Have you ever tried to break the news to a friend that her special someone is cheating on her? Doesn’t go so well, does it? Unfortunately, our friend Jake has to board a plane from Dallas to Austin, book a room at what appears to be a Holidome or Hyatt (what happened with The Bachelorette discount at the Fairmount?), and learns that lesson the hard way–in a chambray shirt, no less. But we’ll get to all that and more from last night’s dramatic painful episode after the jump.
Loyal FrontBurnervians will remember my new favorite intern, Bonathan. Remember? The guy who described his financial situation as “comfortable”? Yeah, that’s him.
Anyway, Nancy sent him on an errand, and Bonathan filed a report on it. If you have a few minutes, you should read it:
Nancy Update: If you’d like to respond to Bonathon’s review, we offer all-the-comments-you- can-type here.
A big congratulations to D CEO columnist and contributing editor John G. Browning for cleaning up at the Houston Press Club’s statewide Lone Star Awards on Friday. Browning, who holds a day job as attorney/partner in Gordon & Rees’ Dallas office, won best magazine article for his May 2008 D CEO cover story (pictured at left).
He also won print journalist of the year in the newspapers under 100,000 circulation category for “Legally Speaking,” his syndicated column. (“Legally Speaking” won first place in the newspaper commentary/criticism category, and his D CEO “Legalities” column won third in its category.)
A full list of the winning entries–which came from Fort Worth, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston–is available on the Houston Press Club site.
I can only assume that Wick has too much time on his hands and has taken to praising himself in the comments section of Unfair Park. Right now, Jim Schutze is live-blogging the City Hall corruption trial. He’s using the comments section of a single post to accomplish this task. In the comments, he uses the handle JimS. But at 11:43 today, JimS wrote the following:
Wick Allison is a very smart man who has devoted a lot of his life to this city. Disagreements about public works projects are not moral. I have made mistakes in writing about the Trinity project. Dallas is lucky to have people like Allison who give a damn about he city instead of decamping to some Hamptons-like refuge and writing about rare lettuces.
So that’s a sock puppet, right? That’s Wick. Either that, or the sheer insanity of the trial (defense lawyer: “The FBI is racist!”) has seeped into Schutze’s brain and driven him crazy. Either way, Schutze’s live blog is a must-read.
So in light of the City of Dallas experiencing a nearly $200 million dollar budget deficit, I thought I would have a little fun with numbers while we watch education, police, fire, and presumably every other necessary service get slashed while road maintenance and upkeep retain highest priority.
First of all, I should say that compared to many other cities that I have been to and worked in, Dallas is getting off light. The city is both lucky and unlucky given its defined boundaries. Many smaller cities are experiencing much more severe budgetary constraints. For example, one city of approximately 100,000 had a projected shortfall of $250,000,000 equalling $2,688 per person. And THAT number was strictly for infrastructural upkeep and maintenance (and upgrades. Can’t forget upgrayddes. That’s how I will spell it from now on whenever an engineer uses the term road improvements or upgrayddes because it is such a bastardization of terminology), meaning no new construction. Compare that number to $146 per person in Dallas. That’s nearly 20x.
Building low density sprawl had come home to roost. We simply can’t afford the level of infrastructure that sprawl expects. The primary issue is that logically and throughout history level of services and amenities increased with greater density. It makes sense, more people sharing burdens and costs, the more can be achieved with that pooled wealth. The countryside couldn’t afford sewer and roads and power, etc.
This is why I state over and over that Deep Sustainability comes in two forms, self-sufficient and very sparse (the Jeffersonian Ideal) or the very dense cities (but I expect due to material constraints this means lower scaled, but still dense building in the model of Florence, for example). As we know, the very necessitation of human settlement patterns (and community) is shared common hardships and then, in turn, quality of life improvements through gains in standard of living brought about by the economics of sharing, trading, cooperation, markets, etc.
This pattern can be traced directly to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Imagine ourselves as lonely neanderthals at the bottom of the pyramid, rising to the highest of levels during times such as the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, or the even the technological revolution of today leading to increased levels of interconnectivity. And then crash back down to the yellow in our fractured and disconnected society via the car, the television, etc.
With out new found wealth and suburban explosion, we expected the best schools and similar level of infrastructural support to follow. For a time it worked, but upkeep has proven to be the problem. The infrastructure and population density are spread so thin that we put so much pressure on such brittle apparatus that it begins to collapse due to overuse often caused by our dendritic arterial system versus a more choice-laden, adaptable and dispersive grid network and underfunding.
So getting back to why the City of Dallas’s budget shortfall is 20x less than that of smaller cities as discussed earlier, Dallas is lucky in that it is landlocked by its suburban neighbors. Dallas proper can do very little in the way of new growth, which has mostly happened in areas like Rockwall, Mansfield, and Frisco, meaning less no roads (despite everyone from the City to the State, to COG, and to TxDOT’s best efforts). So we can ideally focus our efforts on QUALITATIVE over QUANTITATIVE growth.
