December 23, 2025

Fast Trains There; Dreams of Fast Trains Here

by Keith Schneider5

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 …

Read More

New Measure of Community Vitality: Neighborhoods That Blog

by Keith Schneider2

Outside.in is a Web site launched last year to gather the panoply of writers doing place-based blogging. The site is the brain child of Steven Johnson, a  prominent writer and blogger in New York who’s written five books and contributes to, among others, the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Johnson was helped by John Geraci, a social media specialist, and John Seely Brown, the former chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation and member of the board of Amazon and the MacArthur Foundation. …

Read More

Brand Associations That Are Helping Cities, Hammering Suburbs

by Keith Schneider1

Nielsen Buzzmetrics, which has offices in New York and Cincinnati, is one of the top shops for using Internet search engine technology and sophisticated analysis programs to understand consumer attitudes and predict powerful trends. The company combs millions of conversations occurring on blogs, message boards, and in chat rooms, sifts out salient details, and analyzes the results to forecast consumer behavior and values.  Earlier this month Pete Blackshaw, one of the company’s senior leaders, published a Buzzmetrics brand association map (see graphic) that …

Read More

Flip: Great Interactive Maps by LIAA

by Keith Schneider2

Flip, you may recall, is this blog’s effort to call out particularly good applications of interactive multi-media to the exquistely difficult work of reshaping America’s resource-wasting and demoralizing patterns of development. To an extent that is at once stupefying and aggravating most American communities have zoned themselves into corners of the 20th century — stressing separateness, division, car dependence, racial purity, and income stratification — that make no sense fot the mashup that is the 21st century. Put another …

Read More

As Gas Heads to $4, Teachable Moment For Presidential Candidates

by Keith Schneider3

  We’re one-tenth of a penny short of $3-a-gallon gas today here in Michigan. Energy analysts predict that the price will approach or exceed $4 by mid-summer. Welcome to the new world of gas price politics and the emerging new culture of energy efficiency in America.  It’s a whole lot easier to make the case for land and energy-conserving development patterns, energy efficiency, and a new economic development strategy in the United States when consumers’ ire is stoked by the price at …

Read More

Ellie Mae Returns

by Keith Schneider0

  Benzonia, our little town of 500 in northwest Michigan’s Benzie County, is abuzz with the story of Ellie Mae, the little black, nearly 18-year-old dog that turned up alive and well after wandering in the woods here for two weeks. Ellie Mae, of course, is the canine matriarch of my family. I reported in an April 12 post that she’d walked off the back porch in half a foot of snow and never returned. She’s back, is in good …

Read More

Email the Sun

by Keith Schneider5

  New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of a select number of Republican leaders in the United States who makes any sense, turned up at the American Museum of Natural History on Sunday to deliver an Earth Day plan for his city that should be the basic text for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States. A full account of the 127 steps the mayor proposed is here. The big pieces …

Read More

Build High Speed Rail in the Midwest

by Keith Schneider22

  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 …

Read More

Earth Day is Boomer Day

by Keith Schneider8

  Perhaps not since the very first one 37 years ago has Earth Day attracted the credibility or the genuinely intense national and global focus that it has this year. Thousands of grassroots celebrations, including the annual march in downtown Traverse City today, are occurring this weekend. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a moderate Republican, introduced a green investment plan and policy strategy for transforming the nation’s largest metropolis into an even more transit-friendly, energy-efficient, environmentally-sensitive place to live and do …

Read More

The Right To Speak and the Duty to Be Right

by Keith Schneider6

For longer than I care to recount Rush Limbaugh has been in my life. My work takes me on the road, as it’s done for three decades now, and sometime in the early 1990s I scanned the AM dial and happened on his show. He was an amusing host then; funny, well-informed, voluble, not nearly the sanctimonious blowhard, fabricating tool of the radical establishment right that he’s become. Rush attracted so many listeners to his noon to 3. p.m. show …

Read More