Outlook Tower

RESEARCH AND MODELING

2012-02-02T15:58:00.000-07:00

STANDARD RESEARCH PAPER FORMAT
Introduction
Methods
Results
Analysis
Conclusion

MODEL DEVELOPMENT SEQUENCE
Define problem/Research Interest
Define Objective
Develop Conceptual Model
Implement Model
Verify and Calibrate Model
Validate the Model

THEORY OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

2012-01-11T15:20:00.000-07:00

ECONOMIC BASE

An economic'base' is necessary for metropolitan growth. While some analysis contend that ametropolis's economic base can by measured by the concentration of an industry,the true metric is much simpler: Whatever brings in outside money.The easy flowof fiscal resources has made the world vastly 'flatter' than any time inhistory. As a result, it is not possibleto have metropolitan economies based entirely on transfer payments.

In a world ofglobalized supply chains, and internationalized corporate ownership, theprimary economic impact from increased economic activity is not the purchase ofadditional local inputs, or even through local taxation. The on-goingcompetition for taxable economic activity between different locations hassparked a ‚race for the bottom‘, significantly reducing firms tax burdens.

The capacityof an industry to be the economic base for an industry depends on its wageoutputs, with a strong preference for high-wage jobs. The size of a metropolitanarea‘s secondary economy corresponds to the magnitude and number of valueinflows. While a metropolitan economy can be supported by a large stock oflow-magnitude flows, high-magnitude flows are strongly preferable, because ofthe impacts on the secondary economy.

SECONDARY CYCLE

Clearly, notall economic activity in a region consists of primary economic activity.Secondary economic occurrs when money from the primary economic activity isrecirculated in the local economy. Secondary economic activity can be defined as any economic activity thatwould not occurr without the flows of value provided by the economic base. Mostnotably retail, they also include most services, including public services andinstitutional services such as health and education made possible by taxdollars provided by the economic base.

As valueflows from agent to agent, each agent takes a *cut* of the value, thus reducingthe magnitude of the flow. A high-magnitude flow of value is extremelydesirable because of it’s capacity to generate multiple chains of secondaryvalue flows. Value continues to flow through a metropolitan economy until itleaks out to acquire goods and services that are either unavailable oroverpriced within that economy. Thus, the more *complete* a metropolitaneconomy is, the greater the number of secondary cycles occurr within theeconomy.

JOBS ATTRACT HOUSEHOLDS

2012-01-09T15:16:00.000-07:00

As an economic base grows, so does the demand for employees. In a growing economic region, the rate of economic growth exceeds the rate of natural increase, necessitating immigration. The demand for employees in excess of supply leads to rising wages, which then attracts households from other metropolitan regions. As the number of households rise, the vacancy rate of available housing (rented and owned) falls, and the rising value of property/rents stimulates new construction. (This relationship characterizes one of the virtuous cycles that helps power economic development in growing metropolitan regions).

Intro to Python Notes

2012-01-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

Integrated window--IDLE. Type in, responds directly. There are a lot of things that python just does automatically, through automatic presets--simpler once you know it, but more of a learning curve. Python is case sensitive.

If you want to get decimals, you need to include at least one of the numbers as a non integers. 19.0/3 will return decimals, 19/3 will only return a integer--6. Standard order of operations. 19%3=1 % is the character for 'remainder'. Considered as 'division' in order of operations. ^ is not used for exponent--** is used instead.

Alt+P retypes the last command you exectuted--may 'scroll back' through multiple commands--not just last, but commands previous to that.
#/Sharp/Hashtag used for commenting.
Used for commenting code.

Seems like variables can be any string. Will accept strings or numbers.
frog=6
frog='communism'

Allows and echo like:
frog*6 gets communismcommunismcommunismcommunismcommunismcommunism
May set mathematical operations as variables:
frog=2*9
frog=18

Saving, must add the extension .py. If you miss it, not critical--will have to open IDLE and then open the file rather than just being able to double-click it.

Create new is out of the main python terminal, which allows you to execute multiple line scripts. In the main editor it runs each line as you type it in.

Variable types = string, number, tuple, list, dictionary...
List needs end-brackets [], separated by commas.

>>> print "My number is", MyNum
My number is 1
#automatically adds the space before a variable?

"append" adds a name to a list.
>>> names.append('catherine')

Ideal Design

2012-01-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

The ideal spatial distribution of trip ends would would result in in an arrangement where the trip-ends for the most frequent trips were in closest proximity. In reality, the distribution of trips ends is more arbitrary.

Ring Residential

2012-01-05T15:10:00.000-07:00

The historic 'ring' structure of industrial and manufacturing-centric urbanization, with residential around an employment core is caused by the need for transportation access. The core forms around essential transportation infrastructure--ports, rivers, railways, highway interchanges. Access to transportation is an economic necessity, and are capable of 'outbidding' competing land uses. At the edge, 'outbid' residential uses locate. Because residential uses require more land area per person than industrial uses, they eventually come to 'ring' the industrial uses, impairing their expansion potential.

Urban Land Supply

2012-01-04T15:15:00.000-07:00

The rate at which urban land is being made available for development exceeds the demand for new urban land. This is indicated by the prevalence of fully depreciated vacant buildings and vacant lots present in the urbanized area.

Intensification

2012-01-03T15:14:00.000-07:00

Not all urban uses are amenable to more intensive use—for some uses, it is not cost-effective. Multi-story construction is significantly more expensive than single-story construction. Thus, limited developable area acts as a constraint on economic growth.

MODEL DEVELOPMENT

2011-12-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

Model structure--the relationship between model elements.

Calibration--using data-sets to ensure that model matches. Differences between these two constitutes specification error.

Validation --Tests to measure models predictive capacity. Requires a second data-set.

Model Development Principles
•    Concentrate on transparency. Models should be communicable. This necessitates the development of nested modeling.
•    Limit interconnectivity between model elements to the minimum possible.
•    Model structure should be transparent. Relationships between model elements shoul be clear, and should (when possible) correspond to participants pre-existing mental categories.
•    Equations available, data-sources documented. When possible, a model should be packaged to contain it's own documentation.

SYSTEMS DYNAMICS MODELING

2011-12-27T20:26:00.000-07:00

The theory and process of system dynamicsmodeling requires specialized knowledge and mind-set which is time-consuming todevelop.

With the notable exception majormetropolitan areas, and certain innovative MPO's, most regions no longercontain the problem solving capacity 'in-house'. Existing in-house capacity isprimarily institutionalized in a 'system maintenance' role. The capacity tosolve problems has been outsourced to consultants. Consultants maintain the capacity to offeron-demand expertise and solutions based on comparable experience. Also maintainspecialized of occaisonally needed technical know-how. Effecively, act as intermediaries between decision makers andtechnical information and interpreters of that information.

System Dynamics does represent a 'newscientific revolution', in the sense that it is replacing the linear andatomistic representations of the world. However, the educational project shouldremain separate from system dynamic consulting. The structure of scientificrevolutions dictates that the theory will be more widely adopted as morepractical applications for the theory are found and demonstrated.

Causal Flow of Road Building

2011-12-25T03:14:00.000-07:00

Present crisis may provide the mechanism to overcome political and institutional difficulties…

….Constraints on Federal budgetàreduced federal subsidies for road-buildingàreduced state road building budgets

….Rising gas pricesà Reduced commuting distancesàIncreased demand for ‘close in’ landàRising urbanized land valuesàRising densitiesàRising alternative mode shareàfalling automobile dependencyàre-shaping of transportation infrastructure

=reduced urban sprawl and constrained traffic congestion*

MEGA-TECHNIC

2011-12-23T15:01:00.000-07:00

'Mega-technic' method--increasing economic activity through increases in scope, rather than in efficiency.

Makes sense when increasing production is a capital intense endeavor, benefitting existing firms and institutions.

As things change, vast capital stocks actually problematic. No longer located in an expanding market, but instead competing for limited resources. In such a context, a vast stock of capital can actually be a competitive weakeness. Developed over time, it naturally includes older, less productive technology. (Institutions also).

The ongoing expansion in housing units square footage per person and acres per housing unit is usually justified using the 'Economistic' idea that humans are rational self-interest maximizers, capable of gauging the marginal value of an additional increment. In reality, humans are not rational optimizers, but rational satisficers and irrational maximizers. People make decisions on the basis of meeting percieved needs. Once those perceived needs are met, they act to maximize any offered considerations, regardless of their desirability.

Dangers of Linear Regression

2011-12-21T22:33:00.000-07:00

Linearregression is adequate for short-term forecasts, but dangerous over long timeperiods. Any given regression provides a snap-shot of current conditions. Asconditions change over time, the predictive capacity of a regression declines.

Maintainingthe predictive capacity requires repeating the process of data collection,cleaning, and regression. This runs upagains the limitations of data: Statistical methods require statisticallysignificant data samples to function. Long-term data series requires that datacollections methods, geography, and metrics remain constant over time,with 'ideal' data-sets are collected ata single point in time. These limitations on the availability of data limitwhat can be regressed.

More dangerously,there is an increasing reliance on automatically calculated statisticalanalytics as measures of formalstatistical validity, without the recognition that these measures are not'absolute', but rather innovative methods developed to detect known errors inthe application of other statistical methods. Successfully applying andinterpreting these results requires a separate body of knowledge to identifyand explain anomalies.

To improvemodel quality, there is a strong desire to reduce the number of variablespresent in a regression analysis. When faced with two highly correlatedvariables, only one may be included. This becomes extremely problematic if twohighly correlated variables diverge over time, it becomes an open question about which variable actually possessedpredictive capacity. Or if either variable did, and the validity of a modelactually resulted from a the two variables linkage to a third, unregressedvariable. Regression models are only capable of showing correlation betweendifferent variables, rather than causal relationships. Without that explicitlinkage, it becomes possible to draw conclusions that are statistically valid,but that have limited utility.

THEORY OF URBANIZATION

2011-12-21T15:21:00.001-07:00

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT DEMANDS ADDITIONAL SPACE

Urban growthis a reflection of economic growth. Economic activity takes place in space.

As the amountof economic activity taking place increases, so does the amount of space neededto 'house' that activity. The amount of space needed can be provided by makingeither making more intense use of existing urbanized area, or by makingadditional urban land available.

BOUNDED CITIES

As a thoughtexperiment, consider a 'bounded city', which can no longer expand in spacebecause of of a 'hard boundary' (Political, legal, geographic, regulatory, etc.). This city isthus limited in its capacity to expand its urban area. But because economicactivity takes place in space, contined expansion of economic activity requiresadditional space. Without the capacity to add additional urban space, existingurban space must be used more intensively. A combination of three factors makesthis difficult.

FIXED STRUCTURES

Theoretically,urban land is developed in a manner characteristic with its highest and bestuse, so that in a context of limited land, urban land would convert to highvalue uses. In reality, development occurrs in accordance with the highest andbest use at the time of development. Changes in the amenity of a parcel overtime means that the highest and best use can also change. However, the capacityof the parcel to adapt to these changes is minimal. Once developed, a parcel'sland use is fixed by the structure of the developed building. Many structuresare so specialized as to be unsuitable for other uses, regardless of changes inthe highest and best use. Urban land use thus remains fixed over long periodsof time.

PARCEL FRAGMENTATION

Secondly,urban land suffers from fragmentation. Large parcels are partially developed,or broken into smaller parcels. Over time, this process generates progressivelysmaller and less coherent parcels for development, which are progressively moredifficult to develop. The impact of this dynamic is compounded over time.Because of differences in construction and maintenance, different structuresdepreciate at different rates and are available for redevelopment at differenttimes. This makes it difficult to recombine smaller parcels into largerparcels.

REPLACING EXISTING USES

Redevelopmentoccurrs when the income generated by new development is sufficient to cover thecost of clearing old structures, erecting new ones, and covering the resultantloss of income from the destruction of old structures. As urban land becomesscarcer, the value of urban land and the resultant rents that can be chargedrises, making it more difficult to find a replacement use that will providesufficient income to be worth redeveloping.

URBAN EXPANSION

Given theconstraints posed by re-use, urbanized area tends to expand in response toeconomic development. But urban expansion does not occurr in a random manner,but in a pattern dictated by thefunction of urban land markets. Because thevalue generated by undeveloped parcels on the urban fringe (greenfields) isextremely minimal, they are developed in preference to redeveloping existingsites.

