transportprovidence – Page 2

February 1, 2016February 1, 2016

#NoNewRoads: How Bernie Sanders Should Preempt Michael Bloomberg

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Rumors have been floating that former Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, might run for president. Bloomberg has presented his potential run as a middle-ground between rightwing candidates like Donald Trump and progressive leaders like Bernie Sanders. Whatever critiques there might be of Bloomberg, the fact is that he’s led on some issues. Bernie Sanders should work hard to undermine Bloomberg’s base of support on a key issue where the Bloomberg administration led: transportation.

Michael Bloomberg was a big proponent of stop-and-frisk policies, which should be a concern for any progressive voter. Stop-and-frisk did recover caches of weapons, perhaps preventing some crimes, but only by harassing large numbers of people of color with an indiscriminate dragnet. The vast majority of people stopped-and-frisked were found to have committed no crime whatsoever, and federal courts found that the policy systematically violated the rights of people of color. Bloomberg’s candidacy would certainly be considerably better than any of the Republican candidates, but in an election year when voters have the ability to choose a candidate like Bernie Sanders, it shouldn’t be hard for progressives to make the choice: Sanders has led on issues of mass-imprisonment, ending the drug war, and restoring respect for people of color in a way that few American candidates, and no mainstream American candidate, ever has. Alongside Bloomberg’s iffy positions on civil rights stand some genuine achievements in transportation and land use. Bloomberg’s New York became a leader on environmental issues related to transportation, and the Sanders’ campaign needs to sharpen its messaging on this subject in order to undermine that leg of support.

A signature advantage for Bloomberg is that his administration smartly approached transportation policy to augment environmental and social benefits for New Yorkers. This Streetfilms video shows the almost magical transformation of many New York intersections under the tutelage of Janette Sadik-Kahn and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Even for someone like me who “Feels the Bern”, and who doesn’t fully trust Michael Bloomberg on a range of other issues, it’s hard to not be impressed:

Sanders’ campaign has called for infrastructure investment as a major plank of his get-people-back-to-work message. I have disagreements with Sanders’ approach. I think that transportation funding should come from user fees. None of the candidates–Sanders included–has taken this position. But even as Sanders approaches the funding mechanisms differently than most urbanist voters would like, he can still draw from his past experience and speak to the need to economize on what the country spends on out of that funding.

The United States spends more money on expansion of its road system than on maintenance, and despite some hopeful examples to the contrary, has often maintained design mistakes like urban highways into their second lifecycle, often at the behest of corporate giants like Microsoft and against the wishes of local voters and small businesses. Sanders, who was a four-term mayor of a leading urbanist place, Burlington Vermont, doesn’t need to stretch himself into any pretzels to speak eloquently to why this is a mistake. But at present, Sanders is not doing enough through his campaign to explain how America’s infrastructure crisis is one of overspending. His campaign needs to say clearly: #NoNewRoads.

As a mayor, Bernie Sanders ‘out-Republicaned Republicans‘. He did so by introducing radical concepts like competitive bidding, by successfully lowering property taxes, and by successfully guiding the city towards new development while also protecting the rights of poor people in public housing. Sanders inspires people like me not just with his social-democratic approach to some issues, but his genuine understanding of when free markets work well. Transportation is an opportunity for Sanders to bring that cost-saving approach into focus.

Sanders wants a new single-payer healthcare system, but has also spoken eloquently to the fact that Americans spend more on healthcare than any other industrialized nation. Just as we waste money on healthcare procedures that bring poor results, we also are wasting precious resources on transportation boondoggles that do not add up to longterm economic growth. It’s time for the Sanders campaign to speak more forthrightly on this. In the second Democratic debate, Sanders again stuck to this spending issue:

…[W]hy do we remain the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care to all people as a right? Why do we continue to get ripped off by the drug companies who can charge us any prices they want? Why is it that we are spending per capita far, far more than Canada, which is 100 miles away from my door, that guarantees health care to all people?

It will not happen tomorrow. But when millions of people stand up and are prepared to take on the insurance companies and the drug companies, it will happen, and I will lead that effort.

Medicare for all, single-payer system is the way we should go.

On imprisonment, the focus on fiscal conservatism has been mixed into Sanders boldly progressive message. From the second Democratic debate:

We’re spending $80 billion locking people up disproportionately, Latino and African American. We need very clearly major, major reform in a broken criminal justice system from top to bottom. And that means when police officers out in a community do illegal activity, kill people who are unarmed, who should not be killed, they must be held accountable. It means that we end minimum sentencing for those people (UNINTEL). And it means that we take marijuana out of the federal law as a crime and give space for freedom to go forward with legalizing marijuana.

Sanders has even brought his hawk-eyed approach to spending to military waste. From the second debate, again:

This nation is the most powerful military in the world. We’re spending over $600 billion a year on the military. And yet significantly less than 10% of that money is used to be fighting international terrorism.

We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars (UNINTEL), 5,000 nuclear weapons. I think we need major reform in the military making it more cost effective but also focusing on the real crisis that faces us. The Cold War is over and our focus has got to be on intelligence, increased manpower, fighting international terrorism.

A “no new roads” approach, sometimes called a “fix-it first” approach, would also be surprisingly within the mainstream. In a recent interview, Urban Cincy blog author Randy Simes points out that even fairly conservative and car-oriented DOTs like Ohio’s ODOT are looking to “fix it first” for financial reasons. Part of what worries transportation advocates about Bernie Sanders’ messaging on transportation funding is that this fix-it-first way of doing things might evaporate at the state level if more money became available. Sanders should make it clear to the transportation community that his focus on transportation funding does not mean a return to business-as-usual for road expansions, and that DOTs still need to start prioritizing and limiting their spending to bring the U.S. back on track.

Talking about the true roots of America’s transportation crisis–overspending on bad projects–should hone close to an attitude about public finance that Bernie Sanders has already embraced his entire life. It will clearly energize existing, young, liberal voters, while also reaching out to moderates who are concerned about costs. It takes away the false choice of progressive vs. practical, and puts them in one candidate together. Supporting the #NoNewRoads campaign will also bring Sanders close to a group of people the Clinton campaign has been attempting to separate him from: Obama lovers. Sanders has supported many of the positive achievements of the Obama era while also criticizing the president from the left, but on this issue he would be in line with our current president: President Obama invited Strong Towns, the organization that coined #NoNewRoads, to the White House to speak on rural development issues. Sanders can demonstrate that he’s able to work with fiscal conservatives, champion climate change action, and shore up support from supporters of President Obama, all at once. Win-win-win.

Donald Trump may think that we can slap a billion dollars on anything and make it better, but Bernie Sanders has shown on a range of issues that he’s much smarter. Sanders is a “man of the people” says one article: he walks to work and takes the middle seat on planes. The Sanders campaign should speak smartly on transportation so as to draw on the approach he’s taken in the past. Let’s #FeelTheBern for #NoNewRoads.

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December 22, 2015

Should we really be able to drive before we can smoke?

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Rep. Teresa Tanzi introduced legislation to change the tobacco buying age to 21. I came across this in my Twitter feed just the other day, although upon further investigation, this has been reported on in The Projo.

I respect Rep. Tanzi, and oftentimes I agree with her on a lot of issues. I disagree with her on this. Adults are adults at 18, and unless there’s a strong public interest in their behavior, 18 year olds should be free to make decisions, including really bad ones like smoking. The issue of further restricting smoking raises questions for me about where we socially place smoking (i.e., Is smoking a poor person thing now?). It also feels like an overreach on account of the fact that so many important public matters remain unregulated–are we wasting our political capital annoying people with regulations while not regulating things we should? This issue is a private one, and should stay that way.

Okay, James, So Why Take this On?

Drug policy is something I’m interested in, but it’s definitely not my focus. I debated when I saw Rep. Tanzi’s tweet whether I even wanted to get involved in challenging the idea of raising the tobacco age. But ultimately, what it comes down to is trying to work out what the appropriate place for public intervention in private affairs is, and that’s something that I do want to work out for myself, philosophically.

My grandmother died of emphysema and multiple heart attacks in her early 70s because of smoking, and that experience made a big impact on me, such that as a kid I was a bit of a Puritanical crusader against other people’s smoking. I’d lecture other relatives. Hide packs of cigarettes. I really can’t know what draws Rep. Tanzi to this issue, but the reason I feel like I respect where her heart is not to be patronizing, but because I really do understand where her heart is. I can only assume that some kind of human suffering underscores this urge to bring people to a healthier lifestyle.

As you all know, I’m a pretty strong proponent for various measures that would lower our reliance on cars. Some of those proposals very much use regulation to achieve their goal. Arguably, you could say that trying to do this is Puritanical in exactly the same way. What’s central to me in this conversation is trying to figure out what qualifies as the “public” good, and where it makes sense to start impinging on people’s choices to do as they please. I believe that this proposal to change the smoking age impinges on people’s personal freedom in a way that mostly impacts individuals’ rights to be their own persons, rather than for a genuinely public good.

18 Should be 18. Mostly.

One of the issues here is what rights adults over 21 should have to legislatively limit the rights of adults 18-21. I’m 30–Wow!–but I’m surprised by how much the feeling of being marginalized as a young adult still resonates with me, emotionally. I would argue that 18 should mean 18, unless there’s an overwhelming public interest at play.

Rep. Tanzi points out that 18 year olds’ decisions differ greatly from 21 year olds’ decisions. For me, this isn’t a point of contention. The more we come to know about the science of the brain, the more it is clear that our minds change continuously throughout our entirely lives. The decisions I made even five years ago were related to the kind of person I am today, but I certainly wasn’t an identical person to who I am upon greater reflection, experience, and biological growth. The first question is teasing out to what extent this justifies taking away young adults’ rights. I made a similar appeal in a series of housing pieces I wrote about Providence City Council and Mayor Elorza enacting harsh zoning restrictions against college students in Jo-Ann Ryan’s district and other sections of the city (The ACLU backed me on that position, by the way).

I’m not exactly a purist on this. I’ve jokingly but not-so-jokingly said many times that I think the driving age should be raised to 45, and that the only people who receive exceptions should be people living in very rural areas, and people whose disabilities would benefit from being able to drive. One place that is making great gains in reducing people’s reliance on cars is Cambridge, UK. The university doesn’t allow students to bring cars to campus, and instead supplements their mobility with an excellent bus system and superb bike amenities.

I would argue that restricting the right to drive by age is different qualitatively than doing so for smoking. Yes, in both cases it’s true that younger people are more impulsive. But in the first case, the young person is at the wheel of a very heavy piece of fast-moving machinery that can not only hurt them, but lots of other people. Young people are also uniquely capable, more than any other group, of using active transportation. So long as reasonable exceptions are made for people who really have to drive, restricting driving by age is at least arguable on the basis of public safety and well-being.

In the case of smoking, I’m not convinced. The entire State of Rhode Island and its Providence Plantations could light up at once, and so long as I’m standing a bus-length away from them and outside, their activity will have little impact on me. Smoking kills more people than car crashes or car pollution, but it also tends to kill people who have chosen smoking. In terms of actual volume and severity of pollution, cars are way worse, it’s just that typically we don’t sit in an enclosed room with the tailpipe directly in our mouths. I’m fully in favor of regulations of indoor, publicly accessible buildings to keep them smoke-free because I think the public health benefit of being able to choose whether or not one wants to be a smoking (i.e., not experience second-hand smoke) outweighs the personal freedom of individual smokers. But I’m also concerned that we’ve now passed the peak of what kinds of legislation can both be effective at nudging people away from smoking while still respecting them as individuals. Restricting smoking is more like restricting 18 year-olds’ housing (could make noise!), or restricting 18 year-old’s sex (could get AIDS, after all) than it is like restricting their ability to drive (could kill someone).

Sloe Gin

One thing that concerns me about continuing to regulate smoking beyond a reasonable balance point is that I think it’s trying to kill the golden goose. We can’t make the world perfect. We can regulate things, for sure, and those regulations are not idle. But if we go beyond a certain level of regulation, we’re in danger of creating social stigmas that hurt people.

