A Texas-Sized Pavement Problem
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
The offered solution:
>For automobile flooding (congestion), the only way to deal with it and still have a successful economy is to address it at the source. We need to absorb those trips locally before they become a flood. Instead of building lanes, we need to be building corner stores.
I'm thinking hard about this article - I'm an ex-Houstonian. I can't go back. They worship the vehicle. They brag about their hour+ commutes one way. It's been wrapped up in machismo Texan pride. Because, inevitably when you bring up how much it sucks that no matter what we want to do, we've got a 20 minute drive ahead of us at least, instantly everyone's anti-tax hackles are raised. "Socialism" is on everyone's lips, you're getting suspicious glances.
So hell yea brutha, we drivin! At least we don't have state income tax or zoning laws like those stupid Californians, just look at all the good that did them! /s
If Strongtowns can find a way to start convincing Texans that cornerstores (which sounds to me like, need zoning) can be built without increasing taxes, I bet they could make the pitch. I remember as a real young kind in Green Bay, WI and then Charleston, SC, we could ride our bikes around and go places. I remember as a slightly older kid in Houston being tremendously bored on my friend's couch, suggesting we bike somewhere, and then realizing we had nowhere we could go. It was nothing but miles of suburbia encased in impassable freeways. Life got fun again at 16 when I finally got a car.
So, I would say until traffic gets much worse people would not support the corner stores.
The term implies more density, rather than just being closer.
"legalize housing"
a people ideologically against government intervention should be all for removing government barriers to building what you want where you want. that includes corner stores and town houses. they naturally should be against the gov telling you how much setback you need and how tall you can build.
don't phrase it as we need to zone for corner stores. phrase it as we need to legalize corner stores.
[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/are-you-getting-all-...
[1] https://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/bud-...
[2] https://comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/property-tax/exemptions/...
Sounds like it was good for everyone that you left and are not going back. The problem so many have these days is their lack of understanding towards other people's preferences, and then leveraging it to demean. Clearly, lifestyle disagreements must be wrapped up in pejoratives and stereotypes as though Texas isn't steeped in diversity.
I'm sorry your boredom on your friend's couch and other your-life-and-situation-specific anecdotes jaded you, but that doesn't mean you understand preferences of others or the general societal situations.
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
I also like the way this post breaks down the numbers. for example:
Okay. So we're talking about an amount [to be spend on roads] equivalent to more than the county's entire budget right now, and a really sizable fraction even if we add cities (which provide more services than the county itself, and which are responsible for maintaining local streets) into the mix.
For myself and other visual learners, it would be very helpful to see these numbers presented graphically. Graphs for other data are presented in the article, but not the numbers I reference above that clearly paint a picture of program that will end in tears.
In my opinion the best way to change behavior is to make an incentive for that behavior. Reduce taxes on urban areas and housing. Unregulate businesses that promote local economy. Make small businesses more favorable instead of giving large exemptions to big corporations.
Perhaps the biggest thing you can do is to participate in the local government and municipalities. Find out who and what is driving the local economy and make reasoned recommendations for change.
I agree that giving tax breaks to large companies gets it backwards. Small companies, due to larger overhead, are probably employing more. Thus, the rational thing would be to tax larger companies harder, as they generate proportionally less wage taxes.
Giving tax breaks should be illegal altogether though. It's distorting the marketplace. It's perhaps beneficial for a town that gets the Amazon delivery center, so the legalization should be on a higher, perhaps federal level -- not sure if that's possible.
What if the citizenry is happy and doesn't want change? This option never seems to appear in suburban sprawl discussions because so many of the discussors think clearly it's not wanted.
I think, especially compared to others, the county's situation is ideal for most.
But it’s not reasonable to expect people to not be short sighted. If people really want the future to be gated insular communities like in TX and FL, then I guess that’s what they deserve, but I’ve been to Africa and India and Brazil and the visual class divide it shows is unappealing to me.
Richardson (home of Texas Instruments) is literally* just another part of downtown Dallas now. In another decade, Oklahoma City will just be the newest suburb of Dallas.
*not literally. Though also not entirely a joke.
It's apparent from looking up Charles Marohn that he's contributing to a lot of pieces on the web to push this idea, but I don't buy that infrastructure expansion is a straight up ponzi scheme.
It's really common, the whole "ignore future repair costs" thing. I lived in an HOA a few years ago that enjoyed low dues for many years, and everyone was always really happy about that. Guess what, the roofs and siding was ten years past due for replacement, and we had nothing in the bank. I want to say we were looking at special assessments of $30-40k/unit.
The big roads Strong Towns despises have many lanes, road networks have many paths from A to B, and vehicles that are resilient to low-quality roads are readily available for purchase. On the other hand, the failure of any component anywhere in a rail network can ruin the whole system until it's fixed. If I have to live with a falling-apart transportation system, I'll take crumbling roads over crumbling trains.
The real doom is when people abandon the town or city because property taxes have to be hiked dramatically to pay for the bill come due. This drives people to leave, which drives taxes higher, which drives people to leave... This kills the city.
New York & the train system there has big problems. But because there are so many people paying into it, nobody is leaving New York over the cost of fixing it. It is troubled but not failed.
ST's core raison d'être is abandoned, decaying suburban sprawl. Growing up in Silicon Valley, I didn't really get ST until I was walking through vast, crumbling suburbs in the midwest.
Adapting to worse mobility is also a thing you can do with roads. Drive slower over the potholes, close the lanes that are too far gone, revert to gravel if need be.
I guess you could say that dense cities are so singular and compelling, people will be willing to put up with poor mobility in exchange for the other opportunities they provide. Whereas exurbia is so abundant and generic, people will flee to an equivalent municipality with better mobility.
