Creative Class

This year’s NBA finals pitting the Dallas Mavericks against the Miami Heat is a rematch of 2006 championship, still it’s just the second time that each team has appeared in the finals. Miami came away victorious in that first matchup; Dallas has yet to claim a title. Will the “Heatles” – Lebron, Wade, Bosh – win the championship they banded together for? Will Mark Cuban, the Mavericks billionaire owner and former Dancing with the Stars contestant, finally get a crown after years of falling short? Which city will get its parade?

But might this budding rivalry signal something bigger at play?  Are we witnessing a shift in the geography of the NBA’s dominant teams?

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CCG CEO Rana Florida’s HGTV Creative Spaces Series launched today. Check in every month to see some of the most inspiring designer digs.

Check out this interview.

Here are the featured spaces:

• A Masterful Modern Reno in Historic Georgetown, Washington D.C
  
• Cold Office Space Turns Sweeping, Luxurious Living in Downtown Toronto

“Is your Englishman so expert in his drinking?” asks Cassio in Othello. “Why he drinks you with facility your Dane dead, he gives your Hollander a vomit ere the next pottle can be filled,” Iago replies. Many countries—like many barflies—take perverse pride in their thirsts. Now, thanks to the the World Health Organization’s recent Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health, we can actually find out which countries put away the most booze. The map below shows it graphically; it generated a lot of attention when it was picked up by the Huffington Post.

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Read about my travel adventures in the business section of today’s New York Times.

It’s that time of the year again: More than 40 million Americans are expected to be traveling on the roads this Wednesday before Thanksgiving, according to AAA – the busiest travel day of the year.

Hope you’re not traveling on one of the roads listed below, from a ranking of the roads with the “slowest typical rush hour” in the United States and Canada. It’s based on data from NAVTEQ, the digital traffic and location data company (via TechCrunch/GreenTech). New York City tops the list, but Montreal is a close second. Philly, L.A., Boston, Dallas, and Toronto make the list.

Freeways with the Slowest Typical Rush Hour

1. New York City – Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (northbound)

2. New York City – Washington Bridge (eastbound)

3. Montreal – AUT-15 (eastbound)

4. Philadelphia – US-202 (southbound)

5. Montreal – RTE-138 (westbound)

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Being stuck in traffic ranks as one of life’s most miserable experiences, according to researchers who study happiness, and unfortunately too many Americans find themselves spending more time stuck. A new report by urbanist Joe Cortright for CEOs for Cities provides a new ranking of the the nation’s 51 largest metro areas, based on the length of peak-hour commutes and the time commuters spend in peak-hour traffic. Americans living in large metro areas spend an average of 200 hours in peak-hour traffic. But peak-hour travel time varies from more than 250 hours to less than 150 hours across these metros.

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So, what are America’s busiest airports? Depends on what you measure, it turns out. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics compiles detailed statistics on America’s airports (via the NYT’s Catherine Rampell).

For domestic flights, Atlanta is the busiest airport, followed by Chicago O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, and LAX. (more…)

That’s the overwhelming conclusion of a new Gallup-Healthways survey based on telephone interviews with 173,581 employed Americans over the past year.

The first chart shows the toll that commuting takes on physical health. Americans with longer commutes suffer higher levels of back pain, higher cholesterol, and higher levels of obesity. (more…)

This chart from Gallup shows the dramatic growth in the percentage of Americans who want to see smoking banned in public venues.

Over at The Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark accuses me of making too much of a case for high-speed rail:

Setting aside the positives and negatives of fast trains for now, my biggest qualm with Florida’s argument is his sense that the megaregion will produce the “Concentration and clustering [that] are the underlying motor forces of real economic development.” He cites the Boston-Washington and Char-lanta regions as examples of these megaregions, which he says “Will do more than anything to wean us from our dependency on cars…”

Though there was been an increase in the number of residents living in the dense cities along the corridor (those that Florida implies need to be reinforced to meet the demands of the next century), that expansion is minor compared to the increase in the number of residents living in not-so-dense areas. It is true that the interconnections between cities in the Northeast have led to strong intercity rail ridership compared to the rest of the country, but the true success, especially of the New York metropolitan area, has been in maintaining urban and commuter rail ridership, which represents a far larger quantity of users and which has nothing at all to do with the presence of the greater Boston-Washington megaregion. The megaregion in itself, in other words, cannot be directly correlated with the notions of higher density…

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