I often walk to work on Tuesdays and Thursdays because I do not head downtown first on those days. Plus, I like to mix it up. Walking home yesterday — all of 3/4 mile — I saw five separate incidents of people being silly on the streets. Upon seeing the first one, I thought: Oh, [...]
Raise your hand if you own a computer. Keep your hand up if your computer has ever glitched while in use, i.e. lost its internet signal or crashed or done some other annoying thing that basically ended its functionality if even for a few seconds. Ahhhh … all of you Now imagine a computer driving [...]
OK, so I was in Kansas City on Monday to attend an academic conference, and to get there I rented a compact car from Budget. I’ve rented three cars in 2011 — to go to Florida for a winter vacation, to go to St. Louis on a class field trip (I’m working on a certificate [...]
I began my career out of college as a news photographer. I carried a camera 24/7 and was always ready. Those days are gone. I have my iPhone, but getting it ready for photography eats up precious seconds. So I can’t show two of the coolest things I saw this morning: two men, in business [...]
Three scenes from today: 1. As I approached the 4-way stop at Walnut and South this morning, a cyclist passed me on the right and proceeded through the stop. I was positioned in the center of a narrow lane with parked cars along the road. The bicyclist is a guy I’ve seen before. From his [...]
Disclaimer: This is not a complaint about the hard-working people who plowed the streets for the City of Springfield during Snowpocalypse ’11. This is, instead, a complaint about all of us, i.e. our culture. In case one needed proof that the car is king of the road — indeed, king of all transportation modes — one merely [...]
Thanks to a heads-up from James Baumgartner, author of Car-free in PVD, check out this Blueprint America Special Report called Crossing the Line: Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know. This is what happens when you design roads for cars instead of people. Also see the discussion at Commute Orlando. Technorati Tags: car culture, pedestrian [...]
The final chapter of David Owens’ Green Metropolis describes some aspects of urban life in China today. One thing I found particularly interesting: According to his observations, the Chinese have an interesting sense of right-of-way. Or, rather, not much sense of it at all (that is in the American sense of it). Owens says traffic [...]
Transportation planner Jarrett Walker says this post by Michael Druker is the most important you will read this year. It’s about the fundamental attribution error in transportation choice. This error: …refers to the tendency for people to over-attribute the behavior of others to personality or disposition and to neglect substantial contributions of environmental or situational [...]
Jason Peters continues to meditate on the virtues of walking at Front Porch Republic (re: Walk, Damn It!). This week he writes about what it means to walk in the cold. And by now this walking has become habitual enough that, if for pressing reasons I do not or cannot walk, I feel that an [...]
Why do I have a 3/4-mile commute? I have a 3/4-mile commute because that’s the kind of commute I want — one that makes driving a car a silly choice. I’m lucky. I had the opportunity to make this choice based on my profession and my socio-economic status. Others are not so lucky. Sadly, most [...]
Today is the middle of the second week of classes. In my media ethics class we spend much of this week discussing students’ personal reactions to the “overview” to the textbook — a crash course in the philosophy of ethics prior to studying the applied ethics of the media professions. I ask them to identify [...]
Slow ain’t in the American vocabulary, baby! And that plays a role in why about 35,ooo to 40,000 Americans die in traffic every year. This figure shocks no one because, frankly, we 1) don’t give a shit, and 2) think that it won’t happen to us because “I’m a better driver than others” (read this [...]
The New York Times today published a major article on the socio-political history of the marketing of cell phones for use by car drivers. I found this part particularly interesting: Long before cellphones became common, industry pioneers were aware of the risks of multitasking behind the wheel. Their hunches have been validated by many scientific [...]
I recently mentioned the Dangerous By Design report and our own crash stats here in Springfield. While were not suffering to the same extent as Florida, we are suffering (here, here, here). Keri Caffrey, of Commute Orlando, updated her Facebook page today with a link to the Time article above and this message: I think [...]
