This is a component two of Planetizen’s yr in review for 2022. Part one focused on the unprecedented advancements in zoning reform completed in 2022. Part two focuses on the extra significant trends in planning from the yr more likely to have an ongoing influence on the sector of planning long beyond 2023, equivalent to empty office buildings, shifting priorities in transportation planning, and climate change.
Downtown in Crisis
Considered one of the most important stories of 2022 is the growing awareness that employees usually are not returning to offices at rates comparable to the “before times”—not now, not last September, not next September, and perhaps not ever. A good portion of the daytime workforce is now staying home some or the entire work week, dramatically reducing the activity levels in central business districts everywhere in the country. Some cities, led by San Francisco, are seeing higher office emptiness rates than others. A small variety of cities, namely Salt Lake City, Columbus, and Fresno, have actually increased their office occupancy because the outset of the pandemic, in line with the Institute of Governmental Studies on the University of California, Berkeley. But signs of scrambled routines are in every single place—from reduced in-migration to cities to increased vehicle miles traveled to reduced transit ridership. The results of the shift away from paperwork are impacting home sales, demographics, elections, traffic congestion, the true estate market (in each the office sector and the residential sector), and the larger economy.
Some cities can expect to suffer significant fiscal consequences from office vacancies in the approaching years—especially as federal relief packages enacted throughout the pandemic begin to dry up. Transit agencies are the bellwether for this post-pandemic fiscal reality—with fewer office employees rushing to public transit during peak commute hours, lots of the nation’s busiest transit agencies have been using temporary federal relief grants to make up the difference for lost fares. Transit agencies in Recent York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, and everywhere in the country are preparing for the fiscal worst while already struggling to cover even reduced service levels. With the looming lack of tax revenue from so many industrial units , other public agencies can expect to face austerity measures. San Francisco is projecting $200 million in lost revenue to the federal government in 2028. Clearly, among the layoff and recession fears expressed in 2020 are still in play for each the private and non-private sectors, barring some still-unrealized path of recovery and regeneration.
The vacuum in office occupancies must be taken as a possibility to redefine the urban core. Quite a few cities are already at work with adaptive reuse programs; others are angling for more of a share of the innovation industry—tech and inventive businesses that wish to work in non-traditional industrial spaces.
Despite the potential of many buildings to be reborn for contemporary uses, some advocates and researchers warn that lots of the office properties left dormant by work at home trends are incompatible with adaptive reuse to residential. Even with robust adaptive reuse programs in place and many housing demand to draw investment, many cities are going to be left with numerous vacant and underutilized units and buildings in areas once teeming with social and economic activity. Unfortunately, a vacuum of transit service and operators for buses and trains may even present difficult challenges, making it harder to center a recent, more efficient transportation system within the recovery. The planning challenge will probably be massive. Some cities are are taking initial steps to mobilize an effort to show crisis into opportunity, equivalent to Minneapolis and Pittsburgh, but solutions for this recent number of challenge for downtowns, the results of a really contemporary combination of things, are more likely to be present in the longer term.
The Recent York Times infamously warned of an “urban doom loop” in November. Considered one of the good planning challenges of the century—stopping the urban doom loop and reinventing urban cores for all times after the arrival of Covid-19—is already upon us.
Transportation Planning Shift
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) represent the most important shift in transportation planning priority in a generation. While the effectiveness of those two massive federal bills in stopping the worst effects of climate change or maintaining and supplementing long-term equitable economic recovery (the “Construct Back Higher” promised by the Biden administration) is debatable, their influence over the best way communities and regions and america plan for the longer term will probably be immense. It’s clear already that different states have wildly different ideas about how they’ll spend the cash. We will probably be tracking the results of the programs and policies implemented by these massive laws for a long time to come back (Planetizen has already begun).
However the IIJA and the IRA should be acknowledged for his or her intentions—implementing substantive reforms for the best way infrastructure is planned, funded, and maintained in america. The previous suggests a fundamental rethinking of racial and environmental justice in federal infrastructure programs. The latter suggests the scrapping of the interior combustion engine for electric vehicles. In the event that they accomplish even a portion of their ambition, they may have completed a major course correction in U.S. planning history.
Street Interventions
While it’s tempting to write down the history of the pandemic solely in national or aggregate terms—a worldwide stage for a generational event—the pandemic was a private experience. Along those lines, a lot of essentially the most visible and tangible changes produced by the pandemic occurred on the hyperlocal level—home by home, street by street, block by block. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the continued disputes and debates about what to do with the assorted street-level interventions implemented throughout the pandemic, from slow streets and open streets to al fresco streets and parklets.
The history of street interventions in 2022 is a decidedly mixed bag, nevertheless. While transportation planning priorities are shifting everywhere in the country, on the local level, a few of that shift is back to the pre-pandemic establishment. In Miami Beach, as an illustration, the town decided in January to revive automobile traffic to Ocean Drive. San Francisco decided to dismantle a preferred “slow street” on Lake Drive in July. San Diego residents worked to remove the ultimate vestiges of that city’s slow streets program. Chicago dismantled its slow street on Leland Street three months ahead of schedule. Recent York has reduced its total mileage of open streets from 83 in September 2020 to simply 20 by August 2022.
