Tag: smart growth
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A Less Destructive Form of Sprawl
by James A. Bacon A development group is asking for approval to build up to 2,900 homes and 1.8 million square feet of commercial space off Interstate 95 in Stafford County. The proposed “George Washington Village” calls for a 1,100-acre town-center development with a mix of single-family detached houses, town houses and apartments to be…
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Downtown Richmond Falls in Love with the Mid-Rise
by James A. Bacon Still need proof that the momentum of growth and development is shifting back to traditional downtowns? Consider this: Roughly 3,000 apartment units are under construction in the Richmond metropolitan region — and half of them are located downtown. That gem of a factoid was buried in a Times-Dispatch article about the construction…
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Marriage, Children and the Millennials’ Preference for City Life
by James A. Bacon How long will the return-to-the-cities movement of the Millennial generation last? Smart Growthers think that a fundamental lifestyle shift is occurring. Millennials are different: They are the smart-phone generation, the shared-ownership generation. As long as they can readily access a car when they need one through Zipcar or a peer-sharing service,…
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Flood Insurance: Subsidizing the Rich
Owners of expensive condos and beach houses along the coastline are petitioning the Federal Emergency Management Agency to redraw flood-zone maps to exclude their maps from the flood zones. Getting the maps redrawn saves as much as 97% in flood insurance — but gives petitioners the same protection as their neighbors inside the flood zones.…
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Calculate ROI on Pothole Repairs, Too
by James A. Bacon Del. Christopher Stolle’s transportation-prioritization bill (described here) has passed the House of Delegates and has been referred to the Senate Committee on Transportation. The bill would create a methodology for prioritizing the expenditure of transportation funds, including such factors as congestion mitigation, economic development, accessibility, safety, and environmental quality. Given the fact that…
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Setting Goals, Measuring Results
In its final section on building better transportation systems in an era of fiscal austerity, “The Innovative DOT” manual tackles the issue of how to improve internal DOT processes. The chapter makes a number of useful points but the one that stands out in a Virginia context is this: “Define acceptable and measurable goals, and…
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Time for Better Scenario Planning
by James A. Bacon A century ago, developers set up street car lines to provide transportation access for inhabitants of the housing and commercial projects they were building. A new neighborhood wouldn’t sell if people couldn’t reach it. By necessity, transportation and land use planning went hand in hand. But when governments took over transportation responsibilities,…
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Map of the Day: Wal-Mart Versus Downtown Waynesboro
Kudos to Luke Juday for his latest graphics in “Mapping the Commonwealth.” As an intellectual exercise, he overlaid Google images of ten downtown areas around Virginia with overhead images of nearby Wal-Marts. There was no particular agenda to the images, he says — “I’m not a big Walmart hater or anything.” He just wanted to…
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Paving Paradise
by Luke Juday How much space does a car take up exactly? The answer, of course, is that it depends – on the design of the place, the type of driving going on, the density, the tendency of the population to build new lanes and parking lots everywhere, etc. The answer is important because people…
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Time to Overhaul Traffic Engineering Guidelines
by James A. Bacon Employees of the Virginia Department of Transportation, like most transportation departments, see themselves as being in the profession of building roads for cars. The challenge is to move the highest volume of cars as rapidly as possible through a given number of lanes. Designing roads for the convenience of pedestrians, bikers…
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Richmond Needs an Innovation District, not a Baseball Stadium
Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones has doubled down on his proposal to build a minor league baseball stadium in Shockoe Bottom, suggesting that people opposing his plan are “anti-growth and anti-economic development,” according to the Times-Dispatch. I can’t speak for other skeptics of the plan, but I’m certainly not anti-growth or anti-economic development. To the…
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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…