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Jetpacks & garden privacy
I just finished a term paper on “corridors in the polycentric city,” looking at various bodies of literature and their ideas for the urban form in transit corridors linking nodes in a city. Along the way, I read Stephen Marshall’s excellent Streets & Patterns, a well thought-out analysis of road hierarchies and the subtle auto-oriented [...]
The Science Commons
I’ve been writing a short report on open source transportation software, and I ran across an interesting website along the way. Apparently, the Creative Commons people are trying to kickstart a new Science Commons for factual information. Unlike creative content, facts are not covered by copyright protection, but collections of facts (i.e., databases) fall into [...]
Malfunction junction
A great link from vyaroshevich (via Price Tags and Thrilling Wonder). The flickr photo below shows a horrific left-turn in Russia. The route starts from the left (lower line)… and just follow the arrows from there. If I was on the road, I’m sure it would soon seem fairly natural, actually… we’re very well-trained in [...]
Scholastica
I haven’t actually written much about my school experience here yet, so I thought I’d at least put up a few sentences on my experience with transportation planning here at U of T. Last term was crazy busy, although in retrospect much of the burden was self-imposed. Since I was starting a new discipline, I [...]
Virtual City
The Globe and Mail had a story today about a very cool website for techie urbanists like me: Virtual City. They’ve digitized streetscapes for a ton of Toronto and Montreal cities, and you can use Google Maps to bring up photos of the street. Great idea, and reasonably well implemented. It clearly still needs a [...]
Narscissism
No, that’s not a typo. I spent the last three days at the North American Regional Science Conference (NARSC), here in Toronto at the Royal York hotel. It’s probably not the type of conference I would normally attend – the focus is more on regional economic models than transportation or land use – but it [...]
Dutch bike culture
On the VACC listserv today, Gregg Sayer posted a great article on bike culture in the Netherlands. Small-wheel bikes are clearly the thing of the future out there – he’s got some great pictures of cargo bikes. Check it out, and see some photos of an eight-man cycling beer machine. Gregg Sayer’s blog.
Sustrans talks galore, and the story of the Cheonggyecheon River
Before After It’s been an eventful two weeks. A ton of urban conferences hit Vancouver: the World Urban Form, the Canadian Institute of Planners Congress, and Planners4Tomorrow. Enrique Peñalosa gave an inspiring talk about his time as the mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. In a city where less than 20% own a car, why was so [...]
GO Transit
I’ve been reading Steve Munro‘s blog lately, as he discusses the nitty-gritty details of transit planning in Toronto. He brought up an interesting point regarding the extension of the Spadina subway line to York University: there’s already a GO transit line that goes direct from York University to downtown, and GO is a better way [...]
Cyclist falls off bridge
This past weekend, I rode my bike down through Surrey, North Delta and Annacis Island. It was the first time I’d taken my bike across the Alex Fraser bridge, and it had a few scary moments: a narrow sidewalk, and a low railing, plus three danger spots. The freeway signposts block the path at two [...]
