Kaid Benfield's Blog: Curbing Pollution

Transit-oriented development in Arlington: stunning success and some lessons (part 2)

2008-06-24T13:23:04Z

Yesterday I wrote about how Arlington, Virginia’s redevelopment along one of the Washington, DC region’s Metro subway lines has created an amazing amount of new mixed-use development - all without expanding the region’s development footprint, while preserving the community’s single-family residential neighborhoods, and while strengthening the county’s tax base.

If all Arlington had done was to provide new housing and office space in an existing community at smart densities, thus saving thousands of acres that might otherwise have been developed as sprawl on the region’s fringe, the planners would have earned our praise. But here’s the really good news: Arlington also greatly reduced automobile dependence, providing residents and workers with convenient transportation choices, putting shops and many other daily destinations within walking distance of homes and offices, and shortening distances for those who need or prefer to drive.

It worked. Today, fewer than half of the residents in the Rosslyn-to-Ballston corridor drive to work. 39 percent use public transportation, and over 10 percent walk or bicycle (2.3 percent work at home). Perhaps most significant, the additional 17 million square feet of office space and 24,000 homes have added only minimal automobile traffic. Mariia Zimmerman of Reconnecting America reports that the daily traffic count on the corridor’s main street, Wilson Boulevard, was around 15,000 vehicles in 1980; in 2004, it was 15,795. (In 1980, before the redevelopment began, the county had been predicting that the count would soar to 36,900 vehicles per day!) The count on nearby Washington Boulevard actually decreased from 1980 to 2004, from 20,000 to 17,230.

Arlington’s lovely single-family neighborhoods remain lovely, and now residents can walk to more neighborhood conveniences and Metro, without suffering the traffic increases people sometimes fear from intensive development.

As Roger Lewis points out in The Washington Post,

"The corridor functions well. It offers pedestrian-friendly sidewalks, on- and off-street bicycle lanes, plazas and mini-parks. It takes less than 10 minutes to walk between any two adjacent Metro nodes on the corridor -- Rosslyn, Court House, Clarendon, Virginia Square and Ballston. People there can get along without cars.
"Appropriately high densities and multiple uses -- commercial, residential, civic, cultural and educational -- are concentrated at each node. Intense redevelopment and convenient transportation have made the corridor successful as a place to live, shop and play, as well as to work or commute to work."

Well said. Although the corridor's redevelopment is outstanding, I can’t say that it’s perfect. Roger also notes that the “urban design is not flawless, and much of its architecture is less than exemplary.” I have to agree. Although I love Clarendon and find much to like near the Court House and Virginia Square stations, some of the new concrete-canyon development around the Ballston station feels uninspiring at best and oppressive at worst. Surely it confirms NIMBY fears of what transit-oriented development might bring elsewhere, which is too bad. I say to take Ballston as a valuable lesson to provide more architectural and building-height variety, along with more green space, in future development near transit, and look to Clarendon instead for the better model.

High-rise glitches aside, this is an amazing success story. The amount of development in Arlington went way, way up compared to what was forecast in the 1970s, while automobile traffic on the arterial and residential roadways basically stayed the same. New homes, shops, and offices were provided close to public transportation and close to the region’s center.

Arlington could rest on its laurels but, instead, the planners are now looking to innovative, citizen-endorsed redevelopment of another section of the county that has suffered decline, the Columbia Pike corridor, and this time the development will be supported by streetcar service. (Watch this space for a future post on Columbia Pike.)

I believe the country has turned a corner and this, not sprawl, is our future. Arlington is setting a terrific example, and I'm lucky to be able to visit anytime I want, right across the river from DC.

Did you see the Washington Monument and US Capitol in the photograph that opened yesterday’s post? If not, look again. You can see the Jefferson Memorial, too.

Transit-oriented development in Arlington: stunning success and some lessons (part 1)

2008-06-23T13:29:37Z

The image you see above, of Arlington, Virginia looking north to the Potomac River and Washington, DC, shows one of the country’s most stunning smart growth success stories.

