Modeshift

MINNEAPOLIS – Technically speaking “light rail transit” encompasses an urban rail line capable of carrying 2,000 to 20,000 passengers an hour at speeds reaching 70 miles per hour. “Heavy rail” describes longer, faster commuter and inter-city trains.

The reality of light and heavy rail in this city of 400,000, and in 29 other cities across the United States that have built light rail, street car, and commuter rail systems since 1984, is much more encompassing and enlightening.

The New Apollo Program 1 Rebuild America Clean and Green • Establish a national energy efficiency commitment to reduce energy use in new and existing buildings at least 30 percent by 2025.• Provide the support necessary to produce 25 percent of the nation’s power from renewable and recycled energy resources by 2025. • Bring the power grid into the 21st century. • Improve efficiency by 20 percent in existing power plants and industries by 2025. Connect America’s 21st century neighborhoods and cities with world-class transit systems. • Strengthen and improve America’s transportation infrastructure by “fixing it first.” 2 Make It in America • Rebuild the U.S. auto industry by investing in high-efficiency vehicles.• Invest in a national low-carbon fuel infrastructure and next generation alternative fuels. • Restore America’s manufacturing leadership to meet the demands of the clean energy future. 3 Restore America’s Technological Leadership • Double national investment in clean energy research and development.• Establish a National Energy Innovation Fund to invest in the most promising new clean energy technologies emerging from our nation’s laboratories. 4 Tap the Productivity of the American People • Train America’s workers for the new clean energy economy.• Ensure the transition to America’s clean energy economy creates widely shared economic opportunities. 5 Reinvest in America • Establish a federal “cap and invest” program to generate and strategically reinvest the resources necessary to build the new clean energy economy.

The four-year-old, $715 million Hiawatha Line, which connects downtown with the Mall of America and the airport, serves 32,000 passengers a day, about five times the number that officials anticipated at this point in the line’s operation. Thousands of new units of housing, and hundreds of thousands of square feet of office and retail development have been constructed near the line’s 17 stations. More is in the planning stage.

A new 11-mile route to St. Paul is in the engineering phase. And a new 40-mile, five-station, $317 million commuter rail line between Minneapolis and Big Lake, is scheduled to open in 2010.

New Apollo Program and Hiawatha

Rail transit, and the Hiawatha Line in particular, has become a signature of a Midwest City buffeted by a highway bridge collapse that exposed the frailty and expense of the 20^th century’s vehicle-centered transportation system, and the growing popularity of the less costly and more energy efficient rail transit systems of the 21^st.

“The impressive performance of the Hiawatha LRT line has continued to inspire local advocates, planners, and decision makers,” noted the Federal Transit Administration in a statement in August.

In The New Apollo Program, a clean energy, good jobs economic strategy for American prosperity published in October, the Apollo Alliance called on Congress and the new president to “drive the expansion of rapid transit nationwide.” The Alliance proposed to amend the federal transportation bill to establish a Transit Trust Fund to support new systems and expanding existing ones. The Alliance also called for new policy that gives spending priority to regional transportation plans that support development around transit stops, access to transit for low-income ad working families, and to infrastructure to support regional bikeways.

“Transit programs don’t just reduce carbon emissions, they also create jobs,” said the report’s authors. “Transit projects tend to generate nine percent more jobs per dollar spent than road and bridge repair and maintenance projects and nearly 19 percent more jobs than new road or bridge projects.”

Obama and New Energy For Transit America
In mid-October, Transportation For America, a national coalition of citizen groups, trade associations, and policy organizations, released a five-point national strategy for rail transportation that made similar recommendations.

In June 2008, at the height of the spike in gasoline prices, James S. Simpson, the administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, spoke in Sacramento, where he described the rush to trains and buses, and the need to spend $60 billion annually to double their capacity by 2028. Half would need to come from the federal government and the balance from state and local governments. This year, the federal share of transit funding fell to less than 44 percent.

“The “value proposition” for transit has never been greater,” said Simpson. “Ridership is at its highest level since late 1950s – with over 10 billion trips taken in the U.S. last year. Every $1 invested in public transportation projects generates $6 in local economic activity. And transit saves the nation almost 4 million gallons of gasoline a day and drastically reduces carbon dioxide emissions.”

Though it’s unclear what Congress is prepared to do next year, the momentum for making significant changes in transportation spending priorities is growing. On Tuesday California voters overwhelmingly approved a $10 billion bond to begin building a regional high-speed rail network between tying the state’s southern cities with the Central Valley and California. Los Angeles voters approved a half cent rise in the sales tax to expand the city’s subway system. Voters in Marin and Sonoma counties in California approved a quarter cent increase in the sales tax to start a 70-mile commuter rail line between Cloverdale and Larkspur. And Seattle voters approved an extra half cent sales tax for a $22.8 billion plan to extend light rail service from downtown to the outlying suburbs sometime after 2020, adding 34 miles of light rail and expands commuter train and bus service.

In Hawaii, voters supported a $4.3 billion elevated commuter rail line. In New Mexico, voters in four counties backed a one-eighth cent sales tax, half which will go to running commuter trains between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The 2008 results from transportation ballot initiatives were consistent with the results of such ballot measures in every election since the mid-1990s. According to the Center For Transportation Excellence, which tracks ballot results, more than 70 percent of transit initiatives passed, most of them in Republican dominated counties.

