Month: March 2024
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The Week Observed, March 29, 2024
What City Observatory did this week What the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project doesn’t want you to know. The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is afraid of what you’ll find out when they release their Environmental Impact Statement. IBR officially determined that “leaking” the project EIS would result in “negative public reaction” to the project. Guess…
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Carmageddon does a no show, again (Baltimore edition)
On Tuesday, March 26, the containership Dali slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing it to collapse into the Patapsco River. Tragically, six workers on the bridge were killed, but fortunately the collision occurred in the middle of the night, rather than during peak travel hours, when hundreds of vehicles would likely…
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What IBR doesn’t want you to know
The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is afraid of what you’ll find out when they release their Environmental Impact Statement IBR officially determined that “leaking” the project EIS would result in “negative public reaction” to the project Guess what: We have an advance copy of the draft EIS: You can now see what they…
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The Week Observed, March 22, 2024
What City Observatory did this week The high cost of covering freeways. The latest fashion in highway urbanism is “capping” freeways. In theory, highway builders claim that capping freeways will repair past damage and even create new urban land. They produce gauzy green renderings of what capped freeway might look like. But urban leaders need…
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Freeway covers are an expensive way to create new urban land
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could create valuable new urban land by decking over freeways? Turns out, its massively uneconomical, and doesn’t eliminate many of the most negative effects of urban freeways Its massively uneconomical because that “land” thats created by capping freeways costs at least three times more to build than the land…
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The Week Observed, March 15, 2024
What City Observatory did this week Abandoning road pricing monkey-wrenches state transportation, traffic reduction and climate plans. This week, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek terminated Oregon’s Regional Mobility Pricing Program, which would have imposed per mile fees on major Portland-area freeways. The plan, approved by the legislature seven years ago, has been developed at a snail’s…
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Monkey-wrenching road pricing
R.I.P. Road Pricing in Oregon: Dead before its even tried More than just money, the demise of pricing monkey-wrenches state transportation policy It’s no surprise: ODOT’s attempts to implement pricing have been half-hearted and still-born Without pricing, Portland traffic congestion will grow worse, and this blows a hole in state and regional climate plans This…
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The Week Observed, March 8, 2024
What City Observatory did this week A yawning chasm in neighborhood distress among metro areas. Almost every metropolitan area has some neighborhoods that face serious economic distress, but the patterns of distress vary widely across the nation. We use data from the Economic Innovation Group’s latest distressed communities index to identify clusters of contiguous zip…
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A yawning chasm: Patterns of neighborhood distress in US metros
There’s a yawning chasm of neighborhood level economic distress across US metro areas. While about 1 in 6 US neighborhoods is classed as distressed, some metro areas have large concentrations of distress, while others have almost no distressed neighborhoods at all. Focusing on groups of contiguous zip codes classified as “distressed” shows that in some…
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The Week Observed, March 1, 2024
What City Observatory Did this Week Is it time to address the problem of “Missing Massive” housing? This past week marked the latest convening of YIMBYTown, this year, held in Austin, Texas. One of the perennial topics was state strategies to promote “missing middle” housing—as evidenced by multiple initiatives to allow duplexes, triplexes and four-plexes…