METROPOLITAN FORM

Employmentcenters occupy the most central locations—not out of a direct desire forcentrality, but because of their primacy in the metropolitan developmentprocess. They come first, and the rest of the metropolis orients itself aroundthem. Second most-centrally located are retail uses. While they followresidential in the development process, the competitive advantage representedby a more central location ensures willingness to 'outbid'residential users. Residential uses located at theleast central locations, where land values are lowest.

Centralityshould be understood in a network sense, rather than in a geographic sense.While their has historically been a correlation between the geographic centerand centrality, it is not a causal linkage. Historically, the center of a cityoccupied the most 'central' location, because it was located en-route tothe largest number of destinations. Development of limited access transportationnetworks such as subways and freeways changes this dynamics, so that proximityto transportation network access points becomes the best measure of centrality.

Land Value

2011-12-21T15:17:00.001-07:00

Land values are lowest at the edge of the urban area because amenity value is at it's lowest. A use located on the urban fringe has half the amenity exposure of a more central location, simply because land beyond the urban fringe remains undeveloped.

Post-Graduate Education

2011-12-21T14:54:00.000-07:00

Predict the future demand for skills, capacity to predict the future. Faced with limited ability to do so, ongoing education seems key.

Life-long learning not as an 'enrichment' exercise (History of Jazz, Appreciating Wine), or an opportunity to explore the basics of other fields, but as an ongoing excercise is professional development. There are a record number of students returning for graduate degrees and doctoral degrees, in an effort to improve their earnings and gain competitive advantage. Traditional degre programs are unsuitable for this.

The modern university education includes both technical and liberal arts elements, designed to develope well-developed people with a range of capabilities that will be useful over the course of a lifespan, as well as technical and professional training that will be useful immediately upon graduation.

This is done on the assumption that a university education represents a 'once in a life-time' experience. That does not reflect the demands of modern society.

University needs to grab a growing share of the 'adult education' market, which will require changes in its pedagogical method. Classes structured for working professionals with very different needs, capacities and requirements then traditional students. I advocate for the expansion of certificate-scope programs. I qualify it with the use 'scope', because the historical role of certificate development has been one of curricular development--first a certificate, then a minor, before becoming the focus of an entire degree, post-graduate or doctoral degree.

Urban Services

2011-12-20T19:33:00.002-07:00

Enormous economic prosperity madeavailable by urbanization, characterized by the development of services.(Services differ from goods in that services require proximity to deliver.) Asa result, their exists a population density threshold for which it iseconomically viable to deliver services.

SYSTEM ELEMENT FABRICATION

2011-12-20T18:26:00.002-07:00

Large corporations possess the sparecapacity to generate necessary infrastructure (physical or institutional) forthe expansion of economic activity, thus adding elements to a system necessary for system growth or maintenance.

Industry Clustering

2011-12-20T14:54:00.002-07:00

Different 'economic bases' are attracted to different packages of amenities. Similar firms tend to cluster in the same metropolitan labor because they are seeking the same amenities. Specifically, labor-intensive work requiring skilled workers often co-locate.

Innovative industries are characterized with a high rate of 'churn', with high employee turnover, as new firms are created, staff up, and either grow explosively or implode.

Locating within a metropolitan area that possesses an existing pool of skilled labor represents a competitive advantage because it makes hiring cheaper and simpler. Also makes firms more efficient, because the incentive to 'conserve' an expensively assembled labor force is less--the 'assembly cost' of acquiring replacement workers are lower.

Metropolitan 'sector' growth stops when the existing pool of skilled labor is becoming depleted, and the competition for limited workers causes wages begin to rise. While rising wages initially draw in skilled workers from outlying areas, that pool is also finite. Additionally, the high level of skill required takes years to develop, so the 'lead time' for developing additional workers. Requires educational programs to anticipate the demand for technical skills in advance of the rise of wages.

(What of Capital Intensive Industries?)

The Rate of Climate Change

2011-12-18T19:59:00.002-07:00

Life can adapt to global climate change but the rate of climate change is important. The gradual cooling that ran from about 50 million to 1.8 million years ago was accompanied by a diversification of life and increasingly complex ecosystems. The shifts between glacial-interglacial conditions that have characterized the past 1.8 million years have been harder on life. These shifts have been accompanied by sudden temperature swings that have happened on the order of centuries or even decades.1 Similarly, there is a big difference between a car going from 60 to zero miles per hour in 10 seconds and 60 to zero in one second.

Urban Dynamics Case Studies

2011-12-18T19:57:00.002-07:00

http://cases.systemdynamics.org/?p=49
http://cases.systemdynamics.org/?p=58

Refugee Resettlement

2011-12-10T19:57:00.001-07:00

I forget the source, but Iwas reading on immigrants and housing markets several years ago—something aboutrefugee resettlement centers. Anyway, it did great things to the central city,because the immigrants suddenly filled up previously vacant housing stock,raising rents and property values. The increase in car-less population then justifieda major transit investment, which then began to revitalize the center-city ingeneral. It’s important to realize that prices are not set by the stock ofsomething, but by the stock in comparison to the demand for it. There is a whole economic development literature on Direct-Indirect-Inducedeconomic impacts, the nut of which is that ‘growth begets secondary growth’.

Innovation

2011-12-10T19:47:00.001-07:00

Innovation is dangerous thingto measure, but it is a lagging indicator—the outcome of a process, rather thanthe cause of the process. While there is something to be said for a ‘virtuouscycle’ of innovations, the cycle has to start someplace and ‘powered’ fromsomeplace.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

2011-11-28T18:16:00.001-07:00

Reading Freire reminds me of reading Confucius--both are notable for their humanism, and for their emphasis on the vocation of developing ones own humanity. I detect deep Marxist elements within Freire, although without the stridency and utopianism I associate with Marxist thought--the emphasis is upon transcending the division between classes, rather than replaces the current oppressor with a (theoretically fairer) 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Freire's explanation of how revolutions can go astray, as revanchist elements establish an oppressive bureaucracy rather than engaging in continued dialogue. Most communist/socialist revolutions, from Russia to Boliva, all seem to fall into that particular trap.

More to the point of this class, this quote really struck me: "There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that serves to integrate the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring conformity to it, OR it becomes the 'practice of freedom', by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the creation of their world" (Freire 34).

Reading this, I feel by humbled and flabbergasted. It is as if all the years I spent tutoring were a lie. Did I actually educate anyone, or simply integrate people into the world? That seemed (seems?) a worthwhile endeavor—teaching people to fit in, to get along—to learn how the system works, so that they might game it better.

I also remember the enraging difficulty of getting high school students to try and think critically. Students were not interested in thinking critically, or understanding—they wanted answers, to fill in the blanks, to get the assignment done. It certainly made tutoring English and History very difficult. Once students are acculturated to 'recitation', breaking them of the habit is difficult. The same is true of questions. If you provide fully formulate the question, the capacity to engage critically is minimal. Formulated questions presuppose answers. With most questions, it is possible to infer the answer from the structure of the question. The 'Problem Posing' education is not easy--it is a skill that must be developed. Their is almost a koan-like structure to it. It is not merely a matter of posing questions, but of highlighting inconsistencies. Between belief and reality, between the expected and the actual. It really is a matter of 'leading someone'.

The gentle action of leading someone into critical thought is not an easy exercise. It involves the ongoing process of revealing the limitations of anothers understanding, while recognizing that that efforts to force others into realization only meets resistance, and is ultimately counter-productive. But how can that method be applied in a classroom context?

Problem-posing education is also institutionally difficult--it becomes very difficult to offer a 'standard' class, when the nature of the class is dialogue. How can what students have learned be gauged? Yet my most memorable (and valuable) classes were service learning classes. The material 'deposited' in me by lecture classes is long-gone--forgotten or discarded, with only factoids remaining.

I found the first two chapters vastly better than the second two. They latter were less insightful, less applicable (to me), more concerned with a program for actually undertaking his ideas within a specific context. While I've still found some gems within, they've been a bit of a slog. It's not bad material, but it is material I'm already familiar with from rationality and power. The mechanisms by which power are exercised, and the opposition fragmented, distracted, and 'bought out' were already familiar to me.

System Dynamics

2011-11-10T01:10:00.002-07:00

Systems Dynamics is fascinating stuff. Check out this page to learn more!

(Link not working? Try this: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/macroscope/chap2.html)

"Premium service"

2011-11-08T14:50:00.000-07:00

I was reading the Utah Transportation Report, and this caught my eye:

In order to gain support for tolling, Poole suggested that any interstate tolling project must add value; that is, bring something new and extra to users. Tolls cannot simply be placed on an existing highway without adding new value to it. Value can be added in the form of an entirely new highway, major capacity additions to an existing highway, or major reconstruction of an existing highway. Conti agreed with Poole on the idea that there must be some sort of new benefit to any new tolls."Maybe we need to focus on this 'premium service' concept," Conti said. "Could showing that there is value added change any opposition?"

I think it goes a long way toward explaining WHY light rail does so much better (politically) than 'improved bus' projects. If you are going to charge people more (in fares or taxes) you need to show them some benefit for it. And not just aggregate benefit, but direct benefit.

This is something more and more non-profits have learned over the years--people give more money when they can see the impact their money has made. The WWF postcards don't say "You saved an estimated 1.1 tigers!"--they say "This tiger. You saved THIS tiger". Transit agencies would do well to emulate that level of connection, and the related accountability.

Bridge to Bus Transfer

2011-10-27T17:10:00.000-07:00

Minneapolis's bridge-to-transit transfer looks pretty nifty. Salt Lake is adding our own version of the same, between TRAX and FrontRunner, @ North Temple and 500 West. Hope it looks half so nice.

Update: Guess not. Probably a lot cheaper, though.

Street Connectivity Matters!

2011-10-27T17:01:00.000-07:00

One of the ideas I tried to get on the agenda was a complete the street grid network--that there were 'lost linkages' in the street network.

Mapping something unrelated today, something popped out to me. Check out the attached map. It shows the building value to land value ratio--a general indication of investment of disinvestment in a neighborhood. The pale area now circled in red struck me--low values, and a notable disconnected street network. I'm talking to another PhD student (Amir) about doing a formal network connectivity measure for the area, so see if the relationship is statistically valid, but I thought this was worth mentioning.

And if Salt Lake City feels like doing something to spur neighborhood reinvestment, 'formalizing' that street could be a cheap and efficient way to do so...

More system Dynamics

2011-10-04T15:58:00.002-07:00

Pretty pleasing blog: http://blog.metasd.com/

System Dynamics Feed!

2011-10-04T15:56:00.000-07:00

This is pretty cool. I had not previously heard of Scoop.it. Like tumblr, but more focus on articles. Or like twitter with more pictures and better editting.

http://www.scoop.it/t/sytems-dynamics-and-policy

Real Estate Market Analysis

2011-09-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

Current Economic Conditions

America is in the third year of a ‘Great Recession’ brought on by a financial crisis. Depressions and recessions induced by financial crises tend to be longer lasting than other recessions. It takes time for banks to de-leverage, write of bad debts, and attract enough deposits to restore their core capital ratios to sufficient levels to begin making additional loans, a process largely dependent on the population savings rate. Until that occurs, the supply of private credit to business is limited. Given the current popularity and financial advantages to debt financing, ongoing sources of credit are no longer essential just to business expansion, but also integral to business operations and cash flow management. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the climate of uncertainty slowed both the expansion of the money supply and the velocity of money, resulting in a ‘credit shock’ that rippled through out the economy, resulting in delayed payments and missed payments. While the Federal Reserve policy of QE (Quantitative Easing) has increased the volume of money available to overcome the lack of liquidity, political opposition to it is increasing, and it seems unlikely to continue.

The recession has also resulted in massive job losses and an increasing unemployment rate. While job creation is increasing, it is currently only keeping pace with the rate of population growth, and is thus insufficient to bring down the unemployment rate. Additionally, because unemployment only counts those seeking a job, official statistics fail to recognize the ‘shadow pool’ of previously employed workers.

Local economic conditions are rosier. The State of Utah has endured the recession far better than many states, with ongoing economic growth and an unemployment rate lower than the national average. Despite also having been victim of the ‘housing bubble’, its rate of house-hold creation exceeds the national average as a result of its higher population growth, and will be able to reduce the stock of unsold housing at a faster rate.

