Contributor Blog

For those who either have been wondering about, or not regularly following, the private life and times of your correspondent, I believe some sort of explanation is in order for what appears to have been my abrupt and complete disappearance off the face of the Earth.  No, I did not get hit by an electric bus.  No, there were no sinkholes in my proverbial bike lane.  No, I didn't fatally discover an improperly phased pedestrian “Don't Walk” message on a recent signal timing field test.  In fact, I have not disappeared from the face of any planet; rather, I have been devoured by the political wranglings and machinations of a very complex and tumultuous mayoral campaign in my fantastic hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey.  More importantly, one week after being appointed Provisional Director of the Hoboken Parking Utility, my wife gave birth to a wonderful boy.  But – sniff – I did miss you!

You probably already know that the largest mass transit system in North America is in New York City.  Perhaps you didn’t know that this system is supplemented by a very heavily used sister-system between New York City and New Jersey called the Port Authority Trans-Hudson, or PATH for short.  PATH runs two lines through Jersey City, Newark, and Hoboken, carrying tens of thousands of passengers daily.  My hometown, Hoboken, is considered one of the most densely populated cities in the country, and a large number of those residents commute via PATH on a daily basis.  As the popularity of living in the city has increased, so have the swarms of passengers crowding onto PATH each morning and afternoon in their daily commute between New Jersey and Manhattan.  The cars are very old and make for a rickety, sometimes enthralling ride.  So it is not with anything but a huge warm welcome that we began to receive new rail cars over the past month.

Move over XBox; step aside Playstation.  The height of game-playing action is free and it's online.  The new game in town is University of Minnesota, Intelligent Transportation Systems Institute's "Gridlock Buster".  Test your mettle on the increasing levels of difficulty in processing vehicular traffic through a network of intersections.

Everybody knows that most, if not all, of downtown businesses' customers arrive by car.  So it's intuitive to try to come up with a way to encourage drivers - who normally wouldn't venture downtown - to hop into their rides and cruise on down to Main Street to shop for wares.  If we could do this, just think of all the new business we'd be stimulating!  In continuing with this logic, it's also a given that it's impossible for would-be customers to actually get to downtown without the essential attaché to driving, gasoline.  So, isn't it therefore intuitive to suggest that if cities were to give away a little bit of gas to each customer – you know, to kind-of thank them for their generosity - then customers would find an overwhelming incentiv

America's so-called “love affair” with the automobile, although cliché, provides a vivid description of how attached we really are to driving.  Public policy, and the historically overwhelming effect of auto industry lobbying, is only partly to blame for the endemic traffic jams and smog of the twentieth century.  Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant hired by New York City advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, recently demonstrated that urbanites with multiple transportation options still choose to commute by car for rational reasons of privacy, convenience, and speed.  A chart of his, shown below, demonstrates how perplexing this choice is.  Overcoming these reasons is a ser

I can’t deny that one of my strongest personality traits is that of being a hard-core cheapskate.  So much so, that I feel obliged to caveat this post by saying that my initial reasons for getting into rooftop gardening were more to save money on buying fresh vegetables and fruit from our rather pricey local markets than any particular affection for gardening.  While it turns out that my wife and I probably do save money (surprisingly, I never ran the numbers), the joy of gardening, and the kick I get out of showing our rooftop garden off to friends, has far outweighed the economic benefits.  As counter-intuitive as it sounds, urban gardening is much easier than you might imagine.  The hardest part is overcoming the psychological hurdle of thinking that it is difficult, confusing, time-consuming, or takes up lots of space.  In fact, it is none of these things; you don’t need expensive, special equipment, or any particular skill.  You only need a window box, a fire escape, or a small patch of patio if that’s all you have.  If this geeky transportation engineer can grow tomatoes, so can you!

I live in Hoboken, New Jersey.  It is a small (~50k residents), very densely populated city (fourth in the country), with high pedestrian volumes and some hairy traffic issues in certain areas.  With heavy rail, light rail, subway, bus, ferry, taxi, bicycle, pedestrian, and para-transit all converging at Hoboken Terminal, it is also home to perhaps the richest intermodal transportation facility in the world (in terms of modes).  It is often characterized as  feeling European, or like Brooklyn, take your pick.  Recently, we have been successful in implementing a nascent bicycle plan that includes bike lanes striped along the length of two north/south avenues in the heart of the city.  Cross streets are next with “sharrows" since these streets are too narrow for exclusive

The growth in hybrid car sales is a welcome sign that a major change in the automobile industry is afoot.  The shift to transport infrastructure that is not based on the archaic complexity of an internal combustion engine, with its hundreds of moving parts and compressed fuel explosions, has been long put off by an automobile industry, happy with status quo, partnered with oil cartels with the power to price their product as if it were in endless supply.  But with smack-in-the-face-reality fuel prices last summer, the collapse of the so-called “Big Three” over the winter, and the simultaneous heralding assertion of alternative energy technologies (Daimler AG bought a 10% stake in Tesla Motors last month!), the fallout of western economic near-collapse has changed everything we’ve known to be sacrosanct; Leonard Lopate even waxed nostalgic about the “Death of the Car Song” yesterday on National Public Radio’s local station, WNYC.

Once again, the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) delightfully surprises the design community with another major leap forward in making city streets a public realm for all users (I can’t tell you how odd it still feels to write that).  As if the impressive, incessant roll-out of bike lanes, successful implementation of the “Select Bus Service”, and the unprecedented changes to Times Square and its environs weren’t enough to pique the imaginations of New Yorkers used to streets built for cars, NYCDOT has just issued their “2009 Street Design Manual”.  Planners and Engineers, get ready for a thrill!

