|
|
|||
|
Near the soon to be opened and fantastic Park at the Yards, there’s a lot of new low-impact development infrastructure. These bioretention areas should be a great example of the new kind of both urban and environmentally sustainable infrastructure can be. These are not ordinary tree boxes. Instead of draining into a standard storm sewer, these Continue reading Low impact development near the Navy Yard Amtrak and Union Pacific trains pass each other. Photo by SP8254. While American passenger rail often leaves much to be desired, our freight rail network is second to none. This privately owned and operated network often finds itself at odds with desires for increased passenger service and high speed operations. Hauling the Freight: Freight rail companies Continue reading Weekend Reading – Hauling Freight A streetcar speeds by in Toronto. CC image from Matthew Burpee. Jarrett Walker has a wrap-up post on his debate with Patrick Condon on the need for speed in urban transit. Condon is a professor of sustainability, not a transportation planner or engineer, and his view is that we need to improve the experience of Continue reading The Need for Speed A couple of blogs today (GGW, DCist) featured this fantastic map of DC and environs from Flickr user Eric Fischer. Fischer has a set of similar maps from various cities around the world. Fischer’s methodology takes data from the images and the user accounts to determine the location of the photo (via geotagging), as well as Continue reading DC Photo Map Some suburban items to share today: Design: Infrastructurist takes a look at the problem of culs-de-sac (which I believe is the proper plural of cul de sac). Commenters take note of some serious issues with this particular study, but the general point still stands – culs de sac remove key links from the street network, requiring longer Continue reading Changing suburbia Some items of note today: Matt Johnson (GGW, Track Twenty-Nine) takes a closer look at Metro’s new 7000 series railcars. The ‘America’s Metro’ logo seems to have disappeared, and there are opportunities for a longitudinal seating arrangement. Continue reading Briefly noted CC image from urbanfeel on flickr Ed Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard, chimes in on cities, density, and their economic value on the Economix blog: But now humanity is marked more by concentration than by spread. In 2007, one-half of the world’s population became officially urban. One-third of Americans inhabit just 16 Continue reading Economists for cities, density Over the last few days, the Washington Post featured a number of streetcar pieces. First, Lisa Rein laid out the basis for the debate on overhead wires. The Post’s editorial board then chastised all the players to find a realistic and reasonable solution. Today’s print edition features two pieces delving deeper into how streetcars fit into Continue reading Streetcar smackdown watch Some cool map-related items: San Francisco’s Parking Census – with one of those ideas that’s so obvious that no one ever thought of it before, San Francisco has completed the first known census of all the publicly available parking spaces in an American city. The census found 441,541 spaces in the city, just 280,000 of which Continue reading Parking, Census, & Maps In the same vein as UCLA’s Hypercities maps I’ve discussed previously, I recently ran across some more historical maps from Shannon over at We Love DC. The maps themselves are ok, not nearly as detailed or interesting as the Hypercities maps, taking the historic maps and re-projecting them onto an interactive Google maps interface. More interesting Continue reading Historic DC Maps  |
||
|
Copyright © 2010 City Block - All Rights Reserved |
|||
Recent Comments