Streetsblog Capitol Hill
I have begun contributing to Streetsblog Capitol Hill.  My first piece is on the regressivity of our housing policy.  Check it out.

"No road we built in Texas paid for itself."
From Streetsblog Capitol Hill: Over the past two days at the Congress for the New Urbanism Project for Transportation Reform conference, attendees have called for reform at local, regional, and national levels. In a panel debate about the future of transportation funding and the role of regional planning through MPOs, several speakers argued that the foundation of transportation and development funding had to be systematically overhauled. Mike Krusee, [AC

Aragon
Mueller gets a lot of criticism -- see the grouchy comments to this entry -- much of it unfair.  I like Mueller.  I do agree, though, that it is not a model mixed-use, New Urbanist development.  Among other things, there is  too much segregation of single-family and multi-family/commercial. So let me offer an example of a model New Urbanist development.   Aragon is an infill development in Pensacola designed by

Using asphalt more efficiently
Most mornings on my way into work, I stop at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on South Lamar, a new coffee shop between Riverside and Barton Springs, one door down from Bridges on the Park.  (The building used to be a soccer store.) If you are looking for an example of how code mandates too much parking, here you go. According to Travis County tax records, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf occupies an 8,861 sf building.   City code requires restaurants to have 1 parking spot for every 100 sf for the first 2,500 sf, and 1 spot for every 75 sf over that.   This means that CBTL, had it built on a suburban greenfield, would have nee

No
I agree with Ryan Avent that this WSJ piece makes a bizarre argument against congestion pricing: By requiring car drivers to pay a fee to drive in a city at peak hours, congestion pricing reduces traffic and raises money that can be used to support public transit—both worthy goals. Yet congestion pricing has dubious environmental value. Traffic jams, if they're managed well, can actually be good for the