In the 19th Century Britain, whiskey was considered a gentleman’s drink, and gin was illegal. Obviously the two have a similar effect and danger, but the difference was a social one. More recently, we have the example of differing levels of enforcement and different sentencing requirements for rock cocaine vs. crack cocaine. As a non-smoker who hates being around the second-hand smoke, I nonetheless get the feeling that tobacco is changing places with marijuana in our society. Who smokes (or at least, who is perceived to smoke?). I’m not–not even a little–suggesting that the reason that Rep. Tanzi wants to regulate tobacco more is because she personally has any kind of class bias. But I think what is true is that past movements of drug regulation have tended to draw people from varying backgrounds for varying reasons. A law like the ordinance Providence just passed to keep smoking out of public parks gained support probably as much from earnest people who want people to be healthy as it did from people who like the idea of being able to shuttle poor people out of Burnside Park, if the poor people’s smoking habits allows it. We’ve got to confront this shared alliance that tends to happen. This is one reason I think regulation of smoking in indoor public places is reasonable, but not going beyond that. Having outdoor public places that are accessible by everyone is really important. On another level, too, I wonder what will happen if we start to squeeze people out of public life entirely because they smoke. So far, no one says we should stop people from smoking in their homes, but if we don’t allow people to smoke on the sidewalk or in parks, that’s exactly where they’ll do it. And for those of us who care about childhood asthma, the biggest thing we can do to prevent smoking parents from harming their children is to get the parents to enjoy their habit somewhere where it doesn’t stick around in the air.

Medicaid/Medicare Costs

Rep. Tanzi points out that public costs for Medicaid and Medicare go up because of smoking. No doubt! Smoking is one of the worst things you can do to your body. I would support allocating taxes on cigarettes to Medicaid and Medicare, as a way of discouraging smoking and making smokers internalize costs they put on the public. But restricting the age, to me, feels like it goes well beyond this.

I often make the argument that driving less will be good for our health. But the measures I propose are different than the ones Tanzi is proposing. For one, that major way that I think we publicly impact one another’s lives with cars is by killing each other in crashes, killing each other with pollution, and tearing up our public spaces so as to make it impossible to walk or bike. Each of these requires public intervention, but the focus of the public intervention is to give people more options through collective action. A social-democrat-type liberal should always be looking for ways to collectively come together as a society for these types of goals.

On the other hand, not driving also means that people might exercise more, but I think it’s none of my business to tell people that they have to exercise. It’s totally fair for me to say, “hey, if you want to drive you’ve got to pay what the costs are” and it’s totally fair for me to say “everyone should have the option to walk or bike.” But we don’t get out their with a whistle and a sweatsuit and chase people around the yard. The goal of smoking cessation policies should be to encourage good decisions, make resources available for people to take the right steps, and regulate certain shared spaces (like publicly-accessible buildings) for the common good. We shouldn’t say “you can’t smoke because someday you’ll get sick.”

What Works to Stop Smoking?

I don’t know 100% what stops people from smoking, but I have some guesses.

In a lot of other countries, the drinking age is 18, or even lower. The big campaign to make drinking rights go to 21 was led by MADD, which ironically didn’t see that car-culture, at least as much as drinking, was the cause of drunk-driving. A lot of countries have much more consistent enforcement of DUIs than we do, while also not necessarily preventing young people from drinking, or even favoring the harsh penalties our politicians propose. And the attitude towards drinking is different in other ways. People tend to drink and ride a bicycle down the street, and there isn’t an open stigma of “walking with under the influence” which I’ve heard more than a few DOT officials use as an excuse for pedestrian injuries (How are people supposed to go to bars, then?).

I’ve not been to Europe, but I’ve had a few friends and acquaintances that live there, and their impression (anecdotally) of drinking in those countries has been that is is more moderate. There’s something to be said for the idea that if you’re introduced to drinking earlier, in a social setting among family members, and are taught that the purpose of drinking is casual enjoyment rather than getting drunk, that you might have fewer problems with alcoholism (although, I admit that I don’t have the level of expertise to prove that statement definitively).

Smoking obviously varies from drinking in that almost everyone who smokes gets hooked, and also in that the optimal amount of smoking is generally understood to be zero cigarettes, while the optimal amount of drinking is a glass or two of wine. So, to that extent, I realize that the two are not apples to apples. But don’t we owe ourselves questions about what raising the smoking age to 21 will do, from this social perspective? It starts to give smoking an even greater image of “adulthood”. It makes it more likely that one will be able to buy cigarettes at a point when one is only surrounded by other young people (as with binge alcohol experimentation in college dorms). I’m not entirely convinced that what ails us in smoking policy is that 18 year olds can do it.

Get to the Point, James.

Alright, alright. My summary is this: government should help us do things we can only do collectively, but it’s goal should be to create opportunities for choice within that framework. Government can educate us to dangers, internalize costs of our bad decisions, and create safety nets for our mistakes. But government shouldn’t go as far as to take away our decision-making ability unless there’s a very solid, very public reason for doing so. Smoking is a private decision. There a reasonable things government can do to lower smoking, but raising the smoking age of consent to 21 is not one of them. We have other problems that are genuinely impinging on our ability to function as a society, which are public. We need to regulate those, and part of being able to do that means conserving our political capital. There are also issues here in terms of how we infantilize young people. Young adults are different than older ones, but we shouldn’t let that truth guide us into black-and-white corners.

I would urge members of the State House to vote no on this bill.

~~~~

November 22, 2015November 22, 2015

Beyond the Lucky Charms version of Irish history

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In a recent press conference opposing the acceptance of Syrian refugees fleeing ISIS terror, the Rhode Island GOP drew a contrast between the past acceptance of Irish refugees of the Potato Famine and the current, ongoing refugee crisis in Syria. Arguing that Syrians fleeing ISIS were different, Rep. Mike Chippendale said, “‘the United States of America is an extremely compassionate nation’ but added this is a different time than when the Irish came to the country because of a potato famine” according to a Projo report on the press conference.

As the great-great-grandson of an Irish-American terrorist, I feel the need to correct the historical record.

William Crossin, my mother’s mother’s mother’s father, died in summer of 1912. His funeral procession was a well-attended public spectacle, as reported in the July 6, 1912 edition of The Gaelic American (here I pull from The Gaelic American as quoted in a 1982 undergrad paper by Denise M. Hennessey, my mother):

It was “one of the most remarkable tributes of respect for the dead ever seen in Philadelphia. No popular public man was ever more honored in the number and quality of those who accompanied his remains to their last resting place. And they were all men and women who knew him personally.”*

He was burried [sic] from the Church of the Annunciation, located at Tenth and Dickinson Streets, Philadelphia which church “was filled to capacity.”

“A dense mass of people thronged Morris Street and the neighboring blocks, and it required a detachment of police to keep the space in front of the house clear”

Six pallbearers carried Crossin’s coffin:

John DeVoy

John T. Keating

John L. Gannon

Francis Reilly

Edward McDermott

Joseph McGarrity**

A procession of honorary pallbearers included the dignitaries from all over the United States. Fifteen nuns were also among those in the procession and it was noted that, “Crossin had always been a great friend of the sisters and made many a collection for charitable enterprises in which they were engaged.”

“A long line of carriages followed the hearse to the church, all the side streets on both sides of the route had a double line of waiting carriages and more than 2,000 members of the Clan-na-Gael wearing badges marched on foot.

A high mass of Requiem was celebrated at his parish church and a host of priests assisted his Pastor, Rev. P. Daily. In his sermon Fr. Daily attested to Crossin’s good character when he said, “No man can point the finger of scorn at William Crossin. He was a good Catholic, a practical Catholic in the strictest sense of the word. His performance of his religious duties was not perfunctory. His faith was strong and his fervor was like that of the Irish missionaries who carried the light of the Gospel to the peoples of central and western Europe in the Middle Ages when Ireland earned the proud title of the Island of the Saints. He was filled with the spirit which animated those men. His life was simple and pure. He was a model husband and father, a good citizen who won the respect of his neighbors and of all who came in contact with him. He was loyal to the land of his adoption, and to his motherland he gave a devotion that was without the slightest taint of selfishness Men might differ with him but all respected his sincerity and singleness of purpose.”

“The procession of carriages going to the grave sight stretched as far as the eye could see.”

“Outside and on the way to the cemetary [sic] great satisfaction was expressed at this kindly and eloquent tribute to the dead. One of the professional men at the funeral, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, said that he had never met a man of finer intellect, of more upright character or stronger personality than William Crossin. Had Crossin had the advantage of a college training, the man believed Crossin would have become one of the foremost men of America.” [William Crossin was a horse-cart driver in South Philadelphia]

The Clan-na-Gael was a forerunner of the I.R.A., which collected money and weapons for the latter group as it formed. William Crossin, one of the Clan-na-Gael’s leaders, presided over the country’s largest chapter in Philadelphia. He was an intellectual and personal mentor to the leaders of the Easter Rising, which took place four years after his death. He also personally took part in actions such as the dynamiting of a British cargo ship leaving New Orleans for British South Africa. In his old age, William Crossin successfully fought extradition to Great Britain to face trial for his actions.

My mother had mixed feelings about her great-grandfather, as do I (my grandmother did not, according to family legend. When my mom came home to tell her parents what she had researched at night school, my grandfather gleefully exclaimed, “Good, Denise! Dig for the dirt! I want to know everything her [my grandmother’s] side of the family did!” My grandmother replied–I imagine between sips of milky black tea and puffs of a Camel cigarette–that, “If any relative of mine blew something up, they must have had a goddamned good reason”).

History does not repeat, but rhymes. There are contrasts and similarities between the Irish experience and the Syrian one. The Irish focused their violence on the British, not Americans, and Britain was not at that time considered a solid ally of the United States***. Irish resistance was violent, and incidentally must have harmed civilians, but was not the sort of nihilistic terrorist violence that characterizes ISIS (though it later would become exactly that type of violence). In both cases, the vast majority of people were non-combatants with nothing to do with terror.

Of course, the biggest immediate contrast is that Irish-Americans deeply sympathized with Irish republicanism in all its forms, and the leaders of the community, though perhaps not in full harmony with the Clan-na-Gael and I.R.A., certainly considered the group within the fold of reasonable disagreement. Syrians, by contrast, are overwhelmingly fleeing from ISIS. The Arabic slur, Daesh, meaning something akin to ‘the dividers’ gives clues to how the broader Syrian public feels about ISIS. There’s no doubt that we should be careful to screen out ISIS terrorists who might opportunistically try to hide amidst the hoards of their own victims, but that does not justify punishing the vast majority who are fleeing ISIS.

There is also a longer arc of history to be considered.

The date of my great-great-grandfather’s death in 1912, makes for a convenient endpoint from the perspective of my family, because we as his relatives need not fully grapple with the complexities of political violence. Helping to form the early seed of the I.R.A. but not carrying out its full history is something akin to being at the storming of the Bastille, but not sticking around for la Terreur****. The Easter Rising in 1916 bore William Crossin’s political mark but not his actual hand. The Rising, in which an armed brigade of I.R.A. militia took the Dublin Post Office and a smattering of other British buildings, marked the beginning of a protracted struggle for Irish independence. During the Rising many people died, including forty children, but by the standards of later I.R.A. violence, the Rising was a targeted and humane affair. Over the next century, the I.R.A. would become ever more nihilistic in its targeting of civilians. The initial choice by people like my great-great-grandfather to even consider the use of violence came from the sense that no other option was available, and as the U.K. used repressive torture and mass-detainment measures against the Irish Catholic population, the movement became correspondingly more desperate and terroristic.

Likewise, the Arab world once flourished with democratic ideals and religious tolerance. The struggles that Middle-Easterners fought ranged from the nonviolent to the limitedly violent, and the outright terroristic. But it was repression that gave terrorism the upper hand. Our leaders chose to overthrow Iranian democracy in 1953 to secure oil, and throw that country into the arms of theocracy. Our leaders chose to put chemical weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein and the Iranian theocracy alike (supposedly our enemy). Our leaders chose to arm the Taliban. Our leaders chose to use torture and trial-free detainment policies similar to those of Northern Ireland at Guantanamo Bay. British repression pushed republicanism to the point that its most extreme practitioners became more like a pro-Catholic mafia fighting for an Ireland for Catholics Only. American repression has helped spawn a vicious movement for an exclusionary, theocratic “Caliphate”.

British repression did not justify the I.R.A. Our leaders’ choices do not justify Daesh/ISIS. Irish and Syrian terrorism has historical roots, but is carried out by individuals with agency and responsibility. We must defeat Daesh. But above all, Irish-American history should give us a guide for why terrorism happens, and how to stop it. You stop terrorism by isolating and fighting the extremists. You acknowledge and address the legitimate claims of the general public, which can either serve as your ally our the terrorists’.

We should remember what Irish-American history was, in all its hues. The Lucky Charms version of Irish history results from the fact that the goal of a free Ireland is no longer considered extreme, and from the fact that none of us in America recall the violence and destruction that went into its creation. It poses a view that we are the rational people, and the foreigners are dangerous and other. We should not pretend that there are not real dangers. But by recognizing the full scope of our history, we should be able to make rational choices about those dangers. I owe it to myself as an Irish-American, my ancestors, and the world to bring this story to light.

