Big Topics & Big Ideas
Urbanization
RTD is Sinking
The RTD ship is sinking and Colorado legislators want to fix it by rearranging the deck chairs. According to U.S. Department of Transportation data, RTD carried less than 64 percent as many riders in May 2024 as in May 2019, well below the 77 percent average for...
Frontier Live on X – The Good, Bad & Ugly of Winnipeg Plan 20-50 – with Randal O’Toole
Big Topics & Big Ideas
Building a 21st Century Transit System for Calgary
Calgary Transit is mired in the past, building an obsolete transit system designed for an archaic view of a city. Before the pandemic, transit carried 45 percent of downtown Calgary employees to work, but less than 10 percent of workers in the rest of the Calgary...
Featured News
Canadian Property Rights Index 2023
A Snapshot of Property Rights Protection in Canada After 10 years
Alberta Politics and Empty Promises of Health-care Solutions
The writ has been dropped and Albertans are off to the polls on May 29. That leaves just four weeks for political leaders and voters to sort out what is arguably the most divisive, yet significant, issue for this election - health care. On Day 2, NDP leader Rachel...
We Should Follow New Zealand On Housing And Free Up More Land For Growth
Attempts to contain ‘urban sprawl’ have driven land prices sky-high. It’s time to abandon densification strategies.
The 15-Minute City: An Extraordinarily Bad Idea
The latest urban planning fad to sweep across Canada is the 15-minute city, which proposes to redesign cities so that all urban residents live within an easy, 15-minute walk of schools, retailers, restaurants, entertainment, and other essentials of modern life. This...
Frontier Live on X – Is Our Transit System Really Serving You? – With Randal O’Toole
Big Topics & Big Ideas
Reinventing Transit for the 21st Century
Canada’s first subway line, which opened in Toronto in 1954, was 7.4 kilometers long and cost $6.8 million per kilometer—$76 million per kilometer in today’s money. That seems a bargain compared to a subway line Toronto is now constructing at a projected cost of well...
Building 21st Century Transit Systems For Canadian Cities
Policy Series 241
Revival of Rail Transit in Canada Questioned by Latest Policy Report
WINNIPEG, [March 12 2024] Canada's transit landscape is experiencing a profound transformation as eight major cities embark on the ambitious journey of developing rail transit systems. This marks a significant departure from the conventional wisdom of the 1950s when...
What Will Become of Cities?
Brownstone Institute
How to Kill a Country
Much of Seoul is a sea of high-rises. And not just Seoul: Busan and other cities in South Korea have lots of high rises. More than half of all South Korean households live in high rises, and well over 60 percent live in some kind of multifamily housing. South Korea...
High-Rise Datacenters: Potential to Assist Downtown Recovery
The largest Central business districts (CBDs or downtowns) face a serious crisis as working from home has seriously reduced the demand for five-day on-site employment. The CBDs most at risk are typically those with the strongest transit work trip market shares, at...