Posts about Sprawl

If someone has been building these elements of infrastructure for 30 years, we could call them an "expert" on building that stuff. But should they alone decide what kind of towns we should build?

People are overwhelmingly saying, wait a minute, this isn't what we want. Housing prices in walkable areas like Logan Circle, Ballston, or Silver Spring are high and still rising because a lot of people want to live there but there isn't enough supply. We have lots of single-family, detached, suburban homes but not enough apartments and townhouses a short walk from shops, parks, and transit.

People are sending clear signals through their housing choices that they want walkable urbanism. Yet most (but not all) professionals working in the field are locked in to the ways they've been trained and the way they do things. That's where we get the crazy traffic engineer adherence to "standards" even when they make little sense, as this Strong Towns video so effectively parodied.

There's an important role for experts in identifying specific steps to implement a policy. Parochial political concerns become dangerous when making small-scale choices that can enrich indviduals, where the danger of corruption becomes strong. But when it comes to deciding the big picture, overarching directions, we need officials who listen to residents, not just make decisions based on how they've always done things.

The Washingtonian analogues of those experts are the ones Bob Chase and Rich Parsons consulted on their study that aimed to tell leaders what the regional transportation priorities should be (and coincidentally mirrored those priorities they were already pushing for). I spoke with Chase and Parsons last week, and they were adamant that they were just trying to find out the views of experts, devoid of politics.

They said they wanted "a pretty balanced, professional objective study about what works and what's not working well," to "take the local jurisdiction and state perspective out of it." In selecting their anonymous experts, they said they were "looking for people who take the politics out of it, and "intentionally selected people very senior, with 20 years of experience."

That doesn't change the fact that the questions guided people toward megaprojects, and that there's plenty of evidence the list had an exurban bias. Besides having a small number of people from DC, Chase and Parsons refused to tell me which counties the "experts" lived in.

But even had their sample been broader, there's a problem with saying that senior engineers should set transportation priorities. I'd definitely prefer an engineer with 20 years of experience to design a new road or transit line over someone who lacks a professional degree. I'd also prefer to have them tell me how much it will cost and what hydrological problems might arise.

I'd even welcome their input on where to put a line, but we shouldn't be setting priorities just on that basis. A transportation engineer is not responsible for thinking about the merits of different growth patterns, or their effect on people's health and happiness, or on the environmental costs.

Remember, Jane Jacobs got regular people to step up to stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway when the "experts" were saying it was necessary. All of the conventional wisdom in the urban planning field at the time held that the road was the only way to make New York work in the modern age.

Should decisionmakers disregard input from the 23-year-old college grad who has a job at PriceWaterhouseCoopers but doesn't want to live in Fairfax County because there aren't walkable places with an urban vibe? What about the 75-year-old in Aspen Hill who's finding it harder to drive, hates that she has to travel 30 minutes to the Pike just to get to most kinds of retail, and wishes she could live in Bethesda but prohibited by expensive housing?

The Board of Trade has been pushing WMATA and local jurisdictions to excise elected officials from any decisionmaking authority on the WMATA Board. Sure, it's the experts and not the elected officials who should decide which contractor is best suited to replacing the broken track circuits. But I want officials who listen to riders to decide whether to cut weekend service. By a strictly performance-based metric, that service is relatively poor at cost recovery, but its benefits to the region go far beyond WMATA itself.

Now, with their survey of anonymous "experts," Chase and Parsons are going to be pressuring groups like the Transportation Planning Board to abdicate their traditional role in setting priorities and instead choose the megaprojects their "experts" picked, which happen to be the same ones they were already pushing for.

They'll say, as they told me, that local officials are too preoccupied with the immediate interests of their local jurisdiction to think "regionally." Instead, decisions about how to spend billions in transportation dollars over decades should go to the professionals, who won't think about the big picture of regional growth but rather just move as many cars or trains as fast as possible as far as possible.

The TPB and other officials should reject this idea. The input of professionals is useful, but far more so when those professionals can attach their names to their recommendations and everyone can weigh them knowing the biases and interests each person brings with them. The input of other people is important too, and our elected representatives, even if imperfect, are the ones best situated to make those choices.