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama met with Mike Fischer, an Indiana resident who works for Amtrak. Over lunch, Obama expressed his support for “expanding rail service.”

He added: “One of the things I have been talking about for awhile is high speed rail connecting all of these Midwest cities — Indianapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis. “This is something that we should be talking about a lot more. We are going to be having a lot of conversations this summer about gas prices. And it is a perfect time to start talk about why we don’t have better rail service. We are the only advanced country in the world that doesn’t have high-speed rail.”

Riding The Train
Here in Minneapolis, riders of the Hiawatha Line readily express their support for rail transit. The line’s two-car trains travel the length of the city on narrow tracks inscribed into a berm beside a busy freeway. Setting out from its home station, underneath the Mall of America, the Hiawatha looks tiny, European — like a miniature tram traversing a Scandinavian city.

Before it was built, critics derided the proposal as a waste of money, and a “Train to Nowhere.” But by attracting passengers who would never ride a bus, the Hiawatha is also demonstrating why light rail is the fastest-growing form of public transportation in America.

The Hiawatha Line took nearly 40 years to build. When the Hiawatha Roadway was constructed in the 1960s, Minneapolitans objected to the original eight-lane plan. So it became a four-lane, with land on either side reserved for a train line. For decades, Minnesota politicians complained that a train would cost too much to build, and be ridden by no one. Finally, a tri-partisan coalition got it done. Once Minnesotans realized that traffic congestion could not be slowed by building more highways, Republican Governor Arne Carlson approved the Hiawatha Line’s initial funding.

After Carlson left office, in 1998, Reform Governor Jesse Ventura appointed Democrat Ted Mondale, son of the former vice president, to head the Metropolitan Council, the Twin Cities’ regional planning agency. Mondale convinced Ventura to put up the rest of the money. Over 300 construction workers built the line, and 150 members of the Amalgamated Transit Union keep it running.

Up and down the Hiawatha Line, stations have brought new residents and new businesses to sleepy south Minneapolis neighborhoods. At Lake Street, a struggling shopping center now has a Subway, an Aldi, and a Little Caesar’s. Near 46th Street is the Oaks Hiawatha Station Apartments, built by a developer who realized he could offer more amenities — and charge more rent — because residents wouldn’t be burdened with car payments.

For More Information For a copy of The New Apollo Program click here: Data Points: Transportation Spending In U.S. Center for Transportation Excellence Results of transit initiatives 2008 electionTransit For Livable Communities Hiawatha Line Phone: 612-373-3333 Reflections at Bloomington Central Station 8151 33rd Avenue South Bloomington, MN 55425 Phone: 952-883-0123 Email: reflections@edinarealty.com Web site: www.reflections-bcs.com Tillie’s Bean 2803 E 38th St Minneapolis, MN Phone: 612-276-0100 Mark Garner, Senior Project Coordinator Community Planning and Economic Development 105 5th Ave S, Suite 200 Minneapolis MN 55401-2534 Phone:612-673-5037 Email: mark.garner@ci.minneapolis.mn.us American Public Transportation Association Web site: www.apta.com Phone: 202-496-4800 Federal Transit Administration fda.dot.gov 202-366-4043 North American Light Rail Information and News Web site: www.lightrail.com Email: lightraildotcom@yahoo.com American Public Transportation Association Most Recent Light Rail Ridership Figures http://www.apta.com/research/ stats/ridership/riderep/documents/ 08q1lr.pdf News Release FTA News Starts http://www.fta.dot.gov/news/ news_events_7787.html Map of Light Rail and Heavy Commuter Rail In Final Design Stage in U.S. www.fta.dot.gov/documents/ Fig_2_2006_New_Starts_ Projects_FD_PE.pdf Transportation For America http://t4america.org/news /archives/495 Light rail lines built since 1986: Los Angeles — 55.7 miles Oceanside, CA — 22 miles Sacramento — 41.1 miles Denver — 15.8 miles Baltimore — 29 miles Minneapolis — 11.6 miles St. Louis — 46 miles Camden, N.J. — 34.5 miles Jersey City, N.J. — 9.6 miles (added to existing “heritage” system) John F. Kennedy Airport, Queens, N.Y. — 8.1 miles Charlotte, N.C. — 9.6 miles Portland, Ore. — 44 miles Dallas, Tex. — 68 miles Houston, Tex. — 7.5 miles Salt Lake City — 19.5 miles Seattle — 14 miles (opens next year) Tacoma — 1.4 miles Minneapolis — 11.6 miles San Francisco — 15 miles San Jose — 42.2 miles Phoenix — 20 miles Pittsburgh — 5.2 miles (Source: Lightrail.com)

Transit Oriented Development

“These developments work because they attract people who want to live near transit,” City Planner Mark Garner said. “Young couples who are in entry-level professional positions.”

In 2003, Maggie Turner and her husband bought a house near 38th Street, expecting to commute to their downtown jobs on the soon-to-open Hiawatha Line. Once the train started running, the Turners sold one of their cars. There was only one problem with the neighborhood: unlike the hip, youthful enclave the Turners had moved from, it didn’t have a coffee shop. Then Maggie Turner spotted an empty storefront, a block from the 38-th Street station.

