What do corporate sponsorship of station names and advertising wraps on buses and trams have in common?
A literature student will know the answer: For a transit agency, they are both Faustian bargains. Continue Reading →
Philosophy
Can U.S. States Lead on Urban Planning?
The Transport Politic proposes the need to consolidate more multi-modal planning authority at the level of the states. While multi-modal planning authority is a good thing at any level of government, I wonder if US states are poorly suited for this purpose because so many US metro areas cross state boundaries. I notice this problem more from my current perch in Australia, because Australians even flirt with the idea of abolishing their state governments entirely. While that’s certainly not the answer in the US, Americans do need to think about which level of government is best suited to which kind of task. Continue Reading →
Technology vs Geometry at the Venice Biennale
For the Venice Biennale later this year, the Audi Urban Future Award asked six prestigious architecture firms to come up with visions of what cities might be like in 2030. The preliminary responses, as reported in the Economist, had a disturbing common theme: cars. Continue Reading →
Transit and the Hierarchy of Needs, contd.
In a post last week I mentioned Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, a simple diagram suggesting that certain needs will only arise if more fundamental needs are met: Continue Reading →
Transit and the Hierarchy of Needs
When transit advocates talk past each other, especially about the
glories of their favorite technology, I often feel we need a better way to talk about
what’s really important. Which features of a technology or transit plan
are truly essential in motivating ridership? Which are just really
nice? Continue Reading →
Line Numbering: Geek Fetish or Crucial Messaging?
Commenter Mike recently laid out a nice explanation of the line numbering system in Aachen, Germany, and then asked, fatefully:
How do professionals assign line numbers?
The answer is: Much as geeky amateurs do, when drawing imaginary networks. It’s a process of (1) imagining beautiful systems of order, and (2) willing them in to being. Unfortunately, real-world professionals have to proceed through the additional steps of (3) clashing with proponents of competing systems, (4) enduring the derision and sabotage of anarchists, and finally (5) resigning to a messy outcome where only traces of beauty remain, visible “between the lines” so to speak, for those still capable of enchantment. Continue Reading →
Is Speed Obsolete?
For a while now, a strain of urbanist thought has been asking: Should we want transit to be slower?
That, broadly speaking, is the question raised by Professor Patrick M. Condon at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Condon heads the Design Centre for Sustainability inside UBC’s Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and is the author of the very useful book Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities. In his 2008 paper “The Case for the Tram: Learning from Portland,” he explicitly states a radical idea that many urban planners are thinking about, but that not many of them say in public. He suggests that the whole idea of moving large volumes of people relatively quickly across an urban region, as “rapid transit” systems do, is problematic or obsolete: Continue Reading →
Does High-Density Life Have a Bigger Ecological Footprint? And Why?
Over at New Geography, Joel Kotkin has a new broadside against high-density inner city life. It’s called “Forced March to the Cities,” presumably to feed the right-wing talking-point that urbanism and planning are totalitarian. Here’s the part that’s supposed to scare you: Continue Reading →
The Most Important Blog Post You’ll Read This Year … (Updated!)
… may well turn out to be this one, by Michael Druker at Psystenance. It’s about a conceptual error that lies at the root of a lot of bad transit planning decisions, an error made, at one time or another, by most citizens, many political leaders, and more than a few professionals. It’s called (not very effectively) the Fundamental Attribution Error. It happens when we say or believe statements of the form: “My decisions are based on my situation, but other people’s choices are based on their culture, the kind of people they are.” Continue Reading →
Damascus: Cars Banned from the Old City
The Syrian newspaper Baladna launched a new English edition in December. The first issue is on the web, and features a story about the Damascus mayor’s plan to ban cars from the narrow streets of the old city.
If Syria is an alien place to you, this article will make it feel utterly familiar. In the interviews with restaurant owners, shopkeepers, and tourism operators, everyone says exactly what they would say if this were proposed in any other city in the world. Continue Reading →