Samuel Staley
Sam Staley is Associate Director of the DeVoe L. Moore Center at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Contributed 43 posts
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.
A Planning Contrarian's Reading List
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">Transcontinental flights are a great time to catch up on reading, and a recent flight from San Jose to Chicago inspired this blog post. As I was reading book #1 (below), I realized that a number books have been published recently that have important things to say about cities although they might be dismissed too easily as reactionary, ideological, or simply not relevant to urban planning. </font></p>
Slicing Water Planning With Okham's Razor
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">I first learned of </font><a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ockham's%20razor"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#800080">Okham’s Razor</font></a><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> in an undergraduate economics class. Also called the Law of Parsimony, the idea states that the simplest of two competing ideas or theories is preferable to the more complicated one. </font></p>
Horsepower vs Horse Power and Sustainability
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">How sustainable is the internal combustion engine? The answer depends, in part, on your historical perspective. This point becomes startlingly evident in a recent article by UCLA doctoral student Eric Morris in the most recent issue of </font><a href="http://www.uctc.net/access/access30.shtml"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#800080">Access magazine</font></a><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">. The magazine publishes accessible versions of academic research and is published by the University of California Transportation Center at Berkeley. </font></p>
Are planners ready for the Drew Carey (not so free) freeway?
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">Technology creates new challenges and opportunities, and this came home to me a couple of weeks ago when I was previewing a rough cut of </font><a href="http://www.reason.tv/video/show/6.html"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#800080">Gridlock: Hell on Wheels</font></a><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">, a video on traffic congestion released by </font><a href="http://www.reason.org/"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3" color="#800080">Reason Foundation</font></a><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> today. In the video, Comedian Drew Carey makes the following off-the-cuff comment on a morning drive-time radio show: “I would love to own a freeway in LA.” </font></p>
The Politics of NIMBY
<span style="font-family: Arial"><font size="3">The following came through on a planning list serve, and I thought it raised several very provocative points that speak to the core of how we plan in the U.S. </font></span><span style="font-family: Arial"><font size="3"> </font></span> <blockquote><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial"><font size="3">“I heard, though I cannot remember the source, of a municipality that countered predictable neighborhood opposition to a higher density TOD proposal by broadening the review process to the whole community. I believe that the actual adjacent property owners were deemed to have a conflict of interest: i.e. their backyard versus overall better transit and housing opportunities for the entire town.