Slowing Down Saves Money and Lives, Manville Says

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was featured in an Atlantic article about the benefits of driving slower. Fast speeds use more energy to cover the same distance, making driving fast more dangerous, more harmful to the environment and more expensive, especially with the recent increase in gas prices. According to Manville, the first step to altering the culture of fast driving is simply to enforce existing speed limits more consistently. “If a camera catches everyone who speeds on a road segment, every time they speed, then you can actually get meaningful deterrence,” he said. Furthermore, speeding fines would be less expensive if they caught every instance of speeding. “The logic behind the high fines for speeding right now is that you don’t catch most people who speed,” Manville explained. However, if drivers knew they would be consistently penalized for speeding, they may slow down, a decision that could save money and lives.

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On the Decline and Fall of Parking Requirements

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A StreetsBlog article about the evolution of mandatory parking requirements noted that recommendations put forward long ago by Distinguished Research Professor of Urban Planning Donald Shoup are now gaining wide acceptance. Shoup recommended removing off-street parking requirements, allowing developers and businesses to decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers. He also recommended pricing on-street parking so that one or two spaces will always be left open in order to avoid parking shortages. Finally, he suggested spending parking revenue on public service projects on the metered streets, which would help increase the popularity of demand-based pricing. Many local governments are taking these recommendations seriously and implementing changes. The article cited Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville‘s research on San Diego’s 2019 decision to stop requiring parking for housing near transit, which helped make affordable housing projects more economically viable. As Shoup predicted, parking requirements are quickly being eliminated across the United States.

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Manville on How Toll Roads Change Driver Behavior

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to Community Impact Newspaper about ways to reduce traffic congestion on roads and freeways. The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority has broken ground on its $612 million expansion of US 183 North in Austin, Texas. The project will add four express toll lanes and two general-purpose lanes, making it 18 lanes wide in some areas. While Manville said he sees advantages in express lanes, he is skeptical the project will actually reduce congestion because adding non-toll lanes will induce demand and cause more people to use them. Manville explained that he prefers toll roads because they force drivers to consider the time involved and how they make trips. “If you just changed the behavior of a small number of people who might get on that road, the road works a lot better, carries more people, there’s less congestion, and you actually have a high-quality service,” Manville said.

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Manville Sees Pandemic Shift in Parking Paradigm

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to Commercial Observer about how the pandemic opened up new possibilities to utilize streets and parking spaces. Many restaurants were able to save their businesses by expanding outdoor seating into parking lots and street parking spaces; other parking spaces have been converted to electric vehicle charging stations and even ghost kitchens. “The pandemic gave everyone this very vivid illustration of how much space, even in very vibrant parts of their area, is devoted to surface parking,” Manville said. “It helped them understand, more than any other sort of medium could, just how much of this scarce resource of urban land is devoted to holding empty cars.” These pandemic-triggered changes have accelerated a shift toward reevaluating the parking paradigm, including a Los Angeles city ordinance that does not require builders to add new parking and efforts to transform some downtown parking structures into affordable housing units.

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New Transit Doesn’t Alleviate Traffic, Manville Says

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the San Diego Union-Tribune about the anticipated effects of a new trolley line in San Diego. The 11-mile trolley runs from Old Town to UTC mall in La Jolla and is expected to carry 20,000 daily riders in the coming years. While the trolley line may seem like an ideal solution to reduce traffic congestion in the area, Manville explained that all the cars the trolley removes from the freeway “will almost certainly get replaced by backfilling prompted by reduced congestion” as open space on the freeway is filled by new commuters. “It’s a very established empirical fact that new transit doesn’t alleviate traffic,” Manville said. “It’s self-undermining, because congestion is the No. 1 thing that blunts demand.” He agreed that the new transit line is good for the economy and the region but noted that “you need to be realistic about what transit can and can’t do.”

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Manville on Showdown Over California Housing Laws

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An NBC News report on a looming showdown over new California laws aimed at building more housing included insights from Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville. The laws going into effect on Jan. 1 include Senate Bill 9, which will allow property owners to construct more than one unit on lots previously reserved for single-family homes. Opponents say the laws will strip cities and counties of control over zoning and will not ensure that new units will be affordable. A proposed constitutional amendment that would undo several of the laws may appear on the November 2022 ballot. The debate illustrates how difficult it is to address the state’s affordable housing crisis. “It took a long time for us to get into this hole, and it’s going to take a long time to get out,” Manville said. “It’s going to take some time to see so much construction that rents are going to fall.”

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Manville on Shifting Dynamics of City Life and Work

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to CNET about recent changes in living and commuting patterns. The shift to remote work for many during the pandemic accelerated an existing trend of people moving outward to areas surrounding their former homes in big urban centers. “Once you were deprived of the opportunities that a fully open Los Angeles or, for that matter, a fully open San Francisco offered you, it was very hard to justify the cost of housing here,” Manville said. The pandemic has also had a large impact on traffic patterns and use of public transit. At the beginning of the pandemic, “traffic just plummeted to levels we have probably not seen in 100 years,” but congestion and traffic have almost returned to pre-pandemic levels as the economy has reopened, Manville said. The article also cited UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies Director Brian Taylor regarding the variables that lead to traffic congestion.

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Single-Family Zoning Causes Harm, Manville Says

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville joined Detroit Today to discuss the effect of single-family zoning laws on wealth, access and opportunity. In most cities, the majority of residential land is zoned for single-family housing. By preventing non-single-family homes from being constructed in certain areas, Manville noted that single-family zoning hinders access to wealth for new, younger homebuyers, reinforces segregation and exacerbates issues of housing affordability. “My objection has nothing to do with single-family homes themselves,” Manville explained. “It’s the idea that you can have a law saying that nothing else can be built.” In metropolitan areas undergoing growth, single-family zoning drives up the minimum purchase price to be a part of the community, and this barrier has adverse consequences that fall disproportionately on low-income people and people of color. “Regardless of motivation, keeping these barriers in place causes harm, and we would do some good to remove them,” Manville concluded.

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Manville Explains Equity of Congestion Pricing

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the Washington Post to help debunk myths about highways and traffic. While some cities have widened their highways in an attempt to decrease traffic, “the iron law of congestion” explains the phenomenon in which widening highways results in a proportional increase in cars on the road. Some economists and urban planning experts, including Manville, have proposed congestion pricing as a solution to traffic congestion by making drivers pay for the space they take up on the highway. Some opponents of congestion pricing have argued that the policy would hurt the poor, but Manville responded, “Free roads are not a good way to help poor people.” Manville explained that affluent people drive more regardless of whether or not congestion pricing exists, so the best way to help low-income residents is actually by improving infrastructure and public transit, which can be funded through congestion pricing revenue.

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Manville on Opportunities Created by SB9

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In a recent Bloomberg column, Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville weighed in on SB9, a new California law that allows people who own single-family homes to add additional units on their property by constructing a new building or turning an existing house into a duplex. SB9 creates opportunities to make land more valuable in areas where housing is in great demand by allowing small-scale projects and giving homeowners a financial stake in new housing. Manville said that many of those who oppose SB9 don’t want to see their neighborhoods change, in spite of the financial advantages of the new law. “They like their neighborhood, they are risk averse, and they don’t want to see it change,” he said. However, Manville also noted that many historic L.A. neighborhoods include attractive duplexes and fourplexes from the early 20th century. “If more of the city just looked like that, we probably wouldn’t have a housing crisis,” he said.

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