Reducing Livability: How Sustainability Planning Threatens the American Dream

This report posits that sustainability plans are infringing on people's rights and preventing them from securing the type of housing they desire

The Perfect Firestorm: Bringing Forest Service Wildfire Costs under Control

Blessed and cursed by a Congress that gives it a virtual if not literal blank check for fire protection, the Forest Service's fire spending is out of control. Prodded by a centralized planning and budgeting process, the agency's expensive, onesize- fits-all approach to wildfire does not fit the extremely diverse 193 million acres of national forests. The Forest Service's program -- which consists of spending close to $300 million per year treating hazardous fuels and as much as$2 billion a year preparing for and suppressing fires -- will not restore the national forests to health or end catastrophic fire in most of those forests. In many forests it may do more harm than good. Forest Service plans are based on the notion that western national forests suffer from an unnatural accumulation of hazardous fuels. In fact, that is probably true for no more than about 15 percent of those forests. The appropriate treatments on the remaining 85 percent may be as diverse as the forests themselves. Significant structural changes in the Forest Service are essential to control fire costs. Those changes should divorce the agency, or at least its fire program, from Congress's blank check. They should also decentralize decisionmaking so local decisions will respond to local economic and ecological conditions. This paper suggests several possible structural changes, including:Cost-containment programs (effectively the current direction);Focusing efforts on the wildland-urban interface, which is mostly nonfederal land; Relying on private insurance to fund (and control the costs of) emergency fire suppression; Turning national forest fire control over to state and local fire protection districts; Turning national forests into fiduciary trusts funded exclusively out of their own user fees; and Abolishing the Forest Service and turning the lands over to the states. Because the actual situation varies greatly from one region to another, it may be that no one of these solutions will work for all federal lands. To find the solution or solutions that work best, Congress should apply some or all of these alternatives to one or more national forests on an experimental basis. Such experiments will help point the way to future wildfire management

Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

Far from protecting the environment, most rail transit lines use more energy per passenger mile, and many generate more greenhouse gases, than the average passenger automobile. Rail transit provides no guarantee that a city will save energy or meet greenhouse gas targets. While most rail transit uses less energy than buses, rail transit does not operate in a vacuum: transit agencies supplement it with extensive feeder bus operations. Those feeder buses tend to have low ridership, so they have high energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile. The result is that, when new rail transit lines open, the transit systems as a whole can end up consuming more energy, per passenger mile, than they did before. Even where rail transit operations save a little energy, the construction of rail transit lines consumes huge amounts of energy and emits large volumes of greenhouse gases. In most cases, many decades of energy savings would be needed to repay the energy cost of construction. Rail transit attempts to improve the environment by changing people's behavior so that they drive less. Such behavioral efforts have been far less successful than technical solutions to toxic air pollution and other environmental problems associated with automobiles. Similarly, technical alternatives to rail transit can do far more to reduce energy use and CO2 outputs than rail transit, at a far lower cost. Such alternatives include the following: Powering buses with hybrid-electric motors, biofuels, and -- where it comes from nonfossil fuel sources -- electricity;Concentrating bus service on heavily used routes and using smaller buses during offpeak periods and in areas with low demand for transit service;Building new roads, using variable toll systems, and coordinating traffic signals to relieve the highway congestion that wastes nearly 3 billion gallons of fuel each year;Encouraging people to purchase more fuel-efficient cars. Getting 1 percent of commuters to switch to hybrid-electric cars will cost less and do more to save energy than getting 1 percent to switch to public transit. If oil is truly scarce, rising prices will lead people to buy more fuel-efficient cars. But states and locales that want to save even more energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions will find the above alternatives far superior to rail transit

Roadmap to Gridlock: The Failure of Long-Range Metropolitan Transportation Planning

Federal law requires metropolitan planning organizations in urban areas of more than 50,000 people to write long-range (20- to 30- year) metropolitan transportation plans and to revise or update those plans every 4 to 5 years. A review of plans for more than 75 of the nation's largest metropolitan areas reveals that virtually all of them fail to follow standard planning methods. As a result, taxpayers and travelers have little assurance that the plans make effective use of available resources to reduce congestion, maximize mobility, and provide safe transportation facilities. Nearly half the plans reviewed here are not cost effective in meeting transportation goals. These plans rely heavily on behavioral tools such as land-use regulation, subsidies to dense or mixed-use developments, and construction of expensive rail transit lines. Nearly 40 years of experience with such tools has shown that they are expensive but provide negligible transportation benefits. Long-range transportation planning necessarily depends on uncertain forecasts. Planners also set qualitative goals such as "vibrant communities" and quantifiable but incomparable goals such as "protecting historic resources." Such vagaries result in a politicized process that cannot hope to find the most effective transportation solutions. Thus, long-range planning has contributed to, rather than prevented, the hextupling of congestion American urban areas have suffered since 1982. Ideally, the federal government should not be in the business of funding local transportation and dictating local transportation policies. At the least, Congress should repeal long-range transportation planning requirements in the next reauthorization of federal surface transportation funding. Instead, metropolitan transportation organizations should focus planning on the short term (5 years), and concentrate on quantifiable factors that are directly related to transportation, including safety and congestion relief

