Smart Growth Around America

If you’ve been around the conversation on growth and development for any amount of time, you’ve undoubtedly heard someone bring up Arlington, Virginia. Arlington is the bit of Virginia just across the Potomac River from the monumental core of Washington, DC that leveraged the arrival of two Metro rail lines in the 60’s and 70’s to renew and revitalize their county into a prosperous, enjoyable and livable community that is a sought-after destination for employers, businesses, residents and visitors.

This video comes to us from Sightline up in the Pacific Northwest. I’d summarize it myself, but Sightline’s Eric de Place does it better himself:
It’s difficult to illustrate the opportunities that are available now on our roads. We don’t need big expensive building projects, just smarter systems that protect both our pocketbooks and our natural [...]

Gas prices are up. People are turning to transit in record numbers these days. But as you probably know, not everyone has access to a decent public transportation system, and many current systems are woefully underfunded or neglected, much like the rest of our national infrastructure.
The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) sent us [...]

If once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, and thrice a trend, where are we now? More evidence continues to roll in that the high costs of fuel are pressing more and more Americans towards making lifestyle changes to reduce their consumption. Two stories over the weekend, one in the New York Times and [...]

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 [...]

As you may have read this morning in numerous other outlets, New York City’s plan to implement congestion pricing in Manhattan was defeated last night without reaching a vote on the floor. [NYT] The plan would have charged most cars $8 and trucks $21 to enter traffic-choked Midtown and Lower Manhattan during busy hours on [...]

As we’ve highlighted this week, Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change is out in its final, sharp-looking book form. Released in a preliminary technical form last fall, the book has been revised, updated, and published as a beautiful hardcover book, replete with informative graphics, pictures and illustrations.
The crux? It will be [...]

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, [...]

Dan loves traffic. “It’s about the journey, and this way, the journey takes forever,” he says.
“In 2009, Congress will decide whether to continue to spend billions on highways and roads to generate more traffic. Or whether they’re going more money on trains and buses — that suck the lifebblood right out of traffic.
Help Dan save [...]

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 [...]

It would appear that, at the very least, 1/5 of Radiohead has a good grasp on the relationship between building new roads and how they invariably fail at solving the congestion they were tasked with relieving. Singer Thom Yorke in the New York Times:
Signing a new major-label contract “would have killed us straight off,” he [...]