March 2024

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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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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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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