~~~~

*It’s unclear to me at times who is being quoted in The Gaelic American. The author may have been quoting someone mentioned earlier in the obituary, or it may be a typo from my mother’s paper.

**Joseph McGarrity was one of the heavyweights of Irish republicanism, and his papers are kept at Villanova University, where at night school, much of my mom’s research was done. According to my mother’s paper, 1960s bombings by the I.R.A. were often accompanied by letters signed with the pseudonym “Joseph McGarrity” the way one might sign a letter “Thomas Jefferson”. McGarrity was one of my great-great-grandfather’s closest friends, and another of the Clan-na-Gael’s chapter presidents.

*** (which does not really make any moral difference, but is certainly a relevant political one)

****(which, ironically, is the origin of the term “terrorism”)

October 28, 2015October 28, 2015

Media misses metaphor of Bernie Sanders’ political revolution

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Bernie Sanders gave calm, reasonable answers to the questions he faced on the Today Show this morning, explaining the fundamentals of his campaign. His responses were quiet and measured. He even failed to take a bait on whether Hillary Clinton is “expedient” for suddenly accepting a range of issues she’s opposed (gay marriage, peace, criminal justice reform, death penalty abolition and so on) for decades–issues that Sanders has supported all along.

Then came the big question.

Senator Sanders, you have all of us reaching into our high school textbooks to look up the definition of socialism, versus ‘democratic socialism’, versus capitalism. You call yourself a democratic socialist. In our last poll, 60% of our respondents said they were comfortable or very comfortable with capitalism. I see those signs at your rallies. They say ‘join the revolution’. What about those voters who don’t think a revolution sounds exciting, they think it sounds scary?

On the one hand, asking this question is understandable. Revolutions vary greatly in scope and meaning. The term can be used for anything from the American War of Independence, to the non-violent Civil Rights Movement; from Robespierre to Napoleon; from industrialization to the internet. The word “revolution” inspires feelings of warmth or revulsion across the political spectrum, but much like Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (Ode to Joy), has no distinct ideological flavor.

The question is, why do media outlets repeatedly plant the idea that Sanders is calling for something violent or destructive in his campaign (“scary”), when he’s repeatedly explained that the “revolution” is an electoral one involving–gasp–free public college tuition and universal healthcare?

The media have a responsibility not to support Bernie Sanders politics, but to help voters understand what his politics are, so that they can either accept or reject him at the polls. Asking such leading questions when, by the questioner’s own admission, many people are “reaching into textbooks” to try to understand basic economic concepts is irresponsible.

Being the resident transportation writer, I wanted to offer some examples of “revolution” that have been less outrageously received by our media.

U.S. auto maker Chevrolet was not the only car company to use the metaphor of “revolution” to describe their product. Fiat, complete with Halloween-ready sexy-Betsy Ross*, reminded us in 2014 that “The Italians are coming!” in its revolutionary ad:

Though the most touching to me when used as a promotional accessory to cars, “revolution” is used to sell other things that we all find non-threatening. Steve Jobs “kicked off 2010” by introducing “a truly magical and revolutionary product.” He was referring to the IPad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KN-5zmvjAo

I’m not even suggesting that the use of the word revolution for these products is a bad thing. It seems a bit overwrought for my tastes, but on the other hand, IPads are kinda’ cool.

The largest blind spot for media outlets is not necessarily ideological. It may be that some journalists or news outlets actively disagree with Sanders’ program, or want to red-bait him. But more often, I would suspect that the bias is totally outside of the political spectrum. What it’s really about is sound bites. Media outlets are most successful with their audiences when they can instigate a short-term buzz over an issue, with relatively little effort into depth or clarity of thought. If the political buzz suddenly said Sanders was twenty points ahead, the media would oblige with a scattering of stories about how Hillary Clinton is in free-fall. It would sell. It also sells to constantly follow the drool trail of Donald Trump as he wallops his way across the country saying absurdly racist things (Extra! Extra!). The bias is in offering a poor platform for ideas, whatever their ideological origin.

Whatever the coverage of Sanders’ politics, sharp questions about “revolution” should not be part of the package. It would be perfectly acceptable, as some have, to launch into detailed analyses of Sanders’ platform and whether he’s the best choice. Picking on the candidate for using a metaphor that is common in American parlance is shallow, thoughtless journalism. You would expect that when so many of the advertisements on television refer to “revolution”, that this would be an easier lesson to learn.

~~~~

*Although, it’s probably not Betsy Ross if she’s hanging out with Paul Revere, but then again, I don’t think that would be the most historically inaccurate thing in this commercial. Where are the hand-stitched bunny ears we all read about in elementary school?

September 14, 2015

RI ACLU urges PVD to reject exclusionary zoning

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The ACLU has written the City Council of Providence and Mayor Jorge Elorza calling for the rejection of Jo-Ann Ryan’s exclusionary zoning provision.

The zoning, as proposed, would limit students to three-to-a-house occupancy in Zones 1 and 1A of Providence’s zoning code. Affecting areas with large single-family homes, many of the buildings in question can house far more than three people. Exclusionary zoning has major downsides for equity, and is also a big problem for transit, biking, and other non-single-occupancy-driving modes of transportation.

The proposal passed its first test last week when City Council voted 10-3 for the provision. Zoning provisions must pass twice, and either have veto proof majorities or gain the support of the mayor, to become law. Knocking just one vote off the victory margin would allow a mayoral veto, though the prospects of such a veto are unclear.

Read: Ten PVD City Councilors voted for exclusionary zoning

As of this weekend, a tweeted email reply from Elorza representative Evan England suggested that the Mayor Elorza’s administration was leaning towards support of the provision, though the language was vague enough to leave the administration open to changing its position (Hat-tip, Patrick Anderson, Projo).

The ACLU joins critics of the zoning provision, which have included the three “no” voters on City Council, Transport Providence, Greater City Providence, and Eco Rhode Island News.

In the letter to the Council, ACLU of Rhode Island executive director Steven Brown stated that, “The ordinance’s undue stigmatization of Providence’s students is contrary to the City’s reputation as a robust host to the local colleges and universities. The focus on this one criterion is unfair and extremely unlikely to help resolve any of the legitimate concerns prompting calls for action in the first place.”

The letter cites rejection by Rhode Island courts of similar laws, citing a 1994 Narragansett zoning provision that attempted to keep non-related persons from cohabitating (This answers a question I had had–a reader pointed out that Providence indeed also has such a law, preventing more than three unrelated persons from living together, and wondering whether the zoning law was ever enforced. It must be left over from before such provisions were struck down in the courts). Quoting the judge who rejected the provision, the ACLU letter shows how arbitrary many zoning provisions truly are:

“It is a strange—and unconstitutional—ordinance indeed that would permit the Hatfields and the McCoys to live in a residential zone while barring four scholars from the University of Rhode Island from sharing an apartment on the same street.”

The City Council is scheduled to vote on second passage of this ordinance at its meeting this Thursday, September 17.

A full copy of the RI ACLU’s letter is here.

If you haven’t contacted your city councilperson and the mayor, contacts for both along with voting records are in the original RI Future profile on this issue, here.

~~~~

September 4, 2015September 12, 2015

10 PVD city councilors voted for exclusionary zoning last night

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The Providence City Council voted 10-3 to modify the zoning code to add exclusionary zoning restrictions on student housing on Thursday night. Under the provision, persons defined as “college students” would not be able to live more than three to a house in zones 1 and 1A (map), despite reports in The Projo that many of the homes in question have as many as five bedrooms.

Zoning laws in Providence must be passed by City Council twice, and either have a veto-proof majority or be signed into law by the mayor. The measure, if passed a second time, would be a challenge to housing affordability and transit-oriented design. The upshot is that the 10-3 vote is very fragile. Just one turnaround would allow Mayor Jorge Elorza to veto the zoning change. I am contacting Mayor Elorza’s chief-of-staff Brett Smiley for comment, but by publication time it is unlikely that I will have word on the mayor’s position. Keep your eyes peeled for updates!

The tempest-in-a-teapot in Ward 5 started around student noise. Councilwoman Jo-Ann Ryan has tried proposing other methods of shunning students, including additional fees on student housing, but decided to settle on this zoning measure, according to reporting done in The Projo.

Changes in density affect transit. Transit viability is affected along an exponential curve, rather than a linear progression, based on density. So small changes in density through exclusionary zoning can have large reverberating effects on transit frequencies, and those changes disproportionately hurt low income people, especially time-poor low income people, like those with multiple jobs or children.

Changes in zoning like this also negatively affect housing affordability, not only for students, but for everyone. You might find yourself saying, “Who cares what happens to college students?” It’s not like someone is being discriminated against on the basis of race, or gender, or sexuality. Being a college student is just a stage in life, and it’s not even a stage in life that everyone goes through.” But the students who are most affected by this type of rule will be disproportionately those students who are riding the razor’s edge of affording school. Upper class students will shrug this off, and perhaps not even notice it, or be annoyed by it for lifestyle reasons.

Students who can find housing will. When students overflow from housing they may have previously been able to occupy, they may outbid others with less money looking for apartments. While sometimes this outbidding process can lead to greater housing development, resolving the imbalance, the zoning ordinance itself stops an increase in zoning density, and actually reduces densities below their existing levels. The price increases here are also not due to people’s increased desire for a neighborhood–which is at least a mixed blessing–but by artificial regulations that will just keep certain people out. The process of using zoning to limit housing is one of the things that has most affected displacement of working class families from homes. It tries to shape our cities into an imagined ideal of single-family homes that never existed except in the imagination of someone like Frank Lloyd Wright. This means that housing will become expensive, but with none of the attendant positives of that process–a kind of “stagflation” of housing policies.

Who are the people who voted for exclusionary zoning?

Councilman Kevin Jackson, Ward 3, Mt. Hope (my councilman)

Mr. Jackson narrowly won his last election against a write-in candidate, Marcus Mitchell, who started a write-in campaign for his seat just before Election Day. The election went to a recount. I have contacted Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jackson on this issue, but as yet have not heard back, but multiple previous conversations I’ve had with Marcus Mitchell have centered on his involvement with RhodeMap, which opposes exclusionary zoning.

Councilwoman Jo-Ann Ryan, Ward 5, Elmhurst

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Councilwoman Ryan voted for her own bill. She is a new councilor.

Councilman Michael Correia, Ward 6, Manton

Councilman John Iggliozzi, Ward 7, Silver Lake

Councilwoman Carmen Castillo, Ward 9, Elmwood

Council President Luis Aponte, Ward 10, Lower South Providence and Washington Park

The Councilman’s vote for exclusionary zoning shocks me, because he has frequently been a voice for tenant’s rights and an acceptable if not perfect voice for transit-oriented development. This is a misstep for the Council President, and we hope he’ll change his vote.

Councilwoman Mary Kay Harris, Ward 11, Upper South Side

Councilman Bryan Principe, Ward 13, Federal Hill and the West End

I have to report disappointment on this vote by Councilman Principe, as I’ve found him to be a very urbanist-oriented councilman much of the time. I hope that residents in my old neighborhood of the West End will speak out to Councilman Principe, and that he’ll change his vote next week.

Councilman David A. Salvatore, Ward 15, Elmhurst and Wanskuck

Councilwoman Sabina Matos, Ward 16, Olneyville

Many of these councilpersons represent districts that ought to be unified in their opposition to exclusionary zoning for one reason or another.

Councilmen Yurdin, Zurier and Jennings voted against the measure. Councilmen Narducci and Hassett were not present at Thursday night’s meeting. Councilman Zurier’s hands haven’t exactly been clean. In his own district he has worked to make apartments and other types of multifamily housing less easy to develop.

Please contact your city councilor–and indeed, please contact the entire Providence City Council–and let them know that Providence is not supportive of exclusionary zoning policies. And ask Mayor Elorza to veto any vote next Thursday that isn’t over the veto-proof margin of 10.

