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Sunday, May 20th, 2012

New York Considers Parking Meter Privatization

According to the Wall Street Journal, New York City is on the verge of soliciting interest in some form of parking meter privatization.

In considering this, it is important to understand the nature of parking meters. Parking meters aren’t a capital asset like a bridge or highway. Nor are they a real government service like garbage collection or parks. Rather, parking meters are an urban planning tool that cities use to manage access to precious on street real estate for the benefit of the city and neighborhoods. Because neighborhood business conditions are dynamic, and because the best rate to charge and even the best use of that real estate (which may not be parking) change over time, this makes parking meters an extremely bad fit for privatization in the style of Chicago.

Fortunately New York says that they are “not looking to sell the system” and that they will not relinquish control over setting rates. Those are both positives. While Chicago got it wrong, I think there is certainly plenty of scope for involving the private sector in the management of parking. For example, who cares who takes the quarters out of a meter? I sure don’t.

Also, the private sector could potentially implement new technology better and faster. We are on the cusp of a sea change in parking management. One of the key rationales for parking privatization has been the political difficulty of raising rates. But a new system being piloted in San Francisco, embedding ideas from UCLA professor Donald Shoup, points a better way forward. The idea is to bring congestion pricing to parking, by letting the market decide the value of the spot. The computerized meters there dynamically vary parking prices to maintain 80% meter occupancy. People who want and need a spot can then always find one, but spaces don’t go to waste. It gets the city council out of the business of setting parking rates, and depoliticizes them. There could conceivably be many other ways to both more efficiently manage parking and better deploy technology.

However, the devil is in the details. Private companies aren’t in the business of making investments unless they get a return. So what do you promise them to invest in new technology? The WSJ quotes a NYC official as saying, “Our process has been to consider locking in the current performance, and, if it makes sense, transferring the risk to a third party.” This sounds nice in theory, but to get someone to take on risk requires compensating them to do so. I always saw risk transfer as a key benefit of privatization, but through compensation clauses in contracts, it is clear very little risk is often transferred in these deals.

Thus beyond the concept of doing privatization right, there’s the enormous focus that must be brought to bear on contracting. As I’ve come to discover, too many of these agreements are copy/paste jobs with clauses that really disadvantage the public. New York needs to do better. A key is to make sure the term is limited. I’d say anything longer than around seven years is inappropriate.

In that regard I’m sorry that former Deputy Mayor Steve Goldsmith is no longer around. He’s someone who did many privatizations in Indianapolis nearly 20 years ago. While he’s perhaps more favorable to parking meter privatization than I am, I think he appreciated the need to get the details right.

In any case, New York City is probably right to give this a look, but they should realize that they are playing with fire. More than anything else, the most important thing is to make sure the public of New York doesn’t end up getting burned.

Sunday, May 20th, 2012

Correction: OECD Chicago Review

I want to make an important correction to my story on the OECD territorial review of Chicago. Based on previously published reports, I’d said that Indiana had not participated in the study and strongly condemned that. However, it turns out that Indiana did in fact participate in the study, at both the state and local levels. In fact, some Indiana representatives actually traveled to Paris for the initial review of the report. So I’d like to apologize for getting it wrong and set the record straight on this.

Thursday, May 10th, 2012

Will Yet Another Fiasco Finally Convince Rahm Emanuel to Cancel Chicago’s Parking Meter Lease?

Chicago’s parking meter lease is the gift that keeps on giving. Put aside for the moment the fact the parking meters are a bad type of asset for a long term lease in the first place. Even ignoring this, this deal continues to be Exhibit A in What Not to Do for privatization.

Recently the parking meter lessee claimed $13.5 million dollars in compensation for just one year’s worth of allowances for free handicapped parking. Over the course of the lease and with inflation at 3%, that would be over $3.3 billion paid to the vendor just for this!!! Figure in a discount rate of 12%* and that’s a net present value of $173 million. Rahm Emanuel is strongly disputing the payment, but the fact that he’s quietly pushed legislation in Springfield that would end free parking except for the most disabled is almost an implicit admission that the compensation claim is valid.

