Pages tagged with urban planning

Planning a High-Density, Transit-Oriented Future for Waldorf, Maryland
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

When high-capacity transit comes to downtown Waldorf, Maryland -- as the Maryland Transit Administration has been discussing for several years -- local planners want the site to be ready to handle the new development that they hope will accompany it. A 2010 study funded under the Transportation P

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Infrastructure deficit, U.S.-China climate challenges, regional economic growth, and more!
Monday, May 14th, 2012

It’s been awhile since we’ve done a round-up of posts here at The Yardstick and since we’ve covered so many topics over the past couple of months, we thought we’d sum them up in case you haven’t had a chance to see them all: Metro Washington and the U.S. as a whole are suffering from a

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Changes to How Metro is Governed Informed by Extensive Review of Other Transit Agencies
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

An extensive research effort by the Transportation Planning Board and other groups in the Washington region over the past two years has informed a series of actions by area jurisdictions and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) that change how the transit system is governed. 

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Observations from China on Governance, Sustainability, Future Global Partnership
Friday, April 27th, 2012

This March, Jeff King, a Principal Environmental Planner at MWCOG, and Rick Cole, City Manager at the City of Ventura, California, traveled to the cities of Beijing, Xi'an, and Chongqing in China as part of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) China Center initiative. As p

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Global Fridays: Are countries “cheating” to reduce emissions? What role does urban planning play in race relations?
Friday, April 20th, 2012

Happy Friday! To get your weekend off to a great start, here are a few international news clips related to climate change, bike sharing, energy efficiency, and a reminder on the role of land use plays in how people interact with one another: “Very few countries have cut their carbon emissions

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Connecting people to the transportation planning process
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Twenty community leaders from around the Washington region recently attended a two-day workshop hosted by the Transportation Planning Board to learn about how transportation decisions are made in the region and how to become more involved in the decision-making process. Now in its sixth year, the

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Innovation and Urbanism: A Winning Combination
Friday, March 23rd, 2012

How innovative is your metro area? Jonathan Rothwell over at The New Republic breaks down some new OECD data on inventors per capita and applications for patents by country and by metro area. Rothwell notes that ten metro areas, which comprise only about two percent of the world’s population, acco

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New tools to measure and predict the region’s travel patterns
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

Recent updates to the tools used by the Transportation Planning Board (TPB) to forecast future travel patterns in metropolitan Washington will provide more accurate predictions of where, when, and how the millions of current and future residents of the region will travel in coming decades. The ch

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Regional cooperation, economic diversity, public transit, & small business key to the DC area’s future economy
Friday, March 16th, 2012

This video features "highlights" from the presentation given by Dr. Stephen Fuller on the current state and future of the metro Washington economy. Fuller explains that the region must take a cooperative approach to planning for slower growth and promoting economic diversification, in light of li

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Small tech firms, Silver Line (not Uncle Sam) will fuel future growth in Metro Washington
Thursday, March 15th, 2012

As we’ve discussed many times on the blog, significant cuts in federal spending are right around the corner.  And metro Washington, more than any other region in the nation, will feel a major impact from them. Fortunately, area leaders are working proactively to create a more diversified, stab

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