Month: April 2017
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The Week Observed, April 28, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The latest from the Louisville travel behavior experiment. Just before the New Year, Louisville started charging tolls to cross its newly-widened I-65 bridge. When it did, traffic across the bridge fell by almost half. Part of the reason was that motorists could take a very short detour and…
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What does it mean to be a “Smart City?”
Cities are organisms, not machines; So a smart city has to learn and not be engineered The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue. Many have embraced the Smart City banner. But it seems each observer defines “city” in the image of…
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Hagiometry: Fawning flatterers with an economic model
It’s no longer fashionable to get an unrealistically flattering portrait painted, but you can get an economist to do it with numbers. You’ve no doubt heard the term “hagiography” an unduly flattering biography or other written treatment designed to burnish the public image of some person. The term is derived from the Greek words for…
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The 0.1 percent solution: Inclusionary zoning’s fatal scale problem
Inclusionary zoning programs are too small to make a dent in housing affordability Two of the most respected names in housing research are Lance Freeman and Jenny Schuetz. Freeman is professor urban planning at Columbia University and author of a series of papers examining neighborhood change, and considering whether and when gentrification leads to the…
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The latest from the Louisville traffic experiment
Even with the free alternative closed, traffic is very light on the new I-65 bridges Time for one of our periodic check-ins on our real world transportation pricing experiment in Louisville, Kentucky. As you recall, we’ve been watching Louisville closely, because just at the end of last year, the city started what amounts to a…
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The Week Observed, April 21, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. How we measure segregation depends on why we care. Daniel Hertz explores the various ways we measure the geographic separation of different racial and ethnic groups. There’s a widely used dissimilarity index, that looks at differences between two groups, like blacks and whites. There are broader measures that…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Let’s Widen Some Freeways!
Four decades after the city earned national recognition for tearing out a downtown freeway, it gets ready to build more April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon’s Legislature is on the verge of considering a transportation package that would drop more than a billion dollars into three Portland area freeway widening projects. Back…
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The high, high price of affordable housing
Why is affordable housing so expensive? In many cities, affordable housing has a problem: it’s not affordable. California Governor Jerry Brown made that point again, emphatically, with his new state budget. He’s said that he’s not putting any new state resources into subsidizing affordable housing until state and local governments figure out ways to bring…
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The New Urban Crisis: Cliff Notes version
Your 1,200 word bluffer’s guide to Richard Florida’s new book Richard Florida’s new book “The New Urban Crisis: How our cities are increasing inequality, deepening segregation, and failing the middle class–and what we can do about it,” came out last week. The book touches on many of the issues that are near and dear to…
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How we measure segregation depends on why we care
Segregation is complicated and multi-dimensional, and measuring it isn’t easy In 2014, NYU’s Furman Center hosted a roundtable of essays on “The Problem of Integration.” Northwestern sociologist Mary Pattillo kicked it off: I must begin by stating that I am by no means against integration…. My comments are not to promote racial separatism, nor to argue…
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The Week Observed, April 14, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Too soon to write off city revival? The release of the Census county-level population estimates two weeks ago led to a series of quick-reaction analyses of what the data portend for the “back-to-the-city” movement that’s been seen in the past several years. Unfortunately, county level data is a…
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Why might Uber & Lyft support road-pricing?
The real disruptive technology for transportation is road-pricing. There’s been a surge of interest in road pricing in the past few weeks. In a new study of growing traffic congestion in New York City, Bruce Schaller attributed traffic delays to the expanding number of Uber and Lyft vehicles on city streets. Given the economics of…
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Has Portland’s rent fever broken?
More evidence that supply and demand are at work in housing markets In early 2016, Portland experienced some of the highest levels of rent inflation of any market in the US. According to Zillow’s rental price estimates, rents were rising between 15 and 20 percent year over year in late 2015 and early 2016. Portland…
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Too soon to write off city revival
County data can’t tell us much about thriving urban neighborhoods New county-level census population estimates became available last week, and Jed Kolko produced an interesting analysis published by FiveThirtyEight concluding that “America’s Shift to the Suburbs Sped Up last year.” While there’s nothing wrong with Kolko’s math, we think there are several reasons to believe…
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The Week Observed, April 7, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Carmaggedon stalks Atlanta. Following an arson-caused blaze, a key section on Interstate 85 in Atlanta collapsed, and is likely to be out of service for at least a couple of months. Since the roadway carried about a quarter million cars every day, the media were quick to predict…
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New York City isn’t hollowing out; It’s growing
You can’t leave out births and deaths when you examine population trends The release of the latest census population estimates has produced a number of quick takes that say that cities are declining. The latest is Derek Thompson, writing at The Atlantic and bemoaning the net domestic migration out of the New York metro area,…
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Migration is making counties more diverse
Migration, especially by young adults, is increasing racial and ethnic diversity in US counties As we related last week, a new report from the Urban Institute quantifies the stark economic costs of racial and income segregation in the United States. Places with higher levels of segregation have lower incomes for African-Americans, lower rates of educational…
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The Ben & Jerry’s crash course in transportation economics
What one day of free ice cream teaches us about traffic congestion Today’s that day, folks. Ben and Jerry are giving away free ice cream to everyone who comes by their stores. Whether you’re hankering for Cherry Garcia or Chunky monkey, you can now get it for absolutely zero price. Well, there is that one…
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Carmaggedon stalks Atlanta
Why predicted gridlock almost never happens and what this teaches us about travel demand It had all the trappings of a great disaster film: A spectacular blaze last week destroyed a several hundred foot-long section of Interstate 85 in Atlanta. In a city that consistently has some of the worst traffic congestion in the country, losing…