Archinect - News

MIT research finds that commuting distances are standard regardless of city size

2023-01-03T11:24:00-05:00

Researchers from the MIT Senseable City Lab have produced a series of maps visualizing commuting habits across Chinese cities. Titled Potato Project, the study used mobile phone location data from 50 million individuals across 234 cities to understand commuting patterns between a person’s home and work locations.

Image credit: MIT Senseable City Lab

The research project was launched in response to the group’s observation that despite the significant increase in the size of cities over decades, commuting distances and times in larger cities have remained stable versus smaller cities. “The conserved commuting properties are quite counter-intuitive,” the team notes, “as the distance from the periphery to the urban center in larger cities is obviously greater than that in medium- or small-sized cities.”

Image credit: MIT Senseable City Lab

With little existing large-scale modeling on the subject, the researchers analyzed the mobile phone location data to better understand the similarities...

100 MPH commuter rail plan could modernize San Diego's highways

2019-10-22T12:47:00-04:00

The San Diego Association of Governments’ ambitious rail plan includes laying hundreds of miles of track throughout the county to connect residential areas to these job centers. Agency experts are analyzing the region’s commuter patterns in an attempt to design rail service that lures commuters off the most congested highway corridors. The lines, many of which are planned as subways, will go through existing residential areas with the added aim of encouraging dense development along the routes.

The ambitious plan could be funded by a series of sales tax increases, which would have to be approved by local voters.

SANDAG Executive Director Hasan Ikhrata told The San Diego Union-Tribune, “I think this region is more suited to follow-up with transit-oriented development than any other region in the country,” adding, “All California and the U.S. is designed around the car, around the interstate system. It took 50 years to have the land-use we have. It’s going to take 50 years to reverse it with the rail.”

Driverless technology is about to reshape the real estate industry

2018-02-16T18:06:00-05:00

The link between property and transport has been perhaps the most durable in human history. Since the ancients, few things have delivered higher land values with more certainty than advances in transport, from roads to canals, railways to highways. [...] But now, the dawn of the driverless car—promising a utopia of stress-free commutes, urban playgrounds and the end of parking hassles—threatens to complicate the calculus for anyone buying property.

Bloomberg Technology explains how the real estate industry is already preparing for all that sweet, sweet valuable space to open up for development once the widespread arrival of driverless vehicles makes parked cars — and the blocked square footage they occupy — a thing of the past.

Killer commute? Job hunt in the US’s top public transportation cities

2017-12-13T11:50:00-05:00

Traveling to and from work should be easy, efficient, and allow you to focus on what matters: your job. While hunting for the next opportunity, take commute into account and start searching in the US's top cities with the best transportation. Scoring is based on The AllTransit Performance Score, which looks at connectivity, access to jobs, and frequency of service. We have rounded up some current job opportunities in these top cities from Archinect’s Job Board.

New York, NY

New York City’s vast public transportation network provides access to the highest number of jobs and moves by far the greatest number of people with a total ridership of more than 2.5 billion including buses.

NYC map of jobs reached in half an hour using public transportation, dark red is one million plus. Photo: University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies.

COOKFOX is currently hiring an Intermediate Architect.

The right candidate will possess excellent design skills, 4-7 years of professional exper...

Car-less apartment renters pay 16% of their rent for parking that they don't use

2017-07-18T18:43:00-04:00

The average price of building a garage parking space (as much as $34,000 in 2012) is passed on to people whether they own a car or not, and distort the true demand for urban parking.

According to the 2011 National American Housing Survey data of the US census, about 16% of a housing unit’s monthly rental cost is attributable to the expense of building an urban parking spot. For the average renter that amounts to to $1,700 per year, or $142 per month.

Parking mandates increase housing prices by displacing area that could have gone to housing (thus shrinking supply), and makes each new unit more expensive to pay for more garage parking. A separate study in Los Angeles found the city’s parking minimums raised apartment prices by about $200 per month and price of a condo by about $43,000. Renters without cars end up subsidizing this arrangement to the tune of about $440 million annually in the US. While only 7% of US rental households lack cars, according to Census data, this burden falls most heavily on the urban poor since lower-income households can least afford to subsidize garage parking spaces.

Researchers find that it might be less wasteful to price and sell ...

How much is easy access to a subway worth?

2016-08-31T13:40:00-04:00

How much would you be willing to pay to shave a minute off your commute? For New Yorkers, the answer appears to be around $56 per month. That’s how much more New Yorkers pay in rent, on average, for a one-bedroom apartment that’s a minute closer by subway to Manhattan’s main business districts. That finding...puts an approximate value on the old real estate adage about the importance of location, location, location.