The 2030 Group's high-powered PR firm, Dewey Square, touted the report yesterday in a press release that this would be "a first-ever comprehensive study of the most critical transportation priorities." But the survey does not actually study the transportation priorities. Instead, it only takes a poll of some anonymous people and then advocates for setting priorities on that basis.

In other news, a groundbreaking poll of "transportation experts" I just polled via Gmail Chat overwhelmingly agreed that a different set of priorities is more appropriate.

Chase and Parsons call for "performance-based measures" for transportation projects over "parochialism and politics." Absolutely. But as we've seen with the debates in Congress, the devil is in choosing the right measures.

Developers who own land far from people's jobs have been long promoting a "congestion" metric, which measures only the speed of automotive traffic, not the length of people's commutes. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has been working on more comprehensive "livability" standards which look at the actual quality of life that results from transportation investment, not just the net increase in paved miles.

Far better studies of regional priorities include those from the Council of Governments, whose scenario studies looked not only at vehicle speeds but overall land use and found that the biggest gains in improving commutes came from responsible land use, like developing underutilized Metro stations, addressing the east-west job divide in the region, and revitalizing existing, aging commercial corridors.

The COG Region Forward report, which all 22 area jurisdictions endorsed, shows that addressing land use and the imbalance between jobs and housing, along with supportive transit and transit-oriented development, are the top priorities. COG's scenario studies demonstrated that better land use planning offers the biggest bang for the buck in reducing the amount we have to drive.

These initiatives, as it happens, also involved many people who haven't already placed themselves at one extreme end of the spectrum on our region's transportation debate.

It's laughably easy to find ridiculous methodological holes in the survey. For example, only 9% of the experts are from DC despite there being a far greater share of commuting activity to, from, and within DC.

The anonymous so-called-experts first list of priorities put transit first. But then, Chase and Parsons asked them to pick "the single most important" project. That wording inherently steers people's thinking to "megaprojects," single large facilities like roads or whole new transit lines instead of the real places that can have the most bang for the buck, like local streetcar lines, roundabouts to smooth traffic, infill rail stations, bus priority, ped/bike investments and more.

But there should be no need to even enumerate the transparent lengths to which the authors go to steer conclusions toward their own preconceived ends. Regional leaders should laugh at this report simply because it pawns off an survey of 45 anonymous people handpicked by Chase and Parsons as the "First Ever Comprehensive Regional Transportation Study."

One useful nugget in the report is a list of current regional priorities, as some of the respondents saw it. For those of us who have monitored transportation planning in the region, these are indeed the projects state and local officials mention most often.

1. Corridor Cities Transitway
   
2. Purple Line
   
3. BRT or express bus network
   
4. I-270 HOT lanes
   
5. I-495 HOT lanes
   
6. MARC service expansion
   
7. Metro core capacity expansion
   
8. Metro system maintenance
   
9. DC streetcars
   
10. Silver Line

This list is Maryland-heavy, and Chase and Parsons note that more of their Maryland participants could identify clear priorities. (DC also has clear priorities, but they had relatively few DC participants, pushing its projects low on the overall list).

Chase and Parsons say this means the region lacks a clear set of priorities, and therefore everyone should adopt their priorities. But elected officials and staffs spend considerable time every year developing detailed priority lists to go into the region's Constrained Long-Range Plan. Virginia created the Transaction 2030 plan a few years ago and is working on an update, Transaction 2040.

That report lists far more than 3 or 4 megaprojects, because a few huge projects don't do much to really address transportation. Northern Virginia is a big place, and really improving mobility involves many smaller projects, addressing individual road bottlenecks, adding options like transit, carpooling, walking and bicycling, and maintaining our existing roads and transit so maintenance breakdowns don't happen and cause delays.

Virginia's priorities also feel more muddled today because local governments and current Secretary of Transportation don't agree on what the priorities should be. They should continue to debate the issues and work toward consensus. Chase, Parsons and their deep-pocketed funders, who would personally benefit from more sprawling development in outer areas, are just frustrated that this process of discussion isn't coalescing around the agenda they happen to have.

