater to cars instead of people. Autocentric street design therefore forces even more cars onto roadways, which further impedes walkers and bicyclists. The vicious cycle continues and local governments turn to the only “quick fix” that they seem to know: build bigger highways (at enormous taxpayer expense) to accommodate the increased traffic.

Got more to add? Any member of the Livable Streets Network can edit a StreetsWiki entry. 

The front page of The Messenger, June 4th, 2008

Brad Aaron is on assignment in the Southeast this week.

My hometown of Madison, North Carolina, lies in the Piedmont-Triad region near the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, just south of the Virginia line and about midway across state if you look east to west. It's approximately 25 miles north of Greensboro, most famous for the Woolworth sit-ins of the civil rights era. When I was a kid it was more like 30 miles, but both towns have sprawled so much since then that Greensboro's newest strip malls are a mere 25-minute drive, if that, from Madison's ever-expanding subdivisions and mobile home parks.

Madison abuts its sister city, Mayodan (its namesake being the Mayo and Dan Rivers -- the impetus and, for a long while, the lifeblood of its existence -- it's the only Mayodan on Earth). The combined population of the towns is around 5,000. Both have distinct, historic, walkable downtown shopping districts, though both are largely deserted due to the proliferation of "uptown" strips. Many of those, especially the ones built in the 70s and 80s, are abandoned these days as well, as the Kmart that helped put downtown business in dire straits was recently one-upped by a new Wal-Mart on the edge of town. And so it goes.

To my eyes, though the people of Madison and Mayodan rely almost exclusively on their cars to go anywhere (there is no public transit here), there are fewer full-sized trucks and SUVs on the road these days. I thought this might be a case of perception accommodating a conclusion, until I picked up a copy of today's local paper, The Messenger ("Published twice weekly for loyal readers in Western Rockingham and Eastern Stokes counties").

Above the cover fold, but below the top story -- a fatal car crash on the highway between Madison and Greensboro, not far from my parents' home -- is what at first appeared to be a feature on the winner of a recent M-M Saddle Club competition. Then I noticed the subheading.

Rising fuel prices affect horses, too

With gas prices soaring to record levels, many people are beginning to seek alternatives to gas-guzzling cars and trucks. But a weekend event in Mayodan proves the gas crunch even affects those who favor horses for transportation.

"The way gas prices keep climbing has forced us to try something new to make it easier for riders to make our horse shows," said Donald Joyce of Madison. "We decided to double up on events to cut down on the number of travel times."

The story goes on to report that participants are paying upwards of $100 in fuel costs to get their horses and equipment to and from local shows. The saddle club has started holding multiple events in one day out of fear that the normal 15-day schedule would result in lowered attendance.

Reading that first paragraph, I at first thought my hometown was looking to the horse as an alternative to driving. Who knows, maybe a few downtown hitching posts would do the trick.

Suburbanites in northern Virginia are finding their streets more clogged with traffic than ever, and, as the Washington Post reported earlier this week, they aren't about to get bailed out by road-widening projects. Here's the crux of the problem, told from the Post reporter's decidedly windshield perspective:

Thoroughfares like Rolling Road are the blood vessels that connect suburbia, the secondary roads that carry commuters to interstates, residents to supermarkets and children to school. They include Braddock Road in Fairfax County, Colesville Road in Montgomery, and even such larger highways as routes 7 and 50. They are the roads that Washington area residents traverse every day, sometimes several times a day.

Just months ago, Northern Virginia residents and elected officials were expecting hundreds of millions of dollars in improvements to such roads. Now, because of budget cuts and state lawmakers' failure to reach a deal on regional transportation funding, drivers can expect only more misery.

The Virginia Department of Transportation recently announced a 51 percent cut in the region's road-building program. Dozens of projects have been eliminated or postponed indefinitely. And rising maintenance costs are eating away at what little remains.

The Post assumes that expanding road capacity is the only answer, and casts the problem as purely a budgetary shortfall. It neglects to mention the role of land use in bringing about this state of affairs. The pattern described in the article is similar to what regions all over the country are facing, as past decisions to separate housing from other land uses come back to haunt them in the form of ever-mounting traffic.

