Samuel Staley

Sam Staley is Associate Director of the DeVoe L. Moore Center at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Member for
18 years 8 months

Contributed 43 posts

Full Bio

Sam Staley is Associate Director of the DeVoe L. Moore Center at Florida State University in Tallahassee where he also teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in urban and real estate economics, regulations, economic development, and urban planning. He is also a senior research fellow at Reason Foundation. Prior to joining Florida State, he was Robert W. Galvin Fellow at Reason Foundation and helped establish its urban policy program in 1997.

Five Observations from Three Years in China

I’ve spent much of the last <a href="http://reason.org/news/show/china-mobility-project">three years working on transportation finance and planning issues in China</a>, and Reason Foundation now has transportation policy projects up and running in the cities of Chongqing, Xi’an, and Beijing.

The Use and Abuse of Multipliers

<a href="http://www.planning.org/">Planning</a> magazine recently (December 2009) published a story on the benefits of economic impact studies for planners. Most professional planners have run across them at one point or another: they are used to evaluate economic impact and the effectives of various types of programs on job creation. Unfortunately, the article did little to also illuminate the pitfalls and weaknesses of these studies.

Conventional Planning May Be Contributing to Cleveland's Decline

<a href="http://www.reason.tv/">Reason.tv</a> has launched a multipart series of videos <a href="http://www.reason.tv/video/show/reason-saves-cleveland-with-dr">on how the city of Cleveland can turn itself around</a> using free-market approaches and limited government reforms.

The End of Sprawl As We Know It...NOT

As the housing market collapsed and gasoline prices spiked in 2007, many planners may have read Cornell University law professor Eduardo Penalver’s essay in the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/">Washington Post</a> with more than a little satisfaction.

Thinking Through the Right Transportation in the Right Place at the Right Time

In an earlier post, <a href="/node/42367">I discussed the difference between mobility, accessibility, and transportation technology</a>. In today’s post, I want to discuss what I think is the next step in this taxonomy in terms of the implications for the built environment and urban planning. More specifically, we need to move beyond the idea that certain transportation technologies—whether it is a car, a bus, a train, or our feet—are substitutes.