18 Month Outlook

The eighteen-month outlook continues to look grim. Previous economic recoveries were ‘housing led’, an impossibility under current circumstances. As a result of both a growing population and a declining household size, new households were continuously being formed. New households represented an ongoing demand for additional housing units. That demand in turn fueled residential construction, and related household formation induced purchasing (furniture, home construction, appliances, etc.). The construction industry in turn provided employment with low skill, low income laborers with low education. Further, this led to a competitive shortage of labor for other low-skill positions, resulting in rising wages. Given the propensity of low-income workers to spend a high proportion of their income as consumption, this resulted in a ‘virtuous cycle’ of economic activity. That dynamic will not be pushing us out of this recession.

Previously able to resell mortgages to be repackaged into mortgage backed securities, banks are now stuck with any mortgages they originate, a trend pending regulation seems determined to reinforce. As a result, lending standards for mortgages are tightening. Combined with the need to rebuild core capital (as mentioned earlier), and declining income, the pool of qualified mortgage borrowers has shrunk substantially.

Further, the rapid appreciation in housing prices permitted many Americans to take home equity loans. These loans were then used to fuel consumer purchases, artificially elevating retail sales per square foot, and raising rents. Responding to these artificially high rents, additional retail space was constructed. Following the advent of the recession, sales tax records show consumer demand crashing, reducing the demand for retail space. Demand on retail space cannot be expected to return to the pre-recession ‘normal’.

Again, the outlook for Utah remains rosier. Because of its larger than average family size, and high dependency ratio, a higher percentage of purchases are non-discretionary. While inferior complements (cheaper toys, off-brand food) can by substituted, they actual purchase cannot be avoided.

Utah is also riding a rising tide in the health care and education sectors. While the future seems likely to hold lower federal payments for medical care, the aging population of baby boomers will continue to demand (and pay for) quality medical care. Another consequence of the recession has been the return people (especially young adults) to school, and to keep them there longer as they wait out a bad economy. While this has future implications on National financial stability, the present bounty in education is fueled by subsidized Federal loans, a dynamic which seems unlikely to change.

Real Estate Market Analysis Methods

The purpose of real estate market analysis is to reduce risk in real estate investment. The primary threat to profitability is competing supply. When supply exceeds demand, prices fall to compensate, and may result in a negative capitalization rate. To ensure that real estate development is profitable, it is necessary not only to estimate existing supply and demand, but to be able to forecast future supply and demand at the end of the real estate development process, so that new product can be absorbed into the market at an acceptable rate.

While there exists a large stock of real estate, demand for new real estate is driven by the small segment of businesses and households currently seeking new or additional space. Unlike many industrial products, one of the essential elements of real estate development is developable land. And, as the saying goes ‘They aren’t making any more of it’. While many parcels are interchangeable, parcel locations are (if not unique) then certainly limited. As a result, real estate demand takes place not at an aggregate level, but at a local level.

Critical to determining both demand and supply is the market area for which both totals are drawn. The market area varies by product type. The market area for a regional resort is different for that of a convenience store—the former may span several states, while the latter may only span a few blocks.

There is never exact comparability between product types—in order to avoid niche saturation and direct competition many developers attempt to bridge niches, establish cross-niche appeal, or provide a superior package of amenities. As a result, even with the same geographic area, two different analysts may produce different supply and demand numbers.

Additional supply of a product type are created primarily by competing developers, but may also originate as a result of conversion or rehabilitation of existing real estate. As mentioned earlier, not only the current stock must be assessed, but the ‘pipeline’ representing expected future supply of currently planned, permitted, or under construction.

Demand for real estate is a more complex phenomenon, because it tends to be more elastic. Increasing the usage of existing space (through over-crowding or more intensive use) can be increasingly inefficient, but it faces no ‘hard’ limit. For each major product type (residential, retail, office, industrial, and service), there are different drivers of demand. For residential, it is a combination of household formation, financing, and socially conditioned tenure-style expectations. Demand for retail and service real estate results when the expected rents per square foot exceeds the construction cost per square foot of additional space. Demand for office space tends to be conditional on increase in employees in the types of businesses that demand for office space, with different types of office users demanding different ‘classes’ of office space. Industrial is similarly driven by sector growth, but is also contingent upon access to necessary inputs—proximity to raw materials, processing facilities, supplier clusters, or equivalent transportation access. Data for projecting employment growth by sector can usually be obtained at a state or metropolitan level from the relevant business/demographic/planning agency or body.

The Future Holds..

2011-09-28T17:18:00.001-07:00

Utility access (especially transportation access) determines the development potential of many parcels.

Historically, a steady supply of developable land has been ensured as a result of an expanding roadway network. Federal subsidy for road network expansion can be expected to become scarcer and Federal funding is reoriented towards preserving existing roadways. Freeway and highways, which provide the greatest increase in ex-urban accessibility to urban employment and services, have typically been justified on the basis of congestion mitigation. Future efforts on congestion mitigation are more likely to emphasize less costly and more efficient solutions such as ITS and transit improvements. While roadway expansion can be expected to continue, it seems likely future roadway expansion will no longer exceed the rate of population growth.

Non-linear population Growth

2011-09-23T02:14:00.002-07:00

Hypothesis

Given that maintaining the same population growth rate over time requires increasingly larger increases in population, there is a tendency for the rate to decline in proportion with in increasing population. Thus, the rate of population growth at any geographic scale is inversely proportional to the size of the base population, and is governed by a non-linear relationship.

The relationship between population size and population growth rate is approximates a cubic curve, with some ‘absolute maximum growth rate’. The growth rate curve is characterized by an ‘inflection point’ where population size continues to increase, but the rate at which population is increasing moderates. This inflection point represents the ‘absolute maximum growth rate’ (AMGR) for population. AMGR will vary inversely with geographic size, with the lowest rates for States and the highest rates for block groups. The distribution of growth rates for all geographies within a class of geographies (States, counties, tracts) will be normally distributed about a mean.

Because population grows in a non-linear manner, future population can be better predicted through the use of non-linear projection methods than through linear extrapolations.

Metric and Methodological Test

Determine population growth rates at five levels of census geography: State, MSA, County, Tract, and Block Group for 7 ‘Rocky Mountain’ States, viz: Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.

Using the population growth rate from 1990 to 2000, a linear projection for 2000-2010 will be performed. That projection will compare count data from the 2000 census, and Percent Root Mean Square Error (PRMSE/%RMSE) for the linear projection will be calculated. The distribution of %RMSE error vs. population growth rates and population size will be tested using a series of logarithmic scaling efforts to determine if any correlation exists. Assuming some relationship exists, logarithmic curves will then be fit to the 4 population data points provided by the 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 censuses. The curves will then be split into 3 segments for the 3 inter-censal periods, and the ‘absolute maximum growth rate’ at each geographic scale determined in terms of linear percent change and non-linear logarithmic/exponential change. Use the 1980-1990 and 1990-2000 periods to make projections about future population for 1990-2000 and 2000-2010 and compare them to actual counts for those periods. Determine the %RMSE error for the logarithmic projection vs. the linear projection for each level of geography.

Results & Analysis of Results

‘charts and graphs, chart and graphs’

Conclusions

‘It works, except when it doesn’t’—and it doesn’t work under these conditions, because X’.

Further Research

Expanded geographic scope, analysis performed at block-group level.

Possible Applications

Small Area Plans population forecasting for inter-censal years: By establishing the ‘absolute maximum growth rate by geographic scale, it makes it possible to make forecasts of future population given only the current population and widely available spreadsheet software. Also makes possible to analyze the likelihood of a given growth rate for that geography, reducing tendency to use the ‘high end’ growth projection.

American Community Survey

2011-09-23T01:13:00.000-07:00

Replacement of the Census long-from with the American Community Survey has destroyed the capacity to perform multi-census analysis of many data series. Many factors for which it was previously possible to make highly reliable estimates even for small geographies, it is no longer possible to do so. The future holds great promise for those that can combine the data collected in the 2010 census with the data available through the American community survey to make accurate inferences about the broader population.

HSR not a panacea

2011-09-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

An excellent article Martin Buchert turned me on to: http://www.economist.com/node/21528294

To some extent, HSR is a 'solution looking for a problem'. Like the advantage of LRT over bus, some of the speed gains are created purely by bypassing stops* and concentrating activity into highly networked hubs.

Which makes me wonder about the new UTA bus system. UTA has unveiled a series of 'flex' buses that are demand-response (dial-a-ride**) rather than fixed route buses. It seems to be positively received, and will (hopefully) lead to fewer empty buses meandering through suburban neighborhoods in an effort to fulfill federally mandated coverage standards.

Perhaps the long-term evolution of transit network will be a 2-tier system--Flex shuttles ferrying people in and out, and long-straight high speed BRT and TRAX lines moving people from location to location. The key issue becomes 'peak hour' transportation, when everyone is trying to use the system at once. Make the 'Flex' shuttles larger, unto 40' buses? Or run two shuttles?

*How is that not a private taxi? -- Because it only drops you within its service area, or at the nearest transfer point.

*God knows Amtrak could use some of that.

Photo Morphing

2011-09-13T18:30:00.000-07:00

I attended a technical presentation by Fregonese Associates at Envision Utah on doing photomorphs--aka changing streetscapes over time.

Photomorphing--it doesn't have to be that good--just good enough to fill the eye, and let the brain fill in the rest. Start with a good image--maintain consistent lighting--minimal shadows. Picture big enough to convey changes in roadway right of way and streetscape. Enough 'blighted' or underused private property that can reward changes over time. Can shoot down centerline of street, or from one of the sidewalk corner, at edge of property lane. A 30-60 angle, to see down one street, to explore nature of pedestrian environment.

Add buildings--take a picture of a building you like, or cut it from your library--get perspective right, to get vanishing points right, take picture from the same angle. Use the transform features in photoshop to distort the building so it matches the picture.

Same for people and cars--rough cut out, including shadow, scale them basically right, pop them in. To scale people, use the height of the building. Follow vanishing lines. Taller buildings a little more complicated, because of lens distortion, but not much.

Spend the time to get shadows in, even if poorly done. To make a shadow--take a copy of the image, adjust brightness to zero to make them gray, then reduce transparency, then use the transform tool to distort it and squish it down so it sits and the feet.

Frego has entire LIBRARY of people and buildings and objects. Frego uses their pictures and cutting out the people. .png format. Frego has a library of about 30 people that they just use and re-use. Commercial Version is ArcVision.com--a photoshop plugin that provides a library of trees and people and images, including rotating people to many angles.

Cars can be tricky--may need to remove some cars. Use clone tool to clone nearby area, and paint out the other area. Follow the same vanishing plane. Aligned--pull from same distance from the point. Aligned--duplicate from original alt-selected point. Try to keep color profile identical to surrounding area.

Clean up the base image of temporary or obstructing items (cars, cones, power lines, streetlights).Use shadows/highlights to brighten things up--balances highs and lows of over and underexposure. Can automate a batch function in photoshop to do a series of tasks.--like records a macro in excel.

Corner bump-outs a big deal--reducing walk-out distances to cross the street. Wider streets actually SLOW traffic, because the width of rode requires longer pedestrian signals. 30 seconds on Seventh East. (ADA accessibility).

Dynamic Travel Assignment

2011-09-13T12:59:00.001-07:00

WFRC is building a new traffic model. I'm attending the update meeting, and taking notes. Thought I might as well publish them. I believe they are using Dynus-T.

Ability to model how people shift their routes or departure times in response to congestion, pricing, controls, incidents, and improvements. Also, understand how individual impacts affect entire region. Not as detailed as micro models, but capable of high-fidelity simulation of entire region. Not micro-simulation of individual cars.

Macro-Meso-Micro integration.
Travel Demand Model-->VISUM-->VISSIM
Automatically integrating data from the higher tier into the lower level of modeling as part of the model flow.

NEXTA.exe. Fort Worth Network in Dallas, 13 zones. Each link with data loaded.
Dynamic traffic assignment--can see traffic density over time.

TRANSIT WALK BUFFERS
--Transit network built on highway network. Cube model uses that info to extract data about how long transit trips will take, and how many people will take transit on that basis. But the percent of people who have walk-access to the transit station is a big question--what portion of pop/emp in a TAZ can do this?

