America Moves: Transportation and Public Policy in the United States

The United States is in a perpetual state of motion. Every day, Americans drive over 8 billion miles, board over 20,000 flights, and ship over 45 million tons of freight. But what drives all of this physical movement? And what is the relationship to public policy? This presentation will begin to answer those questions, utilizing a combination of quantitative metrics and policy analysis to explain how, where, and why Americans move. It will outline driving habits, and the disruptive moment every metropolitan area and state faces due to federal gridlock. It will map aviation patterns, and the emerging presence of global connections in our congested skies. It will expose the oft-hidden transportation category—freight—and how it is the secret ingredient to make modern life possible. Using the major Mountain West metropolitan areas as examples, the presentation aims to give attendees a new understanding and appreciation for America’s enormous transportation network and its inseparable connection to public policy

How Technology Will Change Our Built Environment

As part of the ongoing Brookings Scholar Lecture Series, Brookings Mountain West presented a lecture titled, Digital Place: How Technology Will Change Our Built Environment by Fellow in Metropolitan Policy, Adie Tomer on February 6, 2019. Digital technologies promise to upend nearly every component of the economy, including how we work, shop, travel, and even live inside our homes. There is too little conversation about how adoption of various technologies will interact with the current built environment and the policies that guide future investment. This lecture explores how the economy currently functions, where technology will transform economic functions, and how future scenarios will place different demands on local leadership to develop a built environment that promotes growth, opportunity, and resilience

Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America

Analyzes data on metropolitan areas' transit systems, including access, rush hour service, and percentage of high- and low-skill jobs reached in ninety minutes. Explores implications for investments and land use, economic development, and housing policy

Not according to plan: Exploring gaps in city climate planning and the need for regional action

As the country's primary economic and population centers, cities drive most greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and will absorb most climate-related costs. And the growing frequency of floods, fires, droughts, and heat waves puts cities of all sizes in greater danger.To reduce these costs and amplify benefits, cities need to reduce emissions (or "decarbonize") their built environment. Eliminating fossil fuel consumption from their transportation, building, and electricity sectors is essential; collectively, these sectors produce nearly two-thirds of national GHG emissions. However, achieving those reductions will require more than simply relying on new federal rules and funding, including those in the Inflation Reduction Act. Local planners, policymakers, and practitioners need to coordinate on new infrastructure investments.One of the first steps cities have taken is the drafting of "climate action plans"—many of which pledge specific carbon reductions. Yet even as these plans proliferate, cities leaders are struggling to hit their targets. One gap in city climate planning and action is internal, with cities often failing to specify detailed strategies that will advance their goals. The other gap is regional: Individual cities do not have the fiscal, technical, or programmatic capacity to single-handedly drive decarbonization across their metropolitan regions, and often, they do not coordinate with other jurisdictions.This report attempts to better understand why cities are failing to meet their targets and what can be learned from the planning practices that are working well. By evaluating the most comprehensive decarbonization plans across 50 of the country's largest cities, the report judges how well the strategies and actions in these plans prepare cities for meaningful, accountable decarbonization

State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation

Examines 2000-09 demographic and economic trends and highlights five new realities: growth and outward expansion, population diversification, aging, uneven higher educational attainment, and income polarization. Analyzes national and regional challenges

Making local economies prosperous and resilient: The case for a modern Economic Development Administration

