Now is the time to be an infrastructure hawk, not a deficit hawk (Washington Post)
It’s Not Just Nice to Share, It’s the Future (New York Times)
The Most Expensive Housing Markets Are Becoming Even Less Affordable (Atlantic Cities)
Study: AASHTO Guidelines for Bikes Outdated, Not Based on Research (Mobilizing the Region)
Ezra Klein makes the case for delaying deficit reduction in favor of focusing on our infrastructure needs. The reasons have been covered many times in the past several years, but this paragraph really nails it: "This, then, is the difference between spending the next two years investing in infrastructure and spending the next two years sharply reducing the deficit. Both of them need to be done eventually. Delaying either means saddling the future with debts we declined to pay off in the present. But this is a particularly good time to invest in infrastructure and a particularly bad time to cut deep into the deficit. And yet we’re ignoring infrastructure and rapidly reducing the deficit. We’ve got it backwards."
Tina Rosenberg discusses the rapid evolution of the sharing economy, in which the long-time availability of some shared resources, like hotel rooms, DVDs, and gym equipment is expanding to things like cars, bikes, tools, clothes, textbooks, etc. She goes on to catalogue some of the reasons for the shift from ownership to access, including the recession, the sustainability movement, and improvements in technology.
Home prices have been rapidly increasing, with a roughly 10% average increase year-over-year across the nation. But while this is good news for many homeowners, the gains are not uniform, and the least affordable markets are the ones experiencing the fastest gains in value while cheaper markets like Houston and Indianapolis are lagging behind the national average, exacerbating already-large disparities between metro areas.
A report by the Harvard School of Public Health reveals that the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), "the go-to resource for transportation engineering guidelines," is using guidelines from as far back as 1972 to inform their bike facilities recommendations, and that they continue to advocate against their use despite their unmitigated success in increasing ridership and improving safety for all road users.
And lastly, a little more fun at the expense of Citi Bike haters:
Why Conservatives Hate Citi Bike So Much, in One Venn Diagram (NY Mag)
Why Conservatives Hate Citi Bike So Much, in One Venn Diagram (NY Mag)