Rights of Way

Agenda Item: URBANIZED at Space Gallery

2012-01-23T10:55:00.004-05:00

Showing tomorrow at Space Gallery:

Urbanized (the third part of Gary Hustwit’s design film trilogy, joining Helvetica and Objectified) is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.

Over half the world’s population now lives in an urban area, and 75% will call a city home by 2050. But while some cities are experiencing explosive growth, others are shrinking. The challenges of balancing housing, mobility, public space, civic engagement, economic development, and environmental policy are fast becoming universal concerns. Yet much of the dialogue on these issues is disconnected from the public domain.

Followed by Q&A with Noah Chasin, Assistant Professor at Bard College and Mitchell Rasor of MRLD Landscape Architecture + Design.

Doors at 7 pm, film starts at 7:30. See you there.

Portland's Smart-Growth Housing Plan: 10 Year Progress Report

2012-01-18T15:45:00.003-05:00

Ten years ago, the City of Portland drafted a new Housing Plan. Recognizing that housing prices were rising out of control and that it was becoming increasingly hard to find a place to live here, the city set out to find ways to increase the number of homes and apartments available here.

The city's housing plan is a crucial smart growth strategy for the entire Greater Portland region. Sprawl isn't merely the fault of outlying rural communities. If people are going to be able to live near the places where they work, drive less, and promote local small businesses in walkable neighborhoods, then the City of Portland absolutely needs to provide more housing opportunities in town. Otherwise, households will be forced by basic financial necessity to find affordable housing elsewhere.

So, after ten years, how are we doing? Not so well, as I outline in my column this week in the Portland Daily Sun. In spite of some minor regulatory improvements, the vast majority of the county's new housing is still being built outside of the city limits, in outlying communities. That means more traffic on local streets, more money being spent on foreign oil, fewer customers for local small businesses, and more regional vulnerability to volatile housing markets.

In this blog post, I'll go into some more detail, looking at three specific Housing Plan goals and how we've so far failed to meet them.

Goal: Encourage growth in Portland; target Portland to achieve and maintain a 25% share of Cumberland County's population.

Reality: In 1960, before urban renewal laid waste to our downtown, 40% of Cumberland County residents lived in the City of Portland. In the 2000 Census, 24.2% of the County's population lived in Portland. By the 2010 Census, it was evident that sprawl had continued unabated for the past decade: Portland's population had grown somewhat, but not as fast as the rest of the county. The city now possesses only 23.5% of the county's population, and only 24.4% of the County's housing units:

	Cumberland County population	Portland City population	% of County population living in Portland	Cumberland County Housing Units	Portland Housing Units	% of County housing in Portland
2000	265,612	64,249	24.19%	122,600	31,862	25.99%
2010	281,674	66,194	23.50%	138,657	33,836	24.40%

This goal drives many of the plan's other objectives: if more and more County residents are living farther away, that creates sprawl, and hollows out the city's local economy. Therefore, the City of Portland needs to add new housing within the city's limits, at an equal or greater pace as the rest of the County's municipalities.

The Census Bureau also tracks building permit data for each year, and from those statistics, it's clear that the City isn't even close to keeping pace with sprawl:

Here's the source data, and a link to the Census site.

In this chart, the red line indicates county-wide housing construction for each year since 2000. The orange line is 50% of the height of the red line: that's where the City's housing construction would need to be in order for Portland's population growth to keep pace with the rest of the county's, in line with the housing plan's goals. The blue line, nowhere near the orange line, shows how much housing actually got built each year.

Instead of providing 50% of the County's new homes, the City of Portland has actually built a pathetic 11% of the county's homes. In other words: in the decade since the city's new housing plan got written, roughly 9 out of 10 new homes in Cumberland County have contributed to sprawl. Ugh.

Outlook: You might suppose, as I did, that the City might have had a rebound relative to the rest of the county after 2008, when spiking gas prices and the foreclosure crisis put the big hurt on sprawl development in the suburbs.

Unfortunately, you'd be mistaken: in the past 3 years, the City's proportion of housing construction relative to the rest of the County has fallen even more, to around 6%. The fundamental issue seems to be that new housing construction in Portland is a lot more expensive than it is in the 'burbs, thanks to more expensive real estate and zoning mandates. The main expense that's under the city's control - its outrageously expensive and outdated parking mandates - was loosened somewhat in 2008, when planners reduced off-street parking requirements somewhat. In hindsight, unfortunately, it hasn't had much of an effect, and planners ought to be asking whether they should be doing more.

Goal: Create 300 new units of housing in Bayside within 5 years [by 2007] and 500 additional units within 25 years, a significant portion of which will be owner-occupied units.

Reality: Cumberland County's Census Tract 6 is roughly contiguous with the Bayside neighborhood. Census data indicates that there were 1,421 housing units in the neighborhood in 2000. By the 2010 Census, there were 1,618 housing units: a net gain of 197 homes.

Census Tract 6 extends only as far south as Cumberland Avenue, which means that these numbers don't include the Chestnut St. Lofts project near Portland High School, completed in 2007. Adding that project in bring brings the neighborhood's total to 234 new homes. So five years past the original deadline, the City still hasn't met the plan's short-term goal.

Outlook: Still, two large apartment complexes from Avesta Housing are currently under construction in Bayside, and will add 91 new subsidized apartments within the next year or so. And the Federated Companies, new owners of the Somerset Street blocks along the Bayside Trail, are tentatively planning 540 additional market-rate apartments in high rises on their land. Along with infill projects happening elsewhere in the neighborhood (including, hopefully, along the new Franklin Street), it seems like the city should be able to meet its 25-year housing goal for Bayside, even if it missed the shorter-term goal by a wide margin.

Goal: Encourage and support the Portland Housing Authority to become more active in development of more housing.

Reality: The Portland Housing Authority hasn't developed a single new home on any of its properties since the Reagan administration. But at least there's plenty of free parking in East Bayside!

Outlook: The PHA owns acres of empty and under-utilized real estate on the Portland peninsula and in close-in neighborhoods like East Deering. In the past decade, the value of that land has increased dramatically, and the PHA also possesses the ability to raise capital through bonds. It's in an ideal position, in other words, to de-stigmatize its run-down public housing complexes, improve its financial standing, and help address the city's housing shortages with new, mixed-income housing complexes.

Unfortunately, the PHA is run by bureaucrats whose timidity and lack of creativity and courage are extreme even by bureaucratic standards. I worked with the agency's director, Mark Adelson, during the Peninsula Transit Study, and he insisted that empty parking lots were more important than building new homes for the homeless.

To be fair, the man isn't so much callous as he is afraid that he might hear a complaint from someone who loses their parking lot. 'Tis better for hundreds of people to sleep on the streets than for a single car in East Bayside to park on the street (somebody translate that into Latin so it can be the Agency's new motto).

As a quasi-independent agency, the PHA doesn't have much oversight from the City Council, which is part of the problem. Still, my guess is that the new Mayor and city manager could find creative ways into getting the PHA to be more involved in addressing the city's housing shortages – putting more conditions on the PHA's Community Development Block Grant applications would be a good first step.

Worthless

2011-12-16T10:06:00.004-05:00

Consider this equation:

a - b = c

where a = disgraced Maine Turnpork Authority director Paul Violette's putative net worth, b = the value of his fraudulent hoardings from highway contractors and tollpayers during his tenure at the Maine Turnpork Authority, which hoardings he will be required to return to the public in a recent court settlement.

It follows that the variable c equals Paul Violette's honest net worth.

Now, according to today's newspaper, a, Violette's current wealth, equals $430,000. And b, Violette's fraud, also equals $430,000.

Therefore, the value of c - the honest net worth of Paul Violette, is a big fat Zero. Quod erat demonstratum.

From Franklin Street to Back Cove, on Foot (at last)

2011-12-12T22:55:00.002-05:00

The Maine Department of Transportation has almost finished spending $200,000 to build this short section of trail.

Which that it's now possible to take a nice walk from East Bayside to Back Cove, for the first time since I-295 was built in the 1970s (photo by Baysider Alex Landry):

Technically it's still under construction, so you'll need to wait a few more days before you can hold the state legally liable for the substandard crosswalks on Marginal Way and Franklin Street. Nevertheless, it's very much usable, and surprisingly pleasant for the amount of traffic in the vicinity - remember to wave "hello" to the bitter motorists waiting impatiently at the traffic lights.

Parking Isn't "Affordable"

2011-12-05T09:46:00.005-05:00

Two weeks ago, I wrote in my column in the Portland Daily Sun about the obscene expenses for parking garages that our city's planners impose on new publicly-subsidized housing construction:

Joe Lewis’s Planning Board, which approves and denies new construction projects, requires every new home and apartment built in our city to also build one parking space. Want to build a triple-decker on Munjoy Hill? You’ll need to make it a quadruple-decker for a three-car garage on the bottom floor. Want to build studio apartments for college students? They probably don’t drive, but you’ll still be forced to build a parking lot that’s bigger than the building itself.

The parking requirement is particularly onerous for builders who would like to build smaller, less expensive apartments, since it requires them to set aside nearly as much real estate for automobile storage (whether or not it's needed) as they do for rentable living space.

That’s the major reason why the nearly every new apartment building constructed here in the past decade has either required public subsidies, or been targeted and priced for the wealthy. The Planning Board’s obsession with building free parking literally makes it illegal for a private-sector builder to create affordable homes for the city’s thousands of non-motorist households.

Community Housing of Maine, a local nonprofit, is currently trying to finance a project on High Street with 38 apartments, at a cost of about $10 million. The high cost has turned the project and its state financiers into a political talking point for the right wing.

It's a worthy project that would add valuable homes for Portland's downtown workforce. And a number of the project's big-ticket expenses - the in-town real estate, the historic preservation elements - can be justified as things that advance the public good.

But the project's $500,000 underground parking garage unambiguously works against the public interest. Aside from jeopardizing the project's financial viability, the parking garage, if built, would only add more traffic and pollution to Portland streets, and decrease the amount of real estate available for the hundreds of car-free households that need affordable housing more than they need affordable parking.

The High Street project is within walking distance of thousands of downtown jobs and every single one of the region's bus routes. Instead of being forced to spend half a million dollars on a parking garage, affordable housing agencies should be spending their money on housing.

While I'm on the subject of expensive affordable housing, I'd also like to highlight this innovative social housing project built in Chile. Residents of a former slum were given new homes on the same site. Crucially, the architects approached the project "as an investment and not as an expense... to add value over time."

Designers from ELEMENTAL designed 100 no-frills townhomes to be built at dirt-cheap prices:

...but crucially, the design included voids between each home, each of which was intended for future home expansion to be funded and built by the residents themselves. Thus, the design actively encouraged residents to provide their own investments into their homes and neighborhood:

And thus, the residents themselves took the financial responsibility (and rewards) of adding new housing space to their homes, and of adding architectural variety to their neighborhood. The project didn't merely produce affordable housing: it provided a platform for low-income families to build financial equity.

Is this feasible in the USA, with our building codes and housing bureaucracies? It certainly ought to be.

Images courtesy of ELEMENTAL via archdaily.com.

Final Ranked-Choice Voting Results

2011-11-10T10:37:00.006-05:00

We have a new mayor! And though he wasn't my first choice - though he has extensive experience in Augusta, he hasn't been particularly involved in recent issues in City Hall - I think he'll be a quick study and a good leader.

I'm heartened that the big money of the Democratic machine lost their expensive gamble to exact revenge for the Maine State Pier humiliation (suckas!).

I'm also heartened that candidates Dave Marshall, Nick Mavodones, and Jill Duson will continue their service on the city council, and that Markos will soon be busy leading the next phase of re-connecting Franklin Street.

Some final observations on the ranked-choice dynamics follow below. For the details, check out Jack Woods's tabulation of how the instant runoff reallocations played out, and Seth Koenig's round-by-round tally of the leaders.

None of the instant runoff rounds rearranged the rankings of the leading candidates. Ballots were reallocated more or less in proportion to the original standings, and candidates were eliminated in the exact same order of their standings in the first round of ballot-counting. The candidate with the 3rd-fewest 1st-choice votes got eliminated 3rd, and the candidate with the 4th-fewest 1st-choice votes got eliminated 4th, and so on.
For each eliminated candidate, the majority of their ballots were reallocated to one of four leaders (Brennan, Strimling, Marshall, or Mavodones). Of these, Brennan received the majority the most often, which meant that he broadened his lead as the rounds progressed.
Dave Marshall generally did better than Mavodones in capturing 2nd-choice votes, but never so much that he could catch up and capture the 3rd place position.
The most substantial boosts in Brennan's lead over Stimling came in round 11 and in round 14, when Miller and Marshall were eliminated. In each case, roughly twice as many voters picked Brennan than Strimling as their next-choice candidate.

Dave Marshall's elimination in the next-to-last round gave Mike Brennan a particularly big boost towards the 50% threshold: 978 of Dave's ballots (which included a number of Miller's ballots, at this point) were reallocated to Brennan, as opposed to just 462 to Strimling.

Before Marshall's ballots were reallocated, Brennan was leading with 36% to Strimling's 30%; after, with Marshall's votes, Brennan had a much wider lead: 43% to 34%.

So what's the purpose of a ranked-choice election, when the outcome that included all 15 choices turned out to be the same as the outcome that only looked at our 1st choices?

I can't speak for everyone, but I appreciated the ability to be able to vote for several candidates, to express to the eventual winner that, while I would support him, I liked the ideas and experience of a few other candidates a bit more. Particularly because voters who had picked Markos and Dave Marshall as their first choices contributed significantly to the eventual victory of Mike Brennan, the new mayor ought to be receptive to those guys' smart-growth, pro-housing policy ideas.

OK, election's over. Time to write about streets and better public spaces again...

Polling

2011-11-02T10:40:00.007-04:00

Yesterday, the Maine People's Resource Center released a poll (detailed results here) to try to preview the upcoming mayoral election. The poll itself projected a victory for Mike Brennan, and that's been the conventional interpretation coming from the press as well (witness analysis from Mike Tipping, one of the poll's sponsors, and the Press Herald).

However, as I'll illustrate below, the projected Brennan victory isn't statistically supported by the poll's data. The most we can say is that Brennan is a front-runner for 1st-choice votes. That will get him far, but the dynamics of the ranked-choice ballot are too complicated for a poll like this to predict the actual winner with any confidence.

In spite of its shortcomings, this is the only poll we're going to get before election day, so here are some observations:

The poll decided to eliminate six lower-tier candidates (Bragdon, Lapchick, Dodge, Haadoow, Vail) from poll questions. This group of six received 11.1% of the poll's 1st choice preferences, which means that each candidate from this group received, on average, 1.85% of the vote (some probably got more, some less). Ralph Carmona, who WAS included in the poll, received only 1.4%. So the decision about whether or not to include a candidate in the poll seems to have been somewhat arbitrary.
But let's talk statistics. The poll surveyed roughly 500 people (actually 477, but let's use a nice round figure to make the math easier). That, they say, gives the results a 4.44% margin of error. I'm assuming that they're assuming a normal probability function distribution (i.e., your typical bell curve) in calculating their margin of error.

A poll with this sample size would work fine with a regular, one-round election of two or three candidates. But it's much less reliable with nine candidates (plus a big, vague "other" category) in the mix. And it's WAY more problematic when instant runoff dynamics come into play (more on that later).
To illustrate: suppose you're blindfolded and instructed to throw darts at a wall that's painted partly red, and partly black. You have a judge to tell you what color each dart hits, and you're supposed to infer, from what he tells you, how much of the dartboard is colored black, and how much is red.

If you have 500 darts, and 400 of them hit a red section, you might reasonably conclude that 80% of the wall is red. And, based on the normal probability distribution, there's a 95% chance that you'd be within 4.4% of the correct answer.