Congress has recently shown serious interest in reauthorizing the Economic Development Administration (EDA), a Department of Commerce agency last authorized in 2004. Congressional appropriators will also have their turn in adequately resourcing the agency, following the extraordinary demands of the pandemic and other impacts to local economies over the past two years. The urgency and importance of congressional attention cannot be overstated. America's global economic standing is under threat as digital disruption, the race for talent, and widening inequality both within and across regions challenge the nation's competitiveness. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy regularly confronts recessions, extreme weather events, supply chain breakdowns, and other shocks that disproportionately impact some local economies and further test the nation's collective ability to adapt and maintain economic resilience over the long run. In response, the country needs to marshal the economic assets that cluster in specialized ways across the regions that make up the U.S. economy--be they leading industries, research universities, entrepreneurs, or workers. These assets are critical if the nation hopes to, for instance, reduce its reliance on imports and boost supply chain resilience with greater homegrown capabilities in computer chip, renewable energy, and medical equipment design and production. Furthermore, regions with strong innovation, economic diversification, and civic capacities are more able to adapt and bounce back from economic disruptions. For these reasons, the federal government has a vested interest in spurring place-based regional economic development. To do that, it has the EDA--the one federal agency whose sole charge is to promote economic revitalization in communities of any scale, rural or urban, across the country. In short, the EDA's role is essential if the U.S. is to compete globally and prosper locally. The concern is that the EDA is not properly resourced or equipped to meet its vital mission and nationwide mandate. The agency is tasked to do too much with too little—its chronically small annual budget, combined with unpredictable special appropriations, positions the agency as marginal when, in fact, the opposite is true. The EDA is the nation's indispensable agency for supporting economic growth and resilience for communities large and small, as their leaders respond regularly to new opportunities and threats. But the policy and budget process does not yet treat it accordingly.  Congress can do its part. It can use reauthorization, now decades overdue, to elevate and modernize the EDA. It can give the agency the tools and resources to match its mandate, so it can successfully help communities and the nation adapt and rise to the immense challenges of the 21st century economy, including the range of economic disruptions today and those to come. EDA reauthorization deserves bipartisan attention and action. To inform this process, this brief provides a rationale and framework for EDA reauthorization. It is organized in three sections. First, it expands on the case for a federal role in regional economic development. It then shows why only the legislative process can better equip the EDA to improve America's capacity to innovate, compete, and expand economic opportunity for more people in more places. The brief closes with how: We recommend that the EDA become a $4 billion agency with a sharper purpose and set of roles and capabilities that match that mission. We believe this framework for EDA reauthorization and future appropriations would set the agency and its community partners up for success in today's--and tomorrow's--economy.  The authors of this brief have worked for decades with local, state, tribal, and national leaders on economic development planning, strategies, and execution. We are attuned to the demands placed on economic development actors across urban and rural communities, small and large regions, tribal nations, and downtowns and Main Streets. We are familiar with the complexity of implementation in areas such as innovation, talent development, finance, community economic development, placemaking, infrastructure, and regional and environmental planning. We came together to test a simple proposition: That despite our diverse backgrounds and experiences in economic development, we could agree on the importance of making the EDA a high-performing federal partner in spurring innovation and economic renewal for every region of the country and a policy framework for how to make that happen.

Building for proximity: The role of activity centers in reducing total miles traveled

American households live amid a transportation conundrum. From a technological perspective, no developed country makes greater use of private vehicles and their incredible ability to cover long distances in relatively little time. The problem is that all those vehicles come at a real cost to society: growing environmental damage, unsafe roads, higher household transportation spending, and rising costs to maintain all the infrastructure. Even as electric vehicles promise to reduce the climate impacts of driving, this latest innovation still fails to address car dependency's other persistent costs to society.Building for proximity could offer a more holistic solution. Helping people live closer to the centers of economic activity—from downtown hubs to local Main Streets—should reduce the distances people need to travel for many of their essential trips. Shorter trip distances, in turn, make walking, bicycling, and transit more attractive and can improve quality of life. And as more people travel by foot instead of a private vehicle, officials can feel empowered to build complete streets that include lower speed limits, protected bike lanes, and other amenities

Value Capture In Situ

This paper provides a qualitative examination of the implementation of a value capture–funded streetcar investment in Kansas City, MO. Using semi-structured interviews, I show that the local benefits of value capture financing go beyond revenue-raising. Local officials used value capture to limit the public approval process to residents who supported enhanced transit and to redefine the metrics of a successful transport investment in terms of land development impacts. This strategic, and unexpected, use of value capture underwrites property-led economic development that uses infrastructure investments to signal public-sector priorities, in terms of both geography and populations

Performance of scientific cameras with different sensor types in measuring dynamic processes in fluorescence microscopy

The plethora of available scientific cameras of different types challenges the biologically oriented experimenter when picking the appropriate camera for his experiment. In this study, we chose to investigate camera performances in a typical nonsingle molecule situation in life sciences, that is, quantitative measurements of fluorescence intensity changes from video data with typically skewed intensity distributions. Here, intensity profile dynamics of pH-sensors upon triggered changes of pH-environments in living cells served as a model system. The following camera types were tested: sCMOS, CCD (scientific and nonscientific) and EM-CCD (back-and front-illuminated). We found that although the EM-CCD cameras achieved the best absolute spatial SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) values, the sCMOS was at least of equal performance when the spatial SNR was related to the effective dynamic range, and it was superior in terms of temporal SNR. In the measurements of triggered intensity changes, the sCMOS camera had the advantage that it used the smallest fraction of its dynamic range when depicting intensity changes, and thus featured the best SNR at full usage of its dynamic range. (C) 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc