Transit is a very safe form of transportation, not only in terms of safety from accidents, but also in terms of personal security from crimes and theft. A new study authored by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute argues that the narrative for transit needs to be changed to emphasize this fact.
Urbanization – migration away from the suburbs and to the central city – will be the biggest real estate trend in 2015, according to a new report from ULI and PwC. The Emerging Trends in Real Estate report, in its 36th year of publication, makes projections in commercial and residential real estate for the coming year.
It has been well documented that large companies offering transit benefits to their employees gain payroll tax savings, lower health-benefit costs, increased employee productivity, and better retention levels. But we seem to hear less about the advantages to small companies.
There are a lot of reasons to be frustrated with the federal government, but making Americans’ commutes longer has got to be one of the worst. And yes it’s true, the federal government is Subsidizing Congestion. That’s the name of the report by TransitCenter and The Frontier Group that describes the numerous ways in which a relatively obscure U.S. tax policy impacts commuters.
In real estate, the smartest move for developers is to build and invest in cities that have multiple transportation options. To be competitive, embrace transit-oriented development (TOD). Those are two main takeaways of a report from Cushman and Wakefield exploring 10 major cities (Mexico City, Manhattan, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Washington D.C., Miami, Atlanta, Boston, and San Francisco) experiencing rapid population growth. The most prosperous were those that were transit oriented.
Cities that Embrace Transit-Oriented Development Prosper More »
How do government leaders learn from one another? One example is the recent tour Arlington County leaders offered to representatives from multiple Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) districts to showcase the county’s best practices in pedestrian and bicycle engineering.
Behind the Scenes of Arlington’s Bike and Pedestrian Innovations More »
Apple’s announcement in September regarding the 2015 launch of the Apple Watch has some pundits wondering if the tech giant can do for wearable tech what it did for the MP3 player and smartphone: create a must-have consumer device out of a fledgling, yet promising, product line.
An employment opportunity brought Matt Smith (above), a 30-year old business-development manager, to the Washington D.C. area from Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania in 2009. He chose to live in Arlington because of its urban feel and plethora of transportation options. “Arlington feels like D.C. to me, but it’s cleaner and greener,” said Smith, who works at goDCgo in the same suite as Mobility Lab. “I hear people complain about the Metro here and I just don’t get it. We don’t have anything like that where I’m from.”
As driving habits change, places that cater to millennials thrive More »
There will always be those who are resistant to change. These are the people who fight the Columbia Pike Streetcar despite credible evidence of its return on investment. These are the ones who use rhetoric like “war on cars” and are fond of excessive punctuation.
Big cities aren’t the only places working hard to create terrific communities. I was reminded of this fact when visiting Roanoke, Virginia over the past few days to attend CityWorks(X)po, a conference for change agents and placemakers. Going in, I was completely unfamiliar with the city, but was delighted with what I discovered there during my short visit.
Roanoke, Virginia placemaking shows a city on the rise More »
If you want a list of innovators in the transportation demand management (TDM) industry, you need look no further than the officers and board of the Association for Commuter Transportation (ACT).
Transportation choice in America is largely a product of where one lives, which is both directly and indirectly dependent upon core values and attitudes. This is a major finding in TransitCenter’s Who’s on Board: The 2014 Mobility Attitudes Survey, and it supports the idea that transportation and land use are inextricably linked.
A new shared-space residential project by Vornado and WeWork, approved in July by the county board, will be Arlington, Virginia’s first micro-unit project, and could be priced affordably. The Crystal City project will be a temporary revamp of the vacant Crystal Plaza 6 office building at 2221 South Clark Street, which is scheduled to be redeveloped by 2050.
New Shared-Space Residential Project Made Possible by Tech, Transit More »
Why do so many Americans choose to live in the suburbs, despite the increasingly long commute times and lack of community often associated with these places Benjamin Ross, a Washington D.C.-based transit activist whose grass-roots lobbying efforts led to the planned Purple Line in Maryland, argues that suburbia has a persistent allure because it is a great “velvet rope” separating those of means from the rest of us.
Do Americans seek out a velvet rope of status in suburbia? More »
“Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost wrote in the poem “Mending Wall.” It is a line that captures the 1914 poem’s themes of boundaries, ownership, and privacy perfectly. But today, 100 years later, fences are becoming more of a quaint notion in an increasingly urbanized world. In another 100 years, will streets be viewed in the same way?