Smart Growth Around America

Across the country, older cities are struggling with outdated water-sewer systems that collect sanitary sewage and stormwater runoff in a single pipe system. When a big storm occurs, the system gets overloaded: sewage combines with stormwater and runs into lakes and streams, causing serious water pollution and health issues. Cities are beginning to turn instead to “green” infrastructure as a viable alternative to addressing combined sewer overflow. Green infrastructure uses plants and porous pavement among other tools as natural ways to filter water, increase infiltration, and reduce stormwater runoff into pipes.

Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein had his own version today of a James Kunstler column on our economic “readjustment” going on right now — just without JK’s colorful metaphors. Most of it is about all the “mirage economies” and the bubbles that were all very related to each other. But there was one interesting [...]

I’m back from a weeklong vacation, so you probably already saw Paul Krugman’s wonderful column in the New York Times last week that was subsequently posted and emailed all over the place, but it’s worth posting for posterity.
In “Stranded in Suburbia,” Krugman muses on the differences in how high gas prices are devastating our economy [...]

A few months ago, I was in Baltimore for a summit conducted by the Regional Plan Association on the Northeast Megaregion maintaining its economic competitiveness while addressing climate change. Rep. Earl Blumenauer had one bit of narrative that stuck with me about our nation’s history of rising to the challenge of infrastructure with visionary plans [...]

How can we cut our emissions, fuel consumption, while also reducing congestion and providing more space for jobs and housing?
The US EPA’s smart growth office released a new study (5 mb pdf) examining the impact that good infill development can have on reducing transportation demand and lowering emissions. In some ways, this study picks up [...]

If you, like a majority of Americans, think that any proposal to suspend the gas tax is a bad idea — bad for the environment, bad for our infrastructure, bad for our dependence on foreign oil, and bad for our wallets— you’ll be interested to see an online petition that was sent to us today:
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The situation: Bridges are falling down, traffic congestion is worsening, gains in fuel efficiency are reducing gas tax revenues, worthwhile transit projects are sitting on the shelf, and the Highway Trust Fund — funded by the 18.5 cents a gallon gas tax that is already inadequate for funding transportation investments — is about to run [...]

If the king tells you to “jump!” you say, “how high?” And when Warren Buffett tells you to buy something you say “how much?” So when Buffet, one of the kings of investing, starts putting his money into freight railroads, financial analysts take note. Michael Sivy of CNN Money correctly observes some of the competitive [...]

Expectedly, there was plenty of interesting commentary on yesterday’s feature in the Washington Post on political appointee Tyler Duvall and the Department of Transportation’s attempts to steer America towards the privatization of transportation infrastructure.
Ryan Avent sees a problem, perceiving that the issue is painted as a decision between roadway pricing OR transit. (It’s worth noting, [...]

While New York City has been in the news lately for their plan to implement congestion pricing in Manhattan, what you don’t know about the experiment may surprise you. It wasn’t just the brainchild of a progressive city government committed to reducing vehicle traffic and congestion in a portion of the city with great transit [...]

Click the video to watch a recent CBS News piece on the growing use of passenger rail
Retailers of scale like Wal-Mart and Target survive on small margins. The rate of profit may be small, but selling a bazillion units of everything adds up to a tidy sum at the end of the day. In the [...]

Highways like these in San Antonio get built with federal highway funds.

President Bush’s proposed budget for the 2009 fiscal year contained an alarming provision for “fixing” the transportation funding crisis. Unfortunately, the solution is akin to putting a band-aid on a gaping wound while also cutting off an arm.
Without getting too deep into the weeds, [...]

The Alaskan Way Viaduct is a three story barrier, separating Seattle from its historic waterfront.
Continuing the thread started yesterday on urban freeways and the CNU Teardown Survey, we have a guest blogger today. Cary Moon is the co-founder and director of the People’s Waterfront Coalition, which is a grassroots group that formed a few years [...]

San Fran capitalized on damage from the Loma Prieta Earthquake to remove the Embarcadero Freeway. Before and after at Market Street
This is part one of a series. Click here for part two on Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct.
Take a peek at the road atlas or Google Maps for any major American city and there’s [...]

BusinessWeek published a special report on Green Design and Innovation this week, and one of their top stories highlights the core message of Growing Cooler: meeting the demand for the walkable neighborhoods and cities that result in less driving is one of the best solutions for reducing emissions.
Alex Steffen reworked his longer essay that appeared [...]

After nearly two years of study and debate, the Congressionally mandated, bipartisan commission charged with predicting our nation’s transportation future emerged last week with it’s collective hair on fire, screaming that our driver-less SUV of a federal policy is headed for a cliff. To which the news media responded with a collective yawn, except for [...]

As long as local and state leaders in Georgia fail to grasp that Atlanta can’t pave its way out of traffic congestion, Atlanta could be in danger of becoming a case study in what may happen to a city’s business climate when an economic model based largely on growth and continual outward expansion hits the [...]

Three-fourths of Americans believe that being smarter about development and improving public transportation are better long-term solutions for reducing traffic congestion than building new roads, according to a survey released today by the National Association of Realtors® and Smart Growth America.
The 2007 Growth and Transportation Survey details what Americans [...]

Falling bridges, sweetheart earmarks for developers’ highways … The evidence just keeps rolling in that the lack of accountability in how our national transportation dollars are spent is hurting us in myriad ways. Today, another potent example: A study out of St. Louis University showing how the construction firms paid with our tax dollars for [...]

Before the rubble had even settled after the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, the road-building lobby was already hard at work spinning creative tales to anyone who would listen about how investment in transit and alternative modes was to blame for thousands of bridges across America being structurally deficient. Not only is it patently absurd to [...]