Vaporizing the Gas Tax Myth

The United States must move away from the gas tax to solutions that charge people for the roads they use, including a VMT fee, congestion pricing for peak hours and toll roads, says Jack Finn of HNTB. Such efforts will encourage Americans to be less dependent on oil, reduce congestion, take public transit and properly invest in infrastructure.

For years we’ve comforted ourselves with the notion that filling up at the pump pays for our roads in full. This is nothing more than a myth, a misperception that must end. In fact:

There is no such thing as a free road. Anyone who has paid off a mortgage knows there are always costs of home ownership. Renovations, expansions and simple upkeep — while necessary — can be expensive. Simply paying off the original financing on a transportation project doesn’t mean it’s paid for either.

Roads don’t pay for themselves. Research from the Texas Department of Transportation has compared how much gasoline is consumed on a roadway with how much gas tax that generates, revealing that no road completely pays for itself over a 40-year lifespan.

We’ve run up a huge transportation tab. Crumbling roads, rusting bridges and congestion are all signs we’ve deferred too much maintenance. According to a national commission that studied our surface transportation needs, we need to invest at least $225 billion annually for the next 50 years to repair and upgrade the system. The longer we wait the more expensive it becomes.

The gas tax isn’t what it used to be. The federal gas tax, now set at 18.4 cents per gallon, was last increased in 1993. A combination of inflation, changing driving habits — due in part to higher gas prices — and better fuel economy of our cars has robbed it of much of its purchasing power. In fact, the trust fund is broke, needing infusions from the general treasury totaling more than $15 billion in the last year alone.

Moving the Tipping Point for Creative Places

Human-scaled, creative development isn’t getting built because most of the money in real estate comes from institutional investors that prefer predictable, large scale projects like subdivisions and strip malls, says Neil Takemoto of CoolTown Beta Communities.

Becoming a Learning City

The reason we have become a non-learning city is because we have been using social causes to develop job-creation industries, rather than going the extra mile and unleashing social capital that discovers new rationales for industries and develops new markets that create new jobs.

The reasons we cannot go the extra mile is because we have become a non-learning city.

How Architecture Transformed a Violent City

Over the past ten or so years, the city of Medellín, Colombia, has undergone a high-profile transformation, shedding its reputation as one of the world’s most violent cities. In an interview with architect Giancarlo Mazzanti in the art magazine Bomb, former Medellín mayor Sergio Fajardo discusses the vital role of architecture and design in the city’s renewal, which he explains was driven by the concept of “the most beautiful for the most humble”—a departure, or “rupture,” he says, from the notion “that anything you give to the poor is a plus.”

How to Stop Complaining and Start Improving Government

For many in Kenya, their government is a black box. Attendance records for members of Parliament are kept secret, and the Parliament website has little to no information on its members. Frustrated by this flagrant lack of transparency, Ory Okolloh co-founded the website Mzalendo to keep an eye on her government. She was motivated by the challenge of acting, rather than just complaining, and because, “if you let them get away with stuff they will.”

Concerned citizens, developers, and bloggers around the world are using the internet to promote transparency, accountability, and civic engagement. In Jordan, where complaints “are really a tradition,” Waheed Al-Barghouthi helped start Ishki, a clearinghouse for Jordanian griping online. In Chile, Felipe Heusser and Rodrigo Mobarec started Vota Inteligente, a website that fact-checks politicians and gives Chilean citizens more information about their government officials.

California Considers Full-Cost Parking Bill

The bill focuses on providing incentives for municipalities to reduce subsidies to parking, including reducing or eliminating ‘minimum parking requirements’. Funding of ‘transportation demand management’ measures would be available from the Highway Users Account.

How to Buy Humane Eggs: What to Know, and What You Can Forget

Cage-free. Organic. Range-fed. Humane. We know the terms, and we see them on the labels of the egg cartons at the store. But can we trust them? And just what do they mean?

How to Expand Urban Agriculture

The National Building Museum’s well-known “For the Greener Good” series featured a panel on urban agriculture, including Josh Viertel, President, Slow Food USA, Liz Falk, Director and co-Founder, Washington D.C.-based Common Good City Farm, and Steve Cohen, food policy and programs, City of Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. The panel was moderated by Allison Arieff, Food and Shelter Ambassador, GOOD and “By Design” columnist, The New York Times.

What Jane Jacobs Can Teach Us About the Economy

Late urban champion’s notions about decline and imports newly resonant during this recession.

This Import Might Preserve American [Canadian]Jobs

Might a cooperative model that arose from ashes of a civil war serve the Rust Belt economies of America’s Midwest?

Canada’s well-educated workforce lacks much-needed physical capital to improve productivity

OTTAWA - Canada has a well-educated workforce that has not been given the required physical capital-machinery and equipment, infrastructure and buildings-to maximize output. This helps to explain the country’s sluggish productivity growth over the past 25 years, the Conference Board argues in a new report released today.

Building Evolution

How do current practices of planning and regulation affect the evolution of buildings and cities? Erick Villagomez looks at the nature of urban evolution over history and offers the development of Olympic Village as an interesting point of reflection about the pros and cons of contemporary methods of directing the city form.

Ecotourists just love Brick Works

Heritage site praised by National Geographic for reconnecting the city with the natural world

Stop Blaming the Victim for the Increase in Pedestrian Deaths

In Toronto, they are calling it the “War on Pedestrians”; 14 have been killed since the start of the year, compared to 32 in all of 2009. In New York City, the mayor is proud that overall traffic fatalities are the lowest in a century, but the number of pedestrians killed was up, to 155. In Portland, Oregon, Jonathan Maus writes that “A spike in traffic collisions over the weekend highlights the urgent need for traffic safety improvements across the Portland area.” In Florida, 502 pedestrians were killed last year, one tenth of the entire country’s pedestrian deaths. 7,878 were injured.