Posts tagged Robert Moses
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Breakfast links: Stupidity and violations
Move cars faster, geese or no geese; Bus not a good getaway vehicle; You’d get there slower in Zipcar marketing’s brain; Bad driver, bad rider; Three Steeple Square?; Bike & ride the Alleghany; New York’s planning drama in books. Keep reading…
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Breakfast links: How we do things in America
More bars on the Metro: By 2012, customers of all four existing mobile networks will be able to use their phones in Metro tunnels. The new network will also provide Wi-Fi access. (Post) Keep reading…
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Breakfast links: Thinking about urbanism edition
Conserbanism: A recent panel on transportation and energy featured conservatives and liberals who all agree on transit and compact development. For the conservatives, global warming isn’t the reason; while painting urbanism as an environmental issue is a powerful argument, it shouldn’t be the only one. Via Ryan Avent. Keep reading…
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Roll Call covers parking reform
Roll Call, one of Capitol Hill’s newspapers, ventured beyond the federal realm to cover DC’s parking reform proposals. The lede: Keep reading…
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The Master (Re)builder
The NYT writes about DC’s Capitol Quarter project, which is replacing the failed Capper/Carrollsburg housing projects with new mixed-income townhouses. It includes enough low-income units to accommodate all residents of the old projects, but also has its critics. Keep reading…
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Bryant Park’s restoration
In the 1970s, New York’s Bryant Park in Midtown was called “needle park” for the enormous drug trade in the park. Residents and tourists steered clear. Today, it is a jewel of an urban park, packed with people eating lunch on every nice weekday, jammed for Monday night summer movies, and a pleasant and safe place year round. What changed? Architecture and private… Keep reading…
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Chicken, meet egg on Dulles rail line
Yesterday, many wrote about the FTA and DOT Secretary Mary Peters’ decision to deny funding for the Metro extension to Dulles, at least unless the project meets a new set of criteria over and above the many hurdles it’s already surmounted. Some are livid. Others doubt the project’s wisdom. But Peters and FTA chief James Simpson advance unreasonable chicken-and-egg… Keep reading…
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Save Our Superblock
One of the travesties of 1950s-era urban planning was the “superblock”, where cities disrupted the regular street grid to build large towers surrounded by windswept plazas. Most of these superblocks are now recognized as mistakes, such as Boston’s City Hall Plaza, a huge barren space nearly empty all year round, and the World Trade Center superblock,… Keep reading…
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Three visions of the city
As Boozy so entertainingly informed us, Le Corbusier’s vision for a city was the Radiant City, of rows of identical buildings and skyscrapers separated by parkland. Robert Moses’ vision for the city included wide expressways (which eventually became choked with traffic) cutting across boulevards of urban renewal style projects. And Jane Jacobs famously… Keep reading…
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Freeways that never were
In the 1950s and 60s, urban planners were busy constructing freeways across America, through plains and mountains where they were needed, and into the centers of cities where they bulldozed vibrant communities and hastened sprawl and urban decay. Keep reading…