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There’s plenty of chatter about whether federal economic stimulus money should go for transit, for road-building, for repairs or building new. But there’s also a big push to target the about-to-be-written federal transportation bill. A coalition group called Transportation for America is warning: ”Now is not the time to squander money on projects or plans that do not help save Americans money, free us from oil dependence and create long-term jobs.” Here’s a link to a blog item on it from Smart Growth Online. It quotes an Associated Press article:

”Now is not the time to squander money on projects or plans that do not help save Americans money, free us from oil dependence and create long-term jobs,” warns a diverse Transportation for America coalition of environmental, urban design, housing and other groups, launching a campaign to make sure the 2009 federal transportation bill allocates a fair share for mass transit and infrastructure repair instead of funding mostly new roads, reports Associated Press writer Sarah Karush. The effort [has been] joined by Pennsylvania and Virginia Democratic Governors Ed Rendell and Timothy M. Kaine, and former Maryland Democratic Governor Parris N. Glendening, now the Smart Growth Leadership Institute president.

”That’s always difficult politically,” said Governor Rendell about his state’s fix-it-first approach, but recalling the deadly August 2007 collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis, he asked, ”How many more Minnesotas do we have to have as a country?”

Governor Kaine cited a decline in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and an increase in transit demand, telling the writer, ”The key is to provide choices, so you invest in everything.” And Governor Glendening said, ”Make sure that infrastructure really builds for the future. That’s about transit, that’s about walkability, that’s about ‘fix it first.’ ”

Here’s the article from today’s paper explaining what was about to happen. If April Bethea (who’s sitting next to me here in the front row) posts a new story I’ll add a newer link.

Commissioners Dan Murrey and Dumont Clarke now talking about promoting local food, and preserving farms.

County commissioners’ meeting is only 50 minutes late starting. When they filed in, Bill James was mobbed by a TV camera and 2 or 3 other press types. So I wandered over, and asked if he had used his recorder-disguised-as-pen that he got at a “spy store” to tape the closed session, which he’s been threatening to do. He swears he didn’t. (A bad cellphone photo is above.) Let me just say Mont Blanc it isn’t.

CATS honcho John Muth gave a presentation to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission on Monday, detailing the most recent projections for budget cuts by the Charlotte Area Transit System. Here’s a link to a pdf version of his PowerPoint.

If you went to the December Metropolitan Transit Commission meeting (of course you did, and it was the highlight of your holiday season) you’ve already seen Muth’s PowerPoint presentation. But for the rest of us it was a good summation of what they’re looking at.

Note in particular the graph on slide 3, showing the old 10-year projections of transit sales tax income, and the new 10-year projection, based on the most recent few months. Ouch!

Note also, on slide 7, that CATS has submitted $295 million in requests for funding from the Obama stimulus bill. Muth pointed out it’s highly unlikely CATS will get $295 million. But if you never ask …

If you’ll recall, on Dec. 16 in “What University City needs,” I referred to a study by the UNC Charlotte Center for Real Estate about housing and real estate in the University City area. University City Partners commissioned the study.

I’ve finally got a link to the report, if you’ve got a yen to burrow in. Here’s the link. The study says it “evaluates the need for greater diversity across product types in the University City housing market. It also explores ways to encourage the production of higher–end housing through collaboration between the public and private sectors.”

Here’s one interesting tidbit about what homebuyers are seeking: “Interestingly, proximity to UNC Charlotte was identified as an amenity only for employees of the university. Athletic, cultural, and educational opportunities available at the university were rarely cited on their own as important factors to homebuyers.”

Also pay attention to the sections on pages 8 and 9 about knowledge-based workers, a.k.a. the creative class. They prefer mixed-use, urban neighborhoods over homogenous suburbia, and tend to shun newly developed mixed-use neighborhoods because they feel contrived and lack “authenticity.”

That doesn’t bode well for U.C.’s hopes to attract the creative class. The area is total suburbia. Even if its new development is on a more urban pattern — stores and homes not separated, apartments aren’t sequestered from single-family houses and everything is closer than in conventional suburbia — it isn’t going to be “organic” for decades.

Quick disclaimer: I haven’t read the whole report. It IS a workday, after all, and my regular job (editorial board member, op-ed columnist, etc.) nips at my heels. But I wanted to offer the full report to those interested.

Aaron Houck, in the January Charlotte Viewpoint (online magazine) asks: Does rapid transit subsidize sprawl? He concludes it does, sort of. (Also in this issue, Mark Peres — dubbed one of Seven to Watch by the Observer’s Local Desk late last year– muses about business ethics.)

I’ll give you my thought on the matter later, but here’s the headline: Whatever transit might be doing to subsidize sprawl, the outerbelt is doing to the 10th degree. Building the outerbelt AND building a transit system was a truly schizophrenic approach to transportation planning.

