The traditional argument for anti-jaywalking laws is that they protect pedestrians from themselves, by limiting their ability to walk in dangerous traffic conditions. If this argument made sense, we would have seen pedestrian traffic fatalities increase in less punitive states.

For example, if jaywalking laws were effective, California’s pedestrian death rate would have increased in 2023 (when jaywalking was legalized). Instead, the number of deaths decreased from 1208 to 1057, a 12 percent drop. (Relevant data for all states is here). Although pedestrian deaths decreased nationally, the national decrease was only about 5 percent (from 7737 to 7318).

On the other hand. the data from Nevada and Virginia is less encouraging. As noted above, jaywalking was decriminalized in those states in 2021, so the relevant time frame is 2021-23. During this period, pedestrian deaths increased quite modestly in Virginia (from 125 to 133) and more significantly in Nevada (from 84 to 109).

On balance, it does not seem that there is a strong trend in either direction in these three states- which (to me) supports my previously expressed view that Americans should be trusted to walk where they like rather than being harassed by the Nanny State.

The post Decriminalizing Jaywalking: The Early Data appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Delivery vehicles might come soon. Corporate fleet vehicles. And the big jump, of course, will be when they’re available as private vehicles. It’s possible that the costs are high enough that won’t happen, or won’t happen for several decades. Let’s assume it does. What comes next?

Preferences

1. Autonomous vehicles will vastly lower the opportunity cost of time spent driving.
   • Once the transition to an all or almost-all AV automobile fleet is complete, we will be able to redesign cars to be much more comfortable. In the ideal case, they’ll be like 1^st class airplane berths or better. Being “stuck in traffic” will just mean “I’m in my mobile office” or “I’m binge-watching the 2040s Lord of the Rings remakes.”
   • Imagine having a self-driving Winnebago – for the cost of electricity, we’ll be able to take vacations anywhere on the continent without stopping work. Imagine how I’m going to spend my summers when I can shift from Quebec to Minneapolis to Moab to San Diego every day or two!!!
2. Highways will be OK to great, because AVs will cut down on vehicle spacing at high speeds.
3. Downtown streets will be a disaster. There isn’t much vehicle spacing to reduce. And AVs will be more conservative about “creative”
4. But some people (and goods) will still have places to be. If they’re stuck in traffic with all the mobile-office-workers, mobile-movie-enjoyers, and mobile nappers, they’re going to incur just as much cost as people do today when they’re late.
5. This is a recipe for extremely high congestion welfare costs. In cities, for sure. But also in desirable areas during peak seasons. Imagine the roads into the Rockies in summer if Denver office workers can get their work done while driving to their evening picnic spot
   • In case you’re tempted to think I’m exaggerating, remember that all our experience with congestion comes from people whose eyes, hands, and feet must remain attuned to the traffic, and whose vehicles are designed to keep them in safe seats.
   • AVs will enable higher highway capacity, where following distance is a major constraint. But the gains at intersections will be much smaller, and AVs will be programmed to be more cautious than human drivers on streets with pedestrians, etc. At least some places, likely including most downtown streets, will be much more congested.

Policy

1. Obviously, the solution to this problem is road pricing, which can be quite sophisticated with AV. The traditional privacy concerns about segment-specific tolling are in the rearview mirror (there’s a metaphor with a terminal diagnosis) at the point that AV tech is in control.
2. The default attitude toward regulation has been to treat parked cars with more skepticism than moving cars. That made sense when a moving car implied a driver paying a substantial opportunity cost to occupy public space. Solve for the equilibrium if downtown streets are free but downtown parking is market priced.
3. The transition from driven vehicles to AVs deserves consideration but should be secondary to thinking about post-transition equilibrium.

Politics

1. Even when pricing has large, obvious benefits, voters resist it. We still can’t toll urban interstates even though 100% of experts think it’s a good idea in at least some cases. NYC’s kinda-sorta congestion pricing highlights how the bad politics of pricing intersect with the difficult technicalities of dynamically pricing traditional cars.
   • Congestion pricing for all cars, now, would be great, but it’s not realistic.
   • And many downtown streets that are OK now will collapse under the increase in driving that AVs will bring.
2. Voters will resist tolling AVs after they have AVs.
3. So the time to begin tolling AVs is now, when they have a handful of lobbyists but no grassroots.
4. The initial price can be small – the key is to institute the architecture and expectation that AVs pay to use congested roads.

