Joe Cortright
Recent Posts
How Green Is My Free Parking Structure? Not Very.
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Why does the National Renewable Energy Lab give its employees free parking?
Urban Myth Busting: Congestion, Idling, and Carbon Emissions
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Increasing road capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will backfire.
What the Price of Parking Shows Us About Cities
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To see where your city falls, check out the interactive chart at this link.
Cross-posted from City Observatory.
Earlier, we rolled out our parking price index, showing the variation in parking prices among large US cities. Gleaning data from ParkMe, a web-based directory of parking lots and rates, we showed how much it cost to park on [...]
Comparing the Price of Parking Across U.S. Cities
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This article was cross-posted from City Observatory.
How much does it cost to park a car in different cities around the nation?
Today, we’re presenting some new data on a surprisingly under-measured aspect of cities and the cost of living: how much it costs to park a car in different cities. There are regular comparisons of rents and [...]
Sprawl and the Cost of Living
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Cross-posted from City Observatory.
Over the past three weeks, we’ve introduced the “sprawl tax”—showing how much more Americans pay in time and money because of sprawling urban development patterns. We’ve also shown how much higher the sprawl tax is in the US than in other economically prosperous countries, and how sprawl and long commutes impose a [...]
Lobbyist Holds Up Spectacular Example of the Futility of Widening Highways
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Crossposted from City Observatory.
Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways.
Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called one of its interchanges the second worst bottleneck in the nation wasting 25 [...]
The High Price of Cheap Gas
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At least on the surface, the big declines in gas prices we’ve seen over the past year seem like an unalloyed good. We save money at the pump, and we have more to spend on other things, But the cheap gas has serious hidden costs—more pollution, more energy consumption, more crashes and greater traffic congestion. [...]
Another Tall Tale About Congestion From the Texas Transportation Institute
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Photo: Texas Transportation Institute
Crossposted from City Observatory.
Everything is bigger in Texas — which must be why, for the past 30 years, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) has basically cornered the market for telling whoppers about the supposed toll that traffic congestion takes on the nation’s economy. Today, they’re back with a new report, “The Urban Mobility Scorecard,” which [...]
No, Millennials Aren’t Buying More Cars Than Gen X
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Millennials are far less likely to have bought cars over the last year than their Gen X counterparts. Graph: City Observatory
Cross-posted from City Observatory.
Will somebody teach the Atlantic and Bloomberg how to do long division?
Today, we take down more breathless contrarian reporting about how Millennials are just as suburban and car-obsessed as previous generations. Following several [...]