Planetizen Newswire
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Roads
Blog post
Is inadequate infrastructure a reason to keep new housing out of cities?
A pilot program in Columbus, Ohio, will help bring order to the city’s curbside space, a response to a mobility network that has become more complicated and crowded.
Smart Cities Dive
Large-scale road and rail projects aim to facilitate travel from the south of Italy all the way up to Sweden and Finland.
The Economist
An explainer post on that much-lamented feature of contemporary communities—the stroad.
Strong Towns
Urbanists consider what the administration of President-elect, Donald Trump, will mean for cities.
CityLab
In pursuit of an honest conversation about congestion, Charles Marohn produces a comparison between roads and stormwater infrastructure.
Strong Towns
Act 178, approved by Vermont in 2006, required that all ancient roads be catalogued by July 1, 2015 to be included in the state map. The exploration of old roads leading up to that deadline makes a compelling story.
The New Yorker
In the next few decades, U.S. governments and businesses are predicted to spend trillions of dollars on infrastructure. This is the reality. The question is: how do we get smart about these investments?
Infrastructure Crisis Sustainable Solutions
A comparison of road conditions in Rwanda and Mali—the former an autocracy with sterling roads, the latter a democracy where poor road conditions reveal a deep divide in the country.
Foreign Policy
A new study published in the journal Nature maps out a plan for the development of roads around the world—where roads should be avoided due to their environmental costs, and where they can be built to maximize their potential benefit to humanity.
Science Daily
Might a recent agreement to fund water projects pave the way for more transportation spending? That's what positive signals out of Washington seem to indicate. Just one small obstacle stands in the way: how to finance road and bridge projects.
The Wall Street Journal
Extreme temperatures aren’t just a public health concern: they also affect how we get around.
Better Institutions
A multifaceted £100 billion infrastructure modernization plan for the UK was announced this week by Treasury Minister Danny Alexander. The opposition Labour party is objecting to the timeline for the investments, which aren't due to start until 2015.
BBC News
Evan Soltas pens a contrarian take on the state of America's infrastructure, equating those who repeatedly warn of crumbling roads and bridges to a bunch of "Chicken Littles."
Bloomberg View
With the federal government unable to agree on much of anything, state and local taxpayers are bearing the burden for repairing and replacing America's aging infrastructure says a new report from Standard & Poor’s Rating Services.
The Washington Post
SPUR, the San Francisco-based planing think tank, looks at the potential benefits to the public sector of using dynamic, demand-based pricing to manage limited public resources - from parking to electricity.
SPUR
Finally, something Red and Blue America can agree on! A new poll published this week by the NRDC shows support for local investment in transit to reduce traffic crosses the country's wide political and geographic divides.
Streetsblog D.C.
Blog post
In the early 1990s, transportation politics at both the state and federal levels was often fairly simple: an all-powerful Road Gang (made up of real estate developers and road contractors) typically got whatever it wanted, rolling over a much weaker pro-transit coalition of environmentalists and urban politicians.
Blog post
Arguments over transportation policy often run as follows:
HIGHWAY SUPPORTER: Highways pay for themselves! Buses/trains don't! So highways good and everything else bad bad bad!
TRANSIT SUPPORTER: But highways create bad externalities like pollution and climate change! So if highways were taxed at their true cost gas would cost a zillion billion cajillion dollars per gallon! (followed by numerous counterarguments and counter-counterarguments that I won't bore you with, except as written below...)
It seems to me that these arguments miss one point: even if the highway system as a whole pays for itself, the system is so chock full of cross-subsidies that each individual road doesn't (except for toll roads).
Mayor Villaraigosa plans to borrow against future Measure R money to fund one massive, two-year road improvement project before he leaves office.
Los Angeles Times
