(ed. note. Please welcome contributor Chris Bradford, author of the economics blog Austin Contrarian.)

As this recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report reminds us, the answer is "very regressive."

Even in lean economic times, the average rent in San Francisco (above) is close to $2,000/mo. (Photo: BinBin.net)

The disparity between the federal government’s support for homeowners and renters is stark. In fiscal year 2009, according to CBO, Washington spent almost four times as much money ($230 billion) to support homeownership as it did to improve rental affordability ($60 billion).

That spending on homeowners included $80 billion for the tax deduction for  mortgage interest, $16 billion for the state and local property-tax deduction and $16 billion for the capital-gains exclusion.

But it also included temporary commitments, such as the Obama administration's mortgage modification program ($75 billion) and the first-time home buyer tax credit ($14 billion). And let's not forget the continuing federal outlays to subsidize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s credit activities ($43 billion). 

By contrast, Washington devoted just $60 billion to improving rental affordability, mainly through a combination of low-income housing tax credits, Section 8 rental assistance, and public housing.   

Most people, I think, will acknowledge a general uneasiness with this disparity. It seems unfair for the government to spend 80 percent of its housing budget on the 67 percent of its households who own property.

What's more, these federal subsidies flow disproportionately to the most affluent of those households. Homeowners see no benefit from the mortgage interest, property tax or capital-gains deductions unless they itemize -- which means that many homeowners get little or no actual subsidy. The subsidy rises with the value of the home and the tax bracket of the buyer.

In other words, the federal government handsomely rewards the affluent for buying expensive homes and leaves renters (as well as low-income home owners) relatively worse off in the process.

But Washington's housing subsidies, which have continued under both Democratic and Republican administrations, have an even more insidious impact in the nation's most expensive markets. There, they make renters worse off in absolute terms by raising the overall cost of housing.

How does this happen? While federal homeowner subsidies nominally flow to home buyers, the actual beneficiaries depend on the particular housing market.

In markets where it is easy to add new housing -- those with an elastic supply -- rising demand spurs more new housing rather than higher prices. Home buyers do indeed receive the subsidies’ benefits (though they often take an environmental hit from new, often sprawled construction patterns). The federal programs reduce their cost of housing without raising the cost of housing for renters. 

But the story is different in markets with high demand and tight supply, such as the expensive markets on the coasts -- highly desirable, highly productive metropolitan areas constrained both by geography and restrictions on new construction. In these markets, sellers possess a scarce good in high demand and can force buyers to bid away their federal subsidies. The federal subsidies are bundled into the sales price; in the end, home buyers are neither better off nor worse off than without the subsidies.

Renters, however, are unequivocally worse off.

But unlike buyers, renters do not enjoy large offsetting subsidies from Washington. They are stuck with higher real prices ... until they decide to flee for a city with cheaper housing. The relative pittance the government spends on rental housing cannot begin to remedy the imbalance (and might actually make things worse, to the extent the government merely creates more demand for housing without stimulating new supply).

The federal homeowner subsidies are thus doubly regressive in our most expensive cities. These cities have the richest residents living in the priciest homes that command the largest subsidies. And these cities have the tightest housing markets most vulnerable to distortions in demand. These places would undoubtedly be expensive to rent in anyway -- I can’t imagine center-city San Francisco being affordable to a young, working-class household -- but are decidedly less egalitarian, thanks to our federal government's housing programs.

(editor's note: The section with area specific data for Southern California isn't done yet.  When it is, we'll have a post specific to our region.  In the meantime, this statewide article prepared by Matthew Roth in San Francisco is a great read.)

California residents living in sprawling suburban developments could save billions of dollars every year if they lived in denser, urban zones and along transit corridors, according to a study released today by smart growth and transit advocates TransForm. Analyzing four metropolitan areas--Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Sacramento--Windfall for All found that shifting populations in those regions to denser development along transit corridors would save save $31 billion per year, or $3,850 on average per household [Report Summary PDF].

In the Bay Area, where annual car ownership costs on average over $8,000 per person, individuals spend roughly $34 billion every year on personal transportation costs, compared to only $4.6 billion spent by public agencies on transit and roads combined. Households with poor access to public transit not only spend double the amount per year on transportation when compared to those with good access to transit, they produce more than double the amount of CO2, a greenhouse gas.

"The most astounding thing is that agencies pinch their pennies on transit and cut back and we feel like we can't afford not to save that service," said Stuart Cohen, Executive Director of TransForm. "We're already spending more than seven times as much as our agencies spend on public transit and roads just on buying and operating our vehicles."

What's more, the report points out that fuel costs represent a small minority of the cost of owning a car, so the craze for electric and other low-emission vehicles will not dramatically reduce the transportation costs for those living far from their jobs and far from transit. The best solution to combating climate change, the report notes, is to build walkable, vibrant communities where residences are situated close to job centers. 

Click to enlarge: household CO2 from transportation in the Bay Area.

"By reducing public and private transportation costs and increasing revenues to local governments, SB 375 can help put dollars back in the pockets of consumers and local governments," said Cohen.

Windfall for All counters the claim that SB 375 will be too costly to implement during the current economic crisis with several examples of how planning denser cities and offering alternatives to private car travel can save money.

First, in Sacramento, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) created a 2050 development blueprint that forecasts current development patterns and compared them to smart growth patterns. SACOG found that Sacramento would save $9.4 billion in public infrastructure costs (transportation, utilities, water, etc), $655 million in annual residents' fuel costs and $8.4 billion less for land purchases to offset environmental degradation from sprawl. The city would also see a 300 percent increase in public transit use if the city clustered development around transit within an urban growth boundary.

Benefits of public transportation for household costs and pollution. Image: TransForm.

