Austin Contrarian

The city hurts your brain

So reports Jonah Lehrer for the Boston Globe:

[S]cientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."

. . . 

Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy thoroughfare like Newbury Street. There are the crowded sidewalks full of distracted pedestrians who have to be avoided; the hazardous crosswalks that require the brain to monitor the flow of traffic. (The brain is a wary machine, always looking out for potential threats.) There's the confusing urban grid, which forces people to think continually about where they're going and how to get there.

The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.

This kind of research seems calculated to generate splashy headlines --  such as "How the city hurts your brain."  I'm sure anti-density types will eventually cite it in debates over urban form as evidence that density is "bad for us."  So let's fisk it now.

Explanation?

Addendum to my post on Austin households with children . . . 

Ryan Robinson, Austin's city demographer, produces lots of interesting charts and tables.  He has created a neat map depicting the concentration of married-with-children households by 2000 census block, which I have cropped to focus on the urban core:

Married families with children are just a small, small percentage of central Austin households. 

So why do most families with children choose the suburbs over central Austin?

Here are some potential explanations:

1. Crime.
2. Schools.
3. Home prices.
4. Home size.
5. Yard size.
6. Because families with children want to live near lots of other families with children, which means the suburbs.  

I don't buy 1 or 2.  I live in central Austin and I don't worry about crime.  Anyway, many of the neighborhoods with higher crime rates have lots of children. 

Central Austin does have some bad schools, but it also has some good ones (I'm willing to send my kids to either Zilker or Barton Hills elementary schools), and Austin High School is as good as any public school in the suburbs.  Maybe I'm just underestimating the draw of Laura Bush Elementary, though.

I don't believe 5, either.  Home lots in the suburbs, or at least in some subdivisions, tend to be quite small.  It's true you can't get a 2- or 3-acre lot in central Austin, but that's not what most suburban families are buying.

I think 6 is a possibility.  Families with children like being around other families with children -- they like their kids to have other kids to play with, family-oriented businesses tend to cluster around subdivisions with lots of families with children, and parents with children may feel they have more in common with other parents with children.  6 wouldn't explain why families moved to the suburbs in the first place, but it would explain why married couples tend to move to the suburbs after they have children.

I think a combination of 3 and 4 is also a possibility.  I should probably phrase it as "home price per square foot."  One can get a bigger house for the money in the suburbs.  The tradeoff is being farther away from downtown, Zilker Park, UT, South Congress -- the amenities that make central Austin so desirable.  Families with children tend to put a higher value on living space than do singles or couples without kids, and so tend to choose bigger houses over living close to downtown.

Can anyone think of other explanations?

(Please note that I'm talking about trends.  A particular family could have different preferences.  For example, we live in a central Austin infill subdivision with few other families with children; we have next to no yard; and, while we live in a decent-size house, we live in a smaller house than we'd have if we lived in the suburbs.  We haven't moved because we like being close to downtown and central Austin's parks.)

IBM is pushing congestion pricing

It implemented a trial road-pricing system for Stockholm and is running an advertising campaign touting the results:

The road charging system has made a real impact in congestion and overall quality of life for the citizens of Stockholm.  By the end of the trial, traffic was down nearly 25 percent.  Public transport schedules had to be redesigned because of the increase in speed from reduced congestion.  And even inner-city retailers saw a six percent boost in business.

And this:

In the face of local skepticism about the project, the authorities decided to implement road pricing for one year—on a trial basis—and then allow citizens to decide via a referendum whether to make it permanent. That referendum recently passed, and in a few of months, the program will be up and running again.

IBM obviously thinks it can make a lot of money implementing road pricing schemes for other cities.  Not to be cynical, but there is real hope for road pricing if influential, politically-connected corporations start lobbying for it.  

H/t The Overhead Wire.

Central Austin maps: households with children

While working on a piece for Newgeography, I generated a couple of Census maps depicting the percentage of various central Austin block groups populated by households with children.  I was particularly curious about the change in the composition of central Austin households between 1990 and 2000.  I've put the maps below the jump.

As expected, the maps show that the percentage of households with children generally declined between 1990 and 2000.  I'm not trying to make any other point than that.  I just like this kind of stuff.

Stop privatizing toll roads

Ben Wear discusses (but unfortunately does not link to) a report from a task force created by the Texas legislature to examine TxDot's public-private toll road partnerships.  These partnerships have stoked a lot of opposition.  The task force offered a mixed evaluation; it is unlikely to settle the debate.

I think privatizing toll roads is a bad idea, at least for now and maybe forever.

Privatizing roads is unpopular.  Some people simply can't abide turning public roads over to private companies.  Some think the deals amount to corporate charity.  And public-private agreements include contract provisions that infuriate some people. These include clauses limiting speed limits or capacity increases on parallel roads.  These are necessary to assure the private operator that revenue will be stable, which in turn is necessary to sell bonds.   But most people don't see them that way.

There is already plenty of resistance to tolling roads.  It will take the public time to get accustomed to them.  There is no need to link tolls and privatization, which simply stokes more opposition to tolls.

There is another reason to oppose privatization.  Privatization requires that each new road pay for itself.  For reasons I've explained before, the roads that ought to be tolled are the congested, older roads.   Properly pricing these older roads with congestion tolls would generate revenue to fund new capacity -- whether new roads or commuter or light rail.  Pricing new roads does little to relieve the congestion on existing roads.  Instead, it discourages trips that ought to be taken while doing nothing to discourage trips that shouldn't be taken.  (This is exacerbated by TxDot's insistence on charging flat tolls rather than variable congestion tolls.)  It should be no surprise, then, that new toll roads rarely pay for themselves.

We ought to treat our roads and transit systems as a network.  We should care about network capacity and network congestion and not so much about the revenue generated by a given road.  Privatization encourages us to chop up the network into little pieces.  That's counter-productive at best.