Author: James A. Bacon
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More Good Questions about Self-Driving Cars
by James A. Bacon Nat Bottingheimer, a former executive with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), has been asking the same kinds of questions that I have about the impact of self-driving cars (SDCs) on transportation policy and human settlement patterns. Writing in Greater Greater Washington, he urges transportation planners to begin thinking about…
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Matatus for America
by James A. Bacon What would happen if government didn’t subsidize publicly owned mass transit systems in the United States? How would millions of car-less Americans ever get around? It may be instructive to look at the example of Nairobi, Kenya, a city of three million that hasn’t gotten around to establishing a municipal transit…
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Feds to Mandate Smart Car Technology
by James A. Bacon The Obama administration has signaled its intention to require automobile manufacturers to install technology in cars that would allow them to communicate position, direction and speed to one another. The sensors would alert drivers to impending collisions and, in some systems, would automatically brake to avoid an accident. I’m not a…
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Squeezing More Capacity from Existing Roads and Highways
by James A. Bacon Thanks to tax increases enacted in 2102, Virginia has roughly $800 million more to spend each year on transportation projects. But that money won’t stretch very far if we use it all to build more lane-miles of roads and highways. An alternative approach is to invest in making our existing assets…
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Strike a Blow against Income Inequality — Marry a Floozy
by James A. Bacon President Obama has made it plain that addressing income inequality will be the great theme of the rest of his presidency. Now is the time for all good liberals and progressives to follow his call — not just by seeking to tax the rich but by aligning their personal behavior with…
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Big Box, Big Bollox
by James A. Bacon Lefty Smart Growthers loathe big box stores, none more so than Wal-Mart. The big boxes are ugly as sin, they (allegedly) oppress their workers, they perpetuate dysfunctional, auto-centric human settlement patterns and they drive small, independent merchants out of business. If only there were a way to legislate them out of…
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Hmmm. Tastes Like Chicken.
Time to eat crow. The tax assessment numbers are in for Henrico County, and they are disappointing indeed — up only 2.8% from last year. (I blogged about Chesterfield’s assessment results yesterday.) I had suggested that soaring home sales prices would give a much bigger boost to the tax base, obviating the need for a…
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Commonwealth Cartography
I’m a map geek because maps help us visualize information that is difficult to explain in words. In few fields of endeavor is spatial visualization more important than understanding human settlement patterns. That’s why I’m psyched that Luke Juday, an urban planning graduate student at the University of Virginia, has launched a blog, “Mapping the…
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Coming up: Cars and Traffic Lights that Communicate
There are smart roads, and there are smart cars. The next step in the evolution of the digital city is smart cars that communicate with the smart roads. As Jennie Xie writes for Atlantic Cities, there is considerable innovation in traffic signals these days. An increasing number of signals are synchronized to accommodate changing traffic…
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Chesterfield Assessments up 3%. Bacon Checking out Crow Recipes.
Uh, oh, I may have to eat crow. I’m not eating it yet, but I’m firing up the grill just in case. During the meals tax debate, I drew attention to soaring home sales prices in Henrico County, suggesting that the county would enjoy a surge in property tax revenues far greater than the 2%…
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A Free-Lunch No-Brainer: Pay-As-You-Drive Insurance
by James A. Bacon Pay-As-You-Drive (PAYD) automobile insurance bases premiums on the number of miles the customer drives. It stands to reason: the less you drive, the less likely you are to be involved in a traffic accident. As it also happens, the less you drive, the less you contribute to traffic congestion. Thus, it…
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Virginia Colleges among Least Unfree in the Country
by James A. Bacon I’ve chastised my alma mater the University of Virginia on many an occasion over the years but today I can say I’m proud to be a Wahoo. UVa is numbered among a mere four percent of all public colleges and universities in the United States whose written policies do not seriously…
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Virginia Population: 8.3 Million and Climbing
Virginia 2013 population growth highlights fresh from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center: Current population: 8.3 million The state population grew 74,531, less than one percent and the slowest rate since before the Great Recession. Still, that rate was faster than the national average, making Virginia the 14th fastest-growing state in the country. Population…
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How to Stretch Those Transportation Tax Dollars
by James A. Bacon The Commonwealth of Virginia has expended way more effort in recent years figuring out how to raise taxes for transportation than it has ensuring that those tax dollars are well spent. That’s not for a lack of opportunities. In its new publication, “The Innovative DOT: a handbook of policy and practice,” Smart…
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Dominion Proposes to Bury Problem-Plagued Electric Lines
Dominion is pushing a bill that would allow the electric utility to raise rates to pay for moving interruption-plagued power lines underground. The plan calls for burying 350 miles of line per year until 4,000 miles have been relocated, reports the Washington Post. The task would cost about $175 million per year, to be recompensed…