Cities aren't wasting money, they're wasting space.

Portland, like most governments in America these days, is in the middle of a big budget shortfall. They're cutting school programs, raising bus fares, and laying off social workers. The city's main source of revenue is a 1.8% property tax, which is already high by Maine standards - the city can't raise it much further without sending more development and investment into the suburbs, and sending more homeowners into foreclosure.

On the face of it, it looks pretty hopeless. But in fact, City Hall has millions of dollars in costs that, out of pure neglect, it's been hiding off of its balance sheets. They're not in the schools, or in homeless shelters.

They're the opportunity costs of the city's acres of parking lots.

Here's an example - the East End School has a half-acre off-street lot on North Street. It's got gorgeous views of Back Cove and Casco Bay, it's across the street from the community gardens, it's a desirable neighborhood - and we're using this space only 15% of the time, for private vehicle storage during school days. This is self-evidently stupid, isn't it? And yet, there it is.

What if, instead, we made those few drivers park in the abundant on-street spaces on North Street and the Eastern Promenade (or walk, or take the bus), then sold this half-acre on the open market, no strings attached? Even in this economy, such a desirable location would fetch a lot of money - probably at least $400,000, which happens to be roughly 5% of the school system's budget shortfall this year.

And that's not all. If this half-acre of hilltop land goes to the private sector, it's all but certain that some developer will want to build something there. Most likely it would be homes, which is something our city needs more of. Let's assume they build 8 townhomes for $210,000 each. Then the city will collect 1.8% every year in property taxes - or about $30,000 in new revenue total. That's enough to cover the entire East End School's annual supplies budget.

And another thing: if we sell a pointless parking lot on the open market, the East End School will save a few thousand dollars every year in avoided pavement maintenance and plowing costs. It would become somebody else's problem, instead of the taxpayers'.

What do you think would make the teachers at the East End School happier? Having very convenient off-street parking, or having their jobs and a reasonable number of kids in their classes?

This is just one single parking lot. There's also Reiche School's 1/4 acre parking lot on Brackett Street in the West End, the 1/2 acre of parking at the corner of Stevens and Pleasant Ave (the very center of Deering Center), and the huge 6 acre front lawn of the PACTS school on Allen Avenue. Selling all this land could recoup 1/3rd of the school budget cuts this year, and start generating new property taxes immediately for future years, and trim the school system's property maintenance costs.

And that's just the school system. The public Housing Authority is hoarding acres of parking lots in the West End and East Bayside. Redeveloping those lots wouldn't just mend the budget, it would also start to mend those neighborhoods' ugly scars of urban renewal, by providing new homeownership opportunities and a measure of economic diversity.

But the biggest opportunity is the city's parking management itself. By charging below-market rates for parking on the city's streets and in its garages, the tiny little Parking office might rank as one of the most expensive in City Hall: it's hiding tens of millions of dollars from the city's balance sheets, from unaccounted parking subsidies to lost tax revenues. Our city's parking manager could have worked for Bernie Madoff.

So, I ask you again: what's more important? Solvent schools, a social safety net, and decent public services, funded by the development of new housing opportunities?

Or free parking?

Peak Oil Hits the Road

According to NPR's All Things Considered (hat tip to the lovely girlfriend who told me to listen), truckers all over the nation parked their rigs yesterday to protest high diesel prices, which have already risen well above $4 a gallon.

Independent truckers are being particularly vocal, since they lack the bargaining power of larger firms to negotiate for lower diesel fuel contracts, and also seem reluctant to raise their rates. NPR quoted independent trucker John Paul Trainor as he sat on the beach in San Diego on Tuesday instead of delivering cargo in his rig. "It's like everybody wants something for nothing," Trainor said. "And they finally pushed us past the nothing point."

But it's not as though the bigger trucking companies aren't getting squeezed: some are taking the drastic measure of asking their drivers to obey speed limits, according to Treehugger. This quote is from an AP report of the phenomenon: "Truckers and industry officials say slowing a tractor-trailer rig from 75 mph to 65 mph increases fuel mileage by more than a mile a gallon, a significant bump for machines that get less than 10 miles per gallon hauling thousands of pounds of freight."

OK, so I harbor no deep regret that trucks are driving more slowly and that some truckers will sell their rigs and find something more productive to do than warehousing goods on our freeways. In fact, this is great news for air quality and highway safety.

However, after decades of Detroit's influence over transportation policies, the American economy is dangerously reliant on its trucks. Big rigs carry roughly 3/4 of America's goods (by weight) around the country (source). If truckers go out of business and constrain the supply of available shippers, or, if trucks driving at more reasonable speeds force retailers and manufacturers to invest more in their inventories, then the companies that hire the trucks will have to pay more to stay in business, and in turn, the prices we all pay for just about everything will rise.

