Sprawl

Want to know why so few cities invest in transit? Because the vast majority of their residents — drivers — have much shorter commute times in their cars. A cautionary tale....

The end of single-family zoning rule has gotten all the attention. But Minneapolis's new plan is groundbreaking on transportation as well.

Caltrans has widened U.S. 101 seven times since 1996 and hasn't cured congestion. But it's not going to try a new approach.

The trend toward private rooms has hospitals heading for the cornfields.

Your regional planning agency is probably set up to favor the suburbs.

The mortgage interest deduction costs the federal government more than all rental subsidies combined. All that money promotes sprawl by encouraging people to buy more house, while transferring wealth to the upper tiers of the income ladder.

Like many Sun Belt cities, Memphis owes its population growth over the last several decades to outward expansion. Since 1998 alone, the city has overseen 15 annexations, occupying a larger footprint than Chicago. But now the city believes that some of its farthest flung territory is more liability than asset.

Sprawl isn't just a problem in car-centric America. Even cities with the world's best transit systems are surrounded by suburbs with poor transit access, according to a new report by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. As billions of people migrate from rural to metropolitan areas in the next few decades, these growth patterns threaten to maroon people without good access to employment while overwhelming the climate with increased greenhouse gas emissions.

With their powerful results, the studies coming out of the Equality of Opportunity Project, led by Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, have become an important touchstone for journalists and transportation policy advisers. In their 2014 [PDF] and 2015 [PDF] studies, Chetty and Hendren show that place matters for low-income families. When low-income families have the opportunity to raise their children in better environments, their children do better as adults. And with their use of “big data,” Chetty and Hendren can show that these better environments are not just correlated with improved incomes, but actually cause them.