Raise the Hammer

I think it's the population that doesn't learn after all, we're the ones that vote these winners in right?

As far as goods transported by air and whichever costs the most, what other modes of goods transport is viable for intercontinental transport of perishable items like tropical fruit etc? Train? Boat? Both would end up with rotten fruit at the other end. I guess if global "warming" turns out to happen at an accelerated rate, we can grow our own...

There will always be air transport no matter what the cost of oil just like there will always be cars. Of course, thinking sensibly it'd be ideal to maximize goods transport for non perishable items using methods like rail and water and building an Aerotropolis is most likely not a smart thing to do.

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Will someone please work this teleporting thing out?????

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I was listening to the Bill Kelly show the other day. They had a university economic professor talking about the lost manufacturing jobs in Hamilton. He touted the airport lands as the best opportunity Hamilton has for turning its economy around. This is a Prof at the De Groote School in Hamilton who sits he says on the Airprot Lands committee. He must know what he's talking about.

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After around 60 years of abundant cheap energy and putting off the many consequences of that cheap energy, the chickens are coming home to roost.

But don't expect Hamiltonians to accept that massive change is coming. It's impossible to imagine the real world coming back after you've been brainwashed by highways and Wal-Mart. There's no denying it: oil and the twentieth century were an aberration.

None of the elites that run this city from developers to politicians to academics will ever be able to see these truths. So they are going to continue to bet on highways and air travel because that is all they have ever known. But the party's over whether they like it or not.

If you are past the denial and know what's coming you might want to set real priorities and learn real skills: food, shelter and community are essential if you ask me.

And just in case you're counting it's now over $110 a barrel.

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The "aerotropolis" is not about the airport by the way. The City through GRIDS is planning for the future as required by the province. The City needs employment lands in the next 30 years as per Places to Grow. Our council said, if that is the case then lets put it up around the airport. It is about employment lands and jobs not about the success or failure of the airport and airline industry.

If airline transportation comes to an end because of rising fuel costs, we'll all have a lot more to worry about than the "aerotropolis". The effect would be catatrophic.

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Thom said, "None of the elites that run this city from developers to politicians to academics will ever be able to see these truths." Isn't it great that we have Thom who sees the truth when everybody else just cannot. After all what do elites (whoever they are?) and academics (those whose job it is to study impassionately and objectively all manner of truth), and those who have been elected by the public know?
Only Thom and his same-think friends know best.

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"t is about employment lands and jobs not about the success or failure of the airport and airline industry. "

This is straightforward post hoc reasoning. The study that recommended creating aerotropolis specifically justified the idea on the basis of cultivating airport-centred development: logistics, warehousing, and the various value-add multipliers that accrue to any concentration of economic activity.

John Kasarda, the economist who articulated the aerotropolis model, makes this abundantly clear in his explanation of how aerotropolis development works, i.e. what he calls the "three As: accessibility, accessibility, accessibility."

The argument in Hamilton was always that we needed to grow the airport activity and develop the employment lands around the airport to take advantage of that virtuous cycle in airport related economic development.

It was not until practical objections to the aerotropolis development model - based primarily around projected energy instability - that its supporters started to claim that the economic activity didn't necessarily have to be airport related.

When I interviewed Mayor Larry Di Ianni about it in August 2005, he proved surprisingly difficult to pin down on this point:

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RTH: I mean, it seems to me that any reasonable outcome of having an aerotropolis type development would be, first of all, to increase the traffic through the airport, and second of all, that the activity around would be dependent on the airport. Otherwise, there'd be no point in putting it there. But it seems like you're trying to characterize the two as being -

LD: No, no, no.

RM: - independent of each other.

LD: No, no, they're interdependent, but quite different operations. Whether we develop an aerotropolis or not, planes are going to land, planes are going to take off. Can we find some, some, opportunities for some activities around the airport that will complement that side of the operation? A head office, perhaps. An operation that flies in and out of whatever that might use the airport and also benefit the community, create some jobs there. A hotel use, with some recreational or restaurant uses. An industry, a high-tech manufacturing or some sort of knowledge-based industry that will be copacetic with the airport but quite independent in terms of the pure operation from the airport as well. I mean, these are all good uses of the airport too, and benefit the community.

When I pressed the point about peak oil, he rejected the argument that it will lead to energy scarcity:

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LD: [M]y view of the world is that in a hundred years' time, or fifty years' time, the technology - if, indeed, we will have the crisis that is there, and it's not manageable - will shift to some other form of being able to get these airplanes to fly. In fact, I think we'll see more air travel rather than less.

