Category: Infrastructure
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The Huge Controversy Over Gas Pipelines
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By Peter Galuszka Just a few years ago, Gov. Terry McAuliffe seemed to be a reasonable advocate of a healthy mix of energy sources. He boosted renewables and opposed offshore oil and gas drilling. He was suspicious of dangerous, dirty coal. Then he started to change. During the campaign last year, he suddenly found offshore…
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The Simple, Lovable Sidewalk
By Peter Galuszka Forever humble, the simple sidewalk is becoming an issue in land planning and transportation. In densely-populated populated urban areas, sidewalks have been a staple of living since the time of the Ancient Greeks. They were classics in the familiar grid plans that marked most American towns in the 19th and early 20th…
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The Emerging Exurban Dead Zone
by James A. Bacon The Northern Virginia exurbs, like exurbs across the country, are cruising for a bruising. EM Risse would never express himself so inelegantly or imprecisely but that’s the thrust, in colloquial terms, of a new essay, “The Great Submergence,” he has posted on his website. The United States economy, argues Risse, a…
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Map of the Day: Average Broadband Speeds
While Virginians beat themselves up over Medicaid expansion, slow economic growth and the McDonnell corruption trial, here’s a morsel of good news: According to Akamai’s latest “State of the Internet” report, Virginia has the highest average broadband speeds of any state in the nation — 13.7 Mbps (megabytes per second). That’s world-class, exceeded only by…
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How Not to Shift From Coal
By Peter Galuszka Coal is rightly the scourge of environmentalists. Economic pressure is on to shift to cleaner natural gas made plentiful by controversial hydraulic fracking. Political pressure is on to replace fossil fuels with renewables such as wind, solar and other methods. In Virginia, Dominion, the state’s largest utility, relies for 46 percent of…
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How to Convince Your Mom that Congestion Pricing Is Good
by Michael Brown Odds are if you show up at a family reunion and try to convince your parents and siblings that congestion pricing is good, you’ll be lonely pretty quickly. People want the freeways to work but they hate paying tolls! If you are reading this, then you’re probably part of the choir. My…
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How Planners Can Rescue Virginia from the Fiscal Abyss
This is a copy of a speech that I presented to the Virginia Chapter of the American Planners Association Monday, with extemporaneous amendments and digressions deleted. — JAB Thank you very much, it’s a pleasure to be here. Urban planning is a fascinating discipline. As my old friend Ed Risse likes to say, urban planning isn’t…
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The Top Ten Positive, Sustainable Effects of Congestion Pricing
by Michael Brown This is the third part of a four-part series. Part 1 ◊ Part 2 Part 3 ◊ Part 4 “Free” freeways aren’t as free as they used to be. Adding new capacity costs billions of dollars and mires communities in unaffordable debt. We can’t continue…
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Boomer….Wha?
By Peter Galuszka Remember the federal deficit that lurked behind the corner? Where did it go? Al Kamen of The Washington Post asks that question in a column today. He writes: “Not long ago, the federal deficit was projected to destroy the country, our country’s future and just about everything else. The politicians and the…
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Maps of the Day: Condition of Virginia Roads and Bridges
Citing data provided by the White House as President Barack Obama makes the case for more federal transportation funding, the Wall Street Journal has produced these interactive maps showing how the condition of roads and bridges varies widely by state. Virginia’s roads are in relatively good shape (only 12% rated poor) but its bridges are…
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RAM, Coal and Massive Hypocrisy
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in Business and Economy, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Health Care, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Social Services and Entitlements, TaxesBy Peter Galuszka Sure it’s a photo op but more power to him. Gov. Terry McAuliffe is freshly arrived from the cocktail and canape circuit in Europe on a trade mission and is quickly heading out to the rugged and impoverished coal country of Wise County. There, he, Attorney General Mark Herring and Health and…
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Who Wants to Be a Billionaire? Embrace Congestion Pricing
by Michael Brown This is the second part of a four-part series. Part 1 ◊ Part 2 Part 3 ◊ Part 4 As I contended in my last post, Americans can do mountains of good for sustainability by using free-market pricing tools to solve traffic congestion. In this…
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Does Virginia Want to Be a Wireless Friendly State?
States and regions that want to stay in the vanguard of economic growth need to expand their broadband infrastructure. Mobile data traffic will increase 13-fold between 2012 and 2017 by some estimates. To accommodate that growth, the wireless industry will have to build new cell towers, distributed antenna systems (DAS) and other infrastructure. However, permitting and regulation…
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More Defense Cuts Plague Virginia
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in Business and Economy, Demographics, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Politics, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, Transportation, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka Virginia continues to see painful military spending cuts in the aftermath of the years’- long U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the latest news is that the Army may cut 3,600 jobs at Ft. Lee, ironically the site of a recent and large expansion, by 2020. That could result in a…
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For Sustainability, Convert Freeways to Fastways
by Michael Brown This is the first part of a four-part series. Part 1 ◊ Part 2 Part 3 ◊ Part 4 By many peoples’ reckoning, faster-running, free-flowing freeways are the enemy of environmental sustainability. But what if I told you of a strategy that would: Result in…