Author: marynewsom

Will spurned Wis., Ohio, rail money come to N.C.?

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood dropped major hints today in Charlotte about more federal money coming to North Carolina’s high-speed rail plans, from funds to be reallocated away from Wisconsin and Ohio. LaHood and Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff were in town speaking to about a hundred local and regional politicians and transportation officials.

Both those Midwest states elected Republican governors this month who campaigned against high-speed rail projects in their states that had won big federal grants: $810 million to Wisconsin for Milwaukee-to-Madison, and $400 million to Ohio for the so-called 3Cs project: Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.

“Some governors were elected who said maybe we don’t want to be in the high-speed rail business,” LaHood said. “We are going to reallocate some money from Ohio and Wisconsin.”
Because of North Carolina’s work already on high-speed rail (and its work on intercity passenger rail), he said, “We are going to be making some announcements about that. … Because of the leadership of the state on high-speed rail, you all are going to be in the high-speed rail business.”

Wisconsin’s Gov.-elect Scott Walker has recently been waffling on whether to give back the $810 million, suggesting maybe it could be used for other transportation needs. But Wednesday, speaking in Charlotte, LaHood was specific. “The money’s going to be reallocated,” he said. Firmly.

Turns out the question of reallocation came up Tuesday at a high-speed rail conference in Richmond. My colleague Jack Betts (see his This Old State blog) asked Patrick Simmons of the N.C. DOT’s rail division about the possibility. Simmons replied to Betts via e-mail: “If OH & WI do not follow through then I expect USDOT to allocate the monies where they can be put to work for the original program of investing in infrastructure, creating jobs, enhancing mobility and so on. From our years of work and previous investments NC is well-positioned to compete for these funds. Several other states will be competitive too.”

(See below for more talk of reallocation, this time of streetcar money, possibly toward Charlotte.)

Other key points from the talk:

– LaHood’s oft-mentioned use of the term “public-private partnerships.” Why? “There are not enough tax dollars to do all the things we want to do. We have to rely on the private sector.”

– Rogoff (right) heaped praise on Charlotte: “Charlotte has been one of our great success stories,” he said. He mentioned not just the light rail but the city’s partnership with the private sector (Bank of America) in building the Transportation Center on Fourth Street uptown. He pointed out Charlotte was one of only five cities to win an urban circulator grant for a streetcar and said the city’s earlier work to lay the tracks [along Elizabeth Avenue] while pavement was already torn up for a street improvement “is visionary thinking.”

– Rogoff again: People try to pit transit versus highway. “I think it’s a false choice,” he said. He pointed out 55 percent of all transit trips in America are on roads – by bus. “I need a good efficient road system.”

More reallocation in the future?

This afternoon, amid a lengthy meeting of the Metropolitan Transit Commission about diminished transit revenues, Charlotte Area Transit System chief Carolyn Flowers mentioned that Charlotte was one of only five cities to get a streetcar grant in July. (LaHood mentioned the same). Charlotte, so far, is the only city still moving ahead on its streetcar, she said, and it’s possible some of those federal funds might be reallocated.

FTA rules said construction must start within 18 months or the city will lose the money. Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Dallas-Fort Worth also received money for streetcars.

Photo credit: Ray LaHood in Charlotte. DAVIE HINSHAW / CHARLOTTE OBSERVER STAFF

Art sprouts on doomed building

The long-lived but still-doomed Virginia Paper Co. building on West Third Street uptown sports new art on its boarded-up windows. It’s the result of a collaboration among artists with ties to the McColl Center for Visual Arts, students at Hopewell High School, the Arts & Science Council and the Charlotte Knights.

Artist Annabel Manning, a former McColl Center artist-in-residence, worked with the students and their teacher, Ben Permeaux (a future McColl Center teacher-in-residence) on collages inspired by artist Romare Bearden, a Charlotte native and the namesake of Romare Bearden Park, which is to be built in Third Ward if/when the county parks department can find the money.

The students looked at Bearden’s work, then used computer software to create their own, contemporary visions of what a Bearden collage might look like today. The vinyl panels were installed Monday on all the upper level of windows and all the windows facing Third Street. Each panel is the work of a different student.

The historic and architecturally significant building is owned by the county but has been leased for $1 a year (for up to 99 years) to the minor-league baseball team Charlotte Knights, which has planned to demolish to build a new uptown stadium. But with the economic crash, the Knights haven’t moved forward with their plans. Under the lease agreement the county could void the lease if the Knights can’t have their stadium ready to open by fall 2011 – which doesn’t look likely. But so far the county hasn’t opted to do so.