Debunking Portland: The City That Doesn't Work

Though many people consider Portland, Oregon, a model of 21st-century urban planning, the region's integrated land-use and transportation plans have greatly reduced the area's livability. To halt urban sprawl and reduce people's dependence on the automobile, Portland's plans use an urban-growth boundary to greatly increase the area's population density, spend most of the region's transportation funds on various rail transit projects, and promote construction of scores of high-density, mixed-use developments. When judged by the results rather than the intentions, the costs of Portland's planning far outweigh the benefits. Planners made housing unaffordable to force more people to live in multifamily housing or in homes on tiny lots. They allowed congestion to increase to near-gridlock levels to force more people to ride the region's expensive rail transit lines. They diverted billions of dollars of taxes from schools, fire, public health, and other essential services to subsidize the construction of transit and high-density housing projects. Those high costs have not produced the utopia planners promised. Far from curbing sprawl, high housing prices led tens of thousands of families to move to Vancouver, Washington, and other cities outside the region's authority. Far from reducing driving, rail transit has actually reduced the share of travel using transit from what it was in 1980. And developers have found that so-called transit-oriented developments only work when they include plenty of parking. Portland-area residents have expressed their opposition to these plans by voting against light rail and density and voting for a property-rights measure that allows landowners to claim either compensation or waivers for land-use rules passed since they purchased their property. Opposition turned to anger when a 2004 scandal revealed that an insider network known as the "light-rail mafia" had manipulated the planning process to direct rail construction contracts and urban-renewal subsidies to themselves. These problems are all the predictable result of a process that gives a few people enormous power over an entire urban area. Portland should dismantle its planning programs, and other cities that want to maintain their livability would do well to study Portland as an example of how not to plan

Rails Won't Save America

Rising gas prices and concerns about greenhouse gases have stimulated calls to build more rail transit lines in urban areas, increase subsidies to Amtrak, and construct a large-scale intercity high-speed rail system. These megaprojects will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but they won't save energy or significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Although media reports suggest that many people are taking public transit instead of driving, actual numbers show that recent increases in transit ridership account for only 3 percent of the decline in urban driving. Also, contrary to popular belief, rail transit does not save energy. Many light-rail operations use more energy per passenger mile than the average sport utility vehicle, and almost none uses less than a fuel-efficient car such as a Toyota Prius. People who respond to high fuel prices by taking transit are not saving energy; they are merely imposing their energy costs on someone else. Rail transportation is also much more heavily subsidized than other forms of travel. Where highway subsidies average less than a penny per passenger mile, and subsidies to flying are even lower, Amtrak costs taxpayers 22 cents per passenger mile and urban transit costs 61 cents per passenger mile.Even if rail transport did save energy, spending more money on rail will get few people out of their cars. People who want to save energy should plan to buy more fuel-efficient cars and encourage cities to invest in traffic signal coordination, which can save far more energy at a tiny fraction of the cost of building new rail transport lines

Do You Know the Way to L.A.? San Jose Shows How to Turn an Urban Area into Los Angeles in Three Stressful Decades

California cities have the least affordable housing and the most congested traffic in the nation. California's housing crisis results directly from several little-known state institutions, including local agency formation commissions (LAFCos), which regulate annexations and the formation of new cities and service districts; the California Environmental Quality Act, which imposes high costs on new developments; and a 1971 state planning law that effectively entitles any resident in the state to a say in how property owners in the state use their land. Cities such as San Jose have manipulated these institutions and laws with the goal of maximizing their tax revenues. Meanwhile, California's transportation planning has allowed transit agencies, such as San Jose's Valley Transportation Authority and Los Angeles' Metropolitan Transportation Authority, to hijack tax revenues that were originally dedicated to highways so they can build rail empires that will do little or nothing to relieve congestion. New highway construction in the 1990s cut San Jose congestion in half, but congestion is again worsening as funds once spent on highways are now diverted to expensive and little-used rail transit projects. California should change its planning laws to forbid cities and counties from conspiring to drive up housing prices in order to maximize tax revenues. California and its urban areas should also fund transportation out of user fees instead of taxes, thus making transportation more responsive to the needs of users instead of politically powerful special interest groups. Other states should avoid passing laws that create similar conditions. These recommendations and eight others in this report will greatly improve the livability of San Jose and other California urban areas

