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This blog has been a bit obsessed both about the benefits of dynamichighwaytolling to controlcongestion, and about economic distortions caused by “free” parking. Apparently, our two pet obsessions have cross-bred, producing this San Fransisco Weekly article on dynamically-adjusted parking fees. Here’s the basic idea: new, inexpensive remote sensing technology is coming online that could… …precisely monitor activity in a city’s parking spaces, so a computer might figure out how much...

Urban ecologists are fond of reciting the benefits of trees in the big city: they reduce storm water runoff, absorb pollutants, increase real estate values, and make neighborhoods more attractive. But a recent study (pdf) shows that urban trees may have an unexpected bonus for city shopkeepers:  apparently shoppers are willing to pay extra to shop near trees. UW professor Kathleen Wolf showed photos of retail streets with and without...

Seattle’s monorail project has smashed into the biggest bump in its bumpy history. This is hardly news anymore: the $2 billion 14-mile line will end up costing $11 billion, with $9 billion in interest payments, and the tax to fund it will extend until 2053. City hall and Olympia are, in short, freaking out. Read about it here, here, and here. There’s good reason to freak out. The monorail financing...

Editor’s note: The following essay is by blog contributor (and former Vancouver city councillor) Gordon Price, a reprint from his "Price Tags" newsletter and Business in Vancouver. (See the Price Tags version for accompanying images.) Why is the Provincial Government going to spend $3 to $5 billion on a strategy which it acknowledges will not work? If, as everyone seems to say, we can’t build our way out of traffic...

It’s a rare treat to read a dry, technical report and—almost by accident—learn something surprising, counterintuitive, useful and (at least to me) genuinely new.  Which is exactly what happened when I read this paper (beware, pdf) by Todd Litman at the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute.  The upshot:  raising vehicle fuel-economy standards, which always seemed to me like a good idea, may actually be counterproductive, even if they’re truly successful at...

Well, from the LA Times, at least.  The paper’s had a series of guest editorials about traffic, transit and urban planning—specifically, how sprawling, congested LA can get itself out of the fix it’s put itself into over the last 60 years or so.  The LA area is surprisingly dense, but the population is spread out fairly uniformly over a large area—which makes it very hard to service the region cost-effectively...

I’m a little late picking this up, but both the New York Times and the Seattle Timeshave now run stories on what’s supposedly a hot new trend in Seattle:  adding luxury condo units to downtown hotels.  Condo-owners get the benefits of hotel amenities, such as room service, room cleaners, valet parking, and a concierge. Plus, at least one of the proposed hotel/condo plans would be bundled with a mix of...

The City of Seattle is proposing another positive step: lowering requirements for off-street parking that drive up the cost of housing in close-in neighborhoods. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has the story. Unfortunately, reporter Vanessa Ho seems intent on fomenting controversy. She writes: As bad as it is now, parking on Capitol Hill—Seattle’s densest neighborhood—may get even worse under a proposal by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. The mayor wants to reduce the...

Microsoft is planning to expand its Redmond, Washington headquarters, adding between 10,000 and 20,000 new employees—plus the parking garages that will be needed to accomodate their cars. And the company is offering to pay $30 million for transportation and infrastructure improvements, including $15 million for a bridge construction project, to help compensate for the increased traffic the expansion will generate. The $30 million offer may seem like a generous gesture,...

Prices influence billions of decisions every day. But they often ignore social and environmental effects, yielding prices that are sometimes too high and sometimes too low. To correct these flawed economics, we can tax “bads” rather than goods such as paychecks; make the polluter pay through fees and permits; and align markets with public goods.