In the Bay Area, parking regulations are a significant impediment to dense development. In San Leandro, parking minimums of more than two parking spaces for each new home made dense development a planning impossibility. When San Leandro re-wrote its downtown plan, it rezoned to allow 3,400 new homes, more than seven times the limit under the old zoning laws. The first development in the new Downtown Transit-Oriented Development Strategy, The Alameda, designed by San Francisco Architect David Baker, saves $3.9 million by eliminating a level of parking and produces 30 more affordable units, according to the report.

Based on these and other case studies, Cohen suggested California should consider levying a climate impact fee on gasoline to generate enough money to expand public transit options and expand walkable communities while improving the economy and meeting ambitious greenhouse gas targets.

"Building our communities with the expectation that every driver in a family is going to have to own their own car is part of what is part of what is bankrupting families," said Cohen. "The infrastructure for the... roads and those patterns of growth is part of what is bankrupting our public agencies."

Windfall for All Critical Recommendations

• Integrate full economic analysis into planning. The huge dividends from efficient land use become evident once personal costs, not just public budgets, are considered. Without such analysis, we will continue to promote plans and policies that cost too much for families, businesses, and local governments.
• Provide cities and counties with an infusion of funds to engage the community in planning. The state should make funds available for updating zoning codes and parking policies to make more efficient use of land and resources. Identifying strategies to maintain and expand the number of affordable homes is also critical.
• Fund cost-effective public transportation. The state needs to provide leadership and restore funds for public transit, as well as make it easier for regions to raise new revenues with climate-impact fees. Economic analysis could determine whether such fees, if spent in ways that promote more efficient communities, can reduce our overall costs.
• Innovate, evaluate and replicate. There are dozens of innovative strategies – whether an individual program such as car-sharing, or a comprehensive rewards approach such as UC San Diego’s. MTC, the Bay Area’s transportation agency, will soon launch the first “Transportation Climate Action Program.” This program will seed, evaluate and replicate innovative programs. Other regions should follow suit.
• New development should minimize pollution from new residents – or pay to mitigate it. The San Joaquin Valley is encouraging efficient development from the start. New developments that don’t provide walkable communities with convenient transportation choices must mitigate the costs of the air pollution that will be generated by future residents. The state and regional air districts should encourage this same system for mitigating the costs of greenhouse gases.

President Obama may be optimistic about continued U.S. economic growth as 2009 ends, but the reality on the ground in urban America -- which an estimated two-thirds of the population calls home -- is undeniably, disturbingly bleak.

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (Photo: PennLive)

That was the message delivered today by two economists and a bipartisan quartet of U.S. mayors at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Michael Nutter, Philadelphia's Democratic mayor, seemed to sum up the mood as he mused aloud that the federal government had seen fit to deliver no-strings-attached cash to financial and auto companies deemed "too big to fail."

"Cities and metro areas are too important to fail," Nutter said, adding that successful urban government is "equally or, I'd suggest, more important than anything that's going on in industries."

Unfortunately, economic data suggests that cities are only just beginning to bear the brunt of what some have christened "The Great Recession." Steve Cochrane, managing director of Moody's Analytics, showed today's Brookings audience a map of the nation with states where employment could be expected to rebound the quickest.

A dozen states, including urban-dominant economic powerhouses such as New York, California, and Illinois, were colored bright red -- meaning that their employment recovery could be expected after 2013, or even later. A city-by-city map of housing price declines had more bad news for northeastern and West coast cities, showing that the foreclosure crisis has yet to hit bottom in those areas.

What does this mean for urban priorities, particularly transportation and infrastructure? The percentage of city officials reporting to the National League of Cities (NLC) that they are "less able" to meet financial needs jumped from 3 percent in 2007 to 88 percent in 2009, the highest number in the 26 years the NLC has measured metro fiscal health.

When the NLC asked urban officials to describe where they were cutting spending, 62 percent said capital infrastructure projects were being delayed or canceled. That high number suggests sustained, intense cuts in cities' ability to work on their built environments, NLC research director Chris Hoene said today. "[Cities] are going to be in trouble for years," he predicted.

How is the economic downturn affecting city services? Transit riders in many areas are sadly familiar with service cuts caused by budget austerity, but other aspects of urban community maintenance are dying out.

Nutter was forced to cut residential street cleaning and shutter nearly half of Philadelphia's public pools to help close his billion-dollar fiscal shortfall. Elaine Walker, mayor of Bowling Green, Kentucky, noted that "we were building sidewalks to the tune of $1 million a year. We're not doing that anymore."

The mayors had much more to say about how federal and state governments could begin repairing relations with local leaders that have been "irreparably damaged," as Scott Smith, mayor of Mesa, Arizona, put it. (Stay tuned for more coverage.)

But Walker suggested that the solution to the nation's urban budget crisis would have to begin with a fundamental shift in what Americans expect from -- and how they think about -- their elected government. Bolstering her theory, David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal (who led the mayors' debate) quoted a recent observation from Congress' chief budget adviser:

The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services the people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance those services.

Pedestrian life downtown. Photo by MarcTonySmith/Flickr

Los Angeles -Long Beach-Santa Ana Metro Area is among the most dangerous communities in the nation for pedestrians, ranking third in the percentage of crashes involving pedestrians and 27th out of the 52 largest metro areas in total pedestrian safety, a new report shows. Unfortunately, the report also shows that our Metro area shows the least political will to correct the problem, ranking in the bottom 10% when it comes to spending funds to protect the most vulnerable road users. The Greater Los Angeles Metro Region ranked fourth from the bottom when it comes to spending money to fix dangerous roads. You can read the full local press release by LA Walks at their blogsite.