In my role as Observer editorial board member I’ve written before about the Knights’ lack of upkeep of the building. Last summer a city building code inspection found the Knights weren’t keeping the building up to code. It found trash, kudzu and standing water, as well as evidence vagrants had lived there. The new boarded-up windows resulted from that inspection.
And now, at least, some of those boarded-up windows have a more pleasing appearance. It’s to the Knights’ credit they’ve cooperated in the artistic endeavor.

PHOTO CREDITS:

Romare Bearden-inspired vinyl panels on the Virginia Paper Co. building (Nov. 15, 2010, photo by MELISSA SUE GERRITS/Charlotte Observer)
Broken windows mar historic building (Feb. 16, 2010, photo by MARY NEWSOM/Charlotte Observer)

Do cities matter? Whither the suburbs?

Do cities matter? Are the suburbs declining or healthy? I’m sharing a variety of links today that take differing looks at things. Note – I don’t necessarily agree with everything written here, but found the articles of interest.

First, the Center for American Progress writes about “Trouble in the Suburbs: Poverty Rises in Areas Outside Cities.” This is not unexpected: As center cities have gentrified, some of the low-income families who were displaced have moved farther out. And as jobs have moved to the suburbs, workers have followed, including those earning lower incomes. Then, the recession is forcing some middle-income families into the ranks of the poor.

The article links to a 2000 paper by the UNC Center for Community Capitalism, “Facing the New Suburban Housing Crunch,” which found that the problem of finding affordable housing is not just a problem for the poor but is moving deeper into the middle class.

The article also links to this Brookings look at the new map of poverty in the U.S. It reports, “The number of poor people in large metro areas grew by 5.5 million from 1999 to 2009, and more than two-thirds of that growth occurred in suburbs.” Last March Brookings had an interesting report, “Job Sprawl and the Suburbanization of Poverty.”

The natural order of land values would hold that being near the center would make land more valuable, hence most costly, hence center cities would be home to the wealthier people. That’s the pattern in European cities, where the poor live in the suburbs. (The very rich have in-town homes and villas or chateaux in the country.) The U.S. has been different, due in part to federal involvement in housing programs dating to the mid-20th century, when federal loan programs specifically encouraged suburban housing and pretty much forbade federally backed loans in neighborhoods inhabited by black people or other ethnic groups. That had the effect of reserving the suburbs for white, middle-class homeowners. Of course, the disinclination of many white people to live next door to black people played a huge role, too. And large-lot, single-family zoning created large areas where only middle- or upper-income homeowners could afford to settle.

But the end of those discriminatory policies and the efforts of many cities to add more multifamily housing in the suburbs seems to be changing the U.S. suburban landscape as well.

In some ways, spreading low-income families through the suburbs is not a bad thing. As several of the articles point out, it means poverty is less concentrated. But social services and public transportation are not as readily accessible in the suburbs, where local governments may not be equipped to serve the poor the way city governments are. (This, of course, raises the question of what is “suburban”? In a city such as Charlotte, with liberal annexation laws, the city limits themselves take in plenty of “suburban” neighborhoods that, in other areas of the country, would be separate municipalities.)

Changing topics, here’s a provocative piece from National Resources Defense Council blogger Kaid Benfield: ” ‘Cities’ may not matter as much as we think – regions and neighborhoods are where things actually happen.”

He starts off noting that, of course, cities do matter. He also notes the problem of city limit lines having little to do with the reality of a metro region’s functioning. But, he says, not enough attention is being focused on the suburbs (he means separate municipalities). He writes: “Stormwater runoff per capita is much worse in suburban sprawl, as are emissions of all sorts (CO2 per capita from transportation). One can even make the case that we should be going easier on cities than on sprawling places: To paraphrase David Owen, why put skinny people on diets? My personal view is that our environmental framework absolutely should be tougher on sprawling places than urban ones, but that urban ones should also do their fair share to heal our ecosystems, through appropriate standards, safeguards and mitigation.”

He continues: “Unfortunately, I think we remain relatively less attentive to the suburbs, largely because our crazy patchwork of municipalities makes them legally so diffuse and with very rare exceptions there simply is no regional authority to address them as a group.”

Illustration from San Jose Mercury News/MCT

Will killing train kill jobs?

