Good news: The Harold Washington Library Center is on a list of world-class buildings in the world. Bad news: The list is Forbes magazine’s ten ugliest (forbes.com/2002/05/03/ 0503home.html).
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The hype: “Transit Grows Faster Than Driving,” according to a Surface Transportation Policy Project press release issued April 17. The facts: “In 2000, transit provided about 46.6 billion miles of movement while passenger miles traveled in the same year on highways totaled about 4 trillion,” writes veteran urban analyst Anthony Downs in Governing (March), responding to a similar grossly misleading press release from the year before. Advocacy groups such as the STPP can play games with the numbers because transit ridership is so small that any ridership gain can be translated into impressive-looking percentages. As Downs writes, “In 1999, a year about which STPP said that ‘growth in public transit exceeds growth in driving,’ total transit travel grew by about 1.7 billion passenger miles. But growth in car passenger miles was at least 51 billion miles.”
Boeing is the exception, not the rule. Thomas Klier and William Testa of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago find that more than half of the big businesses (those having more than 2,500 employees) that had their corporate headquarters in Chicago in 2000 were either already established by 1990 or had grown big since then (“Economic Perspectives,” second quarter). Just six percent had moved in from out of town in the last decade. They also found that nationwide between 1990 and 2000 there was “a high degree of turnover and migration of headquarters, but an even higher degree of headquarters growth that has come about as small local companies have grown large. This result implies that policies to assist the growth of local indigenous firms of smaller size may be more beneficial than policies aimed at recruitment of footloose companies.”
