Author: James A. Bacon
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Urbanizing the Burbs: Fairfax Circle Plaza
by James A. Bacon Route 50 through the City of Fairfax is a classic stroad, a street-road hybrid, that originated as a state highway and degenerated into a local access road for commercial development, with the result that it serves neither function — moving cars or providing local access — especially well. In a lengthy…
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Quote of the Day: Doug Koelemay
As it appears increasingly likely that Congress will throttle the flow of federal transportation dollars to the states, state officials are looking at alternative financing mechanisms such as Public Private Partnerships (P3s). As it happens, Virginia is one of only four states with extensive experience with P3s — the others are California, Texas and Florida…
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Will Google Cars Boost City Productivity?
The spread of Self-Driving Cars (SDCs) will lead to tremendous increases in the productivity of cites, argues Brian Wang in The Next Big Future blog. Wang builds his argument on claims by Google that the ability of SDCs to drive faster and closer with greater safety than human-driven cars will effectively double the capacity of roadways.…
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Virginia, the Land Where New Ideas Go to Die?
by James A. Bacon I can’t say I’m surprised that the Commonwealth of Virginia now faces a $1 billion shortfall in the next biennial budget. That’s what happens when economic growth decelerates rapidly, as Virginia’s economy has been doing since the federal budget sequester put the quietus on the great Northern Virginia economic boom. We’ve been…
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The Evolution of the Burbs
Leigh Gallagher, assistant managing editor of Fortune magazine, made a big splash last year with her book, “The End of the Suburbs.” While she added little new to the urbanism vs. suburbanism debate, she did a superb job of articulating and popularizing the urbanism side of the argument. The title is misleading — probably dictated…
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Re-Thinking the Sidewalk
by James A. Bacon The vast majority of sidewalks in my home town, Richmond, Va., are made of concrete slabs. Concrete materials are inexpensive and the sidewalks are easy to install. But in a burg like Richmond, where people dearly love their trees, concrete pavement presents a problem. Tree roots lift or crack the slabs, creating…
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Brightening up the Beach
It seemed like such a great idea: Commission painters to adorn Virginia Beach’s lifeguard stands with bright, crowd-pleasing art, and then pay for the initiative by selling sponsorships. “Between 42 lifeguard stands and 37 containers over a 3-mile resort strip, you’ll effectively have one fixture every 75 yards,” Bobby Levin told city officials, as re-told…
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A Dystopic Future of Road-Clogging Robot Cars?
by James A. Bacon Whether we’re ready for them or not, the United States will be flooded with self-driving cars (SDCs) within 10 to 15 years. Envisioning a future in which people subscribe to driverless-car sharing services, some urbanists look to the future with equanimity: When people don’t need to own cars outright, they’re more likely to take…
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Who Needs Dad When You’ve Got Uncle Sam?
by James A. Bacon Consider the following progression in logic: – One in three Virginia children live in poverty or near poverty, and half of these children live in married families. – Marriage alone does not protect children from poverty; indeed, there is little evidence that marriage, as opposed to influences associated with marriage such as the level…
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Bacon Bit for the Day
From Michael Paul Williams’ Friday column in the Times-Dispatch: The former capital of the Confederacy is also the capital of the state where mixed marriages were sanctioned by the Supreme Court in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision. In a 2012 study by Pew Research Center, has the nation’s highest percentage (3.3%) of marriages between…
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A Building Year
by James A. Bacon Ask Robert Sarvis if he thinks he really has a chance to win the race for the U.S. Senate, and he won’t insult your intelligence with a lot of bogus reasons why he just might be able to pull it off. Even though the Libertarian candidate garnered 6.5% last year in…
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Prospect for Virginia Housing Prices: Grim to Dismal
If you’re a homeowner hoping to see your house increase in value, or if you’re a local government looking for assessments and tax revenues to rise, Virginia is just about the worst state of the union to be in right now. According to a new projection of housing prices published by the Demand Institute, the price…
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Suburbs Regain Their Appeal! But the Definition of “Suburb” Is Changing
by James A. Bacon “Suburbs regain their appeal!” shouts a headline for an article in the Wall Street Journal today accompanied by a quarter-page aerial photograph (shown above) of a cul-de-sac subdivision in Chicago. The editor’s treatment of the story, which is based upon research findings by Brookings Institution scholar William H. Frey, is highly…
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Save Lives: Treat City Streets Like City Streets
by James A. Bacon In the decade between 2003 and 2012, more than 42,000 pedestrians died on American streets and roads. That’s more than 16 times the number that died in earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. While natural disasters attract national attention, pedestrian fatalities are buried in the back pages, if they’re noted at all, even…
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Revisiting Taxation and Migration
by Timothy Wise Your humble scribe, ElGrowlerGrande, first became interested in the issue of taxation and interstate migration after reading a paper by Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder. We discussed this in an article in the July 28, 2003 edition of The ACTA Watchdog, focusing on the question of how decisions of the Arlington County Board affect…