Strong Towns' message is more compelling for very small towns, which could be entirely walkable. Then there's no transportation infrastructure needed. People can walk on anything. But for small and mid-sized cities, it has some weaknesses.
I think this is a gross exaggeration. New York's subway has pulled back from the precipice before; in the '70s the subway was literally falling to pieces on the ground, with routine derailments, trains running at 5MPH everywhere due to the state of the tracks, and record levels of crime. It got to the point where a triage plan suggested cutting out entire lines, including the L, which is now one of the most congested.
Today's issues can mostly be attributed to neoliberal City and State administrations (Giuliani, Pataki, Bloomberg, both Cuomos) that consistently cut MTA funding to tell a future national electorate that they balanced a budget. As a result the MTA took on debt, the interest of which is almost entirely responsible for all the fare hikes in recent memory.
Add in a near-crippling focus on safety in operations above all else, including speed, and it explains the current train unreliability.
This is surprising to me, although I live in Canada and property taxes are a pittance. https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/residential.a... So that's like two thousand dollars a year for a million dollar home.
Consider that Nassau County, home of the first suburbs and one of the wealthiest counties in America by median income, has been under state fiscal control since 2000 because it simply cannot balance a budget. New York City infrastructure looks downright peachy compared to Nassau's troubles.
There was a gubernatorial challenger who was much more pro-subway, but she lost a campaign by basically treating it as a run for the mayor of New York and ignoring the rest of the state. (Her lack of managerial experience also didn't help.)
Tldr: Zoning isn't going away, that will take educating multiple generations.
The roads were built very cheaply, often with federal subsidies, but much of this infrastructure is due for repairs and that’s where StrongTowns’s sustainability critique comes in. The status quo ignored future liabilities now coming due. And the political problem is structural: politicians get far more credit for building new roads and bridges than paying the bills for old ones or balancing budgets. So the forces that be are strongly pushing back against StrongTowns, and if you want to be skeptical and suspicious, I think it’s better to target that at the system rather than the skeptics trying to reform it.
Also the general fund is starved partially because of propositions like 13 that unfairly limits taxation on people whose houses have appreciated tremendously in value.
Edit:
Over 30 years, $230 million / year with a 4% annual escalator is about $12.9 billion in total spending. Lets assume that Plano's $343 million / year in spending for 30% of county residents is consistent with other cities and add in the $381 million / year spent by the county. Then the required local highway spending is about 15% of the total ~1.5 billion spent by all local governments.
Perhaps it is a large amount of money, but spending 15% of the local budget on highways does not seem like an insurmountable burden on local taxpayers.
> County Commissioner Duncan Webb told business leaders at a forum Wednesday that the county will need $13 billion for roads over the next three or four decades. Later Wednesday, former Commissioner Mark Reid, during a presentation to the Frisco Tea Party, said the figure is $12.6 billion.
So not malicious or misleading at all. ST is using the commissioners own numbers.
It’s a dumb number to quote and was cherry picked to make a point.
All local governments in New York combined spent around $3B in 2009 ( https://www.osc.state.ny.us/localgov/pubs/research/snapshot/... ) as a comparison.
bmurray7jhu is right to call out this mistake, because TFA says $381m is the current yearly budget, which is actually enough to fund it. (other issues not withstanding). Messing this calculation up makes me question the rest of the TFA's integrity.
"County Commissioner Duncan Webb told business leaders at a forum Wednesday that the county will need $13 billion for roads over the next three or four decades. Later Wednesday, former Commissioner Mark Reid, during a presentation to the Frisco Tea Party, said the figure is $12.6 billion."
[0] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/collin-county/2018/09/13/tra...
Why should we accept that roads should be that expensive? [1] is an article that provides a good overview of the rise in construction costs that eventually stalled new highway construction projects. One can imagine this trend in costs being reversed: in particular, 1) we should be able to reduce labor requirements through relaxation of work rules, 2) streamline community and environmental review to reduce administrative costs of construction, and 3) raise revenues with direct usage fees instead of relying on increasingly precarious fuel taxation, decreasing the amount of highway funding that needs to come from the general budget.
I feel like a lot of people are too eager to declare that new roads are no longer feasible and that we should adapt society to the degraded transit infrastructure of the future, but this attitude is defeatist and will impose a burden that will fall on everyone in society. Roads are good. Transportation is good. We should be devoting our energies to making roads cheaper, not finding elaborate ways to justify inaction.
[1] https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-1993/why-california-stop...
Your "let's make things cheaper by sacrificing quality" seems to smell of a very deep ignorance of how this stuff works.
That’s not to say you can’t get federal or state grants for some roadway related local projects, but these roads described would be primarily county roads built with borrowed money (or local tax dollars if they’re available, which they usually aren’t, hence the bond issue kicking the can down the road).
Texas is a success despite basically doing the opposite of what New Urbanists say at every turn.
This must really burn up writers at StrongTowns.
The big problem for New Urbanists is the fact that dense cities seem to end up with more and more expensive problems than the burbs.
Looking forward to a wave of Medium posts and Atlantic articles in 2021 professing a newfound love for suburbia as Millennials get sick of paying the bills for broken boondoggles like HSR and the dead-on-arrival Transbay hub
NYC transit has it’s own issues, but if you look at the population there you’ll see on average they are skinnier than folks in Texas who drive around in cars. Are there costs associated with that obesity? Costs that everyone picks up instead of just those who are obese? Will that make Texas a more expensive place to live? Who knows?
As someone who lives in the suburbs and just got hit with a water rate increase to pay for the aging infrastructure i can say it’s good to have these conversations early before you rack up unexpected costs.
Also Dallas has the DART rail and it’s great. I do wish there were a lot more stops, but it’s well loved by millennials.