With amazing foresight and gifted planning, Arlington has transformed itself in about three decades from a declining inner-ring suburb into a thriving, bustling and immensely livable community. This was done by coordinating the county’s (under Virginia law, Arlington is a county, not a city) redevelopment and growth with the region’s Metro subway system.

As Roger Lewis put it in Saturday’s Washington Post,

"Arlington planners and politicians were bold, optimistic and foresighted. They insisted that the [Metro line] run underground through Arlington, following Wilson Boulevard and Fairfax Drive, rather than running along the Interstate 66 right of way, which would have been the path of least resistance and at the lowest cost. And they wanted five closely spaced stations [along the route].
"Arlington leaders were predicting, some would say gambling, that the extra cost of running the line underground and building those five stations would someday yield big returns. They expected that billions of dollars of private real estate investment would be attracted to the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, in turn producing tens of thousands of new jobs, as well as new dwellings, and pulling in new residents, plus many millions of dollars in new tax revenue."

In a nutshell, that is exactly what has happened, and it has brought a range of environmental and community benefits. I am particularly fond of Arlington's Clarendon neighborhood, which seamlessly blends new and old near its Metro stop:

Chris Zimmerman of the Arlington County board notes that the community’s planning goals were to focus redevelopment within walking distance of the Metro station entrances, preserve existing single family and garden apartment neighborhoods and green space, and strive for a 50/50 tax base mix of residential and commercial development.

Check, check, and check. Since 1980 Arlington has nearly quadrupled both its housing units and office space along the Rosslyn-to-Ballston Metro corridor you see in green above. More people now work in Arlington than in downtown Dallas or Denver.

The areas around Arlington’s seven Metro stations (the others are along Jefferson Davis Highway, appropriately running south) produce more than half of the county’s tax revenue, Not coincidentally, Arlington residents now enjoy the lowest tax burden in the metropolitan Washington region. What makes this such a tremendous smart growth story is that all this great development happened without expanding the region's development footprint.

Tomorrow: why Arlington is an environmental as well as planning success story.

How smart is your city?

2008-05-13T21:30:46Z

After so many wonky posts in a row, this time I'm going to lighten up with one of those fun internet quizzes that I can do more or less all day when I have something I want to procrastinate. This one is "How Smart Is Your City?" offering just a few breezy (but not entirely impertinent) questions. It's part of a special series about sustainable and green cities this week on Grist, and it will have articles on cities in the southwest, Atlanta and the southeast, cities in the Rust Belt, and the ever-popular "how to green your city!" conclusion. I make fun, but I'm really glad they are covering these issues.

In fact, if you live in a larger US metro area, chances are your city is ranked on a sustainablity scale published with the first article. My home, Washington DC, comes in 12th (out of 50). Portland, Oregon is ranked first.

Of course, some bozo has already posted on Grist that Portland doesn't deserve its green hype. He couldn't be more wrong. Portland isn't perfect, but through excellent coordination of walkable development and public transportation, the greater Portland region decreased its per capita rate of driving by six percent from 1996-2006, a period in which other regions across the US increased theirs by an average ten percent. I think Portland may have been the only major US region to reduce driving rates over that period.

Here's what the American Planning Association said in giving its 2008 Planning Excellence Award to Metro, Portland's regional government:

"Helping reduce sprawl and carbon emissions in the 25-city, three-county Portland, Oregon, metropolitan region with 1.4 million residents by developing "up not out" is Metro, the area's unique governmental agency. Through nearly two dozen transit-oriented development projects completed during the past decade — and another dozen in the pipeline — Metro is showing how development can be more compact while at the same time reducing residents' dependence on automobiles for local trips and commuting to work.
"Projects completed to date have used 80 acres of land compared with 587 acres that would have been needed using conventional development practices."

Well-earned, in my opinion. And probably worth a blog post of its own at some point.

Thanks to NRDC's Kim Ranney for pointing me to the Grist series.