"Councils of Governments and local jurisdictions spread out and segregate the various forms of land use, rebel against mixed-use, put all of their non-residential uses on the arterials, and then sit there and scratch their heads and wonder where all of the traffic came from," says Gary Toth, who heads up transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces and formerly served as director of project planning and development at NJDOT. "Then, they demand that the state DOT fix it. It is like a middle aged man who eats donuts and smokes all day, never exercises, and then wonders why he has chest pains."

The Post, while doing nothing to counter this mentality, at least captures it perfectly with its driver-on-the-street interviews:

"My youngest child is going to celebrate his fifth birthday sitting at a traffic light," said McLean resident Julie Hyams, who frequently uses Route 123, which had a key interchange cut from the state transportation budget. "Now the money that was allotted for improvement has gone 'poof,' and the roads are only going to get worse."

When the default assumption is that road widening will solve the problem, suburban residents fail to see the benefit of smart growth initiatives to their daily lives. "What is missing," says Toth, "is an organized and comprehensive PR campaign designed to educate people that they are opposing and crippling the only solutions to their problems."

"In the immortal words of Pogo, 'We have met the enemy, and he is us.'"

With higher gas prices and more budget-constrained DOTs becoming the norm, will suburbanites be open to a different perspective? There's little reason for optimism in the Post story, but at least one northern Virginia resident grasped the concept of induced demand:

Leesburg resident William Bethke drives the bypass every day to get to a park-and-ride lot in Herndon, where he catches a Fairfax Connector bus for the 20-minute ride to the West Falls Church Metro station and on to his job in Crystal City. In the 3 1/2 years Bethke has been traveling the bypass bottleneck, the trip has gone from 10 or 15 minutes to 20 or 30 minutes.

But he doesn't think widening the road will solve its long-term problems.

"Those who now avoid it would then use it, and in three years we'll be back to where we are," he said.

Photo: AlbinoFlea / Flickr

NYC Blog directs our attention to the map above, which depicts every street in the continental U.S. Map creator Ben Fry (no relation) posts a larger version on his site, and explains it like so:

All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. The pace of progress is seen in the midwest where suburban areas are punctuated by square blocks of area that are still farm land.

Democratic front runner Barack Obama just released a campaign "Fact Sheet" entitled, "Strengthening America's Transportation Infrastructure" (download it). While Hillary Clinton has put forward some outstanding and heavily transit-oriented plans of her own, Obama appears to be the first major party presidential candidate to outline a national transportation platform that explicitly seeks to "create policies that incentivize greater bicycle and pedestrian usage of sidewalks and roads" (if anyone knows differently, let us know in the comments section). Whatever the case, it's a significant step up from the 2004 campaign featuring George W. Bush's mountain bike fitness regimen and John Kerry, spandex-clad on an $8,000 Serotta.

Before you get too excited, it's worth noting that Obama's paper looks like it was a bit rushed. Is Amtrak really "the only form of reliable transportation" in "many parts of the country?" What parts of the country would that be? The plan is also missing language from Obama's energy plan concerning the equalization of subsidies for motorized and non-motorized commuting.

Nitpicking aside, we do get a good view of what a President Obama would aim to do for more Livable Streets. In addition to encouraging biking and walking, he wants to:

• "Provide states and local governments with the resources they need to address sprawl and create more livable communities."
  
• "Double the federal Jobs Access and Reverse Commute (JARC) program to ensure that additional federal public transportation dollars flow to the highest-need communities and that urban planning initiatives take this aspect of transportation policy into account." Presumably this includes better transit for inner-cities.
• Provide long-term federal support for Amtrak and "increase the availability of rail transportation options for residents of rural communities."
  
• Support the development of high-speed freight and passenger rail.

Now that we have transportation plans from both Obama and Clinton; John McCain, where you at?

Photo: alison.jane/Flickr

For ordinary Americans like Phyllis Berry, a 31-year-old factory worker for General Motors in Cleveland, gasoline costs are starting to hurt.

“I used to fill it up pretty regularly, but now I drive it until the tank is almost empty, looking for the cheapest place to buy gas,” said Ms. Berry, who drives a beat-up Dodge Caravan.