In another poll, the devoutly nonideological Consumer Preference Survey, respondents favored public transportation over road building as a solution to congestion by almost three to one.● The actual funding allocation currently favors roads four to one over transit,9 so it would seem that a major correction is in order.

First: The computer model is only as good as its inputs, and there’s nothing easier than tweaking the inputs to get the outcome you want. When we were working in Oklahoma City, the local traffic engineer’s “Synchro” computer model said that our pro-pedestrian proposals would cause gridlock. So we borrowed that engineer’s computer model and handed

Why were these first meters so popular? Because they reduced overcrowding and hassle, but also because they increased turnover, ensuring more customers per hour. The result was more sales and dramatically higher downtown property values.

Happily, there is no evidence that granny flats lower property values and it’s easy to see why. First, they are almost invisible. Second, they provide the homeowners with an income stream that allows them to live in their own home more comfortably. Third, they are of course carefully regulated to avoid the tenement-style use contemplated by my

most American cities do not need more affordable housing in their downtowns. Most American cities have too much affordable housing downtown. Or, more accurately, too much of their downtown housing is affordable, since everyone but the poor was able to join the suburban exodus. The typical midsized American city center now contains a few market-rate

What was certainly missing, among all the parking policy, was a parking plan, and such a comprehensive plan is ultimately what every “over-parked” place in America needs. This plan must include on-street pricing, off-street pricing, in-lieu payments supporting a collective supply, parking benefit districts, and residential permits where needed.

Over the past decade, there has been a series of studies that attribute obesity and its related illnesses directly to the automotive lifestyle and, better yet, to the automotive landscape.● One effort found that for every additional five minutes Atlanta-area residents drove each day, they were 3 percent more likely to be obese.13 Another showed

Through the 2000s, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) system has continued to grow, and transit ridership has continued to drop.17 A few billion dollars later, despite escalating gasoline costs, a greater percentage of Dallas residents are driving to work than at any time in the past quarter century.

Back in 1991, the Sierra Club’s John Holtzclaw studied travel habits in twenty-eight California communities of widely varying residential density. He found, as expected, an inverse relationship between urbanity and driving miles. But, perhaps not expected, he also found his data points distributed around a pretty sharp curve, with most of the gains