• Plight of the family-owned store

    Philip Langdon’s Common\Edge article , The Precarious State of the Mom-and-Pop Store , highlights the beauty of, and challenges facing, an American tradition. “Mom and pop” stores have been under economic pressure for many decades due to suburbanization and the proliferation of national chains. The...Read more

  • Four principles for a federal highways to boulevards program

    For many Americans, controlled-access highways are a regular part of their daily landscape. They take these high-speed roads for granted, with little consideration of how they were built, the damage they have caused, and the massive amount of money and subsidies that are needed to support them. But...Read more

  • Diverging diamond dystopia: Boston edition

    This article began as a would-be tweetstorm, until I realized there was too much to say. Jonathan Berk, director of Patronicity , tweeted out an image of this new intersection planned by MassDOT for Natick, a Boston suburb, and it was a shock. Sure, folks have built these monstrosities in Utah,...Read more

  • Reduced demand is just as important as induced demand

    It's time to use the idea of reduced demand where it has the potential to improve a city's economy, society, and mobility.
    Induced demand is a well-known and generally acknowledged principle of road building, and may be summarized by the famous line from movie Field of Dreams : “Build it and they will come.” When substantial new road capacity is built, people will change their behavior—perhaps moving to a community...Read more