Here’s a shirttail to my post on the future of high-speed trains. A company that opened in Milwaukee to manufacture and maintain high-speed train cars says if Wisconsin cancels its proposed high-speed rail project between Madison and Milwaukee, it will have to leave.

Talgo, the Spanish-owned company, is working on an order for Oregon trains. The piece in the Daily Reporter of Milwaukee says:

“We were hoping to stay in Wisconsin and we were expecting our business to grow,” said Nora Friend, a Talgo spokeswoman. “But once the order for the Oregon trains are done, we would have to shut down the facility. I don’t think that’s what the new governor wants.”

The trains to fulfill an order from Oregon are to be completed by the spring of 2012. Talgo recently hired 40 workers and expects to eventually employ 125, she said.

Gov.-elect Scott Walker has opposed the project, for which Wisconsin received an $810 million federal grant. On Wednesday the Wisconsin DOT suspended all work, although it has already signed an agreement with the federal government for use of the money. What happens next is not clear.

High-speed rail plans still on track?

What do Tuesday’s election results mean for passenger rail in North Carolina? The apparent Republican heir to the chairmanship of the House Transportation Committee, Rep. John Mica of Miami, says he wants to re-examine President Obama’s almost $10 billion in high-speed rail grants. He doesn’t oppose high-speed rail, he told the AP, but disagrees with some of the states that won grants. Hmmm. In January Florida snagged $1.25 billion for a Tampa-to-Orlando (and eventually to Miami) line. But Mica thinks the Northeast is the only corridor that can support high-speed rail.

North Carolina won a $545 million federal grant. It was part of the stimulus package for “high-speed rail” projects, although in North Carolina’s case, don’t be imagining bullet trains. The state plans to use most of its half billion to upgrade the Raleigh-to-Charlotte route. It projects top speeds of 90 mph, eventually reducing the average Raleigh-Charlotte trip nearly an hour from the current 3 hours 10 minutes.

I checked in with Patrick Simmons who heads the rail division of the N.C. Department of Transportation. What does he foresee for North Carolina’s high-speed passenger rail project with Republicans in charge of the U.S. House, not to mention both houses of the N.C. legislature?

Simmons said he expects additional scrutiny and questions, but that the funding the state has received is secure. The state is very close to signing an agreement with the feds, he said. “Short-term, I feel good,” he said. Long-term? He expects the whole U.S. passenger rail program to be questioned at a national level.

A savvy observer might find reason for concern. After all: The Wisconsin DOT on Thursday told contractors to stop work on that state’s Milwaukee-to-Madison high-speed rail line, which had won $810 million in federal money. Republican Gov.-elect Scott Walker has promised to cancel the project, although shortly before the election the current governor’s administration and federal administrators signed an agreement to commit the state to spending all $810 million of federal stimulus money.

And in Ohio, the Republican governor-to-be, John Kasich, who defeated incumbent Gov. Ted Strickland, opposes to plans for faster train passenger service there – the 3Cs line connecting Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. The Obama administration gave that project over $400 million this year.

What might it mean for North Carolina’s passenger rail, I asked Simmons, that the legislature will be dominated by Republicans? He reminded me that the whole idea for the NCDOT’s role in passenger rail came during the administration of Republican Gov. Jim Martin.

Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic has a good national analysis. The map is cool, too.

‘A citadel of bigotry and Babbitry’

My furlough week (no work, no pay) begins in a few hours, during which I’m not allowed to do anything that smacks of Observer work, so no Naked City postings (or comments moderated) until Monday Nov. 1. In other words, don’t think I’m ignoring you because I don’t like you. I’m ignoring you because federal law says I must.

Until then, have fun with this item from former Observer Forum editor Lew Powell, who’s staying busy in retirement posting interesting tidbits from N.C. history at North Carolina Miscellany, a blog offered by the North Carolina Collection at UNC Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library. Here’s a great bit, “The Making of ‘The Mind of the South,’ “ which includes a paragraph describing Charlotte that may sound familiar to many of you, even today. It was delivered by former Observer editorial page editor Ed Williams, and it refers to the writings of W.J. Cash, in H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine:

“Other articles in the Mercury would follow, including an indignant portrayal of Charlotte as a citadel of bigotry and Babbitry, besotted by Presbyterianism and in love with Duke Power Co., a city where life for many consisted of ‘a dreary ritual of the office, golf and the church’ that is ‘unbearably dull even for Presbyterians.’

If you explore the site you’ll find a fabulous photo of Ike and Mamie Eisenhower in their bathrobes, waving to a crowd from a train car in Salisbury in 1952.

This time, Atlanta gets streetcar bucks

The news emerged last week, and official word came today. Atlanta won a $47 million U.S. DOT grant to help it build a proposed $72 million streetcar line. Here’s a link to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article with details. Salt Lake City also won a streetcar grant, for $26 million, and Los Angeles won $20 million for its Crenshaw/LAX light rail line. Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic offers an analysis here. He notes that of the $600 million total in these so-called TIGER II grants most went to small-scale projects in small and mid-size cities for street improvements, building transit centers, and rehabilitating freight lines. Here’s a link to the USDOT site where you can find the list of capital project grants and the list of planning grants.

Asheville won an $850,000 planning grant for its East Riverside Sustainable Multimodal Neighborhood plan. The project will “integrate existing master plans and revise codes and regulations (emphasis mine) to create sustainable development.” For a bit more information, see Page 22 of the link for planning grants.

Transit, taxes and Tampa

This one is for transit and tax-policy wonks. It’s a piece from Yonah Freemark, in The Transport Politic, about the problems many transit systems are facing with sinking revenues. “When the recession strikes, little maneuvering room for transit” He points out that one reason for the problem is over-reliance on a very volatile revenue stream: sales taxes.

Most cities have been especially affected by the recession because of their reliance on the sales tax to provide revenue. Of the recent referendums on transit expansion programs, almost all have involved a 1/2 cent or one cent increase in that tax; few cities have looked to other forms of revenue, like an income tax or a payroll tax. The consequences of this decision, however, have been devastating because sales tax revenues have fallen considerably as a result of the recession and the reduced standard of living experienced by the majority of Americans over the past few years. A more stable financing program for transit, using other forms of taxation, would ensure that planned projects actually get built.

If you want to get deep in the weeds of transit finance, follow the link on “financing program for transit,” above. I haven’t read it all the way through yet, but it looks at the New York and Paris transit systems and how they get and spend their money.

In other transit-related news, here’s a piece about Charlotte that ran Sunday in Tampa, Fla., where voters next month will decide on – you guessed it, a sales tax – to pay for transit as well as roads and other transportation needs.

And here’s a fun contrarian piece from the Market Urbanism blog, “The Great American Streetcar Myth,” by Stephen Smith, who contends it wasn’t General Motors and Standard Oil who killed off streetcars as much as the Progressive Era and New Deal planners and politicians. Fare-increase restrictions, labor union requirements, publicly paid street-paving and road-building all combined to finish off streetcars, he writes. It’s an interesting perspective. Smith also points out:

“While the status quo’s more libertarian-minded backers will point to the gas tax as a user fee, the highway funds are hardly adequate to cover the true costs. Though state and federal governments do now cover most of the capital and operating costs of the highways, local roads are still paid for almost entirely out of general revenues. And when you consider the forgone taxes and opportunity costs, roads start to look severely underpriced – to say nothing of the last hundred years of subsidized road building (the mainstay of FDR’s WPA), eminent domain, anti-urban federal home tax breaks and lending programs, positive feedback loops, and density-limiting zoning and parking policies.”

Looking at congestion a different way

A new report on urban traffic skewers methods used by the widely quoted Texas Transportation Institute. In traffic circles, this is huge. The TTI’s Urban Mobility Report is frequently used by cities to justify huge expenditures for wider streets and intersections. But it is deeply flawed, says a new report, “Driven Apart,” from the nonprofit group CEOs for Cities. It doesn’t consider that in some cities you don’t have to drive as far as in other cities. The more compact cities, where you don’t have to spend as much time in traffic, actually can end up looking more congested, because of the TTI’s formulas.
Follow the links above to read the report.

Also, Streetsblog New York City has a good, readable analysis of it here. It opens this way:

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?
Shockingly, the standard method for measuring traffic congestion implies that the second driver has it better. The Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report (UMR) only studies how congestion slows down drivers from hypothetical maximum speeds, completely ignoring how long it takes to actually get where you’re going. The result is an incessant call for more highway lanes from newspapers across the country.

“Driven Apart” shows how the key tool contained in the Urban Mobility Report – the Travel Time Index – penalizes cities with shorter travel distances and conceals the additional burden caused by longer trips in sprawling metropolitan areas. It also looks at the reliability and usefulness of the methodology used in the UMR and finds it doesn’t accurately estimate travel speeds, exaggerates travel delays and overestimates the fuel consumption associated with urban travel.