The report, Dangerous by Design: Solving the Epidemic of Preventable Pedestrian Deaths (and Making Great Neighborhoods), ranks America's major metropolitan areas and states according to a Pedestrian Danger Index that assesses how safe they are for walking. An update of the 2004 Mean Streets report, Dangerous by Design was released by Transportation for America and the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership.

The report also examined how states and localities are spending federal money that could be used to make the most dangerous streets safer, and found that Los Angeles -Long Beach-Santa Ana Metro Area ranks 48th, spending (only) $0.45 per person. Yet, 26.99% of traffic deaths in the metro area are pedestrians, making the metro area the 3^rd highest rating location in the nation. This percentage is particularly high since only 2.7% of the population walks to work.  In other words, few people commute to work by walking, owing in part to the unsafe nature of our streets, and our governments are not spending nearly enough money to reverse that trend.:

"Los Angeles is where we are in the rankings because we are not investing to protect our citizens from speeding traffic as well as designing and building livable streets in our neighborhoods," said Deborah Murphy, Founder of Los Angeles Walks, "Be it the horrific crash that claimed the lives of two USC students after one was drug for almost 200 yards, or the case of a commuter being slammed by a city-bus in a crosswalk downtown; there are too many crashes every year that point to a dangerous system in need of real investment."

Unfortunately, these types of crashes are all-too frequent. Just last night, a pedestrian was killed by a car while legally crossing the street in a crosswalk in Long Beach.

One small step the City of Los Angeles could make immediately is setting aside a portion of its Measure R Local Return funds for bicycle and pedestrian safety. The City Council Transportation Committee is set to vote on how to spend it's portion of the county-wide transit tax on November 18.

"As Congress prepares to rewrite the nation's transportation law, this report is yet another wake-up call showing why it is so urgent to update our policies and spending priorities," said James Corless, director of Transportation for America.

Angelenos could have a great impact on the debate in Washington, D.C. on how transportation dollars are spent. ⁞ After all, L.A. is the largest city in the home state of Barbara Boxer, the Chair of the Senate Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Photo: npGreenway

The Congress for the New Urbanism's Project for Transportation Reform summit in Portland, Oregon, has brought together transportation engineers, city planners, and transportation reform advocates to share best practice policies for reforming transportation metrics, funding mechanisms, and regional practices that isolate transportation planning from land-use and growth targets.  The highlight of the first day of the program was Portland itself, as councilors from Portland Metro, one of the only elected municipal planning organizations (MPOs) in the country, elaborated on their multi-disciplinary mission, which seeks to limit development within an urban growth boundary and coordinate transportation, parks and recreation, and solid waste management to achieve a more sustainable city.

It's quite a mandate, one that Metro's own councilors and representatives reminded the audience was a work in progress. Despite Portland's reputation among new urbanists and livable cities advocates as a national leader in promoting pedestrian safety and multi-modal accessibility, the region's municipal stewards said they have a long way to go.  

Metro Councilor Robert Liberty said, "I know this is the image many of you have of our region," while displaying a slide of Dorothy and her cohorts skipping along the yellow-brick road to Oz (Portland's green bike lanes do beg at least a chromatic comparison to the Emerald City). In reality, said Liberty, moving onto a photo of one of Portland's many crisscrossing freeways, the city is still fighting off the influence of Robert Moses (who visited in the 1940s and convinced city leaders they should build bigger and faster roads). 

Since 1973, with the passage of Oregon's Senate Bill 100, which led to the original urban growth boundary around Portland, the region has incrementally chipped away at the Moses paradigm of freeway expansion, instead funding light rail, robust bus service, extensive neighborhood traffic calming, and ever more impressive bicycle infrastructure. So thoroughly have Portlanders embraced the bicycle, in fact, St. Stephen's Episcopal Church recently unveiled a new bicycle shrine in its efforts to reach out to cyclists.

An abandoned spur from the planned Mt. Hood Freeway, plans for which were scrapped after the freeway revolts of the 1960s and 70s. Photo: Matthew Roth

Despite this effort to moderate the expectations of conference attendees, it was clear twenty minutes into the first presentation that Metro has so thoroughly incorporated new urbanist principles into their lexicon that they are essentially speaking a different language than any other MPO in the country. What's more, they are not merely drafting good plans that collect dust on a shelf, but funding the innovative policies and setting performance targets so the public, which has a remarkable opportunity to give direct feedback via the ballot box, can gauge their successes and failure.

When I asked the city engineer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, how receptive his peers, their MPO and the state DOT were to principles of network connectivity and human-scale transportation objectives, he gave me a bemused smirk. He explained that his city was moving closer to installing a 2-mile streetcar route, but that most efforts to convince Wisconsin DOT that it should consider transit projects are met with responses like, "we're in the highway business."

Two other conference presentations from the day were particularly interesting, the first from CNU President John Norquist, who explained the efforts his organization has been involved in to build support among fire and emergency service personnel for human-scale streets, traffic calming, and dense development. Norquist said the process has been slow but positive: they are hoping more states will adopt policies similar to Oregon's, where final authorization of traffic calming depends on traffic engineers, not the fire marshal.  

The other presentation, by University of Connecticut Engineering Professor Norman Garrick, bolstered Norquist's assertion that dense cities are safer cities, per capita. Garrick presented data from a yet-to-be-released study of cities all over California that measured the impact of street design on a range of safety factors, from emergency response times to bicycle injury collisions and pedestrian fatalities.

Garrick found that cities built on a grid network and cities built before 1950, which tended to have smaller streets not designed primarily for automobility, realized significantly better safety indicators. In grid cities, according to Garrick, one's chance of dying in a car was 50 percent lower than in suburban-style cities (branch street networks) and injury collisions were 30 percent lower in grid cities.  People living in grid cities were four times more likely than their suburban counterparts to walk and bike and two-to-three times more likely to take transit.