But what if there are 15 different colors, and you still only have 500 darts? Your targets would be much smaller, which means that there's more likelihood for error, and therefore you'd be much less confident in your inferences. There could be a sizeable part of the wall that you don't hit once with any of your 500 darts, for instance, and there might be another tiny section that you accidentally hit fifty times.

The proportion of random error to the to the size of each target is much higher in this case. And that's what's happening in this poll. The poll report would have been a lot more honest if it had included error bars for each candidate, like this (the black bars show where each candidate's bar would be if the estimate were increased or decreased by 4.4%):

In this view, it's clear that Jed Rathband, Dave Marshall, and Markos Miller (near the center of the graph) might actually be ahead of putative "front runner" Nick Mavodones in terms of 1st-choice preferences: all of their error bars overlap in the 9%-11% range.

So, grain of salt number one: with fifteen candidates in the mix, the margin for error in this poll is very large in proportion to the putative results.

These error margins become exponentially more problematic when the same poll tries to extrapolate the results of a series of instant runoff reallocations. The pollsters seem to reason thusly: "Carmona gets eliminated in the 7th instant runoff round, and 30% of Carmona's voters picked Rathband as their second choice, therefore, Rathband should get 30% of Carmona's ballots to be boosted from 8% to 8.6% of the voters' top choices."

OK, but let's recall that there were only seven people of the 500 polled who picked Carmona as their first choice. That's way too small a sample size from which any statistician worth her salt would draw any conclusions. If you see seven Canadians at Old Orchard Beach and three of them are smoking, you can't conclude that 43% of all Canadians smoke. Similarly, inferring that 30% of Carmona voters will choose Rathband as their backup is statistically spurious.

But that's exactly what this poll is inferring for all of the lower-tier candidates as the pollsters goes through the motions of a ranked-choice election. In each round of instant runoff possibilities, the pollsters are building on, and multiplying, their statistical errors.

By the tenth instant runoff round, they're reallocating Markos Miller's votes based on a sample size of 35 poll respondents - still way too small, and by then they've more or less arbitrarily re-allocated about a third of the ballots to other candidates.

These conclusions are built on a logical house of cards - and the flimsy logic gets geometrically flimsier as it goes.

So, grain of salt number 2 for this poll: ignore this poll's instant runoff projections. They're worthless and frankly they make the pollsters look silly.

OK, so flaws aside, there are some good things about this poll (and as I said, it's the only poll we're going to get pre-election, so might as well make the most of it). So here are some interesting things that we CAN conclude from this poll, in spite of its flaws:

Brennan and Stimling are clear front-runners for 1st-preference votes.
But both of the front runners will get, at most, about a third of the ballots in the first round. That means that they'll need to accumulate 15% to 20% of lower-choice votes from other candidates as those lower-tier candidates get eliminated in the instant runoff process.
Because they're front-runners, it's unlikely to matter whom voters pick as 2nd choices behind Strimling and Brennan, since those guys are less likely to get eliminated in the instant runoff rounds. That's too bad for Nick Mavodones, Markos Miller, Jill Duson, and Jed Rathband, all of whom get marked as choice #2, to no avail, on a lot of Brennan and Strimling ballots.
The lowest nine candidates, together, will get about 19% of the 1st-choice votes. Even if all the second-choice votes on those ballots are marked for the front-runner (which is unlikely), it won't be enough to put him over the 50% threshold.
Duson looks like a lower-tier candidate with only 2.9% of 1st choice votes. Her 2nd choice numbers look good though: she gets 8.6% of everyone's 2nd-choice preferences (more than anyone save Brennan, Strimling, and Mavodones). That said, most of Duson's 2nd-choice votes seem to come from people who pick Strimling, Mavodones, Brennan, and Marshall as their 1st choice. None of those candidates are likely to be eliminated before Duson, which means that those 2nd-choice votes won't do her any good.
Strimling does surprisingly well with 1st-choice preferences, but he drops way behind among everyone's 2nd and 3rd choices. As runoff rounds progress, it looks likely that Brennan will get more and more follow-up choices from lower-tier candidates, and widen his initial lead over Strimling.

[an aside: so apparently Stimling's pessimistic and divisive, "we-should've-let-my-cronies-build-a-hotel-on-the-Maine-State-Pier" campaign style is turning people off. Good. Let this be a lesson to future candidates and a ringing endorsement of ranked choice voting.]
Middle-tier candidates Miller, Rathband, and Marshall need lots of lower-tier candidates' second-choice votes to survive elimination in the later instant runoff rounds. Again, the sample sizes for those lower-tier candidates are too low to make any real inferences from this poll about whether that's possible.
Accepting that either Miller and Rathband are likely to get eliminated in a later round (which is a disappointment for anyone who cares about the issues I write about in this blog), their voters could deliver another candidate a vital block of 2nd-choice ballots if they chose to coordinate their voters in the last days of the campaign to mark someone like Brennan as their 2nd choice.

If those 2nd choice votes put the Mike Brennan over the 50% threshold, then the new mayor would owe a lot to Markos and/or Jed. It could be a way for those guys to see their policy ideas prioritized, without actually needing to attend to the daily business of mayoring.

Six more days 'till the election. We shall see!

The Ranked Choice Voting Game

2011-10-28T11:20:00.002-04:00

This November, voters in Portland, Maine will elect their new mayor using a ranked-choice ballot. Voters will be able to rank as many as 15 candidates in their order of preference.

The ranked choice system will provide a lot of advantages over traditional elections, where you can only choose one candidate. No longer will we have to worry about the "spoiler effect" of third-party candidates: now, we can vote for Ralph Nader AND Al Gore.

Nevertheless, with fifteen candidates (and up to fifteen possible rankings to choose), the novelty of the ranked choice system is causing some confusion for local voters. It's difficult to explain the dynamics of a ranked-choice election in prose, and some attempts have been downright misleading.

So (and I'm puffing my chest out as I write this, because this represents my first substantial foray into practical programming) I've written a Ranked Choice Election simulation game to let people experience firsthand how a ranked choice election will work.

Play the Ranked Choice Election Game

Fill out up to 50 different ballots as though they were coming from different voters. The program will then run through the Instant Runoff counting process, sequentially eliminating last-place contenders and explaining the process of reallocating the ballots along the way, until one winner crosses the crucial 50% threshold.

It may not look like much, but I spent many, many hours working on this over the summer and fall, so please consider leaving a tip if you find it useful (or, click often on our fossil fuel propagandist advertisers). I've tried my best to debug it across various browsers but it'll work best on Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, and don't bother if you're on a phone.

City Council Transportation Committee: Tuesday 10/18

2011-10-17T22:29:00.003-04:00

The Portland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee will be delivering our report to the City Council's Transportation Committee tomorrow at their monthly meeting. We'll be first on the agenda at 5:30 and hopefully done by shortly after 6 pm, and it would be great if we could get at least a small crowd in there to show the Councilors some of the citizens who care about safer streets in Portland. Please come!

There's also lots of other interesting stuff on the agenda, including a proposal to park a new UCarShare car on Munjoy Hill, possibilities for a new train station on Thompson's Point, and the early stages of pedestrian-friendly revisions to the city's street design standards - it could be worth staying for the balance of the evening as well.

Either way, I hope I'll see lots of you there tomorrow!

GM SUCKS

2011-10-12T15:53:00.003-04:00

Oh, SHIT, readers! I know lots of you ride bikes, but this General Motors advertisement implies that college ladies, in their impeccable good taste, might find guys like me unattractive on my bicycle, ERGO, I might not get laid as prolifically as I deserve!

SO WELL I"D BETTER incur massive debt to purchase a product that will lose half its value as soon as I drive it off the dealer's lot! And as long as we're talking GREAT ideas, why not buy some AXE BODY SPRAY as well? And BAILOUTS FOR EVERYONE!

Via BikePortland [the other one].

Ranked Choice Game Theory

2011-10-10T11:03:00.018-04:00

My most recent column for the Portland Daily Sun analyzes some of the strategic ramifications of the city's new Ranked Choice Voting election for mayor this fall. Read it here.

