If You Build It, Cars Will Come: the Common-Sense Logic of Induced Demand
Highway expansion has been shown, time and again, to increase traffic and congestion. Cities are finally getting the message. May 14, 2021, 6am PDT | Diana Ionescu |
For decades, conventional wisdom in transportation planning circles held that when a highway is choked with traffic, the solution is to expand it or build another road nearby. Yet research from projects around the country, writes Alan Ehrenhalt in Governing, has disproven this theory. When Los Angeles widened its notorious I-405 freeway in 2014, [t]ravel times actually increased once the project was finished, although rush hours shortened slightly. Meanwhile the Katy Freeway in central Houston, expanded in 2011 to more than 20 lanes in some segments, making it one of the widest highways in the world, saw travel times out of downtown increase by some estimates as much as 30 percent after the project s completion.
What, Exactly, Is Gentrification?
It’s hard to define, but it s dramatically changing the urban landscape and bringing a host of new challenges to local leaders.
January 26, 2015 •
series on gentrification, which appears online and in the February 2015 print issue.
Ask the mayor of any reasonably successful medium-sized American city about his or her dreams for the city’s center, and you will nearly always get the same answer: The mayor dreams of a vibrant downtown, blessed with myriad dining and entertainment options; storefronts that attract high-end retail shopping; streets that are well-traveled and safe at all hours of the day and night; in the old neighborhoods just outside the center, long, pleasant blocks filled with stately pre-war houses restored by new owners to their original glory; and in the center, a sprinkling of luxury condominium and market-rate rental buildings attracting young couples lured by all the amenities a thriving city can provide.
Economy, finance, and budgets
Speaking at an October 2019 Obama Foundation Summit, Michelle Obama reminisced about growing up in South Shore, a Chicago lakefront neighborhood. Some memories were bitter. The former First Lady, born in 1964, lamented living through “white flight.” As “upstanding families like ours, who were doing everything we were supposed to do . . . moved in,” she said, “white folks moved out.”
In her telling, the whites who abandoned South Shore had motives as obvious as they were ugly, choosing to relocate because “they were afraid of what our families represented.” They voted with their U-Hauls to reject families like hers because of “the color of our skin” and “the texture of our hair,” those “artificial things that don’t even touch on the values that people bring to life. And so, yeah, I feel a sense of injustice.”
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TGIF, Illinois. And Happy Hanukkah to all who celebrate and to others looking for a little light in this crazy year.
TOP TALKER
Sonya Harper as its new chair, following Sen.
commander-in-chief has a constitutional obligation to take seriously the commitment the nation has made in conventions like the geneva convention and i might also add the convention against torture. the statute in cumbers the statute of crime and so on and so forth. see absolutely and i think washington was very eager to catapult this into the realm of nations and it was important to him that he sort of saw the united states as a shining way of democracy and the public that would abide by principles so i think it s definitely important for the commander-in-chief to be looking at the commitments that we make. others could? more questions? speeches, opinions about canada? [laughter] [inaudible] she wants to make a speech about canada, her youth. i spent many summers canoeing in canada and singing every morning oh canada which is a beautiful and it s for that reason that i ve made it a point in junior high school of studying the history of canada and why i happen to have t