WASHINGTON–A year ago, during his State of the Union address, U.S. President Barack Obama set a goal for a national high-speed rail (HSR) network: 85 percent of the country’s population would have access to HSR within 25 years. One year later, that goal seems wildly optimistic. Within a month of Obama’s speech, Florida Governor Rick [...]

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WASHINGTON—Earlier this week, according to the U.N. Population Fund, the world’s population surpassed 7 billion. With the global economy in recession and the impacts of a warming climate increasingly apparent, this new milestone comes at a time of enormous strain and has significant implications for the world’s natural resources, its economy, and of course, its [...]

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WASHINGTON — Civil unrest is breaking out on both sides of the Atlantic. This year, Greek protestors took to the streets in resistance to government austerity measures. Riots broke out in London neighborhoods in response to cutbacks in government services and rising unemployment. Now Americans are camping out in city centers across the country, following [...]

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By Tamar Shapiro and Thomas Legge WASHINGTON — On May 15, Richard M. Daley stepped down as mayor of Chicago. With his retirement, his city lost its chief executive of 22 years, but America also lost one of its most environment-friendly local leaders.  With the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive climate and [...]

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WASHINGTON — News from U.S. state capitols does not often make it across the Atlantic, but over the past month the actions of several U.S. governors have been featured in the European press, from last month’s coverage of the decision of three governors to reject federal high-speed rail funding to last week’s coverage of Wisconsin [...]

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 In my last blog post about the effects of High Speed Rail (HSR) stations on cities in Europe, I discussed the architecture of several notable HSR station buildings that have attracted a great deal of attention in and of themselves.  However, a memorable building alone isn’t sufficient to generate the so-called HSR Effect, which can [...]

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A GMF blog post by Ben Adler in September 2009 discussed the economic potential of high-speed rail, citing governmental and business leaders in Strasbourg, France, who agreed that their area had benefitted from the “High-Speed Rail Effect,” a host of civic advantages that can result from, or arrive alongside, new High-Speed Rail (HSR) service. These [...]

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WASHINGTON — President Obama scored an historic victory by making health care accessible to almost all Americans. Of course, this victory came at a price. The president was not able to win over a single Republican. Nobody who has witnessed the fierce debate in Congress, the comparisons with Hitler and Stalin, and the tumultuous protests [...]

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WASHINGTON — In the early 2000s, the issue of Muslim schoolgirls, teachers, and civil servants wearing headscarves in public institutions and schools was a heated national debate in France and a source of discussion and controversy around the world. In 2009, President Nicholas Sarkozy rekindled the flames of that debate with statements condemning the burqa [...]

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WASHINGTON — Having worked in France for what we call a “metropolitan community of cities” in Nantes and for a regional council in Brittany, one of my objectives for my Comparative Domestic Policy fellowship at GMF was to have a close look on how metropolitan and regional organizations in the United States address energy and [...]

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