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Should Transit Fares Cover Operating Costs?
Maryland has long had a state law requiring transit systems to collect enough fares to cover at least 35 percent of their operating costs. While it is admirable to set a target, this particular target...
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Deindustrialisation in Sydney
According to property analysts CoreLogic, the Sydney median vacant land selling price has hit $450,000, a massive 20.5 per cent higher than the same time last year. This follows the New South Wales...
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California's Tribal Politics
To my fellow residents, and particularly fellow taxpayers of California, I have a special message: Your concerns don’t matter much anymore. Rather than a functioning democracy, California has become a...
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The 37 Megacities and Largest Cities: Demographia World Urban Areas: 2017
Many of the world’s biggest cities are getting bigger still. In 2017, the number of megacities --- urban areas with better than ten million people --- increased to 37 in 2017, as the Chennai urban...
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Leaving California? After slowing, the trend intensifies
Given its iconic hold on the American imagination, the idea that more Americans are leaving California than coming breaches our own sense of uniqueness and promise. Yet, even as the economy has...
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The Politics of Migration: From Blue to Red
Democratic “blue” state attitudes may dominate the national media, but they can’t yet tell people where to live. Despite all the hype about a massive “back to the city” movement and the supposed...
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Reason #1 to End Transit Subsidies: It’s the Most Costly Transportation We Have
Fifty-three years ago, the transit industry was mostly private and earned a net profit. Today, it’s almost entirely publicly owned, and subsidies have grown out of control. It’s time to take a stand...
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Driving Alone Hits High, Transit Hits Low in "Post-Car" City of Los Angeles
According to The New York Times, the car used to be “king” in the city (municipality) of Los Angeles. “'A Different Los Angeles', The City Moves to Alter its Sprawling Image,” was another story that...
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The Jungle
Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle was intended to inform the larger American public of the miserable working environment and sub survival wages of Chicago’s meat packing employees. The popular...
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America the Cheap
America is a price dominant culture, and we need to take responsibility for that when we complain about bad customer service, poor infrastructure, etc. Certainly American business and political...
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The Arrogance of Blue America
In the wake of the Trumpocalypse, many in the deepest blue cores have turned on those parts of America that supported the president’s election, developing oikophobia—an irrational fear of their fellow...
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California Squashes Its Young
In this era of anti-Trump resistance, many progressives see California as a model of enlightenment. The Golden State’s post-2010 recovery has won plaudits in the progressive press from the New York...
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Father of the Bernie Sanders Presidency
President Trump’s elite-managed populism opens a path for a more genuine version.On the usual political spectrum, there are left and right, people who call themselves progressive or conservative,...
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Reason #2 to Stop Subsidizing Transit: Subsidies Haven't Increased Ridership
In 2015, the American Public Transportation Association issued a press release whose headline claimed that transit ridership in 2014 achieved a new record. However, the story revealed that 2014...
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The Great Non-Profit Die Off
Marc Lapides wrote an op-ed in Crain’s Chicago Business calling for an 1871 accelerator for creating new non-profits.Most cities could actually use the opposite. What they need is an infrastructure for...
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The Springfield Strategy
I just enjoyed an adventure in Springfield, Massachusetts with Steve Shultis and his wife Liz of Rational Urbanism. Steve does a far better job of describing his town and his philosophy than I ever...
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The news media are losing their search for truth
To someone who has spent most of his career in the news business, it’s distressing to confront the current state of the media. Rather than a source of information and varied opinion, the media...
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The Evolving Urban Form: Warsaw
Like other major cities in the high income world, Warsaw has seen central area population losses, with all of the population growth taking place outside the urban core, principally in the suburbs and...
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Déjà Vu and the Dilemma for Planners
Some planners may be feeling a little angst. A few months ago, the Federal Highway Administration released 2016 vehicle miles of travel data, indicating robust travel demand growth in 2016, up 2.8%....
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Guaranteed Minimum What?
I was on the road a while back and needed to stop to use the facilities. A chain restaurant on the side of the highway seemed like a reasonable spot. As I headed to the men’s room I noticed iPads on...
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