Expect inflation, in other words. And since it's coming right in time for a recession as well, with the Federal Reserve Bank handing out bailouts and cheap loans like they were candy, it's beginning to look a lot like a shit storm of stagflation might be coming down, and it's highly unlikely that a $600 tax rebate is going to save us.

This is generally unfortunate news for everyone, not just truckers. But at least it's interesting for macroeconomists. More on stagflation, monetary policy, and the wage-price death spiral in a future post.

The City trumps the Prius

Image: Foster and Partners' planned carbon-neutral Masdar City, under construction in Dubai

Hey, all you granolas. Sell your Prius, sign over the homestead to the lumber company, and move to town - it's the new frontier in honest environmentalism.

As America's unmoored energy policy flails about for some kind of "sustainable" solution to keep us moving between our American Dream wilderness retreats and the closest Wal-Mart (turns out the biofuels that won the jackpot in Washington's latest energy bill are are only going to make matters worse - oops), it's becoming increasingly clear that there isn't any sustainable way to maintain the massive amounts of energy and highway infrastructure that suburbs require.

That's the gist of a new essay-in-progress by WorldChanging editor Alex Steffen: My Other Car is a Bright Green City.

Steffen argues that even if Detroit were able to pull a 135 mile-per-gallon-equivalent hybrid out of its ass and into mass production tomorrow, the age of happy motoring would still be doomed (although any efforts that Detroit might invest to that end would be very much appreciated). Modest efforts to increase transit infrastructure and support density in existing towns and cities will have much bigger effects on our total greenhouse gas emissions than the most ambitious gas-mileage standards. Besides that, city-dwellers on average spend less energy on electricity, heating, and cooling as well.

So pack up your geodesic dome and reserve your spot at the community garden - there are still plenty of vacant lots left over from the slums they bulldozed while you were dancing away at Woodstock. The future of environmentalism is in our cities: as Steffen writes, "we might just awaken on the other side of this fight to find ourselves prosperously at home in the sort of communities we thought lost forever, leading more creative, connected and carefree lives."

The People's Car

"That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."
- Henry David Thoreau, 1856

Environmentalists worldwide have been wringing their hands this week with the introduction of the new Tata Nano, a $2500 "people's car" intended to make car ownership affordable to India's burgeoning middle class.

So will 1 billion new motorists in India push the world's carbon-soaked atmosphere over the brink? How could those third-world nations be so inconsiderate?

I'm actually not that concerned about the Nano. I do think that this car is going to cause big problems in India: as thousands of new and inexperienced drivers take to streets that are already congested to the point of uselessness, and as those thousands of newly-minted members of the middle class sink a huge portion of their incomes into cars - a depreciating asset - instead of into their homes, education, medicine, or even safe drinking water.

But who are we to say that India shouldn't drive? Their middle class is merely following the lousy example we've set. We should actually be heartened by the fact that the Nano is remarkably fuel-efficient, and its engine will generate less pollution than most of the three-wheeled rickshaws and two-stroke motor scooters it's intended to replace.

In fact, as this NY Times article attests, the Nano is actually a model of automotive efficiency and frugality: no power steering, no power windows, no air bags or antilock brakes, one windshield wiper instead of two. Stripping out everything they didn't need allowed Tata's engineers to reduce material costs and build a car light enough to run on a tiny 35 horsepower engine (by comparison, this American couch-potato lawnmower runs on a 25 horsepower engine). This is almost the platonic ideal of an automobile: a car stripped down to its barest essence.

So as world environmental crises go, the Nano has got nothing on the hundreds of new coal power plants that China is building to keep our Wal-Mart shelves full of cheap plastic crap. Even if millions of people do embrace the Nano, India will have to respond with even tighter pollution rules (in fact, new auto regulations are already on their way), congestion charges for crowded city streets, and other measures to reduce driving.

Plus, like their Chinese counterparts, new Indian motorists are likely to drive up the global price of gasoline even further - and that should help the developed world trade in our own autos for something a little more frugal.

The way ahead for freeways isn't free

Traffic jams are the Soviet breadlines of our day: too many drivers paying too low a price to use our roads and highways in the twilight days of Socialized Motoring.

The alternative - congestion pricing - has the support of transportation advocates on the left (as a way to reduce air pollution and finance transit) and on the right (as a way to introduce market prices for a scarce public resource). The idea's even making its way into the smoggy Kremlin of the freeway empire, Los Angeles, where the Bush administration is encouraging the transit agency to get more revenue from rush-hour drivers:

"To reduce traffic congestion, the Los Angeles area needs to experiment with charging motorists to drive in special freeway lanes during peak periods, a Bush administration official told the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board Thursday."