Now the Sun-Times reports that the vendor is demanding an additional $14 million in compensation for meter closures – and that just for the first nine months of 2011. Just as a refresher, whenever the city closes meters temporarily for construction, a street festival, or a NATO conference, it has to compensate the vendor for lost revenue if the duration exceeds the contractually agreed to closure allowance. Obviously the allowance wasn’t sufficient as this compensation on an annualized basis would be $18.6 million. With 3% inflation over the 72 years left on the contract, that would be $4.6 billion!!! Again, with a 12% discount rate that’s $238 million.

So if these compensation claims hold up, here’s the math for Chicago. The city took an asset that generated $23.8 million in revenue for the city and converted it into one where the city has to pay $32.1 million annual in compensation to the vendor. This is on top of the meter money the vendor gets to collect for the next 72 years.

In return for this, the city got $1.1 billion, which it promptly spent to paper over budget deficits. But even so, given the net present value of $411 million in compensation payments alone to the vendor, the city really only got about $740 million for the meters!

Now the compensation may be adjusted by legislation, arbitration, or negotiation. And these are back of the envelope calculations to be sure. You might prefer different assumptions around inflation and discount rates. But whatever the case, clearly this is a whole huge steaming pile of Bad News for the city.

The Sun-Times also reports that Rahm is talking tough on parking meters and plans to strongly dispute these payments. But they fail to ask the simple and obvious question: Why doesn’t Rahm unwind this disaster of a deal?

Yes, the parking meter deal can’t be cancelled under the terms of the contract. But I’m talking about a negotiated solution, which I’ve written about elsewhere. Whether my plan could work or not, I find it difficult to believe a guy like Rahm, a guy who doesn’t believe in the Can’t Do mindset, who actually is tackling structural problems like the deficit and pensions, couldn’t find a way to get out of this deal if he wanted to.

Why he doesn’t is a complete mystery to me. I’m assuming he must have at least looked at it. But I for one would like to know why he isn’t pursuing it. Especially since the alternative is dealing with the fallout from a disastrous deal for the next 72 years running. Hopefully this latest thorn in his side will convince Rahm to bite the bullet and do the right thing for Chicago by cancelling this lease.

Related:
Can Chicago Get Out of Its Parking Meter Lease?
Yet Another Privatization Debacle in Chicago
Three Years Down, 72 More Years to Go on Chicago’s Parking Meter Lease
Parking Meters and the Perils of Privatization

There is also lots of good parking meter coverage from the Parking Ticket Geek over at The Expired Meter.

* 12% is the mid-point of the range of discount rates suggested by William Blair, the city’s advisor on the parking meter lease, to be applied to meter revenues in valuing the system. So this is a very fair rate to use, though some have argued for a lower discount rate.

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

Infographics of the Week: Social Media Neighborhoods, Civic Change

For my email subscribers who missed this update, the OECD report on Chicago actually now is available online. Thanks to Jim Russell for pointing this out.

Livehoods

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new way of looking at neighborhood definitions they call livehoods that determines de facto neighborhoods using an algorithm that looks at Foursquare checkins. It’s pretty cool, especially as the maps they generate are interactive. Here’s a static shot of San Francisco though to show you want they look like:

Maps are currently available for San Francisco, New York, and (of course), Pittsburgh, with more to come.

I found this via the excellent Flowing Data blog that I’d encourage any data visualization geeks to check out.

Think, Act, Impact Indianapolis

Another interesting infographic comes to us from the folks at People for Urban Progress. They put together an infographic showing how things get done in Indianapolis city government. If the zoomable image embedded below doesn’t display, click here to check it out on PUP’s site.

