Transportation

California is in trouble: Unemployment is over 13%, the state is broke and hundreds of thousands of people, many of them middle-class families, are streaming for the exits. But to some politicians, like Sen. Alan Lowenthal, the real challenge for California "progressives" is not to fix the economy but to reengineer the way people live.  read more »

“The Great Transit Oriented Development Swindle?” reads the headline in the Fog City Journal, one of the growing number of internet newspapers providing serious, professional web-based journalism as an alternative to declining print newspapers (and their often less than effective web sites).

The article does not directly answer the question in the headline, but certainly provides enough ammunition to what has become a commonly accepted mantra among planners and urban boosters. It reveals how transit oriented development (TOD) is often based upon fragile foundations that amount to an ideological swindle. It is important to recognize that the Fog City Journal is no right wing or libertarian organ. There is little market for that in the city of San Francisco.  read more »

Inrix, an industry provider of traffic information, has just published its third annual Traffic Scorecard, which ranks the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas based upon the intensity of their peak hour traffic congestion in 2009. The results provide further evidence of the association between higher urban population densities and more intense traffic congestion.

Los Angeles, Again: Not surprisingly, Los Angeles is again the most congested metropolitan area over 1,000,000 population.  read more »

Say the words “cable car” and most people think of trolleys being towed up and down San Francisco’s hilly terrain. Most view them as a charmingly antiquated heritage system for the tourists, not as modern mass transit. But cable cars are making a comeback.

Today, cable cars are one of a family of technologies collectively called Cable Propelled Transit (CPT). New generations of CPT not only include cable cars, but aerial trams, gondolas and funiculars as well.  read more »

Recent game changing events — notably, the Massachusetts election depriving the Senate Democrats of a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority, and the projected record breaking $1.6 trillion deficit in the FY 2011 budget proposal — have introduced serious uncertainties into the President’s domestic agenda. The federal surface transportation program is no exception.  read more »

The Smart Growth movement has long demonstrated a keen understanding of the importance of rhetoric. Terms like livability, transportation choice, and even “smart growth” enable advocates to argue by assertion rather than by evidence. Smart Growth rhetoric thrives in a political culture that rewards the clever catchphrase over drab data analysis, but often fails to identify the risks for cities inherent in their war against “auto-dependency” and promotion of large-scale mass transit to boost the “sustainability” of communities.  read more »

Green jobs? Great. Gray jobs? Maybe an even better bet for the new jobs bill. If there is a single graphic that everyone concerned with the nation’s future should have tattooed on their eyeballs, my vote goes to the one on your left. Here is its central message:

Forty years from now, one out of four Americans will be 65 or older.

Twenty million will be over 85.

One million will be over 100.  read more »

State governments have to stop treating transportation like yet another welfare program.

Among urban and rural areas, who subsidizes whom?

It's methodologically difficult to measure net taxation, but the studies that have been done suggest that, contrary to the belief of some, urban areas are big time net tax donors. For example, a recent Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute study found that Indiana's urban and suburban counties generally subsidize rural ones.  read more »

Now that Phoenix's ascendancy has been at least momentarily suspended, its residents are no doubt wondering what comes next. One tendency is to say the city needs to grow up and become more like East Coast cities or Portland, Ore., with dense urban cores and well-developed rail transit. The other ready option is always inertia - a tendency to wait for things to come back the way they were.

Neither approach will work in the long run.  read more »

By Richard Reep

Florida’s era of hard times continues. Last week we held a "Jobs Summit " here in Orlando but heard little but self-congratulation by politicians like Governor Charlie Crist. He praised the Legislature’s budget cuts but had little to claim when it came to reviving the economy.  read more »