Rethinking environmental impacts to manage growth

2008-05-13T12:00:51Z

When faced with a situation where rapid growth is occurring, such as I discussed yesterday, the best thing to do environmentally is to manage and shape it so that a good quality of life is maintained with the least environmental harm. This is fundamentally about per capita, or per household, thinking: how can we shape the new development so that it has the least impact per increment of growth?

This is the essence of smart growth. But it also represents a fairly radical departure from traditional environmental thinking (and much of environmental law), which focuses our attention not on per capita impacts but on particular pieces of land, parcel-by-parcel.

There are dramatic differences in the results of the two methods of thinking. Consider the two maps of the San Francisco Bay Area, below. The one on the left shows carbon dioxide emissions from cars, on a per-acre basis. The deeper the red, the greater the emissions. The one on the right shows the same emissions on a per-household basis:

The maps are practically opposite images of one another. Someone trying to plan how new development should be located, if not thinking in per capita terms, might look only at the map on the left, and conclude that development should avoid the more densely populated portions of the region, because of higher emissions there. The planner might also conclude that new development should be spread out, to avoid mimicking the apparent effect of density.

But it would be the worst thing to do. The map on the right shows that the densely populated areas actually have lower CO2 emission rates than the outlying areas, when considered on a per-household basis. Overall CO2 emissions in the atmosphere will be minimized if new development, to the greatest extent possible, locates within and mimics the more heavily settled areas. This is because people in denser, more central locations drive less.

You can make the same sorts of comparisons for other environmental media. Stormwater runoff, for example, is exacerbated by pavement, rooftops, and other impervious surfaces. Compare the two maps of Seattle below, which show per-acre impervious surface on the left, and per-capita impervious surface on the right. Again, the deeper the color, the greater the imperviousness:

Remember, the choice is not between growing and not growing. The choice is only about how and where. And what the maps show is that per-person incremental impacts of growth are minimized by density and central locations. In other words, for a given amount of growth, the way to reduce overall impervious surface in the larger watershed is to concentrate it in as few places as possible and keep the overall development footprint of the region as small as possible. The result will be increased per-acre runoff in some parts of the watershed, but it will also mean less runoff in the watershed as a whole. This is mostly because more compact neighborhoods require less pavement - fewer road miles and parking lots - to serve them, on a per-unit basis. For more on how compact, centrally located development can benefit watersheds compared to sprawl, see EPA's terrific research on the subject.

The CO2 maps of San Francisco come from NRDC’s longtime collaborator, the Center for Neighborhood Technology. And the impervious surface maps of Seattle come from another longtime collaborator, Criterion Planners.

Smart growth improves air quality, says new research

2008-05-07T18:41:13Z

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has released important new research detailing the benefits of smart growth on transportation emissions and air quality.

In particular, the report reviews the effects on traffic and pollution that would occur if new growth and land development were encouraged to take place on vacant parcels and redevelopment sites within established cities and suburbs, instead of sprawling out onto sites that are now farmland or forests. The report also examines the potential benefits of developing near public transportation and on obsolete industrial "brownfield" sites.

Written by EPA’s Smart Growth Program, Measuring the Air Quality and Transportation Impacts of Infill Development concludes:

“Fundamentally, well designed neighborhoods in more accessible places make walking, biking and transit more convenient options. Therefore, policies that increase the amount of urban and suburban infill development can help more people meet their everyday needs with less driving. In turn, this can reduce traffic and contribute to better regional air quality . . .

“This study illustrates how regions can calculate these benefits. The basic approach relies upon standard transportation forecasting models currently used by Metropolitan Planning Organizations across the country. The results suggest that strong support for infill development can be one of the most effective transportation and emission reduction investments regions can pursue . . .

“Across the three case studies, redirecting jobs and households to brownfield and other infill sites reduces overall travel, congestion and emissions from cars. For example, if just 8 percent of Denver’s jobs and households were shifted over time toward 10 regional centers, congestion would be reduced by over 6 percent and emissions would be reduced by about 4 percent. This would be equivalent to removing nearly half a million trips per day from the region’s roads, a significant share of the daily average (12.7 million miles). If the same amount of development was concentrated in 31 locations, the reduction in emissions would be somewhat smaller (3 percent).

“The Charlotte case study evaluated the impact of increased infill development in a single corridor. Although a much smaller number of jobs and homes were relocated to infill sites, the analysis demonstrates the benefits of focused development around transit. While the new rail service alone did reduce congestion in the corridor, it had a minimal impact on the region’s emissions. However, when 16,000 households and 10,000 jobs are relocated near the South Corridor stations, the reduction in emissions was 10 times greater and transit ridership increased by more than 6,000 trips each day.

“In Boston, the analysis considered redevelopment in just 13 suburban towns along the I-495 Corridor. Redirecting new development to brownfield sites in these towns reduced vehicle travel by 154,000 miles during the evening rush hour. Given the corridor’s average car trip of 15 miles, this reduction is equivalent to eliminating more than 10,000 trips.”

The full, 77-page report may be found here. It confirms and expands a growing body of research on land use and transportation, including last month's release of a major study documenting how smart growth reduces global warming emissions.

Five more green apples for NYC

2008-05-01T17:00:12Z

Last week my longtime NRDC colleague Eric Goldstein posted a blog entry highlighting five laudable environmental sites (green apples) and five awful ones (bad apples). Eric got it right as usual. I am particularly a fan of his because, like me, he loves cities and, besides, he is one of a very small handful of people who were already on the NRDC staff when I first joined 27 (!) years ago.

One of Eric’s green apples is the Queens Botanical Garden Visitor Center, which I mentioned here in my last post as one of the AIA’s “ten greenest” award winners for 2008. It’s one of the good ones, by the way.

But in this post I’d like to offer a slightly (though not entirely) different perspective and cite some additional examples that I think New Yorkers may too easily take for granted as part of their environmental bounty:

Walkable neighborhoods

A lot of places don’t have them at all. New York has them in abundance, from Brooklyn Heights to the Upper West Side to Rockefeller Center to the most celebrated of them all, Greenwich Village, not counting the hundreds I either don't know or don't have space to mention. Living in a “24-hour” environment where jobs, homes, shops, schools, and other everyday conveniences are so close at hand saves time, promotes public health by encouraging walking, reduces carbon and other emissions that would otherwise come from driving, and fosters a sense of community. New York is one of the most walkable cities in the world. Take note of the fact that most Americans have to drive 20+ miles per day just to accomplish the tasks of normal living, and celebrate the difference in New York.

Awesome affordable green development

Two such walkable neighborhoods being constructed near each other in the South Bronx deserve special mention. (Others, too, I’m sure, but these are the two I’m most familiar with.) First, pictured on the left, is Melrose Commons. The pictured bit of green housing is part of a redevelopment plan constructed by the community residents themselves -- approximately 6,000 people, primarily of African American and Latino descent, with a median family income of less than $12,000 a year. Troubled by an initial proposal that would have squeezed many of them out, they organized and took control of the situation, working to promote development that “would be sustainable, would complement the existing infrastructure and the regional location, and would provide for future growth and evolution.”

Today, the plan includes: 2000 diverse housing units that are using green technology, preserving the historical richness of the community, and providing affordable options for residents of different ages and incomes; community open space that is visible from the sidewalk and linked to schools and community gardens; "greening" of industrial areas with recreational space development; business development that will employ community members in such enterprises as an after school center, health care services and recycling projects. They are also developing a town center for education and cultural uses, including the return to community use of a former YWCA building. Melrose Commons is participating in the LEED for Neighborhood Development pilot project, and they sure look deserving to me.

