Commentary

Editor’s note:  City Observatory is pleased to provide this guest commentary by our friend Robert Liberty a keen observer of and advocate for cities.   by Robert Liberty For many years I lived in Northwest Portland, Oregon. It was a part of the city first settled by white pioneers in the 1860s, but development really

What City Observatory did this week 1. Looking at housing injustice requires a broad lens. A new research project on Bay Area neighborhood change defines “displacement” as any reduction in the number of low-income people in a given community. Daniel Kay Hertz argues that this way of thinking leads us down the wrong path in

Back in July, we published a three–part series about what exactly it means for housing to be affordable. Our basic argument was that the most standard measurement—whether your housing costs are more or less than 30 percent of your income—is inadequate to the task, for several reasons: First, it doesn’t allow for lower-income people to

Part 2: A curious discrepancy between two major congestion reports using the same data Yesterday, we explained why one of the most common takes on the Texas Transportation Institute’s “Urban Mobility Report” is actually totally unjustified: Though many media outlets repeat the UMR’s claim that traffic delays are worse today than it has been since

Part 1: Resurrecting discredited data to paint a false history The Texas Transportation Institute claims that traffic congestion is steadily getting worse.  But its claims are based on resurrecting and repeating traffic congestion estimates from 1982 through 2009 that were based on a deeply flawed and biased model.  Since 2009, TTI has used different data

What City Observatory did this week 1. Another tall tale from the Texas Transportation Institute. This week, TTI released another episode of its “Urban Mobility Report,” claiming to measure the cost of congestion and track the continued worsening of traffic in American cities. The problem, as Joe Cortright explains, is that these reports are riddled

UPDATE: A chorus of congestion cost critiques By this point, researchers and practitioners from around the country (and beyond!) have laid out their problems with TTI’s congestion reports. Here’s a roundup of some of the best: Todd Litman of the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute comprehensively debunks the TTI methodology: “The UMR ignores basic research principles: