Category Archives: Urban

Two Midwestern cities—St. Louis and Milwaukee—both acquired new streetcar lines in November, and I went and rode them last week. The lines are comparable in size. Both are miniscule given that they’re in urban areas that are dozens of kilometers across. … Continue reading →

Hong Kong has four quite distinct urban rail systems: [1] the MTR (Mass Transit Railway), which consists of approximately 231 km of modern urban rail lines that run throughout the special administrative region; it incorporates the formerly separate lines of … Continue reading →

A simplistic view of post-World-War-II French urban transportation planning would identify two very different phases. In the 1950s and 1960s, and well into the 1970s, the government largely devoted itself to catering to the automobile. Limited-access highways were built to connect French … Continue reading →

Philadelphia’s Center City (which I recently visited for the first time in more than a decade) is one of the United States’ finest pedestrian spaces. It’s possible to walk comfortably just about anywhere within its roughly twelve square kilometers, and, when you … Continue reading →

When I was in Toronto, I also explored a much smaller project: the renovation of Queens Quay. Queens Quay is a short (3.3 km) street along Toronto’s “Harbourfront.” Over the last forty or so years most of its western 2 … Continue reading →

I spent several days in Toronto this month. This was perhaps my twentieth trip to Toronto since 1966. I had been a witness over the years to Toronto’s astonishing transformation from a socially conservative place whose inhabitants were mostly of British … Continue reading →

Thorek Hospital is a 118-bed hospital on Chicago’s North Side. It is most definitely not a major research institution. It ranks as “below average” in U.S. News and World Report ‘s evaluations of U.S. hospitals. Many (although not all) of its … Continue reading →

In the world of urban planning, Hamburg has perhaps become best known for HafenCity, which has been slowly replacing Hamburg’s obsolete 19th-century port in the years since 2003 (an enormous new container port has grown up across the Elbe). HafenCity is claimed to … Continue reading →

I had been in Jakarta only once before, in 1998. I concluded then that Jakarta was just about the most pedestrian-unfriendly city on earth. Many of its roads had only the narrowest of cracked sidewalks—and carried mind-bogglingly huge amounts of … Continue reading →