Todd Litman's blog

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) refers to communities with high quality public transit services, good walkability, and compact, mixed land use. This allows people to choose the best option for each trip: walking and cycling for local errands, convenient and comfortable public transit for travel along major urban corridors, and automobile travel to more dispersed destinations. People who live and work in such communities tend to own fewer vehicles, drive less, and rely more on alternative modes.

Automobile industry subsidies are an inefficient way to support economic development. Even worse, policies intended to support automobile manufacturers and recover loans can be economically harmful. 

Politicians and planners be warned: you will now be judged according to your ability to improve walking, cycling and public transit services.  

I would like to expand an ongoing debate between Reason Foundation policy expert Samuel Staley and me concerning land use policy impacts on affordability and economic stability to include two additional issues: household economic resilience and wealth accumulation.  

In a recent blog I emphasized the value of using smart growth policies to increase household affordability and support regional economic development. In his blog, “Planning Foreclosures,” Samuel Staley reaches a very different conclusion.

Is a $50,000 annual income wealth or poverty in North America? By historical or international standards such an income should be considered wealthy and luxurious, but most people I know consider it poverty because of the high cost of living.

We have just published a new report, "Smart Transportation Economic Stimulation: Infrastructure Investments That Support Strategic Planning Objectives Provide True Economic Development" which discusses factors to consider when evaluating transportation economic stimulation strategies.

Economic stimulation is an important issue these days. Let’s be smart when choosing economic stimulation strategies.

A paradigm shift is changing the way we think about transportation safety. In the past, traffic safety experts evaluated risk using distance-based units (traffic crashes and casualties per 100 million vehicle-miles or billion vehicle-kilometers), which ignores increases in vehicle traffic as a risk factor, and mobility management as a safety strategy. Yet, we now have overwhelming evidence that the amount people drive has a major impact on their chance of being injured or killed in a traffic accident. Here is a small portion of the evidence:

Some things are so very bad that they are good, for the sake of amusement and as examples to avoid. Of course, everybody makes mistakes, but some massive disasters involve so many errors by so many people that onlookers can also wonder, “What were they thinking?!”