It'll just create more traffic. The mobility problems outside the beltway are primarily about getting to and from the core, plus the local trips tied up by inadequate local street connections. Yes, traffic is bad for many people, and that's something planners need to address instead of dismissing.

However, more beltways will only accommodate a small fraction of the trips involved. Most people will still drive toward or away from the job centers at or inside the beltway, in DC, Bethesda, Silver Spring, Tysons Corner, Arlington, and Alexandria. An Outer Beltway or three doesn't help with that at all.

It could lead to more jobs being located far outside the beltway, but that brings its own problems. Any spot on a theoretical second beltway is much farther from any given resident than a spot on the first or in the core. Mathematically, if we double the radius of the region, we're quadrupling the area. The average person suddenly lives twice as far from their job and has to drive twice as far even to a grocery store.

People in Rockville, or Olney, Reston, Vienna, or Springfield have the most to lose with sprawl because all the residents of the farms that turn into housing will be trying to drive through their communities. Either the states and counties widen the freeways, which adds pollution, wrecks communities along the route and ties up all the money for projects that don't benefit existing residents, or they don't, and traffic gets worse.

It's not what people want. Many people do want single family homes. But many people who live in single family homes, especially empty nesters, want to downsize to walkable communities where they can go to the grocery store, see a play, and maybe take a community education class to gain some knowledge without having to drive an hour in various directions to each one. Young singles, couples and families want to be able to get to their jobs, entertainment and recreation on foot, by bike, or using transit.

Unfortunately, neither group can find what they want. It's just too expensive, because there isn't enough of it. It's hard to build it because people oppose infill due to fears over traffic. But if we spent the money that could go to outer beltways on rail and bus transit and maybe some roundabouts and fixes for bottlenecks in the built-up areas of the region, we could accommodate new growth. Empty nesters can move to the townhouses and condos, and the new families that want big yards and don't mind long commutes can use those houses which are too big for their current owners.

It'll destroy our natural resources. The land in question includes local farms, which not only supply farmers' markets and CSAs, but play host for fruit picking and hayrides. It includes historic Civil War battlefields, which are important parts of our history. It includes the Potomac which supplies our drinking water, trees which clean our air, parks in which we hike, and forests which give deer a habitat so they aren't feeding in our gardens.

The Outer Beltway was a bad idea 22 years ago, and 6 years ago, and it's still a bad idea. But you've started hearing a lot more about it lately, and will continue in months and years to come, because there are people with a lot of money who want to dedicate our transportation money for their goal. They have been paying a lot of think tanks, academic centers, PR firms and lobbyists to push the idea, and so far, the DC press corps and many local leaders are falling for it.

This Silver Line isn't being built to get me from the inner city to our ridiculously far-flung airport. It's to provide all the benefits of transit—a reliable, congestion-free ride to work while you read the paper or doze off to your iTunes—to people who have chosen to live several counties away from their work.

Land use expert Reid Ewing, a professor of urban planning at the University of Utah and associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, said transit leads to development—both sprawling and compact—because it improves accessibility. And increased accessibility to jobs in a shorter amount of time is an engine for development.

"It's the fact that you can reach lots of trip attractions within short period of time on transit that causes development around the station," Ewing said. "It doesn't happen inherently. And accessibility, likewise, is a driving force in highway oriented sprawl."

Different modes create development in different ways. Even different rail modes, Ewing said, have different potential to induce development. Light rail tends to go slower than heavy rail, and so light rail connectivity far out in the suburbs won't be as much of a boon to a community as a faster line. So it won't attract as many new residents to the area, whether people living in a tight circle around the station and walking to transit, or people living more spread out and driving there.

"With highway expansion you really don't get much concentration of activity because the automobile is so flexible—it can go anywhere and it moves at fairly high speeds," Ewing said. "The catchment area for a high performance highway is many miles. And that catchment area is likely to be developed in a sprawling pattern, because it's auto-oriented. In the case of rail expansion, there's at least potential to have concentrated transit oriented development around the station, then potentially sprawl feeding the station through park-and-ride."

