Archive for Transit
November 10, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Cycling, Great Streets, Traffic, Transit
A new report ranking the nation’s most dangerous metropolitan areas for walking finds that ‘incomplete’ streets are a major culprit in the deaths of thousands of Americans every year. Dangerous by Design, from Transportation for America and the Surface Transportation Policy Project, finds that as many as forty percent of fatal pedestrian crashes are in places where no crosswalk was available, and that arterials designed only for cars are the most dangerous.
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Popularity: 28% [?]
November 3, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Climate Change, Traffic, Transit
We know climate change is happening and that its impacts on our society will be serious. Despite this knowledge, planners and elected leaders are not doing enough to prepare our transportation infrastructure for global warming’s effects. That was the message of Friday’s panel discussion, “Perspectives on Adaptation to Climate Change,” hosted by the Engineers Forum on Sustainability.
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Popularity: 21% [?]
November 1, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Cities from Scratch, Suburbs, Traffic, Transit, Urban Structure
Orenco Station, the award winning neighborhood touted as an ideal of mass-transit oriented New Urbanism, has failed to persuade a majority of its residents to use mass transit to get to work.
About two out of three Orenco residents drive to work in cars, slightly less than some other suburbs but hardly the car-free utopia many idealists expect of the transit-oriented area. Even as the neighborhood has grown closer, block by block, to the MAX light rail station named for it, the use of cars for work trips remains relatively high.
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Popularity: 31% [?]
October 28, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Cycling, Transit
When we talk about transportation, we tend to talk about things in motion. What is often left unremarked upon, in conversations about crowded highways, is something without which those crowds would not exist: parking. That humble 9-by-18-foot space (the standard size of a spot) is where traffic begins and ends. It is the fuel to traffic’s fire.
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Popularity: 18% [?]
October 19, 2009 · Filed under Public Space, Transit
With parts of Times Square converted into a pedestrian mall, at least temporarily, some people say they believe the city should take an even more radical step: close 42nd Street to car traffic and build a light rail system to run the width of Manhattan.
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Popularity: 11% [?]
October 19, 2009 · Filed under Heritage, Multi-Level Urbanism, Public Space, Transit, Urban Design
Grand Central Terminal. Why does it work so well? Listen to Vishaan Chakrabarti tell it like it is. First, he reflects on some design details of the spectacular Main Concourse. Next, he wanders down Park Avenue and shares some of the history of how private sector competition led to a major public amenity and transformed the entire metropolitan region. Then he explores the terminal’s tentacular North-end Access and reflects further on how the terminal has transformed urban and regional economies. Finally, as he delves into the food court, he ponders lessons to be learned from Grand Central that could be applied to Moynihan Station.
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Popularity: 21% [?]
October 2, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Artificial Landscapes, Infrastructure, Pedestrians, Transit
When Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle in 1900, it unveiled its vision for the future of transport. Below ground, the city’s stylish new Metro made its debut, while above ground was something more avant garde. The trottoir roulant was a moving walkway that circled the fair in a 3-kilometre loop, its articulated wooden segments “gliding around like a wooden serpent with its tail in its mouth”, according to one reporter. Nearly 7 million visitors hopped on. A few even brought folding chairs, which proved useful when one woman gave birth in transit. Her child was promptly christened Trottoir Roulant Benost. A new kind of traveller had been born.
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Popularity: 23% [?]
July 23, 2009 · Filed under Artificial Landscapes, Infrastructure, Parks, Transit
Concept: bulldoze under Central Park and replace it with a modern, international airport. The idea is so simple, so beautifully elegant, so inevitable that it’s hard to believe we didn’t think of it ourselves. Rather, credit the shadowy figures behind The Manhattan Airport Foundation, who’ve worked up an incredibly detailed plan to turn Frederick Law Olmsted’s bucolic paradise into a postmodern universe of runways, terminals, and baggage claims. Good news for purists, too: per the Manhattan Airport FAQ, “Whenever possible, vestigial architectural elements of the Park space be retained or reworked into the context of the new design.” And they mean it!
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Popularity: 22% [?]
July 15, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Artificial Landscapes, Diversity, Infrastructure, Multi-Level Urbanism, Place making, Public Space, Transit
It seems kind of strange now, but a while back, before airports became the fortresses they are today, I used to visit them occasionally to read and write. I’m not sure what drew me to them—something about the energy, or the equality, or the possibility of the place. You could start on one side of the world, step over a threshold, and in a few hours, begin a totally different life. I loved that feeling of being at the doorway to everywhere.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that according to French thinker and anthropologist Marc Augé, I wasn’t really in any place at all.
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Popularity: 34% [?]
July 14, 2009 · Filed under Beauty, Happiness, Nature, Noise, Public Art, Transit
Chirpingbirds, rustling leaves, a burbling brook: not the first sounds that come to mind about the New York City subway.
But starting next year, the city’s subterranean soundtrack — a familiar overture of clanks, screeches, groans and beeps — is poised to add a few noises of a more verdant variety.
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Popularity: 33% [?]
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