Recent Posts
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Is Red Hook de-gentrifying?
SoHo, Alphabet City, Cobble Hill, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick. One after another, New York neighborhoods full of gritty industrial buildings and unsafe streets have turned into yuppie meccas. Red Hook was next… but then it wasn’t, argues an article in New York Magazine. Despite a Fairway and beautiful riverfront views of Manhattan, would-be gentrifiers… Keep reading…
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Soaring gas prices are slowing sprawl
With gas prices over $3 a gallon, drivers are changing their driving habits. Those who already live in car-dependent areas are locked in to driving and have few alternatives beyond carpooling and buying more fuel-efficient cars, but in the housing market, it’s clear people are choosing their communities with the new costs of driving in mind. Speculators out in the exurbs are… Keep reading…
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Visualizing different modes of transportation
Driving down a busy street, a bus seems to be about twice the size of another car, and a little bit harder to pass. But that bus is also carrying about the same number of people as all the other cars for several blocks combined. In other words, you could replace all the traffic with just two buses. If the whole lane were replaced with light rail, it could carry 18 times as many people per hour. Keep reading…
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The Upper West Side of the future
What if Upper West Side streets devoted more space to pedestrians and less to cars? StreetFilms created a series of photo simulations re-imagining Amsterdam Avenue, 81st Street, and Broadway. Keep reading…
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Ramp spaghetti on the Potomac
The National Mall in Washington DC is an American icon, visited by millions of tourists, but also somewhat threadbare-looking; since 2001, increasingly choked with security barriers; and gradually becoming overbuilt with memorials for every group with clout in Congress. The National Coalition to Save Our Mall is fighting these disappointing trends. Keep reading…
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Brooklyn puts retail in municipal building
“From the street, [Brooklyn’s Municipal Building] looks like ‘dead space,’” writes the Brooklyn Paper. “‘People have just accepted that government buildings are only for government,’” says Joe Chan of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. Downtown DC is even worse, with back to back Federal buildings each of which… Keep reading…
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Hope for DC’s waterfront
DC’s Southwest Waterfront neighborhood is a classic example of failed urban renewal - old row houses and tenements (some nice, some less so) were razed, replaced with a freeway and 1960s/70s-era buildings where cars enjoy more square footage than people. The dinner cruise on the Potomac Stefanie and I took for our six-month anniversary departed from a pier in Southwest, and… Keep reading…
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Drive-through apartments
In Robert Heinlein’s (fairly bad) book I Will Fear No Evil, cities have become so dangerous that residents drive their cars directly into their buildings, up car-sized elevators, and right to the doors of their apartments. Early in the book a significant figure is murdered because she tries to use the pedestrian entrance. Now, via Streetsblog, such a building is under construction… Keep reading…
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The federally tilted playing field on transportation
The Washington Post recently ran an article exploring the impact of the Federal Transit Administration on transit projects. Fierce competition for the FTA’s limited transit funding and strict criteria mean that states are forced to make many changes, wise or unwise, to their projects to qualify. Virginia had to drop plans to put the Tyson’s Corner segment of the planned… Keep reading…
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“We Are Smart Growth”
You know Smart Growth—the philosophy of building “compact, transit- Keep reading…