Monthly archives: October, 2020

Shielding and Weaponizing Your Travel Model

Excerpt from “The Planners Guide to Advocacy Modeling” by Alan Horowitz Chapter 12.  Shielding and Weaponizing Your Travel Model  Earlier chapters of this book describe methods of building and calibrating a travel model to assure that it produces the desired policy outputs.  However, a model will not be particularly useful in advancing a political agenda unless certain steps are taken to …

How I Bought My House in Whitefish Bay (a Story About a Land-Use Model)

I must digress.  The first house Shirley and I bought was in the Detroit area.  After looking at several gorgeous, ridiculously cheap, mansions in the City of Detroit, we decided to look for more modest digs in the suburbs.  We wanted to identify the “good” neighborhoods near the GM Tech Center, so on a map I shaded 2-mile radius circles around every K-Mart.  The closest hole …

Inequities in Transportation Planning, A Southeast Wisconsin Case Study

We badly need to overhaul the composition of one particular regional planning agency in Wisconsin.  The recent protests over inequities in policing have also told us we have subtle institutional inequities throughout our governments.  The inequities cannot be starker than planning in southeast Wisconsin, where I have lived and worked for most of my life.  Usually, at this point in an opinion piece the author inserts a disclaimer.  My …