Sublime

This is in stark contrast to everything we experience today regarding growth and development. Instead of private wealth leading, in today’s cities it is the collective public investment that leads. Governments frequently invest millions of dollars, or make long-term maintenance commitments worth millions, before any taxable private investment has b

My vision for transit is not a reinterpretation of the automobile highway – corridors for commuters – but a return to traditional transit systems: investments in financially productive places. A successful transit trip begins in a financially-productive place and ends in a financially-productive place, connecting the two in a way that is scaled to

I ran the numbers; it would take 37 years of my neighbors and I paying taxes for the city to merely recoup the cost they had initially put into building the road. That was longer than the road was going to last. It was a dead-end road; we were the only ones who used it. If my taxes weren’t even enough to cover the initial construction costs, who wa

If the city spends $1 million repairing a street, it’s not sufficient for the tax base served by that street to only produce $1 million of revenue over the life of that street. If that’s all that results, then why bother? The public doesn’t build infrastructure just to have infrastructure.

Any rationally minded person understands that the street in front of your home is not an asset for the community. It can’t be picked up and sold to the neighboring town. It can’t be pledged as collateral against a debt. The street is a liability, plain and simple. In the infinite game of running a city, it represents an eternal commitment to ongoin

The proper response to congestion between cities is to build capacity. The proper response to congestion within a city is to intensify land use.