Update: According to a by Patrick Anderson, Mayor Elorza’s office will support the zoning change, as proposed.

~~~~

August 26, 2015August 27, 2015

Trade higher wages for paid parking

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What do we want? Free parking!

What?

Greater City Providence deserves journalistic credit for picking up on a story about graduate student organizing at URI and connecting the dots about how those demands impact environmental planning goals. I wanted to make a specific repost here, as well as add a few thoughts of my own, because I don’t find that the labor world and the environmental world always talk to each other very effectively in Rhode Island (or anywhere, maybe). People who read RI Future, like myself, care about labor organizing and what it portends for a more equal future for all of us at the workplace, but may also be concerned about exactly the points that GCPVD brought to light.

The story: The URI grad students reportedly have asked for a continuation of free parking at URI’s ~~downtown~~ Kingston campus. In an earlier version of this article, I had given information about downtown and Kingston, but in this sentence I accidentally glossed over and left only the word “downtown” during last minute corrections. The union has been clear that its demands relate only to the Kingston campus. I am keeping downtown information here as well for context because I think it’s relevant to URI’s overall parking policy discussion. Apologies for the error! The free parking is of course not really free at all, but costs taxpayers money to subsidize the garages where people park, and policies that subsidize parking warp commute choices towards driving. In addition, URI stands out for having very incomplete and inconvenient transit pass policies. The result is a very easy and cheap drive commute competing with a more cumbersome and expensive transit one, right across the street from Kennedy Plaza. Students at URI Main Campus in Kingston have access to the 66 and 64 buses and an excellent bike path through South County, and could in short order have MBTA service as well. Grad students naturally see the attempts from university officials to charge them for parking as an attack on their already meagre livelihoods, but it’s an ominous sign for the future of Rhode Island if free parking policies continue in such obvious transit-oriented locales.

Where I would add to what Jef Nickerson of GCPVD has said is that I actually think this is a relatively easy issue to resolve, and doesn’t at all have to pit us either against the environment or against unions. The solution here is to charge full price for parking just as the university has proposed, but also credit grad students with that cost as pay which can be used for whatever they like. That would mean that workers who bike or ride the bus effectively get a raise, while everyone else breaks even. Graduate students are right, in my view, to be pointing out the absurdity of their pay hovering around $15,000 a year. It’s just that the solution to that is better pay, not subsidized driving.

Many states, like California, require a parking cash out for workers in certain types of jobs. In California, it’s structured so that only employers who rent parking are required to give the cash out, because it’s assumed that rented parking spots are a liquid asset that can be dropped or maintained by the employer based on parking demand, and that the savings should be passed as part of people’s wages. In URI’s case, the parking that is rented is paid for by the state to the Dunk Center, and so is definitely that kind of liquid asset. In Kingston, as in downtown Providence, the parking situation is absurd. URI has been gradually tearing up more and more of the agricultural land around it to satisfy the needs of its students and faculty to drive instead of finding ways to resolve that through on-campus housing expansion, transit, or biking. Parking cash outs have a positive effect on commute modeshares–increasing carpooling, biking, walking, and transit-use.

It’s not probably well known, but there was a window of my life when I did a lot of labor organizing, and was even a card-carrying union member. The work that the grad students are doing to improve their working conditions is something I support. But an injury to one is an injury to all not just in labor situations, but also for our world as a whole, and it’s the duty of union members to imagine a new world in the shell of the old, not just to make shallow demands about their own needs. This is a time when the grad student union could show real leadership and modify its demands in order to get what it needs for its workers while also respecting the future of our planet.

I dreamt I saw Joe Hill last night,

Driving an S-U-V.

I said to Joe, “our planet’s dying”,

He said, “it’s up to me.”

~~~~

June 5, 2015June 5, 2015

Tolls, trucks and transportation: the contours of this debate

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Speaker Nicolas Mattiello has indicated that he may not include tolls for trucks on Rhode Island highways. I’d like to summarize the debate and highlight some ways that Rhode Island can move forward with reasonable compromises on this issue.

Singling out one industry

The trucking industry has been remarkably successful with a talking point: they say that tolling trucks is “singling out one industry” for a special charge. This raises the hackles of business-oriented members of the Assembly.

Expect more. Pay less. Strong Towns blog says this is more than just a slogan for the trucking industry.

The truth of the matter is that truckers are being singled out: for an unusually large subsidy. Director Peter Alviti of RIDOT spoke Monday night for several hours at the Finance Committee meeting, and one of the most important points he made is that trucks cause around 3/4 of the damage on roads, but only pay 19% of the costs of upkeeping them. With new tolls, that number would double, but essentially trucks will still be paying fifty cents to the dollar for the damage they leave behind them.

Some members of the Finance Committee were concerned at what it would mean if trucks decided to circumvent Rhode Island for through-trips. While it’s always smart to think about how a particular tax or fee might be evaded, in this case the worry doesn’t make sense. The truckers are like customers who show up to your lemonade stand: each cup is costing you a dollar to make, but you charge them $0.50 each time. This is a financial loss. You can’t make up that loss on volume, as any fifth grader could tell you. And so the only trucks we should really want in our state (at least at the present toll rates) are those that directly serve our households or businesses. And try as they might, truckers who are coming to directly serve us can’t avoid the tolls.

Fiscally-conservative urbanist blog Strong Towns talks very clearly in this article about why “the real welfare Cadillacs have 18 wheels.”

Why are we bonding for infrastructure?

A serious concern which may be holding up tolls are questions about whether we should be bonding (taking on public debt) to fund infrastructure projects. The tolls raise $700 million plus $200 million for debt service to repay the bonds. Concerns about bonding were raised by left (Rep. Tanzi) and right (Rep. Patricia Morgan), but were generally raised more intensely by conservative members of the Finance Committee.

Portland, Oregon’s Harbor Drive was once a highway. No longer.

Director Alviti pointed out that the long-term cost of our bridges falling into disrepair and needing to be completely replaced is much higher than the $200 million in debt service. Of course, said the director, there is a cost to financing these projects. But the overall net effect is a savings for taxpayers. Alviti used a metaphor over and over: fixing a road or bridge now is akin to replacing the broken hinge on a door. Waiting for perfect financing is like letting the door fall off the hinges and break entirely.

The ugliness of Harbor Drive when it was a highway belies the fact that highway infrastructure is also more expensive, and worse for development and the environment.

I agree with Director Alviti’s metaphor, but would like to expand on it. Debt service to help us fix our projects now is somewhat akin to fixing a hinge, instead of replacing the door. The difference is that in Rhode Island, we have a house that has too many doors.

With 4:7 dollars from the tolls going to capital expenses for the 6/10 Connector, the state should be giving serious consideration to whether we’re overbuilt in our highway system. Already, I’ve been very encouraged (and, frankly, surprised) at the outpouring of bipartisan support for exploring a boulevard on 6/10 to save money. A boulevard would be better for Providence and Cranston neighborhoods, would be better for our environment, but would also greatly reduce costs. This morning, Rep. Patricia Morgan tweeted me to signal her support, joining a consensus that includes West Side Councilman Bryan Principe, UNITE-HERE local 217, Environmental Committee Chair Art B. Handy, Minority Leader Brian C. Newberry, and Rep. Daniel Reilly. You really could not find a more politically diverse group of people who agree on this issue. As Speaker Mattiello explores whether to continue to subsidize the trucking industry, he should address the concerns of fiscal conservatives by including language in the toll bill requiring RIDOT to explore reduction of highway capacity as a cost-saving option.

Contact the Speaker

It needs to be clear to Speaker Mattiello that Rhode Islanders expect him to charge a fair(er) price for truck use of our highways. To not do so is to put the cost on the backs of other road users, and possibly leave our roads in a condition that is embarrassing and unsafe. But Mattiello should address the concerns of fiscal conservatives as well, mandating a reduction of costs by an over-stretched RIDOT.

Fiscal conservatives and environmental/social justice liberals have a budding consensus that part of the problem with our road system is that we’re spending too much money for bad outcomes. Addressing this is a way forward: The Speaker can reduce the overall amount of money needed to be raised, thus lowering tolls. Conservatives will feel that they’ve had a victory. Liberals, too, will be happy. And our state’s infrastructure needs will be addressed in a way that gives all sides part of what they want.

Contact Speaker Mattiello’s office, and email me at transportprovidence@gmail.com or tweet me @transportpvd to let me know that you have.

~~~~

May 28, 2015October 4, 2016

Tear down 6/10: Pictures of our potential future

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Some on the conservative right and the progressive left are angry about tolls and others, on both the right and left, are smart enough to understand why tolls make sense. But everyone should agree, beyond all doubt, that it doesn’t make sense for us to put 4 out of 7 toll dollars to work rebuilding an urban blight.

The oldest section of the 6/10 Connector, Rt. 10 Huntington Expressway, is the oldest highway in the state, and is mostly redundantly a mirror of I-95. It cuts neighborhoods from each other, lowers property values, takes up developable space, and pukes smog into the air for poor folks to breath. One of our state’s best resources, the Washington Secondary Bike Path, is poorly used because its natural connection to Providence from Cranston is at Cranston Street, where only the boldest ride their bikes under the highway through thick, multi-lane traffic jams.

Read: Why Should We Remove Rt. 6/10?

Read: RIDOT Director Alviti Promises 6/10 Bus Lanes: Why Are They a Bad Idea?

Read: Providence is in the Top Ten for Lane-Miles Per Capita of Highway

But forget all that. Here are some places that used to be highways in other parts of the world. If pictures can’t convince you, then what can?

Seoul, South Korea

Used to be a(n American-built) highway. This is one of several that have been removed.

Portland, Oregon

Used to be a highway. The on- and off-ramps for the Harbor Drive highway now serve a bike path.

San Francisco

Used to be a highway. There was no access to this old ferry building when the Embarcadero stood. Luckily an earthquake took it down, and the people of San Francisco decided it wasn’t worth replacing it.

Milwaukee

The Park East Freeway–not there anymore. Removed.

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Used to be this: limited access.

Now it’s this: complete streets.

Memphis

Before.

After:

Jamaica Plain, Forest Hills

I-95, proposed:

Almost happened:

Stopped:

Dallas

Rt. 345. What it is:

What it could be: lots of development land, right next to downtown.

New York City

West Side Highway. Before:

After:

Philadelphia:

(Never happened, South Street)

Proposed:

What it would’ve taken:

Isaiah Zagar helped fight that highway. Here’s his Magic Garden.

Providence

How it was: (Oh yeah! We did that!)

How it is:

Olneyville

How it was:

How it is:

Call your reps, state senators, and other officials, and let them know what should be done with the 6/10 Connector. No urban place has ever been made better by a highway. Every urban place that has removed a highway has flourished. It doesn’t make sense to spend so much money on something that will make our city worse. It’s a no-brainer.

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May 4, 2015May 4, 2015

Put Providence streetcar in proper context

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I have many points of agreement with Barry Schiller’s post on a potential Providence streetcar, but my disagreements are serious enough to be worth writing about.

Barry is right to raise concern about whether the Providence streetcar is the best use of our funds. Streetcars do cost more than buses, and they don’t necessarily upgrade service. The main features that make transit better–a train or bus having its own right-of-way, having signal priority, having an off-board payment system, all-door-boarding, and frequent service–may or may not be present with rail. Many Americans express a strong preference for rail because oftentimes the rail options they’re familiar with have these features, while the bus lines they’ve been on usually have not.

A subway in New York, for instance, has its own tracks, and never gets caught in traffic. Trolleys in the Philadelphia suburbs (and I believe many of the Green Line Ts in Boston) control intersections, so that when they come to a crossing the cars have to stop and they proceed. When you pay to get on a subway or some stops of a trolley, you often will pay through a turnstile, so that when the vehicle arrives you can just get on (using all doors). There are even upgrades that can happen to subways along these lines. The frequent problem of passengers bunching up on the middle cars of a subway is now being solved by putting stretchy accordion-like connections between the cars so that passengers can spread out and reduce boarding delays.

The Providence streetcar, as currently planned, currently has none of these features (If you need convincing still on why it should have them, read this “Dissent of the Week” in Human Transit, about the Washington, D.C. trolleys).

I have criticized the streetcar, but I am currently a proponent of moving forward on it. There are several reasons for this:

Our time is better spent fighting for good service features than fighting whether or not to have a streetcar. While there are many really bright transit-supporters who have legitimate complaints about the Providence streetcar, many of the people who are against streetcars are fighting them for totally different reasons than Barry (or me).

The right has long proposed busing as a way to supplant the greater costs of rail projects, but when cities have recently attempted to take them up on it by building quality BRT routes, the Koch Brothers have banded together with state governments to stand in the way of city planners in cities like Nashville, Tennessee. I’m concerned that we’ll have a pyrrhic victory if we block the streetcar, because it won’t necessarily mean that we’re going to get the money that was for the Streetcar given to us for buses instead. We can grow the strength of smart critics while giving no quarter to anti-transit folks by supporting the streetcar, and simply demanding better service patterns as part of it. We shouldn’t be passive about this–we need to fight! But let’s pick our battles.

Short routes in dense areas are okay. One big criticism of the streetcar you hear is that it’s not long enough. I don’t agree with this one. The comprehensiveness of our transit system is definitely a problem, but it’s not because of length of routes. In fact, Rhode Island has a tendency to run infrequent “coverage” routes to places where they can’t reasonably pick up large riderships, and often those routes connect from parking lot to parking lot in highly un-walkable, sprawly areas. I’m not even talking about little villages or whatnot, which I think should get transit because of their walkability even though they have low population counts. I’m talking about routes like the 54 that loop through multiple parking lots off of highway exit ramps, and as a result are bad connectors between their main urban locations–Providence and Woonsocket (RIPTA addressed the long travel time of the 54 by removing the urban stops along Charles St. and making them a separate route, the 51, but kept the suburban Tour-de-Parking-Lot stops, which just makes me smack my face with my palm every time). A short PVD Streetcar is not perfect. It should go from Central Falls (or at least Pawtucket) to the Cranston border. But the area that was chosen is a dense and walkable area with many trips that need to be covered. In fact, I think the choice to shorten the route and run it north-south between the Upper South Side and the T station is a great idea, because it makes more sense in the long-term to route a PVD Streetcar up N. Main and down through the S. Side and update the R-Line, with a separate route pulling east-west duty from Olneyville to East Providence). Pro-car thinkers (and even a lot of very earnest transit supporters look at a map and see the length of lines), but what matters is the frequency of those lines, not their length.

Streetcars are not the most expensive transportation choice we have. I agree, in principle, and spent quite a long time talking about the fact that Bus Rapid Transit is a better investment idea than the streetcar, and I know that Barry agrees. But I also know that Barry will agree with me that the streetcar is certainly not the most expensive transportation option we have. The 6/10 Connector, for instance, won’t cost $100 million, but $500 million, and unlike the streetcar–the worst of which I think can be said that it will provide mediocre service–the 6/10 Connector will pull neighborhoods apart and absolutely get in the way of sustainable development. The 6/10 Connector is small potatoes compared to some of the highway-oriented crap that gets built around the country, but it actually costs the same as the entire TIGER grant program for the whole United States. So given the fact that RIDOT may imminently decide to throw a bond issue out, or grasp for federal money, in order to rebuild 6/10, I think our time is better spent fighting that abysmal attack on our landscape than trying to stop a mediocre project.

It can get better. A lot of cities have tried streetcars in part because of the Obama administration’s efforts to kick-start them through the TIGER grant program (which also pays for biking and walking improvements), and some of those streetcars have done quite poorly. One such example was Seattle, which built several of them, and saw ridership goals unmet. The Seattle streetcars were sitting in mixed traffic, getting caught at lights, waiting for people to pay with dollar bills at the door, and just generally sucking in every way that a bus does. So Seattle is now working to change the streetcars so that they have rights-of-way, signal priority, and all-door boarding so that they can be highly efficient transit. Providence should build these features into the PVD Streetcar now, but even if it doesn’t we can make the city do it later.

Remember, the Streetcar has a lot wrong with it. But we can make it better. And most importantly, we have bigger fish to fry.

