Quote:
Originally Posted by jawagord
Interesting critique on the possible costs of Calgary's push to increase core density. Higher housing costs, higher transportation costs, longer commutes, inpediments to new businesses in calgary's future? I think the author is saying Mr. Nenshi "you got some splainin to do"!
http://www.policyschool.ucalgary.ca/...ure-arnott.pdf
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I read it too. Got about 20 pages in and had to stop because it had so many errors, misunderstandings, poor metrics, horrible methodology, poor assumptions, and non-sequiturs. Here are just a few:
- Consistently points out Calgary is an anomaly in terms of both employment concentration (correctly) and transit ridership (also correct) but just fails to make the connection. It's why transit ridership is so high.
- Wonders how Calgary can strive for substantial increases in transit ridership over the next several decades, and then later cites how Calgary's transit ridership has massively increased in the last 10 years
- Misuses office, retail and industrial floor area as a proxy for employment density, while completely missing institutional employment. This is why the Foothills/UofC/ACH is completely looked over
- Uses the TTI as a measure of congestion. Horrible, horrible, horrible metric. For critiques see:
Here here here and especially
Here
- Ignores efforts at non-CBD focused transit investments, such as cross-town BRTs
- Uses the four-stage model to predict traffic, which is a poor predictor of behavior
- States that because population projections are low (which is a good point), a intensity-focused land use strategy would result in increased rents, but doesn't say the same for a greenfield strategy. If your population projections are wrong, then no matter how you planned growth, you will be short on supply. Assumes that a laissez faire strategy to land supply can't also apply to increasing density in the existing city. Good job there urban economist!
- Also makes claim that low-population projections were used to justify land-constraint policies. This is incorrect. Infrastructure capital costs and maintenance were the primary justification for the intensification strategy. This only because more, not less, pronounced in high growth scenarios
- Neglects to include transportation in the cost of living analysis- while housing is the largest cost for Canadian households, transportation is the second. Omitting it is a huge error
- Makes the claim that planners are essentially all pie-in-the-sky idealists, while economists make judgements based on data. Two errors here. First, while some planners may be idealists, planning does incorporate economics, engineering, etc when making analyses. Second, to say economists base their theories and models on data or research is laughable. Look at how long it took the field of economics to deal with the criticisms of rational choice theory (which essentially all economics is based off) by the behavioural economists such as Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Consistently showed over and over again through numerous experiments that people do not behave economically rational, but economists just refused to believe it for decades. Kahneman and Tversky won a Nobel for it, but most in the economics field still learn about rational choice theory. Economics was, and still is to a large degree, a field that tries to fit the real world to the model and not the other way around. Read Thaler's "Misbehaving" or "Nudge" or Kahneman and Tversky's "Thinking Fast and Slow" on this.
- Claims that "congestion" will increase in the intensification scenario, yet his own data show that in that scenario trip times are massively lower than in a greenfield scenario- avg ato commute time of 48 mins compared to 138 mins. This is the largest error and misinformation of the entire report. Commute times in an intensification scenario are almost a third of those under a greenfield scenario, yet the report claims congestion will be worse. This is a blatantly misleading conclusion. So bad, whoever the hell reviewed it should be ashamed.
That is all for now. Ugh.