A lot of fuss has been made by urbanists about how important the ARC transit tunnel under the Hudson is to curbing sprawl in North Jersey, but frankly I'm not convinced that more commuter rail into Manhattan is the cure for what ails New Jersey. The state's fundamental problem is its reliance on … [Read more...]
When will New Jersey reverse its sprawling ways?
by Stephen SmithNew Jersey has always been an odd state – it's the most densely populated of the fifty, and yet it lies just outside of the core of both of its metro areas (Philadelphia and New York). North Jersey does have a formidable number of mid-sized cities, but the biggest – Newark - is … [Read more...]
New empirical evidence that parking minimums encourage sprawl
by Stephen SmithAlthough we at Market Urbanism are big fans of Donald Shoup's work on parking minimums, we have to admit that rigorous econometric evidence that parking minimums mandate more parking than the market would otherwise supply has been a bit lacking. Randal O'Toole at The Antiplanner … [Read more...]
Must Read: The Demand Curve for Sprawl Slopes Downward
Sandy Ikeda's latest article at FEE's "The Freeman" is a great summary of the libertarian sprawl debate.There has been a lot of Internet chatter lately about what libertarians ought to think about urban sprawl and its causes, including pieces by Kevin Carson, Austin Bramwell, Randal O’Toole, and … [Read more...]
O’Toole Under More Fire
At Streetsblog, Ryan Avent presented a scorching attack on the most notorious free-market impostor - Randal O’Toole: Taking Liberties With the Facts for his consistent hypocrisy: The Cato Institute's Randal O’Toole gets under the skin of many of those interested in building a more rational and … [Read more...]
Are You a Wright or Friedman Urbanist?
In a post blogger Eric Orozco called, ‘forerunner candidate for "most incisive blog post" of the year,’ Daniel Nairn of Discovering Urbanism discussed the seemingly conflicted camps of libertarianism when it comes to Urbanism. His observations are based upon the comments in the Volokh article on … [Read more...]
Do We Need “New Urbanism” To Fix “Unwalkable Sprawl”?
At Volokh, Ilya Somin discusses a recent piece in the American Prospect (also linked from here) that favors “New Urbanism” to prevent “unwalkable” sprawl. Somin favors “voting with your feet” as the preferred method of satisfying location preferences. Unfortunately, voting options have … [Read more...]
Rothbard the Urbanist Part 1: Public Education’s Role in Sprawl and Exclusion
I’ve been meaning to address the public education system’s complex role in land use patterns, and found that Murray Rothbard does a better job in his 1973 manifesto, For a New Liberty than I ever could. In summary, locally-funded public education is an engine of geographical segregation, which … [Read more...]