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

Eduardo Paes on the Four Commandments of Cities

Rio de Janeiro mayor Eduardo Paes gave a TED Talk this year on his “four commandments” of cities, which you can watch below. If you are in Google Reader or similar platform, it won’t display for you, so click here to watch.

Sunday, May 6th, 2012

The OECD Reviews Chicago

Update 5/20/12: This post has been edited to reflect a correction. Please see here for details.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is an international organization that has its roots in the administration of Marshall Plan aid to rebuild Europe after World War II. The OECD was invited by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce* to perform a “territorial review” of Chicago’s regional economy. I believe this is the first such review the OECD has ever undertaken in the United States. The results were released a couple months ago. The Chicagoland Chamber graciously sent me a copy. (The report is available online here – thx Jim Russell for the link). I did a read through of this inch-thick, 332-page report and wanted to share a few observations about it. As the quote at the top might indicate, this report, like Rahm Emanuel’s economic strategy, was fairly gloomy. My points will be topical and not an integrated narrative as I did not get to undertake as thorough a review as I might like.

Interesting Statistics

The OECD review amassed quite a bit of interesting statistical data on Chicago and puts them in the context of other major cities in the 34 countries that comprise in the OECD. I think that by itself made the review worth doing. I might suggest other cities take a look at this to determine if such a study would be relevant to them, particularly as international comparisons can be difficult to pull off.

This report is a goldmine of stats and there’s way too much to list here, but a few things that jumped out at me:

• The OECD report benchmarked labor productivity, which is less commonly looked at in economic studies. Chicago’s is above average but growing more slowly than average.
• Chicago has trailed the nation in job growth. Had Chicago simply matched the national average in job growth since 1990, the region would have 600,000 more jobs than it does today.
• There was quite a bit of sectoral analysis of Chicago’s economy. In fact, they actually normalize the sectoral composition of Chicago’s economy when looking at job growth to see if its under performance in job growth was due to concentration in slow growing sectors – but it was not.
• Chicago is known for having America’s second largest business district, but it ranks only fifth out of the top ten regions in America for the percentage of its jobs in the core city. Between 1960 and 1990, over 96% of new regional jobs were created outside downtown.
• There were many other interesting statistics around labor force participation, mobility of educated labor, elderly dependency ratios, educational attainment, poverty, patents, the structure of governments, taxation, etc.

Excess High End Talent

According to the OECD, Chicago suffers from a skills mismatch in its workforce. This is not just true at the bottom end of the economy as might be expected, but also at the top end, where there is a surplus of highly skilled labor:

At the high end, there is a large pool of high-skilled, highly educated workers, in principle more than sufficient to fill the jobs available at that level … at the high-skill end, data for the tri-state region points to an apparent oversupply.

To some extent this shouldn’t be a surprise. Chicago is a desirable city for people to live in, particularly for educated workers inside its heartland catchment area. As with other big city talent magnets, the economy doesn’t always supply the right employment for all the people who want to live there. The many articles about unemployment in Portland, for example, illustrates this, and Chicago is similar. In that regard, you might see the skills surplus as a sign of local strength.

However, the skill concentration in Chicago isn’t producing the type of high end innovation economy seen elsewhere. As the OECD notes, “Indicators suggest that the Chicago Tri-State metro-region does not rank as highly among the US knowledge hubs as one might expect, given the size of its economy and population and its concentration of world-class research universities.”

Also, Chicago may not be as attractive a talent hub as its aggregate numbers indicate. Again per the OECD:

To be sure, the Chicago Tri-State metro-region remains an attractive place for many migrants, but it is less attractive than many of its US metro-region peers. Moreover, if the analysis is confined to highly educated people of prime working age (25+, with at least a bachelor’s degree), then the picture is even more problematic. During 2005-09, more such people moved into the area than left it, but the net gain was relatively small compared with other large US metro-regions. Los Angeles, for example, benefited from a net gain of nearly 80,000 highly educated people in 2009, compared with 3,500 for the Chicago Tri-State metro-region.