This is unlike Houston which annexes all of its growth. The future of these two cities can go either way from this tipping point we have reached due to their nature. Houston could become much more responsible with its growth, spending, inertia, and annexation or Dallas could be more successful as it can focus on a much smaller land area.
Where this bites Dallas in the butt, is that there are so many commuters coming in from Richardson, Plano, Arlington, Mesquite, et al., this means Dallas ends up with a very high freeway miles per capita number. Essentially because commuters’ trips to Dallas are subsidized at the expense of state and federal taxpayers, but the real cost is the burden on the well-being of the City itself.
Often when the argument of mass transit comes up, I’m both dumbfounded and frustration by the simplicity of the dollar values and supposed wastefulness that is bandied about. Such things as revenue generation, long-term maintenance, real estate values, etc. are always ignored in favor of startup costs strictly against Mass Transit. Well, how about we take a look at how much embedded wealth we have sunk into all of our roads in Dallas.
**Disclaimer: Very rough numbers.
The chart above shows the City of Dallas at .88 freeway miles per 1,000. This chart from 1999 shows freeway equivalent miles at 1.291. I’ll use this number because freeway equivalent sounds an awful lot like freeway. Call me crazy, but I’ll assume it costs something similar. Also, note how many Texas cities in the top ten. And we wanna build another one as part of the Trinity River Project? Sounds like a good plan (or a racket).
So we know that we have the freeway equivalent of 1.291 lane miles per 1,000 people, approximately 1.3 million people at a density of 3,605 per square mile. And a land area of 385 total square miles. This suggests that 1 freeway lane mile in a congested urban area can cost upwards of a $100 million multiply that over the 1678 freeway lane miles in the city and we get a cost of $167 billion or a cost of $130,000 per person.
But, what about the other roads? Since Dallas was built on mile-square arterial grids we’re going to apply this pattern to get a sense of how many overall road miles there are per capita in this city. As you can see in the graphic below, each super block is bound by 1 mile length arterials and further broken up into blocks by internal collectors or residential streets. The total perimeter equals four miles, but I’ll go with half that or 2 miles because each arterial is shared by another 1-square mile super block.
Internal to this superblock, I will estimate approximately 10 miles worth of neighborhood streets cross this block. This is more difficult to get a sense for as each superblock is subdivided differently due to geography, density, or whim. But, to assume the equivalent of five N-S and five E-W streets is pretty conservative considering that leads to about 800′ x 800′ blocks, not unusual for the ‘burbs.
At 3,605 people per square mile in the city that means that these blocks then have .00277 of residential street per capita (not unreasonable as that equals 14′ of street frontage) and .00055 arterials per capita. I’ll cost the residential streets and infrastructure at $5 million per mile (which assumes NOT a very nice streetscape) and $10 million per arterial.
If we are to extrapolate these superblock numbers over the entire city that means we have spent $7.2 billion on arterials, and $1.8 billion on residential streets and infrastructure. Add in the freeway equivalent costs and we are at $176 billion dollars JUST for construction, or $135,384.62 per Dallas resident. Did we realize we can’t afford that?
Next time somebody complains about a transit line costing X amount of dollars throw some similar numbers like that at them. We already know the difference in quality of place the two create.
Maybe to save our budget and essential city services, we can stop building or “upgraydding” roads and start building for people, not for cars.
In Amsterdam, Bicycle trips have surpassed Car Trips.
“The bicycle is the means of transport used most often in Amsterdam,” reports Bike Europe. “Between 2005 and 2007 people in the city used their bikes on average 0.87 times a day, compared to 0.84 for their cars. This is the first time that bicycle use exceeds car use.”
Brown Air, Gray People. The State of the Air: A report on air quality. Ya know, another one of those things we can’t assign a value for, so it finds no place in modern economics, so we ignore it…until we’re all dead.
Houston, which ranks number five in ozone this year, is a very unusual city. Its mayor Bill White has done something few, if any, mayors nationally have done: confronted both the state and federal environmental agencies himself for their failure to address the dangers air pollution poses to his residents. At issue is benzene, a known carcinogen. Texas does not have a legal limit for benzene, and because of it, cities with concentrations of oil refineries and chemical plants, such as Houston, suffer staggering benzene emissions. Last year, White filed a petition to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for their lack of responsiveness to industry when it comes to benzene emissions. He’s also appealed to the EPA to address the state’s Flexible Permit, which he believes is at the root of the issue for plants finagling their way past emissions limits.
Some of the key health stats from the report include:
* Six out of ten people (61.7%) in the United States live in counties that have unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution.
* Roughly six out of ten people (58%) live in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone.
* Roughly three out of ten people live in an area with unhealthy levels of short-term levels of particle pollution, which is an increase from last year’s report.
* One in six people lives in an area with unhealthy levels of year-round particle pollution
* Just under one in eight people lives in the 37 counties with unhealthy levels of all three: ozone and short-term and year-round particle pollutio.