“When I saw the building, I thought ‘That is the perfect place to build a coffee shop,’” Turner said. “I talked to the banks, and when they realized it was right by the light rail station, their attitudes changed. It was, ‘Oh, that’s a great place to build it.’”

Turner’s shop, Tillie’s Bean, is now crammed with morning commuters. The Hiawatha Line has brought more young people into what was once a neighborhood of middle-aged homeowners. DreamHaven Books, a sci-fi comic book store, has also relocated to 38th Street.

“Before the younger people started moving into the neighborhood, we were the young kids on the block,” said the 33-year-old Turner. “Now, we’re one of the oldest people. It’s just one of those things.”

Much more ambitious than Tillie’s Bean is Reflections at Bloomington Central Station, a condominium built alongside the Hiawatha Line in Bloomington. Reflections was built specifically to take advantage of the train. The building has sold 95 percent of its 263 units, making it the fastest selling condo development in Minnesota, said salesman Joe Jordan. Eventually, the developer plans to build a park, office buildings, and a shopping center, establishing Reflection as “a city within a city.”

“We get a lot of people don’t want to live downtown, but want access to downtown,” Jordan said. “Some of them are rural Minnesotans. They like this cabin in the city, and then they hop on a train and go to a play.”

Jack Zipoy, a 27-year-old financial planner who bought his first home at Reflections, called the Hiawatha Line a “definite selling point.” Zipoy works downtown, and has season tickets to the Vikings and the Twins. Both teams play at the Metrodome, which has its own stop. Before moving in, Zipoy drove his car every day. Now, he often keeps in the garage all the week.

Zipoy is the type of upscale commuter who never sets foot on a crowded, exhaust-coughing bus, but loves riding a sleek train.

“For me, it’s reliability,” he said. “I know this train, snow, rain, shine, is going to be here every 10 minutes. It also seems a little more roomy. If you want to get a seat, you can.”

That’s a practical matter in Minnesota, where blizzards can scramble bus schedules. But an aversion to the bus is a sociological matter, too, says one mass transit expert.

“Light rail is safer,” said Jim Middleton, who worked as supervisor of light rail safety for the Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority, and now maintains the Web site lightrail.com. “”It’s way more open. It’s not as dark or dank. Undesirables don’t like it. On light rail vehicles, there are transit police.”

In the first quarter of 2008, national light rail ridership increased 11 percent from the first quarter in 2007, from 101 million trips to 114 million trips. Overall, transit ridership is at its highest in 50 years. Not since streetcars plied the streets of American cities have so many people ridden public transit, according to the Federal Transit Administration.

Light rail’s popularity is due partly to gas prices, partly to the fact that so many new light rail systems have opened in the past two decades. In 1986, there were eight light rail systems in the U.S., most of them in older, Northeastern cities where neighborhoods grew up around the train system. Since then, more than two dozen communities — including developing metropolises such as Dallas, Charlotte, Houston and Los Angeles — have built light rail. Tucson, Orlando, Atlanta, and Las Vegas are planning or studying systems.

Siemens, the engineering conglomerate, recently signed its biggest-ever light rail contract, receiving $184 million to build 55 cars for Denver. More orders are expected.

Los Angeles is adding 14.6 miles of light rail, Denver 19.5 miles. Norfolk is building a 7.4-mile system and 12 more miles are being built in Baltimore. In all, some 531 miles of light rail lines have been built in the United States since 1984, and nearly 100 more miles are under construction or designed. Not since the turn of the 20^th century has there been such a strong push in rail transit, say transportation historians.

– Keith Schneider

SAN FRANCISCO — Since late March I’ve been living in a one-room cottage behind an old Craftsman-style home in Berkeley, and commuting to downtown San Francisco. It’s not your typical daily trip. But as gas prices rise, congestion mounts, and family incomes fall, it may well become a new kind of commuting norm in the United States. Of course it may not, too. This being San Francisco. And the weather is just unbelievably good most of the year.

But this is how it goes. I am a casual carpooler. Every morning I stand on line in front of the Safeway on Claremont Street, about six minutes walk from my house. Usually there are other people there, too, along with a line of cars and drivers waiting to pick up other casual commuters, two or three at a time. The goal in all of this is to save time and money for driver and passengers. Crossing the tragically congested San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on a weekday morning can take over an hour because of the longest toll lines I’ve ever seen. The cost also is $4.00.

But cars with three or more passengers zip through in the free carpool lanes. I save the $3.30 it would cost to ride the BART from the Rockridge Station to Embarcadero.

I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now and it’s just a marvel of ingenuity, convenience, and overcoming the fear of the stranger, which has gripped our country for 40 years or so. I’ve ridden with two student artists at San Francisco State, a manager of high rise buildings in San Francisco, a graphic designer, and a developer of affordable housing. I’ve had the chance to check out a two-seat Mercedes, a brand new Volvo, a Land Rover and any number of Toyota Prius’s. Nobody, and I mean nobody, drives an American car here. One of the guys I rode with is an engineer who gave me a lead on an apartment in Oakland, which turned out to be too expensive. Another told me about a hot graphic designer, who is as good as advertised and may fit into our publication schedule at the Apollo Alliance, where I work.