When you under-perform as a talent magnet and still can’t put high skilled labor to good use, that’s a definite sign of trouble. This was one thing that was eye opening for me in the study as I’d previously assumed the high end of the market was in pretty good shape and that skill mismatch problems were the result of a large under-educated population vs. open jobs requiring mid-tier skills.

Policy Prescriptions

The OECD’s recommendations were not nearly as strong as its assessment of the region’s conditions. This shouldn’t be surprising as it is easy to look at data and see what may be wrong, but it is not always obvious what to do about it. The recommendations fall into five broad categories:

• Better Skills Matching
• Improving Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• Investments in Transportation and Logistics
• More Green Industry Growth
• More Effective Institutional Arrangements

First off, including “green growth” as one of only five major chapter headings is a joke. The aggregate number of jobs identified as specifically green is small. And as I’ve noted many times, there’s no such thing as green industry. Pretty soon there will just be industry again – it will all be green. So if Chicago and the US aren’t doing well at today’s industries, why would we think they would do any better at tomorrow’s? “Green” isn’t some sort of fairy dust you can sprinkle on and work wonders with. If anything, the acceleration of transition to more green practices will only drive more manufacturing offshore, exactly as it did with light bulbs. The track record of trying to create “green jobs” almost everywhere has been poor and has failed to live up to the hype, so I can’t believe the OECD is doubling down on this snake oil.

For the other areas, the OECD doesn’t break much new ground, though does highlight some interesting international case studies of regions getting it right. The sections more or less regurgitate the laundry list of organizations and initiatives already in place, then tag on “do more and coordinate better.” Examples include, “create region-wide capacity to match skills supply with demand” and “broaden the innovation focus [to include] non-science-and-technology-based innovation.”

By contrast, there was little focus on what counterproductive initiatives might be trimmed. While, for example, the report notes that many of the excessive numbers of local governmental units probably should be eliminated or merged, it doesn’t really look at how many of the alphabet soup of various non-governmental civic development groups might likewise be better off euthanized. Given the unified civic leadership nexus of Chicago, this should in theory be much easier than killing off governments, which are famously resistant to elimination. It’s hard for civic sector leadership to scold state legislatures about the need to consolidate when they can’t even do it themselves. This shows that the OECD had to deal with local political reality, so it probably pulled a lot punches in the recommendations. Statements of raw flattery such as “All key public and private stakeholders are keenly aware of what needs to be done to address these issues effectively” show the extent to which the OECD wanted to avoid ruffling feathers and challenging the Chicagoland status quo, which is disappointing.

I might also take issue with the way the problems were attributed to these structural factors without addressing at any great length many of the clear drivers of Chicago’s under-performance. For example, Chicago is the regional capital of a greater Midwest that has been struggling as a whole. It’s tough to swim upstream against that. (I’ll have more to say on other underlying factors in a subsequent analysis of my own).

In short, this report got it half right in giving us a very good look at the current conditions, strengths, challenges, and international comparisons. Where it lagged was in fully articulating the structural landscape driving the under-performance and developing compelling strategies for turning the ship around. Still, if I were a region out there looking for a good snapshot of where I stood in the marketplace, the OECD would be on my list of people to call.

* Disclosure: I won a competition sponsored by the Chicagoland Chamber in 2009.

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

Venice In a Day

Here’s your latest time lapse, this one a look at Venice in a day. As always, it’s worth watching full screen in high def. If the video doesn’t display for you, click here.

h/t Likecool

Sunday, April 29th, 2012

Replay: Megaregions – A Review by Aaron M. Renn

This review of the book Megaregions, edited by Georgia Institute of Technology Professor Catherine L. Ross, is the second in my three part series on megaregions. I put my cards on the table in my post with initial skepticism about the usefulness of the concept. I will follow this up with a look at potential applications of megaregionalism in the Midwest.

