Ian Sacs

<p> America&#39;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, <a href="http://www.transalt.org/files/newsroom/reports/schaller_Feb2006.pdf">recently demonstrated</a> 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

<p> 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!

<p> 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&quot; since these streets are too narrow for exclusive

<p> 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 <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/19/news/companies/tesla_daimler_electric/index.htm?postversion=2009051915">bought a 10% stake in Tesla Motors</a> 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 “<a href="http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2009/06/08">Death of the Car Song</a>” yesterday on National Public Radio’s local station, WNYC.

<p class="MsoNormal"> 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 “<a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/about/streetdesignmanual.shtml">2009 Street Design Manual</a>”.  Planners and Engineers, get ready for a thrill! </p>