At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
 NEW YORK — Early this morning, before the sun peaked over the roofs of the grand old apartment buildings of the Upper East Side, I followed the road bikers and dog walkers and joggers over to Central Park for a splendid four-mile run. New York is full of young people now, bright, educated, trim, and ambitious. A whole bunch of them are up just after dawn to clear their minds and keep their bodies tuned sufficiently to compete …
Last November, just as they have in previous local and state elections stretching back to the mid-1990s, voters in 13 states considered 32 transit-related ballot measures and approved 70 percent of them, according to the Center for Transportation Excellence, a research group based in Washington, D.C. Spending on those projects will total $40 billion—bringing both immediate stimulus and long-term economic development tools to local economies. Well, the beat goes on. Last month voters in the Grand Rapids …
  Though it’s completely understandable why the triple whammy of rising peak oil energy prices, global climate change, and record population growth might get you down, here are a number of promising Mode Shift trends that indicate the end is not nigh. Singles now head the majority of American households and are repopulating America’s great cities. This from Baltimore, according to the May 29, 2007 edition of the Baltimore Sun: “Across Baltimore, single women – old …
 Late on the Friday night before the Memorial Day weekend, Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Michigan reached agreement with Democratic Governor Jennifer M. Granholm on a very temporary fix to close an $800 million state budget deficit. The deficit, for those who might be unfamiliar, is what happens when what the state earns in tax revenue doesn’t keep up with what it spends on programs. Next fall the crisis worsens when lawmakers look down the raw throat of …
   PROPOSED CALIFORNIA HIGH SPEED RAIL ROUTE  California Democrats have elevated building their state’s proposed high speed rail network to the top of their legislative priorities, according to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The Daily Kos, one of the most read blogs in the country, noted the swirl of attention that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stirred with his proposal to cut $2.5 million in state funding to the California High Speed Rail Authority, the agency overseeing …
Almost three years after Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation that put $2.5 million in the kitty of the California High Speed Rail Authority, which is charged with overseeing the planning of a 700-mile network of fast trains in the nation’s largest state, Schwarzenegger has had a change of heart. The governor’s 2007 budget proposal calls for cutting state appropriations for the Authority, according to an article in the April 29, 2007 edition of …
 Since 1996, nine states in the American Midwest have been gradually inching forward on a proposal to establish a 3,000-mile high speed train network linking 100 of the region’s big and small cities. Chicago would serve as the hub of the The Midwest Regional Rail System. Spokes would include Detroit, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Columbus, Des Moines, and many other large cities served by trains capable of traveling 110 mph, which would make the travel time and …
It’s the nutty season here in the first weeks of spring. The purebred chicken scratch hill billy hound dog puppy that I picked up off the highway in southern Virginia almost 18 years ago decided she’d had enough and wandered off two days ago and vanished. It’s been snowing here in Michigan’s great white north for more than a week. Over the weekend I shoveled nine inches of snow off the deck and driveway and it’s colder than it was in January when …
It’s essential to stay abreast of what opponents to a reasoned development strategy have to say about Smart Growth. And there’s no more unreasonable voice on these issues than the social theorists at the libertarian Reason Magazine. This week Sam Staley and Ted Balaker published their newest assessment of the value of public transit, why Americans won’t ride new trains and buses, and how to relieve congestion. They come to this conclusion: “The planning gurus who are supposed …
Not long ago, in Denver, a Douglas County Commissioner told me that one of the impediments voters faced in approving a nearly $5 billion sales tax increase in 2004 to build the West’s most extensive regional rapid transit system was old attitudes about trains. “The critics, including our governor, kept saying nobody would ride a train,” she said. “This is the West. You have to pry the keys out of people’s hands before they’d get out of their cars.” Well, …