I was very struck by the quote at the top when reading the book. How often to do you find people questioning the very validity of the topic at hand when writing a piece for a book on it? The fact that Ross brings in people who are willing to ask tough questions about megaregions is a testament to her intellectual integrity. It would have been very easy to simply glom onto a topic that shows some early stage notions of being popular in the world at large and trying to flog it for all it was worth. Indeed, Ross is known on this topic, but here she takes an opportunity to shine a light on this emerging concept to see what she might find without excessive boosterism on the subject. As she notes herself in the book, “The quality of a new idea can be judged by the possibilities it creates, especially when such possibilities stimulate new and unbounded interpretations and allow more innovative and beneficial outcomes.” I see this book as dedicated to exploring some of those possibilities and trying to collect and develop frameworks for understanding it and applying it.

The book consists of thirteen chapters, each written by different authors, exploring some aspect of the topic, including looks at Europe and Asia. I will focus primarily on the United States, but don’t want to mislead into thinking this is a US only book.

One of the key questions to answer is, just what the heck is a megaregion? There are a few definitions, but the one I thought was best came from America 2050, a project of New York’s Regional Plan Association. They describe it as “a large, connected network of metropolitan areas that are joined together by environmental, cultural, infrastructural, and functional characteristics.” In short, it is a collection of linked metro areas in a given region. There is an entire chapter in the book devoted to ways to identify and delineate megaregions. And, of course, map them. Here’s the map America 2050 created using their approach:

A few things jump out from this map. First, the megaregion is really an eastern US concept. West of Texas, most of these regions have one main dominant metro, possibility with a satellite or two. The exception the Pacific Northwest “Cascadia” region. Second, the megaregion concept relies heavily on intuitive eyeball appeal. That is, we look at the map and see these clusters of regions and it just seems to make sense that they are related, apart from any academic methodology of boundary delineation. That’s not to say there isn’t logic behind the map, but I believe a lot of the popular appeal comes from its intuitive plausibility. America 2050 does a great job of recognizing this when they reference the cultural aspects of the megaregion. We think of, for example, the Midwest and Northeast as having distinct regional history, culture, values, and economic structures. This powerfully reinforces the intuitive appeal of megaregions. The idea is that we have cities in close proximity, with a lot of common culture and problems, so wouldn’t it be great if they figured out how to work together to solve them?

America 2050 doesn’t have the only map going. Richard Florida, a leading popular exponent of megaregions who wrote a paper on the subject with Tim Gulden and Charlotta Mellander called “The Rise of the Mega-Region“, used images of light emissions from the space to draw boundaries of areas that seemed continuously developed. Here’s his map:

Florida’s definition is based on continuously built up areas, but doesn’t necessarily imply any functional integration, though he has posited this is the case.

And here is the map that is being distributed with the Ross book’s promo materials:

Reading the book and looking at these maps really crystallized in my mind possibly the biggest appeal of megaregions to federal level planners in the Unites States and Europe, even though I have never seen it actually stated anywhere. Namely, megaregions are a convenient abstraction for federal level thinkers to make sense out of the large number of diverse metro areas in America and Europe.

Think about it, there are a huge number of metro areas in the United States. There are a bit over 50 metro areas of over one million people. The Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program deals with the top 100 metros in America. These numbers are simply too high to give proper attention to each.

I’ve championed the notion that there is no one size fits all urban policy and that cities need to develop unique strategies and solutions based on their unique local context (see, “The Mayor as CEO” for instance). But think about it from the standpoint of a think tank in Washington or New York, or from that of Adolfo Carrión, director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs. How do you cope with policies for 250, 100, or even 50 metros? It would be extremely difficult. But it is certainly feasible think about 10-12 megaregions. I think that’s one reason why people so much want there to be validity to the megaregion concept. It provides a very convenient intermediate level of abstraction between the large scale United States (or Europe) and the fine grained detail of individual metro areas.

Brookings did this by positing a “Great Lakes” region to help organize a portion of its thinking. And I did too. As someone who has expressed skepticism on megaregions, I’ve got to admit that my own blog is to some extent a product of that thinking. One of the keys to its success was to pick a topic scope greater than the individual city (and thus to have more than purely parochial interest) but smaller than the nation (where I likely would never have been able to gain traction amongst long established big names). The 12 one million plus metros I focus on is conveniently similar to the total number of megaregions in the US (and the 12 Florida identifies in Europe). And I’ve been able to extrapolate out lessons from them that are relevant cross-regionally, and also to a broader audience as well. The metros of the Midwest actually have a lot of diversity. The strengths, weaknessnes, challenges, and opportunities of, say, Chicago, Detroit, and Columbus are radically different. They require very different policy approaches. Nevertheless, there seems to be some benefit in thinking about them together.

So apart from any real world manifestation megaregions might have, they are an important organizational construct in creating a hierarchy in any sort of large, multi-city geography like the United States or Europe. Megaregions enable people to conceptualize and manage these complex, fine grained territories. It is applying to metro areas the same regional aggregation concept used for functions like the Federal Reserve System (12 regional fed banks) or the federal district court system (11 appellate districts). That is, megaregions are necessary purely as a level in the hierarchy, even if they prove to be a phantom level. They can be defended purely on the basis of organizational and managerial theory even if they have no other application. Indeed, the fact that people persist in trying to find applications for them despite the lack of clear cut success to date shows that at some level they intuitively understand this organizational need.

Robert E. Lang and Arthur C. Nelson had a chapter that hints at this as well, noting that the mere act of formalizing a construct by the government causes people to start paying attention to it. Their example is how the OMB created the construct of “micropolitan areas”. Clearly the idea is that if the federal government created official megaregion definitions, and reported data against it, the concept would take on a life of its own by virtue of that. (Data collection would likely be trivial since megaregions would no doubt be made up of counties, such as by creating a layer above Economic Area). Their idea seems more to create something called a megapolitan area rather than a megaregion, however.

Tridig Banerjee has an interesting chapter further trying to refine the megaregion concept by identifying types of megaregions along a two by two matrix (which, with my management consulting background, I of course love). The dimensions are “galaxy” vs. “corridor” and “mosaic” vs. “network” (hierarchical). The Midwest would be a galaxy-network. Scott Campbell has a chapter asking a number of useful questions, such as the one at the top of this piece.

Ross herself seems particularly interested in the transportation aspects of megaregions, and this is one where it seems to have the most direct applicability. For example, most of the various high speed rail proposals out there revolve around megaregions. There are shared corridors of interest, such as interstate highways, and other important features, such as the Great Lakes. The question is whether these are items of relevance to a megaregion properly so-called, or if they are just the focus of ad-hoc “coalitions of the willing”. I actually suspect the latter as there are many of these (think of the I-69 and I-35 NAFTA corridor coalitions for example, or California’s high speed rail proposal) that exist independently of megaregions. In my view a megaregion would need to represent some true community of interest, in the way that a metro region does, to represent some sort of truly functional element, and I haven’t seen it yet. In fact, I have argued that even things like the Midwest high speed rail network shouldn’t be thought of as a network, but rather as a series of point to point connections linking outlying areas to Chicago. Chicago will not be an HSR hub in the way that O’Hare is a hub – that is, for traffic interchange. Indeed, in we see this in Europe, where there is very little transfer traffic of this type. There seems to be something to this megaregional transportation idea, but I’m not sure what is yet.

The piece I found most compelling was the chapter by Saskia Sassen. In my original piece on megaregions I noted that lots of people talk about them, but no one says what it is we should actually do with them in order to create real value. Sassen suggests how this might happen. Here’s an excerpt:

I argue that the specific advantages of the megaregional scale consist of and arise from the coexistence in one regional space of multiple types of agglomeration economies. These types of agglomeration economies are distributed across diverse economic spaces and geographic scales: central business districts, office parks, science parks, the transportation and housing efficiencies derived from large (but not too large) commuter belts, low-cost manufacturing districts (today often offshore), tourism destinations, specialized branches of agriculture (e.g., horticulture or organically grown food), and the complex kinds of agglomeration economies evident in global cities. Each of these spaces evinces distinct agglomeration economies and, empirically at least, is found in diverse types of geographic settings, from urban to rural, from local to global.

The thesis is that a megaregion is sufficiently large and diverse to accommodate a far broader range of types of agglomeration economies and geographic settings than it typically does today. This would take the advantages of megaregional location beyond the notion of urbanization economies. A megaregion can then be seen as a scale that can benefit from the fact that our complex economies need diverse types of agglomeration economies and geographic settings, from extremely high-agglomeration economies evinced by specialized advanced corporate services to fairly modest economies evinced by suburban office parks and regional labor-intensive low-wage manufacturing. It can incorporate this diversity into a single economic megazone. Indeed, in principle, it could create conditions for the return of particular activities now outsourced to other regions or to foreign locations.

I wrote a four part series in early 2009 called “Reconnecting the Hinterland” which was all about searching for value in attempting to foster a re-created interlinked economy between Chicago and the rest of the Midwest. An answer to Sassen’s question is actually what I was looking for. The simplified idea being, to find some economic activities in which geographic proximity, though not necessarily always in a dense, face to face setting like downtown Chicago, is a source of value; to ask, is there some medium between the “spiky world” of Manhattan and the Loop and the “flat world” of China and India?

I don’t want to jump the gun and go into detail, since that is a part of the next part in this series, but if you are interested, you might want two check out two pieces in that series, “Metropolitan Linkages” (about extended labor markets) and “Onshore Outsourcing“.

One curious omission from this book was the difference between megaregional and non-megaregional locations and whether there was some benefit to being in a megaregion. I can’t help but notice that in the Midwest, Kansas City (in most maps) and Des Moines are both outside of the megaregion yet are two the of the absolute best performing metro areas. Not being part of a megaregion does not appear to have hurt them any. I’d be interested to see some analysis on this.

In any case, for those interested in these things, this is a nice survey book to pick up. It is accessible to the general educated public, but is written in the style beloved of academics, so is likely to be very dry to all but those who are wonky about this stuff. Read the Sassen excerpt to get a sense of what is in store. For those who are in the planning or related fields, it is worthwhile to educate yourself on the megaregion concept to be able to parse a lot of the rhetoric out there about it. Reading this book would be a good way to do so.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, to give a perspective from one of the all time great screedmasters on this subject:

Instead of creating the Regional City, the forces that automatically pumped pumped highways and motor cars and real estate development into the open country have produced the formless exudation. Those who are using verbal magic to to turn this conglomeration into an organic entity are only fooling themelves. To call the resulting mass “Megalopolis”, or to suggest that changes in spatial scale, with swift transportation, in itself is sufficient to produce a new and better urban form, is to overlook the complex nature of the city. The actual coalescence of urban tissue now taken by many sociologists to be a final stage in city development, is not in fact a new sort of city, but an anti-city. As in the concept of anti-matter, the anti-city annihilates the city whenever it collides with it.

Don’t hold back Lewis, tell us how you really feel.

This post original appeared on December 6, 2009.

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Common Driver Behaviors

Steve Vance, who co-runs the Chicago transport blog Grid Chicago, is a huge bicycle advocate. He put together the following short video from clips he shot cycling around the city showing how drivers commonly behave on the streets of the city. If the video doesn’t display, click here.

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

More Parking Madness in Providence

As a quick addendum to my Providence series, here’s a graphic put together by Greater City Providence that highlights all the parking in downtown Providence. As in most downtowns, it’s pretty staggering.

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