Drivers dispatch their passengers in San Francisco at the corner of Fremont and Howard, which is a couple of blocks from the Embarcadero along magnificent San Francisco Bay. In 1991, two years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, San Francisco demolished the elevated Embarcadero Freeway, replacing it with a palm-lined boulevard. An active lightrail line now runs in the median, passing gardens and parks and thousands of new units of housing, and swanky bars, the Giants baseball stadium, and all the other centers of human commerce that blossomed in what had been the shadows of a loud, dangerous, transportation eyesore.

If I walk, with the sun rising over the bay, it takes about 25 minutes. When I ride the Muni train to 4th Street, a block from my Townsend Street office, it takes about 10 minutes and costs $1.50. Total commute time: 45 minutes to an hour. Going home, I take the Muni to the Embarcadero BART station. BART takes me to the Rockridge Station, and I walk the 12 minutes up College Avenue and Claremont, stopping by the Safeway to get something for dinner. Travel cost: $4.80. Travel time: 45 minutes. Total expense saved from not having to own or drive a car: At least $1,000 a month, after taxes.

As the dimensions of the mortgage crisis both expand and get clearer, a new picture is emerging of a nation in pain that simultaneously is coming to new conclusions about what it means to be safe and secure in America. For the first time since post-war federal policy ganged up on cities to promote suburban expansion, cities are rebounding in remarkable ways and suburbs appear to have reached some kind of new limits to growth. The evidence of this profound shift is easy to find if you look.

First, here in Michigan and across much of the country, the towering growth in homeforeclosures is hitting the newest suburbs at least as hard, and in most cases harder than it is striking the state’s cities. Foreclosures in West Bloomfield and Birmingham are occurring at the same or higher rates than the rate of foreclosures in Detroit and its older suburbs.

The same is true, according to this article in the Atlantic Monthly, in Florida, California, Colorado, Georgia and other states.

Cities meanwhile are attracting new residents and new wealth, so much so that vast tracts of the urban landscape in cities as different as New York and Salt Lake City, Boston and Denver, Seattle and Knoxville, Chicago and Atlanta, and dozens of others, are being completely rebuilt.

This is a remarkable transformation. For most of my life cities were places to dismantle, not build. I was a kid in the 1960s when city officials and U.S. housing administrators teamed up to tear down much of White Plains, N.Y., my home town, as part of the federal urban renewal program. An elegant network of narrow streets and historic offices and walk-ups was replaced by Houston-like boulevards. A windowless mall was built near the center of town that became one of the most dangerous places to shop in the whole state. White Plains gradually came to its senses and slowly began to replace the urbanism that was removed, and the city is experiencing its own economic and cultural renaissance.

Chicago, too, is undergoing more than $1 billion in new housing, retail, and commercial investment along south Michigan Avenue, an area that encompasses hundreds of acres of old warehouses, storage buildings, and light industrial facilities. Boston is building a new city above the Big Dig. Los Angeles is rebuilding Grand Avenue. New York is planning 45 million square feet of homes and offices above a rail yard along the Hudson River.

A third bit of evidence is the popular clamor for modern transit. Grand Rapids recently won federal approval for a new rapid bus system, and as much as $29 million in US support to build the 10-mile line, which could be the first rapid transit line built in Michigan since early in the 20th century.

Northern Virginia is planning to build a new streetcar line, which would join a growing number of other streetcar systems, including operating lines in Portland and Kenosha, Wisc. And Atlanta is considering a new streetcar line along its famous Peachtree Street.

What appears to be occurring in the United States? Time-wasting, costly, energy-inefficient, land-consuming, and obsolete exurban patterns of development are taking new forms. The institutions that supported the old patterns are grievously injured. Citibank today announced a $23 billion write off connected to sour loans in its mortgage business. The American auto industry continues to shrink. Developers are going bankrupt, among them Levitt and Sons, which built the first auto-dependent cookie cutter suburb after World War Two, New York’s Levittown.

Coming up in their place are builders of new transit systems, designers of new green housing and LEED certified office buildings, and the entrepreneurial high tech businesses popping up downtown in small places like Traverse City, and big places like Charlotte.

NEW YORK – The day after Thanksgiving it was as though no one had ever eaten a square meal, judging from the lines that formed at Zaro’s Bread Basket or the Little Pie Company or Two Boots Pizza. Like everyplace else in midtown Manhattan, the ground floor, the “dining concourse”  of Grand Central Station was mobbed.

Some of what New York City presents to the world these days is familiar to those of us raised there in the 1960s and 1970s. Men and women, wrapped in cardboard or blanketed in grimy carpeting, huddle against the cold and sleep in doorways. Street vendors, their tables heaped in knock off pocket books and designer watches and gloves and hats, line 34th street where Macy’s is located. The spire atop the Empire State Building is lit in the colors of Christmas.

But much about New York is new, like the dining concourse at Grand Central. Many of the roughly 700,000 people who visit Grand Central every day spend at least a few minutes drinking coffee, or eating sushi, or salads, or fresh fruit in the company of hundreds of other New Yorkers. They sit without fear of the stranger.

