National Links: Should Cities Use Cool Pavements?
Doubts are raised about cool pavements, engineers need more transportation education and other great reads await in this week’s National Links.
Tag Archives: boston
National Links: Phoenix’s Ancient Watery Secret
The desert city of Phoenix, Arizona is home to 180 miles of canals, supplying much needed water in a region plagued with scarcity. Yet the canals are not without precedent: the Hohokam people, who once inhabited the area, constructed hundreds of miles of canals to supply tens of thousands of acres of farmland, hundreds of years before Phoenix rose from the ashes of the civilization.
National Links: Gentrification and Bike Lanes
Stories from across the country and around the world show the harsher effect of climate change on the poor and how banning cars could help solve the problem.
The Importance of Airport-Downtown Rail Connections
Direct transit links are not only good for urban quality of life but improve regional competitiveness. They should be a no-brainer. Being able to land in a city and board a train with assurance you’ll be downtown in a fixed amount of time provides peace of mind for residents, tourists and businesspeople alike. A pleasant […]
Chart of the Day: Minneapolis Street Grid Orientation vs. Other US Cities
Here’s a cool project by Geoff Boeing, a planning postdoc in California. Check out this street grid chart: The tiny part the center is the river-oriented part of downtown Minneapolis, where the streets are aligned to the Mississippi instead of the ordinal directions. Even better, Boeing made charts for a whole bunch of US cities. […]
2017 Walking Summit in Saint Paul – A Review
Few things in life relieve stress, instill creativity and boost health and more than taking a stroll. “Walking is a man’s best medicine,” Hippocrates declared in the 4th Century BCE. “To solve a problem, walk around,” St. Jerome advised during Roman times. “When we walk, we come home to ourselves,” observes Buddhist monk Thich Nhat […]
Boston’s Odd Squares Offer a Vision for West 7th Street
There should be a complex German compound noun describing “the feeling of arriving in a new city and staring at an intersection in amazement.” I’ve felt this feeling more than once, in San Francisco, Copenhagen, and most recently in Boston, where I spent a week visiting friends and family. Boston is famously non-linear, eschewing the ubiquitous […]
Chart of the Day: Operating Subsidies for Boston Area Transit
OK, so Boston isn’t in Minnesota. But I found this chart on a fascinating discussion of “social stratification in transit” a while ago on the Itinerant Urbanist blog, and thought I’d share it. Heres’ the chart showing the per-passenger trip subsidies for the different subsets of Metro Boston transit system: Note: If you look at the ridership numbers […]