It has now been over 4 weeks since New York City started charging motorists to enter Manhattan so that they pay for a portion of the impact they have on roadways in the city. And the data overwhelmingly supports that travel times have fallen as a result. Transit ridership also appears to be increasing, despite what some critics will tell you, and trains and buses appear to be moving more efficiently as well (via Fast Company):More commuters are opting for buses to cross Manhattan, and those b...

Today is the third day of New York's new congestion relief zone. And if you're curious to see how it's already impacting traffic conditions, here is a website run by Joshua Moshes and Benjamin Moshes, under the supervision of Brown University Professor Emily Oster. The site collects Google Maps traffic data every 15 minutes for 19 routes leading into Manhattan (some of which are directly affected by the new relief zone and some of which are not). It then calculates average traffic times for e...

Good morning. Well, it finally happened. After decades of delay and negotiations, New York City finally implemented congestion pricing for the area of Manhattan south of 60th Street. This is a first for the United States, and so it's a big deal not just for the city, but for this part of the world. It went into effect yesterday, on Sunday at midnight, so that the MTA could work out any kinks before this morning's rush hour. And apparently everything went smoothly. Drivers are now required to ...

When I first saw this picture of Louis Vuitton's flagship store in Manhattan I thought it was AI. That is where we are right now. When something looks wild, I just automatically assume it's fake. But alas, it's not fake. Louis Vuitton is renovating their flagship store at the corner of 57th Street and 5th Avenue and so, naturally, they decided to completely cover it with luggage facade wraps. These wraps make the entire building look like six grey trunks stacked on top of each other and are a...

I first wrote about Manhattan's proposed congestion charge back in 2018. Naturally, some people supported it and some people opposed it. Four years later, it was reported that the charge was still being considered for the area of the island south of 60th Street, and that it could generate an additional $1 billion in revenue for the city's transportation authority. But then in June of this year, right before the charge was set to come into effect on June 30, 2024, New York Governor K...

Let's continue with our theme of city blocks and talk about another city with a noteworthy street grid: Barcelona. Up until the middle of the 19th century, Barcelona was a tiny medieval city hemmed in by 6 km of walls and totalling just over 2 square kilometers. If you look at a map of the city today, it's pretty easy to see where this was:This was of course done for military purposes. Barcelona's medieval walls helped the city resist siege after siege. But the result was also overcrowding, u...

https://youtu.be/erHe_WF4D1s?si=k0boyRmdSHrf8Y2r Street networks tend to be pretty sticky. Meaning, they tend not to change very much, or at all, over time. We have spoken about this before, over the years. A good example of this is Broadway in Manhattan. Broadway is a world-famous street. And it's perhaps no coincidence that it's also the only street that runs the full length of Manhattan and breaks across the city's regular street grid. The exact reasons for this are somewhat...

It is estimated that about 1% of the total housing stock in New York City is rent controlled (2019 figure), which is something different than rent stabilized. Generally the way the former works is that you have to have been living continuously in the home since July 1, 1971, and the building itself needs to have been constructed before 1947. If this is the case, then in theory, you should have seen relatively minor rent increases over the years. This was the case for the late real estate agen...

Last week we spoke about how many businesses don't want to own their own real estate, but that some do. We then spoke about Prada's recent acquisition of 720 and 724 Fifth Avenue for $835 million. However, they're not the only ones. According to New York's The Real Deal (thank you John Bell for the article), last year saw the following transactions:Swiss fashion house Akris bought a property from SL Green for $40.6 millionJapanese coffee retailer Geshary bought a property ...

We need more "activity centers". That is my takeaway from this report by Brookings. Activity centers are exactly what they sound like. But to be more specific, the definition used in the report is based on five categories of assets: community, tourism, consumption, institutional, and economic. And what the authors did was look at the relative concentration of each across the 110 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the US with at least 500,000 residents. They then came up with 3 different...