Links

1.   Frumination works out the highway and parking capacity Manhattan would need to replace its morning rush hour subway capacity:

At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges. And this neglects the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, NJ Transit, and PATH systems entirely.

Of course, at 325 square feet per parking space, all these cars would need over 3.8 square miles of space to park, about 3 times the size of Central Park. At that point, who would want to go to Manhattan anyway?

See the neat map at the bottom of his entry showing how much land Manhattan would have to devote to parking.  Commuters of course would abandon Manhattan long before things reached this state.  But Manhattan would not be Manhattan in either case.  

Pointer from a reader.

(NB: Tyler Cowen thought this was interesting enough for a link . . . to Kottke, who merely quoted a snippet of Frumination's entry.  Jerk.  (Cowen, not Kottke.))

2.  A Detroit neighborhood reverts to prairie (images from DetroitYES):

(H/t the Urbanophile.)

3.  Professor Chris Nelson, Director of the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah, projects  that the homeownership rate will fall to 63.5% by 2020, sparking intense demand for rban infill and redevelopment.   (Via Calculated Risk; no link to paper available.)

I think our homeownership rate is too high, a result of tax subsidies and land-use policies.  It ought to drop.  But it won't drop by several percent.   Richard Green, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California (and no conservative), fisks Nelson's study.