Hoboken

As if all this inclement weather hasn't been hassle enough for those of us who cherish our cars, I practically careened into another tragic loss for the rightfully auto-minded recently in Hoboken, New Jersey.  It seems the needs of lofty pedestrians et.al. have once again been imprudently prioritized over us drivers in a result that is sure to make your muffler ratlle: a one-block segment of an historic belgian block street has been closed off to the ideal form of personal mobility (read: car) so that silly people with nothing better to do than run around frivolously in streets have another place off the sidewalk to inconvenience the driving majority of our great nation.

So, I'm out at a site visit with the city engineer last week and we're talking about ways to implement curb extensions to reduce pedestrian exposure to vehicular traffic.  We're discussing inexpensive ways to accomplish this, and then on queue, as is the right and obligation of all civil engineers, the ugly villain subject of all things bumped-out rears its head: drainage.

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.

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

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.