Australia’s New South Wales state government has proposed a new Metropolitan Strategy for the Sydney area which would significantly weaken its highly restrictive smart growth policy (also called urban containment, smart growth, livability, growth management, densification, etc.) that has driven if house prices to among the highest in the affluent New World (Australia, Canada, New [...]
We have just released the 9th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey covering 337 metropolitan markets in Australia, Canada, China (Hong Kong), Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. As usual, the most unaffordable markets are those in with urban containment policy (also called by other names, such as smart growth and [...]
Friday’s San Antonio Express-News commentary (“Streetcars will please San Antonians once they are running”) by Garl Boyd Lantham, president of the Texas Association of Rail Passengers begins: I still remember when, as a young child, my father first pointed out the dangers inherent with the misuse of statistical information. He told me that “an astute [...]
There has been considerable publicity to the effect that younger people are driving less than before. In fact, however, among the 16-25 age cohort, solo driving is up as a share of total work trips. According to the 2011 American Community Survey, the share of 16-25 year olds commuting alone by car was 69.6 percent, [...]
It didn’t take long for California’s “cap and trade” program under AB 32 (the “Global Warming Solutions Act”) to deteriorate into just another slush fund for political officials to spend on their favorite projects. Of course, the purpose of cap and trade funds is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The state of California has adopted [...]
Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley – Thomas talks glowingly of rail transit in Los Angeles in a recent Honolulu Star-Advertiser commentary. However, nowhere did he say that rail transit had reduced traffic congestion or increased transit ridership. There is a good reason for this — it did not happen. It is useful to consider [...]
Jeb Kolko, Chief Economist of the real estate website firm, Trulia has provided the only believable sub-county population change data available for 2010 to 2011. In a Trulia website posting republished at newgeography.com (Even After the Housing Bust, Americans Still Love the Suburbs), Kolko shows that household growth was generally greater in less dense areas [...]
Large government financed infrastructure programs are often justified by promoters on the basis of apocalyptic delusions about the intolerable future that would face the public if the projects are not built. A case in point is the Victorville California to Las Vegas high-speed rail proposal, called “Xpress West” (formerly called “Desert Xpress”). Planning documentation alarmingly [...]
An article by Dan Neil in The Wall Street Journal takes the issue of driverless cars a bit further and concludes that it would make the nation more productive economically. The one brilliant part of the U.S. economic profile is productivity. It turns out, Americans are a little nutty when it comes to work. If autonomy [...]
There is a perception that mass transit is dominant in the metropolitan areas of Western Europe, unlike in the United States. In fact, in all metropolitan areas of Western Europe, as well as in the balance of the high income Western world, automobiles command the overwhelming majority of the motorized transport market share. European mass [...]