Joe Cortright
Recent Posts
Why Peak Period Road Pricing Is Fair
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Peak hour car commuters in Portland have incomes almost double those who travel by transit, bike, and foot.
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.
Yet Another Flawed Congestion Report From Inrix
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Do the costs of congestion outweigh the costs of building wider roads? Probably not. Despite an impressive amount of data, Inrix falls into the same old traps with its congestion report.
What the Price of Parking Shows Us About Cities
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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 a monthly basis in different cities. There’s a surprising degree of variation: […]
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 […]
McMansions Fading Away?
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Just a few months ago we were being told—erroneously, in our view–that the McMansion was making a big comeback. Then, last week, there were a wave of stories lamenting the declining value of McMansions. Bloomberg published: “McMansions define ugly in a new way: They’re a bad investment –Shoddy construction, ostentatious design—and low resale values.” The […]
Court: Don’t Spend Billions on Outdated Travel Forecasts
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Cross-posted from City Observatory. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has ordered new ridership projections for the proposed Purple Line light rail line, which will connect a series of Maryland suburbs. Like any multi-billion dollar project that serves a densely settled metropolitan area—and this one connects some […]
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 […]
Are Millennials Racing to Buy Cars? Nope
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Crossposted from City Observatory. Hot on the heels of claims that Millennials are buying houses come stories asserting that Millennials are suddenly big car buyers. We pointed out the flaws in the home-buying story earlier this month, and now let’s take a look at the car market. The Chicago Tribune offered up a feature presenting […]
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 […]
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. […]