Month: August 2017
-
Uber’s Movement: A peek at ride-hailing data
Uber’s lifting the veil–just a little–to provide data on urban transportation performance Uber’s new Movement tool provides valuable new source of data about travel times in urban environments. We’ve gotten an early look at Movement, and think its something that you’ll want to investigate, if you’re interested in urban transportation. Uber likes to bill itself…
-
Inequality in three charts: Piketty, the picket fence and Branko’s elephant
Rising inequality in the US isn’t new; Declining inequality globally is. Scratch just beneath the surface of many daily problems, and you’ll find income inequality is a contributing factor, if not the chief culprit. Whether its concentrated poverty, soaring housing costs, disparities in educational attainment and public services, or the nation’s political divide, it all…
-
The Week Observed, August 25, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Such a deal. Suppose someone offered you this investment deal: You can get $200,000 in preferred stock, that pays a 5% annual dividend tax free, and when it comes time to sell this investment, all of your capital gains will be tax free, too. Can’t afford $200K? No…
-
What Dallas, Houston, Louisville & Rochester can teach us about widening freeways: Don’t!
Portland is thinking about widening freeways; other cities show that doesn’t work Once upon a time, Portland held itself out as a national example of how to build cities that didn’t revolve (so much) around the private automobile. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, it recognized that building more freeways just generated more traffic, and…
-
Such a deal
How tax policy subsidizes homeownership, mostly for the wealthiest Americans OK. Imagine that someone offers you this investment deal. We want you to buy some stock; in fact, we want you to buy about $150,000 or $200,000 in stock. In a single company. Sounds a bit risky, doesn’t it? But keep listening, we have some…
-
The Week Observed, August 18, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Hundred dollar bills on the municipal sidewalk? There’s a lot of interest in tapping the hidden value of municipal assets to address city financial problems. The typical city owns billions of dollars of assets, particularly valuable urban land, and at least in theory, if it could earn even…
-
Driven Apart: How sprawl is lengthening our commutes
The secret to reducing the amount of time Americans spend in peak hour traffic has more to do with how we build our cities than how we build our roads. Our 2010 report, published by CEOs for Cities, looks at how land use patterns determine travel distances. Commonly used measures of traffic congestion, like the…
-
Why we’re talking about Portland’s freeway widening proposal
Portland is a bellwether for transportation policy; is it going to take a giant step backward? Last month, the Oregon Legislature passed a $5.3 billion transportation funding bill. A central piece of this legislation is advancing three projects that would widen Portland area highways. HB 2017A makes initial allocations of funding to start (but not…
-
Hundred dollar bills on the municipal sidewalk
The public wealth of cities is substantial, but under-pricing public assets is rampant There’s an old saw among economists. Two economists are walking along, and one of them says, “Look, there’s a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk.” The second economist says, “It can’t be a hundred dollar bill; if it was, somebody would have…
-
The Week Observed, August 11, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. How luxury housing becomes affordable. It’s always been the case that developers build new housing for those at the top end of the market. It’s true today, and it was true 50 and 100 years ago. We look back at “luxury” apartments built in Portland in 1910 and…
-
Dying to widen highways
Oregon’s DOT seems to be more concerned with making cars go faster than saving lives Yesterday, we took a look at a recent Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) “performance report” on Portland area freeways. One of its main messages–which we found some problems with–deals with congestion. But the report also seems to devote a lot…
-
What a congestion report doesn’t tell us about congestion
Congestion is increasing in Portland: But not, apparently, because traffic volumes are increasing Traffic congestion reports are just as formulaic as bodice-ripping romance novels. They have a predictable narrative form: our region is growing; it has more people and more jobs and more cars. And the number of people and jobs and cars is growing…
-
Is it a net zero home if it has a three-car garage?
Another model energy-saving project ignores density and location The National Institute of Standards and Technology has built what it calls a model “net-zero” energy home on its Gaithersburg, Maryland campus. The house is festooned with arrays of solar cells that generate more electricity that the house consumes, and its extensively insulated, air-tight and high-efficiency windows.…