1. Planners in the Twin Cities have decided to "back away from the age-old compact in which the state tries to keep pace with suburban expansion" (i.e., they're canceling new outer road projects) and add toll/bus lanes to highways in the inner metro area. Republican governor and business on one … [Read more...]
Cap’n Transit comes out of the closet as a market urbanist
...sort of. He never quite cops to it, but he says he "appreciates" libertarianism's arguments (unlike some people), and gives this great summary of what we here call the market urbanist narrative: In the past, private companies ran the trains, interurbans, trolleys and buses. They were usually … [Read more...]
Friday links
1. Miller-McCune (what a bad name for a magazine) has an article about a possible VMT tax, and points out that more fuel-efficient vehicles will lead to less gas tax revenue.2. Streetsblog has an extremely unflattering profile of Republican nominee for NY Governor Carl Paladino. He made a name … [Read more...]
New York City links
There are a couple of NYC-related links that I've been saving up, so here they are:1. Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indiannapolis and NYC's new deputy mayor, appears to be interested in privatizing New York City's parking meters in order to balance the city's budget. We're more interested … [Read more...]
More urban planning mismeasurement
Apparently I'm not the only one thinking about urban mismeasurement, because the planning blogosphere is lighting up with examples. In addition to my critique of per passenger-mile measurements and the aforelinked critique of average density (and the great follow-up post here), I've noticed two … [Read more...]
More links!
Why didn't I catch onto this whole linking thing earlier? Are these link lists boring for you guys?1. Human Transit has a great post on "density" and all the different ways to measure it, with a cool picture of sprawling apartment buildings that illustrates why transit use in the Las Vegas … [Read more...]
The folly of measuring transportation costs per passenger-mile
When comparing costs of various modes of transit, units measured "per passenger-mile" are very common. It makes sense intuitively – people take trips of varying length, and longer trips are more expensive than shorter trips, so the desire to standardize and compare makes us want to simply divide … [Read more...]
Environmentalism vs. density
Recently I was reading an article about the death-by-delay of an upzoning proposal near a train station in Boston because the property might have been "considered 'priority habitat' for rare species, including the eastern box turtle," and I thought about all the times I've heard of opponents of … [Read more...]