~~~~

March 24, 2015

Support modern streets in downtown Providence

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Providence needs modern bike infrastructure, but private interests stand in its way.

Regency Plaza Apartments and the Providence “Dunk” Convention Center should not get to decide what happens to Providence’s streets. We should.

Sign the petition: Broadway and Sabin St. should get modern design standards to improve conditions for all users.

Regency Plaza would like part of Broadway to be “abandoned” to allow for further development. New apartments in downtown would be great for the city, but with a footprint that is mostly surface parking, there’s no reason for Regency Plaza to take more land from the city’s rights-of-way. It should make better use of what it has.

The Providence Convention Center has blocked any changes to its front street, Sabin St. Sabin is essentially the same street as Broadway, leading up to where the name changes over. Sabin’s geometry is extremely wide, allowing for high speeds punctuated only by traffic jams. Bike infrastructure makes streets safer and helps to reduce city congestion.

We would like Jorge Elorza to act administratively or in concert with City Council to preserve these streets as public rights-of-way, and to modernize their design.

Please sign our petition, and share it far-and-wide (not too far, though, we only need Rhode Islanders.).

Sign the petition: Broadway and Sabin St. should get modern design standards to improve conditions for all users.

~~~~

March 12, 2015March 12, 2015

Mandatory minimum for DUI homicides wrong way to enforce law

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Atty. Gen. Kilmartn’s recent proposal that vehicular homicide should bring a minimum 30-year sentence strikes me as a bad idea.

People who kill with their cars while intoxicated deserve severe punishment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that higher sentencing guidelines are what will work to prevent deaths. If tomorrow it was announced that I could watch a drunk driver be dangled by his or her ankles from the top of the Superman Building, I’d be out at Kennedy Plaza with my lawn chair to see the debacle. As cathartic as that might be, though, there are better ways to approach the issue.

The Ocean State was a leader in ending the death penalty, and we should recognize as a culture that severe punishment is less important than consistent punishment.

Rhode Island suffers from a serious DUI problem. It’s ahead of its New England peers–in the sense of more drunk driving, not better policy–and needs desperately to do something about the problem. But the U.S. approach of using prison to deal with any social problem is a failed one that we should reconsider. The places that lead on road safety don’t share our views about imprisonment.

In the Netherlands, which boasts some of the safest streets in the world, prison is a last resort. The Netherlands impounds people’s cars much more easily and for much longer periods of time than the U.S. The response to driver offenses is swift and sure in the Netherlands, to be sure: people lose their licenses for much less than vehicular homicide there. What would be considered baseline Rhode Island driving technique–speeding and failing to yield to pedestrians–is considered a serious breech of public safety in the Netherlands and not tolerated. People are arrested for such behavior, but from there the focus is less on competing for longer and longer sentences than it is on keeping irresponsible people away from cars, fining them for their behavior, and moving on.

The Netherlands has such a low imprisonment rate that it’s renting out empty cells to inmates from other Scandinavian countries.

Motor vehicle fatalities declined from 65 in 2013 to 52 in 2014, all time low but still 52 fatalities too many.

— Peter Kilmartin (@AGKilmartin) March 11, 2015

I have nothing but respect for Atty. Gen. Kilmartin’s proposal. In Rhode Island, many of our lawmakers treat DUIs as a joke. So much is this the case that we made it to Last Week Tonight for the flippant and disrespectful behavior of State Senators Ciccone and Ruggiero related to a drunk driving and shoplifting incident:

What should Rhode Island do about drunk or otherwise impaired driving?

Cars should be impounded with a very streamlined process. Driving is a privilege. You abuse it, you lose it. And that doesn’t mean just for homicide, but for offenses like speeding, distracted driving, and failing to yield to vulnerable users. One of the things that strikes me as odd about the 30-year minimum is that it is tied to the act of actually killing someone–a sort of flip of the coin. More modest but more consistent punishments for the act of bad driving itself–with or without killing someone–is more important. A person who doesn’t already consider the 15-year minimum enough to deter their behavior isn’t going to be further deterred by an extra 15 years. The odds have to be increased that a person will be caught, rather than focusing on extreme punishments for the rare cases where someone is caught.
Drivers should be able to lose their licenses very easily, and for very long-term periods of time. A second moving violation (after first receiving a ticket) should result in temporary license suspension of one year. A homicide or serious injury should result in permanent license revocation. Any incident of intoxicated driving–with or without injury–should also result in permanent loss of one’s license. Failing to submit to a breath test should mean permanent loss of one’s license.
The state should use suspended sentencing as a means to enforce behavior of convicts, but should focus on placing irresponsible drivers in jobs and treatment and keeping them away from cars. A focus that is less about prison should not mean that people who are irresponsible can’t get prison time. It just should mean that it isn’t our go-to, even for vehicular homicide. In many European countries, even first degree murder is treated with lighter sentences than what the Atty. Gen. is suggesting for vehicular homicide, and while I agree with him that driving drunk is a conscious choice on par with other types of murder, I think we should think carefully about the fact that these other countries are succeeding in every measure of crime prevention that we’re failing at. It’s not about being soft, it’s about being effective.
The state should make it illegal to operate a bar in a driver-dominated location. I hope that Rhode Island MADD will join the call to fix this design problem. The places which are most successful at combating drunk driving are those which focus on density, transit, walking, and biking as primary means of moving around. Bars do not belong on the sides of fast roads or in low density areas unless they are providing a specific non-motorized way of getting around. Rural or exurban bars can meet this requirement by helping to fund shuttles or safe biking routes for their patrons–this should be a requirement of any liquor license. Municipalities should start placing parking maximums instead of parking minimums on bars–because only a few designated drivers should be expected to arrive by car. In the Netherlands, people drink or even use decriminalized marijuana and then go home safely, because the Dutch don’t build their environments with cars as the first and last option–they’re just as obnoxious as any bar-goer in Warwick but no one is hurt. The owners of bars may respond that providing non-car transportation costs too much in their locations–if that is the case, then they should relocate to denser areas where provision of other options is easier. No exceptions.
RIPTA should also be receiving additional funding to extend its hours late into the night the way the MBTA, MTA, and SEPTA do.
I’ve reported in the past on a tip from a RIDOT safety worker who told me that many municipalities do a poor job of enforcing DUI laws because of the amount of time it takes to book offenders for this offense–five hours. The perception in many locations is that violent crime is a higher concern, but cars actually kill far more people than guns in the United States. The Atty. Gen. should work with communities to find out how this institutionalized bias away from DUI enforcement can be fixed.

We live in a culture that sees prison as the first solution to any criminal problem. Prison is a tool, and should be available as an option for offenders who cannot be controlled by other means. But the design of our communities, the consistency of our enforcement, the standards we have for our drivers’ licenses, and other factors are far more important than blustering over large sentences. I encourage Atty. Gen. Kilmartin to take a different route to solving this serious problem.

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March 4, 2015

Subsidized parking as substitute for justice

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The Next City takes on gentrification–by proposing subsidized housing? Nope. Subsidized parking.

Over and over, I have had many frustrating conversations with people who don’t understand how egalitarian policies and land-use/transportation fit together, to the point that I’ve been working on a piece to parse apart the details. Just as I was on my fourth or fifth draft, a perfect example of people having all the right impulses in all the wrong places fell right into my lap like a ripe apple.

Exhibit A: Seattle advocates want to fix poverty by complaining about development and subsidizing parking. Face palm! According to The Next City, a Philadelphia-based urbanist blog, the proposal would:

1) Honor all requests for low-income restricted parking zone; 2) Charge no more than five dollars per year for low-income restricted parking permits; and 3) Allow restricted parking zone permits for registered nonprofits located within a restricted parking zone.

The Next City goes on to say:

On its face, Sen. Jayapal’s revision reads like a NIMBYish cry to protect her constituents’ parking as transit expands and density increases.

Ding ding ding! We have a winner! But then The Next City says:

In reality, it is part of a broader effort to protect some of Seattle’s most diverse and lowest-income communities from the high risks of displacement that rode into the neighborhood on light rail.

Um, no.

A tri-cornered hat

There are three basic progressive policy choices on any given issue, but the three do not always overlap. It’s important to understand the differences between them, because shooting from the hip without clarity sends you all over the map.

Leave people alone. This is like the null hypothesis. There are lots of times when we should do something, but having a policy choice that says “do nothing” reminds us to think clearly about what we’re trying to accomplish, and whether we’re overstepping our bounds and creating a new problem out of whole cloth.
Set a policy that equalizes people’s position. This is a huge one. There’s no end to the moral and practical reasons we should want to eliminate the unnatural wealth gap that exists in this country.
Set a policy that incentivizes people’s behavior. Of course, fighting inequality relies on incentives, but the best poverty fighting does that and leaves everything else alone. So this category sums up policies that incentivize other things; examples include pay-as-you-throw trash collection, tolls and congestion pricing, and fines for not shoveling one’s sidewalk.

These three policy goals are not the same! Don’t tell me that pay-as-you-throw trash collection means that creating more trash costs more, and is therefore regressive. That would be the case if we fail to have option #2 in our policy array, because then very unequal people would be paying market prices without any counterbalance to ensure they stay within reach of one another. And for sure, our country doesn’t do very well with #2. But Fixing the lack of equality with #1 or #3 doesn’t work. It just creates a mess.

Let’s break it down

Leave it alone: Gentrification, which I will define here as the displacement of poor people from a neighborhood when wealthier people move in, mostly doesn’t exist. So at the outset, I bristle at the article because it misdiagnoses a positive thing as a problem.

A very wide-ranging study of 1,100 U.S. Census tracts from 1970 to the present shows that most high poverty census tracts stayed that way, that we actually gained some high poverty Census tracts, and that those Census tracts that did get new investment mostly maintained the same number of low income people, while simply gaining higher income people alongside them (that mix, the study found, actually ameliorated poverty, while in the most isolated Census tracts, poor people’s lives got worse). Although not concerned by gentrification per se, the study concluded that poverty remains a serious, wrenching problem that should actively confronted by government. Daniel Kay Hertz does a really great breakdown of the information in the context of Chicago, and This Old City has some great, specific data on housing prices in Philadelphia (the data pre-date the study). The point is, the model we have that says we have to jump in to stop gentrification is mostly wrong.

If your neighborhood is popular, that’s a good thing. But you should make sure there’s enough housing to allow everyone to enjoy that. And in a lot of cases that means leaving things alone.

Equalize people: The same study on gentrification that concluded that housing development should be allowed to happen, even encouraged, in gentrifying areas also concluded that deep, centralized, isolating poverty remains a problem in the U.S. It won’t be news to anyone here that poverty is, in fact, growing. So while under #1. we talked about how to leave something alone that’s not a problem, under #2 we should focus on how to change something that is a dire problem.

Some of the best programs that equalize people included the 1950s consensus to have an income tax system that decreased the income and wealth gap in the U.S. by creating an effective maximum wage, a proposed program for a guaranteed minimum income or its cousin the Earned Income Tax Credit. Other examples include the Estate Tax, which at the federal and state level has always been a way to equalize the inherited wealth gap. What’s perfect about these programs is they very squarely take on the problem of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, but they stay hands off about exactly what it is that people do with the money beyond that. But that brings us to #3. . .

Incentivize behavior: In general, it’s good to let people have choices, but sometimes there is a society-wide reason for pushing people to make a particular decision. You would hope that one of the behaviors that cities would want to encourage would be driving less, and in fact, Seattle is a city that has made huge strides in that direction, moving from above 50% of urban core trips by single-occupant drivers to just around 30% in just a short time. But a program of subsidizing parking, though intended to accomplish the goals under #2, is actually a really bad conflation with #3. It incentivizes behavior: the wrong behavior.