The Planning Tax: The Case against Regional Growth-Management Planning

Regional growth-management planning makes housing unaffordable and contributes to a business-unfriendly environment that slows economic growth. The high housing prices caused by growth-management planning were an essential element of the housing bubble that has recently shaken our economy: for the most part, this bubble was limited to urban regions with growth-management planning. In 2006, the price of a median home in the 10 states that have passed laws requiring local governments to do growth-management planning was five times the median family income in those states. At that price, a median family devoting 31 percent of its income (the maximum allowed for FHA-insured loans) to a mortgage at 6 percent, with a 10 percent down payment, could not pay off the mortgage on a median home in less than 59 years. In contrast, a median home in the 22 states that have no growth-management laws or institutions cost only 2.7 times the median family income. This meant a family could pay off a home in just 12.5 years. Growth-management tools such as urban-growth boundaries, adequate-public-facilities ordinances, and growth limits all drive up the cost of housing by artificially restricting the amount of land available or the number of permits granted for home construction. On average, homebuyers in 2006 had to pay $130,000 more for every home sold in states with mandatory growth-management planning than they would have had to pay if home price-to-income ratios were less than 3. This is, in effect, a planning tax that increases the costs of retail, commercial, and industrial developments as well as housing.The key to keeping housing affordable is the presence of large amounts of relatively unregulated vacant land that can be developed for housing and other purposes. The availability of such low-cost land encourages cities to keep housing affordable within their boundaries. But when state or other planning institutions allow cities to gain control over the rate of development of rural areas, they lose this incentive, and housing quickly becomes unaffordable. States with growth-management laws should repeal them, and other states should avoid passing them

A Matter of Trust: Why Congress Should Turn Federal Lands into Fiduciary Trusts

The Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service collectively manage well over a quarter of the land in the United States. Although everyone agrees that the lands and resources managed by these agencies are exceedingly valuable, the lands collectively cost taxpayers around $7 billion per year. Several Cato Institute studies have called for privatization of the public lands, but this idea is strongly resisted by environmentalists, recreationists, and other users of public land. An alternative policy that will both enhance the values sought by environmentalists and improve the fiscal management of the lands is to turn them into fiduciary trusts. Under this proposal, the U.S. would retain title to the lands, but the rules under which they would be governed would be very different. Fiduciary trusts are based on hundreds of years of British and American common law that ensures that trustees preserve and protect the value of the resources they manage, keep them productive, and disclose the full costs and benefits of their management. For trust law to apply, public land trusts must be based on a law written by Congress that clearly defines the trustees, the beneficiaries, and a specific mission or missions for the trusts. Congress should create two types of trusts. Market trusts would have a mission of maximizing revenue while preserving the productive capacity of the land. To achieve this mission, Congress should allow them to charge fair market value for all resources. Nonmarket trusts would have a mission of maximizing the preservation and, as appropriate, restoration of natural ecosystems and cultural resources on the public lands. Each pair of market and nonmarket trusts would jointly manage all federal lands in one of about a hundred ecoregions. Each ecoregion would have about 5 to 10 million acres of federal land that might include forests, parks, refuges, and other public lands. Trustees would be elected by a friends' association that anyone would be welcome to join. Trusts would be funded out of the user fees they collect, with some retained by the market trust and some given to the nonmarket trust. In some cases, excess user fees would be returned to the U.S. Treasury. The trust idea would significantly improve both fiscal and environmental management of the public lands. Congress should begin to implement this idea by testing it on selected national forests, parks, and other federal lands

High-Speed Rail: The Wrong Road for America

In the face of high energy prices and concerns about global warming, environmentalists and planners offer high-speed rail as an environmentally friendly alternative to driving and air travel. California, Florida, the Midwest, and other parts of the country are actively considering specific high-speed rail plans. Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110-to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take few cars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future. Nor are high-speed rail lines particularly environmentally friendly. Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road. California planners forecast that high-speed rail would reduce pollutionand greenhouse gas emissions by amere 0.7 to 1.5 percent -- but only if ridership reached the high end of projected levels. Lower ridership would nullify energy savings and pollution reductions. These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail's market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn't work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States? As megaprojects -- the California high-speed rail is projected to cost $33 to$37 billion -- high-speed rail plans pose serious risks for taxpayers. Costs of recent rail projects in Denver and Seattle are running 60 to 100 percent above projections. Once construction begins, politicians will feel obligated to throw good taxpayers' money after bad. Once projects are completed , most plans call for them to be turned over to private companies that will keep any operational profits,while taxpayers will remain vulnerable if the trains lose money. In short, high-speed rail proposals are high cost, high-risk megaprojects that promise little or no congestion relief, energy savings, or other environmental benefits. Taxpayers and politicians should be wary of any transportation projects that cannot be paid for out of user fees