Second, in the same area of the Bronx, is Via Verde, an award-winning project designed to serve a mix of incomes through a variety of unit types, including rental, co-op, and live/work town homes. Via Verde’s form is inspired by the integration of garden and city: the connected rooftops of low-rise town homes, a mid-rise duplex building, and an 18-story tower will be used to harvest rainwater, grow fruits and vegetables, to exercise, and to relax. Additional biophilic elements connecting people to nature will include private backyard gardens, semi-private courtyards, and public learning and gardening space to provide a range of outdoor experiences.

The project, being developed by a partnership that includes my sustainability brother-in-arms, Jonathan Rose, is being designed to exceed LEED Gold standards for environmentally responsible and energy efficient design. Passive, low-tech strategies include cross ventilation in all apartments, solar shading, and aforementioned green roofs to provide insulation and control storm water. The project also incorporates high-efficiency mechanical systems, energy-conserving appliances, and renewable energy strategies, including solar voltaic canopies. In addition, smart material choices, including non-toxic paints and rapidly renewable wood products, will improve the air quality for residents and conserve natural resources. Where were these projects on the AIA’s “ten greenest” list?

Bryant Park

I really hope New Yorkers don’t take this one for granted. A shameful embarrassment in the heart of Midtown for much of the last century, this is now a treasure. To say it had fallen into hard times is an understatement. As one observer put it, “the grim joke among New Yorkers was that the police only went into the park after someone was murdered to identify the victim.” In the late 1980s, though, the welfare of the park was handed to a private entity, the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation. After a massive effort, today the eight-acre urban oasis hosts a football-field-sized lawn, twin promenades featuring the same species of trees as the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, six flower beds planted seasonally with 100 species of woody shrubs and herbaceous perennials and 20,000 bulbs, a carousel, a boule board, chess tables, the Bryant Park Grill, free wireless access, and 2,000 moveable chairs for pausing to take in the sights. It is an astounding success and is enjoyed by thousands of visitors every day.

World-class public transportation

This one is a no-brainer. New Yorkers can not only walk, they can ride. New York’s subway system is used by over 600,000 riders per day. It is one of the most extensive public transportation systems in the world, with 468 passenger stations, 656 miles of “revenue track,” and a total of 842 miles, including non-revenue track, according to Wikipedia. The subway is also notable for being among the few rapid transit systems in the world to run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This, of course, is in addition to the extensive regional rail service, and more buses and bus lines than one can count. In most US communities, the share of trips taken by public transportation is under three percent. Think about it.

Really small environmental footprint

Yes, you read that heading correctly. All this adds up to what is unquestionably the most resource-efficient and low-polluting city in the country, when those measures are considered on a per capita basis. As David Owen wrote in his thoughtful article “Green Manhattan,” originally published in the New Yorker, “if you made all eight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town, they would require a space equivalent to the land area of the six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey.” (No word on where the current residents of New England, Delaware, and New Jersey might go.) Metropolitan Phoenix, which has a population roughly twice that of Manhattan, occupies more than 200 times as much land.

Owens continues, “eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.”

So what’s my point, anyway?

New York certainly has its share of problems, environmental and otherwise. I am extremely glad that some of my colleagues, including Eric, are working on them and solving them. But it also has some amazing environmental qualities, particularly for the US, that are not just particular spots like Queens Botanical Garden or Bryant Park, but systems producing environmental benefits. We don’t think to single them out because they are such an inherent part of the city’s fabric. But they deserve some apples, too. Don’t take them for granted, New Yorkers.

Chris Jordan’s art: crushed cars, 1.14 million supermarket bags, and more

2008-04-29T17:00:02Z

Chris Jordan thinks big, and he wants us to think big, too. He makes large-scale fine art photographs of American mass consumption, the losses from Hurricane Katrina, and more. Have you ever wondered what the number of plastic drink bottles used by Americans every five minutes (two million) look like, all piled together? Or the number of cell phones retired in the US every day (426,000), in a heap? Or the number of brown paper supermarket bags used every hour, stacked together?

In some ways, the art is mesmerizing, and it is rendered not entirely without a sense of humor, although the messages are serious ones. Few words are needed. Barbie dolls, aluminum cans, children’s blocks, even handguns, and more. His art has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries in the US and Europe, and you can see images of it here.

