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Life as a blogger on the TypePad platform includes a daily confrontation with this:

That big bold number is the daily pageviews, since midnight GMT.  (It has not occurred to TypePad that perhaps a rolling total of the last 24 hour period might be more useful.  Instead, I experience the daily crash to zero at 10 AM Sydney time and then a long, slow climb to some unknown summit.)

But then there’s the line graph.  HT has been stable for months now, between 2000 and 3000 pageviews a day except for a weekly trough corresponding to the North American weekend.  This regular weekly low is my best signal that many of you are reading this at work.

But yesterday, clearly, some kind of breakthrough!  A sudden jump to nearly 4000 pageviews.  Was this the well-deserved long-term payoff of weeks of diligent reporting on Frequent Network mapping, and occasional think pieces on big ideas like the perils of average success?  Is it about my forays into urban planning topics like pedestrian malls?  Does it arise from the long investment this blog has made in trying to clarify technology debates?  Does it show the impact of a link from Andrew Sullivan?  Does it even have anything to do with my recent US speaking tour and related videos?

No, it was post about new transit-themed toys by Lego, a post that took me less than 10 minutes to prepare as it was mostly a friend’s email.

Am I focusing on the wrong things in life?

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.

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 →

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.

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.

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 →