Tag Archives: cities

American cities to have driverless cars by next year

Posted on by

It won’t be long before some major American cities feature self-driving cars:

Automated vehicle pilot projects will roll out in the U.K. and in six to 10 U.S. cities this year, with the first unveiling projected to be in Tampa Bay, Florida as soon as late spring. The following year, trial programs will launch in 12 to 20 more U.S. locations, which means driverless cars will be on roads in up to 30 U.S. cities by the end of 2016. The trials will be run by Comet LLC, a consulting firm focused on automated vehicle commercialization…

He explained that they’re focusing on semi-controlled areas and that the driverless vehicles will serve a number of different purposes—both public and private. The vehicles themselves—which are all developed by Veeo Systems—will even vary from two-seaters to full-size buses that can transport 70 people. At some locations, the vehicles will drive on their own paths, occasionally crossing vehicle and pedestrian traffic, while at others, the vehicles will be completely integrated with existing cars…

In addition to the first test site set for Tampa Bay, they’re looking to implement two more projects in Florida. The Comet team is also planning trials in Greenville, South Carolina and Seattle, Washington, where the 70-person buses will be used in public transit.

At 25 to 40 percent cheaper, the cost to ride the driverless public transit vehicles will be significantly less expensive than traditional buses and trains, according to Mr. Clothier. They’ll also be far less expensive to operate. The vehicles are electric, rechargeable and could cost as low as $1 to $3 to run per day.

I used to think people would find such vehicles disturbing at first but I wonder if people will even take a second long by the time these come along. And, even if they are bothered or it takes some time to get used to, people would definitely like the cost savings, safety, and dependability. Now, whether the cost savings would be passed on to mass transit riders is another matter…

Picking apart the top cities for singles rankings

Posted on by

Rankings of the top cities for singles may not be that valid:

“It doesn’t make much difference” where millennials live in terms of their marriage prospects, Andrew Cherlin, director of Johns Hopkins’ sociology department, wrote in an email. He said most major cities now have about the same rate of millennial inhabitants…

And indeed, most of the top cities for this category were near military installations. No. 2 on Wang’s list was San Luis Obispo, which is less than an hour from Vandenberg Air Force base, the third-largest air force base in the country. No. 4, in Hanford, Calif., has a large Navy presence…

So what does predict whether you’ll get married? The reigning champ of marriage indicators is Mormonism, even for millennials. Utah towns occupy the top three slots among 18-34 year-old marriage rates (nearly 2/3rds of millennials are already spoken for in western Utah County, Utah). And the U.S.’s top-three Mormon states, Utah Wyoming and Idaho, occupy the top three slots for states.

Surprise, surprise; rankings found on the Internet may not be that great. Sometimes this has to do with methodology: what is included in the rankings and how are the different dimensions rated? This is discussed here: do you want to look at millennial composition (where Washington D.C. leads the pack) or millennial marriage rate (Washington D.C. doesn’t do as well)? One lesson might be to have more specific rankings – do you really mean it is best for singles if your data is based on the marriage rate?

Additionally, two other issues arise. One, what if the cities aren’t that different from each other? Rankings are intended to differentiate between options but mathematical differences do not necessarily equal substantive significances. Second, why are the rankings in this order? Here, what related factors – such as the proximity of military installations – might be relevant? This may be hard to pick up at times because not all the cities may be affected by the same phenomena. Thus, the researcher has to do some extra digging to try to explain the rankings rather than just simplistically report them.

Even with the argument from Richard Florida about the creative class seeking out cities with enticing culture and entertainment, how many people move where they do because of such rankings?

Growing Latino populations in American cities

Posted on by

Latinos constitute a growing share of American urban populations, raising implications for future political races:

While many cities are experiencing an influx of young whites, those gains are more than offset by the continuing exodus of working- and middle-class whites. The result is a net decline nationwide of the white share of city populations.

Hispanic ascendance is apparent in both cities and suburbs, increasing the likelihood of the election of Latinos to local, state and federal office.

Over time, blacks stand to lose leverage. Cities have been a crucial base of power for African-American politicians. Insofar as the black population becomes diffuse, black leaders will have to grapple with a decline in black-majority districts, especially city council districts, in cities with declining black populations…

Frey pointed toward the rapidly increasing strength of the Latino vote in the 100 largest metropolitan areas. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of city dwellers in such areas who are Hispanic grew to 26 percent from 17 percent; and the share of suburban residents who are Hispanic rose to 17 percent from 8 percent.

Some striking demographic changes that have potential consequences in areas like politics. The changes are numerous: an influx of younger, educated whites into city centers even as whites leave other areas of cities; an increase in the suburbanization of blacks; and growing Latino populations in both cities and suburbs. These changes may not quickly become apparent in the political landscape but should at least draw the attention of political operators. For example, is incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel really in danger in the run-off election? Given the demographic changes in large cities like Chicago, perhaps.

Cities that have experimented with free mass transit

Posted on by

Some communities have tried free mass transit but it doesn’t often lead to increased ridership:

The earliest urban experiment in free public transit took place in Rome in the early 1970s. The city, plagued by unbearable traffic congestion, tried making its public buses free. At first, many passengers were confused: “There must be a trick,” a 62-year-old Roman carpenter told The New York Times as he boarded one bus. Then riders grew irritable. One “woman commuter” predicted that “swarms of kids and mixed-up people will ride around all day just because it doesn’t cost anything.” Romans couldn’t be bothered to ditch their cars—the buses were only half-full during the mid-day rush hour, “when hundreds of thousands battle their way home for a plate of spaghetti.” Six months after the failed, costly experiment, a cash-strapped Rome reinstated its fare system.

Three similar experiments in the U.S.—in Denver, Colorado, and Trenton, New Jersey, in the late 70s, and in Austin, Texas, around 1990—also proved unfruitful and shaped the way American policy makers viewed the question of free public transit. All three were attempts to coax commuters out of their cars and onto subway platforms and buses. While they succeeded in increasing ridership, the new riders they brought in were people who were already walking or biking to work. For that reason, they were seen as failures…

Another report followed up 10 years later, revisiting the idea of a fare-free world. The report reviewed the roughly 40 American cities and towns with free transit systems. Most of the three dozen communities had been greatly successful in increasing ridership—the number of riders shot up 20 to 60 percent “in a matter of months.” But these successes were only to be found in communities with transit needs different from those of the biggest cities; almost all of the areas studied were either small cities with few riders, resort communities with populations that “swell inordinately during tourist seasons,” and college towns. In other words, slashing fares to zero is something that likely wouldn’t work in big cities.

Despite that, one big city has tried. In January 2013, Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, announced that it was making public transit free to all of its citizens. A study released a year later revealed that the move only increased demand by 1.2 percent—though it did inspire Estonians that year to register as Tallinnian citizens at three times the normal rate. The authors of the Tallinn study reached the same conclusion as the NCTR: Free subway rides entice people who would otherwise walk, not people who would otherwise drive.

Two thoughts:

1. More evidence that once people can drive they don’t want to go back to mass transit? We might expect this in the United States but could it also be true elsewhere in the world?

2. Even experimenting with this sort of strategy requires a long-term perspective. thinking about giving up fares for the good benefits of less driving. I’m not sure many communities would be willing to undergo such a test.

MLK streets in the US contained in a “nation within a nation”

Posted on by

Many American cities have streets named after Martin Luther King Jr. and many are located within black areas:

Across the country there are 730 streets named after civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr…

For his book “Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America’s Main Street,” author Jonathan Tilove visited nearly 500 Martin Luther King streets across the country. In his book, he described a “nation within a nation” as “a parallel universe.”

“For many whites, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are lost,” Tilove wrote. “For many blacks, a street sign that says Martin Luther King tells them they are found.”

And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. drive in Chicago has its own complicated past:

Instead, a South Side designation was boosted by Mayor Richard J. Daley. It was a move Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor describe as “disingenuous” in their Daley biography “American Pharaoh.”

Foes when King was alive, Daley, by supporting the renaming, was attempting to portray himself as a forward thinker on race relations ahead of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the biographers said.

In dedicating the street, Daley “invoked King’s devotion to nonviolence in a verbal formation that made it sound as if Daley had the idea first,” Cohen and Taylor wrote.

Par for the course in a racialized country: where the effects of race extend even to street names. That said, I wonder what would happen in some major cities if there were efforts to extend MLK street into white and/or tourist areas…

Would cities consider tiny house villages to combat homelessness?

Posted on by

One writer explores how villages of tiny houses can address problems of homelessness in American cities:

Tiny-home villages for the homeless have retained the idea of everyone having their own tiny structure to sleep and find privacy in, but have, for the most part, consolidated bathroom, kitchen, and recreational space into one or two communal buildings with some combination of plumbing, electricity, and heat. In many ways, they are a multi-roof version of the old-fashioned urban SRO (single-room occupancy) hotel or boarding house, with separate bedrooms but shared baths and kitchen, that provided the working and nonworking poor with affordable living options in so many cities before gentrification turned those properties into boutique hotels or market-rate apartments…

In this regard, they may be solutions that not only alleviate homelessness, but also prevent it by creating more affordable housing. They provide an option below the lowest rungs of market rent, which in cities such as Portland and Eugene can start around $700. In the gap between such rents and low-income units (such as those subsidized by the federal Section 8 program), for which there are often long waits, homeless people often have no options except for shelters — which afford no privacy and, more vexingly, usually kick people out between early morning and late afternoon — or the streets…

They may sound prefab, but tiny-home villages, governed and operated at least in part by the villagers themselves, offer a modicum of safety, stability, warmth, cleanliness, autonomy, and privacy. The feds “have very high standards for [traditional] affordable housing and it’s quite expensive,” said Kitty Piercy, Eugene’s mayor, “so Opportunity and Emerald are ways for us to be able to help some people at a much-reduced cost.”

Add to that reduced fear and stress on the part of residents. “I don’t wanna live here forever,” I was told on a visit to Opportunity Village by a wiry, sweet-natured, 42-year-old recovering alcoholic who goes by the name Johnny Awesome. He was building a small greenhouse onto the front of his cheerful blue cottage, festooned with colored flags and a small disco ball. “This isn’t the top rung of society,” he said. “And the weather dictates a typical day here too much.” Sunny days found residents outside, gardening and building; rainy and cold ones found them holed up in their cottages or congregating in the 30-foot-diameter communal yurt containing computers with Wi-Fi, a large-screen TV, and a pantry.

As the overview goes on to note, this may not just be an issue of being able to build some tiny houses and forming a community. Rather, such villages raise larger questions that cities need to address. Are they willing to let some profitable land be used for such purposes? Where might they allow zoning for such villages? Are cities truly committed to affordable housing? Are cities willing to address the complex issues of homelessness rather than simply trying to regulate or legislate homeless people away? These are not easy questions for cities to answer as they all feel the need for more revenue and exciting new developments. Tiny house villages might be effective ways to address homelessness but they come with an opportunity cost of the land not being used for something else.

I wonder if there is a major city outside of the particular area profiled here – “So far, they seem to be occurring in and around mid- and small-size Western cities whose cultures have some mix of permissive, progressive politics and a certain pioneer DIY spirit” – that would be willing to run an experiment with such a community.

Cities that build their own highspeed internet services

Posted on by

Several American cities have put together their own highspeed Internet services:

Chattanooga isn’t alone. Cities like Wilson, North Carolina and Lafayette, Louisiana have likewise given up on waiting for private companies and started their own ultra-highspeed internet services. But some community efforts have been stymied by state laws prohibiting governments from competing with private internet providers…

The debate over the future of municipal broadband is central to both the economic development of communities across the US—and to the future of investment in broadband infrastructure. Improvements to the state of broadband can’t come soon enough. The US lags behind countries like South Korea and the Czech Republic in both speed and cost of internet access.

Sure, the rise of Google Fiber has spurred competition both in cities lke Austin, where Google has only recently begun rolling out service, and areas that some providers think could be next on Google’s list. But there’s no guarantee that Google Fiber will spread beyond a very limited number of cities, and some communities are being left further behind in the broadband revolution than others. While 94 percent of Americans living in urban areas can purchase broadband faster than 25mbps, only 51 percent of rural Americans can purchase access at those speeds, according to the report.

The report also says that 30 percent of homes have no broadband connection, and high prices for access is a big part of that. Plus, there’s not much competition in most cities: 40 percent of US citizens have only one company in their area that can provide fixed line connections faster than 10mbps—if they have any option at that speed at all. “Without strong competition, providers can (and do) raise prices, delay investments, and provide sub-par quality of service,” the report says.

While this article tends to emphasize the public vs. private provision of the Internet, I wonder how much these projects are intended to help raise the profile of these cities and give them an edge in attracting businesses and residents. Cities compete through a variety of variables including tax breaks, the existing collection of businesses, the human capital of residents, the cultural and entertainment amenities that each place has. I would guess highspeed Internet could provide an edge, particularly for firms that want to be part of an innovative and enterprising community.

Cities get creative in finding ways to resolve bankruptcy

Posted on by

As more cities face dire financial straits, here is a quick overview of the means by which different American cities have escaped bankruptcy:

When Bridgeport, Connecticut filed for Chapter 9 in 1991, they received help from a state oversight board, and also convinced Chase Manhattan to keep its Connecticut headquarters in Bridgeport which helped. There were other approaches, too, one part of which was arranging for Donald Trump to buy out 100 acres of publicly owned property to develop an amusement park and motor race track, though that never came to pass. In 1992, The New York Times reported that there were also “measures including a plan to recover delinquent property taxes by selling tax liens to a private collection agency,” as well as acquisitions for aid from the state, and “concessions from the city’s unions.”

Among the more colorful approaches in recent years was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s. In 2011, having been huckstered by a corrupt company to build an up-to-code (and ultimately faulty) trash-to-energy incinerator, the Keystone State’s capital city petitioned for Chapter 9. They sold the incinerator for $130 million, as well as auctioned off a collection of Wild West artifacts owned by a former mayor which brought in nearly $4 million. It also monetized its parking assets, which included privatizing garages, in effect doubling the price of city parking which, for virtually the first time, they began enforcing…

[Jefferson County, Alabama’s] exit from bankruptcy? They cut their payroll, as well as almost a quarter of the workforce. They shut down many of their satellite courthouses in the suburbs, in addition to a number of “nonessential” services: A nursing home sold to a private operator (to the tune of $8.3 million), a public hospital shut down, and the closing of a massive county laundry facility. Patrick Darby, who represented Jefferson County in its bankruptcy filing, said “I have to say in all fairness, what we did here is easier than it would’ve been in California or up north because we don’t have unions… we don’t have public sector unions and so we don’t have to fight that if we want to lay people off.”

So what does this all mean? Every municipality comes up with its own unique solution, and in the case of Jefferson County that meant shutting down a “charity hospital;” in New York that meant laying off 6,000 school teachers who’d leveraged their pensions; and in Vallejo that meant making it possible for the courts to compel unions to break their collective bargaining agreements, a ruling which now extends to the rest of California, and, having some of the strongest labor unions in the country, seems plausible that it could extend to other states, too. And if we’re going to talk about rhetoric, unions are the group often identified as the primary problem behind fiscal insolvency—when, rather, it’s other underlying fiscal crises that make it impossible for those municipalities to fund the pensions they’d committed to long ago. As Marc Levinson says, “It’s just that we’ve made these promises to people who’ve given their lives in service based on this promise and now we can’t afford it!”

As the article notes, “the leniency of the U.S. bankruptcy code” helps allow this creativity. But, I wonder if this kind of creativity ever runs out – what if there is a bankruptcy that is simply too big (though it is hard to imagine one bigger than New York City in the 1970s) or there are too many at once (imagine three or four major cities going through bankruptcy at the same time or within a single state, like California) or creditors and local groups are simply unwilling to budge? What happens then? We haven’t reached that point yet…

Creating the “mobile-ghetto” in major cities

Posted on by

Affordable housing is scarce in many major global cities so one architect has a design for the “mobile-ghetto”:

So as Malka sees it, Parisians need a way to “reclaim” the city. His idea is a modular micro-city consisting of rooms that attach to scaffolding built around existing infrastructure, like barnacles clinging to a ship. He calls it the P9 Mobile-Ghetto, and has imagined them here hanging off the side of the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris.

“In a time when we are getting more and more mobile, not only regarding our phone and laptop devices, but also…the increasing number of freelancers or homeworkers, mobile-cities would totally change the uses and the morphology of the city,” Malka says. In practice, this means that the idea of a third space—in which city dwellers inhabit coffee shops and parks the way others gather in their living rooms, or regard shared bicycle programs as their own bikes—extends to include a smattering of rooms or event spaces created for the public, and run by the public. The bridge can become your meditation center; an out-of-use monument could become an art gallery.

Obvious complications with zoning and historical preservationists aside, Malka says the Voluntary Ghetto is technically plausible, and would just require using scaffolding to support shipping container-sized rooms. That said, this (conceptual) new layer of infrastructure says more about urban lifestyles than it does about feats of architecture. Would Parisians (or New Yorkers, or Londoners, or any city residents) delight in finding more intimate, indoor, spaces, or would it feel like a brash paint job on a historic city? “If there is an utopia in this project,” Malka says, “it’s more in its social dimension than its architectural aspect.”

Two quick thoughts:

1. Shipping container type structures are popular these days since they are relatively available and have a standard size. Yet, I wonder how communities would respond to the architecture that is often made with them. For lack of a better descriptor, it is boxy. It is one thing to supply affordable housing; it is another to put these sorts of designs on the Pont Neuf. Add that to the barnacle type image and it doesn’t necessarily look pretty.

2. A design like this or other recent innovations like tiny houses really can be limited by zoning laws. Major cities are often mazes of zoning regulations. While these zones exist for a reason, they can often make true innovation quite difficult. How much would cities be willing to revisit their zoning laws to allow spaces for these sorts of designs that are smaller and more flexible? I’m not imagine an overlay district – that is simply putting a temporary or permanent zoning change or exception over existing zones – but rather revisiting the whole thing to adapt to buildings and spaces in the 2010s.

The New York Times is not so good at identifying gentrifying neighborhoods

Posted on by

A new study compares what neighborhoods were pegged as gentrifying by the New York Times and academics based on census data. There was a discrepancy:

The study, by sociologist Michael Barton of Louisiana State University, examines the differences between neighborhoods that the Times has identified as “gentrified” or “gentrifying” in the past three decades, and those identified by Census data and major academic studies. He finds a wide – and concerning – gap between the neighborhoods that social scientists call “gentrified” and those to which the Times affixes that label…

To get at this, Barton’s study used a LexisNexis database search to discover which New York City neighborhoods the Times identified as “gentrified” between 1980 and 2009. He then compared these neighborhoods to those identified as “gentrified” according to measures used in two classic quantitative studies. The first study, published in 2003 by Raphael Bostic and Richard Martin, identified gentrified neighborhoods based on median incomes. Their method sees gentrified neighborhoods as those that saw their median incomes grow from less than 50 percent of the metro median to more than 50 percent of it. The second strategy, based on a 2005 study by Lance Freeman, identifies gentrifying neighborhoods based on a broader set of changes in income, education and housing. For Freeman, gentrified neighborhoods are those that started with median income levels below those for the city as a whole but then where educational levels and housing prices rose to be greater than the city’s. Barton’s study focuses on gentrification in New York City neighborhoods and is based on data for the 188 neighborhood areas identified by the Department of City Planning.

The bottom line: Barton found considerable differences between the neighborhoods the Times identified as gentrified and those identified by the quantitative studies…

What jumps out here are the large swathes of the city in which significant neighborhood change goes ignored by the Times. The Grey Lady was much more likely to peg gentrification in “hip” neighborhoods in Manhattan and adjacent parts of Brooklyn (like Williamsburg) than in the Bronx and Queens, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s. Generally speaking, the gentrifying neighborhoods discussed in the Times lined up more neatly with the more restrictive method used by Bostic and Martin than it did with Freeman.  Still, as Barton writes, “the association of both census-based strategies with the New York Times were moderate at best.”

I was recently looking at some classic “growth machine” literature (Urban Fortunes by Logan and Molotch) and here is an explanation they might suggest: newspapers generally are interested in promoting urban growth. This is because they are interested in building their subscriber base which puts more eyeballs on advertisements which means they can charge more. So, if “hip” neighborhoods are identified by the Times and more people in these young, educated places buy the newspaper that claims they are participating in something hip, the Times comes out ahead. Yet, chasing these younger demographics and the latest monied scene may not match up with accurate reporting on neighborhood change.

This finding may also highlight some significant differences in gentrification patterns. A quick influx of young, creative class whites may mark one neighborhood but income growth (and other positive factors) may be related to a slower process and/or featuring non-whites, non creative class types in other neighborhoods. It is not as if all neighborhoods in major cities with less-than-average incomes have an equal probability of gentrifying as there are numerous factors at work.