Rethinking the Economy

If streets are gridlocked, how can mass transit work? Human Transit, a.k.a. Jarrett Walker, explains:
A few years ago I had a memorable ride on the Ventura Blvd Metro Rapid from Warner Center to Sherman Oaks. The service flowed smoothly through Tarzana and Encino but then got stuck in two miles of gridlock leading [...]

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Great little video by Streetfilms about the transformation of New York City’s streets so they become both more bike and pedestrian friendly — and create some great new urban spaces in the process.

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Great piece in Huffington Post by William Alden about what happens when we cut mass transit:
Peggy Schulz was fed up. In March, after being unemployed for nearly two years, she performed an experiment: She went to a job-search website, limited the search to the Milwaukee area and typed in a simple term: “bus [...]

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If you want help save the planet, you should green your house or buy a green car, right? Not so fast, says an EPA study (via Planetizen).
No factor has a bigger impact than going from conventional suburban to transit-oriented design. Making that change alone results in a 50 percent reduction in energy [...]

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As we saw Monday, parklets could be an interesting model for thinking about encouraging innovation even in areas where we have lots of government rules. Not even rabid anti-”big government” types want to go back to the days of virtually no rules, when anyone was free to dump whatever they wanted into city streets. But [...]

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Steven Rattner, who oversaw the GM bailout, just published Overhaul, his account of what happened. The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn has an interesting interview with him. A few of the highlights:
On why the bailout was necessary: I’d missed this during the initial coverage of the GM bailout. Even though I don’t like GM, I [...]

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On the heels of San Francisco’s new parking meters that automatically adjust parking rates based on up-to-the-minute market supply & demand, Tyler Cowen wrote a nice NYT piece on the problems with the fact that here in the US of A, Big Government regulations mandate that real estate developers create lots [...]

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When I lived in the Bay Area, I did what Mark Mykleby said we should do: I biked to work. I don’t in DC, and it isn’t just the awful summer weather. It’s simple — I don’t want to die.
In DC, I have friends here who bike to work every day. They tell [...]

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Mark Mykleby, a friend of Thomas Friedman who works for the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Office of the Chairman, published a letter in “his hometown paper, the Beaufort Gazette in South Carolina,” about the BP oil disaster. Friedman liked the letter so much he republished it in his column.
This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s [...]

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The International City/County Management Association just came out with an report, Getting Smart About Climate Change, that’s a nice example of Principle #2, Place Your Bets. It uses case studies to illustrate nine strategies cities and counties are using to combat global warming:
1. Create more sustainable and resilient communities
2. Green the local economy
3. Engage [...]

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