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Webcasting Tomorrow
For anyone interested, I’ll be giving a webcast tomorrow in conjunction with Strong Towns on the subject of Urban Design and Property Values. This is a new-and-improved version of a talk that I’ve presented at CNU-18, CNU-Central Texas, Texas Tech University, the Texas APA Convention, the Texas Trails Convention, CNU-Next Gen, CNU 20, and Houston [...]
What will HSR offer and is it worth the cost?
In a comment of his recent article, Tory Gattis asks, “…what will HSR offer that other modes can’t do right now, and is it worth the cost?”  Here are my replies. Rail offers a globally-proven, time-tested, long-lasting, resilient transportation infrastructure that is cost-competitive with paved highways when accounting for operational fuel costs and averaging over their respective designed lifetimes. [...]
Re: Koehler St. Development
I’ve had a number of people ask me to share this, and it’s beginning to circulate around the web, so I thought it would be best to put the original text of my letter to City Council here where I can keep an eye on it. Here is what I wrote to the City concerning [...]
Traffic Calming via Mirage
A group in Canada has come up with a traffic calming solution they think will decrease the number of children hit by cars in school zones. They’ve created an optical illusion, a painting on the street which – as you approach – takes on the appearance of a little girl chasing a ball into the [...]
U.S. 90A Commuter Rail
Proceed to the present when we have a Presidential administration willing to fund rail projects at many levels and a local Representative working to obtain federal funding to assist local transit projects. The U.S. 90A project is back on the radar, here’s the scoop.
No room in the middle
In a new report from the Brookings Institution, MIT ‘s David Autor thoroughly examines economic trends over the past generation and finds a troubling trend: “…the structure of job opportunities in the United States has sharply polarized over the past two decades, with expanding job opportunities in both high-skill, high-wage occupations and low-skill, low- wage [...]
How Efficient Are We in Our Use of Oil?
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the continuing environmental catastrophe that has resulted got me thinking about domestic oil consumption in the United States. Clearly, this disaster is one consequence of our dependence on petroleum and the need to satisfy that dependence with offshore exploration in increasingly difficult and hostile environments. It [...]
E Pluribus Unum
In response to President Obama’s speech today I spent some time thinking about our immigration policy. This isn’t within my normal area of expertise, but it is something that I think everyone should spend some time thinking about. The truth of the matter is, politicians have been screwing this up for generations, and I don’t [...]
What I’ve been up to…
In May I spoke at the Congress for the New Urbanism. I presented a project I’ve been working on for many years, which is now beginning to reach a stable point where it makes sense to open it up to the outside world. This project is called Net Attraction Framework, and it’s my attempt to [...]
Flexible Flow Lanes
In this case study, a flexible-flow lane saved a quiet neighborhood road from being turned into a four-lane thoroughfare while still allowing two lanes of rush-hour traffic. This technique of increasing the traffic load by time-sharing a lane is not suitable in all locations, but should be considered in some cases as an alternative to road-widening.