Flashbacks May 2024
The Overhead Wire Daily
Continuing with flashbacks to share the items we’ve posted earlier this year on our blog and in our newsletter.
Digital Public Utilities | May 1st
One of the things we’ve been thinking about a lot is the idea of transportation infrastructure as a public utility. Now more than ever I believe streets and rights of way are public utilities considering the value of this urban space we use for human transportation and goods movement, water management, and electricity and internet provision. Giving it away for free has led to many perverse incentives including vehicles now roaming around without passengers and private vehicle storage consuming acres of public lands.
So back in 2019 we had the amazing Nate Berg write a piece for us and Moovel discussing the tug of war between private companies and public entities on transportation data, which Nate evolved out of some of my thinking about whether streets could be seen as a public utility. The discussion was heating up due to ride hailing and micromobility companies vying for space on city streets while collecting massive amounts of data. What they also did was move the discussion from the use of physical space to another digital dimension about data and ownership.
It’s interesting to me then that our conversation on digital data from mobility companies in urban spaces can also be extrapolated to mapping technology and companies such as Google, Apple, Baidu, and ESRI that have created powerful mapping and GIS tools that have evolved into their own public utilities parallel to physical rights of way and digital data created by mobility companies. The Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society then asks whether we’ll see continued consolidation or monopolization in this space, or a new diverse set of companies and tools emerge from this mapping ecosystem that is becoming so vital not only to transportation, but the facilitation of information sharing and knowledge itself.
State Capacity | May 2nd
Back in August we shared a paper on state capacity that was written up in The American Prospect that basically said when transportation departments are looking to resurface roads, the places with more public sector capacity are likely to have more bids and lower construction costs. I thought at the time it’s something that likely can be extrapolated to capital projects for transit as well.
Fast forward to today and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics has estimated that highway construction costs could reduce the impact of the IIJA (2021 infrastructure bill) by 40% if inflation remains high. Crude oil which is used to produce asphalt (which we did a really interesting podcast episode on) is one of the largest pressures BTS cites, but I really do wonder how much is lost to this capacity issue which the National Highway Construction Cost Index obviously doesn’t include.
As with the current discussions around inflation calculations and their seeming inability to measure how long term housing supply constraints are impacting the overall numbers, it would be interesting to see how much of this astronomical inflation in transportation construction is a lack of state capacity, something not measured by the cost indexing mechanism.
Environmental Accounting | May 7th
First let me offer a super congrats to Elaine Clegg on getting nominated to the Amtrak Board! Very exciting.
Second, today a piece in Grist jumped out at me, especially after sharing yesterday’s article about a new way to measure GDP around health and happiness by Lloyd Alter. The Grist article discussed the use of natural capital by industries and a new report that asks whether industries would be profitable if they had to pay the full costs of what they used from the Earth. From the analysis, it turns out they don’t, to the tune of $7.3 trillion a year, a huge chunk of global GDP as it’s currently measured.
Of course this is a bit abstract, but it got me thinking about how much we don’t account for a lot of the deeper environmental impacts of transportation and city projects and makes me wonder what a true accounting of our consumption might look like on a more micro level than whole regional industries like coal or farming covered in the report.
As I found out when we chatted with Paula DiPerna for her book Pricing the Priceless, the head of the sportswear company Puma actually did this once, and found by creating an environmental profit and loss statement that the company was in the negative when it comes to natural resources needed to operate the company.
So then for a transportation profit and loss statement, what if we included true land consumption from sprawl and the impact of that to air quality and health outcomes? What if we included the loss of clean water from runoff mixed with motor oil or fine particulates. Or what if cars and trucks and bikes had to account for the ecological costs of plastic pollution or metals extraction? It would probably upend our whole system as we currently see it and thus probably looks pretty scary to anyone with money and power that could be remotely impacted. But it might be an exercise worth doing, if only to understand how much value we’ve extracted from the natural world.
Changing Trajectories | May 9th
An interesting paper about growth in big cities compares housing construction and prices between Texas and California. What researchers found is that housing construction costs are much cheaper as cities continue to sprawl, as California did up until the 90’s and Texas continues to do now, but once that is constrained either by distance to jobs and amenities or build out, construction of infill makes up for more units constructed. But that infill construction is also more expensive on a per unit basis.
The story the paper authors seem to be telling is that Texas and California aren’t really that different, it’s rather Texas is finally catching up to the constraints that California had already reached regardless of regulatory environment.
Another interesting finding is that areas now tend to ossify. Before, land tended to transition from rural to suburban to more urban densities over time, but have now become fixed and don’t transition. People don’t like change, and it’s harder to change the suburban structure.
What this current housing crisis seems to be highlighting for me is that cities around the country are starting to come to limits on available land for cheaper housing and thus expanding supply is becoming harder. What this also tells me is that our transportation policies such as building and expanding highways to accommodate the demand for sprawl have even more diminishing returns than they did the first time around.
Today we released an Mpact podcast (back episodes here) with Tracy Hadden Loh discussing work Brookings has done mapping all activity centers in regions, not just downtowns, and what the pandemic has done to transit ridership. She noted the areas where work from home and transit ridership pre-pandemic are the highest were places that had longer commutes for workers getting into employment and activity centers.
