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America is the most mobile society in history, but our transportation system is on the verge of collapse. Traffic congestion is today five times greater than it was 25 years ago, yet many transportation plans and projects are making it worse. As Randal O’Toole reveals in Gridlock, the prime causes of our ailing system are a government transportation planning philosophy whose primary goal is to diminish auto use—hence, personal mobility—in combination with federal budget incentives that perversely encourage transportation planners to increase congestion. As a result, the automobile which is accessible to almost every family in the nation and provides unparalleled access to better housin...
The American Dream turned into a nightmare when the housing bubble burst, and people have been trying to figure out who to blame- Greedy bankers? Corrupt politicians? Ignorant homeowners? In American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership, Randal O'Toole explores the forces at play in the housing market and shows how we can rebuild the American dream of homeownership by eliminating federal, state, and local policies that distort the free market for housing.
Some people think they know all the answers. They know how far you should live from your job. They know how big your backyard should be. They know how cities and forests should grow. Government planners claim to know all of that and more. They say that if you want to live in pleasant communities, enjoy beautiful wilderness, and get to work on time, you should put them in charge. But 30 years of research has convinced Randal O’Toole—one of Newsweek's top 20 “movers and shakers in the West”—that they’re wrong. In The Best-Laid Plans, he shows in case after case that government planning frequently causes the very problems it is intended to solve. Combining theory with case studies to underscore his analysis, O’Toole calls for repealing federal, state, and local planning laws and proposes reforms that can help solve social and environmental problems without heavy-handed government regulation. The Best-Laid Plans is a powerful challenge to the conventional wisdom about public lands, urban growth, and government planning.
In the blink of an eye, vast economic forces have created new types of communities and reinvented old ones. In The New Geography, acclaimed forecaster Joel Kotkin decodes the changes, and provides the first clear road map for where Americans will live and work in the decades to come, and why. He examines the new role of cities in America and takes us into the new American neighborhood. The New Geography is a brilliant and indispensable guidebook to a fundamentally new landscape.
"Proposes experiments in deregulating and privatizing the country's transportation systems to rid them of inefficiencies and significantly improve their performance in moving goods and people around the United States; the book covers roads, airports and airport traffic control, mass transit, intercity buses and railway networks"--Provided by publisher.
Reforming the Forest Service contributes a completely new view to the current debate on the management of our national forests. Randal O'Toole argues that poor management is an institutional problem; he shows that economic inefficiencies and environmental degradation are the inevitable result of the well-intentioned but poorly designed laws that govern the Forest Service. In this book, he proposes sweeping reforms in the structure of the agency and new budgetary incentives as the best way to improve management. This book is a must reading for environmentalists, academics, forest policy analysts, Forest Service officials, and members of Congress.
Through comprehensive case studies of privately planned cities and neighbourhood in Asia, Europe and North America, this book characterizes the theoretical basis and empirical manifestations of private urban planning. In this innovative volume, Anderss
The Wildfire Reader presents, in an affordable paperback edition, the essays included in Wildfire, offering a concise overview of fire landscapes and the past century of forest policy that has affected them.
"Better Buses, Better Cities is likely the best book ever written on improving bus service in the United States." — Randy Shaw, Beyond Chron "The ultimate roadmap for how to make the bus great again in your city." — Spacing "The definitive volume on how to make bus frequent, fast, reliable, welcoming, and respected..." — Streetsblog Imagine a bus system that is fast, frequent, and reliable—what would that change about your city? Buses can and should be the cornerstone of urban transportation. They offer affordable mobility and can connect citizens with every aspect of their lives. But in the US, they have long been an afterthought in budgeting and planning. With a compelling narrativ...