More than tossing crumbs to the rabble, building Good Parks are Good for the Economy. (Ignore the grammatical error):
By offering free or inexpensive recreation, parks also save residents money. In Boston, for example, the study determined that the economic value of direct park use was $354 million.
The health benefits of exercise in parks offer further savings. The study calculated $19.9 million in medical savings realized by residents in Sacramento because of active recreation in parks.
According to the report, “numerous studies have shown that the more webs of human relationships a neighborhood has, the stronger, safer and more successful it is.” Well-used parks offer many ways for neighbors to get to know each other, and efforts to create, save, or care for parks create further community cohesiveness. This “social capital” can reduce a city’s costs for policing, fire protection and criminal justice. Because the economic value of social capital can’t be measured directly, the report cited as a proxy the amount of time and money residents contributed to “friends” groups and other park-oriented organizations and agencies.
But, of course, in Neo-classical economics we can’t valuate “social capital” so it gets “externalized”.
Making the Car-Free Choice. Hint: It’s much easier in San Francisco than it is in Dallas and their challenge is to drive less than 125 miles in a month??!! Wimps. Or as Tyler Durden says, “LET GO!”
That’s the idea behind the annual Car-Free Challenge sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Area nonprofit TransForm (formerly TALC –
transportation and Land Use Coalition). The Challenge’s over 160 participants pledged to drive less than 125 miles in June, much less than the Bay Area average of 540, or the U.S. average of over 1,000. Many participants contributed blog posts about their experiences on the Challenge website. More than just a group of footloose young professionals living in The Mission, challenge participants were remarkably diverse group living mostly in the Bay Area but also Sacramento, Los Angeles, and cities outside of California.
And expanding on my assumption that the Love Affair with the Car is much like Stockholm Syndrome, planetizen examines the axiom, is it a marriage or a fling?
Developers have been keen to capitalize on the advantages of car-sharing for their projects. Over 30 developments in the New York City area have recently incorporated Zipcars to their parking plan, providing a much-appreciated service to residents, and acquiring marketing benefits, tax deductions, and LEED credits along the way. With typical ratios of one car-share vehicle replacing the need for 10 to 20 privately-owned vehicles (when located adjacent to sufficient transit facilities, please see this post for more details), new residential and mixed-use developments can significantly reduce the amount of materials and land devoted to parking.
This is key as I show in my old presentation on Housing the Millennials, there are several ways to save on parking which I’ve been suggesting to local developers in the DFW market and in NYC developers are doing just that by providing car sharing services. Other ways might include offering bikes with units, vespas, zip car memberships, transit passes, etc.
The key is the realization that the car is not necessary for mobility and the parking provision was created strictly for said mobility.
Having followed Jim Schutze’s live-blogging from the corruption trial yesterday (and I hope, today), I’m sure he is employing all ten fingers and can’t spare two right now to express his opinion of me.
Look for some hoopla today from Mayor Tom and others about Dallas landing next September’s annual convention of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. It is a pretty big deal; the group’s ’09 meeting in Denver this September could attract up to 5,000 visitors and pump $10 million into the economy there. One caveat: It sure would be nice if, before the big group arrives in Big D, the Greater Dallas Hispanic Chamber of Commerce resolves the issues that have split it into (at least ) two warring factions. Definitely not the sort of image you want as a host chamber.
A few follow-ups on yesterday’s Mario Tarradell item from FB Nation, after the jump.
1. The Federal Highway Administration may not build the Trinity toll road inside the levees because of concerns that they won’t, you know, do what levees are supposed to do. That cackling sound is coming from Jim Schutze, who is sitting in a chair next to me, wearing nothing but a “Told Ya So” placard and a smile, waving two middle fingers in the general direction of Wick’s office.
2. Dallas County commish-types will vote today on whether to “take part in a regional planning effort” for the proposed inland port. Any time you got a chance to be part of something that special – I mean, good grief, this planning effort is regional – well, yeah, you’ve gotta lock that down.
3. After yesterday’s high-speed chase, there was another one this morning about 4 a.m. that lasted almost two hours, ending with a woman’s capture near White Rock Lake. Now, I’m not saying there’s a trend here, but if you see two priests driving a Ferrari doing 150-plus, I think I know what’s going on.
The link I posted earlier is now dead. Here’s NBC Channel 5’s video of the crash:
The joint was jammed Saturday night when Ernst & Young announced the winners of its regional Entrepreneur of the Year awards competition at Dallas’ Majestic Theater. E&Y’s 11 winners, who were among 34 finalists profiled in the July issue of D CEO magazine, now become eligible for consideration for E&Y’s Entrepreneur of the Year 2009 national awards,which will be announced in November at a gala in Palm Springs, Calif. Then, if they win there, they’ll be eligible for the World Entrepreneur of the Year awards in Monaco. (No word yet who will represent the other planets in the Solar System awards.) Jump for a list of the locals who made the cut.