Agenda

This is research that I’m thinking about with my more tech-savvy colleagues. It’s not urgent – mass ownership of AVs would take a decade or more even if they were available for individual ownership tomorrow. But it’s important.

Researchers need to model downtown traffic with AVs. We need to think about the correct scales, in time and geography, for dynamic pricing. And we need to convince policymakers that automated vehicles should pay to use congested roads.

The post Agenda: Dynamic congestion pricing for autonomous vehicles appeared first on Market Urbanism.

The goal of congestion pricing is not to penalize car trips but to smooth demand over a more extended time to reduce congestion. Unfortunately, many new congestion pricing schemes seem designed to ban cars rather than manage demand for car trips.

This article appeared originally in Caos Planejado and is reprinted here with the publisher’s permission.

Congestion pricing aims to reduce demand for peak-hour car trips by charging vehicles entering the city center when roads are the most congested. Charging rent for the use of roads is consistent with a fundamental principle of economics: when the price of a good or service increases, demand for it decreases. Charging different rates depending on the congestion level spreads trip demand over a longer period than the traditional peak hour. The goal of congestion pricing is not to penalize car trips but to smooth demand over a more extended time to reduce congestion. Unfortunately, many new congestion pricing schemes seem designed to ban cars rather than manage demand for car trips. Congestion pricing then becomes more akin to the “sin taxes” imposed on the consumption of tobacco and alcohol than to traffic management.

The traffic on urban roads in a downtown area is not uniform during the day but is subject to rush hour peaks, while late-night road networks are usually underused. The use of roads in the downtown area is similar to other places like hotels in resort towns. Hotels try to spread demand away from peak season by reducing prices when demand is low and increasing prices when demand is high. When resort hotels charge higher prices during weekends and vacations, it is not to discourage demand but to spread demand over a broader period. Well-conceived congestion pricing for urban roads works under the same principles as the pricing of hotels. The goal is to maximize the use of a fixed asset by spreading demand over a more extended period.

Starting in 1975, Singapore was a pioneer in applying congestion pricing. As technology evolved, Singapore modified its system to adjust road pricing where and when it was most effective. To this day, it is the most advanced model in the world. While not every city has the political set-up that would permit to implement Singapore road pricing system, it is helpful to know how this city establishes its pricing mechanism and monitors its performance.

Singapore Pricing Mechanism

1. Time-of-Day Pricing: Charges vary based on the time of day, with higher rates during peak traffic periods and lower (or no) rates during off-peak times. This encourages drivers to change their travel times to avoid peak charges. The toll may change several times a day depending on the congestion of a specific area.
2. Location-Based Pricing: Different roads or areas might have different charges based on the congestion levels specific to those locations.

Singapore is now developing a next-generation Duration-Based Charging system incorporating satellite-based technology to allow for more sophisticated charging mechanisms, including charging based on the distance traveled or time spent on the road. The same technology is proposed to be used in the US for  Mileage-Based User Fees that will hopefully replace the gasoline tax to pay for themaintenance of roads and highways.

Performance Monitoring:

Singapore’s Land Transport Authority (LTA) closely monitors traffic conditions. One of the key performance indicators is the average road speed. They measure it in the following manner:

• Monitoring Equipment: Speed sensors are strategically installed across major roads to capture data.
• Target Speed Ranges: LTA sets optimal speed ranges for different types of roads. In 2021, expressways had a target range of 45-65 km/h, and arterial streets had a target of 20-30 km/h.
• Frequent Adjustments: If average speeds drop below these ranges over a sustained period (typically a quarter), the LTA  increases its rates. Conversely, if speeds exceed the high end of the range consistently, charges might be reduced or removed.

Deviations from the Singapore model

Singapore road pricing has achieved its goal of maintaining a minimum speed within specific roads over more than 30 years. While the city has constantly invested in public transport, it has recognized that individual vehicles are an indispensable mode of transportation and complement other modes like transit, bicycles, and automated vehicles. A large city requires a lot of maintenance. Workers in charge of this maintenance, like electricians, plumbers, painters, nurses, and doctors, must use individual vehicles to fulfill their tasks. Shops, restaurants, and bars need to be resupplied continuously. Congestion pricing is particularly efficient in organizing this indispensable car or truck traffic.

