Last week in my article on self-driving cars, I noted the phenomenon that affordable (say $200,000 or less) new houses simply aren’t being built anymore and speculated that might lead to people choosing longer commutes. As a second part, I thought I’d look at some possible reasons affordable houses aren’t being built any more. For the […]
Rather than spending decades coordinating on farecards and behind the scenes payment technologies, transit agencies, and other organizations with their own currency, should join the rest of the world and just use standard modern payment technologies. Not special edition MasterCards. Not new consortiums of region-only standardized fare cards. Use soon-to-be run of the mill NFC-enabled smart phones, cash, and credit […]
Here’s a chart passed along to me by a reader, from one of the many long but interesting (FTA) Transit Cooperative Research Program reports. This comes from a chapter on parking pricing, filled with case studies about how the hidden costs of parking rarely get passed on to the end user. Changing that relationship is […]
Well, today’s news is dominated by the perennial congestion report released from the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), which ranks cities based on congestion and then places a monetary value on that estimate. Feel free to read through James’ critique of the numbers, which was published on the site today. Or check out this chart, from Todd Litman’s […]
There were some mighty big numbers in the annual Urban Mobility Scorecard that the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and data company Inrix released Wednesday. Twin Cities residents, the study found, spent an average of 47 hours in 2014 stuck in rush hour congestion. That put us at 23rd among the 101 ranked metros. Washington, D.C., led […]
It’s no secret that Minneapolis is experiencing both an apartment boom and condo dearth at the same time, which begs the question, “why aren’t condos being built at the same rate as apartments?” According to many, Minnesota’s construction defect laws are to blame. The rhetoric usually claims Minnesota has unique construction defect laws for condos; it’s said […]
Sunday’s Open Streets on East Lake Street was the biggest ever. (Or so I hear; I wasn’t there, I was off doing this.) A while back I was interviewing an East Lake business owner for a story I was working on, and a neighborhood organizer came up to the table to chat. We ended up talking about […]
Probably one of the most comprehensive maps you’ll ever see is this “dot map” of all the jobs in the USA according to census tract, and colored according to census categories. Here is the map at a couple of different scales, showing Minnesota, the Twin Cities metro, and the 494 corridor… [One Dot = One […]
The Bicycle Shop business in the U.S. is tough. Margins are thin, future sales tough to predict, good employees hard to find, and manufacturers refuse to protect bricks & mortar dealers from lower price online competitors. To owners, shops often seem more a labor of love than a source of income[1]. The National Bicycle Dealers […]
Via an Oregon media outlet, here’s an interesting chart of different US metro areas showing the correlation between “median asking price” and “% growth in housing units.” It comes from an op-ed by an Oregon economist named Timothy Duy. Here you go: In typical supply-and-demand fashion, Duy argues that places that build more housing have […]