During the afternoon, attendees broke out into groups to take tours of Portland's various networks, from streetcars, to bicycles, to green streets (my post on the green streets tour will be forthcoming). Today's highlights will be  panels on MPO reform and analysis of the VMT reduction benefits of dense development along transit corridors. Tomorrow, attendees will hear from Representative Earl Blumenauer on his national transportation agenda.

You can get updates from the conference on Twitter by searching for #CNUtrans and be sure to check the CNU website for presentations and video.

Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, where new building energy efficiency codes were recently adopted. (Photo: About.com)

But several other states that aren't widely known for environmental stewardship made strides between 2008 and 2009, including South Dakota, which rose from the ACEEE's No. 47 spot to No. 36, and and Tennessee, which rose from No. 46 to No. 38.

States' total average efficiency score climbed in 2009 from 15 to 17 points, out of a total possible score of 50, according to the ACEEE.

On transportation, states could earn a maximum of 8 points from the ACEEE by passing local measures to encourage denser development and reduce automobile dependence, adopting California's fuel-efficiency standard for cars, investing more than $50 per capita in transit, and offering consumer rebates for the purchase of efficient vehicles.

No state earned that perfect 8, but California and Washington came the closest, with 6-point scores on transportation. However, 23 states earned zero points for transportation efficiency -- almost equaling the 28 states that scored any points at all. Those 23 underachievers: AL, AR, ID, IL, IN, IA, KS, KY, MI, MS, MO, MT, NE, NV, NH, NC, ND, OH, SD, TX, UT, WV, and WY.

How many states tallied an extra point for per-capita transit investment? Find out after the jump.

The Congress for the New Urbanism will meet in Portland, Oregon, in early November for the annual Project for Transportation Reform, a summit to further define and clarify emerging urban transportation policies that embrace entire networks, rather than interdependent transportation segments, and that seek to balance modal transportation splits and reduce overall vehicular miles traveled (VMT).

Summit attendees and partners, including Streetsblog, will participate in discussions on emerging network planning and develop a strategy for informing the national transportation infrastructure debate, of particular significance as the climate and transportation bills move forward. As the draft CNU Statement of Principles on Transportation Networks notes [PDF], climate change and infrastructure problems in the US continue to intensify:

The US now has the world’s highest level of VMT per capita, while simultaneously experiencing the highest traffic fatality rates of any developed nation. Per capita traffic delay has more than doubled in the United States since 1982. This deterioration in transportation system performance has occurred in spite of an ongoing public investment of more that $200 billion per year in transportation infrastructure."

CNU President John Norquist said the current focus by transportation professionals on road capacity gives us cities like Detroit, where consistent spending to widen roads has destroyed communities.

"Federal and state DOTs don't understand how cities work. They still want to take rural forms and jam big roads into cities." he said. "Rather than measuring projected traffic flow, they should be measuring how much value it adds to a neighborhood. The US can't afford to be energy wasting and spending money on projects that destroy the value of neighborhoods."

U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer will kick off the summit and representatives from Oregon Metro will showcase the many innovative transportation and design policies they have implemented in the region that have given Portland one of the highest walking, transit, and bicycle mode shares in the country.

Summit organizers hope to develop the language around network-wide transportation reform so the CNU can persuade lawmakers in Washington DC to incorporate this new urban vision into upcoming climate and transportation legislation.

Marcy McInelly, co-chair of the CNU's transportation reform initiatives and principle of Sera Architects, said, "Reform is about giving more latitude to use highway funds for pieces of the network that may not be for highways. Right now the federal funds have to increase vehicular mobility, which raises VMT. If you had a funding formula that allowed you to count benefits to cost, it would almost always [result in] the other modes besides cars coming out more beneficial.  It would balance consideration of other modes."

Norquist said the CNU is working with the Institute for Transportation Engineers (ITE), the most significant body of professional transportation engineers in the country, to develop transportation standards that ennoble urban streets alongside rural roads and freeways in guides like AASHTO's Green Book for highway and street design.

According to Norquist, reform initiatives should focus on altering "the functional classification system. The current regulatory framework tries to feed future traffic demand, instead of trying to facilitate the network." 

Referring to the traditional advocacy position that tries to chip away at the 80-20 funding formula (80 percent of federal funding for freeways, 20 percent for transit), Norquist said a more fundamental change is needed.

"We're completely for the idea of changing the 80-20 split. But even if the environmental community wins and gets 25-75, you're still spending 75 percent of the money on road capacity. They should focus on creating roads that are useful and pleasant and create a place where people actually want to be."

Jane Jacobs. Photo: BusinessWeek

She may be experiencing an intellectual reconsideration in some corners, but Jane Jacobs is still a beloved figure for the urban planners and designers of Planetizen.

Other notables singled out by Planetizen readers include Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of New York's Central Park (No. 4), Enrique Penalosa, Bogota's former mayor and a dedicated proponent of bus rapid transit (No. 14), and Kaid Benfield, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's smart growth program (No. 42).

Check out the complete top 100 right here. Is anyone missing, or should anyone be ranked higher than they are?

For a decade Los Angeles has tried to build-up it's urban core in an effort to densify and change the character of the city from its sprawling reputation to a more traditionally urban one.  However, instead of modeling its growth after that of New York, a pattern formerly referred to as the "Manhattanization of Downtown" by Mayor Villaraigosa, perhaps Los Angeles should be following the example set by Paris instead of our older brother on the east coast. 

