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Alex Marshall

Alex Marshall

Columnist

A journalist and consultant, Alex Marshall is the author of The Surprising Design of Market Economies; Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities; and How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken. He writes a regular urban affairs/infrastructure column for Governing and has contributed to Bloomberg Voice, Metropolis, The New York Times, Architecture, The Boston Globe, The New York Daily News, The Washington Post and many other publications.

Marshall has taught about infrastructure at the New Jersey School of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. From 2002 to 2018 Marshall was a Senior Fellow at the Regional Plan Association in New York City. In 1999-2000, he was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He has consulted with Arup, Sidewalk Labs and other organizations. He holds a master's degree from Columbia University’s journalism school and a bachelor's in Political Economy and Spanish from Carnegie Mellon University. A native of Norfolk, Va., he was a staff writer and columnist for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk from 1989 to 1999.

He can be reached at amcities@gmail.com or on Twitter at @Amcities.

Sometimes, if you build it, they really do come.
Autos and airplanes have a lot in common with the Web and cell phones. Moving people and information around are both transformative.
Its schedules are undependable, prices high and on-board service of middling quality. Yet demand for Amtrak's inter-city service grows.
It takes far longer to build a major project today than it did a century ago. Why is that?
A city redefines how to use its streets -- even its busiest, most traffic-clogged roadways.
There's more to moving people around than wings and wheels, speed and price.
It could be a mixed blessing if federal funding for infrastructure goes on the upswing again.
A study compared how well old-city street layouts handled traffic versus modern approaches. The results set off a firestorm.
I'm starting to believe the hyperbole about the revolution being spawned by Charlotte's new light-rail line.
What's up with groups that argue for less government but see publicly built highways as an expression of the free market?