Flocking Elsewhere: The Downtown Growth Story
The United States Census Bureau has released a report (Patterns of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Population Change: 2000 to 2010.) on metropolitan area growth between 2000 and 2010. The Census Bureau's...
View ArticleWhere Americans Are Moving
The red states may have lost the presidential election, but they are winning new residents, largely at the expense of their politically successful blue counterparts. For all the talk of how the Great...
View ArticleThe Drive-It-Yourself Taxi: A Smooth Ride?
Despite a corporate sponsor that paid handsomely for the naming rights, Londoners stubbornly refer to our bikesharing system as ‘Boris Bikes’, in a nod to our colourful Mayor, Boris Johnson. But what...
View ArticleThe New Places Where America's Tech Future Is Taking Shape
Technology is reshaping our economic geography, but there’s disagreement as to how. Much of the media and pundits like Richard Florida assert that the tech revolution is bound to be centralized in the...
View ArticleTransit Legacy Cities
Transit's greatest potential to attract drivers from cars is the work trip. But an analysis of US transit work trip destinations indicates that this applies in large part to just a few destinations...
View ArticleDriving Alone Dominates 2007-2012 Commuting Trend
New data from the American Community Survey makes it possible to review the trend in mode of access to employment in the United States over the past five years. This year, 2012, represents the fifth...
View ArticleNo Fundamental Shift to Transit: Not Even a Shift
The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) is out with news of higher transit ridership. APTA President and CEO Michael Melaniphy characterizes the new figures as indicating "a fundamental...
View ArticleNew Central Business District Employment and Transit Commuting Data
Photographs of downtown skylines are often the "signature" of major metropolitan areas, as my former Amtrak Reform Council colleague and then Mayor of Milwaukee (later President and CEO of the Congress...
View ArticleNew York, Legacy Cities Dominate Transit Urban Core Gains
Much attention has been given the increase in transit use in America. In context, the gains have been small, and very concentrated (see: No Fundamental Shift to Transit, Not Even a Shift). Much of the...
View ArticleUrbanist Goals Will Mean Fewer Children, more Seniors Needing Government Help
America’s cognitive elites and many media pundits believe high-density development will dominate the country’s future.That could be so, but, if it is the case, also expect far fewer Americans — and far...
View ArticleAmerica's Subway: America's Embarrassment?
Washington's Metro (subway), often called "America's subway," may well be America's embarrassment. As a feature article by Robert McCartney and Paul Duggan in the Washington Post put it: “'America’s...
View ArticleJeff Bezos Is Right at Home in the D.C. Swamp, but Amazon Might Have Bit Off...
It turns out that tech oligarchs aren’t much better than old dogs at learning new tricks. By splitting his much coveted supposed second headquarters between New York City and greater Washington D.C.,...
View ArticleCalifornia Wildfires Ignite New Funding Battles with DC Lawmakers
As California continues to throw good money after bad and baste in the fires of its own Gehenna, the White House has threatened to cut off emergency aid (FEMA) to residents displaced by the recent...
View ArticleJews Could Swing the 2020 Election — and Why That's Not a Good Thing
In our selfie-defined culture, it’s usually considered a good thing to get attention, the more the better. But it may not be the case for Jews, or for Israel, to be caught in the firestorm that is...
View ArticleBloomberg and the Plight of the Oligarchs
If the tentative entrance of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg into the Presidential race materializes, he may discover difficulty of being an oligarch in an increasingly socialist-minded party....
View ArticleMayors Won't Rule the World
Earlier in this decade, cities—the bigger and denser the better—appeared as the planet’s geographic stars. According to Benjamin Barber, author of the 2013 book If Mayors Ruled the World, everyone...
View ArticleThe Next Election Will Be Decided By the Suburbs
The fate of the 2020 election, whether for Congress or the White House, will be decided in the suburbs. Neither the pro-Trump countryside nor the intensely anti-Trump urban core have enough voters to...
View ArticleUS Population Growth Down 1/3 in 5 Years, California Down 85%
The United States population grew just 0.48% in the year ended July 1, 2019, according to population estimates released on the last day of the year. This is a full one-third decline from the 0.72%...
View ArticleYou Think Trump's a Danger to Democracy? Get a Load of Bloomberg.
Many in the media and political class see Donald Trump as the face of America’s autocratic future. They’ve had less to say about Michael Bloomberg, a far more successful billionaire with the smarts,...
View ArticleWhy Can't California Create Viable National Leaders Anymore?
Once upon a time, Hollywood and California seemed to be leading the country, for better or worse, with outsized public figures and sometimes compelling, or at least entertaining, ideas.California...
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