Last week, I went to see my Cycologist. I told him I was depressed about all the climate change induced flooding in Australia. He suggested that humans would develop new ways to adapt. I told him that I was also depressed by the lack of color on winter streets and the fact that everyone in […]
This week the American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced it was adding “Fear of Parking Loss” to its official “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”. Fear of Parking Loss (FPL) is characterized by a belief that having free, on-street parking next to the front door of your destination is essential for human survival and a […]
I have recently had the pleasure of watching two people learn to ride a bicycle. I have vague memories of learning to ride a bike around age five. Like many people I rode as a child and stopped as a teenager. I took it up again in my late 20s and have now been riding […]
A while back, while reading Daniel Hertz’s recent article about Chicago in City Observatory, I came across the work of Robert Sampson, an urban social psychologist at Harvard. The work is over a decade old, but I still find it compelling and relevant. Sampson’s basic thesis is that perceptions of disorder, i.e. a chaotic or blighted neighborhood, […]
Here’s a chart passed along to me by a reader, from one of the many long but interesting (FTA) Transit Cooperative Research Program reports. This comes from a chapter on parking pricing, filled with case studies about how the hidden costs of parking rarely get passed on to the end user. Changing that relationship is […]
Hello, capitalists. Good to see you here, I guess. My little brother and also the economy says things are going well for you. I’m doing okay. People used to work in factories screwing caps onto bottles of toothpaste, I hear, so pushing pixels seems easier and less dangerous than, say, being a longshoreman or coal […]
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this phrase. “People like their cars!” It’s usually followed with a inane trite like “we’re not Europe or Manhattan.” Actually, now I remember seeing that exact thing in the comment section on a piece for Southerminn.com talking about bringing rail to Northfield: Sidebar: I really wish […]