Forthwith, some links to tide you over the upcoming blog-less days. And remember, just because I link to a piece doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with all the ideas therein. So Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Merry Kwanzaa, Festive Festivus and see you in a week or so.

More on speculation about Obama’s to-be-named director of urban policy. One name being mentioned to run it, says Jeff Byles in The Architect’s Newspaper, is Bruce Katz, the Brookings Institution’s chair in urban and metropolitan policy (Katz has called such speculation “premature”).

“This will be the first time in my professional life that we’ve had a president who comes from a city and has a strong urban agenda,” said Thomas Wright, executive director of New York’s Regional Plan Association. “That position is not going to be your grandparents’ urban policy.”
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Here’s some wonderfully snarky comments on architecture in Russia from Russia! Magazine. It’s courtesy of one of my regular readers, “Jumper.” http://readrussia.com/winter_09_06.htm
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More advice to Obama, this from John Norquist, former Milwaukee mayor and now president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Courtesy of New Urban News:

“Green the bailouts. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may again be needed to ensure liquidity in mortgage markets, but now that the government fully controls them it should remove provisions that prohibit Fannie and Freddie from involvement in buildings that are less than 75 percent residential. That makes mortgages for McMansions in far-flung exurbs easy to write, but makes purchasers of condominiums in many mixed-use buildings scramble for non-conventional financing. A three-story building with condos upstairs and a small grocery store like Trader Joe’s on the first floor would be a godsend in a place like Iowa City or Philadelphia’s Manayunk neighborhood, but Fannie and Freddie need to make it easier to finance.”
Full version of Norquist’s letter here.
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A not-new but still interesting piece in Wilson Quarterly (courtesy of the ever-interesting Joe-at-the-front-desk) on a traffic engineering guru, the late Hans Monderman. (Contains this fabulous factoid: Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was trained as a traffic engineer. Go figure.) Monderman’s most famous maxim was that traditional traffic safety ­infra­structure —warning signs, traffic lights, metal railings, curbs, painted lines, speed bumps, and so ­on — ­is not only often unnecessary, but can endanger those it is meant to protect.
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Last, though not least, a reminder to the visually talented among you, from Manoj Kesavan, founder of http://www.point8.org/ : There’s a Pecha Kucha night Jan. 15, starting at 7:30 p.m., at Alive (2909 NoDa). Pecha Kucha is a sort of open-mike night for visual presentations. You’re limited to 20 slides, 20 seconds each. Deadline for sending your presentations is 5 p.m. Dec. 31.

Want to know more? See www.point8.org/pechakucha/ or e-mail present.pkn@point8.org

Rick Warren’s getting more national publicity, but Ray LaHood (shown left, with Obama) as transportation secretary has dismayed folks in the transit-smart growth-planning worlds.

Even though President-elect Obama is taking Amtrak to DC for his inauguration, the choice of LaHood, a moderate Republican from downstate Illinois with a not-so-hot environmental record, has folks upset. A recent piece on Streetsblog by Aaron Naparstek quotes a former Federal Transit Administration official: “In terms of attracting talent, no one I know is going to want to work for this guy. He’s got a horrible environmental record, he’s bad on climate change and he’s Caterpillar’s bag man. Can we get a worse appointment?”

The Washington Post called him a centrist who grew up in Peoria and when elected in 1994 was one of only three Republicans who didn’t sign Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” OK, so he’s got his moderate creds. But does he know bat-droppings about transportation? Can he even articulate the difference between light rail, heavy rail (no, that’s NOT passenger trains) and commuter rail? Does he understand that transportation is an environmental issue, not just a play-with-rails issue? For that matter, does Obama? The transportation secretary should have been part of his so-called energy team. That it wasn’t is, sadly, telling.

More from Streetsblog, in this roundup of opinion. Some say he’s a bicycling and rail advocate. And a D.C. advocate type (unidentified) says LaHood is “potentially malleable.” I suppose that’s better than “complete jerk,” but still …

Everyone wants to get his or her pet project onto President-elect Obama’s list for his forthcoming stimulus package. (Alice Waters, e.g., wants a White House veggie garden.)

Here’s a pitch, in the form of a letter to Obama, that rolled into my inbox from one of my list-servs. It’s from Michael Ronkin of Designing Streets for Pedestrians and Bicyclists LLC in Salem, Ore., who suggests that small-scale sidewalk projects will stimulate the economy just as well as big road projects and are a lot faster to get rolling:

You have heard from many about repairing bridges and highways. You have been receiving many ‘shovel-ready’ wish lists of projects. Big highway projects are rarely shovel-ready; there will always be legitimate environmental and political hurdles to overcome, requiring robust public debate.

The backlog of sidewalk infill and repair is huge in most cities. When I worked as Pedestrian and Bicycle Program Manager for the Oregon Department of Transportation, I managed a small grant program (approximately $3,000,000/year statewide) that funded sidewalk infill projects. Every year we had to turn away many worthy applicants, as the requests exceeded available funds at a 5:1 ratio.