Transportation

• Self driving buses are sloooooow
• The origin of Washington DC Metro’s 26 train per hour rules
• Design competition for new Port Authority bus terminal at an impasse
• The boundaries that divide our transit systems
• Metra Electric is special, and it doesn’t fit into the paradigm that RTA and Metra have tried to fit it into for the last 35 years

Random

• The tragic story of Sheffield’s Park Hill bridge

New York

• The lingering effects of NYC’s racist city planning

Public policy

• We paved over farmland to build the suburbs; now those neighborhoods are off-limits to development
• A Palo Alto Planning Commissioner Leaves Town—and Starts a Furor
• Palo Alto mayor Patrick Burt fires back at housing critics
• Anti-Development Initiative Gains Backing of Leonardo DiCaprio, Other Hollywood Celebs
• How construction unions helped kill Gov. Brown’s plan to fight the housing crisis
• Reclaiming Sewer Reformism

New York

• Here’s Your Chance To Visit The Top Of The Woolworth Building
• Commercial Trash Carting Reforms Could Cut Millions of Miles of Truck Traffic – here’s the study (pdf)

Public policy

• Democratic, Republican voters worlds apart in divided Wisconsin
• On extraordinariness – on USDS & 18F
• Wisconsin’s Anti-Urban Policies Fed Milwaukee’s Notorious Racial Segregation

Random

• The lost infrastructure of social media
• Building with robots and recycled plastic
• Sears Catalog Kit Houses – Sears Catalog Home Wikipedia article

Transportation

• Young Egyptians Are Leading Cairo’s Transit Mapping Revolution
• A Year After a Radical Route Rethink, Houston’s Transit Ridership Is Up
• Cincinnati Bell buys streetcar naming rights
• Design your own San Francisco subway map – submit it to the city for feedback

 

 

Transportation

• Brand New Subway
• Podcast: Future Shared Mobility in Cities
• Buses Versus Trams: Low-Floor Boarding

Public Policy

• The Economics of Inclusionary Development (PDF)
• It’s Official: Racist Police Practices Are Endemic in Baltimore
• That Time a Louisville Paper Fantasized About Bombing Its Own Downtown
• Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails – deplorable
• Will Urban Renewal Ever End? – regulatory and decision lag still haunts us
• What the Latest Version of Google Maps Tells Us About Cities – on “areas of interest” in Google Maps

New York

• BIG U – fortifying Lower Manhattan to floods (oldie, but I’ll drop this here for later)
• Mapping Lower Manhattan
• Brooklyn Bridge Promenade Expansion Could Start in 2019

General

• The Optimal U.S. National Parks Centennial Road Trip
• Cloud and Field – On the resurgence of “field guides” in a networked age.
• Generating fantasy maps for Twitter bot @unchartedatlas
• Milton Glaser Analyzes Olympic Logo Design Through the Ages
• Adam’s bibliography for the last chapter of his forthcoming book, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
• Welcome to Airspace
• McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?

New York

• TfL contactless fare payment system could come to NYC
• A History of Inwood’s 215th Street Incinerator Smokestacks
• DOT Lays Out a Strategy to Make Left Turns Less Dangerous

Public Policy

• Drive-to Urbanism
• Obama to Leave the White House a Nerdier Place Than He Found It
• Zero-Waste Japanese Town Creates Building From Abandoned Materials

Transportation

• Northeast Corridor, 95% Cheaper: Frankford Junction
• The Lonely Ballad of the Dulles Airport Mobile Lounge
• What are the Strong Tramway Corridors?
• Mixing Circumferential and Radial Transit in the Other Direction
• Union Station’s concourse could get a big facelift
• Traffic-straddling bus makes first test run on Chinese roads

Other

• SF’s landmark tower for rich and famous is sinking and tilting – the concrete framed building with a raft foundation sunk 16 inches and tilted 2 inches.
• The Optimal U.S. National Parks Centennial Road Trip

New York

• New York’s First Zoning Resolution, Which Brought Order to a Chaotic Building Boom, Turns 100
• CityViews: We Need the NYPD out of Vision Zero