Unfortunately, the city's other daily paper chose to publish a more error-prone and confused op-ed column a day later. I've talked to a few people over the weekend who expressed some confusion over the topic. The author of the Press Herald's column, an overseas statistician, does make some good points, but he also makes a number of misleading ones. So I'm going to use this space to break it down and add in some corrections and clarifications.

To start with, though, here's the City Charter's 3-step explanation of the Ranked Choice Election:

(1) The ballot shall give voters the option of ranking candidates in order of preference.

(2) If a candidate receives a majority (defined as fifty percent [50%] of the votes plus one or more votes) of first preferences, that candidate is elected.

(3) If no candidate receives a majority of first preferences, an instant runoff re-tabulation shall be performed... In each round, each voter's ballot shall count as a single vote for whichever candidate the voter has ranked highest and has not been eliminated in a prior round. The candidate with the fewest votes after each round in which no candidate receives a majority of votes shall be eliminated and the votes re-tabulated until one candidate receives a majority. [source]

Step 3 is the most important piece. If there's a 15-way election, it's very unlikely that step 2 will come to pass - the front runners might get 15% or 20% of the votes, tops. That means that several rounds of instant runoff re-tabulations will happen. The last-place candidate will be eliminated from the running, and ballots that had picked him or her as their #1 choice will be re-distributed to other candidates according to those ballots' #2 choices.

In each round, only the top choice out of the remaining candidates gets counted from each ballot, and the elimination and redistribution process continues until a candidate emerges with more than 50% of the ballots' top choices. OK, so let's look at Jack O'Brien's Press Herald piece:

The key variable in the balloting process is the "break," or the count that decides the election.

If one candidate obtains a majority in the first count, the break is one.

If it takes five counts -- so that all votes up to the fifth preference are tallied -- then the break is five.

The last sentence is the column's first false statement, and it's a big one. Having five instant runoff rounds does not mean that all votes up to the fifth preference are tallied: a ballot's #5 choice will only be counted if the same ballot's #1 choice, #2 choice, #3 choice, and #4 choice have all been eliminated from consideration in the previous four rounds.

In fact, the statistical probability of someone actually choosing the 5 least popular candidates from a field of 15 is pretty slight. For an election with a break n, it's actually very unlikely that election officials will get around to tallying your nth-choice votes.

Continuing:

Further, the break divides the candidates into the "head" -- those candidates who survived until the break -- and the "tail," those who are eliminated before the break. Only the votes given to candidates in the head ultimately matter.

Votes given to the tail disappear by the time the runoff process has worked itself out. Finally, the break is important because it determines how important depth of support is to the outcome -- it doesn't matter how many sixth-rank votes you have if the break is at five.

The "break" is a useful concept, as are the "head" and "tail." It's absolutely true that 6th-choice votes won't matter at all if the break happens in round five. But, as I mentioned before, it's extremely unlikely that your 5th choice votes will count in that scenario, either.

This might deserve a simulated election before I go further. Taking O'Brien's lead, I'm going to show you an Ranked-Choice election scenario where the "break" is eight (i.e., there are 7 rounds of instant runoff reallocations, and seven candidates get eliminated), and where only 1st- and 2nd-choice votes influence the final outcome.

Here's a first-round result for our hypothetical election. Only the top choices for each ballot get counted, and because all the candidates are in the running at the outset, everyone's top choice is the same as their 1st choice:

Here, eight cellar candidates all roughly get 5% of the vote. The front-runner, Brennan, takes 16%. Obviously there's nobody with 50% of top-choice votes, so no winner in the first round. Bragdon, with roughly 4% of the vote, gets eliminated.

For simplicity's sake let's suppose that everyone who voted for Bragdon picked Brennan as their second choice. All of Bragdon's ballots then get re-allocated to Brennan (because, with Bragdon out, Brennan is the best choice of the remaining candidates for those voters).

Round 2 of the count then looks like this (in the graphs below, black bars will indicate first-choice votes, and red bars will indicate second-choice votes reallocated from other candidates):

Now Brennan's up to a shade over 20%. The next-last place candidate, Jodie Lapchick, now gets eliminated. I promised to finish this in seven rounds and there's a long way to go, so let's suppose that Lapchick's voters also all picked Brennan as their second choice candidate. Round three:

Brennan's up to 25% - halfway there. You get the idea, now: Haadow will get eliminated next, then Carmona, then Bryant. Let's continue to assume that the vast majority of these ballots pick Brennan as their second choice, and skip ahead to round 8, where 7 candidates have been eliminated:

So, there's a hypothetical, but entirely possible, instant runoff election where the break is eight, but only 1st- and 2nd-choice votes get counted before the winner passes the crucial 50% mark.

It does not matter in this scenario whom anyone picked as their 3rd or 4th or 5th choices (or whether those choices got marked at all). It only mattered whom the eliminated candidates' 1st-choice voters picked for their second choice.

Continuing on in O'Brien's column, let's confront his other big fallacy:

The most obvious, and most disconcerting, difference between the old process and the new is how RCV lends itself to tactical voting, where voters deliberately limit their range of preferences to advance a favorite candidate or candidates.

Suppose a resident votes just for her first and second choices, leaving the rest of the ballot blank. That means the voter is actively withholding support for all other candidates, and this makes her vote more valuable than someone who votes for five, 10 or all 15 candidates.

This is not true. And shame on the Press Herald for printing this, because if voters make the mistake of following this strategy, it will neuter their ability to make their values known in a crowded field of candidates.

Refer again to the simulated election I mentioned above. Suppose that Bragdon's (or Lapchick's, or Vail's) voters had all read O'Brien's column and decided to withhold support for any other candidates, based on the idea that their vote would be more "valuable" that way. What would happen once Bragdon was eliminated from the running? The ballot counters, not seeing any other choices marked, would set those ballots aside - effectively treating them as blank ballots.

A blank ballot is not valuable to anyone. Employing this strategy is effectively the same as turning your back from the election out of spite if your top choices get eliminated from the running. We have enough good candidates in this race that nobody should be doing that.

I've heard rumors from various candidates' canvassing efforts that some voters might be employing this strategy - i.e., that some voters seem less willing to mark other candidates as second choices on their ballots, based on the mistaken idea that their ballots will be more "powerful" that way.

Let's run another simulated election to see why that might be hazardous. This time assume a wider spread among 1st-choice rankings. In this scenario, the lower-tier candidates might get 2% or 3% of the vote, and the front-runners get closer to 15% to 20%. Here's the initial ranking:

Again, Bragdon gets eliminated first, but this time, let's assume that Bragdon's voters choose a variety of candidates for their second choices, mostly to Eder, Miller, and Bryant:

And then a third round, when Lapchick's ballots get redistributed to her voters' follow-up choices:

... and so on. By round six, some of the candidates (Bryant and Carmona) who had previously received second-choice votes from others have themselves been eliminated. Those ballots will then get their 3rd choices get counted (3rd choice votes are denoted by the purple bars below), assuming they've marked 3rd choices on their ballots:

We've eliminated more than a third of the candidates and the front-runners still haven't broken the 20% mark. This is pretty realistic for what we can expect in the actual election. Let's skip ahead to round 11:

Here, the efforts of Rathband, Miller, and Marshall to appeal to voters who had picked others for their first choices have paid off. Our hypothetical election is suddenly a 5-way race with Rathband in the lead. But here's the interesting part: Brennan, the initial front-runner, has fallen behind, having failed to pick up many second- or third-choice votes from the eliminated candidates. In fact, Brennan is now in last place. Which means he's eliminated.

Now, if all the people who had picked Brennan as their top choice had picked one of the remaining candidates in any of their 2nd, 3rd, or 11th-choice spots, they could make a huge difference in the rest of the race - this is a block of voters that represents 20% of the electorate, after all.

But if a substantial block of those voters hadn't picked anyone besides Mike Brennan, then those ballots will be taken out to sit on the sidelines for the remaining rounds. Of the remaining candidates in this scenario, Marshall would be eliminated next. The substantial bulk of his voters' follow-up choices are likely to go to Rathband and Miller, putting both of them well on the way to the crucial 50% threshold, and victory.