These three categories fit together. You want to leave alone development–i.e., gentrification–and in fact, where housing prices have risen to the point of pushing low income residents out, it has been because zoning or other policies have gotten in the way of housing growth. You do want to take from the rich and give to the poor, but not in a way that interferes with that. And you absolutely want to push people away from cars, so your incentives shouldn’t nudge people towards them.

We get these three all mixed up. We don’t leave housing development alone. We put all sorts of constraints on it, from not allowing federally-backed lending for apartments, to zoning against density and for parking, to spending more than half of our road money on road expansion in order to encourage sprawl. We certainly don’t effectively deal with poverty. The top income tax rate used to be 90%, and the point of that was to create a disincentive against ridiculous executive salaries, simply and elegantly, and instead incentivize reinvestment into middle income jobs and capital improvements. And everything, everything we can think of goes into making driving easier. Alongside the pittance of money for walking, biking, and transit, we throw huge subsidies towards parking fees, new garages, wider roads, cheaper oil–and all of it, we say, is because we want to keep the American Dream alive.

The results are summed up pretty well by Angie Schmitt:

The suburbs: In exchange for your "free" — not really free — parking you are chained to two cars that cost you 18% of your income. #win!

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) February 25, 2015

And, of course, any policy that mixes things up this way has the potential to help some poor people along with many middle class people, and leave some poor people completely out in the cold.

It’s so frustrating when you’re explaining to someone how to fix transportation or land use policy and that person responds by placing those goals at odds with equity. There couldn’t be anything further from the truth. If we could straighten out the differences between different policy options, we could have clearer conversations about the huge range of problems that face us.

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February 25, 2015February 25, 2015

Raimondo toll plan deserves progressive support

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Tolls are the way to go, says Gov. Raimondo, and we need to have her back on that.

As Gov. Raimondo recently pointed out, Rhode Island has some of the highest per-mile costs for road infrastructure. In addition to that, as I’ve pointed out right here at RI Future, much of that road infrastructure is highway oriented, even in our cities. Providence is among a rogue collection of cities in the Rustbelt Midwest, Texas, and California for its lane-miles of highway infrastructure per capita.

That means that our poorest areas where people often don’t have access to cars are choked by highways, causing air pollution and congestion that would otherwise be avoided with a multimodal system. The costs of this type of highway infrastructure are many orders of magnitude higher than other projects, and also at the same time stand in the way of development in urban areas. These factors act as both a push and pull force against our economic development and climate change goals.

One way Gov. Raimondo has sought to fix the imbalance of spending is to use tolls to provide some of our road funding. I know that there’s going to be lots of howling from all sides, so I want to preempt it and say to the governor, “Thank you! Well done!”

Tolls are not popular on the left or the right. The right, of course, unaware of how socialized and unbalanced policies around driving have become, cries that tolls are a “war on cars“. In Rhode Island, we’ve seen tea party vandalism against toll collection efforts on the Sakonnet Bridge. Sometimes elements of the left don’t understand the issue well either, seeing tolls as a way of stepping away from the responsibility of government to pay directly for infrastructure costs through general funds. I believe both are mistaken.

It’s correct to use government to invest in public infrastructure and lessen inequalities. Road spending is simply the least efficient way to do it. Although all classes of people drive to some extent, the poorest drive the least. Certainly if you want to help the odd person who is poor and happens to drive, there are more direct ways to target the aid. Though road projects cause a blooming of development, the revenue from the development does not add up to enough over the long-term to pay back the costs of the maintenance on infrastructure. Tolls are an equitable way to pay for road infrastructure. Paying for roads in this way also means that the general funds we have can be repurposed to more important and directly progressive goals, like an increased Earned Income Tax Credit in the state.

I call on the governor not only to toll highway-type infrastructure, but also to look carefully at how we can reduce unnecessary road expenditures. We need long distance roads in parts of our state, but our urban areas are far too choked by highways. The Route 10 section of the 6/10 Connector is now the oldest highway in the state, cuts neighborhoods in Providence and Cranston off from one another, makes the Washington Secondary bike path less useful, and prevents development along a prime corridor of urban land. Removing highways like Rt. 10 and building them in less expensive, more multimodal ways would lower our state’s costs, allowing tolls to be less extreme (I think Rt. 6 should go too, but its infrastructure is newer–some of it, in fact, is being replaced at great cost right now–so that may have to wait).

The progressive community needs to put its elbow grease into supporting tolling as one of the tools we use in transportation. It’s up to us to organize and educate constituencies for this, or else the governor’s proposal will fail.

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February 18, 2015February 19, 2015

Hard times at the DMV getting a non-driving state ID

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I live-tweeted the experience of getting a state ID sometimes under the hashtag #Paisleygate, a joke on the fact that I wore the same weird paisley shirt to get my last ID in Pennsylvania as I did when I went to get my Rhode Island ID earlier this week. But the broken process of getting a state ID card if you aren’t a driver or already a Rhode Islander is no joke.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567699862305533952

It took me two separate bus trips to-and-from the Pastore Center in Cranston from where I live in Providence. This was after a year of wrangling to get other pieces of paperwork like an original of my birth certificate – I only had copies – which are difficult to obtain without a valid ID.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567734538894589952

A couple things I’ve learned:

1. You cannot get a non-drivers’ state ID from any of the in-city locations. You have to go to the John Pastore Center on the Cranston/Warwick line, which for non-drivers is quite a hike on an infrequent bus. The clerk at the DMV made it clear to me that if I had been a driver and had a drivers license that was expired, it would have been no problem for me to use it as a supporting document, but that because I only had a non-drivers’ ID, I couldn’t. Location and process are really tilted against non-drivers.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567736001498726401

2. The cost of the ID itself is pretty significant: $26.50, with a $1.50 charge if you use a debit card. The cost of a drivers’ license is somewhat higher, but the gap is pretty small. There was a great analysis of how many states have an apparent gas tax, which is then exempt from sales tax, and how this exemption inflates the value of the gas tax. The cost to get a drivers license should be looked at in the same way, since the base cost for an ID is so high. An ID fee is like a sales tax–maybe worse, really–because it charges people for the basic cost of being part of the workforce or voting, whereas a license fee presumably covers the cost of testing and administering road safety.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567747700742172672

3. You must have originals! Don’t even bother trying to talk your way into a voter ID with photocopies, even if they’re accompanied by other documents, like college IDs, FBI background checks, BCIs, Medicaid cards, library cards, etc.

4. As a Warden of Elections, I’ve been instructed many times at trainings to turn away people with IDs that are unexpired and valid but not from Rhode Island, even if those people have corresponding documents to prove their Rhode Island addresses.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567735350651781120

5. Unless you have everything together perfectly, this whole process is going to cost you a lot of time. I’ve had copies of things like my birth certificate lying around the house for years for whenever I’ve had to start a job, but since I had to get an original, and didn’t have a non-expired ID, it took me about a year and a lot of interventions from family to get the new stuff in order. And because of the remote location of the Pastore Center, getting an ID as a non-driver means essentially taking a day off. The Center also closes at 3:15 PM, which is kind of ridiculous too. I brought the wrong paperwork the first time, so I actually made two trips back-and-forth by bus, racing against time with the ridiculous closing time and infrequent bus schedule.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567746753483776002

How can we reform this? My thoughts:

1. A state ID should be available in urban locations. There are centers where one can go to renew existing IDs, but not to get new ones.

2. A state ID from someplace else should be as useful to getting a new ID as a drivers’ license from somewhere else is. This distinction is inequitable, and silly.

3. State IDs should be free.

4. Duplicates should be allowed, or at least a broader array of paperwork types.

5. One should be able to get an ID at night or on weekends. The Pastore Center closes at 3:15 PM! Possibly changing the ID process so that it isn’t taken on by the DMV would make sense, since identification for voting and working purposes is an entirely separate thing than driving.

The voter ID process and documentation needed for working has been something I’ve been aware of intellectually for some time, but going through the process really changed my perspective on it in ways that I didn’t expect. We have to change this if we’re going to stop disenfranchising people year after year.

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January 15, 2015January 15, 2015

Not all impervious surfaces equal when it comes to stormwater

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Central Falls, Cranston, East Providence, North Providence, Pawtucket, Providence, and Warwick belong to the upper Narragansett Bay watershed. All of these communities except North Providence have been cooperating in studies of how to prevent stormwater overflow in the region. Phase I of the study is already complete, and Phase II is being worked on. Phase I essentially explores the problem, while Phase II will look into proactive solutions.

The problem, summarized briefly, is that the more impermeable surfaces the region has, the more of our fecal matter goes into the bay when it rains. The plan is to think strategically as a region about how to address the amount of impermeable surfaces we have.

A stormwater management district will assess some kind of fee, usually in people’s water bill, according to what kind of impermeable surfaces the user has. Ratepayers will be able to get credits for improvements to their properties that fix their stormwater issues. Assigning appropriate fees and credits is paramount.

But impervious surfaces aren’t all equally bad.

None the less, frequently advocates have turned to a measure of success based on the percentage of land that is impermeable, with the target percentage being under 10 percent. Percentages hide more than they show:

Screen Shot 2015-01-12 at 4.14.41 PM — Stormwater stats: I apologize for image quality. A better view of this is on p. 24 of the report. Click the image for the report.

Percentages lie

The highest percentage of impermeable surfaces in the region is in Central Falls, at 66.4%. Providence and Pawtucket are close behind. By contrast, suburban areas like Cranston, East Providence, and Warwick look to have half as much impermeable surface percentage covered.

If you look at the absolute surface area that is covered, it’s clear that Central Falls has the least area that is impervious. In a way this is common sense, because Central Falls is small, but the intuitive thinking about protecting water from overflow pollution is that a lower percentage is better. A really stark illustration of this is in the contrast between Warwick and Providence, for instance. Providence is almost twice as impervious as Warwick by percentage, but by absolute area the two are about equal!

Absolute numbers aren’t even giving the full picture.

If you go deeper still, you see that the per person impervious area is very small in the dense cities, and very high in the suburbs. Each of the 19,378 Central Falls residents has about three-hundredths of an acre of impervious surface to their name. In Warwick, it’s almost a full tenth of an acre per person, about three times as much per capita.

Not all impermeable surfaces are equal

Not every square foot of impermeability is equal, and a future stormwater district should not treat them as such. These images are roughly to scale (100 ft level on Google Maps). The top image is part of Warwick Mall, and the bottom one is part of Downcity, Providence. It’s really a toss-up as to which one has more impermeable surfaces. I might be inclined to guess that Providence has slightly less green space in this shot. It’s a clincher. But it’s very clear which neighborhood is making productive use of land.

Incentivizing behavior

Phase II of the study, which is not yet completed, will look at solutions. We should be on top of this process to make sure that it incentivizes the right behavior, instead of green-washing the problem.

The Providence image shows that past errors have led to some knocked out teeth in the downtown, now as “temporary” surface lots. A stormwater district should make it clear that it is a positive benefit to the community to redevelop a surface lot into a building, even if the exact same impermeable surface remains. Surface lots don’t just create their own individual problems, but are the lead on land use and transportation misalignments across the board. When there’s a lot of parking, fewer people can live in downtown, and more people will need to drive, leading to wider roads.

