A few things to know this week: October 18, 2019
Happy Friday, friends!
Every week, we round up some of the things we read, listened to, or watched that really caught our attention.
This week's things to know:
1. Reduced demand: Tolling or restricting cars reduces traffic
City Observatory does important work in this piece of spotlighting a number of key points. First, just as building road capacity creates traffic, reducing road capacity and eliminating routes (demonstrated in two real-world examples) reduces traffic. Second, reducing traffic increases bus ridership. Third, why invest millions into subsidized street infrastructure for which demand drastically diminishes when a toll is applied? Last, why do we penalize (financially and otherwise) those who use "more socially and environmentally responsible options" for travel? At Verdunity, we often talk about misconceptions related to long-term street maintenance. We also talk about approachable, simple experiments that can be done to "test" a premise before permanent changes are made (and dollars spent). This article touches on both. It's a great read. – AJ
2. Cars with high-tech safety systems are still really bad at not running people over
If you just read automakers’ press releases from the past few years, you’d think we’ve made big strides in making cars less dangerous to pedestrians. Sensors! Lasers! Cameras! Computers that helpfully suggest that you don’t mow down that kid chasing that soccer ball! Yeah, the truth is that’s all hokum. And the bigger point it underscores should actually be a very simple and obvious one if you look at the bigger context: “people being able to comfortably walk around” and “cars being able to go fast” do not mix. Design cities and neighborhoods for frictionless driving and you just create better conditions for people to get hit by drivers, whether they have the fanciest, tech-iest new SUV or not (we don’t even have to get into the whole SUV debacle here). Check out this Verge article for some fun videos showing fake pedestrians getting real run over by cars with supposedly high-tech safety systems. Money quote: “The researchers tested several scenarios, including encountering a pedestrian after a right-hand turn and two adults standing alongside the road with their backs to traffic. The latter scenario resulted in a collision 80 percent of the time, while the former yielded a 100 percent collision rate.” Cool! Let’s just be clear: high-tech cars on high-speed streets won’t make our communities any safer, but old-school, naturally walkable streets will. – Jordan
How many times have you heard arguments at a Planning & Zoning meeting (if those are your thing) that new housing (especially multifamily) should not be approved because the infrastructure can't support it? How often have you heard city staff make such an argument? Michael Lewyn does a nice job in this piece of refuting those assertions. "I concede that our most expensive cities could use a little more infrastructure — but so could every other city. More importantly, these inadequacies do not justify policies that raise housing costs to exclusionary levels." Food for thought? – AJ
Do you enjoy these weekly roundups? (Why wouldn’t you?) You can get them sent straight to your email inbox every Friday, if you’re into that.
After several years of decline, transit ridership experienced its first increase in the second quarter of 2019 compared to 2018. This piece from Streetsblog has a great overview of the change, as well as factors that affect ridership. In a nutshell, negative impacts on ridership are bus and rail speeds that are slower than cars, high-cost transit passes compared to car ownership, and job displacement away from downtown areas to suburbs. On the other hand, positive impacts on ridership include investing in new service and infrastructure projects like a new rail line or a bus lane on a street, and changes to traffic signals that make transit move along a little quicker. – Tim
5. In Dallas, a proposed high-rise hints at hospitality’s future
There's a new wave of development coming to a city near you (if it’s a big one), or near us in this case. The "future of the hospitality industry" is coming to Dallas as Sonder attempts to grow its market. The real estate start up looks to move into a development with a proposed "high-rise for homesharing" that will have 270+ units to rent out themselves. With this new wave of real estate development do you believe that this is "creating a high standard that fills the gap between five-star hotels and renting a home" trying to fill a generally missing sector of housing in the "missing middle" or is this just another money/growth hungry company looking to cash in on what many may think of as the "next best thing in renting"? – Ryan
6. Millennials Are Coming to America’s Small Towns
A common narrative is that Millenials are moving to larger cities, pulling resources from smaller cities and leading to 'brain drain.’ However, in this article from Realtor.com, Liz Farmer finds an opposing trend: with the rise of the remote workplace, many Millenials who can take their jobs with them are moving from urban centers to smaller cities. Farmer highlights some potentially appealing aspects of smaller city living, such as a slower pace of life, lack of traffic, and ability to easier accommodate pets and animals. – Tim
7. Baldwin opens rare town-run grocery store to fill food gap
One of the things we hear frequently from rural communities is that they need a local grocery store. Read how residents and city leaders in a small town in Florida worked together to start their own town-run local grocer. – Kevin
Upcoming keynotes and workshops!
Check out our Upcoming Events page to see if our busy October and November schedule brings us anywhere near you.
Want to learn more about how fiscal analysis can help you make your city stronger financially?
We created a new sister website showcasing how we use math, maps, and money to help cities communicate your resource gap and explore ways to increase tax revenue and improve service efficiency without necessarily raising taxes.
Hey, friends in local government:
Have thoughts on any of the links above? Think we missed something essential? We’re discussing these topics and more over on our brand-new online community, exclusively for local government employees.* Sign up for the Community Cultivators Network and join the discussion!
* The network is currently only for those wonderful folks out there who work in local government. If you’re not currently working for a city, town, or county, we still love you (and are sure many of you would add value to the community), but we want to keep our commitment to making this a community focused specifically on our friends working in local government. Thanks for understanding!