Still, some cities did close streets to cars prior to now yr. Los Angeles, for instance, closed a piece of Griffith Park Drive after a driver killed an individual on a motorbike. Washington, D.C. decided to keep Rock Creek Park car-free. Other cities, equivalent to Las Vegas and Berkeley, considered whether to go car-free on their most famous streets.
The conflict over street space is more likely to proceed, though perhaps less conspicuously than how the media documented the influx of pandemic-era street programs. Much of the dismantling of those programs has occurred without much public notice or media attention—cities are suddenly left with scant relics of the pandemic street network before anyone could notice what was lost.
Free Transit
As discussed in a recent blog post on Planetizen, in some unspecified time in the future prior to now few years, in a trend accelerated by the service disruptions of the pandemic, increasingly transit agencies have decided to lure riders back to struggling systems by ending fares. In 2022, some systems entirely eliminated fares, most recently Washington, D.C. but additionally Albuquerque; some prolonged fare-free experiments, equivalent to transit systems in Connecticut and Tucson; and others made transit free for specific segments of the population, like free youth transit passes in Seattle, San Diego, and Orange County, or portions of the calendar yr, equivalent to Colorado, Boulder, and Utah. More systems might be joining the trend soon, equivalent to Atlanta and Boston. Going fare-free, it seems, is the hottest trend in transit planning.
Time will tell if reducing fares was the right strategy for the long-term stability of transit agencies facing reduced ridership numbers and long-term budget deficits—most of those systems are cutting fares on the expense of investing in service improvements and capital projects. One rare exception is Alexandria, Virginia, which used state and regional funding to lower costs for riders while implementing service improvements. Perhaps someday there will probably be more examples of transit agencies that were in a position to do each, but until then, that is the route many transit agencies are on.
It might be irresponsible at this point in history to finish any yr in review without addressing the progress toward greenhouse gas emission reductions and climate adaptation. While the wildfire and hurricane seasons offered a yr of relatively mild risks in comparison with the past few years, ongoing drought across the west threatens to completely collapse the Colorado River water supply system. Near home, floods ripped Yellowstone apart this yr. Across the globe, record heat waves sent temperatures to 140 degrees in India and Pakistan in May. Later within the yr, floods in Pakistan displaced an estimated 30 million people.
The United Nations called on america in April and November, because it had done before, to reverse its land use and transportation planning establishment in america—away from car-centric planning and automobile dependency—to assist reduce greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid the more severe outcomes of climate change. In a change for the anxiety levels of climate advocates, 2022 proved to be essentially the most substantial yr for climate motion in U.S. history (though the bar was set low by previous efforts), led by the approval of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in July. The Washington Post described the IRA on the time as the nation’s “largest ever climate bill.” Models suggest that the law will significantly reduce emissions in america, getting the country closer, but not all the best way, to reduction targets set by the United Nations and the Paris Climate Accords.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act also included large-scale funding programs and policies intended to cut back emissions and adapt to climate change. A Planetizen blog post from April documents the potential of the RAISE grant program for climate motion because of this of funding support made possible by the IIJA.
There’s loads of climate motion to report on the state level, too, led by Colorado and California. The state of Colorado adopted a recent greenhouse gas emission reduction rule at the top of 2021 that may prioritize emissions reductions in capital investments within the transportation system. The rule has already led the state to scrap freeway-widening projects and fund bus rapid transit as an alternative. In California, Caltrans decided to scrap a plan to widen Interstate 710. Many states, including Colorado but additionally rural states like Nebraska, are still moving ahead with highway widening projects, though none at greater expense than Texas. A culture clash between states, not to say legal disputes, guarantees to proceed over spend federal infrastructure dollars, even for programs intended for social and environmental justice.
Climate motion on the state level doesn’t just pertain to highways. California adopted a scoping plan that targets carbon neutrality for the state by 2045. Local governments also contributed. Along with the climate advantages of medium density and walkable neighborhoods, which made huge strides in local zoning reforms in 2022, many cities and counties began or accomplished climate motion plans in 2022, including D.C.; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Chicago.
All this collective motion shouldn’t be enough to stop the worst outcomes of a changing climate—not by a protracted stretch. Massive political, social, and technological obstacles remain. Even the United Nations, while pushing america and other top emitters to do more to stop the worst of climate change, is having trouble producing motion to make sure the world is on the correct path for emissions reductions, producing lukewarm agreements at COP27 negotiations, which concluded in November. European governments, it seems, aren’t pleased with the IRA, because it seems, due to its preference for America automotive corporations.
But where the second half of the previous decade gave the impression of a 3 steps back, no steps forward situation on climate change, 2022 seems to have completed a minimum of one step forward. It is a start.