In This Issue:

– Drivers and Walkers: May the Twain Never Meet

– Regional Planning: Metropolitan or Megaregional?

– Spitzer the Fighter

– Calendar

Drivers and Walkers: May the Twain Never Meet.
When a 6000 pound vehicle covered in metal collides with a 100 pound human covered in flesh, whose behavior does it make sense to regulate if we want to lessen the chance of such interactions in the future?

The answer reveals a lot about the priorities and unconscious assumptions of the answeree and the society he or she comes from.

The question comes to mind because New York State Senator Carl Kruger made headlines this month when he introduced a bill that would prohibit people from crossing the street wearing “electronic music devices” on their ears. In other words, Ipods. Kruger introduced his bill after several people were killed crossing the streets in the last year, reportedly while wearing such devices. To put the matter in starker and more tragic relief, last week, after news of Kruger’s proposed legislation, a driver in a Hummer killed a four-year-old boy who was crossing a street in Brooklyn with his 18-year-old aunt. News articles afterward speculated that the child’s aunt may have been wearing headphones after an Ipod was found in the crosswalk.

The pedestrian equivalent of “let the buyer beware” is somehow a very American ideal. When crossing that big street of life, it’s up to each of us to look out for ourselves, we are told. The problem is, that’s not a very effective way to improve safety, nor is it very fair.

Even in New York’s regrettably weak pedestrian universe, pedestrians have the right of way when they venture out into a crosswalk. (See “Sharing the Road New York State Bicycle and Pedestrian Laws” at www.dot.state.ny.us/pubtrans/share.html#1151) The four-year-old killed last week was legally crossing the street. For killing a child, the driver received a ticket for failure to yield to a pedestrian.

This is unacceptable, not so much on the basis of morality or vengeance – I’m sure the driver of the Hummer was devastated -- but from a practical one. Even in the best managed universe, tragic accidents will sometimes happen but it’s important to limit them. One way is to encourage drivers to pay better heed is by letting them know that severe consequences will befall them if they hit a pedestrian (or cyclist). This should be the case in any circumstances, but especially when the pedestrian had the legal right of way.

In some states and cities, a driver must yield to pedestrians if they step off a curb, even if a crosswalk is not around. That’s not true in New York, Connecticut or New Jersey, where drivers must yield only in crosswalks. At all other times, it’s “let the pedestrian beware” approach. And even then, if a pedestrian is hit, the drivers receive nothing but a ticket unless proven to be driving recklessly or under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Before World War I, there were few if any stop signs, cross walks or street lights in America. Streets held a slow-moving mass of walkers, cyclists, streetcars, and horse drawn carriages. At times, the chaos could make streets dangerous, but people managed. Formal traffic controls were put in place to manage cars. In a sense, it’s unfair to put the burden for safety on pedestrians and cyclists, when they had the streets first.

New York could make streets safer and more pleasant, as well as promote healthier lifestyles, if it put more of the legal burden of safety on the ones doing the killing. To do this though, legislators like Kruger have to confront their own “car-first” mentality. Kruger’s office did not respond to my request for an interview, but I bet the state Senator did not even think about regulating the behavior of drivers before he introduced his Ipod bill.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t look both ways before crossing a street, as your mother told you. You should. But doing the legal equivalent of forcing people to do so is not the best way to make walking safer. I said much the same thing about wearing bicycle helmets in a previous essay. (See the June 15, 2006 issue of Spotlight, http://www.rpa.org/spotlight/issues/spotlightvol5_12.html.)

For one thing, removing Ipods, as both Kruger and The New York Times in an unsigned editorial advocate, is not even practical. If one walks one mile or 20 blocks to work, which for most people takes only 20 minutes, then you would need to remove your headphones about every 45 seconds or so. This is unlikely, even under the strictest laws.

The best approach to increasing safety and making streets more pleasant is a Scandinavian approach where essentially the smallest, softest thing in the street has priority and protected status. That means pedestrians come before cyclists, and cyclists come before drivers of motorized vehicles. It is the responsibility of each type of street user to look out for the people that are more vulnerable than they are. And severe consequences will befall them if they don’t.

