Category: Transportation
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Yikes! Driverless Cars in Blacksburg.
As usual, technology is evolving more rapidly than the ability of pundits, bureaucrats and politicians to absorb the implications — especially in the realm of transportation. Two more cases in point: Googleburg. Google is now testing its self-driving car on the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute’s Smart Road in Blacksburg. Reports the Roanoke Times: The technology…
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“The Missing Metric”
by James A. Bacon Here is must reading for anyone interested in the fiscal implications of Smart Growth: the August issue of Government Finance Review. In the lead article Peter Katz (profiled here) elaborates his thoughts on fiscal analytics and growth management. He starts with the argument, which I have embraced, that the fiscal impact…
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Who Will Report the News? Weeklies, Monthlies and Blogs
In the last couple of days, I have come across two instances of excellent reporting on transportation and land use issues from obscure local publications. Both articles deserve exposure beyond their immediate circulation areas. In Chesterfield Monthly, Scott Bass writes about the lack of a walkable city center in Chesterfield County. Chesterfield is largely a…
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Americans Driving Less. The Question Why Is Still Unsettled.
It is a well-established fact that Americans are driving less today than they were in 2004, the peak year for Vehicle Miles Traveled per capita. The lingering question is what accounts for the change: changing lifestyles and transportation preferences, a dismal economy or something else? A new report by the USPIRG Education Fund concludes that…
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Quote of the Day: Chuck Marohn
Great minds think alike. From today’s Strong Towns blog: “Any city that wants to be financially strong and healthy needs to stop making investments that cost more over the long term to service and maintain than they generate in wealth. They need to stop accepting grant funding or “donated” infrastructure that they ultimately will not…
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Bubbas and Barbarians
Forget symphonies, ballets and gaudy performing arts centers. If you’re looking for an indicator of how civilized people are, observe how they drive. You can tell much about peoples’ manners and impulse control by their behavior on the road. Do motorists courteously wait their turn as alternating cars merge into a single lane… or do…
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Will Broad Street BRT Pay Its Own Way?
by James A. Bacon A proposed rapid transit bus line between Willow Lawn and Rocketts Landing would serve as a catalyst for development along the Broad Street corridor and boost property values by 11%, according to an impact study just released by the GRTC Transit System, the Richmond regional transit enterprise. The 7.6-mile route would…
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Auto Revolution Update: Nissan
Japanese auto maker Nissan has joined Google in publicly pledging to develop self-driving cars over the next few years. Nissan will build a proving ground by 2014 to test its autonomous vehicle systems and aims to bring “multiple affordable, energy efficient, fully autonomous-driving vehicles to the market by 2020,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Most…
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Transportation Tumult
by James A. Bacon There is an extraordinary level of hubris in the world of transportation and land use planning. Planners in state transportation departments, including Virginia’s, advance mega-highway projects based upon forecasts of what transportation demand will be two or three decades from now. My friends in the Smart Growth camp rightly reject many…
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The Stroadification of the South Atlantic Coast
by James A. Bacon Litchfield Beach, S.C., is blessed by natural beauty. It has long, wide beaches with sand as soft as talcum powder. It has fecund marshlands bursting with wildlife. It has thick, semi-tropical foliage: palmetto palms, crepe myrtle and southern live oak draped in Spanish moss. Too bad the humans did such a…
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Walkable Urbanism Takes Root in Virginia Beach
by James A. Bacon Back in the pre-PowerPoint days when people used slide projectors, New Urbanist evangelist Andres Duany traveled around the country with a carousel of slides to illustrate the horrors that poor planning had inflicted upon the urban landscape. One of those slides, I recall, was an aerial shot of the intersection of…
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Prairie Populism Meets Boomergeddon
Over on the Strong Towns blog, Andrew Burleson describes the reaction that he and his compatriots get when they tour the country preaching their Minnesota brand of Boomergeddon, to wit: that human settlement patterns in many cities and towns are fiscally unsustainable; local elected officials need to re-think everything about growth and development; and communities…
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A Logical Approach to Reforming Parking Policy
by James A. Bacon The United States has hundreds of millions more parking spaces than it needs. As a result of this excessive supply, mandated by local government regulations across the country, acreage worth billions of dollars is tied up in unproductive land use. So-called “free” parking really isn’t free. It drives up the cost…
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Low Truck Volume on Rt. 234? Really?
by James A. Bacon Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton returned yesterday to his old stomping grounds in Prince William County to make the case to the Board of Supervisors, a body he once chaired, to back the Bi-County Parkway. The board took no action but, Connaughton certainly got a first-hand taste of the controversy the project…
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It’s the Debt You Don’t See that Kills You
In theory, state and local governments in the United States are required to balance their budgets every year. In practice, many have been running massive deficits. Count on slippery politicians to find the loopholes. The most widely practiced trick is the under-funding of pension obligations. Another is dishing off debt to independent authorities. Another is…