Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

Tag politics

The Central Park Caper And Transit NIMBYism

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. …

Real Estate and Revolution in Moscow

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….

Surprise: Transit In The US Gets Just As Many Subsidies As Transit In Europe!

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….

Washington Post: Only Idiots Think Infrastructure Spending Is Wasteful, And Americans Are Idiots

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….

DC Approved 4,000 New Housing Units This Year, But Is It Enough?

Twitter tells me that earlier tonight, “not-ruling-it-out” possible future mayoral contender (and local smart growth demigod) Tommy Wells held his inaugural book club meeting; the book discussed was Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City. DC’s chief planner Harriet Tregoning was also there, and while she’s been relatively good to the cause of density in DC, the kinds of people who would show up to a Tommy Wells Triumph of the City book club probably want a bit more out of her, so I presume (again, I wasn’t there) that she ended up being one of the least radical people there. One person tweeted regarding the book club: “Building permit data says DC on track for 4,000 new housing units this year,” which I presume was a statement made by someone defending DC’s supply expansion efforts….

The Progressive Reaction Against NYC’s First Subway

nycsubway.org has an amazing trove of transit history, and I just got done reading “The Impact of the IRT on New York City” by Clifton Hood, on the effects of New York‘s first subway rapid transit line, first opened in 1904. There’s so much in it to recommend, but one of the interesting themes is the Progressive reaction to the real estate development that the line (he mostly deals with the IRT Broadway Line) sparked. Progressives were originally big supporters of the subway, on the grounds that it would encourage suburbanization and decentralization, putting people in their own homes, which they believed imbued better moral character than rented accommodations in tenements and large “apartment houses….

Meet Me At The Corner Of Mises & Jane Jacobs!

I'On Village, South Carolina About three years ago Adam wrote about the the story of I’On Village, a New Urbanist development build about a decade ago five miles outside of Charleston, and the difficulties that Vince Graham faced trying to build it. For one, the project had to be scaled down in some pretty significant ways: [The developers] worked to decipher what kind of plan would be supported by those council members who voted against the application….

Why DC’s Architecture Is So Boring

An Eric Colbert special, everywhere and anywhere in DC I’m a little behind on posting this, but Lydia DePillis at Washington City Paper did a great profile a week or so ago of DC architect Eric Colbert, whose buildings’ unifying features seems to be blandness. There are a lot of people out there who dismiss all modern architecture as boring out of hand, and in my opinion undeservedly, but in this case Lydia has a point. He gets a lot of work in DC, and answering the question of why his boring style is so pervasive in Washington, she discusses some of familiar themes, DC’s restrictive height limit and the usual developer conservativeness among them….

The Day the Engineers Turned Against California HSR

No, but really – fly California. On Tuesday, the California High-Speed Rail Authority laid down their cards in the form of a new “business plan” for the proposed line, and its cards are not good – the system is now projected to cost $98 billion in year-of-expenditure dollars, which, taking into account inflation, is about twice the $33 billion figure given in 2008.* But despite the price hike, not many people’s opinions on the project seem to have changed – those who were for it are still for it, while those opposed are even more set against it….

Trending now

A self-defeating argument
Texas MUD
gentrification
Only 2 Ways to Fight Gentrification (you’re not going to like one of them)
The problem with “public” transportation