Month: April 2022
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Frog Ferry: The slow boat to nowhere
A proposed Portland area ferry makes no economic or transportation sense. Why the Frog Ferry is a slow boat to nowhere A ferry between Vancouver and Portland would take 20 minutes longer than existing bus service From flying cars to underground tunnels to ferry boats, there’s always an appetite for a seemingly clever technical fix…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Let’s Waste Billions Widening Freeways!
If you’re serious about dealing with climate change, the last thing you should do is spend billions widening freeways. The Oregon Department of Transportation is hell-bent on widening freeways and destroying the planet April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon is moving forward with plans to billions dollars into three Portland area freeway…
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The Week Observed, April 22, 2022
What City Observatory did this week How sprawl and tax evasion are driving demands for wider freeways. The Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation are proposing to spend roughly $5 billion to widen a 5 mile stretch of I-5 between Portland and Vancouver. The case for the widening is based on the need to accomodate…
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Sprawl and Tax Evasion: Driving forces behind freeway widening
Sprawl and tax evasion are the real forces fueling the demand for wider freeways Highway widening advocates offer up a a kind of manifest destiny storyline: population and traffic are ever-increasing, and unless we accommodate them we’ll be awash in cars, traffic and gridlock. The rising tide of cars is treated as a irresistible force…
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The Week Observed, April 15, 2022
What City Observatory did this week A universal basic income . . . for cars. One of the most widely discussed alternatives for tackling poverty and inequality head on is the idea of a “Universal Basic Income”–a payment made to every household to assure it had enough for basic living expenses. While there have been…
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A Universal Basic income . . . for Cars
California is the first in the nation to establish a Universal Basic Income . . . for cars One of the most widely discussed alternatives for tackling poverty and inequality head-on is the idea of a “Universal Basic Income”—a payment made to every household to assure it has enough for basic living expenses. While there…
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The NIMBYs made $6 trillion last year
In 2021, US residential values increased by $6.9 trillion, almost entirely due to price appreciation Those gains went disproportionately to older, white, higher income households Capital gains on housing in 2021 were ten times larger than the total income of the bottom 20 percent of the population. Little of this income will be taxed due…
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The Week Observed, April 1, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The Cappuccino Congestion Index. Media reports regularly regurgitate the largely phony claims about how traffic congestion costs travelers untold billions of dollars in wasted time. To illustrate how misleading these fictitious numbers are, we’ve used the same methodology and actual data to compute the value of time lost standing in…