In Di Ianni's defence, peak oil was easier not to take seriously in 2005, with oil prices around $50-60 per barrel (though the data were there to be analyzed).

Today, with oil production stalled around 85 million barrels per day, oil prices well past the $100/barrel mark and all signs pointing toward more increases and volatility to come, it's much harder to ignore.

Your thinking around the airport employment lands parallels that of Councillor Sam Merulla, an early and enthusiastic aerotropolis supporter. When Richard Gilbert presented _Hamilton: The Electric City_ to council, Merulla asked:

"So in essence what I've gathered from this presentation is that development pertaining, being directly correlated to the airport is bad, but development in that area not correlated to the airport is good, because we are localizing employment because it ties into our economic development strategy. Is that correct?"

Gilbert replied, "My own opinion, but this is not an opinion based on expert research, is that you have a huge opportunity for developing lands for this kind of purpose between where we're sitting now [City Hall] and the harbour. I've walked around there, and around the harbour, and I'm just impressed by the opportunities for the kinds of industrial development that I'm talking about, which is very knowledge-intensive, very rich in small-scale activity."

Gilbert later clarified his thinking on what kind of land to develop:

"There is a certain amount of thinking [in Hamilton] of putting the land first and then wondering how to fill the land with jobs. What I'm proposing is an alternative way of going about it, which is figuring out what you want to do and then after you've defined it a bit, what the lands are for that particular thing."

In other words, unless the airport development lands are intended to leverage airport related economic development, there's no particular reason to locate them there.

Since the original purpose of the aerotropolis entailed precisely the kind of argument Gilbert made - decide what you want to do, and that will indicate where you should do it - it's disingenuous to change the argument in mid-stream when the original justification falls apart.

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"I think it's the population that doesn't learn after all, we're the ones that vote these winners in right?"

Very true, Frank. And until that changes, we are stuck with the same results.

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as long as there's money to be made by developing those lands, politicians/developers will find a way to pay for it with public money. afterall, everyone knows those lands will be used for residential, not industrial purposes. happens every single time.

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Ryan, thanks for referencing my words. I wasn't being hard to pin down at all, I was making the case for the kind of planning that 'Balanced' is talking about and that the provincial plans mandate on all municipalities. Growth will come. Intensification is part of that as is greenfield growth. Hamilton's plans call for an agressive intensification regime for residential as well as a plan to bring jobs to the community around the airport. Gilbert confided that he was under great pressure to criticize the Airport lands project and did not do so. In fact he talked about energy from waste development in our industrial areas as well as the revitilization of our brownfields, initiatives which were being pursued.

Anyway, it is nice to see you remembered.
Cheers.

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Hi Larry,

Thanks for sharing your perspective. Interestingly, the sense I got from Gilbert was that he was under great pressure not to criticize the airport lands project.

He drew some flak from the city after he was quoted in the Spectator saying, "Air travel in the ways we understand it is doomed. It's a very dicey business."

http://raisethehammer.org/blog/112

Remember also that Gilbert started out with the assumption that he would end up recommending a business-as-usual plan for Hamilton with energy conservation and production as a Plan B just in case the situation got worse than he expected. After researching the data, he ended up changing his mind about this and recommending The Electric City as Hamilton's Plan A.

He expanded significantly on aviation in his new book _Transport Revolutions_, in which he pointed out that no breakthroughs in air transport fuels are on the horizon to replace the high energy kerosene used today.

He believes air transport will shift toward fewer flights with much larger airplanes (like the Airbus A380) and will focus mainly on intercontinental flights, with high speed rail replacing most intracontinental flights.

"Aviation will have a future," he argued, "but it will be a different future" than the way the business operates today.

He maintains that we need to stop investing in airports and spend our money on rail instead.

http://raisethehammer.org/article/692/

As time passes, the case for airport lands development gets worse and worse. John Maynard Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" So far, the city, flatly refuses to change its mind about the airport.

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Ryan, not to belabour the point; however, Gilbert was never instructed by me or anyone acting for the city to do anything but give us his best advice. I do know of only one member of Council who contacted him repeatedly pestering him about his findings and conclusions, and it wasn't me. Gilbert, I will remind folks, was also brought in on the recommendation of those on Council who espoused a less than supportive view of our airport hoping that he would drive a pejorative stake into the heart of that discussion.
I welcomed his presence in Hamilton, having been very impressed with him as President of organizations representing municipalities while he was a Councillor in Toronto. Some say he was the best rep we've ever had.

