I just finished a book called Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities Are Changing the World. It’s an interesting book; I learned a lot from it, although I don’t agree with everything that he says (he has both a weirdly rosy view of certain cities, and a weirdly pessimistic view of the broader situation). The […]
Category Archives: Urbanism
What comes out of the spaces
Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens. The birds do not crash dead out of the sky in mid-flight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do not run red with blood. —Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love Space. Quiet? Yesterday I wrote the first sentence from […]
Vision Zero and enforcement?
When you’re walking and riding around and you see people in 2-ton vehicles doing things that are dangerous to you, I think it’s natural response (especially for rule-followers like me) to think “Someone should stop them from doing that.” Often what they’re doing is already illegal, so it’s natural to think that enforcement by the […]
The emotional challenges of advocacy.
I was having a hard time last summer and fall with getting back to riding my bike more, and with doing advocacy and encouragement work for bicycling. I didn’t — don’t — feel safe riding anymore, and I felt frustrated about the barriers to bicycling, so I didn’t feel comfortable encouraging people, and I didn’t […]
Mees 3: Have your cake and eat it too?
The quote that first caught my eye from this chapter was: However, the same citizens who are most concerned about sustainable transport are often the fiercest defenders of leafy, low-rise neighborhoods. This is a particularly pertinent note for Portland, especially right now in light of the discussion around the code allowing developers to build apartment […]
Mees 2: Was auto dominance inevitable?
One of the most interesting myths that Mees spends time debunking in this chapter is actually not that auto dominance was inevitable (since I didn’t believe that to begin with) but the idea that American public transit declined and died because of a conspiracy by the auto industry. His analysis is that the tram industry […]
Mees 1: “Density as destiny” is a convenient story
One of the most interesting points that Mees makes early on is that the story of “density as destiny” where transit is concerned is convenient for a lot of people on both sides of the spectrum. Road-builders who’d like to keep building roads can say that they have to, because density is insufficient for effective […]
Drawing the wrong lessons
I was reading an interesting Atlantic Cities article someone linked to on Facebook: Survival Lessons from an Ancient City. It made me think of Strong Towns (which isn’t mentioned in the piece, sadly) but it also made me think about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of efforts to extend light-rail systems to far-flung suburbs, as […]