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...]
When will New Jersey reverse its sprawling ways?
by Stephen SmithNew Jersey has always been an odd state – it's the most densely populated of the fifty, and yet it lies just outside of the core of both of its metro areas (Philadelphia and New York). North Jersey does have a formidable number of mid-sized cities, but the biggest – Newark - is … [Read more...]
A comment on NYU’s proposed superblocks
Benjamin Hemric left an interesting comment about my remark about NYU's expansion plans in Greenwich Village. First of all, I should admit that I was lazy and got NYU's plans totally wrong – they are going to add towers to the three that I. M. Pei already built, not tear them down, and they're … [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...]
Zoning blighted Manhattanville before Columbia did
Something that always annoyed me about discussions of the state of Manhattanville and Columbia's blight study is the fact that they usually leave out restrictive zoning as the original sin. We're certainly no fans of eminent domain or Columbia's plans for the West Harlem neighborhood, and while … [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...]