Public Policy

• Future of Suburbia
• When Community-Supported Agriculture Is Not What It Seems
• Tim Kaine Took a Stand Against Cul-de-Sacs
• What I Think Every Time I See an Airbnb Renter in My Neighborhood
• Affordable Housing Means We All Gotta Pay

Transportation

• Bike networks are fragile contributing to reduced use
• New York Transit decides on the 18 month L Train shutdown option to fix Sandy-related damage
• PDF from TransitCenter, Turnaround: Fixing New York City’s Buses
• Explainer: The Transit Ridership Recipe
• AASHTO’s Draft Bikeway Guide Includes Protected Bike Lanes and More

Other

• Design is Both the Insanely Radical and the Passionately Incremental

Public policy

• Los Angeles Looks for Extra Water Down Its Alleys
• The New Officer Friendly, Armed With Instagram, Tweets and Emojis

History

• Monticello’s whitewashed version of history

New York

• Prairie Heals a Verdant Wound at a Former Brooklyn Cemetery
• Adding Personal Flourishes to 112 Square Feet of Paradise
• Some thoughts on gentrification and transit improvements
• A Miracle in New York Harbor
• Uber Undercuts The MTA With Unlimited Rush Hour Passes In Manhattan
• A New Map of New York’s ‘Subway Deserts’
• The Lowline Just Got a Thumbs-up From City Hall

Transportation

• What The Paris Trams Can Teach U.S. Cities
• Study: Bus Frequency and speed matter; wi-fi and USB ports do not
• No, Driverless Cars Won’t Make Transit Obsolete

Random

• Tiny house on the prairie

Public Policy

• Light rail stops driving property values: Dori Monson: Developers are getting insanely wealthy from middle class along light rail lines
  The article paints a negative view of this, but this only proves that demand drives the value a fixed supply (land) up
• Do Taxes Really Cause the Rich to Move? No.
• 6 Principles to Make Self-Driving Cars Work for Cities, Not Against Them
• The Braves Are Going To Ridiculous Lengths To Squeeze Every Dime Out Of Cobb County.
  The public should not pay for a private stadium. Full stop.

New York

• New York’s Sidewalks Are So Packed, Pedestrians Are Taking to the Streets
• See also: The Midtown 8th Ave Bike Lane Is A Chaotic Circus Of Dangerous Depravity
• MAS Opposes Loss of Public Space on Water Street
  Sounds boring, but taking privately operated public space which was a trade for more FAR 40 years ago, and then build on it without a transfer is a bad deal for the city.

Urban Beauty

• New Paris Metro Map
• Philly’s Beautiful Plan to Fight Crime with Neon Murals
• City drawings by Anna Gibb
• Pallet skating on a city’s trolley tracks
• Ghost Boxes: Reusing Abandoned Big-Box Superstores Across America

History

• The History of Urbanization, 3700 BC – 2000 AD
• House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate
  The intersection of architecture and real estate development

• Meet WNYC’s Newest Reporter: This Old Pay Phone
• Why “All Lives Matter” instead of “Black Lives Matter” is such a stupid thing to say
• Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds
• Single family zoning: social engineering
• Cute and Playful Sticky Page Markers That Turn Books Into Miniature Scenes and Landscapes
• How Big Water is trying to stop the National Park Service from cleaning up plastic bottles that are fouling the parks
• How to Build a Better Block
• On Day 3 of Delays, Rail System’s Shortfalls Are Painfully Clear
  Thank you Chris Christie for canceling ARC

• The Railroad Photos of Jack Delano
• James Fallows on The California High-Speed Rail Debate
• Speaking of California HSR: The Path to Level Boarding
• How London Crossrail Will Be Run
• Reinvention looms as MTA commission plans first meetings
• Congress, Oregon Has Your Long-Term Highway Funding Solution Right Here
• Buy a Lighthouse (terms and conditions apply)
• Big U storm defenses “will secretly protect Manhattan from flooding” says Bjarke Ingels