sprawl

Tolls reduce congestion, but they price people off the roadway

Brilliant. That’s the word that kept crossing my mind as I read this clearly written report [PDF] about the Puget Sound Regional Council’s study on using road tolls to fight congestion. The study found that a well-designed, comprehensive system of congestion-busting tolls could make a major dent in traffic backups in the Puget Sound. It […]

How design must change in a warming, oil-scarce world

This week I was able to attend a conference on urban planning hosted by the Penn Institute for Urban Research and the Rockefeller Foundation. Fifty years ago, the same entities had put together another urban conference, at which gathered names like Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, intellectuals who shaped the design world’s thinking about cities […]

Who will bail out the McMansion developers?

If you think the economic downturn is bad for you, try being a developer of sprawly McMansion exurbs. Those dudes have it rough! Don’t miss this hilarious story from Kaid Benfield, director of NRDC’s smart growth program. So developer Gladstone Homes builds this development outside Chicago, in Plainfield, Ill., called Chatham Square, filled with McMansions […]

Why the party that wrecked America can’t fix it

The Republican party has a problem. They have based much of their power, over the last several decades, on the idea of ever-expanding (almost exclusively white) suburbs. The thinking was, as those suburbs become less and less dense — as one wag put it, the further away the houses are from each other — the […]

Let’s hear it for floor area ratio

There’s an interesting exchange going on between Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias regarding the reasons that some communities may or may not be walkable. It seems that the Woodbridge section of Irvine, where Kevin Drum lives, is quite walkable, but hardly anyone does it. Yglesias seems to feel that if an area is made fairly […]

Brownstein on land use

It’s time to link climate and energy policy to land-use policy. We won’t be able to reduce emissions and escape fossil fuels if we keep building communities that require massive amounts of driving. That’s practically a truism among greens, but I’m not sure it’s really entered the political bloodstream, so it’s nice to see a […]

Radiant City is a mesmerizing documentary on sprawl

Radiant City is as described in the trailer -- oddly disturbing, strangely amusing, and sadly illuminating:

A terrific movie. It features planning guru/God Andres Duany and dyspeptic sprawlhater James Howard Kunstler (in a strange and hilarious tie that looks like he slept in it for a couple days) intoning, in a reasonable tone, some of their most on-target slams on sprawl and the suburban paradigm. It includes lots of "fun facts" about the suburbs, including one or two from Alan Durning's book The Car and the City.

Not quite up to Errol Morris standards, but really, really good documentary.

Public transit ridership is up, but no one’s talking about a better system

But how long will they wait for infrastructure improvements? Photo: Sharat Ganapati One year ago, as America prepared for the traditional summer-driving crush, op-ed pages nationwide fretted over a disturbing trend. Only a decade earlier, oil had plumbed depths near $10 per barrel, and dirt-cheap gas had allowed us to roll over the nation’s blacktop […]

Why the Everglades is burning, and how we sucked it dry

It’s hard to believe, now that it’s been overrun by 7 million residents and 7 jillion strip malls, but southern Florida was once America’s last frontier. As late as 1880, the census recorded just 257 residents in a county covering most of the region — because most of the region was a watery wilderness called […]