In the 1970s, this airy and classic space beneath the main waiting room, defined by arched entrances and marbled walkways, was a place of gloom and loitering. Working people hurried through — collars up, eyes straight ahead– on their way to meet a commuter train to the suburbs.

The great terminal, like the city itself,  was a dying place full of decay and crime and fear.  Grand Central’s dire condition reflected what happens when a rich nation fueled by cheap energy and a national dream of cars and highways and picket fences, directs its people to seek refuge in its suburbs.

Two generations later Grand Central remains a potent symbol for a way of life that is fast changing again. In an era marked by high energy prices, high land values, growing population density, and remarkable constraints on time, the American Dream looks a lot different than it once did. The old train station as a result is a rare study in how and why people gather in public places in the 21st century, as well as an example of energy and time efficiency, two of the new operating principles of the era.

First and foremost, the station is about moving people. Nearly 600 trains depart daily and carry over 500,000 commuters to communities in two states. About a third of that number also find their way into the subway system.

Secondly, it is a grand building that fascinates and satisfies. In 1998, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority completed a $259 million renovation that turned Grand Central into a glittering market. Fresh food is a big draw. There’s a market full of good stuff, almost half a dozen fine dining restaurants and bars, nearly a dozen specialty food shops and bakeries, and more than 20 restaurants on the dining concourse.  The station has become a destination, even for the commuters who once did nothing more at Grand Central than hurry through. 

Third, people feel safe because they are. New York City is safer today than almost any big city in the world. According to the New York Times, the city will likely record fewer than 500 murders in 2007, the fewest since record-keeping began in 1963. To date, just 35 of those killings involved assailant and victim who were strangers to each other. The rest were perpetrated by murderers who knew their target. 

The crowds of people eating lunch at Grand Central are players in a story of a city that cultivates diversity and has found strength in community. That, too, is a new idea.

According to real estate listing services, there are nearly 41,000 homes for sale in Detroit and its three neighboring counties — Wayne, Oakland and Macomb. That’s more than twice as many homes on the market as in 2004, when the housing slump started in southeast Michigan. Moreover, it takes an average of six months to sell a house in metropolitan Detroit, and prices have slipped 15 percent to 3o percent, depending on where the home is located. Realtors I spoke to last week said that the Detroit market is still nine months away from reaching bottom. 

Similar woeful trends exist in other troubled metropolitan housing markets in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Jersey, Georgia, and Florida. But Philip Langdon and Robert Steuteville report in the current issue of New Urban News that even in these tough market times homes located close to rapid transit lines, and homes built in new walkable neighborhoods are holding their value and still selling well.

Langdon and Steuteville cite statistics from the Washington metropolitan region, which is served by the Metro rail system. “In close-in, high-density Arlington, Virginia, which is served by Metro rail, prices in mid-2007 were up 20 percent from a year earlier,” and home prices in Washington itself were up five percent, “whereas most other jurisdictions in the region slipped.”

Dallas also saw a similar trend with home sales in new traditional neighborhoods. ”Bill Gietema of Arcadia Realty Company in Dallas-Fort Worth said his firm’s two active TNDs “are outperforming their submarkets” (competing subdivisions in the same trade areas).” they report. “One of the TNDs, HomeTown, in North Richland Hills, is selling at “about a 10 percent slower velocity” than before the downturn, Gietema said, but in light of the overall market, that’s considered a healthy performance. “Competitors have closed down their models,” he noted. “We’ve stolen everybody else’s share.” The other TND, Capella Park, on the south side of Dallas, is “outselling competing neighborhoods five to one,” Gietema said.”

Not all new urban neighborhoods are faring so well, report Langdon and Steuteville. But enough are to make the point that buyers, especially young professionals and baby boomers are seeking something much different than a new home on a large lot distant from the city. The New Urban News report is consistent with what I’ve found in the last year during visits to Seattle, Portland, Knoxville, Chicago, New York, Washington, and Salt Lake City to write about metropolitan economies and real estate for The New York Times. In each of these metropolitan regions the downtown market for new and existing homes is stronger than the market for new and existing homes in surrounding suburbs. And the market is strongest in neighborhoods closest to rail transit stops.   

Michigan is at a distinct disadvantage in taking command of this trend. The state does not have a single metropolitan rapid transit system, though Grand Rapids is edging closer to building either a light rail or a bus rapid transit line. Every housing market in the state is taking a pounding with the exception of the market along the Lake Michigan coast close to Chicago. Sales of vacation condos and single family homes have been stronger in and around New Buffalo than anywhere else in Michigan or the Great Lakes region, according to regional realty statistics. 
     

Two items caught my eye today. World oil prices reached $93 a barrel this week, which is why gasoline at the Wesco down the road is $3.07-a- gallon tonight. The other news is the announcement on Monday that city leaders in Oregon want to dramatically expand the number of neighborhoods served by Portland’s spectacularly successful streetcar.

The two developments are related, of course, because as fuel prices rise the sanity and fuel-efficiency of streetcar lines makes ever more sense. 

Dallas opened a 2.8-mile streetcar line in 1989, and since then eight cities have built new streetcar lines, including Memphis, Little Rock, San Francisco and Tampa, all serving growing numbers of riders using restored cars or replicas.

Portland, which opened the first section of what is now an eight-mile loop in 2001, was the first to use modern streetcars, designed and built in the Czech Republic.

A new 2.6-mile streetcar line is scheduled to open in Seattle in December; a new line is to open in Washington in 2009; and a four-mile line is to begin operating in Tucson in December 2010. Miami, Columbus, Cincinnati, Phoenix, Missoula, Grand Rapids and some 70 other American cities are studying the feasibility of opening lines, according to Reconnecting America, a national nonprofit transit research group in Oakland, Calif.

Not since the turn of the 20th century, when metropolitan regions built elegant urban-rail networks, which were later dismantled, have streetcars generated such intense interest, according to the American Public Transportation Association, a Washington trade group.

Much of the reason lies in what happened after Portland decided that a streetcar, operating on fixed tracks and sharing the right of way with cars, was not only a new option for getting from one end of town to the other, but also a boon to developers as a new rail corridor for building homes and offices downtown. The Portland region also has a 44-mile network of light-rail lines, using faster and larger cars, that runs through the center of the city to the eastern and western suburbs. An 8.3-mile, $575.7 million extension is under way, scheduled to open in 2009.

John Carroll, a local home builder who is on a committee that oversees the streetcars, told me earlier this month, ”All I can say is that the stars lined up the right way for Portland. The Portland streetcar demonstrated that the city was serious about developing downtown at a time when the core was much quieter than it is now. Our last seven or eight projects have been within a block, block and half of the streetcar line.”

The city-owned streetcar line, which cost $100 million to build, has helped sweep in $2.4 billion in new commercial and housing development, with 7,248 new housing units, according to city statistics. A former vacant railway yard and grimy light-industrial sector on the line’s northern end was transformed into a hip area called the Pearl District. On the other end, industrial ground along the Williamette River has become the South Waterfront, a neighborhood of high-rise condominiums, town houses, offices, parks and a tram with spectacular views.

Although riding the Portland streetcars now seems like a logical step to urban prosperity, getting the line built took 11 years of promoting the idea.

A major task included convincing residents that pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers and streetcars could co-exist in the same right of way. Miami, which plans to open a line in 2012, put the problem to rest by producing videos of Portland streetcars as they operate without a hitch, and posting them on a Web site, miamigov.com/MiamiStreetcar/pages/Videos.asp.

Another challenge was raising money. Portland financed its line almost entirely with local taxes.

Two years ago, Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Portland, convinced his colleagues in the House of Representatives to approve a new funding provision called Small Starts in the federal transportation bill to help pay for the line. This year the program is providing $100 million for building streetcar lines and bus rapid transit systems. Portland wants to use $75 million in Small Starts money to partly finance a 6.7-mile, $146 million extension of its streetcar line.

Portland’s streetcars carry nearly 10,000 passengers a day, almost four times the number it anticipated when the line opened, said Rick Gustafson, executive director of Portland Streetcar, the nonprofit corporation that operates the line. “There’s no question that we are part of the combined investment over the last 20 years that produced the infrastructure that made it possible for people to park their cars and turn Portland into a walking environment,” Mr. Gustafson said. “When you create that, amazingly enough the market responds.”

According to the Portland Oregonian, about 140 miles of the city’s busiest streets show potential for new streetcar routes. Streetcars could make more neighborhoods resemble the popular retail corridor along Southeast Belmont, built originally along a streetcar line in the early 20th century.

The Canadian province of Ontario, which lies across Lake Huron from Michigan, and is home to about the same number of people (10.3 million there, 10 million here), has supported one of the planet’s active conversations on the ties between a strong economy and a clean environment. Much of the dialogue centers of global climate change and the province’s coal-fired power plants, one of which, the Nanticoke plant on Lake Erie, is among the largest on the continent and each year pours thousands of tons of sulfur, mercury, nitrogen, and oxides on New York and New England.  

Four years ago, when he was running on the Liberal Party ticket for provincial Premier, Dalton McGuinty promised to shutter Ontario’s five coal-powered generating stations by 2007 in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels and comply with the Kyoto protocols. Premier McGuinty suggested replacing the power — coal burning plants accounted for 24 percent of the province’s electricity production – with a combination of hydro, wind and other renewables, and generating new commerce and jobs. Roughly 45 percent of the province’s electricity is produced from nuclear energy generated by 10 reactors housed at three enormous plants, according to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. 

Though Premier McGuinty succeeded in 2005 in closing the Lakeview coal-fired plant in Mississauga – and demolishing it with explosives on June 28, 2007 — he missed the 2007 deadline for the other four.  Last month, as another electrion approached, he announced in Toronto that wouldn’t happen again. His government just approved a regulation that requires all of the province’s coal-powered generating stations to close by 2014.  ”There is only one place in the world that is phasing out coal-fired generation and we’re doing that right here in Ontario,” he said.