That's why well-planned station area development so key. It doesn't just make for nice, semi-urban enclaves—it channels outward development along compact corridors, says APTA President Bill Millar.

"We have a long, long history in the country of building compact towns around railroad stations," Millar said. "We know that the value of land goes up around stations and intensity of development goes up around stations and that's anti-sprawl."

Besides, transit lines typically have to go through a cost-benefit analysis to acquire federal and state funding, and they need to demonstrate a certain level of projected ridership. "That is one reason why you don't have trains to nowhere the way sometimes you have other things to nowhere," said Sarah Kline of Reconnecting America.

Transit is generally built in response to outward development, in other words—it doesn't cause it.

"It's not like roads or highways that were built before these places really grew up," Kline said. "The road gets built and then the suburb grows up and then all of a sudden no one can get into downtown anymore because it's so congested, so they build transit. And yes, transit allows people to still live there. But what would happen if there weren't transit? People wouldn't all be moving in closer because there's not enough affordable housing closer in."

Chris Leinberger of Brookings and the University of Michigan writes extensively on the increasing demand for compact urban development. He says the lack of affordable inner-city housing Kline refers to is the product of the failure of real estate developers to adequately fill the enormous demand for compact, walkable neighborhoods. The high prices in the urban core signal the high demand in densely developed areas, according to Leinberger.

Does that mean even transit-oriented development on the fringe can be to the detriment of the city itself? The surging desire for walkability can be sated by little suburban downtowns dotted around the periphery instead of by the urban core, building up the suburbs at the expense of downtown. Here in D.C. for example: a person craving urbanism could go to Tysons or Reston or Rockville and contribute to the starvation of Washington, DC itself.

The city's census numbers showed a rise in population this year for the first time since 1950, but we still only have 75 percent of the population we had then. On the other hand, by relieving some of the pressure for compact neighborhoods, densely-built communities outside the city can have the effect of making housing more affordable inside the city.

Bill Millar says yes, transit lines stretch farther and farther out into the countryside, but it at least concentrates the development that's occurring there anyway, and makes it more efficient. "Transit makes development more dense, more environmentally friendly, and increases the probability people will use car less," he said.

But it can still be done wrong. Portland-area Congressman Earl Blumenauer said transit-oriented development can create walkable, livable communities, but "building nothing but a park-n-ride outside the station will create sprawl."

Every transit line has some stations that fail this test—stations that are anchored in an ocean of parking, with no other services nearby. If there are no residential or commercial opportunities within walking distance of the station, no one will ever walk there. In these cases, transit is an engine for auto-oriented sprawl.

Back to the Silver Line: Four of those 11 new stations will be in and around Tysons Corner, which has embarked on a land use plan to redevelop the sprawling, auto-oriented shopping destination suburb into a walkable urban center. The placement of transit stations there fits well with their plan to increase density and pedestrian-friendliness, and even without that plan, Tysons' population justifies a transit line.

Cross-posted at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

In other words, VDOT would plan using exactly the flawed methodology that the TTI report uses. If one project increases speeds more but would primarily generate sprawl in one area of the state, while another improves access to a denser center that would enable more economic growth and less auto dependence, VDOT would have to go with the former, and regional planners would have no say.

HB1999 modifies the enabling legislation for the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (in the italicized paragraph) to make the same congestion goals a priority and also give priority to "evacuation route" projects. Since evacuating a metropolitan area quickly by car is simply infeasible regardless of how many roads get built, talking about evacuation routes is always just another canard that is used to push for a 1960s freeway vision.

Outer Beltway booster Bob Chase is reportedly behind both bills. Last year, he pushed other bills to also require studying or building these projects which will spur a rapid acceleration of sprawl in Northern Virginia, though smart growth advocates and more sensible legislators managed to block them.

HB2016 comes from Governor McDonnell, and would consolidate the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, which manages Virginia's involvement in Metro; the Potomac and Rappahannock Transportation Commission, which manages the commuter buses and local buses around Prince William and Stafford Counties, and the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority. This would reduce local control of all these transportation decisions, giving Arlington more power over PRTC commuter buses, Prince William more control over Metro, and the governor more control over everything.