Unlike Singapore, most pricing mechanisms and performance monitoring in other cities using congestion pricing, like London, Stockholm, and Milan, are primitive. Except for Stockholm, they charge a fixed rate for entering an area. Milan charges cars according to their pollution level. The objective seems to be to discourage car usage rather than optimize the use of existing roads.

The congestion pricing projected to be implemented in New York in 2024 seems to have the most muddled objective. The city has never mentioned road speed objectives. The peak period is from 5 AM to 9 PM on weekdays, priced at $15 for cars when entering the zone, while $3.75 for the off-peak period. This flat toll for most of the day suggests that the primary purpose of the toll is to raise revenue to subsidize the vast public transport deficit resulting from years of mismanagement and under-investment. The boundary of the priced zone, south of 60^th Street, will create other distortions within Manhattan. It would have been better to set tolls in most of Manhattan and part of Brooklynn by hours and places at different rates.

The impact of the toll on the freight delivery cost ($24-$36) for shops, restaurants, and construction sites has never been discussed.

Ironically, while congestion pricing’s objective is to obtain a more rational use of existing roads, parking remains free on many streets within the Manhattan part subject to congestion pricing. Parking on the roads that are metered costs $14.50 for two hours. Because metered or unmetered street space often occupies both sides of the road, deliveries and taxis loading or unloading passengers block an entire circulation lane. If traffic congestion were the main issue, most of the curb side street lanes devoted to parking would have been dedicated to bicycle or car lanes for loading and unloading. Establishing clear objectives and monitoring performances and possible secondary impacts on transport costs are indispensable tasks for any city considering congestion pricing. The goal of congestion pricing is not to maximize revenue but to manage traffic more efficiently

The post Congestion Pricing: Traffic Solver or Sin Tax? appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Because there are no market signals that could identify the best and highest use of street space, it is the role of urban planners to allocate the use of street space between different users and to design boundaries between them where needed.

This article appeared originally in Caos Planejadoand is reprinted here with the publisher’s permission.

As a city expands, planners and surveyors divide its area between private lots and public spaces. Architects, hired by the owners of private lots, design the buildings erected on each one. Lot owners’ taste, budget, and practical considerations shape the design of private buildings. However, land use regulations might restrict the use and shape of the final construction. Over time, changes in consumer demand, building technology, and land prices will require modifications or even the demolition of the original building, which will be replaced by a new one that responds better to current conditions.

This constant land recycling of private lots is a feature of market economies and the motor of urban land use efficiency. Unfortunately, current land use regulations, particularly zoning, tend to slow down this Schumpeterian creative destruction. A paper written by William Easterly, a professor at New York University, monitored the land use change on a Manhattan street over four centuries. The paper shows the unpredictability and necessity of constant land use changes in private urban lots.

In contrast with private lots, public spaces, which include the area occupied by streets, parks, and natural protected areas like beaches, riverbanks, and lakes, rarely change; they are not exposed to market price signals. So, when a city expands, how are the streets designed, and by whom?

On the American continent, little remains of pre-Columbian urban street design. The European colonists’ first task when creating a new town was to separate private lots from public spaces reserved for streets and plazas. Many of these original designs survive to this day. As cities expanded, private developers or municipalities created new roads.

Once fixed by the original surveyors, the city’s roads’ dimensions and patterns seldom change. Consider the design of streets in Manhattan, a borough well known for constantly demolishing and rebuilding ever-taller structures. The pattern and width of streets in the downtown Wall Street area remain identical to what they were at the time of the early seventeenth-century Dutch colony. Even the name, Wall Street, has not changed. The introduction of new, wide avenues, carved by Baron Haussman out of Paris’s medieval districts, is one of the few exceptions to the overwhelming endurance of existing street patterns. Most streets in our cities are fossils dating from the time when surveyors designed the neighborhoods.

Once they have been created, we must accept that streets’ widths and patterns are practically permanent. The areas of streets being fixed, their use has to be rationed. Because supply is inelastic, demand must be managed.