Now, it's true that the one-vote strategy doesn't explicitly do Brennan as a candidate any harm in this scenario - he got eliminated regardless of what his voters marked down as 2nd and 3rd choices. But a one-vote strategy also wouldn't do Brennan (or his voters) any good.

If you're voting for a candidate because you'd like them to implement specific policies, or to instill specific values in government - and if you'd like other candidates and voters to also care about those policies and values - then it makes no sense to choose only one candidate on the ballot, and sit out the rest of the election in the (not unlikely) event that that candidate gets eliminated in a runoff round.

With this crowded field of candidates, it's a strong possibility that your first-choice candidate - even if he or she is considered a "front runner" - will be eliminated at some point in the process. Whoever eventually wins should be more receptive to implementing your first-choice candidate's ideas if he or she knows that your candidates' runner-up votes provided a substantial boost to putting them past the 50% threshold. Wouldn't you, as a voter, rather see a winner who at least partially shares your first-choice candidate's values, even if your first choice doesn't get to be mayor? Or would you rather just skulk on the sidelines while the runoff process plays out?

One last fallacy in O'Brien's article - it's a false conclusion he draws from the false premise (debunked above) that your 8th-choice vote counts as soon as the runoff reaches the 8th round:

Another conceivably powerful strategy could be named "Eight for Haadoow," after the candidate Hamza Haadoow.
Haadoow likely has enough support among the Somali community to be in the head if the break is fairly high (say, seven or eight). Lacking broad exposure to the city at large, he could succeed by relying on his home constituency to allow him to survive the early rounds and by trying to garner large amounts of weak support by trying to get other voters, who might only be slightly familiar with him but otherwise positively disposed, to rank him as No. 8.

This kind of strategy could also favor someone like Chris Vail, the Portland firefighter and Peaks Island native, who can draw from these two small-but-significant constituencies.

Marketing yourself as the "eighth best" is not - I repeat, IS NOT - a winning strategy. Remember that election officials will only count the top choice on your ballot out of the remaining candidates in each round. Suppose I vote for Mavodones, Brennan, Rathband, and Miller in my top 4 spots, and put Haadow or Vail down at #8. It's extremely unlikely that those four candidates in my top 4 will all be eliminated before Haadow and Vail, and thus it's extremely unlikely that my #8 choice will be counted.

As above, this strategy would only work for Haadow or Vail if they both manage to reach the eighth round AND if the ballots that had ranked them in the #8 spot had all picked losers in spots #1 through #7. Which is highly improbable.

These candidates would be better off spending their time to try to get as many first-choice votes as they can to survive early-round elimination. And come to think of it, that's the strategy that every one of the fifteen candidates should be pursuing.

The Candidates on Transit

2011-10-04T12:17:00.005-04:00

This week's Forecaster includes a rundown of the mayoral candidates' positions on transportation and transit in Portland. Some highlights:

Dave Marshall continues beating the drum to build a streetcar along Forest Avenue to Woodford's Corner. While this is certainly a visionary idea, I'm curious to know how Dave plans to pay for a project like this one, which would easily cost upwards of $20 million. I'm concerned that too much of a fixation on trains could distract him (and divert scarce funding) from making more realistic improvements in the shorter term.
Jed Rathband countered with a proposal to bolster city bus service funded from savings in diminished spending on public parking lots and garages. That may be less sexy than a train, but a whole lot more realistic and would benefit more of the city more quickly.
Similarly, Markos Miller talked about revising the city's land use codes to support transit-oriented development instead of defaulting to our status quo of car-oriented development. Markos, of course, is also very involved in the efforts to reconfigure and redevelop Franklin Street, a project in which he'll play an important role whether or not he's elected.
John Eder endorsed ZOOM service to Lewiston/Auburn. He wasn't involved at all in last winter's Legislative efforts, though, which makes me doubt his passion on the subject - I suspect he's just singing from the League of Young Voters' choir-book.

Overall, I think that Markos Miller has the most experience and knowledge with respect to the city's land use and transportation issues, and having worked with him frequently in neighborhood and smart growth activism, I think he's the best candidate in that regard.

That said, I also admire Jed Rathband's approach. While he's been less directly involved in these issues, they do dovetail with his primary interests in promoting small businesses and additional growth in downtown Portland and in outlying neighborhood centers, where automotive parking costs and regulatory burdens are the major barrier to additional growth. His proposed policies to re-direct city investments and development requirements from a focus on parking lots to a focus on better transit services is a pragmatic, fiscally responsible no-brainer that more candidates should be talking about.

I'll also probably cast a vote for Dave Marshall, although he probably won't be my first choice, for the boldness of his vision for better transit service in the city. Even if it is mostly political razzle-dazzle with little substance, at least Marshall is demonstrating to the other candidates that better transit can be a galvanizing idea for a more sustainable city.

ADDENDUM - other papers are covering this story this morning (10/5), and coverage from both the Press Herald and the Portland Daily Sun included a dig against METRO from fringe candidate Charles Bragdon.

However, only one of those newspapers did any fact-checking to see if Bragdon's Tea Party-style* claims were actually true or not. So kudos to the Daily Sun for holding Bragdon accountable:

"[Bragdon] also said the 'average ridership is about six people per route, per day' on Metro buses. (Metro officials said average daily ridership is more than 4,000 people.)" - from reporter Casey Conley's story in the Daily Sun

*i.e., inflammatory and false.

Now Available: The Greater Portland Bike Map

2011-09-14T22:47:00.004-04:00

I've been slacking on blog updates in order to work on various other projects and today I'm happy to report that one of them is ready to publicize.

After six years of blogging for free, I've graduated into the realm of paid analog publishing, with the printing and distribution of the first-ever Portland Maine Bike Map (!).

My first venture into for-profit cartography covers bike routes, lanes, and paths from Falmouth to Scarborough, Casco Bay to Westbrook - almost everything you can comfortably reach in an easy hour's ride from downtown Portland.

It's retailing for $6, currently at all of our locally-owned bike shops in Portland (I'm still negotiating the purchasing departments of the chain stores), plus Longfellow Books in Monument Square, Art Mart on Congress Street, Pinecone and Chickadee on Free Street, any of the three Portland Coffee By Design shops, Green Hand Books, and Bathra's Market in Willard Square.

Thanks to Sean Wilkinson of Might & Main for making it look so sharp (he designed the cover and advised on typography and colors).

If you own or work at a greater Portland business that might be interested in selling a few of these, please get in touch with me. If you'd like to bulk-purchase more than 10 at our wholesale rate for your workplace's commuting and parking management programs, your should also get in touch with me.

Did I mention that 10% of our proceeds, after covering our costs, will benefit the Bicycle Coalition of Maine and Portland Trails? It's true!

But first I have to cover my costs and I am deeply in the hole for the time being. Not that I'm a charity case but almost I am. Please buy my map.

"Maritime Landing" reaches for the sky (by standing on the shoulders of giant parking garages)

2011-08-17T12:04:00.005-04:00

Patrick Venne, author of the Mainely Urban blog, has uncovered a new commercial sales brochure for "Maritime Landing," a proposed development for the Federated Companies' newly-acquired land in Bayside. The brochure includes the above image of a dense block of high-rises along the new Bayside Trail, stretching from Elm Street to a future extension of Pearl Street.

It also includes this breakdown of what Federated hopes to build there:

96,000 square feet of retail space
80,000 square feet of office space
540 units of housing
1,100 parking spaces

To put some of these numbers in context: the Back Bay Tower on Cumberland Avenue contains 116 units of housing; the new Custom House office building on Fore Street contains 60,000 square feet of offices; the new Whole Foods is about 50,000 square feet of retail space; the taxpayer-subsidized Ocean Gateway parking garage on the corner of Fore and Hancock Streets contains 700 parking spaces.

