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A Field Guide to Transit Quarrels: The Recommended Video

It turns out that the excellent blog Portland Transport created a really clear video of the Portland version of my presentation, “A Field Guide to Transit Quarrels.”  Only tonight have I had both the time and the bandwidth to look at it.  Apart from the well-amplified sniffles from my cold at the time, it looks and sounds pretty good.  Thanks to Bob Richardson and everyone else at Portland Transport who made it happen. Continue Reading →

Follow Me on Twitter

As you know, I tend to write fairly long posts, partly because they’re faster to write than short ones.  If I were writing for print, I’d obviously edit them down a bit.

So it’s with mixed emotions that I announce that you can find me on Twitter as “humantransit.”  I’m not sure I can say anything much in under 140 characters, but we’ll see how it goes.  Quips, at least, should be possible.

Human Transit: The First Year

Well, my Welcome and Manifesto post is dated 10 April 2009, so I’ve been doing this for a year.

I started this blog to provide a source of commentary about transit planning issues based on two decades of experience in that business.  I had no idea whether the blogosphere wanted such a thing.  I wasn’t sure where it would lead.  I wasn’t sure who the audience would turn out to be. Continue Reading →

A Visit From the Loyal Opposition

Very interesting and civil comment threads have grown on the last several posts.  Comment threads, of course, have a tendency to start with the post’s topic but then turn into conversations among the commenters, often leading far from the source.  As long as everyone’s civil, I don’t worry about that much.  I’ve learned not to treat the comment count as a measure of my relevance.

But I do want to note the efforts of commenter Watson, who lucidly argued for parking subsidies, sprawl land use patterns, etc. on the this recent post.  The resulting comment thread is worth a read.  On the subject of whether downtown Portland all-day parking rates should be higher, he began:

Be careful what you wish for. In the short-term, a sharp increase in central city parking prices might induce a significant shift from autos to transit. But over the long-term, the primary effect may be to drive businesses and people out of the city and into the suburbs where land is cheaper and parking can be provided at lower cost.

Continue Reading →

If You Like Intellectual Travel-Writing on Cities …

If you like intellectual travel-writing on cities, you might enjoy some of the work that I do on the personal blog, Creature of the Shade.  Most posts there are on either cities or nature, and sometimes both.  My pieces on cities tend to dwell on architecture and urban form, and usually track unstructured long walks (what Baudelaire called flânerie) across the city in question.  Posting there is much more intermittent than here, so if you like it you’ll probably want to put it on a reader.

In 2009 I did fairly satisfying pieces on Berlin and Paris, and a short mood-piece on the Netherlands (which can be understood as one city, the Randstad, and its rural hinterland).  There are decent 2008 pieces on Delhi and Visakhapatnam in India.  And while I find it impossible to write as a traveler about cities I live in, a small piece on Sydney happened while the place was still new to me.  The 2006 Montréal post is not bad.

Happy New Year, everyone.  Back to transit topics tomorrow.

The Other Meaning of “High-Speed Internet”

DSCF2394 Sometimes, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, the medium is the message.

I thought it worth a post to say only that I’m now on a Deutsche Bahn ICE train sliding across the German countryside at around 200 km/hr while enjoying seamless internet service.  (Those trees are further away than they look, a common high-speed rail illusion.)

At EUR 8.00/hour it’s a little expensive, but most things are in version 1.0.  Like many German services, they clearly put quality before price.

Meanwhile, in Tehran

Today seems to be the climax of the conflict in Iran, and I’m up far too late following the news.  What’s it about?  The truth.  Huge numbers of citizens are risking their lives to create a more truthful society, one needing fewer lies.  If we think about what we advocate as environmentalists or urbanists or transit advocates, it’s ultimately just that, I hope.  We’re looking for clarity, truth.  We’re trying to see through the murk (some natural, some man-made) and give others the courage to do the same.

Continue Reading →