Month: February 2017
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Houston (Street), we have a problem.
A lesson in the elasticity of demand, prices and urban congestion. It looks like Uber, Lyft and other ride sharing services are swamping the capacity of New York City streets Every day, we’re being told, we’re on the verge of a technological revolution that will remedy our persistent urban transportation problems. Smart cities, replete with…
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Yet another flawed congestion report from Inrix
Big data provides little insight Cue the telephoto lens compressed photo of freeway traffic; it’s time for yet another report painting a picture of the horrors inflicted on modern society by traffic congestion. This latest installment comes from traffic data firm Inrix, which uses cell phone, vehicle tracking and GPS data to estimate the speed…
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The Week Observed, February 24, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1.Busting the urban myth about high income housing and affordability. One of the most widespread beliefs about housing is that the construction of new high income housing somehow makes the housing affordability problem worse. Widely believed, but wrong. We marshal the economic evidence for filtering–how as apartments and houses…
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Cursing the candle
How should we view the early signs of a turnaround in Detroit? Better to light a single candle than simply curse the darkness. The past decades have been full of dark days for Detroit, but there are finally signs of a turnaround, a first few glimmers that the city is stemming the downward spiral of…
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Playing Apart
Our City Observatory report, Less in Common, catalogs the ways that we as a nation have been growing increasingly separated from one another. Changes in technology, the economy and society have all coalesced to create more fragmentation and division. As Robert Putnam described this trend in his 2000 book, we are “Bowling Alone.” And while…
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Urban myth busting: Why building more high income housing helps affordability
After fourteen seasons, Discovery Channel’s always entertaining “Mythbusters” series ended last year. If you didn’t see the show-and it lives on at Youtube, of course–co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman constructed elaborate (often explosive) experiments to test whether something you see on television or in the movies could actually happen in real life. (Sadly, it…
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The Week Observed, February 17, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Anti-social capital. You’re probably familiar with the term “social capital” which Robert Putnam popularized with his book Bowling Alone. In it Putnam devised a series of indicators that show the extent to which we associate with and trust one another, ranging from membership in clubs and civic organizations…
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Let’s not demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it
At City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving. Our wonky perspective tells us that there are…
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Postcard from Louisville: Tolls Trump Traffic
Tolls cut traffic levels on I-65 in half; So did we really need 6 more lanes? Last month, we wrote about Louisville’s newly opened toll bridges across the Ohio River. As you may recall, Ohio and Indiana completed a major expansion of highway capacity across the Ohio, doubling the I-65 freeway crossing from six lanes…
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Are young adults moving less?
Conflicting data sources present very different pictures of young adult migration rates The Pew Research Center presented an analysis of census data reporting that today’s young adults are less likely to move in a given year than were their predecessors. A new article from Pew concludes: “Americans are moving at historically low rates, in part…
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Anti-Social Capital?
In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam popularized the term “social capital.” Putnam also developed a clever series of statistics for measuring social capital. He looked at survey data about interpersonal trust (can most people be trusted?) as well as behavioral data (do people regularly visit neighbors, attend public meetings, belong to civic organizations?). Putnam’s…
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The Week Observed, February 10, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The persistence of talent. City Observatory regularly stresses the strong connection between educational attainment and economic success at the metro level. We step back and look at how education attainment has influenced state level economic success over the past 25 years. The data shows that the fraction of…
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Visions of the City Part III: You don’t own me
What kind of future do we want to live in? While that question gets asked by planners and futurists in an abstract and technical way, some of the most powerful and interesting conversations about our future aspirations are reflected in the mass media. Lately, we’ve been struck by the visions embedded in recent television commercials.…
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Visions of the City Part II: A Perfect Day
Yesterday we took a close look at Ford’s vision for the future of cities. Our take: Ford’s preferred narrative of the places we’ll live is all about optimizing city life for vehicles. But is that the narrative that should guide us? Another big global corporation has, perhaps unwittingly, given us a very different vision of…
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Visions of a future city, Part I
What stories do we tell ourselves about the kind of world we want to live in? In his recent presidential address to the American Economics Association, Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller talked about “narrative economics.” He argues that economists, like other disciplines need to begin to recognize that human cognition is structured around story-telling. ”…
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The enduring effect of education on regional economies
One of the themes we stress at City Observatory is the large and growing importance of talent (the education and skills of the population) to determining regional and local economic success. As we shift more and more to a knowledge-based economy, the places that will do well, and that are resilient in the face of…
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The Week Observed, February 3, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1.What HOT Lanes tell us about the value of travel time. The economic underpinning of claims that traffic congestion costs Americans billions and billions of dollars each year is the assumption that travelers would value time savings at about half their average wage rate, or around $15 per hour.…
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Happy Groundhog’s Day, Oregon
Climate change gets lip service, highways get billions. Like many states and cities, Oregon has been a leader in setting its own local goals for reducing greenhouse gases. In a law adopted in 2007, the state set the goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020,…
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Our old planning rules of thumb are “all thumbs”
We all know and use rules of thumb. They’re handy for simplifying otherwise difficult problems and quickly making reasonably prudent decisions. We know that we should measure twice and cut once, that a stitch in time saves nine, and that we should allow a little extra following distance when the roads are slick. What purport…