Economics
How Bus Transit Can Help the Auto Industry
When Vice President Joe Biden visited Minnesota's New Flyer bus company to tout the economic stimulus law's $8.4 billion investment in transit, hopes were high for a boom in cleaner-burning vehicle production -- which made for some bad press when the nationwide transit funding crunch forced New Flyer to lay off 13 percent of its workers.
October 26, 2009
High-Speed Rail: Still a Good Idea
You may remember, back in August, economist Ed Glaeser's series on high-speed rail at the New York Times' Economix blog. Glaeser put together a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis of a hypothetical Houston-Dallas line, which purported to show that rail was a poor investment. You may also remember me responding in detail, and generally pointing out how woefully incomplete and misleading his analysis was.
October 22, 2009
What the Virginia Campaign Can Teach Us About Transportation Policy
However the Virginia off-year gubernatorial race ends up -- and at the moment it looks as though Republican Bob McDonnell will reclaim the governor's mansion for the GOP after years of Democratic dominance -- the media will frame the story as a referendum on the policies of national Democrats.
October 19, 2009
Congestion Pricing: Still Good For Basically Everyone
Urbanists often find themselves falling into a pattern of thinking that boils down to the dictum that what's good for drivers must be bad for walkability, and sustainability, and all the things that they prize about well-designed cities. Drivers seem to believe this too, which is interesting because it often isn't true.
October 13, 2009
Bridging the Local-National Message Divide: The Climate Bill is the Answer
This week, I was fortunate to attend the Open Cities conference in Washington (along with fellow Streetsbloggers Elana Schor and Aaron Naparstek), on the ways in which new media is shaping urban policy.
October 9, 2009
When $1 Billion Doesn’t Buy What it Used To — And When it Does
Since Washington's economic recovery debate first began last fall, advocates for greater infrastructure investment have invoked one phrase more often than almost any other: "Every $1 billion spent on transportation creates 47,500 jobs."
October 8, 2009
Transit and Congestion, an Indirect Connection
Yesterday, Freakonomics linked to a new piece of research [PDF] on congestion that I'd been musing over for a few days. Let me quote the abstract here (paragraph break and emphasis mine):
October 2, 2009
Rezoning Tysons Corner: It’s Hard To Teach Old Dogs New Tricks
Streetsblog has previously covered the effort to transform Tysons Corner, a bustling but car-oriented and traffic-plagued jobs center in Fairfax County, Virginia, into a walkable, transit-oriented corridor based around four new Metro stations -- similar to the immensely successful redevelopment of the Wilson Boulevard corridor in Arlington, just a few miles to Tysons' northeast.
September 18, 2009
Stimulus Spotlight: Delaware Town Boosts Bike-Ped Access to Bus Stop
The new Route 43 bus in Middletown, Delaware, stops at many popular places: the local high school, the retail shopping district, and the Methodist church, to name a few. But the park-and-ride that helped riders access the bus was clogged with cars, which the state DOT attributed to higher transit demand.
September 11, 2009
The ‘Movie Ticket’ Theory of Transportation Pricing
Let's say you're at the movies, and you look up at the box office only to see no ticket prices listed. You know you're going to have to pay for the show eventually -- perhaps even during income-tax season -- but for now you can watch all you want, seemingly for free.
September 10, 2009