Joe Cortright
Recent Posts
A Reporter’s Guide to ‘Congestion Cost’ Studies
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Every year or so, one or more traffic-counting organizations trots out a report claiming that congestion is costing us tens of billions dollars each year. Despite the “big data” and elaborate estimates, the results are simply bunk, because they’re based on a flawed premise.
Opinion: American Parking Policy is the Real Socialism
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"There may be massive inequities in other aspects of life, but each citizen is guaranteed equal access to adequate parking spaces." - Joe Cortright
How to Stop Giving Parking Developers A Free Ride
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There are good reasons of efficiency and fairness for asking parking lot owners to pay more toward dealing with the costs they impose. A tax on parking could be one way to get it done.
Sprawl and the Cost of Living
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Cross-posted from City Observatory. Over the past three weeks, we’ve introduced the “sprawl tax”—showing how much more Americans pay in time and money because of sprawling urban development patterns. We’ve also shown how much higher the sprawl tax is in the US than in other economically prosperous countries, and how sprawl and long commutes impose […]
The End of Peak Driving?
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Cross-posted from City Observatory. A little over a year ago, a gallon of regular gasoline cost $3.70. Since then, that price has plummeted, and remains more than a dollar cheaper than it was through most of 2014. Over the same period, there’s been a small but noticeable uptick in driving in the US. After nearly […]
Another Tall Tale About Congestion From the Texas Transportation Institute
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Crossposted from City Observatory. Everything is bigger in Texas — which must be why, for the past 30 years, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) has basically cornered the market for telling whoppers about the supposed toll that traffic congestion takes on the nation’s economy. Today, they’re back with a new report, “The Urban Mobility Scorecard,” which purports to […]
How Cutting Back on Driving Helps the Economy
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Cross-posted from City Observatory As Americans drive less and spend less on fuel, they have about $150 billion annually to spend in other ways. There are two kinds of economics: macroeconomics, which deals in big national and global quantities, like gross domestic product, and microeconomics, which focuses on a smaller scale, like how the prices […]
Trucking Industry Imposes Up to $128 Billion in Costs on Society Each Year
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Cross-posted from City Observatory During National Infrastructure Week earlier this month, we again endured what has become a common refrain of woe about crumbling bridges, structurally deficient roads, and a lack of federal funding for infrastructure. This call for alarm was quickly followed by yet another Congressional band-aid for the nearly bankrupt highway trust fund […]
No, Millennials Aren’t Buying More Cars Than Gen X
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Cross-posted from City Observatory. Will somebody teach the Atlantic and Bloomberg how to do long division? Today, we take down more breathless contrarian reporting about how Millennials are just as suburban and car-obsessed as previous generations. Following several stories drawing questionable inferences from flawed migration data claiming that Millennials are disproportionately choosing the suburbs (they’re not) […]