That theory is put forth from Jarrett Walker, a public transit consultant who runs the blog Human Transit.  Walker explains why he feels that Paris is more like Los Angeles than it is like New York:

This observation has one interesting and controversial corollary for Los Angeles.  At least from a transit perspective, the last decades' effort to build up downtown Los Angeles as THE pre-eminent center of the region may not be the path to a more sustainable city.  If you want a really balanced and efficient public transit system, nothing is better than multiple high-rise centers all around the edge, with lower-rise density in the middle, because that pattern yields an intense but entirely two-way pattern of demand.  If balanced and efficient transit were the main goal in Los Angeles planning, you'd focus your high-rise growth energies on multiple centers such as Westwood, Warner Center, Burbank, Glendale and perhaps new centers in the east and south, while continuing to add density in the middle as opportunities arise.

I "spoke" with Walker over email yesterday and he expressed interest in hearing our take on how we think L.A. should be growing.  So what do you think?  Should we be scrapping "Manhattanization" for "Parisization?"  Feel free to leave comments here or at the Human Transit story.

It's a nice line for leaders with big goals, but it's worth noting that Burnham wasn't all talk.

Does Carrion's (above) "listening tour" meet the Daniel Burnham standard? (Photo: Daily News)

He orchestrated the planning and construction of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, essentially an entire city built within a city, in a mere three years.

Obama's use of the line, by contrast, comes as he prepares to send his head of the new Office of Urban Policy on a listening tour.

The president's slowness to act is understandable given the constraints he faces: a weak economy, a soaring deficit, a mountain of policy crises to tackle, and an obstinate Senate, among other things.

And he has used the opportunities available to him to push forward important policies.

Obama has done more for high-speed rail investment in six months then his predecessor did in two full terms. Both the stimulus bill and the Waxman-Markey energy bill contain some significant funding for investment in metropolitan economies and infrastructure.

And yet there is ample reason to be frustrated with the administration.

The transportation funding bill which might have done significantly more to close the gap will likely be delayed -- at the administration's insistence -- for two years, despite the desire of a bipartisan group of bill backers to get reauthorization done this year.

The president seems reluctant to address the inevitable financial question -- how to pay for new investment -- at this time, with so many other contentious topics on the table.

The "never waste a crisis" mentality appears to have been retired; economic challenges haven't been invoked to justify deficit-funding of the bill, nor have they been used to sell the inevitable source of additional transportation money -- an increase in gas taxes or highway user fees.

And while the administration is wringing its hands over the fact that stimulus money allocated to states has not been allocated to metropolitan areas in appropriate proportions, it doesn't seem too interested in doing anything about the issue.

As Elana Schor reported yesterday, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is now urging states to send more money to cities, a plea that's easy enough to ignore.

If the administration has made the political determination that real transportation reform and investment isn't possible at this time, then I have no reason to challenge that assessment; I'm no political guru.

At the same time, that acknowledgment ought to be accompanied by efforts to do as much as possible with currently available tools. That means using government tools to create the proper incentives for state and local investment. Use the U.S. DOT's discretionary tools to provide the necessary carrots and sticks.

It also means laying the institutional groundwork for later resolution of tricky transportation funding issues. It is going to be very difficult to convince the American people to pay more for transportation. Doing so is the work of years.

The president seems unwilling, so far, to use his bully pulpit to influence active legislation. Fine. Can he not take the time in speeches such as yesterday's, then, to bluntly state the obvious? Higher gas taxes don't argue for themselves. Someone influential has to do it for them.

Reform doesn't happen magically. If the president feels that now is not the right time for an overhaul of the transportation funding rules or of metropolitan policy more broadly, then that's his judgment. But we need to see the groundwork being laid for later efforts.

Back in January, the LA Downtown News reported on exciting new design standards for new development in the Downtown which will lead to wider sidewalks, landscaped parkways and medians, and bring additional streetlights, trees and street parking to Downtown.  The standards, approved last week by the City Council, will require that as new development comes to the Downtown, that developers will be required to come up with pedestrian plans for the development.

Another part of the plan requires that 75% of the parts of buildings at street level be zoned retail, office or other active uses. The standards also dictate that buildings' primary entrances open onto the sidewalk or a sidewalk-accessible public space.  This part of the new rules may be more important than the sidewalk requirement.  Let's face it, there are plenty of areas in Los Angeles that have wide, attractive sidewalks, but as I discovered when I went for an unplanned, unmapped walk in the Downtown in 2007 wide sidewalks along dead streets with no pedestrian attractions aren't going to encourage anyone to walk through the neighborhood.

In other words, if I were to be planning the new development of Streetsblog Towers in Downtown L.A., I would be required to look at widening sidewalks around the Towers, not widening the road.  In addition to my office, Streetsblog Towers would also have some shops and other attractions for people walking by. 

While these new design standards are certainly a sign that elected officials are looking for ways to breathe life into dead streets, it remains to be seen if they're really willing to do what it takes to truly reclaim the streets for everyone and change the city's parking requirements for new developers.  It's great to encourage people to walk by planning a better walking environment.  It would be even better if those pedestrians aren't required to pay for other people's parking when they buy or rent in the Downtown.

When Barack Obama was elected, urbanists were, in some cases literally, dancing in the streets. For once, America had elected a president who understood the importance of cities -- and who promised to create an "Office for Urban Policy" that would help those cities to take their rightful place in the federal policy debate.

