Manville on San Diego Transit Expansion Plans

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke to the San Diego Union-Tribune about the city’s transit plans. San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) Executive Director Hasan Ikhrata, who spent two years working on a transit expansion plan when the pandemic started, said he is determined to push forward with the $177 billion proposal. Ikhrata will present the plan, which includes 350 miles of new rail track, to the SANDAG board of directors. The plan has faced pushback from some who have said that the pandemic will radically change commuter patterns, threatening to render the plan obsolete by the time it’s under way. However, Manville argued that much of the pandemic’s impact will be temporary. “Right now, most of the economy’s still closed and you’ve got jammed roads,” he explained. “It seems hard to believe that in 20 years there will be no point to having mass transit to San Diego’s job centers.”

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Manville on Reaching a Traffic Tipping Point

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the Boston Globe about an uptick in traffic as the Boston metropolitan area reopens. Transit officials view the increased congestion as a real-time experiment to determine how much traffic the region’s highways can take before hitting their tipping points. Manville explained that, once a road nears capacity, each additional vehicle gums things up exponentially. “In ‘The Three Stooges,’ the classic trope is they all try and go through a door at once and they get stuck. If they had just walked through individually, not only could all of them have gone through the door but an almost infinite number of people could have gone in behind them,” he said. “You can have an incredibly high flow going through a door, or on a road, as long as a critical mass isn’t trying to do so at once.”

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Manville Predicts Return to Pre-Pandemic Traffic as L.A. Reopens

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was featured in a KCRW segment on the resurgence of Los Angeles traffic congestion as the car-centric county reopens. “It’s some combination of businesses and recreation areas reopening, combined with quarantine fatigue,” explained Manville to Press Play program host Madeleine Brand. “It’s still well below what we would be experiencing in non-COVID times … but it’s up a bit from the absolute valley it fell to right after the stay-at-home orders were first put into place,” he said. Once the county reopens completely, Manville predicted that traffic will return to what it was like before the pandemic. “Yes, the numbers are creeping up, and I think we just notice that because they had been so low.”  Manville also noted that traffic congestion is the biggest constraint on driving speeds; during the pandemic shutdown, driving speeds increased and the overall number of high-speed collisions remained fairly consistent.

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Manville, Monkkonen, Lens Against Single-Family Zoning

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An American Planning Association blog post broke down the main arguments made by Associate Professors Michael Manville, Paavo Monkkonen and Michael Lens in their collaborative piece “It’s Time to End Single-Family Zoning.” The article was one of several commentaries by academics and practicing planners included in the January issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association, which focused on the debate over single-family zoning. Manville, Monkkonen and Lens traced single-family zoning’s “racist and classist history” through Supreme Court decisions including Buchanan v. Warley (1917) and Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926). The impact of these century-old decisions can still be seen in the racial and class makeup of cities in the United States, they said. Arguing that socioeconomic and racial inequality and transportation inefficiency are exacerbated by the single-family classification, they called on planners to lead the charge to change the zoning laws.

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Manville on Protecting Tenants from Eviction

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to HuffPost about the consequences renters will face when bans on evictions are eventually lifted. Many Americans may be evicted immediately, resulting in a significant increase in homelessness. Manville predicted that “thousands of newly homeless people and thousands of empty apartments will create a situation that benefits neither renters, landlords nor cities.” He explained that “individual landlords may be confident that if they evict tenants, they’ll be able to fill the vacant unit quickly. If a large number of landlords evict their tenants at the same time, however, there’s going to be too many empty apartments and not enough people with the savings to move into them.” According to Manville, “only the federal government has the power to keep this problem from spiraling.” He argued that all these problems can be avoided “by just letting people stay in their homes.”

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Manville on Land-Use Rules Pricing Californians Out of Housing

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The Cato Institute released a video featuring Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville discussing California land-use regulations as a key factor in the state’s housing crisis. In the video, part of the institute’s Project on Poverty and Inequality in California, Manville argued that, while some limits on development are sensible, there is a certain point at which zoning “becomes an instrument for people who are currently in a neighborhood … to keep other people out.” According to Manville, inefficient land use and rising prices have pushed middle-class people out of neighborhoods, setting off a chain reaction that affects low-income people most. “We need to reform our land use so we can build a lot more housing,” he argued. “It’s true that there isn’t a lot of undeveloped land in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, but land can and should be redeveloped.”

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Manville on Threat to San Diego Transit Plans

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the San Diego Union-Tribune about the threat that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to plans to expand public transit in San Diego. A tax proposal for ElevateSD, a $24-billion plan to expand public transit and build a new commuter rail system, may be postponed as ridership plummets and fare revenue dwindles due to the pandemic. The government planning agency has announced that it will wait until the pandemic subsides to release a blueprint for the plans. Widespread unemployment, economic upheaval due to the pandemic and new fears about riding public transit may be obstacles to securing the two-thirds voter approval required for such a tax increase. “If you were an opponent of public transit finance, could you pounce on COVID as a new talking point to try to derail a ballot initiative?” Manville asked. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone takes a shot at that.”

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Reduced Traffic Accidents: Manville Sees Silver Lining of COVID-19

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to NBC LA about the record low number of car accidents following state and local “stay at home” orders in Southern California. With fewer drivers behind the wheel and the closure of all non-essential businesses to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, traffic crashes in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties dropped 73% last month compared to March 2019. The total number of crashes causing fatalities, injury and property damage went from 21,270 in March 2019 to 5,827 last month. “The amount of travel that’s happening has fallen as close to zero as maybe we’ve ever seen in the modern era,” Manville said. The coronavirus traffic data is being used to inform discussions not only about the high toll that driving takes, but the environmental, social and economic impacts as well, such as how companies handle working from home.

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Manville on Angelenos’ Road Habits Under Coronavirus Restrictions

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the Guardian about Angelenos’ road habits during the time of coronavirus. Even when just a few businesses asked workers to stay home, congestion was down quite a bit, demonstrating how relatively small reductions in cars can generate big increases in road performance, Manville said. “That has lessons for us, because it does remind us that when things get back to normal, policies that nudge just a few people away from a trip at a busy time can have a huge impact,” he said. However, Manville doubted the current health emergency would reshape Angelenos’ long-term relationship to the road. “It would be one thing if we were under an order to still go to places, but not in cars — some of us would find we like walking or biking,” he said. “But there’s no reason to think we will develop a different travel habit while we’re sitting on our couches.”

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Manville Weighs In on Declining Bus Ridership

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, was featured in a New York Times article discussing the factors responsible for a nationwide decline in bus ridership. Urban planning experts point to suburbanization, increasing levels of car ownership and new rideshare services as partially responsible. Manville added that the rise of Craigslist has “altered the market for used cars, making them easier to find and cheaper to buy.” In addition, declining immigration rates in general could shrink the pool of potential bus riders. Manville argued that the best solution is to “make the true costs of driving more apparent” by implementing congestion pricing, higher parking rates and higher gas taxes. “At the end of the day, we may never know what’s driving this decline,” he said. “But I guarantee you that if you took a lane of Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles and gave it only to the bus, ridership would go up.”

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