The committee will start meeting at 5:00. If you can email the members before then, it will help persuade them to oppose these bills.

• Delegate Thomas Davis Rust - DelTRust@house.virginia.gov
  
• Delegate G. Glenn Oder - DelGOder@house.virginia.gov
  
• Delegate Edward Scott - DelEScott@house.virginia.gov
  
• Delegate David Toscano - DelDToscano@house.virginia.gov
  
• Delegate Eileen Filler-Corn - DelEFiller-Corn@house.virginia.gov
  
• Delegate Joe May - DelJMay@house.virginia.gov
  
• Delegate James LeMunyon - DelJLeMunyon@house.virginia.gov
  
• Delegate Robert Marshall - DelBMarshall@house.virginia.gov
  
• Delegate Thomas Greason - DelTGreason@house.virginia.gov

Sadly, despite CEOs for Cities pointing out these methodological problems last year, TTI went ahead and finalized its report without fixing them (PDFs). TTI ranks Portland as worse than Nashville, with a Travel Time Index (TTI) of 1.23 1.15 for Nashville and 1.15 1.23 for Portland. However, because of greater sprawl, Nashville commuters spend an average of 268 hours per year commuting, while the average Portland commuter spends 193 hours per year.

What does this mean for public policy and the Washington region? TTI's data is often used to justify spending money on new freeway capacity, since congestion sounds bad. TTI even promotes this approach. Tim Lomax, a co-author of the report, told the Post's Ashley Halsey III, "You can do little things like stagger work hours, fix traffic-light timing and clear wrecks faster, but in the end, there's a need for more capacity."

"That we are congested is not news, but TTI's report does tremendous damage, because they fail to recognize the primary cause of our congestion and imply that we could simply widen roads to build our way out of the problem," said Stewart Schwartz, Executive Director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

What Lomax didn't say, and which Halsey didn't print even though he should know better, is that there are other approaches besides those "little things." What you can do is concentrate future growth around existing hubs with more residents, jobs, and multimodal transportation.

That's what the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) is trying to push with its Region Forward plan and the related "What Would It Take?" scenario (PDF). These involve focusing development in places like Tysons Corner and the Route 1 corridor in Fairfax, around underutilized Metro stations in Prince George's, future ones in Loudoun, and MARC and VRE hubs in Maryland and Virginia.

Arlington achieved substantial job and resident growth in its Rosslyn-Ballston corridor without adding to traffic congestion, as has Montgomery with growth in Silver Spring and Bethesda and DC development in places like NoMA and the Capitol Riverfront area. Regional leaders should be less concerned with speeding up existing cars, which just leads to sprawl farther out, and invest more in finding ways to grow the region without adding traffic.

In fact, that's just what the DC region has done. Another, better part of TTI's analysis measures the amount of time savings that come from each region's transit; DC is 3rd best. That metric still doesn't account for the value of people living nearer to their jobs, however.

Between better location and transit, to page 50, congestion has not increased since 1999 even on TTI's flawed scale. That means our region has been successfully growing without adding traffic. Instead of "Washington area tied with Chicago for traffic congestion, study finds," this morning's Post headline this morning could have read, "Washington area's traffic hasn't gotten worse in a decade thanks to smart growth."

It's more than a little baffling, though, that Halsey didn't make any reference to the CEOs for Cities report or the COG work. He also wrote, "Researchers said the depth of the data used in this year's study far surpassed the quality of information used in past years, giving the results an unprecedented degree of accuracy."

So, the researchers at this supposedly very highly regarded institute say that their data is super great, but they and the reporters ignored the widely-publicized critiques of their methodology. Maybe it's time for TTI to stop being so highly regarded.

Our one wish for 2011: That officials and civic and business leaders will continue to implement transit-oriented communities with better linkages between jobs and housing, invest more in transit, walking and bicycling, and set us firmly on a course to become the most energy efficient, and environmentally and fiscally sustainable region in the nation.

