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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
Enormous viaducts like this are one reason for the project's ballooning cost estimates Well, the other shoe has finally dropped: the California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group is recommending that the state legislature not authorize the issue of $2.7 billion in bonds to begin paying for the state’s planned $98.5 billion high-speed rail line….
London’s Shard tower, soon to be the tallest in Europe, is, financially speaking, a bit puzzling. Europe is in the midst of an economic crisis, and London’s Southwark, across from the skyscraper-crazed City of London, is gentrifying, but not the safest place for a massive real estate investment. The developers have yet to sign a major office tenant, and nobody is expecting the project to turn much of a profit. …
Cornell-Technion has released another “fly-over” video, this one focused on the interior. But it does shed a bit more light on what the development will look like from the ground, and it ain’t pretty – the campus will be laid out in a fairly Corbusian plan, replete with lots of concrete plazas and grassy knolls (especially near the campus’ northern gateway to the rest of the island), and no retail space in sight. The empty spaces in the video are packed with students milling around, admiring the beautiful grassy fields and sloping moss interiors. But anyone who’s ever been to one of New York‘s many towers-in-a-park high-rises or zoning code-enabled privately-owned public spaces knows better than to believe that what New Yorkers really want is a bunch of grass and concrete to hang out on….
The sky's the limit for Dumbo! Last night I wrote a blog post about tech development in New York City, arguing that before the city pours money into a science campus for Cornell on Roosevelt Island, its planners should make more room for entrepreneurs in existing tech hubs like Union Square and Dumbo. …
Stanford's (losing) vision for Roosevelt Island, with requisite acres of green Big news out of New York City: Stanford pulled out of Bloomberg’s applied sciences university “competition” after Cornell got an enormous donation, leaving the upstate university the front runner to build a new campus, likely on Roosevelt Island. This comes with up to $100 million in state subsidies, plus free land and invaluable planning acquiescence. …
It has often been suggested that one of the reasons that American subway construction is so expensive is that our laws are too friendly to NIMBYs. That is to say, contractors will be paid to engineer expensive, long-term solutions to avoid short-term disruptions to neighbors during construction. The most prominent example is avoiding cut-and-cover subway construction in favor of digging deep holes with tunnel boring machines that don’t disrupt the surface as much. …
"Made in USA"…and don't you forget it! United Streetcar, led by its former lobbyist, Chandra Brown, is ostensibly a manufacturer, though its greatest asset seems to be its ability to win government contractors….
From an interesting NYT analysis of Russia’s new protesting class – young, urban, and doing pretty well: It is a paradox, but one that has been documented by social scientists: the residents of Moscow and other large cities tend to express greater frustration with Prime Minister Putin as his government has helped make them wealthier. One explanation is the high level of public corruption here, which threatens new personal wealth….
The service the Silicon Valley is paying for but not getting Often when I talk about how high American capital transit costs are compared to those in Europe and East Asia, transit backers get quite defensive, and take it as an attack on transit. This couldn’t be further from my intention. My point isn’t that transit in America is expensive and should not be built – it’s that transit in America is expensive and this is why we get such poor service….
It’s no surprise that a lot of politicians and policymakers believe that America’s biggest infrastructure problem is insufficient taxpayer funding. But never have I seen it expressed so condescendingly as in a Washington Post article published yesterday in the PostLocal section, not labeled as an opinion piece, titled: “Experts struggle to express direness of infrastructure problem to a wary public.” There’s no doubt that America’s infrastructure, and especially its transit, is indeed in dire straits….
