City planners have wreaked havoc on cities with their continual obsessions with fads; maybe they should focus on helping people get what they want instead of trying to change people.
You have train stations next to million-dollar bungalows. That's madness. Build up.... But doing that raises the NIMBYs ire.
The challenge with intensification is that the benefits are to the city and the planet, but the downsides are local. City gets more property taxes with the same infrastructure, and a good node for transit. The world gets greener living. However, the neighbors get more traffic and cast shadows.
To me the solution is obvious: make paying off the neighbors part of the standard process.
I offer an alternative: the NIMBY's can keep their un-intensified environment, if they pay via taxes to fund the infrastructure that makes it possible to tie an intensified area elsewhere into the city transit infrastructure, and pay any necessary infrastructure to extend out to that intensified area (roads, utilities, datacomm, permitting, environmental studies, etc.). Currently the NIMBY's force an externality upon all other city residents by making the city grow outward (with costs increasing as the square of the linear distance from the city center) instead of upward (6X multiplier per square meter for high-rise skyscrapers over SFR's, don't know what the multiplier to add for expanding infrastructure).
So if the NIMBY's want to keep 100 hectares of SFR's as SFR's, no problem if they stump up the money to pay for the nearest 100 hectares that can be zoned for intensification, the rail extension to tie it to the city center, the roads to connect to it, etc. As long as the cost of the externality is captured and passed onto willing buyers, I don't see a problem with NIMBY's.
NIMBYs: No.
You: There should be a law.
NIMBYs: Well, no elected official will pass such a law. If they do, we won't re-elect them.
You: I'll find enough YIMBYs to elect someone who will make you pay up.
NIMBYs: You'll find nasty greedy developers who want to bulldoze neighborhoods and kick Grandma out of her home? Go for it. We'll let the neighbors know all about it.
(edit: to be clear, I am a YIMBY and I agree with you in principle. But NIMBY rhetoric wins big in local politics, and I don't know enough effective YIMBY rhetoric to counter it.)
But a land value tax as a partial replacement for property tax is also good.
The city I grew up in had a population of around 27,000 people 30 years ago. I think it's roughly the same today. Unsurprisingly, traffic and parking work about as well today is it did when I was a teenager.
Additional taxes on new construction would exacerbate any traffic problems by pushing people out to the suburbs (, especially with Vancouver's already high housing prices). I would argue for precisely the opposite: allow for much greater construction everywhere, with fewer restrictions. City planners' efforts to 'sculpt' a city usually involves restricting supply to force people to live where the planners want them to, which drives up prices and drives population to suburbs.
Car infrastructure like roads and parking doesn't scale so the only real alternative to congestion is rent - I.e congestion fees and more expensive parking.
If it was (say) $100 a day to enter a major city by car, and as much again to park, then congestion would be over. You might argue this is surrendering the roads to the 1% which it is, but it also quickly funds new infrastructure and public transport.
How is that relevant? NYC has its own issues, and is very far from Vancouver.
edit: comment above was originally only the eight words in my quote when I commented.
It’s amazing how much energy goes into making excuses for why a city can’t get better.
Although I’ve heard great passion for better city-making here in Perth this week while working with the Heart Foundation, I’ve also heard some of those excuses, while working with stakeholders, politicians and State planning and transport staff.
“Perth is different,” I’ve been told, in various ways.
It’s true, Perth is different. Every city is. But you’re not THAT different. You’re really not.'
At the end of the day there's one reason why most cities in the US won't have decent transit any time soon - that the people who would build the transit do so on the grounds that it is Virtuous and Glorious and Green. Beyond that, they make projections that everyone will ride it and that it'll reinvigorate the economy and reduce traffic. (And if you're against it that's probably because you're an evil Republican which means you probably voted for Trump which means you're probably a Nazi, but I digress.)
And then, instead, you get something that goes from nowhere to nowhere, and covers maybe 25% of its operating costs off ticket revenue... before the cost of capital expenditures.
And if you think this is exaggeration (including the Trump bits) try reading several articles about the Virginia Beach TIDE light rail project ... which, to sum it up in one number, gets roughly a $8000/rider/year subsidy from the city.
But the unionized public transport employees will vote for you and campaign for you and your causes forever.
