Author Archive
My Houston 2040
For those who are interested, I’ll be presenting some ideas at the My Houston 2040 happy hour tomorrow night. This should be a fun presentation, and it’s a wide-open discussion format, so there will be plenty of opportunity to chime-in. The full details are attached to the end of this post.
Asnychronous Travel
People often talk about the value of transit in reducing congestion, or in reducing commute times by providing an alternative to congested freeways. This is all fine, but there’s another benefit to efficient regional transit service that I personally find much more valuable.
Transit provides travel redundancy – an additional option for people to get around. [...]
An interesting take on Congestion Pricing
While most environmental advocates believe that congestion-pricing of roads is a good way to reduce congestion and increase use of transit systems, David Owen of the Wall Street Journal essentially argues that, because this would make the automobile network more efficient, environmentalists should be opposed to it.
The Tour of Houston took my advice
… sort of. As you may recall, last year I observed that the Tour of Houston needed a user-friendly route map, and that it needed to go on Memorial Drive.
Well, looks like the City got the message! This year’s Tour of Houston is coming up in about a month, and sure enough they’ve routed it up [...]
$2.50
I was browsing through some data about historical gas prices, when I found some an interesting graph from the Energy Information Administration. Immediately something jumped off the page at me: when looking at historical inflation-adjusted gas prices, every time the price goes above $2.50 we’ve had a major economic meltdown.
About the new web site design
Returning readers will notice that our web site looks somewhat different today. I’ve made a bunch of changes on the surface. You’ll notice that things look a little crisper, more polished, and overall more readable. Some redundant content has been trimmed out, and the important stuff has been made more prominent.
There have been vastly bigger [...]
Obama administration announces major policy shift
In a dramatic change from existing policy, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today proposed that new funding guidelines for major transit projects be based on livability issues such as economic development opportunities and environmental benefits, in addition to cost and time saved, which are currently the primary criteria.
CNU Accreditation
I received notice today that I passed the CNU Accreditation exam, and I’m now one of the first (the first?) CNU Accredited professionals in Houston.
CNU Accreditation is a new process that recognizes professional New Urbanists. Over time I expect its value will grow, for now the biggest impact is that large development projects interested in earning LEED-ND [...]
Perception vs. Reality
General perceptions often don’t match the reality on the ground. Consider a recent study in San Francisco – they found that over 80% of downtown shoppers arrived without a car, but most business owners believed that all of their customers arrived by car. How do misperceptions like this impact Houston?
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