December 2016

What City Observatory did this week 1. The illegal city of Somerville. Just outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Somerville is one of the most sought after suburbs in the Boston area. It has a combination of attractive neighborhoods and dense housing, nearly all of it the legacy of the city’s 19th and early 20th century roots. […]

A crazy toll structure that encourages more driving. Kentucky and Indiana have just put the finishing touches on two new bridges crossing the Ohio River.  Built at a cost of about $2.6 billion, the bridge project also includes a rebuilding “Spaghetti Junction” an elaborate system of on- and off-ramps in Louisville, where I-65 and I-64

Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called one of its interchanges the second worst bottleneck in the nation wasting 25 million hours

Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines and all sorts of claims about the micro and macro effects of growth rates and

What City Observatory did this week 1. A rebound in millennial car-buying?. Stories purporting to debunk the tendency of younger adults to move to cities, buy fewer houses and drive less seem to have great appeal to editors everywhere. We look into recent reports claiming that ride-sharing millennials crave car ownership after all.  A recent

City Observatory has its own modest proposals for making “Smart City” streets safer. Sooner than many of us thought possible, self-driving cars are in testing on city streets around the country.  While a central promise of autonomous vehicle backers has been that this technological advance would eliminate road carnage, there’ve been good reasons to be

Except for boomers, we’re all less likely to be buying new cars today One of the favorite “we’re-going-to-debunk-the-claims-about-millenials-being-different” story ideas that editors and reporters seem to love is pointing out that millennials are actually buying cars.  Forget what you’ve heard about bike-riding, bus-loving, Uber-using twenty-somethings, we’re told, this younger generation loves its cars, even if

What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban transportation’s camel problem.   Naive optimism is the order of the day in speculating about the future of urban transportation.  In theory, some combination of autonomous vehicles, fully instrumented city streets, and transportation network companies will help us solve all of our problems, from congestion to traffic fatalities