Almost every highway and road and most parking spaces have a revenue recovery ratio of 0%
http://www.mercurynews.com/2012/12/26/25-years-later-vta-lig...
> Almost every highway and road and most parking spaces have a revenue recovery ratio of 0%
Theoretically, that's what the fuel tax is for. At the federal level, the highway trust fund raised $35 billion in fuel tax and spend $39 billion on highways (and $8b on transit - the deficit here being covered by the general fund). If we wanted to be generous we'd say that's an 89% recovery ratio, which probably is totally unfair and ignores some important capex somewhere (recent "stimulus" spending, for example) but is substantially more than zero.
(State and municipal numbers are quite variable, I'm sure.)
I see your BART, and
raise you Santa Clara
VTA Rail.
Theoretically, that's
what the fuel tax is
for.
* That's federal spending on interstates only. State and local recovery ratios are lower. The road in front of your driveway is often the worst, it is an amazing outlay of public service to serve relatively few people.
* If you include fuel taxes as part of the recovery ratio for car infrastructure, you should include dedicated sales taxes and other funds as part of the recovery ratio for public transit infrastructure. (Remember, public infrastructure makes things better for car users too. Building an extra parking space helps one car, building a train helps everyone who rides that train and all the car users who no longer have to fight with those people for space on the road or for parking spaces.)
This is almost in line with my initial premise, that politicians putting together public transportation systems are the reason we can't have nice public transportation systems here in the US.
There is one reasonably good public transportation system (the NYC subway - much of it being privately built ages ago in a different sort of era) and several sorta-quasi-nice public transportation systems in the US. BART is one of the latter. We don't even make them like that anymore, though.
> * If you include fuel taxes as part of the recovery ratio for car infrastructure, you should include dedicated sales taxes and other funds as part of the recovery ratio for public transit infrastructure.
No way. Most gasoline and diesel that is sold is sold for the purpose of driving a vehicle on a public road, and it is roughly proportional to the use of that road. It could be closer to a fee-for-use provision if one added a separate tax on square-of-vehicle-axle-weight times distance - the real thing that wears down highways - but it is a lot more practical to enforce with a fuel tax and without computerized surveillance on all automobiles.
A sales tax on all transactions is completely different and drains unrelated economic activity to maintain and operate transport: the most common use of public transportation by volume is to commute to work, an activity that's pretty poorly connected with shopping at the store.
A dedicated fund covering a portion of taxpayer expenses does nothing to improve it, either (the money is fungible).
Are you saying this 8mile light rail requires opex of $16bn, more than the entire NY subway system?
That's a hell of an assumption. I know people who live in NYC, making very good money, and they're all crammed into tiny apartments with multiple roommates because the congestion and rent are so ridiculous. That's fine for people in their early 20s, but do you really think these same people are still going to live in NYC once they get married and have kids? A small percent will buy a place in NYC, and the rest will move out to the suburbs.
If anything, I'd predict that small and walkable urban areas, interspersed inside large suburbs, are more likely to be the future growth areas.
I also know a lot of people that had kids and moved to the burbs - but they all commute via public transport (either train or bus).
I guess my point is that anecdotes don't really mean anything?
If only a smaller fraction of commuters are stuck in congestion the situation is probably working okay for everyone else.
[1]https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-012-x/2011...
That isn't what I said. I implied that someone riding in a train probably doesn't care much about road congestion.
This is a MYTH that must be ended someday. No, not only people living in most city centres are not rich, but they are even poorer than people living in the suburbs.
In my country, this the case for every single city except the capital.
I don't know Vancouver, but a 5 minute search of maps of densities and maps of income seem to confirm this again: centre, dense areas are the poorest.
And yet, on every thread (same in US forums or at my place) about transportation, transit, housing, bicycle(!), urbanisation, whatever that relates to cities, someone (or many) will come and say that people from the centre are rich and privileged and that the suburban people are poor and that they had no other choice than to move there to survive.
Truth is, except for a few slum-like suburbs, other suburbs are mostly populated by people who chose to move there to have a bit of a garden or to have bigger houses or to park their cars or to have dogs or to have a swimming pool, etc. and these people have a higher living standard.