He wrote a very intelligent report. I agree with most of what he said. You can take many points from the report and I hope that Counil enacts recommendations it deems appropriate. I know we were on the way to doing that in some measure even before Gilbert. I am not sure what the status is now.
I also know that some in the community condemned his bullishness about incineration and energy from waste initiatives. I understand the controversies surrounding these processes but Gilbert was pretty strong on them.

You state: He maintains that we need to stop investing in airports and spend our money on rail instead.

You know my supportive thoughts on light rail; but I take the issue of transportation one step further. We need to support all our transportation modes: air, rail, road and water. Hamilton is ideally situated to benefit from investment in all these areas and we should not shy away from doing so. I think Council agrees judging by the recent vote on the purchase of additional lands for strictly airport expansion. It seems that it wasn't just me driving this agenda, but common sense and the collective good of the community.

Also, the debate about the Airport lands goes beyond just air related uses, as has been stated before.

On Peak Oil, I remember that David Braden gave me a very sobering book to read on the peak oil issue. I didn't dis-believe the concerns expressed at all, and said so publicly on a number of occasions. In fact, climate change, cost of energy, energy availability is something I've written about and understand in terms of impact. I also believe in the carbon tax investment being advocated by Stephane Dion as a way of addressing some of these issues.
The point, though, as even Arnold Schwarzeneger has said (and remember he has won kudos for being America's greenest governor), the world should not stop; it should change and governments must adapt, as I believe all citizens and businesses need to adapt as well.

I recall Ontario's Environmental Commissioner telling me in conversation that the issue of oil is as much about cost as it is about quantity. Right now cost has overtaken quantity as a worrisome factor. I hope we all adapt and react appropriately.

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Gilbert was never instructed by me or anyone acting for the city to do anything but give us his best advice.

That may be the case; either way, it's secondary to Gilbert's actual arguments.

Gilbert, I will remind folks, was also brought in on the recommendation of those on Council who espoused a less than supportive view of our airport hoping that he would drive a pejorative stake into the heart of that discussion.

Gilbert himself was sensible enough not to wade into the middle of a domestic dispute. He merely presented his findings about the unfolding energy situation and encouraged Hamilton to draw its own conclusions about its long term growth strategy.

Even so, he stopped just short of telling Hamilton not to waste its money on the airport:

• "Air travel in the ways we understand it is doomed. It's a very dicey business."

• "There is a certain amount of thinking [in Hamilton] of putting the land first and then wondering how to fill the land with jobs. What I'm proposing is an alternative way of going about it, which is figuring out what you want to do and then after you've defined it a bit, what the lands are for that particular thing."

• "[Y]ou have a huge opportunity for developing lands for this kind of purpose between [City Hall] and the harbour. I've walked around there, and around the harbour, and I'm just impressed by the opportunities for the kinds of industrial development that I'm talking about, which is very knowledge-intensive, very rich in small-scale activity."

It doesn't get much clearer than this: invest in energy production and conservation, and develop employment lands that support this kind of industrial development.

I also know that some in the community condemned his bullishness about incineration and energy from waste initiatives.

His point as he explained it to me is that energy from waste is a good idea IF the following conditions are met:

1. The stack produces exhaust that is cleaner, on average, than the ambient air; and
2. All waste must be delivered via shipping and rail, not trucks.

No Hamilton project on the books today meets these conditions.

We need to support all our transportation modes: air, rail, road and water.

That sounds nice and holistic, but it ignores the central fact that global liquid fuels production, on which aviation utterly depends, has stalled at around 85 million barrels a day and will go into irrevocable decline in the next few years.

It just doesn't make sense to invest our scarce public capital in transportation modes that are so vulnerable to high and volatile prices. - especially when we also factor in the potentially devastating externality that is climate change.

Again, the norm over the past hundred years has been that the rate of production has increased steadily and continually year over year. The only exception was in 1973, and the temporary production decline then was political, not geological. The steady assumption of stable and ever-growing energy supplies has governed our planning and economic development decisions for a century; but as Daniel Lerch argues persuasively in his book _Post Carbon Cities_, that assumption is no longer safe to make.

The facts have changed but Hamilton has yet to change its mind.

I think Council agrees judging by the recent vote on the purchase of additional lands for strictly airport expansion. It seems that it wasn't just me driving this agenda

I never argued that you were the only aerotropolis proponent. In fact, I've argued that institutional support for road- and airport-related development is incorrigible, pernicious and runs through the city's political culture.

The 'stacked deck' of aerotropolis supporters in the community liaison committee and its peculiar definition of "consensus" all but ensures that the city will get the predetermined answer the airport supporters are looking for.

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Ryan, at least you are consistent in your views. Supporting a multi modal approach to transportation is pernicious all of a sudden. So be it.
As for the committee you reference, sources are telling me that a few are hell bent on destroying the process. I think that is a bit of an exaggeration. However, I have no confirmation of this one way or the other, since I have never attended a meeting. Perhaps I will go just to see for myself.

As for consensus, I recently wrote a blog essay on the difficulty with achieving consensus. You may want to check it out if you have the time.

Cheers.

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'the debate about the Airport lands goes beyond just air related uses, as has been stated before' - what other reasons are there for creating industrial land by the airport? I'd love to know. It sounds as if you are already distancing yourself from the primary reason for creating this land.

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JoeJoe, it would take more than a few lines here to make the case for you. Why take my word for it, just read some of the recent reports prepared by the City for Council on the need to look at these lands. You will find coherence with what I have said and what those reports say.

As for distancing myself? I don't think so. However, as even the snippets reproduced by Ryan show, I have always argued for a holistic approach to the development of those lands.

Some time ago I also wrote a rather provocative essay on this issue. It offended some, and the language is admittedly strong. But the essential points are accurate. you may wish to read it. It is posted online.

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Supporting a multi modal approach to transportation is pernicious all of a sudden.

You're attacking a straw man here.

Supporting a multi modal approach doesn't entail supporting every mode. I don't see anyone pushing the city to build infrastructure for horse-drawn wagons, Crazy Carpets or hovercraft, and for a good reason: for various reasons, they're just not practical means of moving people or goods.

I support a multi modal approach using the following hierarchy of mode priority:

• Walking
• Cycling
• Transit (including light rail)
• Commuter and Freight Rail
• Automobiles
• Airplanes
• Etc.

I support this hierarchy on the basis of a number of criteria, including the following, in no particular order:

• Energy intensity (lower is better)
• Pollution (lower is better)
• Greenhouse gases (lower is better)
• Public health (healthier is better)
• Street life (more density and proximity is better)
• Neighbourhoods (more social and walkable is better)
• Mobility (more accessible is better)
• Economic development (higher quality jobs are better)
• Infrastructure cost (lower is better)

Collectively, these criteria add up to sustainability, which should be the chief consideration in deciding how the city should invest in public infrastructure.

Airport related development fails on all these criteria of sustainability, as it is the most energy intensive (per tonne-kilometre), the most polluting, the most greenhouse gas emitting, the most detrimental to public health, and so on. In fact it is several orders of magnitude worse than the modes to which I give the highest priority.

This is reflected in the city's GRIDS studies concerning aerotropolis, which acknowledge that it fails seven of the nine GRIDS Directions.

Airport related development fails on economic grounds, since air transport will become progressively less cost effective and hence competitive over time. A proactive approach to economic development would be to look at what heavy-duty modes are going to grow over the next few decades and invest there instead.

It even fails on job creation, since it will at best produce low-skill, low-wage jobs in warehousing and logistics (at a low density of jobs per hectare) - and that still assumes air transport will remain affordable, which is exceedingly unlikely.

Airport related development has run its course. The sooner the city starts seriously considering this possibility rather than addressing it as mere window dressing in an otherwise preordained decision making process, the sooner we will start to make productive investments in areas with strong future prospects.

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Larry is correct, read the reports, especially the ones that went today to Planning Committee. In order to meet the provincial targets we need a minimum of 2800 acres outside the existing urban area. That took into account all vacant industrial lands within the existing urban boundary. Council has decided the best spot is around the airport to create some synergies. If you don't like the airport location fine, but the point is that we are deficient and require an urban boundary expansion as per Places to Grow forecasts.............where would you like it? Where to do a minimum 2800 acre expansion that isn't greenbelt? Seems to me that the Province supports in principle the airport location because a)it's not in the greenbelt b)there are provincial policies in place to protect airport operations from encroachment of incapatible uses c) they built a highway through a rural area right to it. Peak oil or no peak oil, the province requires us to plan for employment lands and we're presently deficient.

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bingo...someone finally got to the root of the problem. The provincial 'requirements' are a joke. They aren't any more dense than what we've been doing for the past 30 years. We need a city council with some vision for our city that will draw a circle around the city like Portland, Ore did and not allow development outside of the boundary until the central city is rebuilt to a minimum average density (a good density, not these sprawl-like numbers put forth by the province). Hamilton council has no desire to rebuild the city. They are looking to find the absolute least amount of infill they can do and still be within provincial mandates. Toronto on the other hand - a city much more full, busy, vibrant, successful and with a good future - is trying to add 1 million new people into the former city of Toronto. They are trying to far exceed the provincial mandates. Why? Because they are the new Ambitious City.
We have a council bent on turning us into another drab, dull place like Mississuaga. They recently decided that it was 'too expensive' to pursue the land banking idea for brownfields. No cost was given (money never seems to be an issue when it comes to subsidizing sprawl, why is it with brownfields??). No good logic was given. Some consultant said "don't do it", so the city said "ok", and that was the end of that. Why does city hall cherry-pick?? We've had consultant after consultant tell us for 15 years to get rid of one-way streets and make downtown about people. We've converted 3 or 4 streets in the past decade. The next batch to be converted are little side streets like McNab, Park and Caroline. We refuse to listen to consultants or the business community when it comes to fixing downtown, yet will immediately listen to a consultant who says to abandon brownfield banking. Toronto's land all along the Gardiner Expressway used to be a horrendous eyesore. Now it's filled with condos and new neighbourhoods like Liberty Village. They have a vision for their city and are willing to clean up the brownfields to a satisfactory level to accommodate residential use. We won't even spend the required money to clean up brownfields to a satisfactory level to accommodate more INDUSTRIAL development! Ambitious City?? Head 50km east.

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Balance, Jason,

Throwing responsibility to Queen's Park is a cop-out. For the most part, the province is a mirror that reflects our own values back at us. Granted, it has set a minimum intensification rate, but in our typical unambitious fashion, Hamilton has adopted that bare minimum as its maximum.

In fact, even then we only meet the minimum on technicalities, by playing with start dates and assuming most of the infill will take place close to the end of the GRIDS horizon.

http://raisethehammer.org/blog/403

Whether we "need" 2800 acres of employment lands depends entirely on what questions we ask. If we start by asking, "Where can we find large, contiguous blobs of undeveloped land?", the obvious answer is around the airport.

However, this shallow, leading question obscures the deeper question we should be asking, the question Gilbert tried to persuade us to ask: "What kind of jobs do we want?"

Do we really want low-skill, low-value jobs in logistics and warehousing? That's what the employment studies are saying. In fact they assume that such jobs are the only growth possibility, partly through a pernicious circular reasoning that starts with the assumption that growth will be around the airport and ends up exactly where it started.

In other words, we need the airport lands because we're aiming for airport related development, and we're aiming for airport related development because we've identified the airport lands for our employment growth. The actual reason for putting lands around the airport in the first place - leveraging the airport itself for economic development - falls out of the self-reinforcing loop.

Other cities have bothered to ask the question, "What kind of jobs do we want?" and reached much different answers than Hamilton. They've decided that they want high-skill, high-value jobs in research, innovation, information technology, entrepreneurship, and sustainable development.

They've set firm urban boundaries, stipulated that 100% of new growth will take place inside the urban fold, and decided that unused and underused urban lands will be the optimal sites for the kind of jobs they decided to seek. They've reinvested in their urban centres, investing in pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, convenient modern transit, density, diversity, streetlife, nightlife, the arts, and so on.

Guess what? Those cities are developing their economies rapidly, attracting creative professionals, creating high quality jobs, spurring new industries, growing their tax assessments, and dramatically increasing their quality of life. They're reducing commuting distances, reducing per capita car use, reducing per capita energy consumption, reducing per capita pollution, and making piles of money while doing it.

As those cities become more and more desirable places to live, they attract more and more of the very bright, ambitious, creative people who are making their economic and cultural transformations happen.

While Hamilton squanders the last of its prosperity by running asphalt and water pipes out to the middle of nowhere, those other cities will be generating solutions to the economic and environmental crises we face, exporting those solutions and producing real wealth.

When our paltry exurban warehousing and logistics jobs dry up, we'll scratch our heads and lament our lack of foresight.

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