With all those things in mind, here are what we see as the biggest opportunities and challenges in 2011:

The Region: The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) made great strides with its Region Forward sustainability plan and studies (study one and study two PDFs) that show a network of walkable/bikeable, transit-oriented centers reduces the amount we have to drive and offers more options for getting around. Two things need to happen in 2011:

1. COG's update to its Regional Activity Centers has to focus on transit-oriented centers, revitalization of older commercial corridors, and walkable urban design.
   
2. We have to stop stapling together state transportation project wish-lists and instead produce a plan based on the transportation projects that meet COG's sustainability goals.

Meanwhile, expect John "Til" Hazel's 2030 Group to announce a renewed push for an outer beltway, for a regional transportation authority led by unaccountable appointees, and for dedicating more funding to highways, not transit.

Focus has to instead be on adequate funding for Metro and other transit, maintenance and operations of our existing roads and transit, and those new projects that best support transit-oriented, energy efficient development patterns. We also hope our local officials will maintain a central role in governing Metro and that the attempt to shift power to less-transit friendly state authorities in Virginia fails.

Prince George's County: With new, reform-minded leadership at the helm, we look forward to progress on a number of fronts. Certainly we'd like to see implementation of the housing reforms highlighted in our Building Stronger Communities report. We also have high hopes that all sectors are coming together to make transit-oriented development happen at Prince George's 15 underutilized Metro stations, as highlighted in our Invest Prince George's report.

Governor O'Malley, Metro, Prince George's officials, the business and smart growth communities, and the federal General Services Administration are coming together to finally get TOD on track in Prince George's. Among the new initiatives is the federal Housing and Urban Development grant for planning redevelopment along the southern Green Line Metro corridor to Branch Avenue.

TOD and moving forward with the Purple Line must be a higher priority than the types of sprawling, traffic generating developments recently approved outside the Beltway in Prince George's. Concurrently, we hope to see a more transparent, unbiased, and consistent approach to development review to give the public and private sectors greater confidence in the process, and attract more investment.

Montgomery County: A pioneering leader in planning for transit-oriented development, preservation of agricultural land, and inclusionary zoning for affordable housing, Montgomery County often seems pulled in different directions today.

Major highway expansion is proposed including widening I-270 at a cost of $3.4 billion, extending the Mid-County Highway and building the 28/198 connection (ICC 2?), and development approvals have included both the transit-oriented White Flint and the far flung "Science City." And with a new upcounty hospital proposed, will it be in a walkable, mixed-use center?

In 2011 we need to ensure that transit-oriented development returns as the top priority for funding and incentives, that more jobs are encouraged at transit-oriented locations on the underserved east side of the county, that the Purple Line and a set of bus-priority corridors moves forward, and that the Agricultural Reserve receives expanded protection and investment in value-added production.

The county's Department of Transportation will need to be more supportive of complete streets, local street networks and transit-oriented communities.

Fairfax County: We're all excited that the Tysons Corner Plan passed, but now it's time to get moving. We need to get the urban design details right, to make sure Tysons is a great place for pedestrian life at the street level. Routes 7 and 123 are still planned as 8-lane virtual highways through the heart of Tysons. We urgently need to shift to a boulevard design.

The "Future of Fairfax" and other area counties will be found in the vast parking lots of their strip commercial corridors. These are the places where we can create walkable communities that absorb growth while protecting suburban neighborhoods, protecting forests and streams, and reducing traffic.

We hope the County will move forward with a major vision-planning initiative for Route 1, linking transit, land use, housing, economic development and the environment. Investment initiatives also need to accelerate for Springfield, Bailey's Crossroads, Annandale, Seven Corners and Merrifield.

New county directors of planning and transportation will be hired. They need to be committed leaders in implementing smart growth and transit-oriented communities.

Loudoun, Prince William, Frederick and Charles Counties: The real estate crisis hit the outer counties hard and the powerful demographic and market shifts seen by the real estate industry (PDF) could mean more challenges ahead. Market demand for large suburban houses in distant locations will remain weak.

