Climate change gets lip service, highways get billions. Like many states and cities, Oregon has been a leader in setting its own local goals for reducing greenhouse gases. In a law adopted in 2007, the state set the goal of…
We all know and use rules of thumb. They’re handy for simplifying otherwise difficult problems and quickly making reasonably prudent decisions. We know that we should measure twice and cut once, that a stitch in time saves nine, and that…
Last Friday, President Trump signed an Executive Order effectively blocking entry to the US for nationals of seven countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. We’ll leave aside the fearful, xenophobic and anti-American aspects of this policy: others have…
Every year, the Texas Transportation Institute, and traffic monitoring firms like Inrix and Tom-Tom trot out scary sounding reports that claim that Americans lose billions or tens of billions of dollars worth of time sitting in traffic. And just as regularly,…
What City Observatory did this week 1.How urban geometry creates neighborhood identity. Our colleague Daniel Hertz is back this week with an examination of the way we look at and think about neighborhood identities. He points out that in many…