We also released a Talking Headways podcast episode with Megan Kimble (full archive) discussing her book City Limits on highway fighters in Texas. TXDOT is spending tens of billions of dollars on highways in Austin and Houston to serve this symbiotic sprawling development pattern that’s dying out because of constraints discussed in the paper mentioned above. And in Dallas, they are fighting to change the calculus on transportation investment to create valuable infill rather than double down on a housing and transportation system that will slowly grind regional growth to a halt.
These two discussions in particular highlight that our transportation investments need to change in order to start seeing more returns. This may be why we’re starting to see more interest in high speed rail as faster connections will change the transportation access calculations once again. Interestingly enough, South Korea sees 6 high speed regional lines as a part of a national birth rate plan in this way. The land available a driveable distance from amenities for cheap housing is gone, and the infill is getting more expensive.
We probably don’t want a type of easily commodified single family sprawl again, so there are other changes we need to make to support lowering costs of infill and cracking open the amber that has so many areas stuck in time. But our discussions on this matter should evolve. Transit and 15 minute cities and accessibility need to be a part of that discussion. The question is whether people can see it happening and change directions.
City Narratives | May 15th
First before I share today’s thoughts, just wanted to let everyone know we passed 100,000!! links in the news archive. Since 2013 we’ve been collecting and tagging the links we share in the newsletter and now it is over 100,000 items tagged by topic and city in our archive that’s available to subscribers.
We’re working on a better access interface as the one there now isn’t the best if I’m honest, but the new one will be coming soon and is much much better. But I thought 100K was a number to celebrate as I guarantee you no other site or newsletter has shared this much information in cities and transportation. We’re so glad we can keep doing this for you all and look forward to sharing the updated archive soon.
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I’ve always been a fan of the census since I started using data in college for GIS projects. While not perfect, it allowed more people to tell more in depth stories about places that really wasn’t available before without a ton of time and patience with a physical map.
That said, the Census Bureau could be in the wrong when it comes to counting population in legacy industrial cities in the Midwestern United States. The City of Detroit in particular is alleging that the census counting methodology in non decennial years subtracts population when homes are demolished which would undercount population as many of the demolished homes have sat empty for years. Additionally, dilapidated homes that are renovated and re-occupied (as seen on popular HGTV shows like Bargain Block) don’t count towards adding population either. There are other issues with the methodology but this undercount could have wide ranging impacts on not just on federal funding opportunities but also narratives.
I hadn’t thought about it much before but the stories we tell ourselves or that are told about places can often form into narratives if they are repeated long enough and sometimes they start to sink in and impact a place over the long term. And if Detroit isn’t really shrinking and instead has been adding population, that changes the discussions of a place and how its perceived by potential businesses and residents. Here in San Francisco we know all about narratives.
But these narratives on the other side of the growth coin can be self fulfilling in other bad ways. A recent MPO vote to allocate $4B to a highway expansion in Austin shows how a narrative about growth and what is needed to supply it can become unchallengable. The only solution to many suburban and county officials is to build a bigger road rather than think deeper about growth and it’s impacts on quality of life and public health. While we really need to have a discussion about who represents regional interests, we might also benefit from talking through the narratives and actions that got us there in the first place.
The Biopsychosocial Model
The philanthropic wing of America’s largest Medicaid insurer has pledged $1B towards affordable housing by offering below market loans to a development partner. As noted in the Forbes article, 80% of health outcomes are driven by what happens outside the doctors office and are often referred to as the social determinants of health.
Dr. Mindy Fullilove has described this further as looking at place through the lens of the biopsychosocial model or the sociology of illness. In this framework, we can see all of the social impacts on a persons life that lead up to an illness or medical emergency. Often this can be a fluctuating social network, unstable housing situation, or even a setback such as a loss of income or a loved one.
Yet governments don’t look deeper into the biopsychosocial model to determine whether they should increase housing production using housing money or give people more transportation options in order to reduce downstream medical impacts. So states are treating the illness by looking to use precious Medicaid monies on housing and transportation instead of sussing out root causes.
There’s definitely a direct benefit to the health care system in getting people housed who would otherwise spend too much time in an emergency room or getting people to appointments instead of missing them, but there are also bigger downstream impacts of improving housing and transportation that reduce health expenditures by reducing stress and improving quality of life.
Today, an article we linked in the LA Times discusses restaurants struggling to stay open amidst rising costs and inflation. Cost of living increases driven by housing seems to be a major culprit even if it’s not explicitly mentioned in the article. There’s also a discussion in Minneapolis of figuring out a way to lower child care costs that are stressing family budgets and creating disincentives to having a a bigger family or even just going out and doing fun things on the weekend.
This all can probably be filed into the housing theory of everything, but I want to give a plug for beginning to actually map it out in the biopsychosocial model Dr. Fullilove puts forward as a way of thinking about place. What are the problems we are seeing and how much are we focusing on them? And how many resources would we have collectively for a lot of other important upstream things if we found that we weren’t focusing enough initially on key root issues. I suspect we’d improve our quality of life and our health exponentially.
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