On my coveted “Bane of Americana” list just behind my cell phone company's automated customer support option to “Press '3' To Stay On Hold” (not kidding!), is the so-called “Passenger Pick-Up System” at airport terminals.  Instead of realizing a purported orderly and safe system, by forcing cars to circuit the entire loop road in an attempt to perfectly intercept with arriving passengers, airports are perpetuating a half-brained scheme reminiscent of Disney World's Mad Tea Party ride.

 
It's Always Six O'Clock At Terminal Eight! 

A friend introduced me yesterday to rambunctious bicycling advocate Fred Oswald via a recent article out of Cleveland’s press. Much debate swirls around his not-so-uncommon opinions. Mr. Oswald’s argument can be boiled down to two points: supporting a critical need for much more bicycling education on sharing public roadways with other vehicles, and fighting an industry-borne fallacy that breaking up streets with allocated spaces, such as bike lanes, is good for the biking community. The former is, of course, not contestable. We all agree that safety and training are absolutely critical to developing a strong and healthy bicycling community.

This extended holiday weekend is much anticipated personally because it signifies the return to a recreational activity that thrills me more so than any other.  By this time most years the weather has warmed up enough to prevent any further delay in getting my cheap, little sailboat ready “for the season”.  While there is very strong merit in, and a touch of previous discussion on, the return to sailing vessels for the purposes of international commercial shipping, this Memorial Day weekend I rather turn to the merits sailing has as a sustainable, low-impact, and surprisingly cheap way of having fun and experiencing the splendor of nature first hand.  Won't you please take a few moments to consider how a traditional form of waterborne transportatio

Shared streets, the contemporary vernacular used to describe streets that have been intentionally redesigned to remove exclusive boundaries for pedestrians, bicyclists, cars, etc., work well within a special set of conditions.  It is, in reality, just a new way of describing the original use of streets (see this previous post for more on that).  The most promising candidates for shared streets are those where traffic volumes are not too heavy, the route is not a critical corridor for vehicular through-traffic, activities and attractions along the street are plentiful, short distance connectivity is viable, and a critical mass of pedestrians (perhaps enough to pack sidewalks at certain times) exists.  A shared street may also be suitable in places where there is a desire to induce such conditions; however, care must be taken to understand the larger network effects of shifting or slowing down vehicular traffic.  But in some instances, seemingly unrelated changes to traffic patterns or the effects of a coincidental collection of the above conditions sometimes go unnoticed until a street that may have been all about cars gradually shifts into something I refer to as a “de facto shared street”.

Introducing car sharing (ZipCar, Hertz Connect, etc,) to a development can significantly reduce parking demand and, hence, construction costs.

One of the many glorious perks of being an engineer is that we are so bad at thinking up clever names for programs and tools that there's been an unabashed, universal concession by the general public to accept our use of horribly convoluted acronyms.  My favorite transportation acronym sub-genre is the collection of traffic signal configurations that for no clear reason (other than because engineers are, deep down, fun people) have flown off on a winged tangent.  The original intersection signal control which included pedestrian push buttons was “PEdestrian LIght CONtrolled”, close enough to be named “Pelican”.  A “Pedestrian User-Friendly INtelligent crossing” alternative to the Pelican is named “Puffin”.  Since a combined pedestrian/bicycle signal means two (

 At a company presentation about environmental impact the other week a colleague included a historic photograph of Scollay Square in Boston.  You are pardoned if, even after visiting or living in that city, this doesn’t sound familiar because all prominent characteristics of the area were summarily obliterated in the mid-twentieth century to make way for a potpourri of brutalist-style administrative buildings and renamed Government Center.  Urban redevelopment arguments aside, the photograph reveals a particularly interesting detail about the function and use of streets virtually erased from our minds over the last century. 

 

An article posted last week by the Guardian and highlighted yesterday by Treehugger.com cites recent studies as well as data from maritime industry sources that the combination of quantity and quality of low-grade bunker fuel used in the massive engines of freight vessels may result in more emissions than all the cars in the world!  I don’t mean to wax sensationalist here, this is what is stated in the article.  If the truth is anywhere near the statement, then the idea of

Once upon a time public rights-of-way were simpler; they made sense.  The mobile laws of society were black and white.  Streets were for cars and sidewalks were for, well, walking on the side of the street.  You know, out of the way?  At some point recently though things have started to blur, and it's starting to get just a little bit out of control.  It's hard to put one's finger on it, but lately there's been this funny notion that the street itself, long the gift to man-and-machine, is supposed to be shared with people who just can't seem to keep themselves on their side of the curb.  Woe is me, in some instances there isn't even a curb anymore!  What's worse, it seems apparent that our public officials, the very people we elect to represent us an

Posted today on CNN, optimistically under “SPECIAL REPORT – Detroit’s Downfall”, was a brief about GM and personal transport company Segway collaborating on a project called “Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility” (P.U.M.A.).  Along with some future-thinking gush about vehicle interconnectivity are eye candy photos of the traditional Seqway chassis redesigned as a side-by-side two-seater with a degree of weather protection and other accommodations to make the vehicle a tad more practical than the original stand-up version.  For those who find the Smart car a tad dumb on the bang:buck ratio but are not about to don a helmet and go the scooter route, the P.U.M.A. may offer a new market segment.

Pains of an imminent NYC transit fare hike and a recent article in the New York Times on bike theft/vandalism defeatism inspired me to validate the overwhelming perceived economic benefits of commuting by bike versus transit, despite the occasional theft.  If frugal is the next big thing and green is the new black, then hop on a crappy old bike if you want to be hip.