But, as Dayo Olopade of The Root reports today in a piece called "What Happened to Obama's Office of Urban Policy," that office has been slow to take shape, or show any indication of wielding serious influence:

[C]elebrations about the potential triumph of urban policy may be premature. In recent weeks, the Obama administration has begun referring to the office as "urban affairs," rather than "urban policy," a small but notable downgrade. And while other offices and Cabinet agencies have been staffing up -- the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships has representation in 12 government agencies -- 100 days in, urban affairs has announced only two senior staffers: Derek Douglas, who was special adviser to New York Gov. David Paterson, and former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión, Jr., who faces allegations of mismanaging campaign donations and development projects in New York City.…

[T]he urgency of dealing with the recession in these first 100 days has made the slow rollout of the office worrisome for some local officials. Caroline Coleman, federal relations director of the National League of Cities, says cities have been pummeled by the economic downturn. For the first time in the 24-year history of the organization’s City Fiscal Conditions report, the three primary sources of revenue for urban centers -- property, sales and income taxes -- all experienced a quarterly decrease. "What we’re seeing reflected in the national news is hitting hometown urban America every day," says Coleman.

Olopade points out that the selection of Carrión, a local pol with no experience at the national policy level, was perplexing to some who have been watching the process. She quotes Diana Lind, editor of Next American City: "[He] doesn’t have a lot of experience in dealing with federal policy. How could you give somebody like Adolfo Carrión control over, say the transportation laws in Milwaukee? It’s a hard leap to make."

Westwood residents are furious with Councilman Jack Weiss and the LADOT over a resolution appearing on tomorrow's City Council Transportation Committee Agenda which would strip traffic calming off of local streets that were placed in February of 2008 as a "pilot program."  The Holmby-Westwood Traffic Committee had asked for certain traffic calming measures to protect their local streets from traffic created by the Palazzo mixed use development which features a Trader Joes and other retail in addition to residential.

In addition to removing the existing traffic calming, the measure in front of the city would also alleviate Caden, Palazzo's developer, from having to build further traffic reduction measures in disregard of an agreement between the city, Casden and the neighborhood homeowner's association.  By alleviating Caden's responsibilities, the developer could save a quarter of a million dollars.  So if someone ever asks you rhetorically what the value of keeping children safe on the streets is, now you know.  It's a quarter of a million dollars.

As part of the deal, the city installed traffic calming throughout the community including a restriction prohibiting eastbound and westbound straight through traffic on Le Conte Avenue across Hilgard Avenue, arestriction prohibiting eastbound and westbound straight through traffic on Weyburn Avenue across Hilgard Avenue a restriction prohibiting southbound to eastbound left-turns from Hilgard Avenue to Lindbrook Drive and a median island and a sidewalk bump-out on Lindbrook Drive at Hilgard Avenue.

While the traffic calming has been an unparalleled success,  the Holmby-Westwood Traffic Committee claims the measures reduced traffic by 124.3% according to the LADOT's own traffic data.  Yet, for the traffic calming to be permanent, it needed two-thirds support of the community.  Yet, when the LADOT did a mail survey of the target area, just over sixty percent asked that the traffic calming remain on the street.  Thus, the city's transportation planners are working with Councilman Jack Weiss to remove traffic calming from the streets.  Their plan has already been approved by the City's Transportation Commission.

Not so fast cry the residents.  The LADOT's area polled seems designed to make certain the poll wouldn't meet the two-thirds required.  Instead of the area bound by the original agreement with Palazzo, the survey stretched farther east into communities that don't see the benefits of traffic calming.  If the LADOT had restricted their survey to the immediate community, it received the support of three-quarters of the community.

In a letter to the Transportation Commission, the Homeowner's spell out their complaints with the LADOT's survey noting that people were unaware that supporting the traffic calming was "all or nothing" and that over ninety three percent of all respondents favored some form of traffic calming for the area.

The public outreach about the proposal to take away the traffic calming was, as is often the case when it comes to a proposal to speed up and increase traffic flow at the expense of safe local streets, abysmal.  The community didn't receive notice of the plan or its hearing in front of the CTC until three days before the first hearing, which was conveniently held hours before a Jewish holiday.

However, the hearing also provides an opportunity for the City Council.  Do they support the LADOT and Jack Weiss' plan to rip working traffic calming out of the ground, or do they look out for the best interestes of the community.  If they truly are legally required to remove the traffic calming, will they require a new transportation plan to protect the local neighborhood from the traffic created by large developments.  Their actions will send a clear signal to other communities as to what they can expect in the citycontinues to grow.

Recently, Governor Schwarzenegger has come under fire for calling on President Obama to relax environmental rules to help stimulate the economy.   However, new proposed environmental standards may finally be changing the way the government looks at transportation and development. 

Anytime a development requires a permit from the state government, it must meet certain standards under the California Environmental Quality Act.  Critics have charged that the CEQA standards, because of the state's seeming belief that the number of cars on the road has little to do with pollution standards.  However, the new proposed rules seem to start going back on that theory by eliminating state parking requirements and motorized Level of Service requirements. Could the state finally be pulling back from its car culture planning paradigm?

After the jump, you can see the proposed changes.  If you want to let the state know how much you like the proposed regulations, you can send comments to CEQA.GHG@opr.ca.gov,  but make sure you do it by the close of business on Monday, July 26.  For a full list of all the changes, click here.

XVI. TRANSPORTATION/TRAFFIC -- Would the project: 

a) Cause an increase in traffic which is substantial in relation to the existing traffic load and capacity of the street system (i.e., rResult in a substantial increase in eitherthe number of vehicle trips, the volume to capacity ratio on the roads, or congestion at intersections) roadway vehicle volume or vehicle miles traveled?

b) Exceed, either individually or cumulatively, a level of service standard established by the county congestion management agency for designated roads or highways? 

cb) Result in a change in air traffic patterns, including either an increase in traffic levels or a change in location that results in substantial safety risks? 

dc) Substantially increase hazards due to a design feature (e.g., sharp curves or dangerous intersections) or incompatible uses (e.g., farm equipment)? 

ed) Result in inadequate emergency access? 

f) Result in inadequate parking capacity? 

ef) Conflict with adopted policies, plans, or programs supporting alternative transportation (e.g., bus turnouts, bicycle racks)?

