Author: James A. Bacon
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What Virginians Can Learn from Bicycle Nirvana
Americans, it is commonly said, have had a love affair with the automobile. By the same token, it is fair to say that the Dutch have had a love affair with the bicycle. A 1938 newspaper article declared the bicycle to be “the most Dutch of all vehicles.” Some 32 years later, when some friends…
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Joining the Waze Craze
by James A. Bacon I had never heard of Waze until I read this morning that the Israeli mobile-map company was coveted by the likes of Google, Apple and Facebook and potentially worth more than $1 billion. But as soon as I visited the Waze website, I realized it was my dream come true —…
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Bobbing and Weaving on the Northern Terminus
by James A. Bacon The Charlottesville Bypass pile-up keeps getting bigger… Last night some 300 Charlottesville-area residents packed a meeting at the Holiday Inn to view three design options for the southern terminus of the controversial, $244 million project. After public outcry over flaws in the preliminary design submitted by Skanska-Branch Joint Venture (SBJV) as…
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Botanical Barges
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has a new idea for saving the bay: Install floating, fertilizer-sipping wetlands in Virginia’s small lakes and storm water ponds. by James A. Bacon The Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden is well known in the Richmond region for its Fountain Garden, its Rose Garden, its East Asia Garden and its Wetlands Garden.…
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City of Richmond Leads Regional Population Growth
It’s only one year’s worth of data, so I don’t want to make too much of it, but new U.S. Census numbers confirm my argument that the center of gravity of population growth and development is shifting back toward the urban core — at least in the Richmond region. Between July 2011 and July 2012,…
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“How Can We Urbanize Where We Are?”
Around the country, local governments are proposing plans to re-develop aging office parks as urban-style, mixed-use complexes, reports the Wall Street Journal, which cited the Innsbrook office park in Henrico as a case in point. “Suburban office buildings are passe,” said Burrell Saunders, a principal with Lyall Design and a prime mover behind the re-development…
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PW Supervisors Delay Endorsement of Bi-County Parkway
So much news today, I can’t keep up! … The Bi-County Parkway, the key missing link in the proposed North-South Corridor, took another hit yesterday when the Prince William County Board of Supervisors delayed a vote to reaffirm its support for the project. The issue has pit Republican vs. Republican. PW Board Chairman Corey A.…
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Virginia Poverty: Better and Worse than We Thought
Motivated by the many drawbacks of the official U.S. measure of poverty, the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has introduced a “Virginia Poverty Measure” (VPM) to account for regional differences in the cost of living, the impact of government assistance and other factors. The more nuanced statistical analysis does not alter the overall poverty…
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IG of the Day: Teen Birth Rate
This map, posted by Richard Florida to the Atlantic Cities blog, shows state-by-state variations in the teen birth rate. Florida makes an unconvincing case that ties higher teen birth rates to the practice of religion, posture on birth control and red state governance, confusing correlation with causality. “Despite all the hectoring and moralizing,” he writes,…
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The Fiscal Benefits of Smart Growth
by James A. Bacon Compared to conventional suburban development, smart growth development can save 38% in up-front infrastructure costs and 10% of the cost of supporting police, ambulance, fire and other public services, according to a new report by Smart Growth America (SGA). At the same time, concludes “Building Better Budgets,” smart growth generates 10…
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Role Reversal: Poverty Increasingly a Suburban Phenomenon
by James A. Bacon Mirroring national trends, poverty in Richmond region suburbs has grown far more rapidly since 2000 in suburban counties than in the City of Richmond, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reporting numbers published in a new book, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America.” Writes the T-D’s Graham Moomaw: “From 2000 to 2011, the…
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A Whole Lot of Commuting Going On
The Governing magazine blog has published some fascinating U.S. census data on commuting patterns in the U.S., and though the author did not pick up on this particular angle, the data shows Virginia as a real outlier. The chart above, extracted from the census data, shows Virginia counties with populations of 60,000 or more. There…
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No Excuses Left!
Now that Governor Bob McDonnell and the General Assembly have restructured transportation taxes away from a user-pays system to an everybody-pays system, they have (perhaps unwittingly) undermined the justification for short-changing funding for bicycle routes. Cycling advocates Tom Bowden and Champe Burnley drive home the point in a Times-Dispatch op-ed today. Now our streets and…
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We’re So Sorry, Toots! We Grovel in Apology!
In the pantheon of Reggae gods, there surely will be an elevated place for Frederick “Toots” Hibbert. In my mind, he would be revered as Apollo to Bob Marley’s Zeus. I’ll never forget watching, “The Harder They Come,” the 1972 Jamaican film starring Jimmy Cliff as a gangster turned reggae star. The stand-out tunes, in…
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Why Commercial Developers Should Be Afraid, Very Afraid
by James A. Bacon While most commercial real estate markets across the United States are slowly recovering from the recession, office vacancies in the Washington metro area ticked higher over the past year, to 13.8% in the first quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal. Clearly a sequester-related decline in federal spending was partially responsible,…