The report essentially makes the point that longer commutes are the main cause of time in traffic, not congestion per se.

“In the best performing cities – those that have achieved the shortest peak hour travel distances – such as Chicago, Portland and Sacramento, the typical traveler spends 40 fewer hours per year in peak hour travel than the average American. In contrast, in the most sprawling metropolitan areas, such as Nashville, Indianapolis and Raleigh, the average resident spends as much as 240 hours per year in peak period travel because travel distances are so much greater. These data suggest that reducing average trip lengths is a key to reducing the burden of peak period travel. Over the past two decades, for example, Portland, Oregon, which has smart land use planning and has invested in alternative transportation, has seen its average trip lengths decline by 20 percent.”

If you want to see the chart showing all the metro areas studied, see page 7 of this link.

On page 10 of that link is a section showing why the report’s authors say the Texas Transportation Institute’s Travel Time Index (the TTI’s TTI?) is flawed. The index is the ratio of average peak hour travel times to average free flow travel times. Here’s what it says, using Charlotte and Chicago as examples:

“Chicago has a TTI of 1.43 (the second highest overall, behind only Los Angeles), while Charlotte has a TTI of 1.25 (just about equal to the average for all large metropolitan areas). This would appear to indicate that urban travel conditions are far worse in Chicago. But the traffic delays in the two regions are almost identical (40 and 41 hours per year, or about 10 minutes per day). Chicago has average travel distances (for peak hour trips) of 13.5 miles, while Charlotte has average travel distances of 19 miles. Because they travel nearly 50 percent farther then their counterparts in Chicago, Charlotte travelers end up spending a lot more time in traffic, about 48 minutes per day, rather than 33 minutes per day.”

But the TTI makes it look as if drivers in Chicago have it worse. But if you look at hours spent in traffic they have it much better. The gives a flawed view of reality, the report says.

In sum, says the report:
“The Urban Mobility Report’s key measure – the Travel Time Index – is a poor guide to policy, and its speed and fuel economy estimates are flawed. In the aggregate, the analysis appears to overstate the costs of traffic congestion three-fold and ignores the larger transportation costs associated with sprawl.”

It points out, for example, “There are strong reasons to doubt the UMR claim that slower speeds associated with congestion wastes billions of gallons of fuel. The UMR estimates of fuel consumption are based on a 29-year-old study of low-speed driving using 1970s era General Motors cars, which is of questionable applicability to today’s vehicles and to highway speeds.”

Photo caption: Raleigh-Cary traffic, from photographer Shawn Rocco, [Raleigh] News & Observer

Raleigh mayor takes on Wake schools flap

Today, I’ve got limited time so I’ll share a couple of interesting links.

1. Raleigh’s Mayor Charles Meeker is “quietly assembling a group of town mayors and ‘high level’ residents to scrutinize the student assignment plan currently being developed by the school board.” The News & Observer’s article is here. The situation is intriguing on a variety of levels.

A. Obviously, the fate of a city’s school system has a huge impact on the city’s overall economic and social well-being. Yet while our former mayor, Pat McCrory, was in office during years in which Charlotte’s public schools were in intense reassignment and re-segregation turmoil, he said virtually nothing publicly. It was a certainly a smart political survival strategy for him — CMS and race are both radioactive topics. But was it the best thing for the city?

B. Meeker’s wife, Dr. Anne McLaurin, is on the school board. Yowie. Talk about power couples.

C. With Wake County schools threatened (by a controversial majority on the school board there) with the same re-segregation that has hit Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the Raleigh political establishment seems to be fighting back more strongly than Charlotte’s did a decade ago. There were some key differences — a court case that had to be complied with. But CMS went beyond what the court rulings required in dismantling racial integration in local schools. And of course, seeing what happened here could be fueling some of the Wake opposition to re-segregation.

D. CMS, meanwhile, is talking about closing up to 10 schools and reassigning students. Here’s Observer reporter Ann Doss Helms’ blog account of the details, which are sure to be controversial. This could have major implications for neighborhoods’ stability and futures. Are city officials and county officials at the table with CMS as it comes up with its plans? I don’t think so. They should be, and if they weren’t invited, they should be knocking down Superintendent Peter Gorman’s door.

2. In today’s New York Times is an interesting piece on a ballot measure before Florida voters that would require voter approval on changes in state-mandated growth plans. The measure is fueled in part by deep anger over over-building and over-zoning. Good idea? Bad idea?