It’s important to note that as coal is phased out as a fuel source in Ontario, the province’s economy is surging because of a new green, clean, land-conserving, transit-focused economic strategy. The provincial government announced last month a $17.5 billion program to expand Toronto’s commuter and light rail rapid transit system by nearly 600 miles. The provincial unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been in more than 30 years. More than 1 million acres of open space are being conserved and set aside in the Toronto suburbs to slow sprawl and improve the quality of life.

Now let’s turn to Michigan, which is representative of the economic conditions in all of the Great Lakes states and is slipping to the back of the American economic pack according to most economic and quality of life measures. Let’s talk just about coal-fired generating stations. Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin have the highest concentration of coal-fired power plants in the nation and produce one-fifth of the carbon dioxide emissions, according to the Department of Energy. These states also have among them the highest rates of unemployment, lowest rates of job growth, highest rates of outward migration by young people, and Michigan has the largest state budget deficit in the nation.

Is there a relationship between a region’s decline and the fact that it generates most of its power from a dirty 19th century boiler technology and an 18th century fuel source?  It’s not just the practice of making power from coal, it’s the moribund thinking. Michigan spends $18 billion on energy every year, most of it importing fuel — coal, oil, natural gas, uranium — from outside the state.

Shane Lopez, an energy researcher and senior at the University of Michigan who’s working with us this summer at the Michigan Land Use Institue, prepared a grounding memorandum that found the state’s 15 coal-powered plants larger than 100 megawatts, and five that produce under 100 megawatts, provide 65 percent of Michigan’s energy. According to a 2006 national energy efficiency scorecard, Michigan ranks 33rd among states. Vermont, Connecticut, and California were national leaders, and not surprisingly their economies are much stronger. Shane also found compelling documentation, including a 2001 study by the Regional Economics Application Laboratory at  the University of Illinois, that a concerted state project to boost energy efficiency and renewable energy would produce 38,000 new jobs in Michigan and increase the gross state product by $3.4 billion annually by 2020.

Michigan, though, is having none of this. At the moment state officials are poised to begin reviewing applications to build two and perhaps three new coal-generating power plants — Rogers City on Lake Huron, and Midland are sites that have been publicly announced. Governor Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, has said little to date about the projects though her aides have privately said the governor is committed to “going anywhere and doing anything”  to generate new jobs. Governor Granholm proposed the 21st Century Energy Plan for Michigan in January.  It recommends spending $68 million a year for energy efficiency improvements. The administration and the Legislature blame the state budget deficit for preventing them from investing in the program.

The 21st Century Energy Plan also calls for generating Michigan’s electricity from coal. Late last month, the state Department of Environmental Quality issued a statement that said it would require new plants to meet tougher emissions and operating standards. 

In 1954, the year that Detroit was busily completing the Lodge Freeway and starting construction on the city’s other major highways Toronto (see pix) opened 12 stations on the Yonge Street subway line, the city’s first. Since then Toronto has built three more regional rapid transit lines, 69 stations, and nearly 43 miles of subway and rapid transit track. The city’s subway and surface streetcar system carries 1.2 million passengers a day, many of whom also use the seven commuter train lines into town. Only New York and Mexico City have a more extensive rapid transit system than Toronto. Detroit, meanwhile, has none.

 The contrast between the two cities in economic competitiveness, quality of life, and opportunity is just as stark. Detroit’s population, now less than 900,000, is less than half of what it was in 1954, when the number of Detroit residents peaked. The Detroit metropolitan region, where 4.8 million people live, has grown by roughly 100,000 residents since 1970. The number of vehicles, meanwhile, has increased by 1.6 million during the same period. Southeast Michigan has the highest rates of racial and economic segregation, joblessness, income stagnation, home foreclosure, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity of any major metropolitan region in the United States.

Toronto, meanwhile, has steadily grown to a city of 2.5 million, and the population of the metropolitan region — 5.1 million — is nearly double what it was in 1970. The largest city in Canada, and the fifth largest city in North America, Toronto also challenges New York as the continent’s most racially diverse and most prosperous. 

Toronto’s economy is booming, and a great deal of its well-being has to do with how regional managers and residents view rapid transit as an excellent investment for responding to the new market signals of the 21st century. Canada was a signatory to the Kyoto Accord, which commits the country to reducing global climate change gases by 2012 to 6 percent less than the levels produced in 1990. Canada also has a national transit strategy that calls for:

• Improving the global competitiveness, quality of life, and environmental sustainability of Canada’s cities.
• Requiring cities to have land use and transportation plans that favor transit as the primary means of accommodating future travel demand.
• Providing funding necessary to maintain and expand Canada’s urban transit systems in order to accommodate population growth and to allow transit to attract a larger share of the total travel market.
• Providing increased mobility for people so that they can take advantage of the employment, educational, recreational, and many other opportunities cities offer.
• Improving air quality and, in doing so, improve people’s health and their ability to enjoy outdoor spaces and activities.
• Ensuring the long-term economic stability and environmental sustainability by reducing climate-changing emissions and reliance on fossil fuels.

These, by the way, aren’t just hopeful words. Canada means what it says, and nowhere is it more visible than in Toronto. On June 15, Ontario’s Premier Dalton McGuinty announced that the provincial and federal governments are teaming up to spend $17.5 billion to modernize and build roughly 550 miles of rapid transit lines throughout the Toronto metropolitan region by 2020. It is the largest and most extensive metropolitan rapid transit investment in North America since New York spent $24 billion from 1982 to 1999 to modernize its aged subway and bus system. That investment helped to spur an economic and demographic revival that reestablished New York as a choice place to live and do business.  