No one wants to kill a child, but it’s only human to be more cautious if one knows that if one kills a pedestrian (or cyclist) on a public street, he or she will suffer more severe consequences than a traffic ticket.
- Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

A New Scale for Regional Planning
Regions are to planners what markets are to businessmen. Simultaneously elusive and essential, the concept can refer to anything from a cluster of towns to the European Union. While defining something as fluid as the social and economic networks that evolve with landscapes and settlement patterns can be difficult, it is a fundamental step that determines how problems are perceived and what solutions are possible.

Ideally, planners need to think on several geographic scales simultaneously, since no single scale is ideally suited to all problems. Metropolitan areas may be highly appropriate for looking at the efficient functioning of labor markets, but far more limited when looking at large natural systems such as watersheds and forest preserves. Most often, problems require multiple layers of analysis with implications at the community, municipal, metropolitan and national levels. Finding the right intervention for each scale is a key to effective policy.

Since creating the nation’s first regional plan in 1929, Regional Plan Association has been associated with metropolitan scale planning. Since 1967, RPA has defined the New York metropolitan area as the 31-county region stretching from New Haven to Trenton, sandwiched between the Appalachian Highlands and the Atlantic Ocean. Informed by Jean Gottman’s groundbreaking 1961 study of the Northeast Megalopolis and RPA’s own analysis of the Tri-State area’s urbanization and commuting patterns, this definition has remained a durable and constructive framework for addressing a wide range of land use, transportation, economic and environmental challenges.

Increasingly, however, this metropolitan framework is becoming inadequate for addressing the challenges facing our region, from congestion along the I-95 corridor to the threat of exurban development to environmentally sensitive areas all along the East Coast. Our situation is not unique, with two of the trends that led to the emergence of metropolitan regions now straining the limits of what the concept can explain, and therefore successfully address. Sprawling patterns of urbanization are leading to overlapping labor markets and spheres of influence, while globalization is creating new international agglomerations and competitive conditions that can affect the most productive spatial organization of firms, institutions, infrastructure and labor. While metropolitan regions are likely to remain the primary focus for many functions, Gottman’s nearly 50-year old observation of a larger “megaregion” is looking increasingly prescient for strategic as well as academic reasons.

This evolution is behind the America 2050 initiative (www.america2050.org), a national effort convened by Regional Plan Association with the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, the University of Pennsylvania, and other academic and philanthropic partners. The goal is to develop a framework for future growth through the examination of the ten or more megaregions where most of the nation’s future population growth is likely to occur. As part of this effort, RPA and the Policy Research Institute for the Region (PRIOR) at Princeton University recently convened a roundtable of some of the nation’s leading regional scholars. Edward Glaeser from Harvard University, and Saskia Sassen from the University of Chicago, presented papers exploring the nature of megaregional scale agglomerations and the public policies that should be addressed at this scale. Paul Krugman of Princeton University and Kip Bergstrom of the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council responded with academic and prescriptive critiques.

At the risk of reducing rich and nuanced analysis to essentials (full papers can be found at http://region.princeton.edu/pub_detail_46.html), several themes emerged that inform the utility of using megaregions to address planning challenges in the next century. One insight is that the forces associated with productivity and growth in metropolitan areas are the same forces connected to success in megaregions. As Glaeser argued, human capital and density are the best predictors of income at both metropolitan and megaregional levels, with the Northeast and Northern California as the leading examples of dense, highly educated, high-income regions. Population growth, on the other hand, is more complex, and appears to be driven by the trilogy of “sun, skills and sprawl.” Weather gives a distinct advantage to places like Southern Florida and the Texas Triangle. But with anomalies like Northern California (highly productive, good weather, slow growth), the “sprawl” factor becomes interesting. Glaeser made a compelling case that housing regulations, largely restrictive zoning in high-income areas, impede growth in places where it would be economically and environmentally beneficial.

Another theme was the distinction between the fact of urbanization on a megaregional scale and the potential for more closely integrated clusters of economic activity. Sassen challenged participants to consider the possibilities of megaregions that contain the advantages of both scale (large-scale urbanization) and complexity (networks of specialized activities). The first is evident, the second has latent potential. In relating to global integration, a megaregion is large and diverse enough to organize a broad range of related activities—from central offices to support functions and manufacturing and distribution —in a way that metropolitan regions cannot. One city or smaller region in a mega region might support lower-paying, lower education demanding back office functions, while another city in a mega region might support higher-paying, higher education demanding research.

From a different angle, Krugman made a similar distinction between negative and positive externalities. Megaregions appear to exacerbate negative externalities, such as congestion, but it is not clear that the economic linkages, labor market pooling and knowledge spillovers are as yet strong enough to constitute distinct advantages.

Bergstrom was more bullish on the potential of megaregions, reminding us that the past is not predictive of the future, and that global forces require every region to reconsider their economic advantage, from the effect of global trade on the Atlanta Piedmont region to rising sea levels on Southern Florida. With metropolitan areas having expanded about as far as they can through auto-oriented commutation, megaregional expansion organized around high-speed rail could be the next wave.

The Right Scale for the Right Unit of Planning
So what does all of the academic discourse mean for those on the ground struggling to find the right scale for planning in a maze of political boundaries that are sure to make a hash of it? Both presenters and audience at the roundtable zeroed in on a few policy priorities.

First, there was virtual unanimity that transportation needs to be planned and implemented at a megaregional scale, and it is equally obvious that no one is currently doing this. Rail networks and interstate highways clearly connect, organize and add value to groups of metropolitan areas, yet it is left to state transportation departments and the occasional single-mode consortium, such as the I-95 Corridor Coalition, to sort it out. The situation begs for new institutional structures at a mega-scale.

Land use and housing are equally compelling issues for the health of a megaregion and, as any planner will tell you, you can’t plan for transportation without impacting land use, and vice versa. But the right scale for intervention is more complicated. As Glaeser pointed out, localized knowledge is important to sound housing and land use policies, even if the incentive structure of local regulatory and fiscal control works against regional and national interests. It may also be true that creating a better balance between local and regional land use control at the metropolitan level would resolve much of the problem observed at a larger scale. And since this goes to the heart of local control and state authority over municipalities, state land use plans and incentives may be the most viable route for improving housing production and location. Multi-state open space systems and labor market areas are notable exceptions, however, and some mechanism for coordinating land use at the megaregional scale is needed.

The right scale for economic development provoked the widest range of opinions, at least in terms of the narrow definition of attracting firms or fostering growth for particular sectors. Sassen’s implied call for megaregional strategies to support complex agglomerations of firms appealed to planners’ instincts, but ran counter to Glaeser’s classic economic view that local competition does more to improve economic conditions by lowering taxes and regulations than regional coordination can hope to achieve. Bergstrom offered the observation that economic development officials have no problem “competing in the morning and collaborating in the afternoon” depending on the issue, and that this may reflect an appropriate balance. In any event, the case for how to take advantage of the human capital, institutions and other assets at the megaregional scale, beyond deploying transportation and land use policies, remains one of the thornier questions.

Left largely untouched by the discussion were questions of income distribution and regional equity. Some of the most productive and high-income megaregions, such as the Northeast, also have the largest disparities between rich and poor. Would promoting megaregions exacerbate this divide? Could existing disparities be addressed with policies explicitly tailored at the mega-regional scale? The potential for improved outcomes are most apparent where there are obvious geographic differences, such as the lagging economies of “second tier” cities such as Newark and Bridgeport that could benefit from a Northeast Corridor rail strategy, for example. But the question of how income distribution could be affected by megaregional strategies clearly requires additional research.

Just as there is not a “one-size-fits-all” definition of a region, it is likely that there is no single definition of the Northeast or any other megaregion that is optimal for every issue. However, as an under-used concept, it provides a new tool for addressing the persistent challenges of regional development.
- Chris Jones, Vice President for Research, RPA

Spitzer the Fighter
Psychologists have long argued whether fear or favor is a stronger motivating force, but in politics the answer is clearer.

Whether in Washington or Albany, the first 100 days of an administration are traditionally considered important for the big tasks that a new administration can accomplish while a legislature is still transfixed by the recent electoral victory of a president or governor.

While this is true, the first 100 days of an administration are also important for what they signal about a chief executive’s operating style – and in this, newly elected Gov. Elliot Spitzer has signaled he is a force to be reckoned with in the way he has reacted to recently losing his choice for state comptroller.

