Google Maps Bike There…for a safer, healthier, happier world. :-)

Neal Peirce writes about city stuff; he does it well, and he’s been doing it for a long time. From a speaking event he did about five months ago in Portland, we get this description of Peirce:

Neal Peirce is a foremost writer, among American journalists, on metropolitan regions—their political and economic dynamics, their emerging national and global roles. Known widely as a lecturer on regional, urban, federal system and community development issues, Peirce has been a familiar figure before civic, business, academic, and professional groups nationally. He has appeared on Meet the Press, The Today Show, National Public Radio, and local media across the country.

Peirce wrote an article this past March that was very popular in the bike blogosphere—”Year of the Bicycle?.” Now, Peirce and his colleagues have launched a new website and column at Citiwire.net. A blurb on the home page offers this greeting and description:

“Welcome to Citiwire.net! We promised to focus on a new American narrative in these dispatches, and this week’s columns match. My Citistates colleague Scott Polikov, president of the Fort Worth-based Gateway Planning Group, describes exciting new development economics that match the today’s sustainability imperatives. My regular column focuses on pathbreaking barriers to the automobile’s total dominance of our local communities.” — Neal Peirce

I’ve only read a couple of articles so far, but I really like what I’ve seen; it might be something you want to check out, too.

Peirce’s latest column touches on a bunch of subjects, an especially-important one being market-rate parking:

A few cities are starting to charge true market costs for parking on public streets. Example: fees of up to $40 for four hours near the new baseball stadium in Washington, D.C.

I think market-rate parking could have a huge impact on downtowns, so much so that we should have included it in our “Big Initiatives” post (along with a few other great ideas). San Francisco is about to launch its trial of this market-based parking, and I can’t wait to see what happens. Donald Shoup is just the latest example of why paying attention to research is so important.

Of course, Streetsblog has a couple of excellent video interviews with “The Parking Professor,” Donald Shoup, here and here (in chronological order). Shoup is a professor of urban planning at UCLA, and has written a book that becomes more important every day in our congested downtowns, The High Cost of Free Parking. If you weren’t already aware of this market-rate parking concept, when you get done watching these videos, you’ll think, “Wow. We need to do this in our city right now.”