WALKPCT identifies the percent of a zone that can actually walk to transit.

Local Bus--buffer around a line
TRAX/BRT--Buffer around stops.

Hiatus

2011-08-08T12:01:00.001-07:00

I'm going to be traveling in Iceland and Spain from August 7-23rd, so Outlook Tower is going to be on hiatus for a bit. I should have some interesting things to say and show when I get back. I get to ride the High Speed Rail in Spain I've been reading about so much.

Development Turnover

2011-08-08T10:26:00.001-07:00

"Look forty years ahead, every non-residential structure you see will be replaced". Chris Nelson suggests that we don't notice it, because it happens gradually, but it adds up over time. Buildings have a long useful life, and most building owners like to make money--as the building wears out, modernizing and maintenance costs increase, and the owner decides it is time to junk it and start over. For buildings with a useful life of 50 years, it will be demolished and replaced in year 33.

More Chris Nelson

2011-08-06T10:21:00.002-07:00

"2/3 of all new homes by 2040 would need to be built in half mile of transit, for the expanded TRAX network, to meet the transit accessibility demand of just the 1/4 of the population that wants to be able to use TRAX". Twenty years of new homes near TRAX..... it's a staggering number.

Chris Nelson on BRT

2011-08-04T10:23:00.000-07:00

Crunching data on the EMX in Eugene, Oregon, Chris Nelson just dropped a bomb--doesn't look like BRT does anything to affect location. The EMX, which is a 'good' BRT, with large stations, but minimal guideway. BRT has long been touted as an alternative to rail, which is cheaper but more efficient. This infers that it may be cheaper, but not actually that effective.

New TRAX!

2011-08-03T11:22:00.001-07:00

Interesting to finally hear where the lines are going. The talk I had head suggested that there was a great deal of demand between West Valley and the U of U. There are going to be a LOT of trains on the Stretch between Courthouse and 2100 South. All three lines use that stretch of track. I assume all three lines are going to run at 15 minute frequency, so that means a train every five minutes. Thirteenth South looks better and better as a TOD site.

I'm pleased to hear they've moved the transfer point away from Gallivan Center. It's a miserable station--cold and windy in the shadow of the Wells Fargo building. I won't miss the Juggaloes either. It is convenient to a number of amenities I'll miss though--an ATM at Wells Fargo, coffee at Sam Wellers, and AJ's convenience store. Still, only a block of walking away.

From the Utah Transportation Report:

UTA to launch Mid-Jordan, West Valley TRAX lines Sunday

SALT LAKE— Utah Transit Authority (UTA) will launch its Mid-Jordan and West Valley TRAX lines Sunday (Aug. 7), expanding significantly the region's light rail system.

UTA held opening ceremonies for both lines yesterday (Aug. 2) and will have the lines open today (Aug. 3) from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. to give the public a preview of the new lines. UTA is partnering with the Utah Food Bank for a "Food as Your Fare" food drive today; riders boarding at one of the new stations are invited to contribute a non-perishable food item as their fare.

As part of the system expansion, UTA is moving to a color-coded system for its different lines. The TRAX system will operate as the Blue (Sandy to Salt Lake Central), Red (Daybreak to University) and Green (West Valley to Salt Lake Central) lines.

Under the new configuration, Red line trains will run between the University of Utah Medical Center and Daybreak in South Jordan. Green line trains will run between West Valley and Salt Lake Central Station. Blue line trains will run between Sandy and Salt Lake Central Station.

The primary downtown transfer station between lines will be Courthouse (500 South). Travel between downtown and the University will require a transfer at Courthouse Station. The new Mid-Jordan line runs along the Bingham Branch Railroad corridor in a southwesterly direction branching off of the existing Sandy/Salt Lake light rail line at the 6400 South (Fashion Place) TRAX station and extending west to 5600 West. From there, the line turns south toward Kennecott's Daybreak development in South Jordan.

The West Valley line connects to the current Sandy Line at 2100 South and ends near West Valley City Hall. The line branches off from the Sandy to Salt Lake TRAX Line at the 2100 South Central Pointe station traveling west crossing under Interstate 15. After crossing the Jordan River, the line turns south and then westward to run north of the Redwood Nature Area and the Decker Lake drainage canal. It then travels through the Chesterfield neighborhood along the Cross Town Trail and continues west across Redwood Road to Research Way. After following Decker Lake Drive to 3100 South at the Maverik Center, the light rail line continues west on the south side of 3100 South, then turns south on 2700 West, crossing 3500 South and ending at the West Valley City Hall, across from the Valley Fair Mall.

Detailed schedule information is available at www.rideuta.com or by calling 801-RIDE-UTA (743-3882)

"And there is nothing you can do about it".

2011-08-02T10:13:00.003-07:00

According to Chris Nelson, to match the ability of the population to pay for housing to the housing supply, every unit of housing built between now and 2020 would need to be a rental. That clearly is not going to happen--but the distribution of prices has to match the distribution of income. So the system will have to reach equilibrium by converting existing owned homes into rental units--either the owner renting it out, or renting out part of the house (joint tenure).

Further, changing preferences mean we have a massive oversupply of exurban large-lot homes. Massive oversupply, combined with falling demand, and the prices is going to crash. Which means you are going to have a lot of poor people living in the suburbs, despite what they may want."What people want, and what people have to settle for". Now, all my planning education told me that was the eventual outcome of things--but I didn't expect it to happen so soon. 2020 is a real year, it's coming, I will be alive to see it. The world will be a very different place in my lifetime, and I know what that world will be like.

Time to buy urban land, I guess.

Gas Prices

2011-07-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

Sitting in a presentation for the Wasatch Choices 2040 consortium. Chris Nelson is presenting, and just noted that 'Gas prices increasing at 3 times the rate of inflation, at a very predictable rate. Gas will be about $8 a gallon in 2020'. He argues against peak oil, but says the exponential increase in demand from China and India will continue to generate increasing price increases. Assuming MPG increases, with hybrids becoming 'standard', and 30 MPG becoming the 'low' acceptable end. Still: big, powerful muscle cars may again become a luxury item

How many people want to be able to ride transit?

2011-07-28T10:03:00.006-07:00

From the Wasatch Choices 2040: "One quarter of people want to ABLE to use transit". Just did a quick estimate for Salt Lake County, and the proportion of the population within a half mile of TRAX. It was about ten percent of the county population. Thus, to match the desire demand, we need an enormous number of new houses in proximity to TRAX.

Now, that makes the logical jump that everyone who wants to be able to ride transit lives within a half mile to TRAX. That makes a certain amount of sense. I now live more than a mile from TRAX, and I never walk to TRAX. I also recently remeasured my daily walk to TRAX from my parents house, and it was far shorter than I had expected--about 2/3 of a mile, not the mile I had expected.

Schedule Change and Hiatus

2011-07-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

Greetings,

My apologies for the lack of updates/sporadic updates of late. I've been so busy doing things I haven't had time to write about things. That said, I'm reducing the rate of updates to three times a week, rather than every other day.

Dynamic Bus Map

2011-07-11T15:47:00.000-07:00

I know UTA has an RFP out for this, but the U of U already has one operating. Check it out!

Transit Benefits Non-Riders

2011-06-23T06:00:00.000-07:00

Don't believe me? Fine. Check it out here.

How Transit Benefits People Who Do Not Ride It: A Conservative Inquiry

By Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind

I'm going to reproduce the introduction here, because I'm as pleased as punch by it. It's by "The Honorable Robert F. Bennett United States Senator, State of Utah".

Do you use public transportation? Of course you do. Even if you live out in thecountry, you use public transportation when you drive to the city.

“No, I don’t,” you reply. “I drive all the way into the city. I don’t change from my carto a train or bus.”

That may be true, but you still use transit to help you get around. How? If it weren’t for public transportation, there would be thousands more cars on the road. You would spend hours more driving in or out of the city, because congestion would be far worsethan it already is. So even if you don’t ride public transit, you still use it, and it is still working for you

I was pleased and honored to be asked to write the foreword to this interesting and innovative study by Paul Weyrich and Bill Lind. Like them, I am a pro-transitconservative. I see public transportation as part of the infrastructure, no different from water lines and highways and services such as the police and the fire department. If infrastructure is inadequate, everybody suffers.
Here, Paul and Bill explain exactly how transit benefits people who do not ride it. Reducing traffic congestion for people who drive is just one way. As you will read here, there are many more.

Why is it important that people who do not ride transit understand that it benefits them? Because too often, when a transit measure is on the ballot, they vote against it. They think, “Why should I vote for this? It won’t do me any good.” They are wrong. When they vote no, they are hurting themselves. That transit issue onthe ballot will often benefit them, in the ways this study describes.

Democracy depends on informed voters, and this study will help voters understand public transportation in a new way. I hope it is widely read and discussed. I certainly intend to help distribute it in my state, and I will urge my colleagues in the Senate to dothe same. I congratulate the Free Congress Foundation on once again producing thekind of cutting-edge work for which it is so well known.

According the WFRC Travel Demand Model, the TRAX carries about a free-way lane's worth of traffic. Many bikers proudly wear a 'One Less Car' tag. Perhaps a train could wear a "1780 Less Cars" tag.

UTA Update

2011-06-22T19:08:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of the Utah Transportation Report:

Mid-Jordan, West Valley TRAX lines open in August

SALT LAKE—On Aug. 7, UTA will open the Mid-Jordan and West Valley TRAX lines. The Mid-Jordan line will travel from South Jordan to the University of Utah and replace the existing University line. The West Valley line will travel from West Valley City to downtown Salt Lake City. These new lines also bring many changes to UTA's bus system.

To prepare for the rail openings and to explore what UTA's riders wanted in the bus system UTA conducted an extensive outreach effort that included an online survey, a telephone survey and a series of open houses last fall. Using the information gathered during that effort, UTA planners developed two service proposals, which were put out for review and comment during a public comment period in March 2011. UTA received more than 900 comments on the proposals and based on those comments UTA has created a final service plan. The final plan addresses more than 60 percent of the comments received while still meeting UTA's goals. It is estimated ridership under the new plan will increase by 6 percent. UTA prides itself on listening to its riders and making changes where possible to meet both their needs and the budget concerns of the agency.

Examples of changes adopted due to comments are:
Most Sunday service will remain
Convert all Fast Bus routes to express routes with the exception of route 307, which will convert to local service.
This will allow some routes proposed for elimination to keep some trips.
Route 454 from Grantsville will retain one A.M. and P.M. trip (it previously had two and was proposed to be eliminated)
Make routing changes to some routes to provide better coverage to affected areas
Create several new flex routes to provide better coverage to affected areas
Maintain some service on several routes that were proposed to be cancelled
Operate the light rail lines as proposed
Timeline
July 7—Online schedules and trip planning available
Mid July—Printed schedules available
Aug. 7—New rail lines open and bus changes begin

I had to look up what UTA defined a 'Fast' bus as. Apparently, it just means limited stops, so that the 320 just ran the same route as the 220, with fewer stops. I seem to recall the 320 was a 'commuter' bus - five buses in the morning, five buses at night.

The 307 converting to local service.

I was started to learn their is a 207 bus. But it only runs from 5300 TRAX to 10000 South TRAX, along 7th East. I can't say I care for the 'TRAX to TRAX' route buses--Probably faster to get off at the nearest TRAX (64th, 72nd, 78th, 90th, 94th) station and walk 10 blocks east. Confusing, the 307 route runs a totally different route than the 207, despite the similarity in numbers. I'm glad to hear about the conversion to local service--it will be nice to have a local bus along 7th east.

The 'Express bus' seems to be UTA's 'Commuter Bus'. 5 buses in the morning, five buses at night, limited stops. (Which begs the question why the 'Fast Bus' distinction existed at all.)

Date for TRAX open moved up against--now August 7th, down from 17th.

Seems UTA also intends to provide a lot more of their 'coverage' service using Flex Buses, rather than scheduled service. I'd call that an improvement. But that's an issue for its own post.

Silver Line BRT

2011-06-21T06:01:00.000-07:00

This is what Class I BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) looks like.

Dedicated Right of Way
Concrete Roadbase (Smoother rider).
Limited Access/No Intersections
Electrified Bus
Articulated bus
Substantial Stations
Off-board fair collection
Multi-door boarding

LEED and Developers

2011-06-19T18:51:00.000-07:00

LEED refers to "Leadership in Environmental Efficiency in Design". It's a certification program run by the US Green Building Council, as a way to 'brand' sustainability, using a ratings system to establish how sustainable a building has been.

Various Federal agencies, State and local governments have supported sustainable building practices directly. Not just by endorsing LEED, but also by mandating that their own structures be LEED certified--a trend which appears to be spreading. Some places in California have also induced private developers to prefer LEED--in one case by having a separate queue for development review for LEED projects.

Developers are equivocal. While their is a growing recognition that LEED certified buildings do deliver in terms of lower construction costs and lower energy operating costs, LEED is regarded as complicated and time consuming. From developers, I hear: "It takes too long to certify a building--the approval process necessary to get a sticker is not worth the additional time it takes to do the development." In addition, receiving LEED certification required rigorous documentation of source materials and disposal options, resulting in additional cost an uncertainty.

LEED certification is controlled by the U.S. Green Building Council. While a non-profit, there are accusations that the cost of obtaining materials necessary to obtain and maintain certification are too high, and that the process of getting a building certified is tied up in development.

Perhaps city planners LEED certified, so they can check a building, rather than having a certified official at the LEED agency doing so. That would put the burden for development approval on local government. Planning and permitting would need to be able to evaluate LEED as well as compliance with building code, fire code, and zoning code, as well as assessing development impact fees. This seems possible-cities already use uniform national codes for evaluating traffic impacts, fire and structural safety. Most of planner labor (and stress) comes from local, highly specific issues regarding the zoning code. Applying an accepted national standard such as LEED seems plausible.

Gallivan Center

2011-06-17T06:41:00.000-07:00

For those in the know, Gallivan Center in Salt Lake City (the location of the highly successful Twilight Conference series) was closed two years ago, for reconstruction. Specifically, the north lawn was converted to the large structure on the right of the picture. Looks like the ice-skating rink is being removed (no great loss) as well as the semi-covered Pavilion that obstructed the view of the stage. Hopefully, the elevated 'bridge' that helped divide the block into a series of inter-penetrating plazas, rather than a single awkward field.

They've added a permanent concrete pad directly in front of the stage (where the concert wrecked the lawn). It looks like the aviary to the east of the stage has been removed, and a new covered plaza added to the north of where it used to be. The north-south axiality has been really strongly reinforced, adding a huge glowing pillar as a terminus at the South End. They've kept the central sun-dial rock+pillar, although most of the other elements of the sun-dial seem to have been sacrificed to axiality.

Understanding Land Developers

2011-06-15T06:16:00.000-07:00

Successful businesses are built on the premise of repeating economically profitable processes. Take inputs, add value, sell the outputs. Land Development is a business. The input is 'raw land', 'development' is the value added process, and the output is the *varied types* of building modern society demands. The issue of 'varied types' is key to understanding developers. To a developer, a development is a 'product'. Different developers make different types of products--some do housing developments, some commercial office, industrial, some retail. A few do highly specialized types--museums, student housing, etc. Regardless, each is regarded as a high-risk, high-margin business with high labor costs, high capital costs, and high financing costs. Getting any specific development project to 'pencil out' so that it is worth attempting, an then actually getting a project built, and then sold (or leased out) is an ongoing struggle. The fewer complications along the way, the better.

Repeating an economic process is made simpler, if your inputs, your process, and your outputs are as similar as possible. In development, none are easy--no two parcels are ever the same, you'll never face the same regulatory environment twice, and the market demand may collapse by the time you get done building it.

Why Mixed-Use Development (MXD) is so hard to do: Low volume. For a developer, it's not worth the time and the trouble to develop the expertise needed for a type of development that you are only going to develop once or twice. Developers conceptualize MXD differently than planners. To planners, it is how all new development should be. To a developer, it's a confusing set of new requirements to be negotiated with the city. When volumes for an economic activity are low, the activity tends to become centralized into a few places where the necessary expertise can be gathered. For MXD, this is more difficult. There are wildly different regulatory and development requirements from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and state to state.

Sustainable Development

2011-06-13T06:09:00.009-07:00

In a class on sustainable development for real estate majors. "How do we do sustainable development?" First, we must get to the root of "What is sustainable?" (Awkwardly, growth is the opposite of sustainability, and America has a political ideology *built* on growth, and the promise of future growth). I'm leery of the question "What is sustainable", because 'steady state sustainability' is a global issue, while development is a local issue.

'Using less' is not a theme that is going to resound with most Utahns--Envision Utah has gained ground beating the drum of 'efficiency', and promoting a sense of intergenerational sustainability ("Our children and grandchildren").

I think that their is a general understanding that to be MORE sustainable, we need to make better use of our resources. What that specifically MEANS is a very big question. It's a little confusing because it's not just a matter of traditional environmentalism--that the earth is worth saving on it's own merits--but that 'green' actions are a matter of enlightened self-interest (and inter-generational self interest).

So, what are we going to run out of?
Land? Water? Air? Roads?

No shortage of land in Utah. Not for development, not for open space. And even if we did pave it, we'd still have the National Parks/Forests/Monuments nearby. Water? Not yet. Water is funny. Looking at multi-century trends, Utah is very wet right now. Looking at the past five decades, we're not doing too badly. We have a couple of bad years where the reservoirs start to run dry, then we have a couple of good years and they fill up. Air? We're not running out of air, but we are running out of clean air. Living in a valley, most Utahns suffer when inversions trap cold, dirty air between the mountains under some warm air, so that is something that is present. Roads...we can always build more roads. And I think this is where Envision Utah does well. They start to stick a price tag on the COST of just 'build more'.

Kids and Walking

2011-06-11T06:45:00.001-07:00

Sitting in class, looking at an analysis that shows large households in mixed use developments generate more trips than smaller households, contrary to some expectations (not my own). I grew up in a suburb, and I was driven everywhere. While there are no stores within a half mile, there are a lot of retail destinations within a mile, including a regional mall. My neighborhood was bordered to the east and the south by five lane arterial roads (106th South and State Street). Crossing the street was extremely dangerous. Thinking back, I cannot recall EVER crossing these streets as an elementary school student (with or without parents).

I didn't start traveling alone until junior high. Almost all of which was along an abandoned railroad corridor, a canal path, and a residential street. I regularly crossed two arterial streets. Both had center turn lanes far from curb-cuts, and one was at a railroad crossing. Had those not existed...I may not have walked anywhere at all.

I'd hypothesize that more kids means more driving. Teenagers (especially in places with graduated licenses) are the primary suburban pedestrians. Anyone old enough to both have a license and a car drives. Suburban transit is commuter-centric: Long distance, peak-hour buses.

Two Trillion Dollars

2011-06-09T06:18:00.000-07:00

"The nation will need to invest an estimated $2 trillion just to rebuild deteriorating networks and more money to expand or at least maintain infrastructure that encompasses roads and bridges as well as water lines, sewage treatment plants, and dams."

—From the Urban Land Institute report on Infrastructure
(Courtesy of the Utah Transportation Report)

It feels like the United States has gotten old, and become a 'developed nation' like western Europe. A lot of the East Coast was already that way (creaky infrastructure, high taxes) but now California seems to be making the transition. Texas, the new 'young buck', doesn't have the liabilities of old infrastructure, and so doesn't get it. Funny how certain things are scale indeterminant--states follow the exact pattern of cities in a metropolitan area.

Equity and Taxes

2011-06-07T12:49:00.000-07:00

American's making over 200K a year pay 60% of the total income tax dollars.

This strike many as unfair. Never mind that the difference in tax rates used to be much, much more substantial.

However, there are certain equity issues that have emerged that are causing serious unrest. In the last 40 years, income growth has not kept pace with GDP growth, and has barely kept pace with inflation.

So what's the deal? If the poor aren't getting the money, and the wealthy are being taxed to death, what is going on?

It appears that it's an enforcement issue. (A matter of 'creative accounting', if you will). The really wealthy aren't paying taxes, and so the tax rate has to go up for everyone else to make the difference. The higher the rate goes, the more incentive there is for people who can afford an accountant to indulge in 'creative accounting'. It's not a new problem. European nations with high tax rates (France, Britain, Italy) are famous for their tax cheats. Some people owe millions in back taxes.

The solution lies not in more regulation, but in more enforcement. And in measures to make enforcement simpler--a simpler tax code, with fewer deductions and exemptions.

Housing Bubble Goes On

2011-06-05T12:24:00.000-07:00

Never trust a trade industry publication. The National Association of Realtors is cooking the books again. The graph below LOOKS great--time to buy a house! But wait... what are they using? Ah. Not median income (as any sensible person would), but 'per capita disposable income'. Per capita disposable income is an average, and like all averages, is prone to distortion due to large outliers.

Given that the distribution of income in the United States follows a log distribution, can begin to understand how the presence of a few thousand millionaires begins to skew the numbers.

The reality shows that it will be a couple more years. Political Calculations had a good graphic on it:

The housing bubble will finally be deflated when that blue segmented line meets the dashed green line. But that may be a while. Housing prices are sticky, there has been some massive Federal intervention, and there is a huge 'shadow inventory' of bank owned homes that aren't even on the market yet.

But have hope--the crisis part of things is over. Prices are showing a 'steady' oscillation pattern, and the inflation adjusted housing price should meet the trend line within a couple of years.

But an undershoot remains a very real possibility. The years 1997 to 2000 seems to have been a 'reversion to mean' period, followed by the frantic escalation between 2000 and 2006..at which point the 'teaser' rates on ARM mortgages began to reset, and mortgage defaults began, coming to fullness only in 2008. Historic undershoots of the trend line look to have been in the 8-10% range, and it's not impossible we might see that again. Still, it's been almost two decades since we've seen that much amplitude in the oscillation of housing prices.

"From my understanding, each city has it's own city planner"

2011-06-04T18:13:00.000-07:00

The mutual incomprehension with which planners and developers regard one another is literally flabbergasting.

2011-06-01T11:27:00.001-07:00

The Melbourne Urbanist has a pretty great graphic:

The post discusses 'peak travel', the idea that the industrialized world has hit a peak, and gross Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) will never be as high as they were in mid-2007. Gas prices are frequently mooted as the cause, which seems plausible.

But what struck me was less then decline in per capita miles traveled then the decline in Per Capita GPD. Historically, there has been a strong correlation between vehicle miles driven and economic growth, but the exact causal relationship has always been fuzzy--do richer countries drive more, or is more driving required for greater economic activity? The latter is a favorite argument of the road lobby.

But gas prices are high, additional credit constrained, and American consumers are broke. I theorize that the price of gas has disrupted the American economic engine in unanticipated ways. It's not just businesses that are suffering from high gas prices, but employees. The Journey to Work is typically the farthest Americans travel in a week, and thus the one that uses the most gas. When gas was cheap, it made sense to live far from your job, where housing was cheap. The time-cost was high, but time is cheaper than gas.

With the housing market frozen, moving is much more difficult, so 'home' is fixed, and workers have to choose from jobs that are close enough that they can afford to drive there. And thus we have lingering long-term employment.

Transit and Journey to Work (JTW)

2011-05-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

There is a famous census table called the 'journey to work', which asks "What mode of travel did you take to work'?, and lists alternatives such as 'private automobile', 'motorcycle', 'carpooled', 'worked from home', and a couple of different forms of transit.

The actual percent of people who take transit to work is pretty low. As the figure from Netdensity.net shows, the vast majority of American's drive to work alone. Anti-transit propagandists like to harp that this number is little changed, despite significant investments in transit over the last decade. Portland is a favorite target, because it shows minimal mode-shift, despite enormous record transit construction.

But I was reading the latest Brookings report, and this phrase struck me:

The typical metropolitan resident can reach about 30 percent of jobs in their metropolitan area via transit in 90 minutes.

Using Mode share to estimate transit usage is using the wrong divisor--it's like being told someone 'drove' from Florida to Puerto Rico--impossible. (Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that 1.5 hours is a reasonable amount of time to spend traveling to work--it's not). If only 30% of the jobs can be reached by transit, then the effective transit mode share needs to be revised. Multiple that by the mode share, you get a bit over 16%. If we lower the travel time to something saner (an hour), I'll bet the multiple rises, and so does the actual share of work-trips being made by transit, until it start looking a lot more like Melbourne, Australia:

Looking at the whole metro area, the car is clearly dominant. Looking at the CBD (a transit-rich area) and things look very different.

Salt Lake City Piling up the Accolades

2011-05-29T10:49:00.002-07:00

The Utah Transportation Report tells me that:

SALT LAKE—A national study on transit by the Brookings Institution listed Salt Lake the third best city in the U.S. for coverage and job access for a transit system and noted that 15 of the top 20 cities are in the West.

The study found that 89 percent of Salt Lake City metro area residents are near a transit stop; transit users wait an average 8.5 minutes for a transit vehicle during rush hour; and 59 percent of all jobs in the metro area are reachable via transit in 90 minutes or less.
In addition to Salt Lake City, top performers include Honolulu, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, Tucson, Fresno and Las Vegas.

The study found that public transit is a critical part of the economic and social fabric of metropolitan areas. Nearly 30 million trips are made every day using public transit. Almost all of these trips occur in the nation's 100 largest metro areas, which account for over 95 percent of all transit passenger miles traveled. People take transit for any number of reasons, but one of the most common is to get to work.

However, when it comes to the question of how effectively transit connects people and jobs within and across these metropolitan areas, strikingly little is known. With governments at all levels considering deep budget cuts, it is increasingly important to understand not just the location and frequency of transit service, but ultimately how well transit aligns with where people work and live. To better understand these issues, the Metropolitan Policy Program developed a comprehensive database that provides the first comparable, detailed look at transit coverage and connectivity across and within the nation's major metro areas.
An analysis of data from 371 transit providers in the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas reveals that:

Fifteen of the 20 metro areas that rank highest on a combined score of transit coverage and job access are in the West. Top performers include metro areas with noted transit systems such as New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, but also Honolulu, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Fresno, and Las Vegas. Conversely, 15 of the 20 metro areas that rank lowest are in the South.

These trends have three broad implications for leaders at the local, regional, state, and national levels. Transportation leaders should make access to jobs an explicit priority in their spending and service decisions, especially given the budget pressures they face.

Metro leaders should coordinate strategies regarding land use, economic development, and housing with transit decisions in order to ensure that transit reaches more people and more jobs efficiently. And federal officials should collect and disseminate standardized transit data to enable public, private, and non-profit actors to make more informed decisions and ultimately maximize the benefits of transit for labor markets.

Nearly 70 percent of large metropolitan residents live in neighborhoods with access to transit service of some kind. Transit coverage is highest in Western metro areas such as Honolulu and Los Angeles, and lowest in Southern metro areas such as Chattanooga and Greenville. Regardless of region, residents of cities and lower-income neighborhoods have better access to transit than residents of suburbs and middle/higher-income neighborhoods.

In neighborhoods covered by transit, morning rush hour service occurs about once every 10 minutes for the typical metropolitan commuter. In less than one quarter of large metro areas (23), however, is this typical service frequency, or "headway," under 10 minutes. These include very large metro areas such as New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Washington. Transit services city residents on average almost twice as frequently as suburban residents.
The typical metropolitan resident can reach about 30 percent of jobs in their metropolitan area via transit in 90 minutes. Job access differs considerably across metro areas, from 60 percent in Honolulu to just 7 percent in Palm Bay, reflecting variable transit coverage levels and service frequencies, and variable levels of employment and population decentralization. Among very large metro areas, the share of jobs accessible via transit ranges from 37 percent in Washington and New York to 16 percent in Miami.

About one-quarter of jobs in low- and middle-skill industries are accessible via transit within 90 minutes for the typical metropolitan commuter, compared to one-third of jobs in high-skill industries. This reflects the higher concentration of high-skill jobs in cities, which are uniformly better served by transit. It also points to potentially large accessibility problems for workers in growing low-income suburban communities, who on average can access only about 22 percent of metropolitan jobs in low- and middle-skill industries for which they may be most qualified.

You can read more about it at Brookings, or download the full report here.

Data Trove

2011-05-28T10:31:00.004-07:00

Apparently, the University of Michigan has an impressive trove of metropolitan travel survey data. It's funny to which learning to do research in any given field is an exercise in knowing where to go for what data resources, and who to call on when you get in trouble.

Prediction of Future Confusion

2011-05-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

I was browsing UTA's website, and came across this map, for the West Valley Trax line.

It will take a few years, but eventually friends and family will start asking me why the Trax line doesn't just go east, along the rail line for the Sugarhouse streetcar, and the need for a transfer. "Why can't the TRAX just use the Streetcar tracks? To me, the answer is clear: Different types of trains, so different types of funding, so different projects.

But it raises an interesting point regarding expert knowledge: What is common sense to me is not to my non-expert/non-professional friends and family. But I still need to be able to articulate that understanding, and to do so on a ad-hoc basis: There is not time to prepare a lengthy exposition. I need a ten word 'elevator answer'. And that, I increasingly come to believe, is the essence of expertise: The seemingly effortless performance of public competence.

What will my ten word explanation be? "TRAX trains are too heavy". The issues of rail types, station spacing, double track versus single track, and the engineered weight capacities of different soil types are irrelevant.

Car Pool Lanes Statistics

2011-05-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

Car Pool Lanes, according to SLC Trib.
Take a look quick, before the pay wall goes up for this week!

Break down of users goes like this:
60% - Car pool
30% - Easy Pass Users
4% - Clean Fuel
2% - Motorcycles
1% - Buses

The car pool lane is 10 mph faster than the regular lanes. About 9,000 people bought transponders. Seems to me that there is an untapped market for congestion pricing out there.

Utah Transportation Report

2011-05-25T10:14:00.002-07:00

The Utah Transportation Report is a great blog that updates regularly. I signed up for his emails, and I've been enjoying them quite a bit. Check it out!

North Temple Transfer Station

2011-05-24T16:07:00.000-07:00

I had heard tales of a North Temple Transfer Station between Trax and FrontRunner, but no official confirmation. You can read about it in the Deseret News here or watch the video here. I won't call the station pretty, (it's very utilitarian) but it's not hideous either. It will be nice to have alternative access/egress from the viaduct--viaducts are never comfortable walking environments because it's impossible to detour. It would be really nice if the FrontRunner station on the ground level also connected to the local street grid. I didn't see any ticket vending machines or seating in the video, but that may be a lack in the animation, rather than a lack in planning.

TRAX News

2011-05-22T15:53:00.010-07:00

With the SLC Tribune's Paywall, the Deseret News has become the best source for TRAX updates. I was reading up there, and I thought I'd compile a list of TRAX related articles:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705371617/West-Valley-TRAX-line-now-finished.html
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705365400/North-Temple-businesses-coping-during-TRAX-construction.html
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700082085/Airport-TRAX-line-ahead-of-schedule.html
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705343553/UTA-plans-open-house-for-Mid-Jordan-line.html
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700041456/New-TRAX-cars-help-give-disabled-riders-greater-independence.html

TRAX vs. Bus

2011-05-20T04:38:00.000-07:00

Living in a suburb of Salt Lake city, I walked a mile to reach the TRAX Light Rail every morning. It's not uncommon for me to walk a mile home from the TRAX. But I've NEVER walked that far to catch a bus, despite years of being car dependent. Part of that is Salt Lake Counties peculiar geography--in a mountain valley, it's hard to more than a mile or two from a TRAX station. But part of it is the sheer dependability of TRAX. I'll walk a mile rather than wait 15 minutes for a bus, even heavily loaded. It is less uncertain and less boring. 'High capacity' transit is bundled with a whole host of other transit improvements, and those improvements provide a great deal of the benefit we associate with rail transit.

SLC Downtown Streetcar

2011-05-18T05:14:00.085-07:00

I was reading a post on stop spacing at Human Transit where Jarrett Walker talks about streetcars vs light rail, and makes the distinction:

The terms streetcar/tram and light rail will be most useful if we use them to refer to the prevailing stop spacing, not the exclusivity of the right-of-way.

Staring at the last graphic, I had an epiphany: With the addition of so many stations in downtown, and such indirect routing, TRAX is being asked to operate as a streetcar. It's kind of an open secret that the TRAX ridership between the Arena Station and the Salt Lake Central Station kind of sucks. Old Greek Town station is FAR too close to both Salt Lake Central Station and Planetarium Station. Salt Lake's blocks may be 660' long, but stop spacing for transit is supposed to be about twice that.

From 10000 South in Sandy to about 500 South (Courthouse) in Salt Lake, stations on the TRAX line are about a mile apart. The 900 South stop breaks the pattern, but it was a mid-point stations added later as an early effort by UTA to promote TOD. SLC then Mayor Rocky Anderson then demanded TWO additional stations when the TRAX line was extendend from Arena to Salt Lake Central Station. But as a result, between 1300 South and Salt Lake Central Station, there are now *9* TRAX stations over a distance of 3 miles, and it takes about half hour to cover the distance. That gives it an average speed of about 10 minutes a mile.While the stop spacing is reasonable for 'local' transit service, it's kind of a waste to use Light Rail for that purpose. TRAX covers the distance between 10000 South and 1300 South in LESS time than it takes to wind through downtown, at a speed in excess of 60 MPH.

Ergo, efforts should be made to preserve TRAX for rapid transit, and use a different (and less expensive) vehicle for downtown circulation. Perhaps a streetcar....

UTA 2 Go Trip Planner

2011-05-17T17:50:00.000-07:00

The UTA trip planner remains as frustrating to use as ever. It's a great idea with (unremarkably) poor implementation. The UTA trip planner relies on recognizing addresses*. The software that runs the trip planner relies on matching the address you enter to an address in its database.

The geodatabases used for the software are typically derived from U.S. postal files--great for keeping track of where to send mail, less useful for finding a physical address. Further, differences in notation may confuse the software. "150 S State Street" may be parsed as:

15000 South, State Street
150 South, State Street
150 South State Street

But UTA is hardly alone--this is characteristic of most transit planning tools.
I recall Portland's as being remarkably different, with one reason: It did not rely on addresses, but on intersections. I recall it as being something like this:

START: "23rd @ Burnside"
END: " Burnside @ NE 6th AVE"

Needless to say, there are vastly fewer intersections than addresses, making it much easier to for the software to find a match, making finding a start and end location much faster.

*The trip planner also recognizes some landmarks. Finding out which ones are acceptable is a matter of trial and error. "U of U" is not, while "University of Utah Bookstore" is.

Old Greek Town Station needs to go

2011-05-16T05:22:00.002-07:00

Currently, SLC has a problem: It's kind of an open secret that the TRAX ridership between the Arena Station and the Salt Lake Central Station kind of sucks. And I think I know why: Old Greek Town station is FAR too close to both Salt Lake Central Station and Planetarium Station. Salt Lake's blocks may be 660' long, but stop spacing for transit should be about 1200', and the station is within 1000' of both. I know WHY it's there--SLC's former Mayor, Rocky Anderson, demanded it as a nexus for additional 'Transit Oriented Development' in downtown. It was a bad idea at the time, but UTA permitted it because Salt Lake City was paying for the line.

Along the Sandy line, each additional TRAX stop adds about 3 minutes to the journey. Downtown, I'd estimate it's greater. The Sandy line has dedicated Right of Way, and so never needs to deal with traffic lights. Downtown, making the stop at Greek town means the train has to match up with the traffic light. When it fails to do so, that requires waiting for the light to cycle, adding another minutes worth of wait time.

Adding the 9400 South TRAX station cost about $2.1, so closing a station represents a pretty blatant waste of funds, plus the additional political cost of confusion by riders attempting to board or disembark at a non-functional station.

UTA 2 Go Trip Planner

2011-05-14T17:39:00.000-07:00

I am glad that UTA has moved the trip planner onto the front of the web-page.

But it could still take a line U-Car-Share on usability. My U-Car-Share account lets me add several different locations--not just work and home, but as many as I want. That would be a great function to add to the trip planner. About 75% of my transit use is between 3 locations (Home, work, school) , and 95% of the rest of my transit use starts at one of these locations, it would be great help to already have 1/2 of the data filled in.

The airlines have been doing it for years. Both Southwest and Delta have been pretty good about anticipating what flights I'm going to be interested in.
Given that over half my flights are either to Phoenix, AZ or NYC, NY, this makes a certain amount of sense.

Salt Lake City Downtown Streetcar Route

2011-05-10T06:00:00.063-07:00

Thought I'd push this up for broader public consumption:

I'm confused and not a little displeased by the routing in Phase 1. Specifically, by the bizarre 'jag' at 450/500 West. A quick inspection of the aerial image furnishes the reason why: There is a historic railroad station in the way.

But why detour down to 300 South at all? The initial proposed routes were much more direct.

I expect the land uses as 300 S. were too much of a temptation to avoid. There is large hotel and quite a few restaurants one the street. When building a streetcar line, the urge to connect ALL the 'dots' can be overwhelming. Going under the station had previously been discussed, but the FTA has specifically inveighed against tunnels in the Small Starts instructions. Tunnels tend to be vastly more expensive, even without the consideration of the difficulty of building a tunnel underneath a historic structure.

All said, I am opposed to that part of the alignment. TRAX is already located along 200 South. Building a second high capacity transit line within a block the the existing one smacks of hubris. The FTA will never fund it, and without Federal funding, it will never get built. Far better to make use of all the existing TRAX track along 200 S.

The rest of the alignment seems reasonable. It will pass directly by the Salt Palace convention center, the US Bank building on Main Street, Gallivan Center, the Marriott Hotel, and there are two major office towers at 250 East and 200 South.

The '2 the U' bus on 200 S. has excellent ridership, carrying riders from FrontRunner and TRAX to an area just sufficiently far enough from TRAX to be inconvenient. Hopefully, the stop spacing is done properly, so that the stations lay between TRAX stations and not directly parallel to them. That will reduce competition with TRAX for riders.

Assume the existing TRAX station at 500 W. is used. That puts the next station between 200 and 300 West. Probably closer to 300 West, because the Salt Palace will certainly have one on their doorstep, on 100 West Street. I'd expect one at Gallivan as well--there are some very tall buildings there, and it would facilitate the transfer to TRAX. That would put the next stop at 200 East, where the alignment turns. I'd lay money they put the station after the turn, putting the final station on the South side of 100 South, just east of the Questar Gas office tower.

Bus Lanes

2011-05-08T12:36:00.000-07:00

Much as I love how distinctly painted Bus Lanes are, I dislike them for reasons of economy. Road paint and it's pretty expensive--Something like 15 cents a square foot. Meaning a mile of painted bus lane (an acre of paint) costs about $9,000 to renew. And road paint doesn't last very long--it needs to be renewed about every three years.

As a temporary measure to impress upon drivers that the bus lane is NOT a normal traffic lane, I approve. But long-term, something else needs to be done. Shifting to a zebra stripe or chevrons instead of a solid would certainly help out, the longterm will probably involve painted rumble markers.

Enforcement is also key--note the car in the bus lane. According to the 'Broken Windows' theory of crime, this guy is merely the test case. If he can get away with it, everyone will be doing it.

20 year MAX planning

2011-05-06T17:20:00.001-07:00

MAX currently only runs west of I-15. What if it were to be extended East, all the way along 3300 South, to where the road terminates at the junctions of I-215? A quick look at Google maps shows Eastwood Elementary School is located at the terminus of 3300 South. To me, this would make an excellent location for a future Transit Center.

The North parking lot is already clearly designed for bus use, and the playground leaves ample paved area for additional parking. Further, it's not impossible to convert an existing school into alternative uses. Kennedy School in Portland in a fine example of what can be done.

Further, Summit County (home of Park City) has recently indicated a desire to join the Utah Transit Authority, and so link up bus service between SLC and Park City. So a bus comes down from Summit County, and ends at the 'Eastwood Transit Center', which is the terminus for three other routes:

'MAX East' along 3300 South westward for 3300 South TRAX station and existing 'MAX West'
Foothill/University/Downtown MAX*
Current 313/810 buses

This would solve several issues: It would provide access for west-side service workers to the University of Utah and Park City, reduce demand on I-80, and fix Foothill Boulevard.

Foothill Boulevard is a perpetual mobility problem. I-215 is built too far east to serve its intended transportation purpose. Pushed up agains the mountain, it can only draw users from the west. Further, it fails to reach the University of Utah. And so Foothill drive handles all the traffic bound northbound and westbound from I-215 and I-80.

The T-bone of I-215, I-80 and Foothill has long made the area unsuitable for rail transit like TRAX. But a series of BRT with a central transfer point would be an effective solution.

*Stops at Stringham Avenue, Skyline Drive, Foothill Village, Mario Cappechi Drive, Rice-Eccles Stadium, and SLC Central Station.

Transit Tourist

2011-05-04T13:42:00.000-07:00

Much as I enjoyed the 'bucket list; of JMD's post, I don't think it reflects my own transit experience particularly well, since a substantial portion of my experience comes from outside the country. I've also riden a fair number of private transit systems I think are worthy of inclusion.
What I've ridden:

2000: MTC Subway (NYC), San Francisco Bay Area - BART, Portland MAX (Blue Line)
2002: UTA Bus (SLC), Valley Metro Bus (Phoenix), UTA TRAX (SLC)
2003: Paris Metro, Paris RER, French TGV,TrenItalia, Monaco Metro
2007: Long Island Rail Road, Washington DC - Metro, Portland MAX (Airport Line), Portland Streetcar
2010: MTC Bus (NYC), GreyHound, BoltBus, Chinatown Bus, Boston Green +Silver Lines, Chicago 'Loop', Phoenix 'Metro'

As I said in a previous post, there have been a number of cities I've visited, where the system seemed too similar to what I already knew to bother ride. Denver and Baltimore LRT systems being notable examples. But there are a fair number of cities I visited where I didn't get a chance to explore the transit system. I particular regret missing out on Baltimore's subway system, the Eugene 'Emerald Express' (EMX) and the Albuquerque 'RoadRunner'.

Platform Screen Doors

2011-05-02T16:45:00.002-07:00

Apparently, the system of dual-doors for the platform and the train I see characteristic on the JFK SkyTrain is rapidly become the 'norm' for metros, instead of the NYC-subway style system where you can touch the train directly from the platform.

Many of the the NYC subway trains run multiple conductors, to make sure that everyone is clear of the trains, and that no one is 'subway surfing' by clinging to the edge of the train doors. Given that labor costs are one of the major drivers of transit service, reducing long-term costs by the installation of a labor-saving feature seems like a reasonable thing to do.

The only issue is door spacing. Without screen doors on the platforms, the train doors can open anyplace on the platform, and transit agencies can run any combination of any style of trains, in any sequence. With screen doors, the distance between doors has to become an industry standard.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)

2011-04-30T16:25:00.000-07:00

While reading about the Ottawa bus network on the Transit Politic, this quote struck me:

"Unlike most “BRT” lines in North America, ’s are mostly grade-separated, producing actually high-speed buses".

One of the questions I get asked the most is when I talk about transit is "What is BRT? How does it differ from a bus?" For me, the distinction is as follows:

Class III - 'Basic': Longer hours, 15 minute service, special branding, substantial stations, CNG/Electric bus, signal pre-emption.
Class II - 'Arterial': Dedicated lanes, off-board fare collection, 3 door boarding.
Class I - 'Busway': Limited access, often grade separated, with no traffic lights.

To my knowledge, the only cities in the world with Class I BRT are Brisbane, Ottawa, and arguably Curitiba.

Open Streets

2011-04-29T07:30:00.000-07:00

Taking a festival day and closing the streets to cars had been discussed for Salt Lake City. Looks like Minneapolis has already beaten us to the punch.

Gotta build something

2011-04-28T16:59:00.000-07:00

I was reading about housing starts today, and this phrase struck me:

Construction started on buildings with five or more units at an annual rate of 171,000 units, the highest level in two years. The rate of starts for single-family homes was the lowest in almost two years.

I find it tremendously cheering. Five years ago, I remain the general despair at the thought of ever getting builders to shift toward developing multi-family properties. "No one will build multi-family, because developers have no experience at it". But the current oversupply of single family homes has changed that--if you've got a construction company, you've got to build something or go broke. Even if you fire everyone, you've still got cost of capital. So builders are switching.

The techniques for building town homes and condos really aren't that different from those used to build mansions and large house. Extra bedrooms, guest bathrooms, second kitchens, second furnaces and water heaters. Simply a matter of adding a few extra walls.

In the long-term, demand for single family homes will resume. But the skills for building decent multi-family units will have been developed, and that will do a lot to overcome the friction associated with developing TOD.

Transit Benchmarks

2011-04-25T01:14:00.000-07:00

Mountain Line Transit in Missoula, Montana has a benchmark that a bus trip should be "no greater than 200% of automobile trip time". While I initially found the idea ridiculous, I came to recognize while the benchmark may be set low, the idea of benchmarks was an excellent idea.

A co-worker once told me that the purpose of accounting is not fairness or equity in distribution, but a technique for detecting what produces value. There are a raft of possible improvements that transit agencies can spend their funding on. Many transit agencies spend far too little on tracking their own performance, and as a result are unable to assess the success or failure of their own efforts. Without rigorous accounting, there is a danger that transit improvements will be limited to what is politically palatable, or the 'flavor of the week'. Worse still, without metrics, when program and policy efforts prove ineffective, transit agencies have little justification for cutting them when faced by an active and vocal campaign by a narrow interest group.

How good is your transit? Has it gotten better? How will you know when it does?

Bad Mapping

2011-04-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

This is a terrible map.

It imitates this far more successful map.

The latter map is based on actual neighborhood boundaries, and does a far better job of representing the actual size of different neighborhoods, and their actual relation to one another. Come to think of it, I've never actually seen a good map of Salt Lake City's neighborhoods. I'll have to take a shot at it sometime.

Consistency Matters

2011-04-22T20:01:00.001-07:00

I have friends who would never willingly ride a bus who will eagerly take a ride on TRAX. I cannot blame them. TRAX was the start of my love affair with Salt Lake City transit. The fundamental difference between TRAX and a bus is reliability--TRAX can keep a schedule. When I was commuting to the University of Utah from Sandy, I knew, to the minute, when TRAX left Sandy station and arrived at the University of Utah.

Much as I support buses, I cannot muster any love for them. Because I cannot trust a bus. By its very nature, a bus is an unreliable beast. No bus can keep a schedule, and the sheer uncertainty of that is maddening. Even when I rode a bus daily to work, I still found myself doing the 'bus bob', craning my neck down the street to look and see if the bus was coming yet. When the bus actually came varied by weather conditions, by time of day, and by individual driver. It was actually pleasing when a regular driver was consistently ten minutes late every day. I knew exactly when I had to be at the stop and I no longer had to stand in the cold for ten minutes every morning, waiting for a bus that the schedule claimed had already arrived.

The bus schedule was worse than useless. It only shows what time the bus is supposed to come, not when it actually will. It is possible and even likely to arrive ten minutes before the schedule time, and wait 20 minutes to catch a bus. But with 15 minute headways between buses or trains, there is only one chance to catch the right bus, so everyone is forced to be early, just to be sure. Thus, irregular arrival times vastly increasing their door to door travel time, to the enormous detriment of ridership.

Drinking and Transit

2011-04-20T01:42:00.000-07:00

Taxi's are far too costly unless you live relatively near where you happen to be drinking. Including tip, a taxi will run about $2 a mile. As a result, when coming home from the bar, there are a lot of people who are certainly over the legal limit. When available, people take transit. It would be a far better thing if there was a 'last train' or 'last bus' at 1 or 2 am. Many times when I would have liked to stay downtown, drinking that were made impossible by the need to catch the last TRAX home.

Salt Lake continues to try and build itself up as Utah's entertainment capital, for dining, restaurants and nightlife. But under budget pressure, UTA continues to cut service, so that the last TRAX train leaves earlier and earlier. The last train once left Gallivan station headed south at 11:24p. Now it is 11:14p, and plans call for cutting it to 11:00p. If Salt Lake wants to be a grown up city, something needs to be done about extending the transit curfew.

Center Change

2011-04-15T19:36:00.000-07:00

While my heart is for non-automobile transportation, any alternative to road widening is a good alternative. And that means making more efficient use of existing roadways. The least efficient part of the urban road network are the intersections. 100% of the traffic volume from two streets trying to share the same space by taking turns. And every time the other road gets it turn, and the lights switch, everyone has to start up and get up to speed. Just in time to slow down and stop at the next light, and then stand idling. Extremely inefficient. The obvious solution is to double the space of the roadway. But that's very problematic because of big rigs. Every bridge needs to be tall enough to drive a semi-truck under, strong enough to support (multiple) semi-trucks at once, and gentle enough curves and slope that you can drive a semi-truck on it. As you can imagine, that tends to make overpasses very bulky bits of construction.

Which is why I'm always pleased to see new alternatives to full interchanges. Bangerter Highway is proving a very innovative area. It already has two Continuous Flow Intersections (CFI) and there are plans to try out some other new tricks, such as the 'Center-Change'. According the Deseret News, the idea is in planning for the 3100 and 4100 South intersections at Bangerter Highway. While the construction will suck, it seems like a worthwhile change. The CFI intersections were certainly a major improvement over the previous 'Dual-Left-Turn' intersections.

Decline and Fail of Portland's Planning

2011-04-13T19:35:00.000-07:00

Portland has lost its 'crown' as a transportation Mecca not because its done badly, but because it has ceased innovating. When Portland created the first bus couplet, it was the first in the nation. It later lead in the adoption of Light Rail, and then in Streetcar. But the 'Grand Plan' for the next 20 years? A massive streetcar network. Not to slander streetcar, but it is a low speed, high access, short-hop mode of transit. You can build a downtown around it, but not a modern metropolis.

FrontRunner Blues

2011-04-11T19:13:00.001-07:00

According to Wikipedia, "Ridership as of the fourth quarter of 2009 is just under the projected 5,830 to 9,037 persons per day traveling on the line that was predicted."

It's not that the ridership is bad--it's just that it could be so much better. The system is really designed to handle crushing loads. FrontRunner uses bi-level Bombardier cars. Each car can seat about 360 people. Assuming each train-set consists of 3 cars, that's about a thousand person capacity per day. Trains run hourly, with some additional peak service, for a rough total of 60 trains per day. Thus, without adding additional cars, FrontRunner could theoretically handle 60,000 riders a day. That's about twice as many as Bangerter Highway currently carries.

But FrontRunner was built on the basis of projections made as the housing bubble was inflating--it looked reasonable to assume that all of Davis and Weber Counties were going to be converted into housing developments within 10 ten years. When the housing bubble explode, that plan went to bits.

Flux and Flow

2011-04-07T19:02:00.022-07:00

Salt Lake City has a 'daytime' population almost three times its resident population. With a resident population of about 200,000 people, that means about 400,000 people enter and leave the city every weekday. While intra-urban circulation is critical for quality of life for Salt Lake City citizens, inter-urban circulation is key for Salt Lake City's business environment. Congestion can literally choke the life out of cities. All economic activity depends on transportation access--nobody can make money if their employees can't make it to work. TRAX is so successful as an Inter-Urban access point. Like I-15, it links Salt Lake City to places all over the Salt Lake Valley (and beyond). When planning for Salt Lake City, this dynamic can't be ignored. The most demanding needs for mobility do not originate within Salt Lake City.

'Smart Lake City' -- Smart Parking Meters.

2011-04-07T11:35:00.003-07:00

According to USA-Today, 'Smart' parking meters are coming to town. That town (sadly) is not Salt Lake City, but Charleston North Carolina. To give the article highlights"

Converting from drop-in-a-coin-and-twist-the-dial machines to a new generation of meters.
-Uses smart-card technology
-Pay by cellphone
-Meters linked by wireless networks that can be remotely controlled and alert officers to parking violations
-'Call in' to register for parking.
-$150 apiece
-$7000 to $10,000 for multi-space meters.
-Powered by solar panels.

That last factor is actually a surprisingly big deal. The installation costs for a parking can exceed the cost of the meter for a normal parking meter. One that requires electrical hookups can be substantially more expensive. While solar panels aren't yet powering whole cities, they are increasingly powering small parts of it.

Too bad the story didn't have more to say about using wireless networks to let drivers know where parking is available. But cities are hurting for money, and parking is a nice source of revenue...

Nobody Drives Alone

2011-04-04T19:02:00.000-07:00

One of the policy levers that Salt Lake City controls is Salt Lake School district. It could drive demand for transit by limiting parking access at the three High Schools (East, West, Horizonte), and by making the availability of parking contingent on a promise to carpool. Call it the 'Nobody drives alone' campaign. Students could walk, bike, take the bus or carpool, but no single occupancy vehicles would be allowed parking.

I-Phone/Android App for NextBus

2011-04-01T11:21:00.002-07:00

Speaking of ITS for transit--it looks like many transit agencies are now providing data on next bus arrivals via smart phone via something called RouteShout. Hopefully, it's real time data based on GPS coordinates. It even appears to have SMS (text message) integration using numbered bus stop locations! Well done. I'll have to see what can be done to get UTA 'on the bus' so to speak.

SLC Frequent Network

2011-03-27T06:34:00.000-07:00

Salt Lake City's 'Frequent Network' (15 minutes or less between vehicles) is oddly distributed. N-S routes through SLC include Trax, the 203, the 205, the 209, 213, and the 220. E-W routes would be the 2, Trax, and.... 21, at 2100 S. So between Trax at 4th South, and the 2100 S., there is no frequent E-W service. Both the 9 and the 17 run at 30 minute headway, and include a baffling detour (a topic for a later post). ~~It's a strange absence, given that the street grid is still largely intact in that area.~~ Closer examination of the street-grid explains the lack--Liberty Park obstructs any potential E-W route from 9th to 13th, and any route between 13th and 21st would have to pick its way through an off-set grid.

1300 South is certainly a through street, so the total lack of any bus service along it is certainly puzzling. The brutal hill between 1100 E. and 1500 E. may be the explanation for that--it is very difficult to safely load and unload a wheelchair on a 20 degree slope.

Low Rise, High Density

2011-03-01T16:18:00.000-07:00

Looking at images of Paris and New York's Lower East Side, I realize that very dense, older urban areas are not particularly high rise. In many cases, they fail to exceed 4-5 stories. But I would estimate a Floor Area Ratio of something like 400%, which generates transit suitable densities. What is critical in generating sufficient density for transit appears not to be tall buildings, but the lack of parking. Every car takes up 300 square feet per parking stall. Include landscaping and access lanes, that means 10 acres of land only provides about 900 parking spaces. Keeping that same ratio, a 1 acre parcel could be used to produce 90 surface parking lots. Or (at 350 ft^2) about 125 small offices. But if each office is matched to a parking stall, so the net production is about 62 offices.

Structure parking is enormously expensive, because it has to support a 'live load' of cars, rather than people. Thus, as much as possible of the need for parking will be met using surface lots. Assuming a 1:1 office:parking ratio, 2 stories of office mean that 2/3 of the parcel must be devoted to surface parking. With a four story building, 80% of the lot will need to be devoted to parking. Automotive oriented high density will produce a city of vast towers, islands in a sea of parking--hardly urban.

Thus, generating urbanism is not just a matter of generating density--it is a matter of providing density without providing parking. Which means alternative modes of access.

Buildout

2011-02-27T15:58:00.000-07:00

The City of Utrecht Planning video still has me thinking. I wonder if it's possible to using a city zoning to create a 'maximum building envelope' from a zoning code, and display it using Google Earth? Just using the '3d buildings tool' in Google Earth is not sufficient--building a city a building at a time is enormously time consuming. To be efficient, it would need to be possible to do using geodata like shapefiles--A tabular format that you could edit and upload, so the 'city plan' can be updated and changed.

What gets built next

2011-02-25T15:56:00.000-07:00

This video is interesting. It shows the location and form of future construction in the city. Looking at, the idea of doing the same thing for transportation projects springs to mind--effectively an animation of phased implementation. WFRC currently breaks things up into 3 phases (short, medium, long) which is probably more politically palatable. But it would be really interesting to see when different transportation projects come online.

Mapping the World

2011-02-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

According to Time, in an effort to be the center of the Google Earth world, the city of Nanaimo (British Columbia) has put just about of every bit of public data available in Google Earth Format. Pretty nifty way of presenting maps to the the general world. Although it has some limitations-- as someone in the Time article put it:

"For people who live out of town, it would be a great resource and tool," he added. "But, to be fair, if you've been living here your whole life like I have, you don't need to use Google Maps. You just use your brain."

Which brings up two interesting points:

Technology is irrelevant unless it is used.
If locals aren't the primary users of geo-data, who is the geo-data being generated for?

Still the idea of being able to track where each fire truck is is interesting. I only wish they had implemented it for buses.

Ticket to Ride

2011-01-17T14:41:00.000-07:00

JMD @ Transit Utah had a fine idea, of listing all the transit systems he has ridden. So I thought I'd do the same. I'll use his list as a starting point. I've added a few. Bold indicates systems I've ridden.

Heavy Rail:

San Francisco Bay Area - BART (Most recently 2007)
Washington DC - Metro (2007 & 2009)
New York- Subway (Many times, 1994-2009)
Los Angeles - Metro Rail
Miami - MetroRail
Atlanta - Marta (2010)
Boston - "T" (2010)
Chicago - "L" (2010)
Baltimore - Metro Subway
Philadelphia - SEPTA
Philadelphia - PATCO
New York/New Jersey - PATH

Light Rail Lines

San Francisco - Muni (2007)
San Diego - Trolley
Portland - MAX (Expo 2000, Airport Line 2007)
Salt Lake City - TRAX (2002-2010)
Denver - The Ride
Seattle - Central Line
Pittsburgh - "T"
Boston- "T" (2009)
Dallas - DART
Baltimore - Light Rail
Philadelphia - Light Rail
Camden - River Line
Newark - NJ Transit
San Jose - VTA
Minneapolis - Light Rail
Charlotte - Lynx
Jersey City - Hudson/Bergen Line
Oceanside - Sprinter
Buffalo - Metrorail
Cleveland - Light Rail
Houston - MetroRail
Phoenix - Valley Metro (2009)
St. Louis - Metrolink
Norfolk - Tide

Commuter Rail:

San Francisco - Caltrain
Los Angeles - Metrolink
Miami - Tri-Rail
Salt Lake City - Front Runner (2008)
Portland - WES
Washington DC - MARC
Dallas - Trinity Railway Express
Chicago - Metra
Philadelphia - SEPTA
Washington DC - VRE
New Jersey - New Jersey Transit
San Jose - ACE
Nashville - Music City Star
New York - Metro North
New York - Long Island Railroad (2005, 2007, 2009)
New Haven - Shore Line East
Boston - MBTA
San Diego - Coaster
Seattle - Sounder
Chicago - South Shore
Austin - Capital Metro
Minneapolis - North Star
Albuquerque - Railrunner
Dallas - A Train

AGT/Miscellaneous

Seattle - Seattle Monorail
Las Vegas - Monorail (2007)
Miami - Metromover (2007)
New York - JFK Airtrain (2007)
Morgantown - WVU PRT
Detroit - People mover
Las Colinas (Dallas) - PRT
Jacksonville - Skyway
Newark - Airtrain

Streetcars:

San Francisco - Cable Cars (2000, 2007)
Portland - Portland Streetcar (2007)
Tacoma - Link
Seattle - Seattle Streetcar
Dallas - McKinney Ave Trolley heritage line
San Francisco - F Line
Charlotte - Charlotte Trolley heritage line
Kenosha - Kenosha Streetcar heritage line
Little Rock - River Rail Streetcar heritage line
Memphis - MATA Trolley heritage line
New Orleans - original streetcars
Philadelphia - Girard Line original
Savannah - River Street Streetcar original
Tampa - TECO heritage line
Tucson Trolley (2009)

Bus Rapid Transit

Boston 'Silver Line' (2010)
UTA MAX (2011)

Bus Systems

Los Angeles - RTD/Metro
San Francisco - San Francisco Muni
Spokane - Spokane Transit Authority
Salt Lake City - Utah Transit Authority
Seattle - King County Metro and Sound Transit
Portland - Tri-Met

Long way to go to ride them all. But there have been a number of cities I've visited, where the system seemed too similar to what I already knew to bother ride. Denver and Baltimore LRT systems being notable examples. But there are a fair number of cities I've visited that I didn't get a chance to explore the transit system.

Where I've been: Salt Lake City, New York City, San Francisco, Portland, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Paris, Amsterdam, Monaco, Nice, Rome, Seattle, Los Angeles, DC, San Diego, Albuquerque, Tucson, Yuma, Denver, Vegas suburbs, Baltimore, DC suburbs, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago....