Ryan Avent
Recent Posts
Has the Government Been Bailing Out Sprawl?
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One of the themes of the financial and economic crisis we’ve faced over the past two years is that government, pressed into responding to serious economic pain, has often found itself supporting the activities that got us into this mess in the first place. Sign of the times? Side-by-side foreclosures in Massachusetts. (Photo: Yovani via […]
Advice for Policymakers: Time to Check Your Blind Spots
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Last week, I left my Washington home, walked to the nearby Metro station, rode a train downtown, walked to the National Press Club, and settled in to hear Steven Rattner, former head of the Obama administration’s auto task force, declare that "no one has yet invented a substitute for the automobile." Steven Rattner (Photo: WSJ) […]
High-Speed Rail: Still a Good Idea
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You may remember, back in August, economist Ed Glaeser’s series on high-speed rail at the New York Times’ Economix blog. Glaeser put together a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis of a hypothetical Houston-Dallas line, which purported to show that rail was a poor investment. You may also remember me responding in detail, and generally pointing out how […]
What the Virginia Campaign Can Teach Us About Transportation Policy
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However the Virginia off-year gubernatorial race ends up — and at the moment it looks as though Republican Bob McDonnell will reclaim the governor’s mansion for the GOP after years of Democratic dominance — the media will frame the story as a referendum on the policies of national Democrats. Virginian rivals Creigh Deeds (D, at […]
Congestion Pricing: Still Good For Basically Everyone
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Urbanists often find themselves falling into a pattern of thinking that boils down to the dictum that what’s good for drivers must be bad for walkability, and sustainability, and all the things that they prize about well-designed cities. Drivers seem to believe this too, which is interesting because it often isn’t true. What’s good for […]
Bridging the Local-National Message Divide: The Climate Bill is the Answer
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Urban areas have a lot to contribute to the congressional climate change debate. (Photo: SDOT Blog) This week, I was fortunate to attend the Open Cities conference in Washington (along with fellow Streetsbloggers Elana Schor and Aaron Naparstek), on the ways in which new media is shaping urban policy. The takeaway, for me at least, […]
Transit and Congestion, an Indirect Connection
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Yesterday, Freakonomics linked to a new piece of research [PDF] on congestion that I’d been musing over for a few days. Let me quote the abstract here (paragraph break and emphasis mine): We investigate the relationship between interstate highways and highway vehicle kilometers traveled (vkt) in us cities. We find that vkt increases proportionately to […]
The Assumption of Inconvenience
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Early this week, I noticed a number of my favorite bloggers linking to this Elisabeth Rosenthal essay at Environment 360, on the mysterious greenness of European nations. The average American, as it happens, produces about twice as much carbon dioxide each year as your typical resident of Western Europe. Rosenthal attributes much of this difference […]
Predicting the Future is Hard
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About two years ago, the Urban Land Institute published Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, which argued that it will be crucial to build cities in a more compact fashion if the country hopes to avoid substantial growth in vehicle miles traveled and carbon emissions over the next few decades. At […]
Would Real Men Tax Gas? A Test for Tom Friedman
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On Monday, Elana Schor highlighted a recent column from occasionally right New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who once again rolled out one of his favorite policy prescriptions — an increased gas tax. Friedman wrote: Tom Friedman (Photo: IvyGate) According to the energy economist Phil Verleger, a $1 tax on gasoline and diesel fuel would […]
Rezoning Tysons Corner: It’s Hard To Teach Old Dogs New Tricks
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Streetsblog has previously covered the effort to transform Tysons Corner, a bustling but car-oriented and traffic-plagued jobs center in Fairfax County, Virginia, into a walkable, transit-oriented corridor based around four new Metro stations — similar to the immensely successful redevelopment of the Wilson Boulevard corridor in Arlington, just a few miles to Tysons’ northeast. The project […]
A Few Words on Transportation User Fees
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We tend to have a few good laughs when Randal O’Toole fires up his Cato computer and weighs in on transportation issues. It’s hard to take seriously a man who thinks that having the government tax people to build something which it then gives away for free is the libertarian ideal. Do federal gas taxes […]