I’ve got a couple of articles I’ve been meaning to write about for a couple of days.<\/p>\n
First, the New York Times<\/em> has a nice piece<\/a> on how cities are losing out on their fair share of the stimulus money.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we\u2019re trying to recover the nation\u2019s economy, we should be focusing where the economy is, which is in these large areas,\u201d said Robert Puentes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution<\/a>\u2019s Metropolitan Policy Program, which advocates more targeted spending. \u201cBut states take this peanut-butter approach, taking the dollars and spreading them around very thinly, rather than taking the dollars and concentrating them where the most complex transportation problems are.\u201d<\/p>\n The 100 largest metropolitan areas also contribute three-quarters of the nation\u2019s economic activity, and one consequence of that is monumental traffic jams. A study of congestion in urban areas<\/a> released Wednesday by the Texas Transportation Institute found that traffic jams in 2007 cost urban Americans 2.8 billion gallons of wasted gas and 4.2 billion hours of lost time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ryan Avent also chimes in<\/a>:<\/p>\n It\u2019s absolutely crucial that the new transportation bill do more to focus spending at the metropolitan level. And indeed, this is one of the goals of the Oberstar transportation bill. As that is unlikely to get anywhere in this legislative session, it would be nice if in filling the highway trust fund\u2019s budget gap the Congress tacked on a reform giving states an incentive to use federal money where the people are \u2014 for the sake of short and long term economic performance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I don’t have anything to add other than to emphasize the importance of keeping our cities humming along.\u00a0 They are the economic engine.\u00a0 I will again emphasize my thought that we can kill a couple birds with one stone<\/a> here – given the simultaneous needs to increase transportation funding and reform the way we distribute those funds, as well as the stimulative effects such spending will have.<\/p>\n To Toll or not to Toll, that is the question. <\/strong><\/p>\n Chris Bradford offers a nice summary<\/a> of a great back and forth between Yonah Freemark<\/a> and Ryan Avent<\/a> on the need and desirability for tolling congested roadways.\u00a0 Chris summarizes the dispute well, documenting Ryan’s desire to reduce congestion and Yonah’s concern about such charges being regressive.\u00a0 However, Chris raises several key points:<\/p>\n Second, tolls encourage a number of shifts. \u00a0Yes, shifts to transit, which seems to be Yonah’s main concern, at least when the transit system is underdeveloped. \u00a0But they encourage other shifts, too. \u00a0Shifts to other routes and shifts to other times. \u00a0 Commuters are the least likely to be nudged to other routes or times. \u00a0The most sensitive are those who use congested roads for local trips. \u00a0Take the soccer mom who hops in the SUV and enters a congested highway to get to the grocery store a mile down the road. \u00a0She imposes enormous costs on others. \u00a0Tolls make her internalize those costs and nudge her to use the local streets. This is a crucial element that’s often overlooked.\u00a0 Performance pricing, whether for congestion or parking or transit usage, will encourage mode shifts, temporal shifts, and spatial shifts.\u00a0 It’s vitally important to consider all three potential shifts and plan for them accordingly.<\/p>\n Green Spaces in DC<\/strong><\/p>\n My friend and colleague Mike Lydon<\/a> forwarded me a great page from the National Building Museum’s Green Building exhibit.\u00a0 The site has nice little videos<\/a> on several DC neighborhoods, emphasizing their green aspects.\u00a0 The videos include profiles of Dupont Circle, U Street, Columbia Heights, and (soon) Barracks Row.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve got a couple of articles I’ve been meaning to write about for a couple of days. First, the New York Times has a nice piece on how cities are losing out on their fair share of the stimulus money. \u201cIf we\u2019re trying to recover the nation\u2019s economy, we should be focusing where the economy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[446,448,457,476],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-congestion-pricing","tag-dc","tag-links","tag-transportation-bill"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pHcGQ-2j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexblock.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexblock.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexblock.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexblock.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexblock.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexblock.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1895,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexblock.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions\/1895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexblock.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexblock.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexblock.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/span><\/em><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n