Tag: Travel
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Connect
It’s winter again in Boston. Anyone who was there last year during February and March knows what that means. The ability to move about the city could come to a screeching halt in the blink of an eye. . The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA, or the “T”) completely shut down last winter after repeated large winter storms,…
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International Urban Development and Transportation
T.O.D. should not only be about transit-oriented development, but about transit-owned development. When I was a child, I was the first in my classroom to notice that the World Trade Center (Tower 1) had been struck, and I later helped to close our windows, watching as it collapsed. The World Trade Center was a transit-owned, transit-oriented development,…
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Enabling Communities to Build Their Own Plazas
All over the country more and more cities are catching on to the idea that public space can be created quickly and cheaply; expensive master plans are becoming a thing of the past. Typically a community partner—a business improvement district or non-profit community organization—can apply through the municipality to transform an excessive roadway into…
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JERUSALEM: Sanctity of Jerusalem in Christianity
This is the second installment of the history of Jerusalem, the first part; Sanctity of Jerusalem in Judaism was posted earlier. The story of Jerusalem is closely tied to the history of the three western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Originally Jerusalem was a small Canaanite settlement brought out of obscurity to the world stage…
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Value Capture and Joint Development
What does real estate have to do with public transportation? Actually, quite a lot. From Michigan Central Station in Detroit to the Hudson Terminal, Helmsley Building, and Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC, American railroads of the 20th century maintained a profit partly due to the transportation hub real estate assets they developed, owned, leased, and/or maintained vis-a-vis value…
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The MTA’s Missed Opportunity
Long Islanders cheered Andrew Cuomo when he intervened in the recent dispute between the MTA and LIRR workers, who had threatened a strike over demands for wage increases. When negotiations stalled between the LIRR, which had demanded a 14% raise over six years, and the MTA, whose offer to spread the same raise over seven…