Toronto already is a grand place. Its downtown is a hub of activity 24/7 with outdoor cafes busy well into the evening. Its suburbs, though jammed with vehicles, are a display of gleaming office towers set amid a natural and agricultural landscape that the provincial government is determined to conserve. One of the region’s land use plans calls for preserving 1.8 million acres of open space and farmland in the region; one million acres already have been saved. 

Detroit turned down a $600 million federal transit grant in 1976 and can’t agree even now on using $100 million in federal funds to revive a heavy commuter rail line between Ann Arbor and the central city.  Toronto’s new transit construction plan, meanwhile, will reduce pollution, congestion, and travel costs in a world where temperatures are rising and gasoline is heading to $8 a gallon. If you were a young person, which city is more inviting?  

Democrat Bill  Richardson, a member of President Bill Clinton’s cabinet and the current governor of New Mexico, this week became the first 2008 presidential candidate to formally introduce a Mode Shift idea into the national race. Richardson was in West Hollywood on Monday, and according to the Associated Press promised “to create a partnership to build a light rail network and help untangle the Los Angeles region’s notorious traffic. With gas prices rising and roadways jammed, Richardson said it was time to rethink a federal transportation policy that pumps billions of dollars into new roads each year. Mass transit, he said, will be the best, cleanest way to move metropolitan residents in the future.”

If elected, Richardson said he would “make it a major effort to refocus transportation construction of roads into light rail and more energy efficient transportation,” the New Mexico governor told reporters at a news conference. I would make light rail at least an equal partner” with highways, he said. With more rail and clean-running buses, “it’s going to improve the quality of life in this country.”

Richardson, who’s not done nearly as well as he needed to in early national television interviews, is nevertheless no slouch on energy or transportation policy. Last July New Mexico opened the first stations and 15 miles of the Rail Runner Express, a new north-south heavy commuter rail line that is now a nine-station, 55-mile system that will extend next year to 117 miles and reach Santa Fe. The system is carrying 2,000 passengers a day now, and is expected to cost $393 million, according to the Albuquerque Tribune. 

We’ll see more such Mode Shift ideas from presidential candidates. Static incomes. High energy prices. Falling home sales and rising rate of foreclosure. Global climate change. Traffic congestion and declining quality of life in American suburbs. Issues too close to home for candidates to ignore. 

If you travel to Las Vegas, Knoxville, Chicago, and Salt Lake City one of the surprising trends you’ll see is the abrupt shift in housing markets. Downtowns in these and other cities are outpacing the suburbs in new home construction and existing home sales. Two of the critical reasons for both are the shrinking size of American households — not a new trend — and the fact that transportation costs exceed housing expenses in household budgets. Though builders are intent on constructing the 3,000 square foot McMansion in the distant suburb, the fact is that there are far fewer households than there once were capable of both filling them up and  being able to afford to get there in the first place. 

Let’s tease out both trends. The US Census Bureau noted earlier this year that the conventional American nuclear family — husband, wife, and kids under one roof — now composes less than a quarter of all households. The Census Bureau also reported that single people now make up the majority of US households. Long story short: the market for those cul-de-sac McMansions is shrinking. The downward slide in new suburban home sales is further exacerbated by reckless lending practices, static or shrinking family incomes, traffic congestion, and the growing popularity of downtown living shared by young people and retirees alike. 

The other major influence in the soaring interest in American downtowns and shrinking housing markets at metropolitan edges is the cost of transportation, now the number one expense in the majority of American households, according to a study by the Center For Housing Policy in Washngton, D.C.  Researchers evaluated households that earned from $20,000 to $50,000 — the majority of households, by the way — in 28 metropolitan regions. They found that on average households spent 30 percent of their monthly income on transportation and 28 percent on housing. Such supposedly low cost cities like Atlanta were actually very high cost places to live. Atlantans spent 32 percent of their income on transportation, more than supposedly high cost cities like New York (24 percent), and Washington, D.C. (28 percent). In fact, when transportation and housing costs were combined Atlanta — one of the most sprawled out, drive through places in the world — was the second most expensive metropolitan region in the nation, next to San Francisco.  Detroit, by the way, had among the highest transportation costs (31 percent) but also near the lowest housing costs (24 percent of household income), the researchers found.

What does it mean for patterns of American development? The old rules of the housing/income/time/distance game have changed.  Working people sacrificed their time in order to find decent housing distant from their jobs. Their commutes in relatively inexpensive vehicles with cheap fuel made it work economically. No more. Vehicles are expensive to buy and maintain and insure. Fuel prices are rising fast. For every dollar people spend each month on housing in the distant suburbs, they’re spending as much or more on transportation. Living far away just doesn’t cash flow like it once did. And that reality is translating into depressed suburban housing markets, downtown redevelopment, and Mode Shift projects occurring all over the nation to finance and build new forms of work force housing and rapid transit systems. Very soon researchers may find that the footprint of major American metropolitan regions has begun to stabilize and then shrink.