Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Tuesday Night Notes

It's just not like when we grew up. I remember riding my bike to school.
"The biggest problem presented in the report is the fact that cities are being planned especially for cars and for adults,"
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Redevelopers have tighter funding these days.
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Learning to live without a car. Moving from the burbs to the bright lights.
I used to make a big grocery shopping trip just about every Saturday, driving several miles to a store and throwing half a dozen shopping bags into the trunk. Now I can walk to a supermarket three blocks away
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Suburbanization and climate change. They are linked.
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Apple will spend some cash to revitalize a Chicago Subway Station.
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I couldn't agree with Ryan more on this point.
There is a terrible chicken-and-egg problem to transportation planning, in which planners express regret that there is so little transit demand and so much traffic before building new roads. They have to accommodate the demand they've got! But you can't have transit demand if you don't have transit, and if you don't recognize that, then you're doomed to keep building roads forever. No one in the mind of the planners has yet invented a substitute for the automobile.
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The electric transit revolution is upon the British. Trolleybuses return.

3 comments:

Matt Fisher said...

The article in the Telegraph talks about the return of trolleybuses to Leeds, England, but it's really in the form of the so-called "guided bus". I am not against trolleybuses, but the "guided bus" is really a lemon, as evidenced by the O-Bahn busway in Adelaide, and the accident involving a similar "guided bus" kinda like the one Leeds is getting in Nancy, France. They say, "But it's cheaper than a tram!" They should just go with steel wheel on steel rail over there.

Matt Fisher said...

Another thing: If Apple is gonna redo a subway station in Chicago, why not get some of the fortune of people like the two richest in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, to help provide some financial support to some needed rail lines? :)

Bob Davis said...

Regarding "then and now" for children: I strongly recommend the "FreeRangeKids" website. It's a very active discussion of the difficulty in letting children get exercise and learn self-reliance by NOT loading them into the car, minivan or SUV for even the shortest trip away from the house. If you look at this site, you may even see some of my comments.