-From the LA Times. Full story here.

They bulldozed it.

Above: Franklin and Oxford Streets in the 1950s. The other historic photo (below) shows another stretch of the long-lost Franklin Street (historic photographs courtesy of Maine Memory Network)

This photograph here is what the corner of Franklin and Oxford Streets looked like about 50 years ago, before the WASPs on the City Council noticed the Irish name on the corner store, called it a "slum," and bulldozed it all to create the hated Franklin Arterial.

Below, another photograph from the same site of another spot on the former Franklin Street. It's hard to know exactly where, since the buildings, shady elm trees, and even the sidewalks have been gone for decades. For those readers who have never been to Portland, here's what urban renewal gave us instead: a grass median full of garbage, some scrubby trees growing over the old neighborhood's rubble, and four lanes of traffic unencumbered by crosswalks or sidewalks. Here's a photo (the Franklin Towers, Portland's tallest building and a fine example of Soviet Sentimental architecture, commands a fine view of the no-man's-land):

Note how all of these "slum dwellings" in the old photos bear striking resemblance to historic homes that now sell for over $1 million in surrounding neighborhoods. Way to invest in real estate, you jingoist highway-engineering dipshits.

Here's some good news, though: my new buddy Patrick writes about schemes to repair past urban renewal idiocy with a new Franklin Boulevard in the Bollard this week: read about it here. Tomorrow at the Franklin Towers will be a "revisioning workshop" to brainstorm new ideas for the blighted pavement - perhaps I'll see you there. Finally, here's a previous post about fixing Franklin Arterial.

This Is Broken: Tukey's Bridge (of Doom)

Tukey's Bridge crosses Portland's Back Bay between the Munjoy Hill neighborhood and East Deering. It also completes the circuit of Portland's very popular Back Bay running path and links into the Eastern Prom bike path. In short, it is an important and well-used connection in Portland's bike and pedestrian network.

It is also completely and utterly broken: poorly designed and maintained, inconvenient, and unsafe. The fact that so many people still use it nevertheless testifies to its importance as a connector between neighborhoods.

Here's a tour of the bridge from a pedestrian's and cyclist's perspective:

To get to the sidewalk from the south, one must either take the Back Bay path or, if you're coming from any of the neighborhoods on the north side of the bridge, cut through a parking lot and follow a dark, narrow path under an overpass (broken glass abounds, natch).

The bridge makes room for eight lanes of freeway and one meager sidewalk, which is only on one side of the bridge. For most of its length, the sidewalk only has enough room for two people walking abreast. Bicyclists, runners, walkers, and strollers passing each other in both directions are frequently forced to jockey for space: in traffic engineering terms, this sidewalk's level of service gets an "F".

A big part of the problem is the fact that there's no sidewalk for northbound traffic on the other side of the bridge. Cyclists headed north have the choice of breaking one of two laws: either ride (illegally) on the sidewalk that leads into the bridge from Washington Avenue, or stay on the right shoulder of the road, even for the 100 yards over the bridge where it's designated a freeway and bicycles are forbidden (I opt for the latter option, which is faster and safer to my mind).

Anyhow, continuing southward, bikes and pedestrians have a choice between peeling off onto the Back Bay/Eastern Prom trails or continuing on a narrower sidewalk along the off-ramp to Washington Avenue and the Munjoy Hill neighborhood. If you should choose the latter, you'll encounter this off-ramp to Anderson Street:

Note the beefy guardrails. Traffic here is only supposed to be traveling at neighborhood speeds at this point, but this road is obviously designed to encourage much faster traffic. Not that this could be at all related to the speeding pickup truck that hit me, dragged me along the pavement, and ran away just a few blocks down this same street (see previous post).

Because of the guardrails, bikes and pedestrians must cross the off-ramp at the crosswalk, which at least has a bright sign to get the attention of the hurtling traffic.

Once across the off-ramp, bicyclists have two unsavory choices: either continue up the extremely narrow and overgrown sidewalk, as this guy does, until the guardrail ends and you can hop onto the street.

Or, if you want to be legal, wait until the coast is clear...

At the other side of the crosswalk, make a sharp turn against traffic (keeping a sharp lookout to make sure there aren't any cars coming around the bend at 60 MPH)...

Make a tight turn around the end of the guardrail...

...and ride normally up the right side of Washington Avenue (presuming you haven't been vehicularly manslaughtered in the meantime).

The state DOT could easily and cheaply fix the latter hazard by cutting the guardrail at the other end of the crosswalk and installing a curb cut there where bikes can go directly from the sidewalk to the road. This would also make it easier for northbound cyclists to get onto the bridge path from the other side of Washington.

