Both Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York reality television personality Donald Trump have based their presidential campaigns in part on the issue of trade. Both of them oppose free trade policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the pending Tran Pacific Partnership, arguing … [Read more...]
A Smart City in Your Pocket: From top-down command centers to bottom-up app markets
Cities, for most of human history, were dumb. At least, that’s what the “smart cities” movement might lead you to believe. Over the past few years, a chorus of acquisitive multinational tech corporations, trend-savvy politicians, and optimistic developers—an odd mixture of former SimCity … [Read more...]
An interview with David Block-Schachter, Chief Scientist of Bridj
Public transportation service provision is changing. As I already have mentioned in this post at Caos Planejado, microtransit services are growing in many cities around the world and one of the forefront companies on this field is Bridj, operating in Boston since June 2014 and Washington DC since … [Read more...]
The deal-making behind the Silver Line
In political transactions, players cannot make deals using dollars, but nonetheless they engage in trades to pursue their goals. Policymakers may engage in trades both with other policymakers and with private sector actors . While these deals are not denominated in dollars, their gains from trade … [Read more...]
Urban Density, Mass Transit, and Uber
Over at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver and Rueben Fischer-Baum claim mass transit is Uber’s best friend. They use data from New York to show that Uber is most frequently used in areas with effective mass transit. They explain that residents in areas with poor access to mass transit are more … [Read more...]
Engineering in the dark
The similarities of urban design across American neighborhoods is no coincidence, but neither is it the result of city planners' uniform adherence to best practices. Infrastructure is often built based on shockingly little information about the demands of its users. And while poorly reasoned … [Read more...]
Interview with Alain Bertaud
Alain Bertaud is probably the most interesting urbanist you've haven't heard about. He is a senior researcher at the NYU Stern Urbanization Project next to names such as Paul Romer and Solly Angel. Bertaud used to be the lead urbanist at the World Bank, and Ed Glaeser has said that everything he … [Read more...]
BART, Josefowitz, and Mass Transit in the Bay
Last week, Nick Josefowitz unseated a multi-decade incumbent for a spot on the BART board of directors. Normally I don’t pay too much attention to elections, but Mr. Josefowitz might actually have some good ideas.For everyone outside the Bay Area, the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system is a … [Read more...]