NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management

02/21/2019

Fixing New York City Bus Service

Writing for City and State NY, Eric Goldwyn lays out the ways in which the City of New York can speed up its bus service and boost ridership:

"Fixing the bus system requires vision and political courage, but – unlike a lot of the city’s problems – many of these upgrades are within the city’s purview. The city and the MTA will need to coordinate their efforts and work together, but it’s not a function of getting the state to fund a multibillion-dollar capital plan, as it is with the subways. Street redesigns implemented by the city transportation department, for example, help buses operated by the MTA run more efficiently, which means fewer hours of overtime and more money for other transit needs."

With all of the excitement and focus on autonomous vehicles and ride-hailing companies like Uber, Lyft and Via, this year is poised to be the year of the bus in New York City. Since Jan.

02/20/2019

What can states in the American Mountain West do to get out in front of nascent housing crises in their fastest growing metros?

Nolan Gray & Brandon Fuller take a look at Utah SB34 as a possible model in CityLab

Through original reporting, sharp analysis, and visual storytelling, CityLab informs and inspires the people who are creating the cities of the future—and those who want to live there.

02/08/2019

Marron Professor Shlomo Angel reviews Rupert Christiansen's "City of Light: The Making of Modern Paris" in The Wall Street Journal

"City of Light should whet readers' appetites to pursue Haussmann's story further. When it comes to tales about the making of cities, the tale of Baron Haussmann ranks among the most inspiring, the one richest in lessons still relevant today. Our cities will need massive retrofitting in this century, and we could use a new generation of farsighted civil servants certainly more transparent and more accountable than Haussmann to pursue the common good."

Haussmann’s projects created the city we know today, but he was brought down by an uproar over the debts the city incurred.

02/07/2019

Marron founding director and faculty affiliate Paul Romer offers advice to the next President of the World Bank Bank in Financial Times. Among other things, he calls on the bank to focus more on planning for rapid urban growth in low and middle-income countries.

Link to FT.com below.

Ungated version of the oped reproduced with permission on Romer's blog:

https://paulromer.net/ft_oped/

Outsourcing research would allow the institution to give help to those who need it most

02/07/2019

We are hiring a fellow to work closely with the Director of the Marron Institute, Professor Clayton Gillette, and Georgetown Professor Sheila Foster of LabGov - LABoratorio per la GOVernance della città come un bene comune on an urban regeneration project in Baton Rouge.

Learn more about the Co-City Baton Rouge project and the project fellow position at the link below.

The Marron Institute is hiring a Project Fellow to manage a co-governance project aimed at regenerating parts of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

01/18/2019

Civic Analytics Graduate Student Fellowship

*Applications due February 1*

An opportunity for New York University graduate students to work with Professor Constantine Kontokosta on data analytics projects that address critical operational & policy challenges in cities.

The Civic Analytics Graduate Student Fellowship invites up to four current NYU graduate students for a four-month applied urban data science fellowship.

01/17/2019

Constantine Kontokosta Joins the Marron Institute

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Constantine Kontokosta to the faculty of the Marron Institute. Professor Kontokosta’s Civic Analytics Program will work with cities to acquire and analyze data that can inform solutions to significant problems of urban policy and planning. Among his program's ongoing projects are an effort to estimate bias in citizen complaint data, a collaborative project to model urban carbon emissions, and an effort to use large-scale locational data to develop a real-time census of the city.

Learn more:

https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/programs/civic-analytics

01/16/2019

Ten things in transit and transportation that are more inequitable than congestion pricing

"There’s a growing interest in using congestion pricing to help tackle traffic issues in major cities. Putting a price on peak hour road capacity is the only thing that’s been shown to effectively reduce congestion, based on experience in London, Stockholm, Singapore and other cities, high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes in a growing number of US cities. But proposals to put a price on something that’s widely–if inaccurately–perceived to be “free” invites all manner of arguments from those who might have to pay. And a favorite argument is that road pricing is somehow punitive to the poor, and inequitable.

Any time we charge a positive price for anything, the cost of paying that price is a higher burden on the poor than it is on the rich. It takes a special combination of myopia and tunnel vision to look at the prospect of congestion pricing anything other than a minor blip on a system of transportation finance that is systematically unfair to the poor and those who don’t own (or can’t afford) car.

Here is our list of ten things that are more inequitable that road pricing." via City Observatory

Don’t decry congestion pricing as inequitable until after you fix, or at least acknowledge, these ten other things that are even more inequitable about the way we pay for transportation. Ther…

01/14/2019

India is far more urban than its official measures suggest — facing up to this reality will be critical to improving the public services that support economic opportunity and growth. Research & comment from Reuben Abraham & Pritika Hingorani of IDFC Institute

And unless politicians start acting that way, its burgeoning metropolises could grow well-nigh unlivable.

12/18/2018

City Observatory on Paul Romer's Nobel Address

"Our ability to enlarge the circle of “us” is critical to achieving the economies of scale that enable idea creation to make our lives better. Cities that work well bring people together, and create a more inclusive “us.” What Romer’s work underscores is that inclusiveness, and the way in which we build great urban spaces is at the heart of both improving human well-being and assuring that its benefits are widely shared."

Cities are critical to expanding the circle of “us” and generating the new ideas that propel progress In October, Paul Romer was awarded the Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences for his…

12/13/2018

Improving student participation rates for online math homework by more effectively engaging parents: a trial snapshot from PS182Q, Samantha Smith School in Queens, and Professor Angela Hawken's BetaEd team.

Professor Angela Hawken's BetaEd initiative recently worked with Samantha Smith School in Queens to test a new approach to engaging parents on math homework.

12/13/2018

Jenny Schuetz of The Brookings Institution on the Minneapolis 2040 plan:

"Perhaps proximity to the North Pole has its advantages. On December 7, Santa Claus (a.k.a. the Minneapolis City Council) delivered an early holiday gift to Twin Cities urbanists: several key zoning reforms, neatly packaged in an 1100-page comprehensive plan. YIMBYs around the country have been following the pitched battle over the plan’s most revolutionary feature: whether to allow small apartment buildings in neighborhoods currently zoned for only single-family homes. The approved plan would change the allowed residential uses on roughly half the city’s land. But, this is only one of several plan components for zoning reformers to applaud. In this piece, I discuss the strategies through which Minneapolis 2040 aims to improve housing affordability, and what the remaining challenges are toward implementing the plan."

Brookings David M. Rubenstein fellow Jenny Schuetz examines the Minneapolis City Council's recent passing of the Minneapolis 2040 plan