It's hard to imagine four buildings of those sizes sitting together on these two blocks in Bayside - but Federated is saying that they plan to build even bigger: the equivalent of 2 Whole Foods stores, plus five Back Bay Towers, plus one and a half Custom House office buildings and Ocean Gateway garages. If they're for real, then most of Federated's Bayside land holdings would be given over to 5- to 10-story buildings.

It would be fantastic to have 500 new households living in Bayside. And great to have additional spaces for businesses to conduct commerce and provide services to central-city residents.

But does the neighborhood really need 1,100 new parking spaces - and 1,100 new automobiles clogging its streets?

With the mix of uses proposed, Federated could, in theory, be able to manage parking more smartly, such that office workers use the same parking spaces during the daytime that residents and retail customers use on nights and weekends.

The city, for better or for worse, has already agreed to finance a 500-car garage on the site, and that could probably be sufficient, even for the amount of office and residential space that Federated is proposing. Looking at the city's sunken subsidies for the half-empty Ocean Gateway garage, I have my doubts whether Federated could possibly find that many cars to fill its garage - especially given the amount of parking that already exists in Bayside.

Building 600 additional parking spaces on the site is going to be expensive for Federated: at a cost of $20,000 per space, building 600 extra spaces amounts to $10 million in additional development costs.

Alternatively, $10 million, matched with federal and state funds, could also build a streetcar line running from the USM campus to the Old Port, and running right past the front doors of Federated's new high-rises.

Isn't it possible that that might be a better investment?

Exit 7 Connection Finally Coming (Albeit Overpriced and Late)

2011-08-02T14:25:00.004-04:00

After a long, drawn-out process of "analysis" (read: inflating costs far beyond necessary) the Maine DOT is finally preparing to install a basic sidewalk on Franklin Street under Exit 7 to connect the Back Cove Trail to Marginal Way, after failing to do so last summer when construction crews were rebuilding the intersection anyhow.

It's going to cost taxpayers $200,000. Now, I'm pretty sure a single Eagle Scout could have done it for less, but at least it's getting done.

If you have any interest, Augusta's bureaucrats are hosting a public meeting about the project tomorrow at City Hall:

Public Meeting to Discuss Much Anticipated Trail Connector
City and state officials invite public to view plans for Bayside-Back Cove connection

Tomorrow, the City of Portland, Maine Department of Transportation and Portland Area Comprehensive Transportation System (PACTS) will host a public meeting to discuss plans to construct a trail connector from the Franklin Street-Marginal Way intersection to the Back Cove Trail. The connector will help fully realize the vision for the Bayside Trail as a key link connecting the city's most used trails and parks: the Back Cove Trail, the Eastern Promenade and Eastern Prom Trail, East End Beach, and Deering Oaks. The connector will also provide easy and safe access for cyclists and pedestrians looking to travel from Portland’s downtown to communities off-peninsula.

“Linking these popular trails with a safe and accessible connector is going to have a tremendously positive impact both on the Bayside neighborhood but also for those who commute to the downtown by bike or foot,” stated Director of Public Services Michael Bobinsky. “The success of this project is directly related to the willingness of all parties, from MDOT to the city and PACTS to the public, to collaborate and work towards a common goal – make the city accessible to all modes of transportation.”

The public is encouraged to attend the meeting to learn firsthand of the preliminary plans for the proposed ten foot wide, asphalt and stone dust bike/pedestrian trail, ask questions, and provide feedback to the design. The $195,000 trail connector, funded by the Maine Department of Transportation with a 20% local match provided by the City of Portland, is expected to be constructed this fall. Plans for the trail connector will also be available for review at Portland Public Services, 55 Portland Street.

When: Wednesday, August 3, 2011, 6:00 PM

Where: Merrill Auditorium Rehearsal Hall, Myrtle Street, Portland

Introducing the Hubway

2011-07-20T12:50:00.004-04:00

Here's one more reason to leave your car behind on trips to Boston: the city is getting ready to launch its Hubway bike-sharing system this summer, with 600 bikes available for cheap hourly rates all across the city.

Both North and South Stations (the arrival points for the Downeaster and Concord Coach, respectively) will have on-site stations where travellers can pick up a bike. You'll need to buy a membership, and , but if you return your bike to another station within 30 minutes, the ride is free.

Before you go, download the Spotcycle app to find stations and available bikes with your phone.

Also: a group of folks is looking into doing something similar, on a smaller scale, here in the city of Portland.

Some New Energy on Middle Street, and Too Much Parking in Falmouth

2011-07-06T10:46:00.005-04:00

Developers are giving some attention to the western stretch of Middle Street, with an eye towards making the area around the 1970s-era Canal Plaza complex more lively and pedestrian-friendly.

First up: the new owners of the Canal Plaza complex and one of their tenants, the new Canal 5 Studio architecture firm, are looking into ways to make their buildings and its central plaza more engaging to the street, and more successful as a public space. Mainebiz ran a preliminary sketch yesterday on their website (at left), and also revealed that the owners are also considering increasing their investment in the property by adding additional floors to two of the complex's office buildings.

The new landlord, Tim Soley of East Brown Cow, bought these buildings a couple years ago, in the depths of the recession, at a low price that assumed that the ground level would continue to be leased as offices. But by adding some street-level interest and attracting more foot traffic, the new owners are clearly looking to boost their revenues substantially by charging Old Port rents in new ground-level retail spaces. If it succeeds, more tourists will get lured up to explore Monument Square and the Arts District. It's a great example of how pedestrian-friendly development that enhances public spaces can be extremely lucrative to developers and neighborhoods.

I'd also like to put it on the record that I'm quite fond of the Canal Bank buildings - they're one of the rare positive examples of 1970s-era modernism that we have in the city (the only other one that comes to mind is the Portland Public Library). I particularly like the window pattern on the tallest building at the rear of the plaza, which, despite its height, has a stately and subdued quality to it (see Corey Templeton's photo at right, from his Portland Daily Photo blog). I hope that the new plaza renovations and additions will respect and enhance the rest of the complex's classic modern architecture.

Also on Middle Street, the old Canal Bank building at 188 Middle (right next door to the Canal Plaza complex) has finally found a retail tenant in the street-level space that was formerly home to the Pavilion function hall. That tenant is Urban Outfitters, catnip to suburban kids with high credit limits and a vanguard in high-rent shopping districts like Boston's Newbury Street.

I have mixed feelings about this. While I'm glad that Middle Street is on the up and up, and successfully attracting businesses and their customers away from the blasted Maine Mall, I'm also wary that our city's downtown area could eventually become a sterile, outdoor copy of the blasted Maine Mall - much like Boston's Newbury Street is today.

To put it another way, maybe Urban Outfitters will entice those Falmouth brats to stop loitering in Post Office Park - or maybe it'll just entice increasing hordes of upper-middle-class twits to take over the entire city. We talk about affordable housing frequently - maybe it's time to start talking about the possibility of affordable retail space in downtown Portland, before we get to the point where new businesses can't afford to start up here.

And speaking of twits from Falmouth, that town's planners are now negotiating an expansion of the Portland area's closest Walmart. A story about a suburb's sad progress towards increasing misery and ugliness is generally not worth mentioning here, but this little bit from the Falmouth Forecaster's news report struck me as funny:

"Walmart has also applied for a waiver to build only 569 parking spaces, instead of the 621 [roughly 6 acres' worth - ed] that would be required, citing 'historic under-utilization of the parking lot.' "

Hey Falmouth Town Planner Theo Holtwijk: if the world's largest owner of parking lots by acreage thinks that your town's parking requirements are too high, it just might time to revisit your zoning codes.

Will Portland's "transit-oriented" development offer a way in for transit riders?

2011-06-25T16:44:00.007-04:00

The Thompson's Point mixed-use development proposal heads to its first workshop at the Planning Board on Tuesday afternoon.

Commenters on this blog and elsewhere have been giving the proposal mixed reviews, accusing it of being too suburban in its style and layout to be considered a real "transit-oriented" development.

I think that's fair, but I also believe that some minor changes could improve it drastically, and make it much more successful as a business venture for the developers and as an interesting place to go for visitors.