The new governor and former attorney general has not gone gently into that good night after the state legislature appointed Assemblyman Thomas DiNapolis as the new comptroller instead of one of three candidates picked by a non-partisan committee. Instead of keeping quiet, Spitzer has shone a spotlight on his defeat and has told anyone who would listen that the legislature, even those of his own party, reneged on a deal and acted like crony-style politicos rather than noble statesmen.

Putting the merit or lack of it of Spitzer’s policies aside, this may be a good thing if we want Spitzer to be an effective governor. A chief executive who wants to accomplish something has to signal that opposing him or her will always come with a high cost.

This realization came into focus for me when I observed the first 100 days of another former state attorney general, President Bill Clinton back in these months of early 1993. Folks old enough to remember what is now almost 15 years ago will recall that Clinton in January, February and March of 1993 lost a series of high-profile battles with Congress.

To me at the time, it wasn’t so much the losses that alarmed me, but the way the new president reacted to them. As I said in an essay that year in The Virginian-Pilot where I was on staff:

“It's becoming obvious that Clinton lacks backbone or doesn't understand how to get things done. With gays in the military, environmental initiatives and nominations to appointed offices, Clinton has blandly retreated at the first sign of opposition. . . .[he has] signaled he [is] going to be a weather vane, not a trailblazer.”

Clinton’s inability to get any sort of national health care bill passed, as well as some of his later troubles, came partly, I’m convinced, because he signaled early on that opposing him brought little painful consequences. Of course, Clinton’s strengths were his capacity to cajole and befriend his critics, but an even better leader can bash opponents as well as butter them up. Spitzer is showing he has those capabilities.
– Alex Marshall

Questions or comments on what’s in this issue? Send them to the editor of Spotlight On The Region, Alex Marshall at alex@rpa.org

March 2, 12 Noon
Property Tax ReForum #4: Where Are We Now? Examining the Implications of 3 Reform Proposals. This is the fourth in a series of forums to discuss the latest proposals for property tax reform in New Jersey, focusing on the land use implications. These free lunchtime forums will be held bi-weekly through March for policy makers, opinion leaders and the public to hear from experts on proposals to address escalating property taxes. State House Welcome Center, 125 West State Street, Trenton, NJ. Space is limited and lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to RPA at 609 575 4472 or e-mail scorchado@rpa.org.

March 7, 6:30 p.m.
Interpreting and misinterpreting Jane Jacobs – New York and beyond at Museum of the City of New York. Jane Jacobs was a vocal opponent of Moses’ plans and a leader of the movement to preserve Greenwich Village and other Manhattan neighborhoods. She went on to become an icon for urbanists everywhere. This panel discussion will examine the principles that Jacobs espoused and how they have been applied, not always as Jacobs might have foreseen. The panel will be introduced by author and founder of the Center for the Living City at Purchase College, Roberta Brandes Gratz, and moderated by Mary W. Rowe, Senior Urban Fellow, Blue Moon Fund. The panel will include Ron Shiffman, Professor of Urban Planning, Pratt Institute; Michael Sorkin, Director, Graduate Program in Urban Design, CCNY; Margaret Zeidler, Toronto Developer. For information and tickets, please go to http://www.mcny.org/public_programs/all/558.html.

March 20, 6:30 p.m.
The Best Laid Plans: Planning New York’s Future from Moses to Bloomberg at the Museum of the City of New York. Robert Moses masterfully knit together his vision for New York and its surroundings but resisted the development of a formal Master Plan for the City’s future. Mayor Bloomberg recently announced a comprehensive sustainability action plan for the City’s long-term growth and development, the first of its kind for NYC. The discussion will question the role of planning in the growth of the city both in Moses’ time and today. Panelists include Rohit T. Aggarwala, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability; Robert Fishman, Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan; Sandy Hornick, Director of Strategic Planning, New York City Department of City Planning, and Ron Shiffman, Professor of Urban Planning, Pratt Institute. Robert Yaro, President of Regional Plan Association, will moderate the discussion. For information and tickets, please go to http://www.mcny.org/public_programs/all/559.html.

May 4th, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Regional Plan Association’s 17th annual Regional Assembly: “A Bright, Green Future: Climate Change, Energy and Growth in the Tri-State Metropolitan Region.” More information will be available soon at www.rpa.org. A distributable save-the-date card (PDF) can be found here

LINK: http://www.rpa.org/pdf/RPArasavethedate.pdf