Market Urbanism

Liberalizing cities | From the bottom up

“Market Urbanism” refers to the synthesis of classical liberal economics and ethics (market), with an appreciation of the urban way of life and its benefits to society (urbanism). We advocate for the emergence of bottom up solutions to urban issues, as opposed to ones imposed from the top down.

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1. The fact that we even have to have a debate over whether residential development should be allowed in Midtown, where new residents will have perhaps a smaller impact on transportation infrastucture than anywhere else in the country (they can either walk to work or do a reverse train commute), is pretty pathetic.

2. The plan for San Jose’s Diridion Station is is so loaded down with boondoggles and bad ideas that it’s hard to keep track of them all. As if a stadium and HSR station weren’t bad enough it’s also getting a neo-Euclidean zoning plan (business and R&D park to the north, entertainment, retail, and office space by the station, and residential and retail to the south), “adequate parking,” and what looks to me like probably too much parkland. One panelist from the Greenbelt Alliance said it was necessary for the plan to include “parks, trails and public plazas.” But given that it looks like we’re only really talking about an area that’s a dozen or two blocks in size, is all that really necessary?

3. Second Avenue Subway on Bloomberg’s transit failures. Looks like my bike lane rabble-rousing is spreading…

4. More union shenanigans: Unsuck DC Metro uncovers with a FOIA request $2.4 million paid out in the last five years “in grievance back pay for work never done.” Some of it is paid out in petty seniority squabbles, some in more reprehensible cases, including to people who have literally killed, assaulted, and stolen on the job. Also, if you’re interested in how exactly unions suck the lifeblood out of American mass transit, Unsuck’s three–part series on the DC Metro’s escalator problems is an excellent case study.

5. Highway interchange transit-oriented development. Not a joke. Courtesy of the Overhead Wire.

Comments

  1. There are definitely plenty of things not to like about the San Jose plan, but to be fair, all of the parkland is already there and developed as parkland. The plan isn’t adding any new parks.

  3. Well, that’s not an interchange. An interchange is two or more highways. Your example is a highway which is out of place, in the middle of a city. By burying it and hiding it, you can restore the city. But there’s no benefit to the development to be above the highway– rather the opposite.

    I’m trying to think of how this could work, and I’m coming up short. I can imagine a layout where there’s a bus station in the middle of the freeway, so the buses don’t have to pull off and on (which would not work well in traffic). But an actual neighborhood around it? The air quality is probably terrible, and the noise, and the highways (and the traffic getting to the highways) would effectively make any mode other than driving pretty unpleasant.

    Maybe if the highways were underground, at staggering expense– but at that point why not just have a rail line and be done with it?

  4. I agree, and as I said, what was done in Columbus is not the same as in the study.

    The parallel is that there are attempts to use what is otherwise a dead zone immediately adjacent to a freeway.

    So in the Columbus example there is advantage to development above the freeway and that is to the adjacent properties which are otherwise in that dead zone.
    Columbus is a good experiment and I’d like to know what has been happening there.

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