Recent Posts
- Sustainable Transportation in Freiburg
- Cool Planning in Boulder
- Another City is Possible: Cars and Climate
- Boulder Biketopia at the ULI Salon
- A Goss Grove Neighborhood Greenway?
- Making Boulder into one of Jan Gehl's Cities for People
- Preventing Bicycle Fatalities at US-36 and Violet
- Bikes and Bus Rapid Transit
- The High Cost of Free Parking in Boulder
- Revisiting Junction Place, the TVAP and Multi-Way Boulevards
Linkstream
- Quantifying the Cost of Sprawl
Sprawling single-family suburban development is more expensive than compact land use. There's more infrastructure per capita and per unit area (pavement, power lines, water and sewage lines, etc), in conjunction with much lower tax revenues per unit infrastructure. This is true if you look at either the capital (up front) costs or the ongoing operational costs. Most subdivisions aren't actually prepared to pay their own way when the bill comes due. - The Fight Against Small Apartments in Seattle
A bizarre account of the NIMBYs fighting against tiny apartments in Seattle. They fear that small living spaces must necessarily end up filled with sketchy-ass meth-heads. But it turns out they're more often young professionals, retirees, and other completely normal folk who either don't want or can't afford the canonical American Dream of yesteryear... and would rather live downtown and have access to the city. - Break out the Bikes for the next Hackfest
Boulder's QuickLeft is hosting a Bicycle Hackfest, the evening of Tuesday, May 14th, from 6-9pm. Unfortunately, I can't make it, but it would be great if someone could work on getting our Mark-A-Spot Open311 testbed built out... contact me if you're interested! - Portland Retailers Love Bike Corrals
On street bike parking (bike corrals) have become very popular with local street-level businesses in Portland, Oregon. I think it's time for Boulder to regularize our bike corral program. We need to get some decent non-diagonal racks in there with higher capacity, like the Portland racks, and also create a process through which businesses can request the racks, and get them. Portland has nearly 100, by population, Boulder ought to have something like 16. - A Profile of Freiburg, Germany
A good short profile of the city of Freiburg, Germany, and their many sustainability initiatives. Freiburg is a little more than double Boulder's size -- both in population and area, so it has a similar average population density. It's also a university town with a strong tech sector locally. The whole city was re-built post WWII, but they chose to build it along the same lines as the old city, with a dense core, and well defined boundaries. Today about half of daily trips are done by foot or on bike, with another 20% on public transit. They have a
- Quantifying the Cost of Sprawl
Boulder Bikes
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Tag Archives: economics
Quantifying the Cost of Sprawl
Sprawling single-family suburban development is more expensive than compact land use. There’s more infrastructure per capita and per unit area (pavement, power lines, water and sewage lines, etc), in conjunction with much lower tax revenues per unit infrastructure. This is … Continue reading
Cars and Robust Cities Are Fundamentally Incompatible
A writeup by The Atlantic Cities of a paper in the Transportation Research Board journal of the National Academies looking at the effects of parking on the vitality of urban centers. It’s found that the detrimental effects of dedicating urban … Continue reading
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Tagged cars, data, development, economics, parking, planning, transportation, urban
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Orange County toll roads’ under review by California
Orange County’s toll roads are unable to pay their own way, leading the state of California to investigate whether their administrative agencies are viable as a going concern. Obviously the situation is complicated by the fact that there are public … Continue reading
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Tagged cars, economics, freeway, policy, subsidy, tolls, transportation
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Suburbs == Ponzi scheme
Charles Marohn of Strong Towns on Grist, explaining the way in which American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme. Essentially, since WWII there have been several rounds of up-front financing for suburban expansion, including federal dollars, and debt leveraging supposed … Continue reading
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Tagged cities, design, economics, strong towns, suburbia, urban
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The Diverging Diamond
Strong Towns takes on The Diverging Diamond and suburban traffic engineers everywhere. It’s nice to see someone on the conservative end of the spectrum also arguing passionately for livable density and good urban spaces. He comes to it from an economic … Continue reading
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Tagged cars, cities, design, economics, highway, transportation, urban
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How Google’s Driving Costs Misses the Train
A fun critique of the estimated driving costs that you get from Google Maps, from Alex Steffen. The costs of driving are largely (mostly?) systemic, and external to the individual, and predicated on an assumption of car ownership, and a … Continue reading
Between the Lines
Yet another article about the Shoupistas, this time in Los Angeles magazine. Have we reached some kind of cognitive tipping point? Will urban parking policy start changing? Will our downtown business districts be transformed? We can hope…
WalMart selling cheap dutch-style bikes
WalMart is selling cheap dutch-style bikes. If you’re gonna sell cheap bikes, it makes a lot more sense to me for them to be simple and utilitarian (like the Flying Pigeon bikes of Tianjin), instead of double suspension 27 speed … Continue reading
Energy and Equity – Ivan Illich
Energy and Equity is an essay from the energy crisis of the 1970s. It’s got a socialist bent, but I don’t think that’s actually vital to the point being made. As the speeds at which we travel and the distances … Continue reading
All Transportation Infrastructure is Development
A good post from Fort Worthology on the perils of continuing to build late-20th century sprawling car-centric cities, and the fallacy that transit/bike/pedestrian infrastructure is a “handout for developers” while highways are not. All public infrastructure — especially transportation infrastructure … Continue reading
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Tagged development, economics, infrastructure, sprawl, subsidy, transit, transportation
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