The primary purpose of streets is to allow the movement of people and goods between private lots. But in a large city, there are many ways of moving. Pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, buses, motorcycles, private cars, and cars for hire all contend for the same space. Street space could also be planted with trees. In addition, streets must have room for streetlights, electricity and telecommunication cables, and street and circulation signs. People also use the streets to rest, walk, and exercise. All these conflicting uses occupy precious space that cannot be expanded.

Because there are no market signals that could identify the best and highest use of street space, it is the role of urban planners to allocate the use of street space between different users and to design boundaries between them where needed.

With few exceptions, urban planners have neglected this critical design and regulating role. For instance, on New York City streets, more than two-thirds of the curb space is allocated for permanent parking free of charge. This neglect in the design and regulation of street space contrasts with the complex regulations that planners have applied to private lots. It is time for urban planners to switch their regulatory and design preoccupation away from private lot users and to concentrate on the design and regulation of the scarce space occupied by streets.

The use of private lots should be driven by consumer demand. Land use should emerge from a grassroot process creating an emerging order. By contrast, public spaces are not submitted to price signals that can make their use adapt to evolving demand. The separation of public space between different users is therefore by necessity a top-down design process under the entire responsibility of urban planners.

The post Urban Planners Overregulate Private Lots but Neglect the Design and Regulation of Public Spaces appeared first on Market Urbanism.

“City defender: if cities were more compact and walkable, people wouldn’t have to spend hours commuting in their cars and would have more free time.

Suburb defender: but isn’t it true that in New York City, the city with the most public transit in the U.S., people have really long commute times because public transit takes longer?”

But a recent report may support the “city defender” side of the argument. Replica HQ, a new company focused on data provision, calculated per capita travel time for residents of the fifty largest metropolitan areas. NYC came in with the lowest amount of travel time, at 88.3 minutes per day. The other metros with under 100 minutes of travel per day were car-dependent but relatively dense Western metros like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and San Jose (as well as Buffalo, New Orleans and Miami).

By contrast, sprawling, car-dependent Nashville was No. 1 at 140 minutes per day, followed by Birmingham, Charlotte and Atlanta. *

How does this square with Census data showing that the latter metros have shorter commute times than New York? First, the Replica data focuses on overall travel time- so if you have a long commute but are able to shop close to home, you might spend less overall time traveling than a Nashville commuter who drives all over the region to shop. Second, the Replica data is per resident rather than per commuter- so if retirees and students travel less in the denser metros, this fact would be reflected in the Replica data but not Census data.

*The methodology behind Replica’s estimates can be found here.

The post Do People Travel Less In Dense Places? appeared first on Market Urbanism.

But my argument assumed that new development would in fact bring traffic wherever it occurred. A new study by three North Carolina State University scholars suggests otherwise. The study concludes that “rural locations are more likely to experience an increase in traffic due to increased development as compared to urban land uses.” (p. 19). This is because “locations that did not experience a significant traffic increase… had a higher traffic volume before development”. (p. 20). This might be because those areas were “already highly saturated, which served as a major disincentive for the migration of traffic” (id.)

So in other words, if I am understanding this paper correctly, an already-congested area will not get much more congested with new development, because people react to congestion by going elsewhere or using slightly different routes. By contrast, when a basically uncongested area gets new development, the new development does not create enough traffic to scare off drivers.

The post traffic and development appeared first on Market Urbanism.

The writing in these posts is a bit squirrelly (or is it Straussian?), but as best I can make out, Tyler is deviating from the mainline economic views of externalities and prices by arguing a few points:

1. Urban serendipity and growth are high-value externalities quite distinct from the usual efficiencies of combining large amounts of capital and labor in downtown office towers.
2. Occasional visitors to the city find very high value there (presumably via a long-right-tail distribution)
   • including by creating demand for new goods
3. Congestion pricing will (a) decrease the number of people in the city, (b) particularly high-value visitors.

He also makes some specific critiques of the mechanism design of the proposed NYC congestion charge. It’s worth getting that right, but let’s leave the technicalities aside here.

Tyler’s points – as I’ve summarized (or mangled) them – seem like a mix of reasonable and wrong, although in several cases difficult if not impossible falsify. I’ll tackle these points in a completely irresponsible order.

2. Distinguished visitors

On the second point: Diminishing marginal returns is enough to give Tyler’s argument the benefit of the doubt. The first visit to a symphony or subway likely has a bigger inspirational impact than the seventh or seven-hundredth. And outsiders may bring insights to the city in an Eli-Whitney-and-the-cotton-gin way.