The only policy measure floated about parking in the report is about using more permeable surfaces for lots (Central Falls already does this at its Ledge Street municipal lot). On page 87-88, the report states:

It is not enough to simply provide funding for the stormwater program, property owners need to help manage stormwater on-site, at the point it is generated. For example, roof runoff can be directed to a dry well on the property, and depending on the size, parking lot runoff can also be “disconnected” by draining to a lawn area, rain garden or other on-site infiltration or treatment system. Improvements made by property owners reduce the volume of runoff that must be managed by the town and thus reduce the town’s overall stormwater program costs.

To me, this line is like trying to trot out the best new fashions in colostomy bags in lieu of offering preventative measures against colon cancer. Why would we make deeper investments into unproductive land uses in order to deal with a surface symptom of the problems they cause?

The surface lot in the image of the Warwick Mall, which is only a tiny piece of the much larger lot, is not something to be tweaked with an underground treatment system. Of course, kudos on making the owner of such a lot pay for the system him/herself, because it’s much better than having ratepayers see increases in their water bills. But the true solution we should be pushing for is recognizing the cancer of surface parking as what it is so that we can root it out.

Houston, we have a problem

We should look to our past mistakes with stormwater management to make sure we don’t repeat them. Houston is a stunning reminder that not all impermeable surfaces are the same. Houston had a huge stormwater pollution problem, which the EPA approached by disallowing new stresses to the sewer system (i.e., buildings with sewer connections) unless other stresses (other buildings) were removed. Houston developers replied to this well-intentioned regulation by tearing out neighborhoods and replacing them with towers in glimmering fields of asphalt parking lots. The problem remains to this day, and Houston’s downtown would make Warwick Mall blush.

The problem is discussed at some length in this Streetfilms video on parking craters.

Parking Craters: Scourge of American Downtowns from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

The approach we take needs to understand that parking and wide roads are some of the biggest and most wasteful public liabilities we have, and that rooftops, though impermeable, are not. A surface lot induces more impermeable surfaces and gives the community nothing in return. A building helps to reduce the need for other surfaces, like roads or lots, by adding density, and gives the community economic development that it can use to eventually pay for even greater improvements, like street trees or green roofs.

This is not an idle point. I’ve only had informal conversations with Providence officials about this, but those officials have expressed a kind of quiet embarrassment about what they see as the city’s being behind on stormwater, and needing to catch up to Warwick and Cranston. With this attitude in hand, I’m concerned about what might result.

We need to make sure that those who are writing a stormwater management system do not blame urban areas by misusing the data, and focusing on percentages of impermeable surfaces. The absolute surface area and the per capita area are far more important. Under this analysis, areas like Central Falls are giving the state a credit through their lifestyle everyday, while residents in Warwick are detracting from the health of the state. The fee system set up for stormwater management should reflect this.

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Small correction: The Streetfilms video mentions Dallas, not Houston. Although, truth be told, Houston does in fact have the same problem. See for example this post from the Final Four competition at Streetfilms’ sister site, Streetsblog. In any case, the point is that we definitely don’t want to follow Texas in anything land use related. It’s a bad scene all around, and we can do better.

January 12, 2015January 14, 2015

Rep. Regunberg supports ‘intelligently-structured parking lot tax’

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A proposed parking tax has cleared an important hurtle. Providence legislator Aaron Regunberg is speaking up for an “intelligently structured parking lot tax.”

Rep. Regunberg, who won the 4th District (East Side of Providence) with 83% of the vote, sent this statement to RI Future:

It is important for economic development, sustainability, and quality of life that our city create incentives that will lead to fewer cars on the road. Most residents familiar with Providence will recognize the incredibly negative impact on downtown of our far-too-many surface parking lots. We know the economic benefits that come with higher density land use, yet our current system incentivizes the spread of these unproductive developments which hurt pedestrian byways, impact our small businesses, and mar our city’s beauty. I believe an intelligently-structured parking lot tax could spur higher-density development and help build a more sustainable community.

Regunberg notes the importance of emphasizing the “lot” part of the tax.

A parking tax would charge a fee to surface lots in the city, and 100 percent of that fee would then be returned to residents and businesses as a tax cut. The exact type of tax cut is up for debate, but I’ve suggested reductions to property taxes targeted to areas nearest the lots.

Because the city’s tax structure offers lower taxes to parking lot owners than other businesses, owners are disincentized to redevelop lots, and building owners can even be encouraged by the tax code to knock down buildings for more parking lots. This creates a death-spiral for the city.

Ethan Gyles, Regunberg’s general election opponent who took 17% of votes, has also indicated support for a parking tax in December 8th Tweet, saying that he was behind the measure so long as it “is written such that the city must lower other regressive taxes” in its place.

December 9, 2014December 9, 2014

Parking tax for PVD: advantage carpoolers

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“With a baby and work, everything else is pretty hectic,” said Andrew Pierson, when the Oak Hill, Pawtucket resident was asked why he often drives to work instead of taking RIPTA.

But when Pierson drives to work he never does so solo. He and his wife “carpool approximately three to four days a week.”

Pierson is rare among American drivers, 90 percent of whom make their trips to work alone. Among carpoolers, though, he’s pretty typical. The majority of carpoolers share their vehicles with family.

“Ironically, we have some of our best conversations in the car,” he said. “And when we really need to talk about something and can’t find any time – the car seems to be the best place. Most people thought that having a baby would force us to purchase another car but it really hasn’t been much of a change. We chose a daycare close to one of our offices and she [the baby] is basically part of the carpool.”

One reason families are the center of carpooling is the inherent power inequality between the owner of the vehicle and the non-driving partners. Carpooling is intimate as much because it asks us to share our vulnerability with a stranger as because it shares physical space.

Carpooling to a place with paid parking is different though. I know this because I’ve been in such carpools to Boston at hours when the T doesn’t run. When there’s parking to be paid for, the passenger is king. They have something to bargain with: half the parking fee.

It’s no real revelation, of course, that the cost of things like gas or parking matter to whether or not people choose to share a car. In 1980, when twice as many people (20%) carpooled to work, the price of gasoline was equivalent to $6/gallon. I’m making a different point entirely, which is that in these situations, the power of the lesser partner is amplified. This may be a major key to stretching carpooling beyond families the way it began.

On a commute, a driver of a carpool is providing a real service, but asking for anything can feel crass. The passenger is reaping a real reward, but might feel like a potluck attendee with no food if he or she didn’t offer something to the driver. Because conversations like these force people into acknowledging difference, some people might rather avoid the whole scene.

If the parking tax brings downtown parking from $10 up to $14/day, getting just one passenger should lower that to $7. When a third person is in the car, driving to downtown would be comparable to a round trip bus commute with transfers (just under $5). If carpooling commuters get more passengers than that, they actually beat the cost of transit, with or without transfers. Meanwhile, they save money on car maintenance, gas, taxes for road repair, reduce congestion and pollution, and help put money back into the downtown instead of surface lot owners’ pockets.

Pierson catches a ride with a coworker to meetings about once a week, something he says makes his shared car situation with his wife possible. This has been a real benefit to his family.

“Why waste ten grand on a depreciating asset when [my family and I] can get exercise, enjoy our commute more and spend a few extra minutes together,” he wondered.

Pierson is fairly conscientious about the role of cars in Rhode Island, working recently to encourage Pawtucket to make itself more bike- and pedestrian-friendly. He responded to a tweet asking for carpool interviews. I know Pierson and work with him on some of his goals.

With a higher parking tax, people who never thought about city planning or walkable cities will have it front and center, and they’ll save money because of it too.

November 24, 2014November 25, 2014

Seth Yurdin: Parking tax ‘great idea for downtown’

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“The parking tax would be a great idea for downtown,” was Providence City Councilor Seth Yurdin’s “initial response” when I asked him about it at a recent Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission.

But he also said he’d need more information before knowing if it would be the right tool for Providence. He said he worries it might be regressive. Our conversation was informal. I didn’t identify myself as a blogger/journalist, but I did introduce myself as, and was referenced several times during the meeting, as a transportation advocate.

Anything that would stop land-banking in Downcity is a good idea, Yurdin said. Land-banking is the process of demolishing buildings and using the vacant land as commercial parking lots in order to take advantage of the way the city’s tax code works: a parking lot owner can claim their lot isn’t worth much, while charging an arm and a leg to bring excess cars into the city.

Support from Yurdin is important because his ward covers the areas of the city that have the lion’s share of commercial parking lots: Downcity and College Hill. A tax on commercial lots, either by revenue or per spot, would be the most likely form that a parking tax would take.

Yurdin said he had “equity concerns” about extending a parking tax beyond downtown, although I think we should push him on the City Council to allow lots located in College Hill to be taxed as well. I feel strongly that colleges shouldn’t get a special status for their parking lots. (For the record, taxing parking is not regressive, although the federal parking tax benefit–essentially the opposite of a parking tax–is). Splitting the difference with Yurdin and taxing only wealthy areas of the city would be fine with me, though, especially since those roughly correspond to the most transit-served job centers in the state.

Yurdin wondered aloud whether a tax rebate on property taxes would actually lead to more affordable housing in the city (“What landlord have you ever heard of who gives you a break on your rent because his taxes go down?” –Touché, Mr. Yurdin). This has had me thinking pretty hard for a response. Charging a higher tax on rental properties indisputably leads those properties to be less plentiful and more expensive than they might otherwise be, but correcting the supply issues caused by bad city policies would take time. Who’s to say one’s landlord isn’t happy to pass on extra taxes when they come his way, but doesn’t care to do the reverse? It’s a quandary. In the long-term, removing exclusionary zoning would tend to put landlords in competition, but we should want tenants to get their money now.

A conversation should be had about how to split revenues in a way that is fair and actually results in tenants getting a fair share. One proposal worth exploring would be to have the city cut a check to tenants directly, rather than having their landlord serve as an intermediary. I haven’t researched how easily that could actually be administered, though. Another option would be to cut the tenants’ tax, but focus initial returns as a credit towards building repairs that can’t just spent away. I like the idea of lowering property taxes because I value infill and affordable housing as priorities, and because I think these goals elegantly replace tax base just as quickly as the city loses parking revenue, but I’ve also discussed the idea of trading a parking tax for part of the city’s car excise tax, and debatably that could be bargained over to achieve equity goals as well.

Seeing the city tackle either the quality or cost of housing would great.

More on A Parking Tax for Providence.

November 18, 2014November 19, 2014

How to structure a parking tax for Providence

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There are several ways a parking tax could easily be implemented in Providence.

In a previous post I introduced the concept of a parking tax for Providence. This post explores five such options for implementing and collecting parking taxes. Future posts will demonstrate how much revenue can be raised, how it could offset other city taxes and what social benefits will result.

A revenue tax on commercial lots

The easiest way to enact a parking tax would be to pass a tax on the revenue from commercial lots – that is, the ones that charge a fee to commuters in the downtown. This is the tax collection model in Pittsburgh, where lot owners are expected to keep receipts of the revenue they collect and pay a 40% tax on that revenue.

There’s a range of effects that could take place with this kind of tax. If demand for parking was really high–no one who already parked stopped parking–lot owners would be in a position to pass 100% of the tax on to customers. So, imagine for instance that your normal fee is $10/day. That fee would become $14/day.

If demand for parking was really low–everyone, say, decided that it was not worth it to park–then lot owners would have to eat the tax entirely themselves. Lot owners pay around $0.60 per spot per day in taxes, so paying a $4 a day tax would be left with a strong incentive to either sell or repurpose their land. Even if a healthy number of people still chose to park, lot owners might be incentivized to reduce the size of their lots in order to stop having to eat so much of the tax. This would reduce parking tax revenue (and parking supply) but would increase tax receipts from buildings (and more importantly, would mean that there’d be way more cool things to visit, places to live, and jobs to work at in the downtown).

The reality is that demand for parking would fall somewhere between these two extremes. Lot owners might feel some pressure to take on some of the tax as a profit loss, because at $0.60 or $0.70 a spot in property taxes, a $10/day fee minus x amount of additional parking tax would still leave them a healthy profit. There would probably be enough demand for parking that commuters would pay some of the tax themselves in higher fees, too.

The big thing to remember about a revenue tax is that if a parking spot were free in the city, the lot owner would pay no tax. If the spot were on the market, but didn’t “sell”, i.e., no one parked in it, it would also be tax-free.

A “per spot” tax on commercial lots

A tax on lots “per spot” could be applied to commercial lots. This varies from the revenue tax in that the city would decide a fee for each parking spot that did not depend on usage. In our 40% example, $4 would be the fee on a $10 parking spot, so perhaps the city would just say to lot owners, “if your spots are on the market, there’s a $4 tax. 100 spots is $400 a day tax, no matter who uses them.”

Lot owners in this scenario would face a slightly different situation, and I imagine this tax having a stronger effect on reducing lot size as well as a greater immediate effect on reducing the profitability of parking lots. For instance, if a lot owner has 20 spots open on a given day, that that’s an $80 loss. If it comes to 10 AM, and those spots aren’t full, he or she may give them away for $4 each, just to break even on the tax. A lot owner won’t accept that position for long, though. He or she will start to look at the bottom line and think about how to get rid of parking spots that are typically not full.

The other advantage to the “per spot” tax is that it’s much easier to account for. The city uses Google Maps, and counts, and issues a bill. In order to prevent fraud in revenue tax situations, cities often use some kind of a smart card, so that there’s an unchangeable paper trail. But none of that would be necessary for a per-spot tax.

Per spot taxes are favored by the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute, covered here on Streetsblog.

A “per spot” tax on all parking lots

A per spot tax also opens up the possibility of taxing all parking lots in the city, not just those that charge a value for their parking. I really think this is the best option, but I also realize that there are political difficulties to implementing it.

A disadvantage to only taxing commercial lots, whether in the “per spot” or “revenue” model is that it creates an arbitrage around the value of parking on free lots. An arbitrage is when something is selling for one price one place, and a different price in another. It’s the kind of thing that day traders take advantage of when they’re doing frivolous trades back and forth to make profits without creating things. Arbitrages can also be a legitimate tool in a marketplace, helping people to make sense of what the price of something is, if information is shared fairly. You don’t want to go out of your way to create one, though.

Imagine you’re the owner of a business. The cost of paving a flat parking lot might be very small to you, both in upkeep and taxes (property tax assessments would say that the lot wasn’t really worth anything). If you give your spots away to your workers for free, your workers are super excited. To them, this is a $14/day value, because their access to parking is solely through what they can buy from a commercial lot, and what is given away to them by an employer. But you, the employer, have a great deal more leverage. You’re not really giving your workers $14/day at all. You’re taking advantage of a tax loophole to turn a tiny investment into a huge benefit for your employees (and you). That might sound well and good if you’re the employee, but it circumnavigates the purpose of the parking tax, so the more we can do to stop that problem, the better.

A tax on free parking would tend to affect big box stores disproportionately, which in my opinion would be both fair in a market sense of the word (pay for what you use) and in a share-the-wealth way. A business like Home Depot is imposing a lot more cost on the city through all types of infrastructure than, say, Adler’s Hardware store on Wickenden. An African grocery store on Cranston Street in a bottom floor of a three story building is costing the city much less than a Stop & Shop. And you’ll notice, although there would be exceptions, that most of the smaller footprint businesses tend to be independently owned. It’s also the case that some Dunkin Donuts stores or other chain stores might get thrown into the mix. But for the most part, the tendency would be that large chain stores would have huge parking lots, and local businesses would have modest parking lots, or no parking at all.

Another really big advantage to a tax on big box lots is that, so long as the city allows it, big boxes may not necessarily object to having somewhat smaller lots. There was an absurd case of a municipality requiring so much parking that even Walmart asked for a variance to get out of the requirement. Parking requirements for big box stores is usually set to some imagined peak demand, usually Black Friday or Christmas Eve, and transportation advocates have even gone out on these days to take pictures and show how overabundant these parking supplies are even for that purpose. So big boxes would have a choice: pay a tax on parking that’s excessive to begin with, or lease out the space and build some more stores. As a mental exercise sometimes, when I’m in a really hopeless looking over-large strip mall, I like to imagine what it would look like if piece by piece, little bits of the parking lot were gradually turned into neighborhood extensions. All in all, many big box stores aren’t even necessarily that awful in and of themselves. In reduced lots with things built around them, they could be shopping hubs for a much more connected population.

Joe Minicozzi’s “value per acre” model often results in small businesses having the steepest lines. Imagine AS220 vs. Walmart. Land use!

Smart Providence voters would support the parking tax on big boxes also as a means of leveling the playing field. Providence has a minimum business tax, which means that you’re paying a fairly high premium just to start out, whether or not you’re successful. Lowering or eliminating this kind of tax, going to some kind of percentage tax, and having a surcharge on parking space could change that scenario. What a big box is doing is essentially wielding a huge weapon of amazing, awe-inspiring car access, but without having to pay for any of what makes that possible (environmental damage, loss of walkability, increased sewage runoff, increased sewer infrastructure, hundreds of thousands of dollars per intersection of signals, wider roads, etc., etc.). Small businesses are essentially paying those costs–the costs of taking away their own customers.

A per spot tax on all parking lots could be set up to have a deduction of sorts for the first X number of parking spots. I don’t really think this is necessary, because the net reality of a parking tax would be to return more property taxes to small businesses and residents than those small businesses or residents pay out, but we also have to be aware that many people don’t like to dive into complicated multivariable math, and if doing this makes it simpler for people to count the pluses and minuses in their life, then fine.

I wrote a lot about the concept of value-per-acre at EcoRI News some time ago. It’s an idea put forward by Joe Minicozzi, and I think people interested in building an equitable growth model that’s good for the environment would do well to familiarize themselves with his work. This also helps to explain this tax model more.

Residential parking

A concern is parking in shopping areas. How would a parking tax affect residential areas? I think the tax models above would have very diminished value in most residential parts of Providence, because in those areas the value of parking may be minimal compared to the effort of passing a law. However, there are parking policies we could institute that would help residential areas. Those I’ve loosely based off of parking guru Donald Shoup of UCLA.

Screen Shot 2014-11-18 at 3.55.58 PM — Mode share visual from California’s employee parking cash-out, which lets employees take cash instead of free parking.

A big tool would be giving renters a cash-out option on parking. As a beginning to this, renters who have a garage as part of their lease should be able to opt out of the cost of the garage if they don’t want to use it, because garage parking affects housing affordability. A rent of $1,000 for an apartment that includes one garage spot can be broken down into $600 for the room, and $400 for the garage. A lot of residents will be happy to pay for the garage if they use it, but forcing landlords to treat these as separate things will open up parts of the downtown to people with less money who don’t drive. The landlords would be free to open unused spots on the open market, which would also help get rid of surface lots, by competing with lot owners. There would be no tax on this residential parking, because forcing it to be treated as a separate commodity would have a downward effect on demand.

Many parts of Providence have driveways, a legacy of on-street parking bans of days of yore. It would be a real gain to get rid of some of those driveways, or at least people to put raised beds above them. Other driveways could be converted into “granny cottages” to add housing. But the reality is that driveways are just not worth anywhere near as much as garage spots, nor are they the severe blight on the city of surface lots. This might make a cash-out hard to calculate. Instead, why not nix the existing on-street parking permits entirely (Do I hear a huzzah?) and trade them for an equal permit cost on driveways. Parking on the street would be free in most residential areas. Think of this as a mini-credit towards green space. Homes that decided to park on the street would and use their driveway for raised beds, or that pulled up the paving on their driveway, or built a building extension into the driveway, would not pay the tax (although the building extension would be weighed into property taxes). Getting people to park on the street in residential areas would not only help green space, but would also slow down speeding. I know that getting rid of some of the driveways in Mt. Hope would make crossing my street much more pleasant.

For streets that got protected bike lanes (mostly arterials), the parking tax would be nixed, and no driveway tax would be issued either. The logic is that in some areas we may have to remove parking lanes to create safe biking, and if you’re not getting a parking spot out front of your house, why should you pay?

Donald Shoup talks about “right pricing” (click for video) parking, which is really just an issue in places where parking is in high demand (the idea is the lowest price that still keeps a couple spots free). Most residential areas are not going to run low on parking no matter what the price, but some that are near shopping districts would benefit from parking meters to impose a price on visitors and ensure that residents have a place to park. To make things simple, residents would pay meters, but the meter money would be taken off their property taxes. This also solves a big problem with the parking permits we have now–they’re by ward. What happens if you want to visit someone? You can’t park away from your house without worrying that you’ll get a ticket. This way when I visit you I pay, and when you visit me, you pay, but we both get 100% of the money off the taxes we were going to pay the city for our house. And. . . and. . . we’ll be able to find a spot.

A land tax

A land tax is not a parking tax, but it’s worth talking about, since my proposal for a parking tax is sort of a modified land tax. A land tax says that you should pay not just for the building you build on top of a piece of land, but also for its location and the type of zoning it has. So, for instance, a vacant lot is a particularly galling case of an owner flaunting the lack of a land tax in Providence, because since we only tax property value, it’s assumed that the prominent downtown location of a lot is worthless when it’s anything but.

The concept of a land tax gets slightly complicated though, and although I’m a believer in land taxes overall, I want to avoid some of those complications by going straight for a parking tax. For instance, what do we do about green space? If you own a house with a huge yard, should you be taxed extra just for the fact that your land is a half acre instead of a quarter acre or tenth of an acre? I think a lot of people might find this concept troubling, because even if it’s not our yard that we’re talking about, we just kind of like grass and trees, etc.

By the same token, what if we decide that downtown is worth a lot more in land taxes than some other place, but we find that some historic buildings don’t produce enough revenue to pay what they would pay as 20 story buildings in that location. Do we want to create a situation that might push them out, or encourage demolitions? A clever administration could draw exceptions and loopholes into a land tax to try to close the problems with this, but I just prefer going around it entirely and focusing on what we want to get rid of most: surface lots.

One concept that works really well from a land tax that we should use is modifying our tax structure based on location. I think a really good rule of thumb should be that a parking tax should be highest in places within 1/4 mile of frequent transit, a bit less 1/2 mile from frequent transit, and nonexistent where transit is nonexistent. Providence City Council could also choose to tax parking lots that are a adjacent to the front of a building differently than it taxed parking in the back of a building, since the latter has less of an effect on neighborhood walkability.

In the next piece I’m going to consider how suburban and rural areas of Rhode Island could best respond to Providence imposing a parking tax if they’re interested in saving their residents money. Stay tuned!

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