Author: James A. Bacon
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How to Cut Auto Usage without Social Engineering
Emily Badger, a perceptive writer for the Atlantic Cities blog, makes a number of excellent points in a commentary published today but manages to confirm conservatives’ worst fears that liberals and progressives are engaged in a war against cars. The libs may say they are “pro-transit,” “pro-bicycle” and “pro-transportation choice,” but when you scratch the surface, their…
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Fixing Our Compromised Interstates and Highways
Over on Strong Towns Chuck Marohn is running a five-part series on how to restructure transportation policy in his home state of Minnesota. Despite a different state/local government structure and different spheres of authority for the two states’ transportation departments, many of his proposals carry over to Virginia. In today’s missive, he tackles three issues…
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Bacon Bits: Bicycles and Baseball Stadiums
The Easy Out. Writing in Henrico Monthly John Gerner, a Richmond-based leisure industry consultant, takes Richmond City Hall’s assumption that building a new baseball stadium requires public funding. Ballparks are often built with little or no public funding, he writes: Greensboro’s privately financed ballpark that was built to accommodate a AA minor league baseball team,…
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Map of the Day: Where the Immigrants Settle
Foreign-born immigrants now comprise 10% of the Commonwealth’s population. Eighty percent of Virginia immigrants originate from Asia or Latin America. The top five countries of origin are (in order) El Salvador, India, Mexico, Philippines and Korea. Sixty-eight percent of all the state’s immigrants reside in Northern Virginia. So reports the Weldon Cooper Center’s StatsChat blog…
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Value Capture vs. Slush Funds as Transportation Funding Tool
by James A. Bacon Charles Marohn at Strong Towns has penned a fascinating piece comparing the financing of America’s railroad system in the 19th century with the construction of the nation’s Interstate highway system in the 20th. (Read the essay on the Smart Growth for Conservatives blog.) The railroads used a form of “value capture,”…
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Roanoke Experiments with Paid Parking
by James A. Bacon In 1999 the City of Roanoke went socialist with its on-street parking downtown — it removed the last of its parking meters with the idea of making downtown more “hospitable” to visitors. Fifteen years later, city officials are planning to experiment with free markets and actually use price as a rationing…
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A Distracting Doctrine
Instead of fixating on the United Nation’s Agenda 21 as a threat to American liberties, conservatives should articulate fiscally responsible, market-driven policies to address the very real challenges facing local governments in the United States.
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Has It Really Come to This?
I do admire Nicole Coon for her bravery in stepping forward to promote passage of the so-called “revenge porn” bill that now awaits Governor Terry McAuliffe’s signature. The pretty nursing student had sent an, um, embarrassing video to a boyfriend who, presumably when he was no longer a boyfriend, posted it on a website that…
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Second Map of the Day: Where the Young People Are Going
If the future of Virginia resides with its young people, we can see from the map above that some regions are a lot better off than others. Luke Juday, several of whose maps I have re-published on Bacon’s Rebellion, has moved to the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, where he has begun posting on…
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Map of the Day: Lightning Fatalities
If you’re afraid of lightning, you’re way better off in Virginia than in North Carolina or Maryland! Source: The Atlantic Cities blog. — JAB
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The Acid Test for Richmond BRT: Will Property Owners Tax Themselves?
by James A. Bacon Momentum is building in the Richmond region to build a 7.4-mile Bus Rapid Transit system along the Broad Street corridor. Transit lovers tout the many blessings that a BRT system would bring, and they discuss the projected costs, but there are two things you never hear them talk about: Risk and…
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Don’t Expect Increased Real Estate Assessments to Bail out Local Government
There’s bad news for local governments in Virginia that rely upon property tax revenues to support schools, public safety and other priorities. Property values for single-family homes, which account for a large majority of most jurisdictions’ total assessed value, will not increase much over the next few years, according to a new study by the…
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A Less Destructive Form of Sprawl
by James A. Bacon A development group is asking for approval to build up to 2,900 homes and 1.8 million square feet of commercial space off Interstate 95 in Stafford County. The proposed “George Washington Village” calls for a 1,100-acre town-center development with a mix of single-family detached houses, town houses and apartments to be…
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Car Sharing Cuts into Automobile Ownership
by James A. Bacon The spread of car sharing could erode automobile sales and automobile ownership in the years ahead, according to a new study by AlixPartners, a business advisory firm. The study, which surveyed 1,000 licensed drivers in 10 developed car-sharing markets and 1,000 drivers nationally as a control group, found that car sharing…
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Downtown Richmond Falls in Love with the Mid-Rise
by James A. Bacon Still need proof that the momentum of growth and development is shifting back to traditional downtowns? Consider this: Roughly 3,000 apartment units are under construction in the Richmond metropolitan region — and half of them are located downtown. That gem of a factoid was buried in a Times-Dispatch article about the construction…