Hey urbanists! This issue marks six months 🎉 of the Radical Urbanist — I took a week off over the hol
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| March 18 · Issue #25 · View online |
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Hey urbanists! This issue marks six months 🎉 of the Radical Urbanist — I took a week off over the holidays — and we’re only two people away from hitting 100 subscribers. I don’t often make requests, but if you enjoy reading every week, please share the newsletter with other urbanists so we can keep growing our subscriber count. And if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see included in the newsletter, please let me know. Moving on to the articles, there are some really good analyses this week of Amazon Go’s impact on small grocers, the economics of driverless vehicles (and how they might not be as great as we’ve been led to believe), and various approaches to address the housing affordability crises in major cities. I’ve decided to mark these with a 🚨. Finally, transportation planner Jarrett Walker has been tweeting recently about how US cities should be looking at Canada instead of Europe as a more achievable model of how to improve public transit. In that spirit, I’ve highlighted a few major transit announcements from the past week. Have a great Sunday! — Paris
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🚨 Amazon Go and the Death of the Neighborhood Supermarket
This great piece by Laura Bliss looks at how Amazon Go could hurt the grocery business, take away the charm of neighborhood grocers, and exclude the poorest customers who already have the least access. (See issue 18 for more on Amazon Go.) |
This is the real story of American retail
There are a lot of headlines about retail stores closing across the country, but the real story isn’t being told. It’s not that retail is dying, but rather that as the middle class has deteriorated, the places they shopped are going under. Luxury and cheap retailers, on the other hand, are doing great.
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The fate of the steering wheel hangs in the balance
There was fierce lobbying in Washington, DC this week over a Senate bill that, if passed, could unleash a swarm of self-driving cars without typical controls onto public roads. It would allow companies to test and sell autonomous vehicles before federal safety regulations are written. (See issues 12 & 15 for more on driverless vehicles.) |
🚨 A Reality Check on AV Economics
Tech leaders talk a lot about how driverless vehicles will significantly reduce the cost of ride-hailing services, but Nathaniel Horadam points out a lot of additional costs that aren’t being factored into the equation.
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🚨 A Tangle for the Anti-Development Left
A good overview of the left’s reaction to the proposed California bill SB 827, which would upzone areas around transit, and how it has evolved since the bill was first introduced. (See issue 20 for more on SB 827.) |
🚨 Affordable housing policy failure still being fuelled by flawed analysis
One of the proposed solutions to urban housing crises is to building as much housing as possible even if little of it is affordable, as increasing supply of market-rate units will lower the price of older housing stock. However, the evidence from Australia 🇦🇺 shows this doesn’t work. We can clearly generate significant dwelling approvals and dwellings in the right economic circumstances. Yet there is little evidence this new supply improves affordability for lower-income households.
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California homeowners receive $6 billion a year in subsidies — 15 times more than renters, report finds
This is an unfair trend repeated in many cities and states: there’s plenty of subsidies for homeowners, but renters who can’t (or don’t want to) get on the property ladder are not given nearly the same level of support.
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Rich people can’t stop buying luxury apartments and not using them
There are now 74,945 vacant homes in New York City — a new high, at 2.1% of the housing stock — because of wealthy people who buy apartments as investments or additional homes they rarely use. If one of the vacant homes was given to every homeless person who slept in a shelter in January, there would still be 12,000 apartments to spare.
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B.C. government, Metro Vancouver mayors agree on $7B transit expansion
A deal between the BC government and mayors in the municipalities that make up Metro Vancouver have agreed to increase transit fares, development fees, parking fees and property taxes in order to fund a new subway line on Vancouver’s Broadway corridor, 10 km (6.2 mi) of light rail in Surrey, and 900,000 hours of additional bus service throughout the region. (See issues 7 and 20 for more on Canadian transit.) |
Montreal approves $1.4-billion plan to buy 967 buses
Montreal will buy 967 new hybrid and electric buses to take old diesel buses out of service and expand bus service throughout the city.
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Quebec City unveils plans for $3-billion tramway network, wants feds and province to pay
Quebec City unveiled a $3-billion transit plan this week, including a 23-km (14.2-mi) tramway, an electric trambus, and reserved bus lanes with the goal of increasing transit ridership by 30 percent.
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