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Archive for the ‘Urban Planning’ Category

Building Communities of Opportunity: Highlights from President Obama’s 2012 Budget

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

POLICYLINK
To inform the 2012 budget debate, this document examines primarily two broad arenas—infrastructure investments to grow the economy and connect people to opportunity, and programs that build healthy, stable neighborhoods. These are both critical components in promoting communities rich with opportunity that enable everyone to thrive. We hope that this document will inform the decision-making process of policymakers and fuel the advocacy efforts of those committed to improving the life prospects for our nation‟s struggling communities.

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A NEW RETROFIT INDUSTRY: An analysis of the job creation potential of tax incentives for energy efficiency in commercial buildings and other components of the Better Buildings Initiative

Monday, June 20th, 2011
Table 1

POLITICAL ECONOMY RESEARCH INSTITUTE
The pursuit of energy efficiency in commercial and multifamily buildings would lead to more than 114,000 new jobs in many industries hard hit by the recession. The President’s Better Buildings Initiative seeks to tap into that job creation potential with a suite of policies designed to encourage the pursuit of energy efficiency…

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Vision Los Angeles

Friday, June 17th, 2011
LA Transit System

VISION LOS ANGELES
Vision Los Angeles seeks to advance economic and environmental success for Los Angeles County by focusing on transportation mobility. It is led and driven by a partnership between a leading national environmental group, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and one of the premier business development organizations in California and the Los Angeles region, the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC).

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Reducing Foreclosures and Environmental Impacts through Location-Efficient Neighborhood Design

Friday, June 10th, 2011
screen-shot-2011-06-09-at-91742-am

NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL
While the nation continues to grapple with a troubling housing market and a rash of mortgage defaults, new research has emerged drawing a direct link between “location efficiency”—a measure of the transportation costs in a given area—and mortgage foreclosure rates. The study shows that factors such as neighborhood compactness, access to public transit, and rates of vehicle ownership are key to predicting mortgage performance and should be taken more seriously by mortgage underwriters, policymakers, and real estate developers.

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Interactive Map: Food Deserts

Friday, June 10th, 2011
http://labs.slate.com/articles/food-deserts-in-america/

According to Slate, “Much of the public health debate over rising obesity rates has turned to these “food deserts,” where convenience store fare is more accessible—and more expensive—than healthier options farther away…” A comment sums up the issue: “As our population ages, more and more will have to move out of rural areas into urban centers where services and basic necessities can be reached via public transportation. I wish our government and local planners had the wisdom to anticipate such problems”

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3-Way Street: Pedestrians, Cyclists and Motorists Clash in NYC

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

By summer 2010, the expansion of bike lanes in NYC exposed a clash of long-standing bad habits — such as pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists running red lights, and motorists plowing through crosswalks.

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Transportation Statistics Annual Report (TSAR) 2010

Monday, June 6th, 2011
importance-of-community-transportation-features

BUREAU OF TRANSPORTATION STATISTICS (BTS)
RESEARCH AND INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY ADMINISTRATION (RITA), U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION

The Transportation Statistics Annual Report (TSAR) presents data and information compiled by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), a component of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT’s) Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), to fulfill its legislative mandate. The RITA/BTS mandate covers all modes of transportation and calls for the collection and analysis of transportation data on topics relevant to USDOT’s strategic goals.

The Annual Highlights section focuses on recent USDOT efforts to collect, compile, analyze, and publish transportation data and analysis. Such efforts include the following:
* the Survey of State Funding for Public Transportation,
* Livable Communities and Environmental Sustainability highlights from the Omnibus Household Survey, and
* Commodity Flow Survey (CFS) data and analysis on Hazardous Materials (Hazmat) shipments.

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Recapturing Global Leadership in Bus Rapid Transit: A Survey of Select U.S. Cities

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
The El Monte Busway in Los Angeles, California, built in the early 1970s, was an early forerunner of BRT. Photo: Dorothy Peyton Gray Transportation Library — Los Angeles Country Metropolitan Transportation Authority

INSTITUTE FOR TRANSPORTATION & DEVELOPMENT POLICY
Bus Rapid Transit was first implemented in Curitiba, Brazil in 1974, and has become a global phenomenon in the twenty-first century. Major new BRT projects have opened since the turn of the century in Africa, Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Turkey, several cities in Europe, and dozens of cities in Latin America…Though it is still in its infancy in the United States, several good BRT systems have opened in the country over the last decade, and perhaps a dozen new projects are in the pipeline in cities from San Francisco to Chicago. In many ways, the spread of BRT in the twenty-first century mimics the worldwide spread of the streetcar a century earlier.

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Learn it from the experts at upcoming infra events

Thursday, May 26th, 2011
Transportation Safety Summit-23

If you’re looking for new ways to participate in the infrastructure discussion and hear directly from experts and policymakers, you might want to check out some of the infra events we have listed. Across the United States and scheduled through 2012, there are plenty to choose from.

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The Public Health Costs of Traffic Congestion

Thursday, May 26th, 2011
Projected Nationwide Premature Deaths Attributable to Congested Traffic, 2000 - 2030

HARVARD CENTER FOR RISK ANALYSIS
Traffic congestion is a significant issue in virtually every urban area in the United States and around the world. Anyone who spends any time commuting knows that the time and fuel wasted while sitting in traffic can not only be annoying, but can lead to real economic costs. An examination of the peer-reviewed literature shows that there are many previous analyses that estimate the economic costs of congestion based on fuel and time wasted, but that these studies don’t include the costs of the potential public health impacts. Sitting in traffic leads to higher tailpipe emissions which everyone is exposed to, and the economic costs of those exposures have not been explored.

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