At 4:30 am, alarms on my cellphone and tablet start beeping, just enough out of sync to prompt me to get up and turn them off. By 5:00 am, I riding as a passenger along an unusually sedate New Jersey Turnpike, making friendly conversation with my driver and survey partner to make sure he stays … [Read more...]
A Guide to Urban Development [Guia de Gestão Urbana]
![A Guide to Urban Development [Guia de Gestão Urbana]](https://i0.wp.com/ec2-34-201-95-206.compute-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GGU_COVER.png?fit=614%2C408)
Caos Planejado, in conjunction with Editora BEI/ArqFuturo, recently published A Guide to Urban Development (Guia de Gestão Urbana) by Anthony Ling. The book offers best practices for urban design and although it was written for a Brazilian audience, many of its recommendations have universal … [Read more...]
Private Neighborhoods And The Transformation Of Local Government
Urban Institute Press • 2005 • 494 pages • $32.50 paperbackIn Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government, Robert H. Nelson effectively frames the discussion of what minimal government might look like in terms of personal choices based on local knowledge. He looks at the … [Read more...]
Donald Shoup Takes San Francisco
Every so often during his tenure as mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg tried to push through congestion pricing, in which drivers would have to pay to use city streets in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. That’s a popular solution to chronic overcrowding but, like drinking coffee to try to … [Read more...]
A Smart City in Your Pocket: From top-down command centers to bottom-up app markets
Cities, for most of human history, were dumb. At least, that’s what the “smart cities” movement might lead you to believe. Over the past few years, a chorus of acquisitive multinational tech corporations, trend-savvy politicians, and optimistic developers—an odd mixture of former SimCity … [Read more...]
Six Shooters and Bullet Trains: High Speed Rail in Texas
California might have some competition in the race for high-speed rail.Texas Central Railway wants to begin construction on a high-speed line from Dallas to Houston as early as 2017. The current plan is to go from downtown to downtown, with possibly one stop along the way in College Station. An … [Read more...]
Book Review: Perverse Cities by Pamela Blais
In her new book Perverse Cities: Hidden Subsidies, Wonky Policy, and Urban Sprawl, Pamela Blais explores the impact of flat-rate fees for development charges and network services like sewer, water, and cable. She explains in detail how these little-discussed policies play an important role in … [Read more...]
Japanese transit and what it can teach us
For a libertarian urbanist blogger, I've always felt kind of embarrassed by my lack of knowledge about East Asian transit, considering that it's the only place left on earth with a thriving competitive private transportation market (they even have profitable monorails!). I've heard good things about … [Read more...]