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Conrad Lumm
A former copy editor, researcher, and journalist for publications from Beverage World to The Times, Conrad was bit by the urban planning bug after picking up a copy of Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking for a little light reading, and has been emptying cocktail parties with parking factoids ever since. He spends his free time on strategic board games, listening to at least five podcasts a day, and sitting around the subway system, where he can often be found muttering about Inconsistent Initial Capping.
Conrad grew up in Michigan, Copenhagen, Rome, and Amman, returning to Michigan to study poetry at Interlochen Arts Academy. After four (well, five) years at Sarah Lawrence College, he decamped to Brooklyn, the borough he loves most (even if he lays his head in Manhattan these days, like a sellout).
Conrad Lumm's Latest Posts
Why we support Move NY
Newly indicted New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver killed New York’s congestion pricing plan in 2008. A followup plan to charge nearly all drivers heading into Manhattan is now in play, and we’re behind it. Since Sheldon quietly smothered congestion pricing in its crib, we’ve added 5% to our population, nationwide vehicle miles traveled have […]
Which states have the most stop signs per mile of road?
There’s a lot of information about building and urban design habits hidden in our sales data. This week, we thought we’d look at the number of stop signs we’ve sold across all of our sites – I was curious about which states have the highest density of intersections. (Also, I remember driving from Virginia to […]
Prototype driving “coach” improves mileage, car safety
Sure, cars are useful… but they’re also energy-consuming, environmentally-unfriendly and even life-threatening. Recent research led by researchers from the University of Oulu, “Personalised Assistance for Fuel-efficient Driving,” develops a prototype for a driver assistance system that would — after gathering what we might call context clues — improve safety and fuel efficiency and reduce environmental […]
Against raising the gas tax
Editorials from the Washington Post to the New York Times called for a gas tax rise last week, with Charles Krauthammer arguing that a $1 per gallon tax would mean more efficient cars – and, if offset by progressive tax breaks on low-income workers, “reduce the disincentive to work” in the form of Social Security taxes. […]
How plumbers, the UPS, and people of color benefit from the NYPD’s slowdown
New York is nearing on the second month of one of the greatest law enforcement experiments in recent memory: what happens if police stop enforcing the law? Since the NYPD’s slowdown began in the wake of the Liu and Ramos shooting – which police union chief Lynch blamed on the Mayor’s comments on race and law enforcement – courts have […]
What’s the point of one-cent parking?
The city of Sycamore – about an hour west of Chicago – charges exactly one penny for 12 minutes of parking. An hour costs a nickel; two hours cost a dime. Parking fines are a whopping $1.00. What’s unusual here is that the city bothers to collect anything at all – if it’s making less […]
Uber & the sharing economy
Is there a busier job than damage control at Uber? Let’s take a quick look at Uber’s recent public relations disasters: In the middle of a hostage crisis in Sydney that ended in three deaths, the company instituted surge pricing. Even though the pricing rose automatically rather than at the behest of a rapacious executive, the […]
5 great (non-documentary) movies for urbanists
1. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), dir. F.W. Murnau Murnau’s masterpiece Sunrise might be the great anti-urban film. The German Expressionist director Murnau moved to Hollywood after directing his other masterpiece, Nosferatu, putting together three silent films and a documentary before his death in 1931 at the age of 43. Steeped in the […]
Mobile parking app watch: PassportParking
Over the past couple of years, we’ve heard a lot about mobile parking apps, from ones that help find vacancies and keep users posted on pricing (ParkMe) to apps that tell users when their time is running out and allow them to let circling motorists know when they’re about to vacate a space (iSpotSwap). Many […]
The Washington D.C. parking nightmare: y u no have garages?
We’ve harped about D.C. before, but it’s not just us saying it – Washington D.C.’s parking is a nightmare and its transport a national shame; a report from Texas A&M’s Transportation Institute says it’s not just run-of-the-mill bad, it’s the worst in the country. Part of the problem is baked into the pie. With the […]
Free parking fallacies: Infographic & report
[raw] [/raw] We at MyParkingSign are in a unique position to discern trends in how people are managing their parking lots. As part of an internal study, we looked into why some parking signs are selling more and others less, and why lot owners are looking for an increasingly diverse set of parking signs and […]
