Blogs

The Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area (DFW) will be the new headquarters of McKesson, the nation’s largest pharmaceutical distributor, the company announced this week. DFW will now have three of the top 10 companies in the Fortune 500 (ranked by total revenue). No other metropolitan area has more than one of the top 10. Dallas-Fort Worth is also home to Exxon-Mobil, the second largest company and AT&T, ranked ninth.  read more »

With news that GM is closing its Lordstown assembly plant near Youngstown, I thought back to a short film I saw in grade school that made such an impression on me at the time that I never forgot it. In the wake of a strike at the plant in 1972, film makers interviewed workers at the plant and created a short documentary from it. Note at the scenes inside the plant are not from Lordstown. In fact, I think they are from a Ford plant.  read more »

Maine governor Paul LePage has announced that he will move to Florida after his term expires in 2019. According to The Hill, taxes are driving the Governor away. He said: “I will pay no income tax and the house in Florida’s property taxes are $2,000 less than we were paying in Boothbay,” LePage said. “At my age, why wouldn’t you conserve your resources and spend it on family [rather] than spend it on taxes?”

According to the Wall Street Journal, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that young people are returning "to upstate cities such as Buffalo." The Governor continued, “This is reality, these are numbers.” Cuomo was quoted in a 27 September article on the population and economic stagnation in New York. Actually, the latest American Community Survey domestic migration data for the Buffalo metropolitan area, there was net outmigration in 2011-2015.  read more »

After years of substantially increasing numbers, working at home has now exceeded transit as an employment access mode. In 2017, 8 million people worked at home, compared to 7.6 million riding transit in the U.S. Since 2010, the share of workers at home has risen 21 percent, compared to transit’s 1 percent rise. More details will follow on newgeography.com shortly.

The Nikkei Asian Review reports that: “A high-speed rail line connecting Seoul to Incheon International Airport will be abolished after just four years of service, as the expensive, politically motivated project loses the ridership race to buses.” Incheon is the principal international airport for the world’s fourth largest urban area, Seoul, which has 24 million residents.  read more »

The Sunday Times (London) reports that it has obtained a secret Cabinet report indicating that “The HS2 high-speed rail project is “highly likely” to go as much as 60% over budget and cost “more than £80 billion.” HS2 refers to the high speed rail project intended to link London to Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and the East Midlands.  read more »

The Economist provides a useful perspective on the continuing decline of mass transit ridership in its current number. It starts with relating how Juana, a Guatemalan immigrant to Los Angeles, no longer takes the bus and now drives everywhere. She told The Economist that she had "two aspirations, to learn English and get a car," which she did.  read more »

Orange County (CA) is a collection of 34 diverse cities with the inspiration and innovation for creating a great life.

OC Focus is a research initiative led by Chapman University, in partnership with the Irvine Company and a group of Orange County business executives, government leaders, students, and citizens for developing a shared economic vision for the region.  read more »

Hong Kong's Transport and Housing Bureau expressed concern that the soon to open Hong Kong to Macao Bridge will fall far short of its usage projections, according to the South China Morning Post (see: "Estimates for traffic on Hong Kong mega bridge cut by up to 26 per cent because of competition, government admits").  read more »