More data collectin' and crunchin':

A look at the history and future of the American commute

2016-05-02T17:34:00-04:00

"The idea that you can replace the 10 trips with one autonomous car and travel less distance, that’s the biggest misconception," says Fagnant. "You can get rid of vehicles, but not vehicle miles traveled. Without ridesharing, there's an 8 to 10 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled based on simulations we've run in Austin. You’re not replacing trips [..] the vehicle has to bounce between locations, and relocate to where it’s needed. Those in-between miles will create a lot of extra travel."

Hyperloop announces plans for first European routes

2016-03-11T13:23:00-05:00

In a joint statement yesterday the Playa Vista, California-based Hyperloop Transport Technologies (HTT) and the Slovak Republic’s economy minister held out the future vision of the Hyperloop whisking passengers at 760 mph between Vienna in Austria, Budapest in Hungary and the Slovakian capital of Bratislava. A Bratislava-to-Vienna route would take just 8 minutes at full speed, while a Bratislava-to-Budapest route would take 10 minutes.

Hyperloop previously in the Archinect news:

More Americans are becoming "mega-commuters", U.S. Census stats show

2016-02-26T17:51:00-05:00

In 1980, for instance, fewer than 12 percent of American workers commuted for 45 minutes or more one way, according to the Census. The Census didn't even bother separating out 60- and 90-minute commuters in 1980, since it was relatively rare. But they began tracking these mega-commuters in 1990. That year, 1.6 percent of workers commuted 90 minutes or more one way. In 2014, 2.62 percent of workers were commuting this long, an increase of 64 percent over the prevalence in 1990.

More about urban mobility:

So Cal has dumped a lot of money into transit projects, but there's been little pay-off so far

The Ehang passenger drone might be another way people will get around town someday

Is America actually shifting away from its car obsession? Not entirely.

Think driverless cars will reduce traffic? Not so fast.

Share your creative commute proposals to NY Transit Museum's PLATFORM 2015

2015-02-02T15:51:00-05:00

With the right mindset, commutes can become an abundant source for inspiration. Creative commuters or commuters in need of a creative outlet are invited to send submissions about public transit to the New York Transit Museum's PLATFORM 2015.

Now in its second year, PLATFORM 2015 lets commuters perform and share their work inside the museum's decommissioned subway station home. Entries from all disciplines and academic fields are welcome, including: history, science, engineering, visual + performing arts, urban studies, and city planning.

Submissions may include but are not limited to:

Live performance (music, theater, dance, spoken word, storytelling, comedy)
Film (documentary, fiction, creative media works)
Visual Art (must include a presentation or programmatic discussion of the artwork)
Presentation (academic lecture, informal slideshow, etc.)
Panel discussion (must include participants, moderator, topic, and your expertise)
Other participatory events

Submissions are due by February 20....

Rise in cycling expands NYC's real estate market

2014-05-29T13:07:00-04:00

As the search for more affordable real estate in New York City pushes deeper into neighborhoods that were once considered out of the way, bicycle lanes are taking on new importance. Since 2007, the city has carved out more than 350 miles of bike lanes in the five boroughs, according to the Department of Transportation. As a result, the distance from the nearest subway or bus stop has become less of a drawback for the two-wheeled set, particularly in transit-challenged areas of Brooklyn.

Biking to work in the U.S. has increased 60% over last decade

2014-05-14T13:14:00-04:00

Many U.S. cities are seeing an increase in bicycle commuters, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released today. Nationwide, the number of people who traveled to work by bike increased roughly 60 percent over the last decade, from about 488,000 in 2000 to about 786,000 during the 2008-2012 period. This is the largest percentage increase of all commuting modes tracked by the 2000 Census and the 2008-2012 American Community Survey.

If you're feeling wonky, you can read the full U.S. Census Bureau report here. It's the Census Bureau's first report to focus entirely on biking and walking to work, with statistics since 1990.

You can also explore commuting statistics for every U.S. neighborhood in the Bureau's Census Explorer, an interactive map that breaks down commuting by commuter age, census tract, type of transportation, and total time.

Regulating the Private Buses of “Google-land”

2014-01-23T14:47:00-05:00

Before the buses became a symbol for San Francisco’s gentrification woes, they were just a fleet of several hundred private coaches that whisked some seventeen thousand workers around San Francisco and to and from the Silicon Valley campuses of such companies as Apple, Google, and Genentech. [...] San Francisco is deep into a second tech boom—and, with it, many less affluent workers are getting priced out of the city.