Coal miner’s granddaughter

2008-02-24T22:14:34Z

While perusing the latest issue of the excellent and soon-to-be-lamented music magazine No Depression, I came across an eloquent review of Kathy Mattea’s forthcoming album, Coal.

Mattea, of course, is the husky-voiced and melodic folk-country artist who has won numerous Grammys and whose wonderful 1986 album Walk the Way the Wind Blows has been played, oh, 40 times or so in my abode. Wonderful, wonderful collection of songs penned by the likes of Nanci Griffith and Rodney Crowell, and about as good as it gets for the genre.

Coal, the new collection, is all about the culture of coal the mineral, and mining, in Mattea’s home state of West Virginia. My colleague Rob Perks was all over the environmental and social issues of mining country in his blog entry last week, so I won’t try to repeat any of that here. But, for a different sort of introduction to those issues, go to Mattea’s website, where you can listen to a thoughtful interview (with in-studio music! click on "Coal" at the top of the site) that was first aired on Public Radio International, and just listen. Mattea’s roots in that culture (two grandfathers who worked in the mines, a mom who worked for the union) are deep indeed.

As a onetime musician myself, I am tempted to go off on so many tangents here that we might never get back to the subject at hand. But I will say that the album – which apparently won’t be released until April – will contain some of the best songs of some terrific songwriters, including DC’s Hazel Dickens, whom I used to see all the time on the #36 bus to Georgetown when I lived on that route; Billy Edd Wheeler, whose songs were some of the first I ever taught myself as a teenager and who lives in my native Buncombe County, North Carolina; and the immortal Merle Travis. There are samples on Mattea’s website where, of course, you can pre-order the album.

I wish I could link Grant Alden's review of the collection in No Depression, but it isn’t online. It is almost poetic in places: If you live in or drive through the Appalachian coal country of West Virginia or Kentucky, a fine gray grit will cover your car. It will shade your house . . . [Mattea] is someone with whom you might have a long conversation, no matter who you are, and both of you would learn something.

I’m generally not a fan of political music, since it tends to be un-nuanced and not as good as I wish at being, well, either political or musical. But I have so many connections to this album that I can’t ignore it.

So check out the music online, and if you’re a music fan pick up a copy of No Depression on the news stand. (The March-April issue also contains features on two of Canada's finest, producer extraordinaire Daniel Lanois and singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards.) You won’t be able to buy the magazine much longer, unfortunately. The issue after this one will be the last in print, although they vow to keep the website going.

I know, this post didn't have much to do with smart growth, did it? What, you thought I was a single-issue kind of guy? And, anyway, figuring out ways to cultivate and maintain a healthy economy and community (and, by the way, generating electricity) while developing and conserving the landscape is a huge part of sustainability. Coal puts all of those in bold relief. Back on topic in a more mainstream way next time.

Should we have to pay to drive downtown? It depends.

2008-02-22T17:15:15Z

In the policy circles I inhabit, “congestion pricing” is all the rage. This is mostly because New York City’s mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed that anyone entering midtown or lower Manhattan in a motor vehicle during peak hours should pay eight dollars each time for the privilege.

The idea is that, if people have to pay, some will shift to other forms of transportation, decreasing both congestion and pollution in the inner city. In addition, the fees can be applied to fund public transportation infrastructure, parks, and other things that provide alternatives and make a city more livable. It has done just that in two major cities, London and Stockholm, where the concept has been instituted in recent years, say its advocates, I think correctly.

NRDC is supporting the proposal for New York, with my friend Rich leading our efforts. And so is my favorite smart growth group in New York, the Regional Plan Association. Our longtime ally Tri-State Transportation Campaign is on the wagon, too.

I’m on board. But I would caution people from jumping to apply the concept to other cities in the US. New York, London and Stockholm have some major prerequisites for the success of downtown pricing that most American cities don’t: amazingly strong downtowns, and amazingly strong public transportation systems. New York, in particular, has arguably the most famous downtown in the world. London’s Underground and bus system is world-renowned. The highly respected transportation researchers Robert Cervero and Michael Bernick, in their excellent book Transit Villages for the 21st Century, referred to Stockholm as “arguably the best example anywhere of coordinated planning of rail transit and urban development.” All three cities have tightly packed downtowns that, prior to the institution of pricing, experienced severe congestion.

The Washington DC region, where I live, has also been experiencing severe traffic congestion, but it’s mostly in the suburbs, not downtown. Traffic downtown actually flows relatively freely during rush hour compared to traffic around, say, the suburbs of Tyson’s Corner and Springfield in Virginia, or the I-270 corridor in Montgomery and Frederick Counties in Maryland. That’s partly because those suburban places have lousy street design, forcing all drivers onto the same few roads, partly because the transit alternatives are poor in many suburban locations, and partly because those suburbs have been growing rapidly at the expense of DC’s downtown, which until this decade was losing both population and jobs. Indeed, from 1950 to 2000 the central city’s population declined from 802,200 to 572,100, a crippling loss of near 30 percent. During the same period, the suburban population quadrupled. In 1950, the central city held 82 percent of the region’s jobs; since then it has been losing jobs while the suburbs have gained, and now it holds only 24 percent. (See a highly informative presentation of regional trends here.)

The last thing DC needs right now is a tax on people who want to work in the city, regardless of how they get here. If still more jobs migrate to the suburbs, regional sprawl, driving, pollution and congestion will all increase, not go down. In fact, if we are sincere about putting a price on congestion and pollution, we should tax the suburban roads, not the downtown streets.

Looking at some other US cities, Cleveland lost half its population between 1950 and 1990, while its suburbs doubled in size. In recent years, 282 square miles of central Kansas City lost population while, because of suburban growth, the region as a whole gained 29 percent in residents. The amount of developed land in the region doubled during that time period. Even in the booming Sun Belt, all the economic and population growth has been occurring in the suburbs. In Los Angeles, job dispersal has been so pronounced that the 19 largest geographic job centers, combined together and including LA’s downtown, hold only 18 percent of the region’s jobs! (Support for these stats may be found in this book.) Heck, I know several professionals in the “Research Triangle” area of Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, and every one works in a suburban location. Transit usage is negligible, and suburban traffic is a nightmare.

None of these more typical American cities has a public transportation system anything like New York's (see above), London's, or Stockholm's. And none, in my opinion, would be a good candidate for downtown pricing.

Due to some smart growth efforts and a renewed preference for urban living, many US downtowns are just now starting to make comebacks. We don’t want to create incentives for people to stay away from downtowns and/or choose to locate their businesses elsewhere, just as we are beginning to make progress. In fact, if some of these places experienced more downtown congestion, that might actually be a sign of environmental progress, a sign that sprawl is slowing. I’m not saying that there aren’t any other US cities where taxing downtown driving wouldn’t work, but you need the right ingredients: downtowns that are the unquestioned hubs of regional economic activity, and very strong transit systems that are convenient for all, or nearly all. In the US, New York is an exception, not the rule.

Finally, there is another reason why New York may be much better positioned to accept and benefit from downtown pricing, and that’s the political calculus. Unlike every other US city, fewer than 5 percent of NYC residents drive downtown to work. Most New Yorkers, including half of those in the “outer boroughs” of the city beyond Manhattan, don’t even own cars at all. The tax (or, if you prefer, fee) will be felt by very few individuals and a lot of delivery and trucking operations. For most New Yorkers, it’s a tax on someone else; that’s not the case elsewhere.

I hope Rich and NRDC’s friends in New York can make this happen. It would be terrific to have less motor vehicle congestion and pollution in the Big Apple. (Does anyone still call it that?) But, if you can make it here, you still can't make it anywhere, not on this issue.

And, speaking of congestion, should they price the sidewalks as well? :)