Archives: Posts From December 2007

Dharavi and the Unmalling of America?
By Sandy Ikeda | Mon, 31 Dec 2007 at 2:17 AM | Permalink
Excerpt: On a 6-hour flight the other night from JFK to Phoenix I managed to read through most of The Economist Special Holiday Double Issue (22 December 2007). If you can get your hands on it, I strongly urge you to do so quickly before they run out. (It can be ...

The Common Sense of Traffic Anarchy
By Sandy Ikeda | Fri, 28 Dec 2007 at 1:01 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Here's a follow-up to my earlier discussion on "unblocking the box." An article on the Washington Post Web site, "A Green Light for Common Sense," reports that "shared space" — a concept that originated in the Netherlands in which the solution to traffic ...

Subways and Buses: Fare Enough?
By Sandy Ikeda | Sat, 22 Dec 2007 at 1:00 AM | Permalink
Excerpt: With the blessing of Governor Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg, the MTA voted earlier this week to raise subway and bus fares as well as the tolls for tunnels and bridges. You can read about it here. A proposal to charge lower fares during off-peak hours, an ...

Some Unintended Consequences of Congestion Pricing
By Sandy Ikeda | Wed, 19 Dec 2007 at 5:20 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: One of the more useful things that economics can do — and here I'm speaking as an economist — is to help us answer the "instead of what?" question. If you eat my cake, can I have it too? No. If the government raises the legal minimum wage, can the least ...

Unblocking the Box
By Sandy Ikeda | Sat, 15 Dec 2007 at 1:08 AM | Permalink
Excerpt: To New Yorkers who drive, and there are actually quite a number of us, the arrival of the holidays seems to bring with it an exponential increase in the phenomenon known as "blocking the box." This happens when a driver, usually one who has had to sit ...

The Post-Doctoroff Metropolis
By Sandy Ikeda | Tue, 11 Dec 2007 at 8:58 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Until recently, the complaint among old-school city planners had been that "after Jane Jacobs you couldn't build anything big." Indeed, following decades of Robert Moses's heavy-handed regional planning and costly mega-projects, smaller-scale planning ...

No 'Wow Factor' to Hudson Yards Designs, Please
By Sandy Ikeda | Sun, 9 Dec 2007 at 12:03 AM | Permalink
Excerpt: Architects tend to make lousy urban planners. While an architect's intelligence and imagination can make a single structure within an existing urban ecology a thing of functional beauty, those same qualities applied to the design of an entire city are ...