I’m not the best poster child for the calorie burning benefits of giving up car ownership since I tend to use my more active lifestyle as justification for eating more ice cream. But in my real job working in public health, a lot of my projects concern the relationship between active transportation choices and [...]
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In the book, I briefly mention Donald Schoup’s excellent book, The High Price of Free Parking, but I don’t go into great detail about how changing the way we price parking might improve our quality of life. As it happens, a couple weeks ago, economist Tyler Cowen wrote a great Op-Ed about this very [...] Last weekend I was in Minneapolis for a wedding, and was blown away by the new Nice Ride bike sharing program. I was particularly impressed with the ubiquity of the program: I saw bikes downtown, in Uptown, in Longfellow, and in several other neighborhoods. I was all set to write a post about it when I got home, but then heard about the imminent launch of Chicago B-Cycle, Chicago’s first bike sharing program. I decided to wait until the details came out and see how the approaches differed. → Continue reading Chicago B-Cycle Launches (Note: potentially unfair and premature judgement enclosed) As most readers of the book and this blog know, I work in public health, and while the intersection of public health and going carless isn’t a big theme in the book, it’s a big interest of mine. On his blog (which I don’t visit often enough), Ken Archer rightly chides the CDC for [...] I talk quite a bit in the book about the relationship between transportation choices and our personal health, although as someone who often takes the train to beloved Chicago food destinations, I’m not always the best person to make the case. But this week, the New York Times reports on a study of the [...] I am unashamed of my desire to see new high speed rail links brought to the Chicago region and elsewhere. But recently, two commentators have reminded us that as exciting as HSR projects would be, they may not really represent our most pressing transit needs. Just today, John McCarron pens a Tribune Op-Ed arguing [...] Every couple of days recently I’ve run across an article about Christopher Steiner’s new book, $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better. One of the more interesting ones is a recent piece in Forbes by Steiner himself exploring the relationship between gas [...] In the book, I write quite a bit about the true costs of owning and operating a car, and offer tools and tips for figuring out just how much money you may be spending on your big metal dependent every year. But there’s a whole other side to this that I barely touch on [...] This is actually New York-related, but I thought this short animation from StreetFilms was a particularly well made piece of transit advocacy. (Via Freakonomics.) (Updated to embed YouTube version instead of original Flash movie.) After posting Matt Yglesias’s observations on mass transit safety yesterday, I had a vague recollection he wrote something along similar lines about bicycles a couple weeks ago. It turns out, I was remembering him linking to an interesting post on Streetsblog, highlighting data from NYC that as the number of bicycle riders goes up [...] I’ve certainly overheard a couple of conversations on the El this week about the terrible events on the DC Metro earlier this week, when one train on their Red Line collided with another in Maryland. Of course, transit safety is critical, and we should all hold our transit agencies to a high standard. But [...] Yesterday, the Sun Times featured a nice write-up of some new research showing that while cities produce more greenhouse gasses per acre than suburban and rural areas, the density of cities means that on a per-person basis, emissions are substantially lower among urbanites. The availability of mass transit, walkable neighborhoods, and opportunities to cycle [...] In case you missed it, current Transportation Secretary (and former congressman from IL-18) Ray LaHood got the Deborah Solomon treatment in last week’s New York Times Magazine. The interview is fairly broad but not very deep, but still gives some notion of the administrations priorities when it comes to livable communities. But although I’ve [...] |
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