This week's planning board workshop will be a good venue to advocate for urban design improvements. It's still early enough for the developers to make changes, especially if those changes might, in the long term, add value to their development.

Here's the site plan as it currently stands. The big building in the middle is the sports arena and event center; just to the south, and sharing a wall with the event center, is a hotel and restaurant. Two mid-rise office buildings are on the southern tip of the peninsula.

Now, imagine that you're a conventioneer arriving here from Boston by bus or train. You walk out the front door of the station and turn left towards your hotel, crossing the train tracks on your way, and see the event building where your event is being held. But then you get annoyed: the main entrance is all the way on the other side! You end up walking roughly the length of a football field, dragging your luggage, to round the corner - at which point you then need to walk along the edge of a large parking lot before finally getting to your hotel lobby.

May I propose a slightly better way?

Instead of attaching the hotel and event center, which inconveniences foot traffic, the Planning Board ought to ask the developers to include a pedestrian street running east-to-west between the events building and the hotel and restaurant. This would give transit riders a shortcut to the complex's other spaces, but it would give the developers a neat little outdoor space to give their development some street life - potentially something like Yawkey Way or Portland Street in Boston:

A more modern example is the "Center Court" outside Portland, Oregon's Rose Garden (in the photo below, the basketball area is on the left; a complex of restaurants and shops is on the right):

I imagine that the developers had initially proposed to attach the hotel to the event center to make it easy for caterers to move between the two spaces, thus easing operations. That's valid. But I used to work in hospitality myself, and there's an old joke that the way to make your work as efficient as possible is to get rid of the guests altogether. And in a way, that's what's happening here. Is having your caterers cross a narrow outdoor space such a high price to pay for accommodating your thousands of car-free guests from New York, Boston, and elsewhere?

City Councilor Donoghue: "It's Too Hard to Stop Subsidizing City Hall Parking"

2011-06-21T09:49:00.006-04:00

Last week, City Hall launched its new TDM2Go.com website, designed to help employers in Portland reduce their parking and payroll costs by getting more employees to work without cars.

It's a great effort, but there's some irony in it, as the Forecaster notes in its news report on the event: "Do as Portland City Hall says, not as it does."

You see, as much City Hall says it wants to encourage more downtown workers to walk, bike, or use transit, it still pays for free parking for every City Hall employee in the publicly-owned Chestnut Street parking garage. Given the "market" rate (I use that term loosely , as the "market" is itself tremendously distorted by other city policies) that's a subsidy of roughly $1,000 per employee every year.

This is, of course, a silly waste of public funds. But it's not as silly as City Councilor Kevin Donoghue's excuse for it: "Staff resources have not been allocated to implement this city policy," said Donoghue, who leads the City Council's Transportation Committee.

You might wonder, as I did, what kind of "staff resources" it takes to kill an ill-conceived subsidy. Wouldn't asking city employees to take personal responsibility for their own motor vehicles during the workday be a lot easier than asking the city bureaucracy to take care of them instead? Isn't this something that hundreds of downtown employees already do without any "staff resources"? Didn't we just go through a labor-intensive budget-cutting process, and wouldn't saving thousands of dollars in parking expenses make things considerably easier the next time around? For that matter, if "staff resources" are really a problem, wouldn't the money that City Hall saves from eliminating its parking subsidies be enough to hire a new full-time city employee?

Forget lightbulbs - how many City Councilors does it take to stop micromanaging the vehicular storage of city employees' personal automobiles?

To be fair to Kevin, whose heart is in the right place, this was a stupid quote made in the flush of embarrassment at being called out for hypocrisy by a news reporter. His natural first impulse was to make lame excuses.

If he'd like to redeem himself, his second impulse should be to make some changes.

Real leaders take charge and get things done without waiting for "staff resources" to do it for them. If real leadership exists on our current City Council, then we shouldn't have to wait until November for City Hall's parking subsidies to die.

The City Council could easily make the changes necessary by directing the city's parking manager to charge market rates for all users - whether or not they work for the city - at the city's publicly-owned garages.

This should not be a hard thing to do. I'd venture to say it might even be easier than changing a lightbulb.

Why is cycling a sausagefest?

2011-06-20T13:48:00.004-04:00

Back in 2002, I spent a long senior-year semester as an editor for the Reed College Quest, which distinguished itself for printing anything because it couldn't afford to be picky. I suppose the experience gave me some insights about the nature of editing and publishing, but what I remember most was the deep animosity I developed for the dopey bro who submitted 1200-word, barely-intelligible essays about his favorite burritos every damned week.

However, as little as we deserved to be taken seriously, we still had a few writers interested in doing real reporting. One of them was Elly Blue, who nine years later, I'm proud to say, is making a name for herself as an authoritative blogger and essayist on bicycling culture, feminism, and economics with regular writings on grist.org and a self-published zine called Taking the Lane.

Elly's latest column on Grist examines the "bicycling gender gap." Why do more men ride bikes for transportation? Some have claimed that women are more timid on busy roads, or too vain to break a sweat on the way to work. Blue cites some more convincing and fundamental statistics:

Bicycling takes time. And this is something that, by the numbers, women have less of than men. In 2004, employed women reported an average of one more hour of housework per day than their employed male counterparts. These same employed women reported twice the time spent caring for young children. Employment status being equal, we have more household duties and are far more likely than men to be caregivers for aging relatives.

These kinds of responsibilities add up to more complicated transportation needs. Women make more trips than men, with diverse kinds of trips chained together. And twice as many trips as men's are at the service of passengers -- that is to say, the school drop-off, soccer practice, and the play date wedged in there between the grocery run and the commute to work (see pages 15 and 16 of this paper). No wonder the minivan is inextricably linked with motherhood in America.

We can hope that one day none of these duties will be tied to gender. Until then, statistically, if you're a woman, biking is going to be less accessible to you than for your statistical male counterpart.

"Bicycling is, in much of the car-centric U.S., either a privilege or a punishment," she concludes. "It isn't because we're fearful and vain; it's because we're busy and broke and our transportation system isn't set up for us to do anything but drive."

Elly's analysis doesn't just apply to women - it applies to any demographic group that's geographically isolated and stressed for time. It also helps explain why some cities and nations don't really have a cycling gender gap (they tend to be relatively prosperous places where women are well-integrated in the workforce, have tightly-knit neighborhoods where running errands doesn't necessarily require a minivan, and have robust social services for parents: places like Germany and the Netherlands).

If I look around downtown Portland, Maine, I see lots of women riding bikes. But most of them are in a pretty narrow demographic: in their 20s or early 30s, living without kids in on-peninsula neighborhoods. If I consider the cyclists I know who are also parents and/or live in the suburbs, the gender gap is more apparent: I can name a lot of men and precious few women.

Part of the challenge is to make our suburban neighborhoods more like downtown Portland: places where it's easy to run multiple daily errands without travelling for miles. For the time being, we don't have many neighborhoods like that, so the other part of the challenge is to make well-functioning places like downtown Portland more welcoming, affordable, and accessible to parents and low-income households. Doing both these things won't just get more women on bikes; it'll create a more just and healthy society for everyone.

Megabus now booking for Portland-Boston Concord Coach buses

2011-06-19T22:42:00.005-04:00

While there's been no actual increase in the number of buses going between Portland and Boston, you can now book your Concord Coach bus tickets to South Station via the Megabus website. By booking in advance on the website instead of buying your tickets at the station, you can get much cheaper fares (and also plan for and buy connecting bus tickets to NYC and the dozens of other cities that Megabus serves).

Right now, a round trip ticket to Boston, bought at the station, costs $36. But, if you can plan a few weeks in advance, you can now buy a ticket on the same bus for as little as $1 one-way through the Megabus website. Typical fares will be more than a dollar, of course, and indeed, Megabus might even charge more than the Concord Coach ticket counter in some situations, so it's worth comparison shopping. Still, if you're willing to trade the flexibility of a standard first-come, first-served Concord Coach ticket for a reservation on a specific bus, the Megabus option could save you some money.

Save these dates

2011-06-13T12:20:00.004-04:00

Tonight is the June monthly meeting of the Portland bike and pedestrian advisory committee. We're meeting in the stately State of Maine room this evening: from the front entrance facing Congress Street, take the grand stairs up to the second floor, then follow the hallway to your right to the end. We get started at 5:30 pm and will hear the latest about the Deering neighborhood byway project, Forest Avenue, the Congress Street bus priority corridor project, and the Bayside redevelopment.
The 2nd Public Meeting of the "Transforming Forest Avenue" study will be on June 22, from 5:30pm-8pm, in the Merrill Auditorium Rehearsal Hall (20 Myrtle St., around the corner from City Hall). City planner Molly Casto writes that "the purpose of this meeting, open to the public, is to present a series of alternative design concepts for the study area, which extends from the intersection of Park Ave and Forest Ave, along the Forest Avenue Corridor, and through Woodfords Corner to the railroad crossing."

The 2011 Active Communities Conference, "Linking Transportation, Economic Development, Health and People, to Improve the Quality of Maine Communities," will be held on Tuesday, June 21, 2011 on the Bowdoin College Campus, in downtown Brunswick. If you can get the day off, it's worth going (Brunswick is about a 70 minute bike ride from Portland, and you can take the 7 bus to Falmouth Town Landing to get 1/4 of the way there). For more information or to register go to the conference website.

Preble and Elm

2011-06-08T17:25:00.004-04:00

As referenced in yesterday's post, getting a quality mixed-use development built in the empty railyard lots of central Bayside is going to be a challenge. Here's a view up Preble Street now, from Marginal Way looking towards downtown:

The street looks exactly like what it is: a failed urban renewal expressway, conceived by mall designer Victor Gruen (the Butcher of Franklin Street) to move lots of cars into Monument Square. And it doesn't even do a particularly good job at that: the street is so bleak that even most drivers use alternate routes.

The idea that Bayside can flourish as a walkable neighborhood, when this is its main connection to downtown Portland, is ridiculous. City Hall has to do more to improve these streets if they really want Bayside to succeed - and if they want the Federated Cos. to deliver a high-quality development.

But here's the good news: if the Federated Cos., the City, and surrounding landlords got together and got a little creative, there's a lot of potential for increasing property values, development opportunities, and the streetscapes of Preble and Elm Streets.

Take a look at the current plan for these lots near Elm Street (this comes from the Bayside Trail plans, but the brown blocks around the trail show the lots that the city recently sold to the Federated Cos. for redevelopment). Note that the triangular wedge where Preble meets Elm currently wastes a lot of space. Note that it also crowds the westernmost of Federated's newly-bought development lots and the lot to the south (owned by Skillful Vending) into an unweildy wedge shape. That's an important detail, since oddly-shaped lots are generally more difficult for developers to build on due to higher construction costs and oddly-angled interior spaces.

Some additional background: the Portland Peninsula Traffic and Transit Studies of 2000 and 2008 (respectively) both found that Preble and Elm were underutilized, and that both of them could feasibly be turned back into 2-way streets (this wouldn't just help calm traffic; it would also make it easier for drivers to get around Bayside).

Plans are also in the works to re-connect Somerset Street across Elm, and extend the Bayside Trail through this area to connect to Deering Oaks Park.

So with all the changes in this area, we ought to be asking whether that huge wedge of land where Preble and Elm Street come together - a piece of pavement designed to let cars coming down Elm Street fly into the Marginal Way intersection at 35 miles per hour - is really the best use of our real estate in Bayside.

What if the City (and possibly the folks at Skillful, who, I understand, have been very supportive of Bayside redevelopment efforts) worked out a land exchange or sale to build something more like this?

Some potential consequences of this scenario:

The developers get more land to build on, and would be able to build a larger or higher-quality building with lower construction costs (thanks to the fact that there would be larger floorplates and fewer weird angles in the walls);
City Hall gets more tax revenue;
All parties could use some of the proceeds from their mutually-beneficial transaction to pay for improvements to the Preble and Elm streetscape;
And surrounding property owners would also see benefits from higher property values and a more vibrant neighborhood.

Here's a quick sketch of what it could look like (it's the same view as above, looking up Preble from Marginal Way). Would you stroll down this street?

Bayside

2011-06-07T12:35:00.004-04:00

Ten years after the City published its "New Vision for Bayside," and three years after the financial collapse scuttled a competitive slate of development proposals for the neighborhood, the empty, city-owned lots along Kennebec Street finally have a new owner.

The Federated Cos. now own five separate building lots between Somerset Street and the Bayside Trail. Details are still in the works, but city planners have verbally described plans to build mixed-use buildings and (in the first phase of development) a 500-car parking garage subsidized by the city and federal governments.

Map via the Portland Press Herald.

The Federated Cos. website shows a portfolio of mostly architecturally bland apartment complexes (although a planned reuse of a historic mill site in Worcester looks like a more interesting and creative project) and only a limited focus on retail and office development.

Still, even a vanilla mid-rise apartment building would be an improvement for lower Bayside, where there's already an abundance of retail services and office space, and not that many apartments. Adding a lot of housing to these blocks will add a lot of housing within easy walking distance of three big supermarkets, a pharmacy, the trail, and downtown Portland's jobs. And even the blandest architecture is better than an empty, trash-strewn lot.

The city has built incentives into the sale agreement to make sure that Federated actually builds something instead of just land banking the property: " Federated would have six months to get permits and approvals for its development plans, or pay $3,000 each for up to three 30-day extensions," according to the Press Herald, and City Hall will also have the right to buy back the property at the same price if nothing happens within 2 years of site plan approval.

Photo of the Elm Street sidewalk near Marginal Way by Corey Templeton, from his Walk Around Portland blog. This is at the western end of the newly-sold property, and the only way to get to Trader Joe's, due to landlord Peter Quesada's spite fence.

While the fast-track provisions are designed to make Bayside more of a neighborhood, I'm also a little concerned that the city's anxiousness to build something will come at the sacrifice of getting a better project for the long term. Also, there's the fact that infrastructure in the neighborhood doesn't match the city's ambitions for a walkable, transit-oriented district: bus routes haven't been adjusted or expanded (even though thousands of new workers and residents have arrived in recent years), sidewalks are broken and discontinuous (see image at right), and the Bayside Trail, while nice, is not particularly useful as a transportation connection (thanks to bad design and idiot landlords like Peter Quesada, who erects chain-link fences in order to inconvenience his tenants' customers).

In an ideal world, the Federated Cos. would realize that they could reduce their parking costs and add value to their own project by making small improvements to the streets and sidewalks adjacent to their property, and thinking creatively about the empty and under-utilized spaces in the surrounding blocks. I have some ideas on that score that I'll write about here soon...

Go Play in Traffic

2011-05-31T21:37:00.002-04:00

John Brooking, the founder of the Portland Bike Commuters' Meetup Group, will be leading a 3-part introductory course on how to cycle safely and confidently on busy roads.

Here's John's description of the first class, "Train Your Bike," coming up on Saturday June 11 from 9 am to 1 pm:

In this three hours of fun you will train your bike to perform at low speed, at high speed and in emergency situations.

You will teach your bike to behave:
As you start and stop correctly
Stop without putting a foot down
Maneuver with precision at low speeds
Communicate with the drivers behind you
Race sloooowly
You will teach your bike to be frisky at high speed:
Use your gears efficiently to accelerate
Avoid obstacles with the rock dodge
Dance through a slalom course
Corner with precision
You will teach your bike to get you out of trouble
Snap turn 90° in a 4ft radius
Stop on a dime ~ without going over the handlebars

The full course also includes these future classes:

The truth and techniques of traffic cycling (3 hrs):
Classroom session. Discover that bicycling is very safe and that with a few simple techniques, you can make your own cycling virtually conflict-free.

Tour of Portland (3.5 hrs):*
On-road tour. We will show you simple strategies to eliminate obstacles and ride with ease and confidence in places you might never have thought possible. *requires completion of previous 2 classes

A la carte session $30/each; full course package $75. Register online here.