Blogs

Sydney's Daily Telegraph announced on April 20 that Sydney is more dense than Mexico City, London, Los Angeles and Paris. Of course, anyone who has been to Mexico City or London knows that this is untrue and it may surprise some that Sydney is not even as dense as Los Angeles.  read more »

The population of the provincial level municipality of Shanghai exceeded 22 million at the end of 2010, according to the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission. The population of 22.21 million exceeds the 2000 population of 16.41 million by 35 percent. This growth of nearly 6 million is more people than live in all but three Western European urban areas (Paris, London and Essen-Dusseldorf).  read more »

The week ended April 16 was particularly difficult for high speed rail, as the following events illustrate.  read more »

The Wall Street Journal reports that China will slow down its world's fastest high speed rail trains. According to the Journal, Sheng Guangzu, head of China's Ministry of Railways, told the People's Daily that the decision will make tickets more affordable and improve energy efficiency on the country's high-speed railways.  read more »

A new international report indicates that traffic congestion in the United States is far better than in Europe. The report was released by INRIX, an international provider of traffic information in 208 metropolitan areas in the United States and six European nations.  read more »

The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s cutbacks on its bus line, eliminating about 12% bus service, illuminate the problems of mass transit in LA, specifically the relative inefficiency of trains in the city. This 12% is a further reduction after the 4% cutbacks six months ago, sparking anger from the Bus Riders Union.  read more »

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last few months working on a study of Calgary’s light rail transit (C-Train) system, which was released today by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.  I’ve had a long standing interest in LRT systems, and spent the summer of 2009 working for the Cascade Policy Institute in Oregon, where we compiled massive amounts of data on their world renowned LRT system as part of an ongoing project.  read more »

Zhengzhou, Henan, China (March 28, 2011): In December, London’s Daily Mail reported that the Zhengzhou New Area was China’s largest “Ghost City.” A visit to the Zhengzhou New Area indicates exactly the opposite. Chinese “Ghost Cities” are large areas of new development that are virtually unoccupied. The most famous example is Ordos, a new and reportedly empty city, built to replace an older city in Inner Mongolia.  read more »

The Vancouver Olympic Village scandal continues to worsen.  During construction, the City of Vancouver was forced to take over financing of the project, as the developer’s initial lender backed out due to cost overruns.  At the end of last August, the developer fell behind its payment schedule, and the City placed the property into receivership in November.  The development has been a spectacular failure, with fewer than half of the 737 units being sold.  read more »

Based upon complete census counts for 2010, historical core municipalities of the nation’s major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population) captured a smaller share of growth in the 2000s than in the 1990s.  read more »