It's kind of a wonder our highway engineers didn't do this in the first place, but I've seen enough highway engineers to know that they aren't fond of using their legs.

I'll be sending this assessment to the following bureaucrats, and I'd encourage you to send your thoughts on this crossing to the same people:

• Steve Linnell, Greater Portland Council of Governments Sr. Transportation Planner: slinnell@gpcog.org


• John Duncan, Director, Portland Area Comprehensive Transportation Committee (PACTS): jduncan@gpcog.org


• Eric Ortman, Transportation Planner for PACTS: eortman@gpcog.org


• MaineDOT Engineers: projectdev.mainedot@maine.gov

Easy riding on the "highway to extinction"

The Court ruling also strikes a blow against the pudgy, middle-aged jackasses who drive Hummers.

It's been a bad week for fossil fuel apologists.

On Monday, the Supreme Court (over the objections of its recent neocon appointees) disciplined the automobile industry with a ruling that gave the EPA the authority and responsibility to regulate global warming pollution from our motor vehicles.

For the nation as a whole, these so-called "tailpipe" emissions account for about 1/4 of our global warming pollution. But that share is much higher in Maine, where hydroelectricity produces a greater share of our electricity and we generally drive more. Maine was actually one of the plaintiffs in the case, and the ruling will help us and other Northeastern states to go ahead and enact our own fuel-efficiency standards for cars.

The Supreme Court also ruled, unanimously, that Duke Energy could no longer avoid investing in pollution control equipment at its oldest coal-fired power plants, which have been grandfathered out of Clean Air Act regulations for decades now (related: Good News From the Midwest).

Then, on Friday, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change followed up Volume One: The Truth (in which thousands of climatologists agreed that climate change is happening and that we're "very likely" to be responsible) with the second part of its assessment report: The Consequences. With lots of dire warnings and hundreds of pages of evidence, this document would make Chief Justice John Roberts himself reconsider his pandering devotion to ExxonMobil.

The report included degree-by-degree projections of global warming and its consequences, which some of the scientists described as a "highway to extinction." Add one more degree Celsius to our average 1990 temperatures, and between 400 and 1700 million people won't have enough water, infectious diseases will increase, and most amphibian species will die out. Add two more degrees of Celsius, and 2 billion people will suffer from water shortages while between a quarter and a third of the world's species will be near extinction.

These are the more modest projections, which could come true by 2050 at our current rate of carbon pollution. If global warming were a highway, this report would make a disturbing warning sign: famine, drought, and mass extinction, one degree straight ahead (look for it between the mall and the car dealership).

A Prague Spring for Auto Socialism?

These are not the best of times for American motorist. Diminishing supplies of oil are increasing the costs of gasoline and pavement, increasing demand for livable downtowns makes highway construction and parking more and more expensive, and concerns about global warming threaten to drive up the true costs of driving even further.

Of course, the typical American motorist is blithely unaware of most of these problems. Sure, gas is more expensive, but government subsidies still keep the price of oil ridiculously low. Similarly, local, state, and federal governments spend trillions on highways that are essentially free for motorists to use, and every city in America has policies and land use codes that provide price-controlled (i.e., "free") parking. Supposedly we can't afford national free health care, but few people seem to notice how much our governments spend on nationalised roads and free parking.

As these twentieth-century traditions of automotive socialism become more and more expensive to the governments and taxpayers that pay for them, economists are becoming increasingly vocal in their support for free-market solutions to congestion, parking, and global warming.

Lest you think that this is some sort of left-wing luddite conspiracy, please note that the Bush administration is endorsing congestion pricing as "the centerpiece of [its] traffic plan," and that this and another story on liberalized parking-meter pricing were both published not in Mother Jones but in the Wall Street Journal.

Motorists actually have a good deal to gain from free-market traffic and parking policies. In our current, socialized scheme, drivers spend hours in gridlock or searching for an empty parking space: a car will rush for an empty freeway lane or curbside parking spot faster than a babushka at a Soviet supermarket. If drivers paid a fair price to use the streets, the money spent subsidizing private vehicles could pay for efficient mass transit instead, more urban land could be used for housing and businesses instead of for vehicle storage, and those who really need to drive would contend with less traffic to get to their destinations more quickly.

London has led the way with the world's first major congestion pricing initiative, and New York City is considering the idea seriously. Meanwhile, parking price reforms are gaining all over the place, from Silicon Valley to Houston, where the one and only land-use regulation (for now) is one that requires free parking.

For now, small reforms, like letting employees opt out of free parking in exchange for cash, are more feasable than citywide congestion-pricing revolutions. Future posts in the new "Socialized Motoring" file will investigate how such ideas might apply to Portland and Maine.