Sunday, July 12, 2009

Sunday News Dump

So these news dumps are just a way for me to make small comments when something doesn't warrant a whole post or I just have a bunch of things to share at once. Anyway, here's the dump for Sunday night.

Curitiba is naming its Metro. I can't wait for this to open up for us to have real vs. numbers on the modes.
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Why are more regions not doing transfer of development rights (TDR) schemes? It seems to me that this would show tangibly how you trade land for development.
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Something caught me in this Urbanophile article I forgot to mention before. I don't think it really matters how far jobs are from the center if most of them are clustered into centers. Many of the jobs in Minneapolis are not in the Central City but 60% of them are in distinct clusters. I think we need to look more closely at what job dispersal means and especially what it means for high capacity transit.
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I understand its a commuter rail station, but please do more than 4! units per acre. That's just wrong. Why not build these on the periphery and come back when the market is stronger around the station. You'll be kicking yourself when the market comes back morons. Not that it really matters with only 10 trips a day. Another reason not to go back to Austin.
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Very cool map of Detroit with SF, Manhattan and Boston drawn inside. Puts things in perspective.

via Urbanophile
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Silver Lie BRT concrete crumbles. Pattern with these BRT projects?
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A plan to streetcarize Oakland. I dig it.

5 comments:

Matthew said...

I really think there's something in the water in Austin that doesn't let ANYTHING good transit-related happen, at least on a relatively large scale. It's extremely idiotic that they're building yet more McMansions, yeah just what Cedar Park needs, more of those.

It seems like most of the TOD planned for the MetroRail, at least in the suburbs, has fallen through; I've yet to see activity on that giant ~150 acre development planned up in Leander. At least some of the stuff in Austin is still happening though.

Noah Kazis said...

re: Silver Line - EVERYTHING Boston builds is a piece of crap. The Big Dig was dropping tiles onto people's heads. And it's certainly not a case of cheaping out - overpaying for corrupt contracts, more likely.

M1EK said...

Jeff, it's not because they don't know what TOD is, it's because they know nobody will pay top dollar for TOD that doesn't have good T. There's no point in waiting, because crappy commuter rail running 100 times a day is only slightly better - you still have that shuttle-bus to contend with.

Loren said...

So Curitiba is getting ready to construct an urban-rail system. Bus Rapid Transit advocates may consider that to be apostasy, which may be why some of them are now championing Bogotá, Colombia.

In any case, the BRT stations of Bogotá have a suspicious resemblance to urban-rail ones, and the buses have their own right-of-way in much of their routes.

Matt Fisher said...

Yes. TransMilenio has become their new favourite. Don't tell BRT boosters that Bogotá is planning a metro (but still expanding and keeping TransMilenio as the major spine).

Don't tell BRT boosters that Jakarta, Indonesia, home of the TransJakarta busway (designs based on TransMilenio), is planning a metro.

What I suspect is that the BRT boosters will likely suffer from apoplexy. I feel bad about BRT here in Ottawa already.

And wish my mother best of luck on her weight loss surgery this Wednesday. She's getting it done in Utica, New York.