The Biourbanist

Richard Florida writes again about the Buffalo Mega-Region, this time in the Buffalo News. In sum, he states that getting people when they’re young to come and stay in the region, and simplify travel within the region, should work together to make Tor-Buf-Chester great.

As readers of this blog know, I am from Buffalo. Therefore, I read with particular pride the Forbes article Best and Worst Cities for Commuters where Buffalo is crowned the best commuter city in America. Forbes.com looked at the 75 largest metropolitan areas in the United States and examined a variety of factors such as public transit usage, time to get to work if driving, and so forth, in order to get a sense of how good a commuting city each place is.

Buffalo in particular is noteworthy for the following: “Of cities with over 500,000 commuters, fewer people spend an hour or more getting to work in Buffalo than anywhere else in the country.” And I can vouch for this as subjectively true: it feels like everywhere in the Buffalo area is only a few minutes apart. However, it must be mentioned though that part of this is due to the high-capacity roads coupled with a rather large serving of population loss. Nonetheless, a quick commute is a joy to behold.

Richard Florida, in this weekend’s WSJ, discusses the Rise of the Mega-Region. Florida argues that nation-states and cities are somewhat passé, and that the relevant quantity that should be considered is the mega-region. A mega-region is an area “that hosts business and economic activity on a massive scale, generating a large share of the world’s economic activity and an even larger share of its scientific discoveries and technological innovation.”

I think the most important part of this concept is that these mega-regions need not be in a single country, and that therefore freedom of movement and trade is vital (see Florida’s suggestions at the end of the piece). For long-time readers of this blog, you will remember that the Buffalo-Toronto region is one of Florida’s mega-regions, and can be significantly helped by these freedoms.

My advisor, Steve Strogatz, and I wrote an op-ed piece that was in this Sunday’s NYT, entitled A Journey to Baseball’s Alternate Universe. It’s about baseball, probability and Joe DiMaggio. We had a lot of fun writing it and I hope you enjoy it.

I was perusing through a list of the 98 nicknames of New York City, when I realized that I didn’t know the origin of the nickname ‘Gotham’ for New York. Apparently, it was nicknamed by Washington Irving after the city of Gotham in England. The British Gotham (which is actually pronounced Goatum), is noted for its Wise Men, who are actually fools. Unlike similar towns of fools in other traditions (Chelm and Abdera, for example), the Wise Men of Gotham were apparently only feigning foolishness (no one ever fakes foolishness, they only feign it). This was because at one time, madness was thought to be infectious, and in order to prevent a road being built through their town, they pretended to be crazy. Washington Irving, thinking that being crazy like a fox a characteristic of New Yorkers, nicknamed the city Gotham. And then Bob Kane came along and made a fictional version of Gotham City and let Batman live in it.

A friend of mine, Josh Sunshine, has had a long-standing interest in transportation, especially technological innovations within the transportation field. He has recently begun writing a very thoughtful and thought-provoking blog, called the New Transportation Blog, which he is using to explore these ideas. For some highlights, check out his often-updated Why We Can Do Better Than Cars and his mission-statement-like post for the blog.

My newest humor piece, Human Anatomy Terms That Sound Like Things You Would Go See on a Vacation, has just been published.

Update: as noted in the comments and elsewhere, it is currently in violation of NFL rules for a team to be shareholder-owned. However, this could be changing. A congressman from Buffalo is petitioning the head of the league to get it changed!

As frequent readers of this blog might know, I grew up in Buffalo. And one of the reasons I like Buffalo is the Buffalo Bills. Yes, they never fail to disappoint, but it’s my team and you’ve got to have city pride. With that said, it appears that the Bills might leave Buffalo in the near future. Ralph Wilson has stated that once he dies the team will go up for sale with the likely ending being that it will move to Toronto.

I don’t want the Bills to leave. However, it is difficult for a small-market city to sustain an NFL team. But there is a possible solution. Taking a page from Green Bay’s shareholder approach and the British MyFootballClub’s mass-ownership, one possibility is to sell the team to its fans. This would mean the fans own the team, but also, they get to vote on draft picks, starting lineups, and so forth.

A friend of mine, Joe Brownstein (a science journalist) and I have begun a website The People’s Bills, devoted to exploring this issue. While we think the Bills should be owned by the fans, there are many details that need to be worked out (how to vote, what can be voted on, how many shares each person can buy, and so forth). So, we need your help. If you have any ideas, please read the site’s blog, and contact us as well. Thanks for your help!

The Freakonomics blog has a nice post about Chicago and New York duking it out back in the 1970’s for financial dominance.

Tim Harford recently had nice little column in Wired about why, despite all our wonderful Internets, living in cities and seeing people still matters. He argues that technology complements the need for people to live near each other, rather than simply supplanting it. And he backs it up with some studies.

(thanks to Ari Kahan for the article).