But for consuming new goods? Perhaps visitors’ demand is enough to sustain new imitations of low-end consumer goods (like a McDonalds in Chennai, if there is one). But for narratives of urban creativity, I prefer Malcolm Gladwell’s account of Airwalk shoes or Peter Thiel’s identification of eBay “PowerSellers” as a stepping stone for PayPal. A concentrated, differentiated – weird – population is better grounds for scaling innovation.

Cities are extremely good places to form weird communities. But slow travel within the city hurts it. Just as Alain Bertaud argues for job access, effective social access is limited by the human density and travel speed.

3b. The stay-at-homes

Tyler affiliates “congestion pricing” with the provincial sentiment “residents good, visitors bad.” This isn’t my interpretation, but I’m not a New Yorker.

As for who is likely to be dissuaded from coming to New York at all by an additional $23 driving fee, it is likely to be someone for whom the $23 represents a large percentage increase of the cost of their trip. For a visitor from outside the metro area making a vacation or work visit, the fee is a minor nuisance, perhaps 5% of a two- or three-day trip that includes expensive parking, gas, a hotel, tickets, and meals. By contrast, a Jersey City couple thinking about driving in for an ice cream and a walk in Central Park might see their trip cost double.

1. Mode shift, job shift

In the long run, the person most likely to stop coming to Manhattan entirely is the car commuter who really dislikes or fears transit. In the short run, car commuters and other city regulars – people for whom the cost would add up day after day – would be most likely to stop driving. Many would switch to other modes or work more days from home.

Ultimately, some of those people would decrease their labor supply to the city. Since drivers tend to be the highest-paid workers, there could be an echo of the 1970s trend of moving corporate headquarters to the CEO’s backyard in Westchester County.

Unlike Tyler’s narrative, this is a very boring risk of inefficiencies in capital-and-labor markets. In fact, maybe nudging some of the too-efficient, too-well paid financiers out of the city will lower prices and create more room for urban creativity, just as tariffs and Luddism can boost growth by forcing people to solve problems creatively instead of efficiently.

3a. Fewer cars…fewer people?

I addressed the “particularly” clause of the third bullet. But there’s a more basic question: Will congestion pricing increase or decrease the number of people in a central city? I wasn’t able to find research on this. One plausibly causal study found that an unexpected congestion price increase in Singapore sharply lowered the value of retail real estate, but not office or residential. London statistics show that entries have grown post-congestion price. This isn’t causal, but it does bring home just how small cars can loom in the social life of a major downtown.

Bus traffic is a key variable here: to the extent that congestion prices speed up bus service (including jitneys or informal car-shares), faster traffic could make trips to a center much more viable. My prior is that this effect would predominate in developing world cities (especially those without rail transit) but be weaker in the developed world. Still, London buses counterbalanced most of the private car decline in the first two years of congestion pricing.

Will congestion pricing improve the quality of life for non-car users and induce more demand to be downtown? Air quality will probably improve, but not a huge amount. There’s no difference between sitting at a café while cars pass at 10 mph instead of 5 mph.

The steel-man case for congestion pricing is that the authorities will spend the money as NYC’s have promised, to improve transit, and will be sufficiently defensive of their scheme to follow through. Significant service improvements on transit could lure far more visitors into downtown (since the price of a transit trip in NYC is mostly inconvenience and distaste), generating the kind of eucongestion that Tyler argues is so essential to urban creativity.

The post Will congestion pricing hurt cities? appeared first on Market Urbanism.

From a transportation standpoint, this is not ideal. Even the most cursory Google search reveals that a neighborhood should have at least eight or ten units per acre to support minimal bus service. This is because if only a few people live near a bus stop, only a few people will ride the bus. So Louisville’s zoning generally prohibits density high enough for decent bus service.

Similarly, from a housing supply standpoint, such zoning is not ideal either. Obviously, a development with 5 houses per acre contributes less to regional housing supply than one with 10 houses per acre.

Much ink has been spilled over the evils of zoning places for nothing but single-family housing. But perhaps the density of housing is just as important as its form.

The post Louisville and density regulation appeared first on Market Urbanism.