Category: Transportation
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Demand Surges for Transit-Oriented Housing
Speaking of the economics of mass transit (see previous post)… The good news is that residential property prices are surging around mass transit stations. In the clearest of possible signals, the marketplace is telling us that there is strong demand among large swaths of the American population for access to mass transit service. People are…
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How Federal Safety Regs Hurt Passenger Rail
by James A. Bacon There has been increasing interest in passenger rail around the United States in recent years but the high cost of building and operating rail systems has posed a major barrier. One reason rail service is so expensive, writes David Edmondson for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is that Federal Railroad Administration (FRA)…
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Gearing up for the Smart Car/Road Revolution
by James A. Bacon The automobile industry is undergoing the greatest technological revolution since… well, probably since the invention of the automobile. Cars are getting “smarter,” as in embedded with more powerful sensors and artificial intelligence, and they are getting more connected — with other cars and with roads, which are getting smarter as well.…
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Floyd, a Street Cyclists Can Call their Own
by James A. Bacon The City of Richmond doesn’t have many tangible results to show for its bicycle-friendly policies so far. Painting white bicycle symbols on a few streets to designate sharrows — lanes where cars should be on the look-out for bicycles — contributes only marginally to making streets safer for cyclists. But the…
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VDOT Terms Conservationist Alternative an Impractical “Thought Exercise”
by James A. Bacon The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) has fired back at conservation groups opposing Northern Virginia’s Tri-County Parkway, asserting that their proposed alternatives would cost $6 billion to implement compared to an estimated $450 million to build the parkway. Ignoring the realities of the transportation planning process, says VDOT, the “substitute vision”…
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Who’s Got More Smart Growth – MD or VA?
by James A. Bacon State-level incentives to encourage smart growth proved to be of limited effectiveness in Maryland because they did not dissuade local governments from pursuing local priorities, according to a new study of the Washington metropolitan area scheduled to be published in Urban Studies. The study by Amal K. Ali, a geography professor…
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Has Washington Reached Escape Velocity?
by James A. Bacon It was long the conventional wisdom — which I shared, by the way — that the Washington regional economy was cruising for a bruising when the federal government encountered its inevitable reckoning with fiscal reality. Well, sequestration, a sort of semi-reckoning, has kicked in, and the Washington economy appears to be…
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Battle for the Battlefield
The Manassas Battlefield has become the scene of yet another irreconcilable conflict: this one involving VDOT, the park service and local residents.
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Good Decision — but What Was the Reasoning?
Richmond City Council should get out of the business of designating and changing bus routes for the GRTC, the Greater Richmond transit corporation. So says a transit study task force in a newly released study. States the study: The Task Force recommends this responsibility be transferred to the GRTC Board of Trustees who is responsible…
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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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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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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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The Cooch’s Freak Show Dream Team
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Gun rights, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, TransportationBy Peter Galuszka Ken Cuccinelli just can’t keep away from the bizarre, but perhaps that’s what makes him what he is. He stages a convention instead of a primary to neuter Bill Bolling. And since a convention is smaller, it draws more GOP hard-righters than June bugs on a humid night and they succeed in…