City Observatory

Show Your Work: Getting DOT Traffic Forecasts Out of the Black Box

Commentary, Uncategorized / Joe Cortright

Traffic projections used to justify highway expansions are often wildly wrong The recent Wisconsin court case doesn’t substitute better models, but it does require DOTs to show their data and assumptions instead of hiding them The road less traveled: Wisconsin Highway 23 There’s a lot of high-fiving in the progressive transportation community about last month’s […]

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The real welfare Cadillacs have 18 wheels

Commentary / Joe Cortright

Truck freight movement gets a subsidy of between $57 and $128 billion annually in the form of uncompensated social costs, over and above what trucks pay in taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If trucking companies paid the full costs associated with moving truck freight, we’d have less road damage and congestion, fewer crashes,

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Urban residents aren’t abandoning buses; buses are abandoning them

Commentary / Daniel Hertz

“Pity the poor city bus,” writes Jacob Anbinder in an interesting essay at The Century Foundation’s website. Anbinder brings some of his own data to a finding that’s been bouncing around the web for a while: that even as American subways and light rail systems experience a renaissance across the country, bus ridership has been

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June 2015

Show Your Work: Getting DOT Traffic Forecasts Out of the Black Box

The real welfare Cadillacs have 18 wheels

Urban residents aren’t abandoning buses; buses are abandoning them

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