Urban planners long have been concerned about “urban sprawl,” despite never having settled on a term that excludes any urbanization, even the densest in the world. But the European Commission (EC) has taken exaggerating about urban sprawl to a new level.  read more »

As a spirt, bourbon is heavily associated with the state of Kentucky. But while major spirits firm Brown-Forman is located in Louisville, traditionally bourbon was distilled in rural – and ironically, dry – counties like, say, Bourbon County.  read more »

One of the last regions settled en masse by Europeans, California’s trajectory long has been linked to its partners across the Pacific. Yet these ties could be deeply impacted by President Trump’s immigration and trade policies, as well as resulting blowback by the authoritarian regime in Beijing.  read more »

Many public transit agencies are struggling to sustain lightly-used routes as passenger traffic dips in response to relatively cheap automobile fill-ups, a rise in work-from-home lifestyles, and the growing popularity of transportation network companies (TNCs), such as Lyft and Uber. The brunt of the decline has been sharpest in small and mid-size communities, where some bus services are infrequent, follow meandering routes, and stop running after peak hours.  read more »

Expect to hear about folks in the Los Angeles area taking stands on the app-based, pay-by-the-mile electric scooters that seem to be scattered about the City of Angels in greater numbers by the day. Tough to tell how many, since scooter brands such as Bird are on a fast track that involves dropping scooters off on street corners, where customers take over, dispersing the two-wheelers without any set route or distribution plan involved.  read more »

Planners and journalists are often uneasy about suburban development, wondering how people will get to work in the center from more distant locations. They needn’t worry. Only a relatively small percentage of people work in the center (generally less than 10 percent). Indeed the residential employment dispersion in American metropolitan areas has been a major factor in keeping work trip travel times among the shortest in the world.  read more »

The Midwest is simply not in the picture when it comes to migration nationally. Even its best performing regions are often migration losers with the rest of the country.

Columbus, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis-St. Paul all have growing populations, and basically healthy economies. Yet all of them are have net migration losses with the country when you look only at migration from out of state.  read more »

This seems about the worst possible month to be suggesting that anybody should try to emulate anything going on in America. The place seems to be going mad in ways no longer funny to laugh at from very far away.

So it’s a bit of a shame that the best lessons on infrastructure financing and affordable housing come from a few places in the United States that have really figured things out. If the exact same lessons had come from Canada, or the UK, or Estonia, Infrastructure New Zealand would have an easier time marketing its latest report.  read more »

“If my thought dreams could be seen

They’d probably put my head in a guillotine” — Bob Dylan, “It’s All Right Ma”, 1965

We live in a newly censorious age, where old crudities are never forgotten. To be sure, there are some clear malefactors, like Harvey Weinstein and many others, who should be punished to the extent of the law, but there’s clearly a distinct danger to free expression as the emboldened thought police steadily expand their domain.  read more »

Lisbon, Portugal’s capital is located on the wide estuary of the Tagus River, with a bridge modeled after San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge connecting the core city to the suburbs to the south. Lisbon also resembles San Francisco in being picturesque, with the urbanization mixed with the complex geography of the coastal waters, dominated by hills.  read more »