Archive for June, 2008
The Award for Excellence in Transcription Goes To…
Bloomberg: “The United States has no allusions about the regime in Pyongyang,” President George W. Bush said in the White House Rose Garden. “Yet we welcome today’s development.”
An Urbanist Party?
Great stuff from Felix Salmon. The piece begins: If you’re reading this, the chances are that you live in a large and vibrant city whose local politics are controlled and stifled by unresponsive and uncreative national parties who have approximately zero interest in urban issues. How is this possible? More than half the world’s population [...]
NB
I have four Firefox windows open, each with multiple tags’ worth of stories waiting to be blogged. Time for a link dump. I’ve been ruminating on Barack Obama’s metropolitan policy speech for days now, trying to think of something to say about it that hasn’t already been said. I can’t. It’s just really good. Peter [...]
On Guardian
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Whiff
This is the kind of thing that drives me absolutely nuts. We’re all speaking seriously about the need to improve America’s rail options, and what do we get? A maglev train between Disneyland and Las Vegas. The project will receive $45 million from the federal government. Not if the Federal Railway Administration gets its way. [...]
Transit for Young and Old
As individuals age, the ability (and often the desire) to drive everywhere declines. And there is obviously a public safety issue involved, where age leads driving skills to erode. So this becomes quite important: According to the Census Bureau, the number of people 65 and older is expected to double, growing from 35 million in [...]
De-Freeway Our Cities
Via BeyondDC, an interesting WTOP story: “Based on a Transportation Planning Board finding that a high proportion of New York Avenue traffic has neither an origin nor a destination within the District, DDOT has requested the option of closing a section of I-395 between its current northern terminus at New York Avenue and its interchange [...]
Shift
The Times: Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas… Across the nation, the realization is taking hold that rising energy prices are less a momentary blip than a change with lasting consequences. [...]
Can We?
The FT: A new era of travel was foreshadowed on Monday as Iain Coucher, chief executive of Network Rail, which owns and operates Britain’s mainline railways, confirmed it was launching a review that could lead to up to five more lines. But the inquiry into the feasibility of new routes is just the latest contribution [...]
The Bachelorette
Randomness–an old childhood friend of mine was on this season of the Bachelorette. He made it to the final four and got voted off last night. I haven’t seen this guy in well over a decade, but we played on the same basketball team for years (coached by his dad, who was on the show [...]