The key to future competitiveness is protecting invaluable scenic and historic landscapes, restoring historic downtowns, and creating a few mixed-use, walkable centers in the right places. Examples include Loudoun's two future Metro stations, Woodbridge, Manassas and the Innovation center in Prince William, continued revitalization of downtown Frederick, and the mixed-use plan for Waldorf's sprawling commercial strip corridor.

Unfortunately, both Loudoun and Prince William counties are on course to plan and approve far too many centers than the market can support. Loudoun also proposes an unaffordable $2 billion road expansion plan. Prince William keeps pushing for the Outer Beltway. They call it their "road to Dulles," but it lands miles west of Dulles whose entrance is on the east side.

The highway, called the Tri-County Parkway, 234 Bypass, Battlefield Bypass and Western Bypass, would destroy the setting of Manassas National Battlefield on the eve of the 150-year anniversary of two of the most significant battles of the Civil War. We should focus should instead on street networks for local activity and on transit investments for the radial commuting corridors of I-95 and I-66. VRE, HOV/slugging, and rapid bus transit are the keys to accomplishing these goals, not necessarily the conversion to private toll roads as proposed by the state.

District of Columbia: A lot of people are wondering if the new mayor and council will continue the momentum started by the last two administrations for cyclists, pedestrians and transit users. These progressive policies not only need to continue, but they must benefit all areas of the District, including east of the Anacostia. DC's economic competitiveness and ability to attract people from around the world is tied to its expanding sustainable transportation and planning initiatives.

Ensuring that there are affordable housing and job benefits from major projects like waterfront revitalization and St. Elizabeth's development should be a top priority. Protecting the social safety net, continuing education initiatives, and restoring and expanding affordable housing programs are essential.

The city's housing trust fund needs to be restored, affordable units preserved, and new affordable workforce housing built in conjunction with new development. D.C. is emerging as one of the world's great, diverse and green cities. Let's ensure everyone benefits.

Arlington, Alexandria, College Park, Rockville, Falls Church and more: Arlington County continues its cutting-edge sustainable growth and Alexandria plans a transit future. Meanwhile, many of the smaller cities and towns within our region share similar goals.

Our historic towns have the fabric to support the sort of walkable, bikeable and transit-accessible communities that are so much in demand, but they need to welcome development designed to the right form and scale, invest in "complete street" networks, adopt the right parking policies, and ensure the right mix of uses.

Do these communities have adequate funding support from the states and the flexibility they need from state and local departments of transportation? There's Route 1 in College Park, Broad Street in Falls Church, Rockville Pike, Maple Street in Vienna, Old Town City of Fairfax and their Route 50 "Boulevard," and more. Will 2011 be the year where we solve the puzzle and move forward with the right development and transportation solutions?

Will we see more smart growth or more sprawl? What do you think?

Sprawl: This subsidy encourages people to build more expensive homes, which are generally bigger, detached, single-family homes. Reducing this subsidization of home sizes would thus lead to greater density as a natural outcome of the free market.

Gentrification: A common response to the argument that reducing this subsidy will reduce sprawl is that it will also reduce urban infill of condos that are more expensive than existing housing. While this may concern some urbanists, I think this would be great. Poor and working class neighborhoods would upgrade their housing stock more organically, without the sudden displacements of existing residents that can occur through government-subsidized luxury condos.

Furthermore, by encouraging people to leverage themselves to the hilt, this subsidy helps undermine communities when home buyers bet big on the housing market and lose. This is true whether the buyers move into new sprawl developments in Prince George's County or infill in Columbia Heights.

The idea that the mortgage interest deduction boosts home ownership rates is a myth, as numerous economists have demonstrated. But simply comparing home ownership rates by country makes the same point.

Home ownership by country.

The United States is one of only four developed countries that allows homeowners to deduct mortgage interest. And the other three (Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands) tax imputed income from home ownership.

Clearly, offering the most generous housing subsidies in the developed world is not the key to boosting home ownership.

Before 2010, most opponents of the mortgage interest deduction considered it a sacred cow. But with the deficit commission's co-chairs attempting to insert real solutions into the deficit debate and Tea Party-supported members of Congress talking big about deficit slashing, perhaps this massive subsidy is no longer off the table.