Category Archives: Transportation

I’d been in Bangkok half a dozen times since the 1990s and had come to know the city moderately well. Although it’s a large, pleasantly complicated place, with a rich traditional culture and a distinctive approach to modernization, Bangkok had … Continue reading →

Austin, with a population of just under a million, is now the 11th largest city in the United States.1 Both the city of Austin and its urban area grew by more than 16% between 2010 and 2016. No other U.S. … Continue reading →

Hong Kong is perhaps best known in the world of urban studies for its extraordinarily high transit share. Public transit accounts for a larger percentage of journeys in Hong Kong than in any other city in the world.1 Something like 77.6% of … Continue reading →

The still far-from-complete Atlanta BeltLine is one of the most discussed pieces of non-automotive infrastructure in the country. Two books have been written about its creation.1 A huge number of newspaper stories have also been devoted to it. Furthermore, dozens … Continue reading →

I was in Harbin and Vladivostok last week. These two cities may be in different countries, but they are only 500 km apart and have a common late-19th-century origin as Russian railroad towns. Harbin was the administrative center of the … Continue reading →

When I was in Montréal a week ago, I made a point of visiting the new Promenade Fleuve-Montagne. The Promenade is a 3.8 km walkway between the old port on the Saint Lawrence (the “fleuve”) and the base of Mount … Continue reading →

The New York area famously accounts for something like 40% of all U.S. transit trips.1 New York may do even better when it comes to pedestrian trips, but these are a great deal harder to measure. New York’s walkscore (89.2) ranks first, but … Continue reading →

Costa Rica is in many ways one of the world’s most admirable countries. It gave up its army in 1949 and has been a democracy ever since, holding freely contested elections every four years. No other Latin American country has … Continue reading →

I visited the parklands created by the Madrid Río project1 a couple of weeks ago. The area had still been under construction in 2010 when I was last in Madrid. The Madrid Río project is of course one of the world’s most famous … Continue reading →

Most of the new, short, slow, and infrequently-running streetcar lines built in the United States in the last few years appear to have been constructed at least to some extent for reasons having little to do with any possible role as transportation facilities. Many seem … Continue reading →