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Bill Christiansen opposes Vision2
In a Thursday press release, former Tulsa City Councilor Bill Christiansen, the only announced candidate for next year's mayoral election, announced his opposition to the Vision2 Tulsa County sales tax scheme on the November 6, 2012, ballot. In his statement, Christiansen, who served on the Dialog/Visioning Task Force Steering Committee...
BOK Center street closures a pointless nuisance
This has been bugging me for a while; an item on tonight's council agenda brought it to mind again. It's bad enough that the construction of the BOK Center permanently blocked 2nd Street, once part of a through pair of one-way streets (with 1st Street) connecting to Inner Dispersal Loop...
Urban link dump
Here are a bunch of links to items of note about cities: Blair Humphreys looks at urban density and finds some surprising stats: The Los Angeles urbanized area is the most densely populated in the nation. Oklahoma City and Boston have the same density, about 900 people per km2. (Again,...
Planning to avoid conflicts
My column in this week's Urban Tulsa Weekly is about two aspects of city planning: the planning failure that resulted in a jail and homeless services being located right between revitalizing older neighborhoods and an arts and entertainment district, and the need for a land-use planning tool like neighborhood conservation...
Property owners owe Tulsans downtown preservation
An edited version of this piece was published in the August 23, 2006, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The edited, published version of the piece is online in the Internet Archive. Posted on the web September 17, 2013. Property owners owe Tulsans downtown preservation By Michael D. Bates A memo...
TANSTAAFL
The response of the downtown building owners and their lobbyists to proposals for downtown historic preservation is ironic, with their talk of capital and free markets. I didn't hear any of them suggest that it was a violation of capitalism to tax groceries to pay for a venue for privately-owned,...
The Knowledge of a London taxi driver
If you have trouble finding your way around the tidy Cartesian grid that defines Tulsa's street network, imagine learning your way around an ancient, complex, and chaotic street network, and keeping that map entirely in your head. From the Transport for London website: All licensed taxi drivers in the Capital...
What they promised if we opened the Main Mall to traffic
(Don't forget this morning's protest! 9 a.m., 4th & Boulder.) The Tulsa Whirled's plan to demolish the old Froug's Department Store at 3rd & Main, to replace it with heating and cooling equipment for the rest of the Whirled's complex, is a slap in the face of Tulsa's taxpayers, who...
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