Photo: Timothy Felsrow/Flickr

via Salon's How the World Works

If you have seven minutes of free time, you should check out this video above.  If not, make time.

Recently, Guillermo Penalosa, the former Commissioner of Parks, Sports and Recreation for the city of Bogotá, spoke at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club about the changes that have gone on in Bogota since the mid 1990's that have made the city a home for alternative transportation.  Penalosa noted that creating parks, public spaces and bicycle and pedestrian amenities isn't only the best way to help a city grow and environmentally friendly; it's also inexpensive.

Penalosa also happily pointed out some of the innovations going on around the world that are changing the way people think about transportation and commuting such as the Velib in Paris, real Congestion Pricing in England and Los Angeles' bike licensing program.  Ok, I'm kidding about that last part.

Longtime Streetfilms viewers will recognize the name Penalosa, but they'll be thinking of the Comissioner's brother, the former Mayor of Bogota.  Streetfilms has more in-depth coverage of a lot of what Penalosa is talking about above including Bogota BRT, Ciclovia, Lessons from Bogota, and an interview with the Mayor.

The City's Vision for the LA River in the Coming Decades

The Los Angeles Department of City Planning will be holding hearings this Friday and Monday  on an ordinance that would provide new guidelines for development on both public and private land adjacent to the river.  If approved, the new River Improvement Overlay District would include all of the neighborhoods within the City of Los Angeles that are adjacent to the Los Angeles River.  The exact boundries aren't set yet.

While it's encouraging to see the city embrace a more green development strategy, the RIO District restrictions don't tackle some of the largest concerns that most people have with developments.  For example, there is no restriction on size or parking.  Instead new developments in the RIO District will have to comply with certain green standards and comply with green transportation programs.

The RIO also provides guidelines for new “complete” streets and includes a mobility strategy to ensure that the needs of pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, and vehicle drivers are considered when major projects or street improvements are undertaken.

I will say, any development plan that is going to create streets that feature the amenities pictured above, especially those pedestrian amenities, is a welcome site regardless of any shortcomings in the proposed ordinance.

For greater detail about what the RIO District will mean for the area, please read Joe Linton's post at Creek Freak from earlier this fall.  If you can't make the meetings and want to add your two cents, leave a note in the comments section and I'll forward it to City Planning.  If you are free either Friday or Monday morning, here is the meeting information.

Friday, December 12              Monday, December 15
12:00 pm                               8:00 am
Room 1B, Braude Building      Room 1020, City Hall
6262 Van Nuys Boulevard      200 N Spring Street
Van Nuys                                Los Angeles

Image: City of LA via Creek Freak

This piece from William Gale and Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution maps out some smart principles for the people who'll be making those decisions. Stop spreading transpo funds around the country "like peanut butter," they tell the feds, and target places with the biggest concentrations of people...

Lost in a morass of pork and politics, federal infrastructure policy today is an unaccountable free-for-all. Though there is little economic justification for making broad improvements in all places, that is exactly how the American transportation structure operates. The 6,373 earmarked projects in the latest federal transportation authorization illustrate the problem. It's not just the distaste for earmarks but the politically driven scattershot approach. The result is that only half of the projects go to places that matter most to the American economy and would benefit most from the investments: the 100 largest metropolitan areas, where 75 percent of GDP is produced.

Katz, you may recall, is one of the leading candidates to head up the new Office of Urban Policy in the Obama White House. So hopefully we'll get to see whether this idea can survive the Senate, where Alaska wields the same number of votes as New York. 

In terms of modal preference, Katz and Gale make no pronouncements, but the goals they describe don't seem all that compatible with 18-lane elevated highways:

The focus should be on investing in infrastructure that supports the competitiveness and environmental sustainability of the nation instead of funding individual states or spending on singular needs.

To score this, the nation needs a strong, deliberate and strategic federal government to do what is necessary to keep America competitive. What would that mean?

It means setting strict criteria for the billions of infrastructure dollars that are spent as part of the stimulus. Such criteria should include a real assessment of economic benefits and costs that consider environmental, energy, and social impacts. We should only invest those dollars where the nation has assurances of high returns.

It means holding the grantees -- the states and metropolitan planning organizations -- accountable through ongoing audits to ensure public dollars are being spent as efficiently and effectively as possible. The direct loss of future federal funds should be a genuine consequence for failing to meet basic accountability standards.

It means making focused, targeted investments in those gateways and corridors that are the critical nodes of international trade and inter-metropolitan commerce, rather than spreading infrastructure funding around the country like peanut butter. An independent national infrastructure bank should be established to define and finance those projects of substantial regional and national significance now and in the future.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

This evening,the American Institute of Architects will host a forum debating whether Los Angeles should consider banning new billboards.  In the event announcement the AIA notes:

Even as the City struggles to identify and regulate existing off-site signage, it moves forward with creative sign districts and signage supplemental use districts that add new off-site signs.  There are currently at least three additional supplemental-use signage districts proposed in Los Angeles. While the City seeks funds from these billboard districts to realize important community-based projects, off-site signage advocates justify overturning citywide ordinances limiting billboards by pointing to the adoption of these same districts.

Put more briefly, the city has inconsistent goals and policies when it comes to controlling the amount of "offsite signage" cluttering our roadways.

The main arguments against these outdoor advertisements is the intrusion on motorists and other street users.  Recently, news articles began appearing because the city is allowing lighted billboards to go up that are lighting up the inside of people's homes.  The main argument to keep billboards, and allow people to put up more and more of them, is the revenue it generates for the city.

The problem with lighted billboards may be one that is too large for the city to handle by itself.  The San Jose Mercury News and New York Times have both looked at the problems created by lighted billboards in Los Angeles, and the city's inability to do much about it.

Legal entanglements dating back years have hampered the city's ability to regulate outdoor signs. In 2002, the council passed an ordinance prohibiting new billboards and ordering an inventory of existing ones. But billboard companies challenged the ordinance in court. In 2006 and 2007, the city settled lawsuits with three of the largest billboard companies: CBS Outdoor, Clear Channel Outdoor and Regency.

Under the settlements, CBS and Clear Channel were allowed to convert as many as 850 print billboards to electronic ones. The 50 or so billboards converted since then all have valid permits, making them legal, but city officials say that given the terms of the settlements, the permits had to be granted without adequate public review.

"It was probably a mistake to approve that legal settlement as it was," said Eric Garcetti, the council's president.

So sometime in the next few weeks, Garcetti said, the council will vote on an emergency moratorium that would halt billboard conversions and new billboard construction for six months. The lawmakers, now convinced that the settlements were a bad idea and that they will find support for more stringent review in existing state environmental law, would use that time to strengthen their 2002 ordinance.

If Los Angeles were to move forward with a ban on new billboards, it wouldn't be the first city to do so, nor would it even be the first in California.  In fact, a quick google search on "arguments against billboards" turns up hundreds of results of a debate going on nationwide, including this article from TIME Magazine from 1957.

The panel discussion begins tonight at 7 P.M. at the AIA's Los Angeles Headquarters, 3780 Wilshire Boulevard.

Photo: Claus 707/Flickr

Via Carfree USA:

An exhaustive two year survey by the Modesto Bee in cooperation with the Great Valley Center and a class of California State University, Stanislaus, pollsters shows that LA County and the OC aren't the only Southern California counties struggling with Smart Growth.  The report concludes that most communities in the San Joacquin Valley can do a lot more to reduce people's reliance on the automobile.

The Bee published a scorecard and map so that readers in different communities can see how their town is doing in relationship to other towns in the area.  You can click on their interactive map here.  To their credit, they don't just attack the towns that are encouraging sprawl, they also praise an example of Smart Growth done right in Oakdale.

A front porch swing catches a lift of breeze and gently sways beyond a white picket fence. A meandering sidewalk, 10 feet off the road, works through bright green grass. The sidewalk connects to a bike path, nature trail and a country river.

It's not old-timey nostalgia or a Hollywood ideal. It's a 320-home mass production subdivision called Burchell Hill.

It is smart growth...

...The city also scored highly in areas that may be less visible but still support smart growth concepts, with strong policies regarding jobs, streets, water and sewers. And Oakdale's west end is protected by an agricultural buffer, a rare greenbelt formally acknowledged by Riverbank.

Such forward thinking vaults Oakdale to the top of The Bee's survey of ideals. But the policies have been in place long enough to produce real results.

Some interesting results from the valley wide-survey can be read after the jump:

Size doesn't seem to matter. The highest-scoring cities feature a mix of the valley's very smallest (Dos Palos*) and largest (Fresno, Modesto and Bakersfield). (*An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed Sanger as among the valley's smallest cities.)

Many cities are conscious about the fees they charge developers. Among nine smart growth sections, cities valleywide scored best in the category measuring whether they charge adequate fees and update them regularly, although even the best cities earned less than 90 percent.

On average, cities' design and public outreach leave much to be desired.

Whether good planning rubs off on neighbors is debatable.

Of the valley's 60 cities, the three highest-scoring -- Oakdale, Patterson and Turlock -- are in Stanislaus County, and the county seat, Modesto, tied for seventh place. Overall, Stanislaus County cities scored an average of 66.19 percent -- significantly ahead of cities in runner-up Madera County, with 57.88 percent.

Photo: The Modesto Bee

Ask virtually any store manager at the Saint Louis Galleria about shoplifting, and you'll invariably get two responses: One, it's out of control; and two, it's gotten exceedingly worse since August 2006, when MetroLink opened a stop just 500 yards from the high-end shopping center.

In the first six months of this year, Richmond Heights police made 345 arrests at the mall. That's nearly double the number of arrests made in all of 2005, before MetroLink opened its Shrewsbury line.

More alarming are the numbers of juveniles (kids under the age of seventeen) arrested at the mall. This year police are on pace to take 276 juveniles into custody for shoplifting and other offenses — a sevenfold increase over the 39 kids arrested at the Galleria in 2005.

"I know it's not politically correct, but how else do you explain it?" comments a frustrated Galleria store manager.

Not everyone is as reactionary. A police officer who regularly patrols the mall, asked to explain the "surge," replied: "Who knows? Perhaps it's the downturn in the economy. Or maybe it's the need for teens to feel like they have to wear the latest fashions."

Of course it could also be that improved transit brings more people in general, or that authorities are more likely to target those who appear out of place for engaging in activities that might otherwise go overlooked. But after establishing its "city problems invade the 'burbs" theme, the story avoids such analysis, relying instead on rote "he said she said" coverage. To wit:

Richmond Heights police reported arresting three adult males — ages 23, 29 and 31 — implicated in a string of thefts earlier this summer. According to Macy's loss-prevention officers, the men would enter the department store, conceal merchandise under their clothes and then hightail it across the Galleria parking lot to the MetroLink station. By the time Macy's officers realized what had been stolen, the men were already on a train out of town.

"Just as we don't blame the automobile industry if someone commits a crime with a car, you need to be careful about blaming the mode of transportation for some of these recent isolated incidents," says [Metro spokeswoman] Dianne Williams.

Photo of St. Louis Galleria: merfam/Flickr